Handle With Care

  'Well . . . you know . . . it's just a curiosity. Even Gordon Ramsay's got to think about Big Macs once or twice in passing.'

  'So I'm the high-maintenance gourmet meal and Charlotte's fast food?'

  'It was a bad metaphor,' Rob admitted.

  Sean O'Keefe was tall, strong, physically fierce - orthogonal to Rob's slight runner's frame, his careful surgeon's hands, his addiction to reading. One of the reasons I'd fallen for Rob was that he seemed to be more impressed with my mind than with my legs. If I'd ever considered what it would be like to roll around with someone like Sean, the impulse must have been quickly squashed: after all these years, and all these conversations with Charlotte, I knew him too well to find him attractive.

  But Sean's intensity also carried over into his parenting - he was crazy about his little girls; he was deeply private and protective of Charlotte. Rob was cerebral, not visceral. What would it feel like to have so much raw passion focused on you at once? I tried to picture Sean in bed. Did he wear pajama pants, like Rob? Or go commando?

  'Huh,' Rob said. 'I didn't know you could blush way down to your--'

  I yanked the sheets up to my chin. 'To answer your question,' I said, 'I'm not even sure it's once a week. Between Willow and Sean's work schedule, they're probably not even in the same room at night most of the time.'

  It was odd, I realized, that Charlotte and I had not discussed sex. Not because I was her friend but because I was her doctor - part of my medical questioning involved whether or not a patient was having any problems during intercourse. Had I asked her that? Or had I skipped over it because it seemed too personal to ask that of a friend instead of a stranger? Back then, sex was a means to an end: a baby. But what about now? Was Charlotte happy? Did she and Sean lie in bed, comparing themselves to me and Rob?

  'Well, go figure. You and I are in the same room at night.' Rob leaned over me. 'How about we maximize that potential?'

  'Emma--'

  'Is lost in her dreams by now.' Rob pulled my pajama top over my head and stared at me. 'As a matter of fact, so am I . . .'

  I wrapped my arms around his neck and kissed him slowly. 'Still thinking about Charlotte?'

  'Charlotte who?' Rob murmured, and he kissed me back.

  Once a month, Charlotte and I went to a movie and then to a seedy bar called Maxie's Pad - a place whose name absolutely cracked me up, given the gynecological connotation, although I'm quite sure that was lost on Maxie himself, a grizzled old Maine fisherman who, when we first ordered Chardonnay, had told us it wasn't on tap. Even when the only films playing were really awful slasher flicks or teen comedies, I'd drag Charlotte out for the night. If I didn't, there were stretches of time when she'd never have left the house.

  The best thing about Maxie's was his grandson, Moose, a linebacker who'd been kicked out of college in the middle of a cheating scandal. He'd started bartending for his grandpa three years ago, when he was back home evaluating his options, and he'd never left. He was six-six, blond, brawny, and had the mental acuity of a spatula.

  'Here you go, ma'am,' Moose said, sliding a pale ale toward Charlotte, who barely even flicked a glance at him.

  There was something wrong with Charlotte tonight. She'd tried to back out of our standing date, but I wouldn't allow it, and for the past few hours she'd been distant and distracted. I attributed it to concern over you - with the pamidronate treatment and the femur breaks and the rodding surgery, she had plenty on her mind - and I was determined to divert her attention. 'He winked at you,' I announced as soon as Moose turned away to help another customer.

  'Oh, get out,' Charlotte said. 'I'm too old to be flirted with.'

  'Forty-four is the new twenty-two.'

  Yeah, well, talk to me when you're my age.'

  Charlotte, I'm only two years younger than you!' I laughed and took a sip of my own beer. 'God, we're pathetic. He's probably thinking, Those poor middle-aged women; the least I can do is make their day by pretending I find them even remotely sexy.'

  Charlotte lifted her mug. 'Here's to not being married to a guy too young to rent a car from Hertz.'

  I was the one who'd introduced your mother and your father. I think it's human nature that those of us who are married cannot rest easy until we find mates for our single friends. Charlotte had never been married - Amelia's father had been a drug addict who'd tried to clean up his act during Charlotte's pregnancy, failed miserably, and moved to India with a seventeen-year-old pole dancer. So when I was pulled over for speeding by a really good-looking cop who wasn't wearing a wedding band, I invited him to dinner so that he could meet Charlotte.

  'I don't do blind dates,' your mother told me.

  'Then google him.'

  Ten minutes later she called me, frantic, because Sean O'Keefe was also the name of a recently paroled child molester. Ten months later, she married the other Sean O'Keefe.

  I watched Moose stack glasses behind the bar, the light playing over his muscles. 'So how goes it with Sean?' I asked. 'Have you managed to convince him to do it yet?'

  Charlotte startled, nearly knocking over her beer. 'To do what?'

  'The rodding surgery for Willow. Hello?'

  'Right,' Charlotte said. 'I forgot I'd told you about that.'

  'Charlotte, we talk every day.' I looked at her more carefully. 'Are you sure you're okay?'

  'I just need a good night's sleep,' she replied, but she was looking down into her beer, running one finger along the rim of the glass until it sang to us. 'You know, I was reading something at the hospital, some magazine. There was an article in there about a family who sued the hospital after their son was born with cystic fibrosis.'

  I shook my head. 'That pass-the-buck mentality drives me crazy. Pin the blame on someone else to make yourself feel better.'

  'Maybe someone else really was at fault.'

  'It's the luck of the draw. You know what an obstetrician would say if a couple had a newborn with CF? "Oh, they got a bad baby." It's not a judgment call, it's just a statement of fact.'

  'A bad baby,' Charlotte repeated. 'Is that what you think happened to me?'

  Sometimes, I let myself run on without thinking - like right now, when I remembered too late that Charlotte's interest in this subject was more than theoretical. I felt heat flood my face. 'I wasn't talking about Willow. She's--'

  'Perfect?' Charlotte challenged.

  But you were. You did the funniest Paris Hilton impression I'd ever seen; you could sing the alphabet backward; your features were delicate, elfin, fairy-tale. Those brittle bones were the least important part of you.

  Suddenly Charlotte folded. 'I'm sorry. I shouldn't have said that.'

  'No, honestly, my mouth shouldn't be able to function unless my brain's engaged.'

  'I'm just exhausted,' Charlotte said. 'I ought to call it a night.' When I started to get up off my stool, she shook her head. 'Stay here, finish your beer.'

  'Let me walk you out to the car--'

  'I'm a big girl, Piper. Really. Just forget I even said anything.'

  I nodded. And, stupid me, I did.

  Amelia

  S

  o there I was in the school library, one of the few places where I could pretend my life wasn't totally ruled by your OI, when I stumbled across it: a photograph in a magazine of a woman who looked just like you. It was weird, like one of those FBI photos where they artificially age a kid who's been kidnapped ten years, so that you might be able to recognize him on the street. There was your flyaway silk hair, your pointy chin, your bowed legs. I'd met other OI kids before and knew you all had similar features, but this was really ridiculous.

  Even more weird was the fact that this lady was holding a baby, and was standing next to a giant. He had his arm around her and was grinning out of the photo with a really heinous overbite.

  'Alma Dukins,' the text below it read, 'is only 3'2'; her husband, Grady, is 6'4'.'

  'Whatcha doing?' Emma said.

  She was my best friend; we'd been be
st friends for, like, ever. After the whole Disney nightmare, when kids in school found out I'd been shipped off to a foster home overnight, she (a) didn't treat me like a leper, and (b) threatened to deck anyone who did. Right now, she'd come up behind my chair and notched her chin over my shoulder. 'Hey, that woman looks like your sister.'

  I nodded. 'She's got OI, too. Maybe Wills was switched at birth.'

  Emma sank into the empty chair beside me. 'Is that her husband? My dad could totally fix his teeth.' She peered at the magazine. 'God, how do they even do it?'

  'That's disgusting,' I said, although I had been wondering the same thing.

  Emma blew a bubble with her gum. 'I guess everyone's the same height when you're lying down doing the nasty,' she said. 'I thought Willow couldn't have kids.'

  I kind of thought that, too. I guess no one had ever really discussed it with you, because you were only five, and believe me I didn't want to think about anything as repulsive as this, but if you could break a bone coughing, how would you ever get a baby out of you, or a you-know-what in?

  I knew if I wanted rugrats, I'd be able to have them one day. If you wanted kids, though, it wouldn't be easy, even if it was possible. It wasn't fair, but then again, what was when it came to you?

  You couldn't skate. You couldn't bike. You couldn't ski. And even when you did play a game that was physical - like hide-and-seek - Mom used to insist that you get an extra count of twenty. I pretended to be bent out of shape by this so you wouldn't feel like you were getting special treatment, but deep down I knew it was the right thing to do - you couldn't get around as fast as I could, with your braces or crutches or wheelchair, and it took you longer to wiggle into a hiding spot. Amelia, wait up! you always said when we were walking somewhere, and I would, because I knew there were a million other ways I would leave you behind.

  I would grow up, while you'd stay the size of a toddler.

  I would go to college, move away from home, and not have to worry about things like whether I could reach the gas pump or the buttons on the ATM.

  I'd maybe find a guy who didn't think I was a total loser and get married and have kids and be able to carry them around without worrying that I'd get microfractures in my spine.

  I read the finer print of the magazine article.

  Alma Dukins, 34, gave birth on March 5, 2008, to a healthy baby girl. Dukins, who has osteogenesis imperfecta Type III, is 3'2'' tall and weighed 39 pounds before her pregnancy. She gained 19 pounds during her pregnancy and her daughter, Lulu, was delivered by C-section at 32 weeks, when Alma's small body could not accommodate the enlarging uterus. She weighed four pounds, six ounces, and was 161/2 inches long at birth.

  You were at the stage when you played with dolls. Mom said I used to do that, too, although I only remember dismembering mine and cutting off all their hair. Sometimes I would catch Mom watching you wrap your fake baby's arm in a cast, and it was like a storm cloud passed over her face - she was probably thinking that chances were you'd never have a real baby, mixed with feeling relief that you wouldn't have to know what it was like to watch your own kid break a million bones, like she did.

  But in spite of what my mother thought, here was proof that someone with OI could have a family. This Alma woman was Type III, like you. She didn't walk like you could - she was wheelchair-bound. And yet she'd managed to find a husband, goofy smile and all, and have a baby of her own.

  'You ought to show Willow,' Emma said. 'Just take it. Who's going to know?'

  So I checked to see if the librarian was still on her computer, ordering clothes from Gap.com (we'd done our share of spying on her), and then I faked a coughing fit. I doubled over and tucked the magazine inside my jacket. I smiled weakly as the librarian glanced at me to make sure I wasn't hacking out a lung on the floor or anything.

  Emma expected me to keep the magazine for you, to show you or even Mom that one day you could grow up and get married and have a kid. But I had stolen it for a completely different reason. See, this year, you were starting kindergarten. And one day you'd be a seventh grader, like me. And you might be sitting in this library and come across this stupid magazine and see what I had seen when I looked at it: the space between Alma and her husband, that baby, too huge in her arms.

  To me, this didn't look like a happy family. It was a circus freak show, minus the big top. Why else would it be in a magazine? Normal families didn't make the news.

  In English class I asked to go to the bathroom. There, I tore the page out of the magazine and ripped the picture into the tiniest pieces I could. I flushed them down the toilet, the best I could do to protect you.

  Marin

  P

  eople think of the law as a virtual hallowed hall of justice, but the truth is that my job more closely resembles a bad sitcom. I once represented a woman who was carrying a frozen turkey out of her local Stop-n-Save grocery store the day before Thanksgiving, when the turkey slipped through the plastic bag and fractured her foot. She sued the Stop-n-Save, but we also included the company that made the plastic bags, and she walked away - without crutches, mind you - several hundred thousand dollars richer.

  Then there was the case that involved a woman driving home at two a.m. on a back road at eighty miles per hour, who collided with a lost tractor trailer that had backed up across the road to turn around. She was killed instantly, and her husband wanted to sue the tractor-trailer company because they didn't have lights along the side of the truck so that his wife could have seen it. We brought a wrongful death suit against the driver of the truck, citing loss of consortium - asking for millions to make up for the fact that the husband had lost his beloved wife's company. Unfortunately, during the case, the defendant's attorney uncovered the fact that my client's wife had been on her way home from a rendezvous with her lover.

  You win some, you lose some.

  Looking at Charlotte O'Keefe, who was sitting in my office with her cell phone clutched in her hands, I was pretty sure which way this case was going to go. 'Where's Willow?' I asked.

  'Physical therapy,' Charlotte said. 'She's there till eleven.'

  'And the breaks? They're healing well?'

  'Fingers crossed,' Charlotte replied.

  'You're expecting a call?'

  She looked down, as if she was surprised to find herself holding her phone. 'Oh, no. I mean, I hope not. I just have to be available if Willow gets hurt.'

  We smiled politely at each other. 'Should we . . . wait a little longer for your husband?'

  'Well,' she said, coloring. 'He's not going to be joining us.'

  To be honest, when Charlotte had called me to set up a meeting and talk about representation, I'd been surprised. Sean O'Keefe had made his feelings pretty damn clear when he'd stormed out of Bob's office. Her phone call indicated that he'd calmed down enough to pursue litigation, but now - looking at Charlotte - I was starting to get a sinking feeling. 'But he does want to file a lawsuit, right?'

  She shifted on her chair. 'I don't understand why I can't do this on my own.'

  'Besides the obvious answer - that your husband's bound to find out sooner or later - there's a legal reason. You and your husband are both responsible for the care and raising of Willow. Let's say you hire a lawyer by yourself and settle with the doctor, and then you get hit by a car and die. Your husband can go back and sue the doctor on his own, because he wasn't a party to your settlement and didn't release the doctor from future liability. Because of this, any defendant is going to insist that any settlement that's reached or judgment in a trial include both of the parents. Which means that, even if Sergeant O'Keefe doesn't want to be part of this lawsuit, he's going to be impleaded - that is, brought into the lawsuit - so that it won't be litigated again in the future.'

  Charlotte frowned. 'I understand.'

  'Is that going to be a problem?'

  'No,' she said. 'No, it's not. But . . . we don't have money to hire a lawyer. We're barely scraping by as it is, with everything Willow needs. That's why .
. . that's why I'm here today to talk about the lawsuit.'

  Every plaintiff mill firm - Bob Ramirez included - began a case with a cost-benefit analysis. It's what had taken us so long to contact the O'Keefes between meetings: I would review a claim with experts, I would do due diligence to ascertain other suits like this and what the payouts had been. Once I knew that the estimated settlement would at least cover the costs of our time and the experts' fees, I'd call the prospective clients and tell them they had a valid complaint. 'You don't have to worry about attorney's fees,' I now said smoothly. 'That would become part of the settlement. However, realistically, you do need to know that most wrongful birth suits settle out of court for less money than a jury would award, because malpractice insurance companies don't want the press. Of the cases that do go to court, seventy-five percent find in favor of the defendant. Your particular case, which hinges on a misread sonogram, might not sway the jury - sonograms don't make the most convincing evidence at a trial. And there will be considerable public scrutiny. There always is, when someone brings a wrongful birth suit.'

  She looked up at me. 'You mean people will think I'm in it for the money.'

  'Well,' I said simply. 'Aren't you?'

  Charlotte's eyes welled with tears. 'I'm in it for Willow. I'm the one who brought her into this world, so it's up to me to make sure that she suffers as little as possible. That doesn't make me a monster.' She pressed her fingers to the corners of her eyes. 'Or does it?'

  I gritted my teeth and passed her a box of Kleenex. Well, wasn't that the $64,000 question?

  It was probable that, by the time this lawsuit got to court, you would be old enough to fully understand the ramifications of what your mother was doing - just like I had, one day, when I was told about my adoption. I knew what it was like to feel as if your own mom didn't want you. In fact, I'd spent my whole childhood inventing excuses for her. Daydream 1: She was desperately in love with a boy who'd gotten her pregnant, and her family couldn't bear the stain of shame, so they sent her to Switzerland and told everyone she was at boarding school when, instead, she was having me. Daydream 2: She was headed off to the Peace Corps to save the world when she found herself pregnant - and realized she had to put the needs of others above her own desire for a baby. Daydream 3: She was an actress, America's sweetheart, who would lose her family-values midwest audience if they learned that she was a single mom. Daydream 4: She and my father were poor, struggling dairy farmers who wanted their baby to have a better life than they could offer.