It wasn’t her fault. She simply fell.
SOME WEEKS LATER, HER PREGNANCY CLEARLY SHOWING, CLAUDIA drove to Clayburn. “I’ll stop by Saturday afternoon,” she told Nicolette’s voice mail. But she didn’t say why.
They sat at the kitchen table. Nicolette moved aside a pile of junk mail, catalogs, and unopened bills, a child’s coloring book. From her handbag Claudia took a piece of paper.
“What’s this?” Nicolette said.
Claudia took a deep breath—cigarettes and air freshener, the smell of her entire childhood. “The title to the trailer. It’s yours now. Mom”—she said experimentally—“would want you to have it.”
The decision, once she’d made it, seemed entirely obvious. Not for a minute of her life had she wished to own a single-wide trailer—a place she’d never live in and couldn’t bring herself to sell, if such a thing were even possible. A tin can, fifty feet long and eighteen feet across; the home her mother had made for them. Its resale value was approximately zero. The trailer’s worth couldn’t be expressed in dollars. Another metric was required, a currency Claudia would have to invent herself.
“This is just for the trailer,” she explained. The land beneath—her grandfather’s—now belonged to his one surviving child, her aunt Darlene. “I don’t think she has any plans for it, but that’s between you and Darlene.”
Nicolette studied the paper in her hand.
“Keep it in a safe place, okay? You don’t want to lose it.” Claudia looked around at the chaos of the trailer. Get a safe deposit box, she thought but didn’t say.
“I have something for you too.” Nicolette got up from her chair and brought a plastic laundry basket from the living room. “Darlene said you were having a girl.”
She set the basket on the table. Inside were pools of silky nylon fabric, hot pink and turquoise and buttercup yellow. “I used to wear these on Skylar.” Nicolette touched the cheap fabric tenderly, almost reverently. “She can’t fit into them anymore.”
Claudia knew this. Judging by recent Facebook photos, Skylar—now six years old—was a little butterball. Claudia wondered, fleetingly, if she had plumped up on purpose, to avoid wearing these godawful outfits.
Nicolette held up a dress for Claudia’s inspection. The shiny purple bodice was studded with rhinestones, the green satin skirt cut to resemble a tail.
“The Little Mermaid. Mom loved this one,” Nicolette said, her eyes glittering with tears.
And Claudia—who would never in a million years inflict such a costume on a child—felt her own eyes tearing.
“Thank you,” she whispered. Then she did a thing she had never done, not even at their mother’s funeral. She took Nicolette into her arms.
IN PREGNANCY SHE WAS ALWAYS TIRED. MAKING A PERSON, IT turned out, was exhausting work. For the first time in many years, she slept deeply and dreamed vividly. According to What to Expect When You’re Expecting, this was common. The dreams of pregnant women were full of magical creatures. In dreams they gave birth to dragons, to snakes and monsters.
Claudia dreamed none of these things.
For all of her childhood, and most of her adulthood, she had fallen asleep thinking of her mother. As she drifted off to sleep, she pictured where Deb was at that very moment: in her waterbed in the back corner of the trailer, or snoring on the old plaid couch. Either way, a TV would be playing. Only after she’d located her mother could she fall soundly asleep.
As long as her mother was alive, she didn’t consider making another person. She didn’t feel the need. Deb’s death changed that, as it changed everything. Suddenly, brutally, she was no longer a daughter. Nothing in her life had prepared her for this loss.
In pregnancy she dreamed of her mother. A different type of person might have taken this as evidence—proof that Deb was still out there, some piece of her alive in the universe, what believers refer to as a soul.