My Sister's Keeper

"What do you want me to say, Julia? I wasn't good enough for you. You deserved better than some freak who might fall down frothing at the mouth any old minute."
Julia goes perfectly still. "You might have let me make up my own mind."
"What difference would it have made? Like you really would have gotten great satisfaction guarding me like Judge does when it happens, wiping after me, living at the end of my life." I shake my head. "You were so incredibly independent. A free spirit. I didn't want to be the one who took that away from you."

"Well, if I'd had the choice, maybe I wouldn't have spent the past fifteen years thinking there was something the matter with me."

"You?" I start to laugh. "Look at you. You're a knockout. You're smarter than I am. You're on a career track and you're family-centred and you probably can even balance your checkbook."

"And I'm lonely, Campbell," Julia adds. "Why do you think I had to learn to act to independent? I also get mad too quickly, and I hog the covers, and my second toe is longer than my big one. My hair has its own zip code. Plus, I get certifiably crazy when I've got PMS. You don't love someone because they're perfect," she says. "You love them in spite of the fact that they're not."

I don't know how to respond to that; it's like being told after thirty-five years that the sky, which I've seen as a brilliant blue, is in fact rather green.

"And another thing- this time, you don't get to leave me. I'm going to leave you."

If possible, that only makes me feel worse. I try to pretend it doesn't hurt, but I don't have the energy. "So go."

Julia settles next to me. "I will," she says. "In another fifty or sixty years."

- (Conversation between Julia Romano and Campbell Alexander at the courthouse) Jodi Picoult, p.370 (2004)

My Sister's Keeper

When I first became a parent I used to lie in bed at night and imagine the most horrible succession of maladies; the bite of a jellyfish, the taste of a poisonous berry, the smile of a dangerous stranger, the dive into a shallow pool. There are so many ways a child can be harmed that it seems nearly impossible one person alone could succeed at keeping him safe. As my children got older, the hazards only changed: inhaling glue, playing with matches, small pink pills sold behind the bleachers of the middle school. You can stay up all night and still not count all the ways to lose the people you love.

-(Sara Fitzgerald in monologue) Jodi Picoult, p.226 (2004)