I couldn’t see Amelia-or you or Charlotte for that matter-anywhere.
My pulse was almost back to normal by the time I reached my car. I slid into the driver’s seat, turned on the engine. When I heard a sharp rap on the window, I nearly jumped out of my skin.
Charlotte stood there, a scarf wrapped around her nose and mouth, her eyes watering in the bite of the wind. I hesitated, then unrolled the window partway.
She looked as miserable as I felt. “I…I just had to tell you something,” she said, halting. “This was never about you and me.”
The effort of not speaking hurt; I was grinding my back teeth together.
“I was offered a chance to give Willow everything she’ll ever need.” Her breath formed a wreath around her face in the cold air. “I don’t blame you for hating me. But you can’t judge me, Piper. Because if Willow had been your child…I know you would have done the same thing.”
I let the words hang between us, caught on the guillotine of the window’s edge. “You don’t know me as well as you think you do, Charlotte,” I said coldly, and I pulled out of the parking spot and away from the rink without looking back.
Ten minutes later I burst into Rob’s office during a consultation. “Piper,” he said evenly, glancing down at the parents and preteen daughter, who were staring at my wild hair, my runny nose, the tears still streaking my face. “I’m in the middle of something.”
“Um,” the mother said quickly. “Maybe we should just let you two talk.”
“Mrs. Spifield-”
“No, really,” she said, getting up and summoning the rest of the family. “We can give you a minute.”
They hurried out of the office, expecting me to self-destruct at any moment, and maybe they weren’t that far off the mark. “Are you happy?” Rob exploded. “You probably just cost me a new patient.”
“How about Piper, what happened? Tell me what I can do to help you?”
“Well, pardon me if the sympathy card’s been played so often that the face has worn straight off. Jesus, I’m trying to run a practice here.”
“I just ran into Charlotte at the skating rink.”
Rob blinked at me. “So?”
“Are you joking?”
“You live in the same town. A small town. It’s a miracle you haven’t crossed paths before. What did she do? Come after you with a sword? Call you out on the playground? Grow up, Piper.”
I felt like the bull must when he is let out of his pen. Freedom, relief…and then comes the picador, lancing him. “I’m going to leave,” I said softly. “I’m going to pick up Emma, and before you come home tonight, I hope you’ll think about the way you treated me.”
“The way I treated you?” Rob said. “I have been nothing but supportive. I have not said a word, even though you’ve abandoned your whole OB practice and turned into some female Ty Pennington. We get a lumber bill for two thousand dollars? No problem. You forget Emma’s chorus recital because you’re talking plumbing at Aubuchon Hardware? Forgiven. I mean, how ironic is it that you’ve become the do-it-yourself queen? Because you don’t want our help. You want to wallow in self-pity instead.”
“It’s not self-pity.” My cheeks were burning. Could the Spifields hear us arguing in the waiting room? Could the hygienists?
“I know what you want from me, Piper. I’m just not sure I can do it anymore.” Rob walked to the window, looking out onto the parking lot. “I’ve been thinking a lot about Steven,” he said after a moment.
When Rob was twelve, his older brother had committed suicide. Rob had been the one to find him, hanging from the rod in his closet. I knew all this; I’d known it since before we were married. It had taken me a while to convince Rob to have children, because he worried that his brother’s mental illness was printed in his genes. What I hadn’t known was that, these past few months, being with me had dragged Rob back to that time in his childhood.
“Back then no one knew the name for bipolar disorder, or how to take care of it. So for seventeen years my parents went through hell. My whole childhood was colored by how Steven was feeling: if it was a good day or a bad day. And,” he said, “it’s how I got so good at taking care of a person who is completely self-absorbed.”
I felt a splinter of guilt wedge into my heart. Charlotte had hurt me; in return, I’d hurt Rob. Maybe that’s what we do to the people we love: take shots in the dark and realize too late we’ve wounded the people we are trying to protect. “Ever since you got served, I’ve been thinking about it. What if my parents had known in advance?” Rob said. “What if they had been told, before Steven was born, that he was going to kill himself before his eighteenth birthday?”
I felt myself go very still.
“Would they have taken those seventeen years to get to know him? To have those good times that came between the crises? Or would they have spared themselves-and me-that emotional roller coaster?”
I imagined Rob, coming into his brother’s room to get him for dinner, and finding the older boy slumped to the side of the closet. The whole time I’d known my mother-in-law, I’d never seen a smile rise all the way to her eyes. Was this why?
“That’s not a fair comparison,” I said stiffly.
“Why not?”
“Bipolar illness can’t be diagnosed in utero. You’re missing the point.”
Rob raised his gaze to meet mine. “Am I?” he said.
Marin
February 2008
“Just be yourselves,” I coached. “We don’t want you to do anything special because of the camera. Pretend we’re not here.”
I gave a nervous little smile and glanced at the twenty-two moon faces staring up at me: Ms. Watkins’s kindergarten class. “Does anyone have any questions?”
A little boy raised his hand. “Do you know Simon Cowell?”
“No,” I said, grinning. “Anyone else?”
“Is Willow a movie star?”
I glanced at Charlotte, who was standing just behind me, with the videographer I’d hired to film A Day in the Life of Willow, to be aired for the jury. “No,” I said. “She’s still just your friend.”
“Ooh! Ooh! Me!” A classically pretty destined-to-be-cheerleader girl pumped her hand like a piston until I pointed to her. “If I pretend to be Willow’s friend today, will I be on Entertainment Tonight?”
The teacher stepped forward. “No, Sapphire. And you shouldn’t have to pretend to be anyone’s friend in here. We’re all friends, right?”
“Yes, Ms. Watkins,” the class intoned.
Sapphire? That girl’s name was really Sapphire? I’d looked at the masking tape above the wooden cubbies when we first came in-names like Flint and Frisco and Cassidy. Did no one name their kids Tommy or Elizabeth anymore?
I wondered, not for the first time, if my birth mother had picked out names for me. If she’d called me Sarah or Abigail, a secret be tween the two of us that was overturned, like fresh earth, when my adoptive parents came and started my life over.
You were using your wheelchair today, which meant kids had to move out of the way to accommodate you if you approached with your aide to work at the art table or use Cuisenaire rods. “This is so strange,” Charlotte said softly. “I never get to watch her during school. I feel like I’ve been admitted to the inner sanctum.”
I had hired the camera crew to film one entire day with you. Although you were verbal enough to hold your own as a witness during this trial, putting you on the stand would not have been humane. I couldn’t bring myself to have you in the courtroom when your mother was testifying out loud about wanting to terminate her pregnancy.