“I’m talking to you, sir. Are you the one who was taking pictures?”
Anthony opened his mouth to answer, but nothing came out.
He took off running.
He ran past the parking garage, the T stop, block after block of Chinese restaurants, fluorescent-lit like bus stations. Finally he glanced over his shoulder, but no one was following.
He felt that he had traveled a great distance. According to Google Maps, he had covered three blocks. Sick to his stomach, his head pounding, he looked around and spotted a cash machine. He withdrew a hundred bucks and texted Tim Flynn.
It’s Anthony. I’m on my way.
ON TIM’S PORCH HE KNOCKED AND WAITED. STRICTLY SPEAKING, the visit was unnecessary; he still had half a bag of weed at home. But it was winter in New England, the TV weathermen full of dire warnings. Storm preparedness, they called it. For Anthony, that meant laying in a supply of weed. Moreover: it wasn’t possible to show up at Tim Flynn’s without buying something. Such were the terms of friendship.
He knocked again, thinking about Tim’s face. Beardless, he looked younger, cleaner. He could literally be anyone—a Little League coach or a plumber or a bus driver, some sort of regular person who didn’t sell drugs. He looked more or less the way he’d looked in high school, the smooth cheeks and clefted chin. Anthony had forgotten about the chin, which he found troubling. It was a bully’s chin, the chin of a guy who might beat the crap out of you, just because.
He waited and waited, but no one came to the door.
17
The roads in Maine were clearer than Claudia had expected. At midday the sun was blinding, the power lines dripping. Wet clumps of snow fell heavily from the trees. Clayburn, Maine, seemed half-asleep. Commercial Street was quiet, the brick storefronts oddly sepulchral, like some designated historical site—a public memorial to the way people shopped in the great long-ago, before Walmart came.
She drove past the body shop, Clayburn Junior High, the Amway store—the exact route Gary Cain had taken that September afternoon in 1985, the day he taught her to drive.
North of town the roads were slippery, untraveled. On either side of Oak Hill Road, the snow looked clean enough to eat. At the bottom of the hill stood the eponymous oak, an important Birch family landmark: on a drunken Christmas Eve some years back, her uncle had wrapped a snowmobile around it. Paralyzed from the neck down, Ricky spent his final ten years in a wheelchair at the County Home, where his sister Deb still worked—conveniently located just a half mile down the road. Just beyond it lay Ricky’s current address, the Congregational cemetery, as though on that snowy Christmas Eve—O Holy Night!—he had simply traveled in a straight line.
The trailer sat on a full acre just past the cemetery. Claudia’s grandfather had bought the land back in the 1950s, believing it would one day be worth something. He hadn’t expected his youngest daughter to park a trailer there and stay for thirty-eight years.
Of course, Deb hadn’t expected that either. A trailer always seemed like a temporary solution, but Claudia knew this was an illusion. People died in them all the time. For an entire cross section of humanity, a trailer was the end point. Untold thousands of American lives ended in aluminum cans.
HER MOTHER WAS FIFTY YEARS OLD WHEN SHE FOUND THE LUMP, younger than seemed fair or even possible. She had no family history of breast cancer, no discernible risk factors.
On a completely unrelated note, she’d never had an abortion.
A female body comes equipped with parts—breasts, ovaries, uterus—not necessary to its own survival. It was a lesson Claudia would learn over and over again, working on Mercy Street: each of these parts had the potential to kill you and might do so at any time, for reasons you would never know.
The lumpectomy left a dimple in her mother’s left breast, a divot the size of a fingertip. Deb had worse scars on her knees, her elbows. Didn’t everyone?