“You can’t call Amelia,” Marin argued.
Booker shrugged. “Why not? You’re the one who put her on the witness list.”
“Is there a reason for calling this witness,” Judge Gellar asked, “beyond simply rubbing the opposing counsel’s face in the fact that you can?”
“Yes, Your Honor,” Booker said. “Miss O’Keefe has information that this court needs to hear, given the implications of a wrongful birth lawsuit.”
“All right,” the judge said. “Bring her in.”
As I walked toward the front of the courtroom, I could feel everyone’s eyes on me. It felt like they were poking holes, and all my confidence was quickly leaking out. As I passed by my mother, I heard her whispering to Marin. “You promised,” she said. “You told me it was just a precaution…”
“I had no idea he’d do this,” Marin whispered back. “Do you have any clue what she’s going to say?”
Then I was in the little wooden cage, like I was a specimen for the jury to scrutinize under a microscope. They brought a Bible over to me and made me swear on it. Guy Booker smiled at me. “Can you tell us who you are, for the record?”
“Amelia,” I said, and I had to lick my lips because they were so dry. “Amelia O’Keefe.”
“Amelia, where do you live?”
“Forty-six Stryker Lane in Bankton, New Hampshire.” Could he hear my heart? Because, God, it was like a bongo drum in my chest.
“How old are you?”
“Thirteen.”
“And who are your parents, Amelia?”
“Charlotte and Sean O’Keefe,” I said. “Willow’s my sister.”
“Amelia, in your own words, can you explain to the court what this lawsuit is about?”
I couldn’t look at my mother. I pulled my sleeves down, because my scars were burning. “My mom thinks that Piper should have known earlier that there was going to be a problem with Willow, and should have told her. Because then, she would have had an abortion.”
“Do you think your mother’s telling the truth?”
“Objection!” Marin shot up so fast it made me jump in the chair.
“No, I’ll allow this,” the judge said. “You can give your answer, Amelia.”
I shook my head. “I know she’s not.”
“How do you know?”
“Because,” I said, making the words as neat and small as I could, “I heard her say so.”
I shouldn’t have eavesdropped, but sometimes, that’s the only way to find out the truth. And-although I certainly wouldn’t admit this out loud-I was feeling sort of protective toward you. You had seemed so down after this latest break and surgery, and when you said Mom wants to get rid of me, it pretty much made me feel like my insides had gone to jelly. We all protected you, in our own ways. Dad blustered around, angry at anything that made life harder for you. Mom, well, she was apparently stupid enough to gamble everything in order to get more for you in the long run. And me, I guess I just lacquered a shell around myself, so that when you got hurt, it was easier to pretend I didn’t feel it, too.
No one’s throwing you away, my mother had said, but you were already crying.
I’m sorry about my leg. I thought if I didn’t break anything for a long time, you’d think I was just like any other kid-
Accidents happen, Willow. Nobody is blaming you.
You do. You wish you’d never had me. I heard you say it.
I had held my breath. My mother could tell herself whatever she wanted to help herself get to sleep at night, but she wasn’t fooling anyone-especially you.
Willow, my mother had replied, you listen to me. Everyone makes mistakes…including me. We say and we do things we wish we hadn’t. But you, you were never a mistake. I would not, in a thousand years-in a million years-have missed out on having you.
I felt as if I’d been nailed to the wall. If that was true, then everything that had happened in the past year-this lawsuit, losing my friends, watching my parents split-was all for nothing.
If this was true, then my mother had been lying all along.
Charlotte
There’s a cost for everything. You might have a beautiful baby girl, but you learn she’ll be disabled. You move heaven and earth to make that child happier, but you leave your husband and your other daughter miserable. There is no cosmic scale on which you can weigh your actions; you learn too late what choices ruin the fragile balance.
As soon as Amelia finished talking, the judge turned to Marin. “Ms. Gates, your cross-examination?”
“I don’t have any questions for this witness,” she said, “but I’d like to recall Charlotte O’Keefe to the stand.”
I stared at her. She hadn’t said anything to me via whisper or note, so I stood up cautiously, unsure. Amelia was escorted past me by a bailiff. She was crying. “I’m sorry,” she mouthed.
Stiffly, I sat down on the wooden chair. Stick to the message, Marin had said, over and over. But it had gotten harder and harder to remember what that message was.
“Do you remember that conversation your daughter was just talking about?” Marin asked. Her voice struck like a bullet.
“Yes.”
“What were the circumstances?”
“We’d just brought Willow home from the hospital, after the first day of testimony here. She broke her femur so badly it needed surgery.”
“Were you upset?”
“Yes,” I said.
“Was Willow?”
“Very.”
She walked toward me, waiting until I met her eye. And I saw in her the same veiled worry that I’d seen in Amelia when she stepped off that witness stand; in Sean, moments after the courtroom emptied the day before; in you, the night we’d had that very talk-the hidden fear that you might not be good enough for someone you loved. Maybe I felt that, too, and maybe that’s why I had started this lawsuit all those months ago-so that when you looked back on your childhood, you didn’t blame me for bringing you into a world full of hurt. But love wasn’t about sacrifice, and it wasn’t about falling short of someone’s expectations. By definition, love made you better than good enough; it redefined perfection to include your traits, instead of excluding them.
All any of us wanted, really, was to know that we counted. That someone else’s life would not have been as rich without us here.
“When you had that conversation with your daughter, Charlotte,” Marin began. “When you said all those things right in the middle of this lawsuit…were you lying?”
“No.”
“Then what were you doing?”
“My best,” I whispered. “I was only doing my best.”
Piper
“That,” Guy Booker said, leaning closer to me, “is a slam dunk.” He stood up, buttoning his suit jacket, and faced the jury to begin his closing. “The plaintiff,” he said, “is a liar. She says this lawsuit isn’t about the money, but even her husband has told you that it is, and can’t support her in this lawsuit. She says she wishes that her daughter was never born, but then she tells her daughter the opposite. She tells you that she wished she had the choice to terminate her pregnancy, and she’s pointing a finger at Piper Reece, a hardworking physician whose only sin, ladies and gentlemen, was having the poor fortune to become friendly with Charlotte O’Keefe.”
He spread his palms wide. “Wrongful birth. Wrongful birth. It just makes you itchy to say it, doesn’t it? Yet the plaintiff is saying that her daughter-her beautiful, smart, trivia-loving, beloved little girl-should never have existed. This mother discounts all of those positive traits and says they don’t cancel out the fact that her child has osteogenesis imperfecta. Yet you’ve heard the experts-who admitted that nothing Piper Reece did as a physician was negligent. In fact, as soon as Piper did see a complication during the plaintiff’s pregnancy, she did exactly what she was supposed to: she called in someone who could take care of it. And for this, ladies and gentlemen, she’s had her life ruined, watched her practice flounder, had her career and her confidence stripped away.”