Mercy Street(68)

He knocked again, thinking about Tim’s face. Beardless, he looked younger, cleaner. He could literally be anyone—a Little League coach or a plumber or a bus driver, some sort of regular person who didn’t sell drugs. He looked more or less the way he’d looked in high school, the smooth cheeks and clefted chin. Anthony had forgotten about the chin, which he found troubling. It was a bully’s chin, the chin of a guy who might beat the crap out of you, just because.

He waited and waited, but no one came to the door.





17


The roads in Maine were clearer than Claudia had expected. At midday the sun was blinding, the power lines dripping. Wet clumps of snow fell heavily from the trees. Clayburn, Maine, seemed half-asleep. Commercial Street was quiet, the brick storefronts oddly sepulchral, like some designated historical site—a public memorial to the way people shopped in the great long-ago, before Walmart came.

She drove past the body shop, Clayburn Junior High, the Amway store—the exact route Gary Cain had taken that September afternoon in 1985, the day he taught her to drive.

North of town the roads were slippery, untraveled. On either side of Oak Hill Road, the snow looked clean enough to eat. At the bottom of the hill stood the eponymous oak, an important Birch family landmark: on a drunken Christmas Eve some years back, her uncle had wrapped a snowmobile around it. Paralyzed from the neck down, Ricky spent his final ten years in a wheelchair at the County Home, where his sister Deb still worked—conveniently located just a half mile down the road. Just beyond it lay Ricky’s current address, the Congregational cemetery, as though on that snowy Christmas Eve—O Holy Night!—he had simply traveled in a straight line.

The trailer sat on a full acre just past the cemetery. Claudia’s grandfather had bought the land back in the 1950s, believing it would one day be worth something. He hadn’t expected his youngest daughter to park a trailer there and stay for thirty-eight years.

Of course, Deb hadn’t expected that either. A trailer always seemed like a temporary solution, but Claudia knew this was an illusion. People died in them all the time. For an entire cross section of humanity, a trailer was the end point. Untold thousands of American lives ended in aluminum cans.

HER MOTHER WAS FIFTY YEARS OLD WHEN SHE FOUND THE LUMP, younger than seemed fair or even possible. She had no family history of breast cancer, no discernible risk factors.

On a completely unrelated note, she’d never had an abortion.

A female body comes equipped with parts—breasts, ovaries, uterus—not necessary to its own survival. It was a lesson Claudia would learn over and over again, working on Mercy Street: each of these parts had the potential to kill you and might do so at any time, for reasons you would never know.

The lumpectomy left a dimple in her mother’s left breast, a divot the size of a fingertip. Deb had worse scars on her knees, her elbows. Didn’t everyone?

During her treatment she’d been told, again and again, how lucky she was. Her cancer had been caught early. Her prognosis was excellent. You know what’s really lucky? Claudia thought. Not getting breast cancer.

If the scar were on her knee or elbow, it would not have been disfiguring, because a woman is not her knees or elbows.

Claudia could remember a student nurse—she looked to be fifteen years old—studying Deb’s scar with palpable dismay. She exuded certainty, a healthy person’s smug confidence: she herself would never be so unfortunate, the luckless one in nine.

Tag, you’re It.

Objectively speaking, the student nurse was right: the odds were in her favor. The odds, technically, were in everyone’s favor. And yet, inevitably, someone was going to be the one in nine.

In any industry Claudia could think of, this failure rate would be unacceptable. If breasts were a consumer product, the manufacturer would be forced to issue a recall.

As countless medical professionals had pointed out, her mother was lucky. Her left breast was gouged with a scalpel, blasted with radiation. Lucky, lucky! A week after the surgery, Deb was back at work, eager for life to return to normal. For her, normal meant taking care of kids, so she got Nicolette.

Their physical resemblance was striking. Of all the kids Deb had raised—Claudia included—Nicolette was the one who most looked like her daughter: sturdy and round-cheeked, a miniature Deb. Ten years old when she arrived, a chubby dark-eyed girl Deb called “part Indian,” though whether she meant Native American or from the Indian subcontinent was never clear. Maybe she didn’t know, or it simply didn’t matter, because in her eyes Nicolette was hers entirely. She’d been raising fosters for twenty years, but this time was different. Deb herself was different. Cancer had changed her, in ways Claudia didn’t yet understand.

From the very beginning, Nicolette was a trial. She was not a lovable child. Most fosters started out wary and tongue-tied, but Nicolette’s shyness evaporated quickly. By the time she entered high school, she had confidence to spare. In Claudia’s opinion—and to her utter astonishment—Deb spoiled her. Not materially—she didn’t have the means—but she tolerated more eye-rolling and teenage sarcasm than most people could bear. Her attempts at discipline were halfhearted. Nicolette was always in trouble: suspended from school for smoking cigarettes, arrested twice for shoplifting, busted for underage drinking when the town cop raided a kegger in the woods.

When Nicolette flunked ninth grade, Deb blamed the teachers at Clayburn High.