Mercy Street(69)

Claudia had shoplifted too, but she had never been caught.

In those years, Claudia learned of family news via Facebook—a rich source of local gossip, the modern equivalent of the Clayburn Star. Nicolette, a power user, posted a dozen times a day, so often that it was hard to imagine her doing anything else. At a certain point she’d sent a friend request that Claudia thoughtlessly accepted. Moments later she received a notification: Nicolette Fleming has identified you as her sister. Click to Confirm.

She didn’t click. Nicolette was her mother’s project, a problem she had no desire to inherit.

She thought, You are not my sister.

HALFWAY THROUGH HER JUNIOR YEAR IN HIGH SCHOOL, NICOLETTE fell pregnant. Claudia marveled at the timing: at eighteen she would have aged out of the system, but now there was no question of her moving out of the trailer. After the baby was born, they would need a place to stay.

As Deb explained this—late one night, by phone—Claudia thought immediately of her grandparents. When Deb fell pregnant, they’d done nothing to help. Her predicament, in their eyes, was a problem of her own making—a reasonable and customary punishment for female misbehavior, no more than she deserved. With Nicolette, Deb had the opposite reaction: protective, jubilant, generous.

Her joy at the girl’s pregnancy was, to Claudia, bewildering. Nicolette was a walking catastrophe. It was hard to imagine a person less equipped to raise a child.

“I know you don’t want to hear this,” Claudia said, “but are you sure this is a good idea?”

She pointed out the obvious: Nicolette had no high school diploma, no job, and, with several misdemeanors on her record, little hope of finding one. Motherhood would put an end to her education, circumscribe her future. Her adult life would be a series of dead ends, over before it began.

As Claudia ticked off these items one by one, Deb said nothing. She listened in silence as Claudia lectured her on the difficulties of young single motherhood.

“She’s seventeen years old,” said Claudia. “She has another twenty-five years to have kids, if that’s even something she wants to do. There’s more to life than having babies.”

She believed it then and believes it still, but she wishes she hadn’t said it. For years they’d tiptoed around the subject of her work. Now, suddenly, there was nowhere to hide.

Deb said, “I don’t know how you can work there.”

(Here’s how: never respond to this provocation. The person who says it—even if she is your mother—is trying to start a conversation you don’t want to have.)

“She doesn’t have to do this. Just let me talk to her. Mom,” said Claudia, “this is what I do.”

“No,” Deb said sharply. “Claudia Marie, don’t you dare.”

They were her final words on the subject. A moment later she hung up the phone.

THEY DIDN’T SPEAK AGAIN FOR MANY MONTHS. CLAUDIA LEFT A few messages on Deb’s answering machine, but her mother didn’t call back. Clearly she had nothing more to say.

At least, not to Claudia. On Facebook she posted constantly: umpteen photos of Nicolette’s pregnant belly, a sonogram image bordered, literally, with hearts and flowers. Her captions were full of exclamation marks. (My grandbaby!!!!) Her online persona was, to Claudia, confounding: breathless, effusive, nothing at all like the stolid, taciturn woman she was in real life.

From what seemed a great distance, Claudia followed the saga of Nicolette’s pregnancy. The prenatal checkups, the gestational diabetes—for Deb and Nicolette, yet another experience to be shared. For years Deb had kept a container in the bathroom to dispose of her own syringes, a plastic sharps bin she’d swiped from work. When Claudia was growing up, this had seemed normal. In Clayburn, everyone was diabetic; shooting insulin was a badge of adulthood, like getting a driver’s license. She learned later that this wasn’t unique to Clayburn; it was true wherever people were poor. At work she encountered diabetes all the time, in shockingly young patients from Dorchester or Chelsea—urban food deserts where moldering produce was shrink-wrapped and sold at a premium and shitty fast food was practically free.

Nicolette’s food cravings, her backaches and heartburn. Claudia read the posts grudgingly, sourly, filled with childish aggrievement. Later she saw the feeling for what it was, a kind of sibling rivalry. By getting knocked up in high school, Nicolette had accomplished something Claudia had never managed. She had made their mother proud.

Their mother. Nicolette wasn’t her sister, but she was—Claudia saw it clearly—Deb’s daughter. She had followed in Deb’s footsteps, made the exact same choices, while Claudia had done the opposite. For as long as she could remember, her mother’s example had informed her every decision. For Deb, getting pregnant at seventeen had been determinative. For Claudia, dealing with unplanned pregnancies—prevention, remediation—was more than a career. It was her mission, her life’s work.

Nicolette’s pregnancy was, for Claudia, a surreal reversal. She felt wounded by her mother’s joy. At the time it felt like a personal rebuke, a resounding judgment on the life she’d made for herself, Deb flipping the bird at all she’d done and all that she was.

As (a reasonable person might argue) Claudia had always done to her.

Nicolette’s baby was born on May first, Deb’s birthday. It was—Deb wrote on Facebook—the best birthday present of her life. That was . . . four years ago? Five? Claudia couldn’t say exactly. It was the defining feature of a life without children: the ability to ignore the passage of time.