During her treatment she’d been told, again and again, how lucky she was. Her cancer had been caught early. Her prognosis was excellent. You know what’s really lucky? Claudia thought. Not getting breast cancer.
If the scar were on her knee or elbow, it would not have been disfiguring, because a woman is not her knees or elbows.
Claudia could remember a student nurse—she looked to be fifteen years old—studying Deb’s scar with palpable dismay. She exuded certainty, a healthy person’s smug confidence: she herself would never be so unfortunate, the luckless one in nine.
Tag, you’re It.
Objectively speaking, the student nurse was right: the odds were in her favor. The odds, technically, were in everyone’s favor. And yet, inevitably, someone was going to be the one in nine.
In any industry Claudia could think of, this failure rate would be unacceptable. If breasts were a consumer product, the manufacturer would be forced to issue a recall.
As countless medical professionals had pointed out, her mother was lucky. Her left breast was gouged with a scalpel, blasted with radiation. Lucky, lucky! A week after the surgery, Deb was back at work, eager for life to return to normal. For her, normal meant taking care of kids, so she got Nicolette.
Their physical resemblance was striking. Of all the kids Deb had raised—Claudia included—Nicolette was the one who most looked like her daughter: sturdy and round-cheeked, a miniature Deb. Ten years old when she arrived, a chubby dark-eyed girl Deb called “part Indian,” though whether she meant Native American or from the Indian subcontinent was never clear. Maybe she didn’t know, or it simply didn’t matter, because in her eyes Nicolette was hers entirely. She’d been raising fosters for twenty years, but this time was different. Deb herself was different. Cancer had changed her, in ways Claudia didn’t yet understand.
From the very beginning, Nicolette was a trial. She was not a lovable child. Most fosters started out wary and tongue-tied, but Nicolette’s shyness evaporated quickly. By the time she entered high school, she had confidence to spare. In Claudia’s opinion—and to her utter astonishment—Deb spoiled her. Not materially—she didn’t have the means—but she tolerated more eye-rolling and teenage sarcasm than most people could bear. Her attempts at discipline were halfhearted. Nicolette was always in trouble: suspended from school for smoking cigarettes, arrested twice for shoplifting, busted for underage drinking when the town cop raided a kegger in the woods.
When Nicolette flunked ninth grade, Deb blamed the teachers at Clayburn High.
Claudia had shoplifted too, but she had never been caught.
In those years, Claudia learned of family news via Facebook—a rich source of local gossip, the modern equivalent of the Clayburn Star. Nicolette, a power user, posted a dozen times a day, so often that it was hard to imagine her doing anything else. At a certain point she’d sent a friend request that Claudia thoughtlessly accepted. Moments later she received a notification: Nicolette Fleming has identified you as her sister. Click to Confirm.
She didn’t click. Nicolette was her mother’s project, a problem she had no desire to inherit.
She thought, You are not my sister.
HALFWAY THROUGH HER JUNIOR YEAR IN HIGH SCHOOL, NICOLETTE fell pregnant. Claudia marveled at the timing: at eighteen she would have aged out of the system, but now there was no question of her moving out of the trailer. After the baby was born, they would need a place to stay.
As Deb explained this—late one night, by phone—Claudia thought immediately of her grandparents. When Deb fell pregnant, they’d done nothing to help. Her predicament, in their eyes, was a problem of her own making—a reasonable and customary punishment for female misbehavior, no more than she deserved. With Nicolette, Deb had the opposite reaction: protective, jubilant, generous.
Her joy at the girl’s pregnancy was, to Claudia, bewildering. Nicolette was a walking catastrophe. It was hard to imagine a person less equipped to raise a child.