My Sister's Keeper

If we lose Kate today, we will have had her for sixteen years, and no one can take that away. And ages from now, when it is hard to bring back the picture of her face when she laughed or the feel of her hand inside mine or the perfect pitch of her voice, I will have Brian to say, Don't you remember? It was like this.

The judge's voice breaks into my reverie. "Mrs. Fitzgerald, are you finished?"

There has never been a need for me to cross-examine Brian; I have always known his answers. What I've forgotten are the questions.

"Almost." I turn to my husband. "Brian?" I ask. "When are you coming home?"

In the bowels of the court building are a sturdy row of vending machines, none of which have anything you'd want to eat. After Judge DeSalvo calls a recess, I wander down there, and stare at the Starbursts and the Pringles and the Cheetos trapped in their corkscrew cells.

"The Oreos are your best shot," Brian says from behind me. I turn around in time to see him feed the machine seventy-five cents. "Simple. Classic." He pushes two buttons and the cookies begin their suicide plunge to the bottom of the machine.

He leads me to the table, scarred and stained by people who have carved their eternal initials and graffitied their i

"I don't know," Brian says. "Does anyone?"

He hands me the package of Oreos. When I open my mouth to tell him I'm not hungry, Brian pushes a cookie inside. It is rich and rough against my tongue; suddenly I am famished. Brian brushes the crumbs from my lips as if I am made of fine china. I let him. I think maybe I have never tasted anything this sweet.

Brian and A

"Not the way you think." I finger the edge of one of Kate's pillows. "You're not a bad person because you want to be yourself."

"I never—"

I hold up a hand. "What I mean is that those thoughts, they're human. And just because you turn out differently than everyone's imagined you would doesn't mean that you've failed in some way. A kid who gets teased in one school might move to a different one, and be the most popular girl there, just because no one has any other expectations of her. Or a person who goes to med school because his entire family is full of doctors might find out that what he really wants to be is an artist instead." I take a deep breath, and shake my head. "Am I making any sense?"

"Not really."

That makes me smile. "I guess I'm saying that you remind me of someone."

A

"Me," I say.

When you have been with your partner for so many years, they become the glove compartment map that you've worn dog-eared and white-creased, the trail you recognize so well you could draw it by heart and for this very reason keep it with you on journeys at all times. And yet, when you least expect it, one day you open your eyes and there is an unfamiliar turnoff, a vantage point that wasn't there before, and you have to stop and wonder if maybe this landmark isn't new at all, but rather something you have missed all along.

Brian lies beside me on the bed. He doesn't say anything, just puts his hand on the valley made by the curve of my neck. Then he kisses me, long and bittersweet. This I expect, but not the next—he bites down on my lip so hard that I taste blood. "Ow," I say, trying to laugh a little, make light of this. But he doesn't laugh, or apologize. He leans forward, licks it off.

It makes me jump inside. This is Brian, and this is not Brian, and both of these things are remarkable. I run my own tongue over the blood, copper and slick. I open like an orchid, make my body a cradle, and feel his breath travel down my throat, over my breasts. He rests his head for a moment on my belly, and just as much as that bite was unexpected, there is now a pang of the familiar—this is what he would do each night, a ritual, when I was pregnant.

Then he moves again. He rises over me, a second sun, and fills me with light and heat. We are a study of contrasts—hard to soft, fair to dark, frantic to smooth—and yet there is something about the fit of us that makes me realize neither of us would be quite right without the other. We are a Mobius strip, two continuous bodies, an impossible tangle.

"We're going to lose her," I whisper, and even I don't know if I'm talking about Kate or about A

Brian kisses me. "Stop," he says.

After that we don't talk anymore. That's safest.

WEDNESDAY

Yet from those flames,

No light, but rather darkness visible.

-JOHN MILTON, Paradise Lost

JULIA

IZZY IS SITTING IN THE LIVING ROOM when I come back from my morning run. "You okay?" she asks.

"Yeah." I unlace my sneakers, wipe the sweat off my forehead.

"Why?"

"Because normal people don't go jogging at 4:30 A.M."

"Well, I had some energy to burn off." I go into the kitchen, butt he Braun coffeemaker I've programmed to have my hazelnut ready at this very moment hasn't done its job. I check Eva's plug and press some of her buttons, but the whole LED display is shot.

"Dammit," I say, yanking the cord out of the wall. "This isn't old enough to be broken."

Izzy comes up beside me and fiddles with the system. "Is she under warranty?"

"I don't know. I don't care. All I know is when you pay for something that's supposed to give you a cup of coffee, you deserve to get your fucking cup of coffee." I slam down the empty glass carafe so hard it breaks in the sink. Then I slide down against the cabinets and start to cry.

Izzy kneels down next to me. "What did he do?"

"The same exact thing, Iz," I sob. "I am so damn stupid."

She puts her arms around me. "Boiling oil?" she suggests.

"Botulism? Castration? You pick."

That makes me smile a little. "You'd do it, too."

"Only because you'd do it right back for me."

I lean against my sister's shoulder. "I thought lightning wasn't supposed to strike in the same place twice."

"Sure it does," Izzy tells me. "But only if you're too dumb to move."

The first person to greet me at court the next morning isn't a person at all, but Judge the dog. He comes slinking around a corner with his ears flattened, no doubt ru

I can hear Campbell before I turn the corner. "I wasted time, and manpower, and you know what, that's not the worst of it. I wasted my own good judgment about a client."

"Yeah, well, you aren't the only one who judged wrong," A

In that moment, I remember the way I felt when I woke up alone on that boat: Disappointed. Drifting. Angry at myself, for getting into this situation.

Why the hell wasn't I angry at Campbell?

Judge leaps up on Campbell, scraping at his chest with his paws. "Get down!" he orders, and then he turns around and sees me. "You weren't supposed to hear all that."

"I'll bet."

He sits heavily on a bridge chair in the conference room and passes his hand over his face. "She refuses to take the stand."