My Sister's Keeper: A Novel Read online

  PRAISE FOR JODI PICOULT

  MY SISTER’S KEEPER

  “[A] fascinating character study framed by a complex, gripping story. . . . A beautiful, heartbreaking, controversial, and honest book.”

  —Booklist (starred review)

  “It’s difficult to find a book combining a timely moral dilemma with well-drawn characters for whom one cares. Picoult has written such a book.”

  —The Boston Herald

  “[Picoult’s] thoughtful, thought-provoking and readable work is . . . arguably her best and most accessible effort to date.”

  —The Denver Post

  “ . . . Compelling and believable.”

  —Richmond Times Dispatch

  SECOND GLANCE

  “Picoult writes with a fine touch, a sharp eye for detail, and a firm grasp of the delicacy and complexity of human relationships.”

  —The Boston Globe

  “Picoult has become a master—almost a clairvoyant—at targeting hot issues and writing highly readable page-turners about them. . . . It is impossible not to be held spellbound by the way she forces us to think, hard, about right and wrong.”

  —The Washington Post

  “Picoult ingeniously ties the ghost story to a true one about eugenics. . . . The history lesson makes for chilling, even shocking, reading.”

  —People (Critic’s Choice)

  “[An] elaborate, engrossing plot. . . . Suspense and the supernatural are artfully interwoven. . . . Picoult’s ability to bring [her characters] all vividly to life is remarkable.”

  —Publishers Weekly (starred review)

  PERFECT MATCH

  “Picoult’s characters are so compelling.”

  —USA Today

  “Picoult’s novel . . . reminds us how easy it is to jump to conclusions and to do all the wrong things for all the right reasons.”

  —Glamour

  “A spellbinding story.”

  —The Toronto Sun

  SALEM FALLS

  “Picoult . . . keep[s] the reader constantly guessing.”

  —The Dallas Morning News

  “Picoult’s depiction of the legal process is excellent . . . intriguing and thorough . . . [with] a couple of eye-opening surprises.”

  —Kirkus Reviews

  PLAIN TRUTH

  A People magazine “Page-Turner of the Week”

  “[A] suspenseful, richly layered drama. . . . [A] hummer of a tale.”

  —People (starred review)

  “Absorbing and affecting.”

  —Entertainment Weekly

  “Quietly electrifying . . . [with a] magnificently painted backdrop and distinctive characters.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  SONGS OF THE HUMPBACK WHALE

  “Picoult spreads her wings and catches an updraft.”

  —The New York Times Book Review

  “Rich and charming. . . . Picoult casts a spell with her beautiful imagery and language. Reading this book is a delight.”

  —Ann Hood, author of Do Not Go Gentle

  “As Picoult uses five voices to tell a complex tale of love, friendship, and a Faulknerian family history, her mastery of language strongly individuates her characters. . . . This powerful and affecting novel demonstrates that there are as many truths to a story as there are people to tell it.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  Thank you for purchasing this Atria Books eBook.

  * * *

  Sign up for our newsletter and receive special offers, access to bonus content, and info on the latest new releases and other great eBooks from Atria Books and Simon & Schuster.

  CLICK HERE TO SIGN UP

  or visit us online to sign up at

  eBookNews.SimonandSchuster.com

  CONTENTS

  Acknowledgments

  Prologue

  Monday

  Anna

  Campbell

  Sara

  Brian

  Tuesday

  Anna

  Sara

  Wednesday

  Campbell

  Anna

  Jesse

  Sara

  Julia

  Campbell

  Anna

  Thursday

  Brian

  Julia

  Sara

  Anna

  Campbell

  Jesse

  Brian

  Friday

  Campbell

  Brian

  Sara

  The Weekend

  Jesse

  Anna

  Brian

  Sara

  Anna

  Julia

  Monday

  Campbell

  Anna

  Sara

  Jesse

  Brian

  Campbell

  Tuesday

  Campbell

  Sara

  Wednesday

  Julia

  Campbell

  Julia

  Campbell

  Anna

  Brian

  Campbell

  Anna

  Sara

  Thursday

  Campbell

  Jesse

  Anna

  Brian

  Sara

  Campbell

  Anna

  Brian

  Sara

  Epilogue

  Kate

  About This Guide

  A Conversation With Jodi Picoult

  Questions And Topics For Discussion

  A Readers Club Guide

  Between the Lines Teaser

  Reader’s Companion

  About the Author

  About Emily Bestler Books

  About Atria Books

  Ask Atria

  To the Currans:

  The best family members we’re not technically related to.

  Thanks for being such a big part of our lives.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  As the mother of a child who had ten surgeries in three years, I would like to thank first the doctors and nurses who routinely take the hardest moments a family can experience and soften the edges: to Dr. Roland Eavey and the pediatric nursing staff at Mass. Eye and Ear—thank you for the real-life happy ending. In the course of writing My Sister’s Keeper, as always, I was reminded of how very little I know, and how much I rely on the experience and the intellect of others. For allowing me to borrow from their lives personally and professionally, or for suggestions of pure writing genius: thank you, Jennifer Sternick, Sherry Fritzsche, Giancarlo Cicchetti, Greg Kachejian, Dr. Vincent Guarerra, Dr. Richard Stone, Dr. Farid Boulad, Dr. Eric Terman, Dr. James Umlas, Wyatt Fox, Andrea Greene and Dr. Michael Goldman, Lori Thompson, Synthia Follensbee, Robin Kall, Mary Ann McKenney, Harriet St. Laurent, April Murdoch, Aidan Curran, Jane Picoult, and Jo-Ann Mapson. For making me “can man” for the night, and part of a bona fide firefighting team: thanks to Michael Clark, Dave Hautanemi, Richard “Pokey” Low, and Jim Belanger (who also gets a gold star for editing my mistakes). For throwing their considerable support behind me, thanks to Carolyn Reidy, Judith Curr, Camille McDuffie, Laura Mullen, Sarah Branham, Karen Mender, Shannon McKenna, Paolo Pepe, Seale Ballenger, Anne Harris, and the indomitable Atria sales force. For believing in me first, my pure gratitude to Laura Gross. For outstanding guidance and the freedom to spread my wings, my sincere appreciation to Emily Bestler. For Scott and Amanda MacLellan, and Dave Cranmer—who offered me insight into the triumphs and tragedies of living daily with a life-threatening disease—thank you for your generosity, and best wishes for a long and healthy future.

  And, as always, thanks to Kyle, Jake, Sammy, and especially to Tim, for being what matters most.

  PROLOGUE

  No
one starts a war—or rather, no one in his sense ought to do so—without first being clear in his mind what he intends to achieve by that war and how he intends to conduct it.

  —CARL VON CLAUSEWITZ, Vom Kriege

  In my first memory, I am three years old and I am trying to kill my sister. Sometimes the recollection is so clear I can remember the itch of the pillowcase under my hand, the sharp point of her nose pressing into my palm. She didn’t stand a chance against me, of course, but it still didn’t work. My father walked by, tucking in the house for the night, and saved her. He led me back to my own bed. “That,” he told me, “never happened.”

  As we got older, I didn’t seem to exist, except in relation to her. I would watch her sleep across the room from me, one long shadow linking our beds, and I would count the ways. Poison, sprinkled on her cereal. A wicked undertow off the beach. Lightning striking.

  In the end, though, I did not kill my sister. She did it all on her own.

  Or at least this is what I tell myself.

  MONDAY

  Brother, I am fire

  Surging under ocean floor.

  I shall never meet you, brother—

  Not for years, anyhow;

  Maybe thousands of years, brother.

  Then I will warm you,

  Hold you close, wrap you in circles,

  Use you and change you—

  Maybe thousands of years, brother.

  —CARL SANDBURG, “Kin”

  ANNA

  WHEN I WAS LITTLE, the great mystery to me wasn’t how babies were made, but why. The mechanics I understood—my older brother Jesse had filled me in—although at the time I was sure he’d heard half of it wrong. Other kids my age were busy looking up the words penis and vagina in the classroom dictionary when the teacher had her back turned, but I paid attention to different details. Like why some mothers only had one child, while other families seemed to multiply before your eyes. Or how the new girl in school, Sedona, told anyone who’d listen that she was named for the place where her parents were vacationing when they made her (“Good thing they weren’t staying in Jersey City,” my father used to say).

  Now that I am thirteen, these distinctions are only more complicated: the eighth-grader who dropped out of school because she got into trouble; a neighbor who got herself pregnant in the hopes it would keep her husband from filing for divorce. I’m telling you, if aliens landed on earth today and took a good hard look at why babies get born, they’d conclude that most people have children by accident, or because they drink too much on a certain night, or because birth control isn’t one hundred percent, or for a thousand other reasons that really aren’t very flattering.

  On the other hand, I was born for a very specific purpose. I wasn’t the result of a cheap bottle of wine or a full moon or the heat of the moment. I was born because a scientist managed to hook up my mother’s eggs and my father’s sperm to create a specific combination of precious genetic material. In fact, when Jesse told me how babies get made and I, the great disbeliever, decided to ask my parents the truth, I got more than I bargained for. They sat me down and told me all the usual stuff, of course—but they also explained that they chose little embryonic me, specifically, because I could save my sister, Kate. “We loved you even more,” my mother made sure to say, “because we knew what exactly we were getting.”

  It made me wonder, though, what would have happened if Kate had been healthy. Chances are, I’d still be floating up in Heaven or wherever, waiting to be attached to a body to spend some time on Earth. Certainly I would not be part of this family. See, unlike the rest of the free world, I didn’t get here by accident. And if your parents have you for a reason, then that reason better exist. Because once it’s gone, so are you.

  • • •

  Pawnshops may be full of junk, but they’re also a breeding ground for stories, if you ask me, not that you did. What happened to make a person trade in the Never Before Worn Diamond Solitaire? Who needed money so badly they’d sell a teddy bear missing an eye? As I walk up to the counter, I wonder if someone will look at the locket I’m about to give up, and ask these same questions.

  The man at the cash register has a nose the shape of a turnip, and eyes sunk so deep I can’t imagine how he sees well enough to go about his business. “Need something?” he asks.

  It’s all I can do to not turn around and walk out the door, pretend I’ve come in by mistake. The only thing that keeps me steady is knowing I am not the first person to stand in front of this counter holding the one item in the world I never thought I’d part with.

  “I have something to sell,” I tell him.

  “Am I supposed to guess what it is?”

  “Oh.” Swallowing, I pull the locket out of the pocket of my jeans. The heart falls on the glass counter in a pool of its own chain. “It’s fourteen-karat gold,” I pitch. “Hardly ever worn.” This is a lie; until this morning, I haven’t taken it off in seven years. My father gave it to me when I was six after the bone marrow harvest, because he said anyone who was giving her sister such a major present deserved one of her own. Seeing it there, on the counter, my neck feels shivery and naked.

  The owner puts a loupe up to his eye, which makes it seem almost normal size. “I’ll give you twenty.”

  “Dollars?”

  “No, pesos. What did you think?”

  “It’s worth five times that!” I’m guessing.

  The owner shrugs. “I’m not the one who needs the money.”

  I pick up the locket, resigned to sealing the deal, and the strangest thing happens—my hand, it just clamps shut like the Jaws of Life. My face goes red with the effort to peel apart my fingers. It takes what seems like an hour for that locket to spill into the owner’s outstretched palm. His eyes stay on my face, softer now. “Tell them you lost it,” he offers, advice tossed in for free.

  • • •

  If Mr. Webster had decided to put the word freak in his dictionary, Anna Fitzgerald would be the best definition he could give. It’s more than just the way I look: refugee-skinny with absolutely no chest to speak of, hair the color of dirt, connect-the-dot freckles on my cheeks that, let me tell you, do not fade with lemon juice or sunscreen or even, sadly, sandpaper. No, God was obviously in some kind of mood on my birthday, because he added to this fabulous physical combination the bigger picture—the household into which I was born.

  My parents tried to make things normal, but that’s a relative term. The truth is, I was never really a kid. To be honest, neither were Kate and Jesse. I guess maybe my brother had his moment in the sun for the four years he was alive before Kate got diagnosed, but ever since then, we’ve been too busy looking over our shoulders to run headlong into growing up. You know how most little kids think they’re like cartoon characters—if an anvil drops on their heads they can peel themselves off the sidewalk and keep going? Well, I never once believed that. How could I, when we practically set a place for Death at the dinner table?

  Kate has acute promyelocytic leukemia. Actually, that’s not quite true—right now she doesn’t have it, but it’s hibernating under her skin like a bear, until it decides to roar again. She was diagnosed when she was two; she’s sixteen now. Molecular relapse and granulocyte and portacath—these words are part of my vocabulary, even though I’ll never find them on any SAT. I’m an allogeneic donor—a perfect sibling match. When Kate needs leukocytes or stem cells or bone marrow to fool her body into thinking it’s healthy, I’m the one who provides them. Nearly every time Kate’s hospitalized, I wind up there, too.

  None of which means anything, except that you shouldn’t believe what you hear about me, least of all that which I tell you myself.

  As I am coming up the stairs, my mother comes out of her room wearing another ball gown. “Ah,” she says, turning her back to me. “Just the girl I wanted to see.”

  I zip it up and watch her twirl. My mother could be beautiful, if she were parachuted into someone else’s life. She has long dark hair a
nd the fine collarbones of a princess, but the corners of her mouth turn down, like she’s swallowed bitter news. She doesn’t have much free time, since a calendar is something that can change drastically if my sister develops a bruise or a nosebleed, but what she does have she spends at Bluefly.com, ordering ridiculously fancy evening dresses for places she is never going to go. “What do you think?” she asks.

  The gown is all the colors of a sunset, and made out of material that swishes when she moves. It’s strapless, what a star might wear sashaying down a red carpet—totally not the dress code for a suburban house in Upper Darby, RI. My mother twists her hair into a knot and holds it in place. On her bed are three other dresses—one slinky and black, one bugle-beaded, one that seems impossibly small. “You look . . .”

  Tired. The word bubbles right under my lips.

  My mother goes perfectly still, and I wonder if I’ve said it without meaning to. She holds up a hand, shushing me, her ear cocked to the open doorway. “Did you hear that?”

  “Hear what?”

  “Kate.”

  “I didn’t hear anything.”

  But she doesn’t take my word for it, because when it comes to Kate she doesn’t take anybody’s word for it. She marches upstairs and opens up our bedroom door to find my sister hysterical on her bed, and just like that the world collapses again. My father, a closet astronomer, has tried to explain black holes to me, how they are so heavy they absorb everything, even light, right into their center. Moments like this are the same kind of vacuum; no matter what you cling to, you wind up being sucked in.

  “Kate!” My mother sinks down to the floor, that stupid skirt a cloud around her. “Kate, honey, what hurts?”

  Kate hugs a pillow to her stomach, and tears keep streaming down her face. Her pale hair is stuck to her face in damp streaks; her breathing’s too tight. I stand frozen in the doorway of my own room, waiting for instructions: Call Daddy. Call 911. Call Dr. Chance. My mother goes so far as to shake a better explanation out of Kate. “It’s Preston,” she sobs. “He’s leaving Serena for good.”

  That’s when we notice the TV. On the screen, a blond hottie gives a longing look to a woman crying almost as hard as my sister, and then he slams the door. “But what hurts?” my mother asks, certain there has to be more to it than this.