Handle With Care by Jodi Picoult Read Free Book Online

one. You had been put into a spica cast—surely one of the biggest torture devices ever created by doctors. It was a half shell of plaster that covered you from knee to ribs. You were in a semireclined position, because that’s what your bones needed to knit together. The cast kept your legs splayed wide so that the femurs would set correctly. Here’s what we were told:
    1. You would wear this cast for four months.
    2. Then it would be sliced in half, and you would spend weeks sitting in it like an oyster on the half shell, trying to rebuild your stomach muscles so that you could sit upright again.
    3. The small square cutout of the plaster at your belly would allow your stomach to expand while you ate.
    4. The open gash between your legs was left so you could go to the bathroom.
    Here’s what we were not told:
    1. You wouldn’t be able to sit completely upright, or lie completely down.
    2. You couldn’t fly back to New Hampshire in a normal plane seat.
    3. You couldn’t even lie down in the back of a normal car.
    4. You wouldn’t be able to sit comfortably for long periods in your wheelchair.
    5. Your clothes wouldn’t fit over the cast.
    Because of all these things, we did not leave Florida immediately. We rented a Suburban, with three full bench seats, and settled Amelia in the back. You had the whole middle bench, and we padded this with blankets we’d bought at Wal-Mart. There we’d also bought men’s T-shirts and boxer shorts—the elastic waists could stretch over the cast and be belted with a hair scrunchie if you pulled the extra fabric to the side, and if you didn’t look too closely, they almost passed for shorts. They were not fashionable, but they covered up your crotch, which was left wide open by the position of the cast.
    Then we started the long drive home.
    You slept; the painkillers they’d given you at the hospital were still swimming through your blood. Amelia alternated between doing word search puzzles and asking if we were almost home yet. We ate at drive-through restaurants, because you couldn’t sit up at a table.
    Seven hours into our journey, Amelia shifted in the backseat. “You know how Mrs. Grey always makes us write about the cool stuff we did over vacation? I’m going to talk about you guys trying to figure out how to get Willow onto the toilet to pee.”
    “Don’t you dare,” I said.
    “Well, if I don’t, my essay’s going to be really short.”
    “We could make the rest of the trip fun,” I suggested at one point. “Stop off in Memphis at Graceland…or Washington, D.C….”
    “Or we could just drive straight through and be done with it,” Sean said.
    I glanced at him. In the dark, a green band of light from the dashboard reflected like a mask around his eyes.
    “Could we go to the White House?” Amelia asked, perking up.
    I imagined the hothouse of humidity that Washington would be; I pictured us lugging you around on our hips as we climbed the steps to the Air and Space Museum. Out the window, the black road was a ribbon that kept unraveling in front of us; we couldn’t manage to catch up to its end. “Your father’s right,” I said.
     
    When we finally got home, word had already spread about what happened. There was a note from Piper on the kitchen counter, with a list of all the people who’d brought casseroles she’d stashed in the fridge and a rating system: five stars (eat this one first), three stars (better than Chef
Boyardee), one star (botulism alert). I learned a long time ago with you that folks who are trying to be kind would rather do it with a macaroni-and-cheese bake than any personal involvement. You hand off a serving dish and you’ve done your job—no need to get personally involved, and your conscience is clean. Food is the currency of aid.
    People ask all the time how I’m doing, but the truth is, they don’t really want to know. They look at your casts—camouflage or hot pink or neon orange. They watch me unload the car and