Mercy Street(76)

“May I see your bracelet, please?”

Claudia held out her wrist, confirmed her name and date of birth. The tech matched the digits to the numbers on the bracelet. Her eyeglasses—Claudia would remember this later—looked fake, unconvincing. They looked like they should be attached to a plastic nose.

“Given your family history, your doctor has ordered a 3D mammogram,” the tech said. “I have a few questions before we get started. What was the first day of your last menstrual period?”

The eternal question.

“It’s been a while,” Claudia said. “A couple months, maybe? My cycles are kind of messed up.”

“Perimenopause?”

“Probably.” She’d had no symptoms yet, nothing resembling a hot flash, but at age forty-three, menopause couldn’t be far away.

“Any chance you might be pregnant?”

Incredibly, she’d needed someone to ask the question. Until she was asked the question, the possibility didn’t cross her mind.

THAT NIGHT, SLEEP WAS IMPOSSIBLE. CLAUDIA LAY IN BED WITH her hand on her belly—still flat, but not for much longer. On her way home she’d stopped at CVS and, though she’d already flunked one at the hospital, bought a pregnancy test. The second test was wishful thinking—a Hail Mary pass, just in case.

Hail Mary, full of grace. There was more to the prayer, but Claudia had never learned it. She understood the words only in football terms, the doomed audacity of the long-distance pass.

She lay awake and thought of her mother, gone forever. There was no one else she wanted to tell.

The numberless ways Claudia had hurt her. When she married Phil, she didn’t invite Deb to the wedding. She knew it was an unforgivable breach. Her mother loved weddings. In Clayburn, they were raucous affairs, all-day bacchanals at the AmVets or the Rod and Gun Club. Deb, a perennial bridesmaid, had an entire closet full of hideous dresses in a vast range of sizes, each bought on layaway and paid for in installments and worn only once.

Deb loved weddings, even though—or maybe because—she’d never had one herself.

She wouldn’t come anyway, Claudia told Phil, which may have been true. Her reasoning went like this: a city hall ceremony wasn’t a real wedding. It was a statutory requirement, like taking a driver’s test. And nothing short of a real wedding would get Deb to visit New York City.

With a city hall ceremony, she would be spared the necessity of introducing her mother to Phil’s parents. She could have a normal wedding, like people on television.

Fat people look poor.

IN THE FINAL YEAR OF DEB’S LIFE, CLAUDIA WAS PRICKLY, INATTENTIVE. If she ever logged into Facebook, she might have seen Nicolette’s posts, requesting prayers for her sick mother. After the funeral, she went back and studied them. The language was vague. Nicolette’s mother might have had a stomach flu or a bad head cold. The casual reader would never have guessed that after eighteen years of remission, Deb’s cancer had reoccurred.

At the time no one knew this, not even Deb herself. She had no use for doctors—a common sentiment among medical support staff, the minnows at the bottom of a food chain in which MDs were the sharks. In all the years of Claudia’s growing up, her mother never saw a doctor of any kind, never mind a gynecologist. Deb rarely spoke of what she called (on the phone to her sister, in a low voice) female problems. An annual exam—spreading her legs for a stranger—was a humiliation she could not bear.

Princess.

If the doctor had been a woman, someone might have talked her into it. But a male gynecologist—the only kind available in Clayburn, then or now—was out of the question. Deb’s wariness stemmed from questions about the doctor’s character. What kind of guy wanted to poke around down there for a living? A pervert was what kind.

When, several years after menopause, she started bleeding, she told no one. She simply took a maxi pad from the box under the sink.

If you happen to be a woman, all problems are female problems.

Failure to perform scheduled maintenance may void the warranty.

For a year, maybe longer, the cancer was confined to her uterus. At that point, a hysterectomy would have saved her. If her daughter—a licensed social worker, a women’s health professional—had taken her to a gynecologist, she would still be alive. Instead the cancer spread to her liver.

Deb was a prude, and stubborn, and it was not inaccurate to say that she died of shame.

Her final weeks were spent on the old plaid couch, coffee-stained and embedded with cat hair, the DNA of several feline generations—the kittens and grandkittens of Mr. Whiskers, a stray cat that little Claudia (the budding sexpert, the future reproductive health professional) had mistakenly identified as male.

Her mother died as she had lived, with the TV playing. It was the only way she could fall asleep. When Nicolette found her, the Today show had just started. Claudia could hear the theme song playing in the background when she answered the call.

The funeral lasted fifteen minutes. The young minister, a mild bald-headed man who’d never laid eyes on the deceased, seemed at a loss. Deb had been baptized at First Congregational, where her parents attended services at Christmas and Easter, but they’d been dead for years and the minister hadn’t known them either. The crowd was small—Nicolette and her daughter, a handful of neighbors. Aunt Darlene came with her new husband and his portable oxygen tank, which he pulled behind him on a dolly as though walking a dog. There were a few other mourners Claudia didn’t recognize: high school classmates of Nicolette’s, her mother’s coworkers from the County Home.