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I look around at the opulence of the room, at our decadent sprawl of wine bottles and chocolate strawberries. "Za
She follows my gaze. "You're absolutely right." She picks up the remote control, flipping cha
I start to laugh, and then she starts to laugh, and soon the room is spi
Laughter rises like steam, swims through the windows. After three days of a torrential downpour, the kids are delighted to be outside, kicking around a soccer ball with Brian. When life is normal, it is so normal.
I duck into Jesse's room, trying to navigate strewn LEGO pieces and comic books so that I can set his clean clothes down on the bed. Then I go into Kate and A
When I place Kate's T-shirts on her dresser I see it: Hercules is swimming upside down. I reach into the bowl and turn him, holding his tail; he wafts for a few strokes and then floats slowly to the surface, white-bellied and gasping.
I remember Jesse saying that with good care, a fish might live seven years. This has only been seven months.
After carrying the fishbowl into my bedroom, I pick up the phone and dial Information. "Petco," I say.
When I'm co
"Ma'am," the girl says, "we're talking about a goldfish, right?" So I call three vets, none of whom treat fish. I watch Hercules in his death throes for another minute, and then ring the oceanography department at URI, asking for any professor that's available. Dr. Orestes studies tide pools, he tells me. Mollusks and shellfish and sea urchins, not goldfish. But I find myself telling him about my daughter, who has APL. About Hercules, who survived once against all odds.
The marine biologist is silent for a moment. "Have you changed his water?"
"This morning."
"You get a lot of rain down there the past couple of days?”
“Yes."
"Got a well?"
What does that have to do with anything? "Yes…"
"It's just a hunch, but with runoff, your water might have too many minerals in it. Fill the bowl with bottled water, and maybe he'll perk up."
So I empty out Hercules' bowl, scrub it, and add a half-gallon of Poland Spring. It takes twenty minutes, but then Hercules begins to swim around. He navigates between the lobes of the fake plant. He nibbles at food.
Kate finds me watching him a half hour later. "You didn't have to change the water. I did it this morning."
"Oh, I didn't know," I lie.
She presses her face up to the glass bowl, her smile magnified. "Jesse says goldfish can only pay attention for nine seconds," Kate says, "but I think Hercules knows exactly who I am."
I touch her hair. And wonder if I have used up my miracle.
ANNA
If YOU LISTEN TO ENOUGH INFOMERCIALS you start to believe some crazy things: that Brazilian honey can be used as leg wax, that knives can cut metal, that the power of positive thinking can work like a pair of wings to get you where you need to be. Thanks to a little bout of insomnia and way too many doses of Tony Robbins, I decided one day to force myself into imagining what it would be like after Kate died. That way, or so Tony vowed, when it really happened, I'd be ready.
I kept at it for weeks. It is harder than you think to keep yourself in the future, especially when my sister was walking around at the time being her usual pain-in-the-butt self. My way of dealing with this was to pretend Kate was already haunting me. When I stopped talking to her, she figured she'd done something wrong, which she probably had, anyway. There were entire days where I did nothing but cry; others where I felt like I'd swallowed a lead plate; some more where I worked really hard at going through the motions of getting dressed and making my bed and studying my vocab words because it was easier than doing anything else.
But then, there were times when I let the veil lift a little, and other ideas would pop up. Like what it would be like to study oceanography at the University of Hawaii. Or try skydiving. Or move to Prague. Or any of a million other pipe dreams. I'd try to stuff myself into one of these scenarios, but it was like wearing a size five sneaker when your foot is a seven—you can get by for a few steps, and then you sit down and pull off the shoe because it just plain hurts too much. I am convinced that there is a censor sitting on my brain with a red stamp, reminding me what I am not supposed to even think about, no matter how seductive it might be.
It's probably a good thing. I have a feeling that if I really try to figure out who I am without Kate in the equation, I'm not going to like who I see.
My parents and I are sitting together at a table in the hospital cafeteria, although I use the word together loosely. It's more like we're astronauts, each wearing a separate helmet, each sustained by our own private source of air. My mother has the little rectangular container of sugar packets in front of her. She is organizing them with ruthlessness, the Equal and then the Sweet 'n Low and then the nubbly brown natural crystals. She looks up at me. "Honey."
Why are terms of endearment always foods? Honey, cookie, sugar, pumpkin. It's not like caring about someone is enough to actually sustain you.
"I understand what you're trying to do here," my mother continues. "And I agree that maybe your father and I need to listen to you a little bit more. But A
My heart is a soft sponge at the base of my throat. "You mean it's okay to stop?"
When she smiles, it feels like the first warm day of March—after an eternity of snow, when you suddenly remember how summer feels on the backs of your bare calves and in the part of your hair. "That's exactly what I mean," my mother says.
No more blood draws. No granulocytes or lymphocytes or stem cells or kidney. "If you want, I'll tell Kate," I offer. "So you don't have to."
"That's all right. Once Judge DeSalvo knows, we can pretend it never happened."
In the back of my mind, a hammer trips. "But… won't Kate ask why I'm not her donor anymore?"
My mother goes very still. "When I said stop, I meant the lawsuit." I shake my head hard, as much to give her an answer as to dislodge the knot of words tangled in my gut.
"My God, A
"It's not what you've done to me."
"It's what we haven't done, right?"
"You aren't listening to me!" I yell, and at that very moment, Vern Stackhouse walks up to our table.
The deputy looks from me to my mother to my father and forces a smile. "Guess this isn't the best time to interrupt," he says. "I'm real sorry about this, Sara. Brian." He hands my mother an envelope, nods, and walks off.
She pulls out the paper inside and reads it, then turns to me. "What did you say to him?" she demands. "To who?"
My father picks up the notice. It is full of legal language, which might as well be Greek. "What's this?"
"A motion for a temporary restraining order." She grabs it from my father. "Do you realize you're asking to have me kicked out of the house, and to have no contact with you? Is that really what you want?" Kick her out? I can't breathe. "I never asked for that."
"Well, an attorney wouldn't have filed it on his own behalf, A