My Sister's Keeper by Jodi Picoult Read Free Book Online Page B

sun god, whose music charmed animals and softened boulders. A
man who loved his wife, Eurydice, so much that he wouldn't let Death take her
away.
    By the time I finish, we are lying flat on our backs. “Can I stay here
with you?” Anna asks.
    I kiss the top of her head. “You bet.”
    “Daddy,” Anna whispers, when I think for sure she has fallen
asleep, “did it work?”
    It takes me a moment to understand she is talking about Orpheus and
Eurydice.
    “No,” I admit.
    She lets loose a sigh. “Figures,” she says.
     
    TUESDAY
    My candle burns at both ends;
    It will not last the night;
    But ah, my foes, and oh, my friends—
    It gives a lovely light!
    —EDNA ST. VINCENT MILLAY, “First Fig,” A Few Figs from Thistles
     
    ANNA
    I USED TO PRETEND that I was just passing through this family on my way to
my real one. It isn't too much of a stretch, really—there's Kate, the spitting
image of my dad; and Jesse, the spitting image of my mom; and then there's me,
a collection of recessive genes that came out of left field. In the hospital
cafeteria, eating rubberized French fries and red Jell-O, I'd glance around
from table to table, thinking my bona fide parents might be just a tray away.
They'd sob with sheer joy to find me, and whisk me off to our castle in Monaco
or Romania and give me a maid that smelled like fresh sheets, and my own
Bernese mountain dog, and a private phone line. The thing is, the first person
I'd have called to crow over my new fortune would be Kate.
    Kate's dialysis sessions run three times a week, for two hours at a time.
She has a Mahhukar catheter, which looks just like her central line used to
look and protrudes from the same spot on her chest. This gets hooked up to a
machine that does the work her kidneys aren't doing. Kate's blood (well, it's
my blood if you want to get technical about it) leaves her body through one
needle, gets cleaned, and then goes into her body again through a second
needle. She says it doesn't hurt. Mostly, it's just boring. Kate usually brings
a book or her CD player and headphones. Sometimes we play games. “Go out
into the hall and tell me about the first gorgeous guy you find,” Kate'll
instruct, or, “Sneak up on the janitor who surfs the Net and see whose
naked pictures he's downloading.” When she is tied to the bed, I am her
eyes and her ears.
    Today, she is reading Allure magazine. I wonder if she even knows
that every V-necked model she comes across she touches at the breastbone, in
the same place where she has a catheter and they don't. “Well,” my
mother announces out of the blue, “this is interesting.” She waves a
pamphlet she's taken from the bulletin board outside Kate's room: You and
Your New Kidney. “Did you know that they don't take out the old kidney?
They just transplant the new one into you and hook it up.”
    “That creeps me out,” Kate says. “Imagine the coroner who
cuts you open and sees you've got three instead of two.”
    “I think the point of a transplant is so that the coroner won't
be cutting you open anytime soon,” my mother replies. This fictional
kidney she's discussing resides right now in my own body.
    I've read that pamphlet, too.
    Kidney donation is considered relatively safe surgery, but if you ask me,
the writer must have been comparing it to something like a heart-lung
transplant, or some brain tumor removal. In my opinion, safe surgery is the
kind where you go into the doctor's office and you're awake the whole time and
the procedure is finished in five minutes—like when you have a wart removed or
a cavity drilled. On the other hand, when you donate a kidney, you spend the
night before the operation fasting and taking laxatives. You're given
anesthesia, the risks of which can include stroke, heart attack, and lung
problems. The four-hour surgery isn't a walk in the park, either—you have a I
in 3,000 chance of dying on the operating table. If you don't, you are
hospitalized for four to seven days,