Free Who Do You Love by Jennifer Weiner Page B

throat.
    â€œWhen Rachel was born . . .” she began.
    â€œCan’t hear you!” hollered my great-uncle Si, who had plumes of white hair protruding from his ears and smelled like Luden’s cherry cough drops.
    My mother gave a trembling smile. She pulled a handkerchief out of her sleeve and started again, pressing her hands down on the page that she’d smoothed out on the podium. “When Rachel was born it was a difficult time for our family. As many of you know, Rachel was born with a congenital heart deformity that required immediate surgery. For a few days . . .” And here, she made a horrible gasping noise, like she wanted to sob and was trying to swallow it instead. Her next sentence came out in a rush. “For a few days we didn’t know if our sweet little girl would survive.”
    I felt an iciness come over me, first numbing my toes, then my ankles, then freezing my belly, turning my arms to chunks of wood. This isn’t happening, I thought. She isn’t doing this. But she was.
    â€œWhen Rachel was six . . .” She swallowed hard and sniffled, and then clamped her hand down on my upper arm, grabbing me like she thought I’d try to run. “We found her in her room, and she wasn’t breathing. I thank God every day for the paramedics who got there so quickly, who revived her and started her heart again, but you never forget . . .” She gave another awful gulp. “You never forget how it feels to see your child like that. For years, Rachel slept with a heart monitor, next to our bed. Every year, it seemed, there was another hospitalization, another surgery, or a trip to the emergency room, something that would make me think all over again, God is going to take her. And I asked myself why this had happened. Why it had happened to me, and my husband, and our son; why God was testing us this way, why he would have given us such a treasure, only to take her away.”
    â€œCan’t hear you!” yelled Uncle Si again. I’d been staring down at my shoes, with my hands clenched, praying sincerely for the first time during the entire service, praying for this speech to end. I made myself look into the audience. Britt Weinstein was staring, her eyes wide and shocked, and both Joshes looked like they were laughing. I’d been to about ten bar and bat mitzvahs by then, and I knew that it wasn’t unusual for a parent to get emotional or even weepy giving the speech, talking about how their little boy or little girl was now a man or a woman; only this wasn’t just a regular mom having a normal reaction. This was my mother telling the secrets that I’d spent the last nine months trying so hard to hide.
    That September, I’d started at a junior high that drew students from five different elementary schools in our town of Clearview, Florida. There would be lots of kids I didn’t know there, kids who didn’t know me as the girl with the broken heart; poor Rachel, who’d missed all those days of school, who had to sit on the bleachers during gym class while the other kids played flag football; Rachel, for whom they were always making get-well cards in art and who once had to carry an oxygen tank with her to class.
    I had spent the summer figuring out how I would remake myself, turn myself into a different kind of girl, a laughing, breezy girl, a girl to whom the worst thing that had ever happened was waking up and finding that her favorite jeans were still in the wash.
    Clothes were part of it, and my mother was more than happy to take me shopping, to buy me everything I’d seen in Mademoiselle and Seventeen and Sassy: high-waisted acid-washed jeans, Henley shirts, a pair of shortalls with suspenders that crisscrossed in the back, and even cropped T-shirts that showed a few inches of my belly when I stretched. “Don’t show your father these,” she’d said, wearing her usual worried look as she paid, and I’d