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.
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.