To that end, I rarely showed up to your house empty-handed. Charlotte said I was spoiling you, but I wasn’t draping you in diamonds or giving you the keys to a Hummer. I brought magic tricks, candy bars, kiddie videotapes that Emma had outgrown. Even when I visited directly from a stint at the hospital, I’d improvise: a rubber glove, knotted into a balloon. A hair net from the OR. “The day you bring her a speculum,” Charlotte used to say, “your welcome is officially rescinded.”
“Hello,” I yelled as I walked through the front door. To be honest, I can’t remember a time I ever knocked. “Five minutes,” I said, as Emma tore up the stairs to find Amelia. “Don’t even take your coat off.” I wandered through the hallway into Charlotte’s living room, where you were propped up in your spica cast, reading.
“Piper!” you said, and your face lit up.
Sometimes, when I looked at you, I didn’t see the compromised twist of your bones or the short stature that came part and parcel with your illness. Instead, I remembered your mother crying when she told me that she had failed to get pregnant yet another month; I remembered her taking the Doptone out of my ears at an office visit so that she could listen to your hummingbird heartbeat, too.
I sat down beside you on the couch and took your gift du jour out of my coat pocket. It was a beach ball-believe me, it wasn’t easy finding one of those in February. “We didn’t get to go to the beach,” you said. “I fell down.”
“Ah, but this isn’t just a beach ball,” I corrected, and I inflated it until it was as firm and round as the belly of a woman in her ninth month. Then I pushed it between your knees, the ball wedged tight against the plaster, and began to strike the top of it with an open palm. “This,” I said, “is a bongo drum.”
You laughed, and began to smack the plastic surface, too. The sound brought Charlotte into the room. “You look like hell,” I said. “When was the last time you slept?”
“Gee, Piper, it’s really great to see you, too…”
“Is Amelia ready?”
“For what?”
“Skating?”
She smacked her forehead. “I totally forgot. Amelia!” she yelled, and then to me: “We just got home from the lawyer’s.”
“And? Is Sean still on a rampage to sue the world?”
Instead of answering, she rapped her hand against the beach ball. She didn’t like it when I ragged on Sean. Your mother was my best friend in the world, but your father could drive me crazy. He got an idea in his head, and that was the end of that-you couldn’t budge him. The world was utterly black-and-white for Sean, and I guess I’ve always been the kind of person who prefers a splash of color.
“Guess what, Piper,” you interrupted. “I went skating, too.”
I glanced at Charlotte, who nodded. She was usually terrified about the pond in the backyard and its constant temptation; I couldn’t wait to hear the details of this story. “I suppose if you forgot about skating, you forgot about the bake sale, too?”
Charlotte winced. “What did you make?”
“I made brownies,” I told her. “In the shape of skates. With frosting for the laces and blades. Get it? Ice skates with frosting?”
“You made brownies?” Charlotte said, and I followed her as she headed toward the kitchen.
“From scratch. The rest of the moms already blacklisted me because I missed the spring show for a medical conference. I’m trying to atone.”
“So you whipped these up when? While you were stitching an epi siotomy? After being on call for thirty-six hours?” Charlotte opened her pantry and rummaged through the shelves, finally grabbing a package of Chips Ahoy! and spilling them onto a serving platter. “Honestly, Piper, do you always have to be so damn perfect?”
With a fork, she was attacking the edges of the cookies. “Whoa. Who peed in your Cheerios?”
“Well, what do you expect? You waltz in here and tell me I look like crap, and then you make me feel completely inadequate-”
“You’re a pastry chef, Charlotte. You could bake circles around-What on earth are you doing?”
“Making them look homemade,” Charlotte said. “Because I’m not a pastry chef, not anymore. Not for a long time.”
When I’d first met Charlotte, she had just been named the finest pastry chef in New Hampshire. I’d actually read about her in a magazine that lauded her ability to take unlikely ingredients and come up with the most remarkable confections. She used to never come empty-handed to my house-she’d bring cupcakes with spun-sugar icing, pies with berries that burst like fireworks, puddings that acted like balms. Her soufflés were as light as summer clouds; her chocolate fondant could wipe your mind clean of whatever obstacles had littered your day. She told me that, when she baked, she could feel herself coming back to center, that everything else fell away, and she remembered who she was supposed to be. I’d been jealous. I had a vocation-and I was a damn good doctor-but Charlotte had a calling. She dreamed of opening a patisserie, of writing her own bestselling cookbook. In fact, I never imagined she would find anything she loved more than baking, until you came along.
I moved the platter away. “Charlotte. Are you okay?”
“Let’s see. I was arrested last weekend; my daughter’s in a body cast; I don’t even have time to take a shower-yup, I’m just fantastic.” She turned to the doorway and the staircase upstairs. “Amelia! Let’s go!”
“Emma’s gone selectively deaf, too,” I said. “I swear she ignores me on purpose. Yesterday, I asked her eight times to clear the kitchen counter-”
“You know what,” Charlotte said wearily. “I really don’t care about the problems you’re having with your daughter.”
No sooner had my jaw dropped-I had always been Charlotte’s confidante, not her punching bag-than she shook her head and apologized. “I’m sorry. I don’t know what’s wrong with me. I shouldn’t be taking this out on you.”
“It’s okay,” I said.
Just then the older girls clattered down the stairs and skidded past us in a flurry of whispers and giggles. I put my hand on Charlotte’s arm. “Just so you know,” I said firmly. “You’re the most devoted mother I’ve ever met. You’ve given up your whole life to take care of Willow.”
She ducked her head and nodded before looking up at me. “Do you remember her first ultrasound?”
I thought for a second, and then I grinned. “We saw her sucking her thumb. I didn’t even have to point it out to you and Sean; it was clear as day.”
“Right,” your mother repeated. “Clear as day.”
Charlotte
March 2007
What if it was someone’s fault?
The idea was just the germ of a seed, carried in the hollow beneath my breastbone when we left the law offices. Even when I was lying awake next to Sean, I heard it as a drumbeat in my blood: what if, what if, what if. For five years now I had loved you, hovered over you, held you when you had a break. I had gotten exactly what I so desperately wished for: a beautiful baby. So how could I admit to anyone-much less myself-that you were not only the most wonderful thing that had ever happened to me…but also the most exhausting, the most overwhelming?
I would listen to people complain about their kids being impolite or surly or even getting into trouble with the law, and I’d be jealous. When those kids turned eighteen, they’d be on their own, making their own mistakes and being held accountable. But you were not the kind of child I could let fly in the world. After all, what if you fell?