My Sisters Keeper | Page 8

will not be particularly comfortable residing under the same roof, once the papers are
served.
Suddenly Judge is at my side, pushing against my thigh with his nose. I shake my head, annoyed.
Timing is everything. "Give me fifteen minutes," I tell Kerri. "I'll call you when I'm ready."
"Campbell," Kerri presses, relentless, "you can't expect a kid to fend for herself."
I head back into my office. Judge follows, pausing just inside the threshold. "It's not my problem," I
say; and then I close the door, lock it securely, and wait.

sara
1990
the bruise is the size and shape of a four-leaf clover, and sits square between Kate's shoulder
blades. Jesse is the one to find it, while they are both in the bathtub. "Mommy," he asks, "does that
mean she's lucky?"
I try to rub it off first, assuming it's dirt, without success. Kate, two, the subject of scrutiny, stares up
at me with her china blue eyes. "Does it hurt?" I ask her, and she shakes her head.
Somewhere in the hallway behind me, Brian is telling me about his day. He smells faintly of smoke.
"So the guy bought a case of expensive cigars," he says, "and had them insured against fire for
$15,000. Next thing you know, the insurance company gets a claim, saying all the cigars were lost in
a series of small fires."
"He smoked them?" I say, washing the soap out of Jesse's hair.
Brian leans against the threshold of the door. "Yeah. But the judge ruled that the company
guaranteed the cigars as insurable against fire, without defining acceptable fire."
"Hey, Kate, does it hurt now?" Jesse says, and he presses his thumb, hard, against the bruise on his
sister's spine.
Kate howls, lurches, and spills bathwater all over me. I lift her out of the water, slick as a fish, and
pass her over to Brian. Pale
towheads bent together, they are a matched set. Jesse looks more like me--skinny, dark, cerebral.
Brian says this is how we know our family is complete: we each have our clone. "You get yourself
out of the tub this minute," I tell Jesse.
He stands up, a sluice of four-year-old boy, and manages to trip as he navigates the wide lip of the
tub. He smacks his knee hard, and bursts into tears.
I gather Jesse into a towel, soothing him as I try to continue my conversation with my husband. This
is the language of a marriage: Morse code, punctuated by baths and dinners and stories before bed.
"So who subpoenaed you?" I ask Brian. "The defendant?"
"The prosecution. The insurance company paid out the money, and then had him arrested for
twenty-four counts of arson. I got to be their expert."
Brian, a career firefighter, can walk into a blackened structure and find the spot where the flames
began: a charred cigarette butt, an exposed wire. Every holocaust starts with an ember. You just
have to know what to look for.
"The judge threw out the case, right?"

"The judge sentenced him to twenty-four consecutive one-year terms," Brian says. He puts Kate
down on the floor and begins to pull her pajamas over her head.
In my previous life, I was a civil attorney. At one point I truly believed that was what I wanted to be-
-but that was before I'd been handed a fistful of crushed violets from a toddler. Before I understood
that the smile of a child is a tattoo: indelible art.
It drives my sister Suzanne crazy. She's a finance whiz who decimated the glass ceiling at the Bank
of Boston, and according to her, I am a waste of cerebral evolution. But I think half the battle is
figuring out what works for you, and I am much better at being a mother than I ever would have
been as a lawyer. I sometimes wonder if it is just me, or if there are other women who figure out
where they are supposed to be by going nowhere.

I look up from drying Jesse off, and find Brian staring at me. "Do you miss it, Sara?" he asks quietly.
I wrap our son in the towel and kiss him on the crown of his head. "Like I'd miss a root canal," I say.
By the time I wake up the next morning, Brian has already left for work. He's on two days, then two
nights, and then off for four, before the cycle repeats again. Glancing at the clock, I realize I've slept
past nine. More amazingly, my children have not woken me up. In my bathrobe, I run downstairs,
where I find Jesse playing on the floor with blocks. "I eated breakfast," he informs me. "I made some
for you, too."
Sure enough, there is cereal spilled