Page 211 of ClickBack

“I kept explaining. I thought if I reminded him who I was, he’d stop talking to me that way. After that, he stopped taking my calls.”

“And you still did the pageant?”

“I didn’t know how to get out of it without telling somebody why. Everything was paid for. The dress was hanging in my room. I kept doing the next thing because I didn’t know what else to do.”

She looks down at her hands.

“They crowned you.”

“That Friday. The fair opened Sunday. I was supposed to ride in the parade the following Saturday, before Mother’s Day.”

I tell her about the call to the borough building before the parade. The adults who already knew. The chair beside mine where Brandi sat with her purse on her lap, learning about her daughter’s pregnancy while someone explained what would happen to the title.

“You didn’t tell Nanny first?”

“No. I was afraid. I let her walk into that room without knowing.”

Rae closes her eyes.

“I used to think mostly about what she didn’t say in there,” I tell her. “I’ve had more time to think about what it was like for her to hear it.”

“Because you were pregnant with me.”

“Because adults chose to handle it that way.” I turn toward her. “You hadn’t done anything. You weren’t here yet.”

I slide the ultrasound picture from the envelope. She takes it by the corners.

“That’s me?”

“That’s you.”

She brings it closer. Her nail follows the edge of the image without touching it.

“I carried it everywhere. To school. To work. I could be scared of everything that was happening, then look at that and want you to hurry up and get here.”

She presses her lips together.

“That first year, I played ‘Angel of Mine’ until Di threatened to hide the CD. You’d go to sleep, and I’d keep singing because I wasn’t finished.”

“You sang that to Zion.”

“I did.”

Rae touches the picture with one fingertip now.

“I was never ashamed of you,” I say. “I need you to hear that. I was scared, and I was ashamed of myself for things people had taught me to be ashamed of. But I wanted my baby.”

She nods without looking up.

“What happened to him?”

I have had twenty-eight years to prepare the answer. My voice still fails on his name.

“Gavin died that August. He’d turned twenty by then. He was a passenger in a car that went off 724 coming back toward Pottstown.”

Rae stops touching the photograph.

“Before I was born?”