Mercy Street(77)

I didn’t know Deb had another daughter, she was told more than once. Nicolette was the daughter they knew.

Claudia got out of bed and undressed in front of the mirror. Her body looked normal except for her nipples, which were bright red, like the mouth of a child after eating a cherry Popsicle. The same thing had happened twenty years ago, the last time she was pregnant.

She slipped on a bathrobe and turned on the television—tuned, as luck would have it, to a rerun of Dateline.

In preventing pregnancy—as in a murder investigation—the first forty-eight hours were crucial. The morning she crept out of Timmy’s bed, Claudia had gone straight to work. She’d answered the hotline and counseled patients, spent hours looking at security footage with Luis. The following day she’d driven to Maine, thinking, all the while, of the unknown man who’d been watching the clinic, snapping photos of unsuspecting women and posting them to the internet.

In Clayburn, she’d stopped at Walmart to make a copy of Nicolette’s key. On her way back to the trailer, she paid a brief visit to her aunt Darlene. As she performed these errands, she didn’t even consider driving to a pharmacy for the morning-after pill—believing, not unreasonably, that she was safe.

Her confidence was reasonable. Women her age didn’t get pregnant every day. Heather Chen, the nurse practitioner—a year younger than Claudia—had tried for two solid years. It took multiple rounds of Clomid injections, and three unsuccessful artificial inseminations, before she finally conceived in vitro with donor sperm.

For a perimenopausal forty-three-year-old woman with an erratic menstrual history, the odds of conception from a single act of intercourse were vanishingly slim.

She was a women’s health professional, an authority in such matters. For years she had taken no chances. She blasted her system with hormones—the Pill, and later the Depo shot—and endured the side effects. Meeting Stuart—vasectomized, blessedly infertile—had freed her. A one-night stand with her weed dealer hadn’t been part of the plan.

Truly, it wasn’t that difficult to avoid getting pregnant. Her reasons, in the end, were the same as everybody’s.

It just happened.

It was all my fault.

When Dateline ended, she dressed and set out driving. She didn’t call or text; she just wanted to see him. What exactly she would say, she had no clue.

In the end it didn’t matter. For the first time in the two years she’d known him, Timmy’s windows were dark.





21


As a boy Timmy had been fascinated by astronauts, by space generally: the numberless planets spinning in their orbits, the unknowable muchness of the world beyond. Earth was just a speck, one tiny pebble on one undistinguished beach among many millions of beaches. He had not dreamed of becoming an astronaut, however. It was not an aspiration you had growing up in Grantham, where aspiration of any kind made you a target. Even as a child, he’d been a realist. Thinking about that now, decades later, made him sad, how a kid could learn, without ever being told, that some things could never be.

At that time, the early 1980s, movies and TV were rife with extraterrestrials and intergalactic adventures. To Timmy they seemed like entertainments for children. Fantasy did not interest him. Only the real thing would do.

It was just after his twelfth birthday when the teacher was sent into space—a regular person from Concord, New Hampshire, a straight shot up the highway from Boston. Timmy had seen her on television talking about the mission. She looked like his mother, his friends’ mothers, a lady you’d see in the grocery store. When she opened her mouth, he heard his parents, his teachers. She sounded like every person he knew.

The morning of the mission, Timmy ditched school. He had done this before, met Andy Stasko at the seawall to smoke cigarettes and pass a flask of Jameson; but this time he didn’t want company. At school the seventh graders would watch the launch together, Stasko and Dennis Link trash-talking the astronauts and especially Christa McAuliffe, the teacher being sent into space. This was expected behavior at any school-sanctioned activity, and normally Timmy would have joined right in. But the shuttle launch was different. He wanted to watch it alone, silently, reverently; to imagine himself into the capsule, in top condition from months of intensive training, strapped in and waiting for the count.

The launch started nine minutes late. In his parents’ basement, Timmy sat in front of the television, waiting.

We have liftoff!

Sixty-five seconds into the launch, Commander Scobee went to full power. Timmy didn’t understand, at first, exactly what he was seeing, the white smoke billowing in a serpentine chain.

The TV journalist went silent, endless seconds of dead air. When he finally spoke, his voice was shaky. Flight controllers here are looking very carefully at the situation. Obviously a major malfunction.

Something was very, very wrong.

Timmy sat there a long time, staring at the television. He wished that he were in school, where he would be unable to cry and wouldn’t need to, because there would be girls on hand for that purpose. The girls would do the crying for you while you slagged on them and silently blessed them for the distraction, for sparing you the humiliation and pain. But Timmy was alone in his parents’ basement. His mom and dad were at work, his brother and sister at school, and there was nobody, nobody he could call.

HE LEFT PASCO COUNTY AT FIVE IN THE MORNING, WHILE THE sky was still dark. He liked driving at that hour, no one on the road but the professionals. He set his cruise control at a prudent sixty-eight and settled in for the ride, I-4 to I-95, which would take him all the way to Boston. As he blew past his old exit, he felt a pang of guilt. He’d meant to stop and see the Tuna on the way down to Florida, but at the last minute had changed his mind. Next time, he thought. The mission demanded his full attention. He’d be more relaxed once he’d worked the bugs out. Next time he’d come early and spend a day fishing with his son.