My Sister's Keeper by Jodi Picoult Page B

out of his fog. “You could have told me before
I passed it.”
    “I did.”
    Before I can even weigh the costs and benefits of entering someone else's
battle again, I say, “/ didn't hear you.”
    My mother's head whips around. “Anna, right now, you are the last
person whose input I need or want.”
    “I just—”
    She holds up her hand like the privacy partition in a cab. She shakes her
head.
    On the backseat, I slide sideways and curl my feet up, facing to the rear,
so that all I see is black.
    “Brian,” my mother says. “You missed it again.”
    When we walk in, my mother steams past Kate, who opened the door for us, and
past Jesse, who is watching what looks like the scrambled Playboy channel on
TV. In the kitchen, she opens cabinets and bangs them shut. She takes food from
the refrigerator and smacks it onto the table.
    “Hey,” my father says to Kate. “How're you feeling?”
    She ignores him, pushing into the kitchen. “What happened?”
    “What happened. Well.” My mother pins me with a gaze.
“Why don't you ask your sister what happened?”
    Kate turns to me, all eyes.
    “Amazing how quiet you are now, when a judge isn't listening,” my
mother says.
    Jesse turns off the television. “She made you talk to a judge? Damn,
Anna.”
    My mother closes her eyes. “Jesse, you know, now would be a good time
for you to leave.”
    “You don't have to ask me twice,” he says, his voice full of
broken glass. We hear the front door open and shut, a whole story.
    “Sara.” My father steps into the room. “We all need to cool
off a little.”
    “I have one child who's just signed her sister's death sentence, and
I'm supposed to cool off?”
    The kitchen gets so silent we can hear the refrigerator whispering. My
mother's words hang like too-ripe fruit, and when they fall on the floor and
burst, she shudders into motion. “Kate,” she says, hurrying toward my
sister, her arms already outstretched. “Kate, I shouldn't have said that.
It's not what I meant.”
    In my family, we seem to have a tortured history of not saying what we ought
to and not meaning what we do. Kate covers her mouth with her hand. She backs
out of the kitchen door, bumping into my father, who fumbles but cannot catch
her as she scrambles upstairs. I hear the door to our room slam shut. My
mother, of course, goes after her.
    So I do what I do best. I move in the opposite direction.
    Is there any place on earth that smells better than a Laundromat? It's like
a rainy Sunday when you don't have to get out from under your covers, or like
lying back on the grass your father's just mowed—comfort food for your nose.
When I was little my mom would take hot clothes out of the dryer and dump them
on top of me where I was sitting on the couch. I used to pretend they were a
single skin, that I was curled tight beneath them like one large heart.
    The other thing I like is that Laundromats draw lonely people like metal to
magnets. There's a guy passed out on a bank of chairs in the back, with army
boots and a T-shirt that says Nostradamus Was an Optimist. A woman at
the folding table sifts through a heap of men's button-down shirts, sniffing
back tears. Put ten people together in a Laundromat and chances are you won't
be the one who's worst off.
    I sit down across from a bank of washers and try to match up the clothes
with the people waiting. The pink panties and lace nightgown belong to the girl
who is reading a romance novel. The woolly red socks and checkered shirt are
the skanky sleeping student. The soccer jerseys and kiddie overalls come from the
toddler who keeps handing filmy white dryer sheets to her mom, oblivious on a
cell phone. What kind of person can afford a cell phone, but not her own washer
and dryer?
    I play a game with myself, sometimes, and try to imagine what it would be
like to be the person whose clothes are spinning in front of me. If I were
washing those carpenter jeans, maybe I'd be a roofer in Phoenix, my arms