Mercy Street(17)

Claudia’s mother got bigger, and finally big, and the therapist in her can’t help making certain connections. After Deb got big, there were no more boyfriends lurking around the trailer. After Deb got big, they were both safe.

At the time Claudia didn’t see this. Like most teenagers, she saw only herself. At fourteen, fifteen, she lived in a constant state of embarrassment, a self-consciousness so intense it was nearly paralyzing, and having a suddenly fat mother (this does not speak well of her) only made it worse. Her mother’s weight gain had coincided with her own puberty, which was traumatic in all the usual ways. (Claudia was a late bloomer—a phrase that should be outlawed—and the blooming process did not fill her with joy.) As she watched her mother expand, her own budding breasts seemed ominous, a harbinger of things to come.

At sixteen she stopped eating. At first it was unconscious: she was so busy shoveling food into the fosters that feeding herself was an afterthought. Later she was more intentional. She discovered that she liked being hungry—the peculiar energy it gave her, the feeling of clarity and control. She could eat what she wanted, when she wanted. Unlike anything else in her life, it was entirely up to her.

She ate what she wanted, when she wanted, which was almost nothing and almost never. When her breasts disappeared and her periods stopped, it felt like victory. She had proved, definitively, that she was not her mother.

She wasn’t, would never be, anything like Deb.

AT COLLEGE SHE MET PEOPLE WHO SUMMERED IN MAINE, IN vacation houses on the coast, but she never met anyone who lived there year-round, and certainly not inland. When the freshman directory—the original facebook, printed on glossy paper and known on campus as “the Pig Book”—listed her hometown, she had no reason to be ashamed. To her classmates at Stirling College, Clayburn had no shabby connotations, no associations of any kind. Raised in East Coast cities and their tony suburbs, they had never been to such a place.

They were from good families. A significant percentage had flunked out of elite prep schools. Stirling was their safety school, an expression Claudia had never heard before she arrived on campus. She’d applied nowhere else and wouldn’t have applied there, if not for a saintly teacher at Clayburn High—a proud Stirling alumna who (bless her all of her days) urged her to try.

When the acceptance letter came, Deb wouldn’t let her see it. As they shouted over the television, she held Claudia’s future in her hand.

A private college was expensive. This was both true and obvious, but it wasn’t the reason her mother wouldn’t let her go. By then Deb had a second job with a home nursing agency, visiting patients in the evening. With Claudia away at college, who would look after the fosters? Without her round-the-clock unpaid labor, life as they knew it would crumble.

Her mother didn’t say, Don’t leave me.

She did say, You’re no better than anyone else.

If Claudia wanted more school (Deb may have added for whatever reason), there was the community college in Bangor. With a nursing certificate, a job at the County Home was virtually guaranteed.

It was a persuasive argument, though not in the way she intended. At that moment, Claudia would have crawled across broken glass to go to college.

Even during a conversation of this import, they didn’t turn off the TV.





4


At six a.m., Timmy opened for business. He was an early riser, though not by choice. It was what he had to show for two hitches in the Marine Corps: a lifetime of early mornings and one bad tattoo.

He smoked a bowl and waited for the text message, the phone call, the knock at the door.

The apartment was freezing. He cranked up the heat and turned on the TV, a reality show about cops in Miami: body cams, traffic stops, search and seizure, cops giving chase. In Miami the suspects were shirtless, the sun blazing. In Timmy’s apartment the radiator clanked rhythmically, as if someone were whacking it with a hammer. A roar in the distance, a snowplow barreling down Washington Street. The western sky looked gray and heavy, Boston winter bearing down.

He was about to pack a second bowl when his phone lit up: hey its Brent (Ian’s friend) U around this am?

The name Ian was vaguely familiar, so he responded immediately: yep, any time.

In Miami the sirens were screaming. Timmy was selling drugs while watching a TV show about drug crime. He was aware of the absurdity of this.

Which Ian exactly, he couldn’t remember and had no way of finding out. Text messages from customers were deleted immediately, his standard operating procedure. Timmy was cautious in such matters—risk-averse, a term he’d learned watching Bloomberg. If he ever got busted, the cops would have to earn their money. He wasn’t about do their job for them, hand them a complete case when they cracked into his phone.

When Brent arrived, Timmy would be waiting on the porch. He liked to see what the customer was driving, how he presented himself to the world. Remember the douchebag who double-parked his Hummer directly in front of the house? The guy put on his flashers like he was delivering a pizza—engine idling, subwoofers thumping. He didn’t even turn off the radio. Timmy sent him away empty-handed: Sorry, man. This ain’t the drive-thru.

On the front porch he waited. Potheads were unreliable people. They arrived hours or days late—bleary, unwashed, haphazardly dressed. Timmy kept, in a kitchen drawer, a growing collection of their misplaced keys and sunglasses, earbud headphones, cigarette lighters, guitar picks. Not one of these items had ever been claimed.