Free My Sister's Keeper by Jodi Picoult Page B

her fingers
through her hair. It comes out in a thick clump, drifts down to the carpet like
a small blizzard.
    “All done,” Kate announces a few nights later at dinner. Her plate
is still full; she hasn't touched her beans or her meat loaf. She dances off to
the living room to play.
    “Me too.” Jesse pushes back from the table. “Can I be
excused?”
    Brian spears another mouthful with his fork. “Not until you finish
everything green.”
    “I hate beans.”
    “They're not too crazy about you, either.”
    Jesse looks at Kate's plate. “She gets to be finished. That's
not fair.”
    Brian sets his fork down on the side of his plate. “Fair?” he
answers, his voice too quiet. “You want to be fair? All right, Jess. The
next time Kate has a bone marrow aspiration, we'll let you get one, too. When
we flush her central line, we'll make sure you go through something equally as
painful. And next time she gets chemo, we'll—”
    “Brian!” I interrupt.
    He stops as abruptly as he's started, and passes a shaking hand over his
eyes. Then his gaze lands on Jesse, who has taken refuge under my arm. “I…
I'm sorry, Jess. I don't…” But whatever he is about to say vanishes, as
Brian walks out of the kitchen.
    For a long moment we sit in silence. Then Jesse turns to me. “Is Daddy
sick, too?”
    I think hard before I answer. “We're all going to be fine,” I
reply.
    On the one-week anniversary of our return home, we are awakened in the
middle of the night by a crash. Brian and I race each other to Kate's room. She
lies in bed, shaking so hard that she's knocked a lamp off her nightstand.
“She's burning up,” I tell Brian, when I lay my hand against her
forehead.
    I have wondered how I will decide whether or not to call the doctor, should
Kate develop any strange symptoms. I look at her now and cannot believe I would
ever be so stupid to believe that I wouldn't know, immediately, what Sick
looks like. “We're going to the ER,” I announce, although Brian is
already wrapping Kate's blankets around her and lifting her out of her crib. We
bustle her to the car and start the engine and then remember that we cannot
leave Jesse home alone.
    “You go with her,” Brian answers, reading my mind. “I'll stay
here.” But he doesn't take his eyes off Kate.
    Minutes later, we are speeding toward the hospital, Jesse in the backseat
next to his sister, asking why we need to get up, when the sun hasn't.
    In the ER, Jesse sleeps on a nest of our coats. Brian and I watch the
doctors hover over Kate's feverish body, bees over a field of flowers, drawing
what they can from her. She is pan-cultured and given a spinal tap to try to
isolate the cause of the infection and rule out meningitis. A radiologist
brings in a portable X-ray machine to take a film of her chest, to see if this
infection lives in her lungs.
    Afterward, he places the chest film on the light panel outside the door.
Kate's ribs seem as thin as matchsticks, and there is a large gray blot just
off center. My knees go weak, and I find myself grabbing on to Brian's arm.
“It's a tumor. The cancer's metastasized.”
    The doctor puts his hand on my shoulder. “Mrs. Fitzgerald,” he
says, “that's Kate's heart.”
    Pancytopenia is a fancy word that means there is nothing in Kate's body
protecting her against infection. It means, Dr. Chance says, that the chemo
worked—that a great majority of white blood cells in Kate's body have been
wiped out. It also means that nadir sepsis—a post-chemo infection—is not a
likelihood, but a given.
    She is dosed with Tylenol to reduce her fever. She has blood, urine and
respiratory secretion cultures taken, so that the appropriate antibiotics can
be administered. It takes six hours before she is free of the rigors—a round of
violent shaking so fierce that she is in danger of shimmying off the bed.
    The nurse—a woman who braided Kate's hair in silky corn-rows one afternoon a
few weeks back, to make her smile—takes Kate's