by Greta Nelsen
Dearest Claire,
My name is Soledad Ross, and I am your half-sister. I have thought of writing you many, many times since I learned of your troubles, but the opportunity never seemed right. I did not want to be a burden.
I am contacting you now to tell you that you are in my heart and in my mind, though we have never met. When our father died, he left a cigar box of mementos—pictures, cards, ticket stubs—that I treasure as he did. In that box was a photograph of you and him in Paris, lounging on the banks of the Seine, your legs dangling over a stone wall.
He must have told the story of that picture a thousand times—how your mother had just snapped it when you reached for a butterfly and started to fall. But he caught you. You were never really in danger, he said, but you were so frightened you clung to him the rest of the day, slept wedged between him and your mother in the hotel that night, though you had your own bed, even at five years old.
That story, like others he told of you and Ricky, captured my imagination from as far back as I can remember, because through that story, I felt you. I knew you in a way only blood can know blood. The way a tree knows the earth.
As you may well know, I spent the bulk of my childhood in Sonora, Mexico with our father, until he died suddenly of an aneurysm in 1987, when I was six years old. My mother had died birthing Amelie, another of your half-sisters, the previous year, a week past my fifth birthday. A few years after our father passed, I moved the younger children to Chihuahua and then, eventually, to Tampa, Florida, where Amelie and Joaquim (your half-brother) still live. I am now in Washington, D.C., and Christina (yes, another half-sister) is in Anchorage, Alaska with her husband, a specialist in the U.S. Army.
I tell you this because Joaquim, Christina, Amelie, and I are your family. We loved the same father you loved, mourned him with the same tears. It has been too long a road getting here, but we would like to know you, whenever and wherever you choose.
I am including my contact information in hopes that, when you become ready, you will reach out to me—to all of us—because it is past time.
Bless you and be well.
Yours Always,
Soledad
I stare at my sister’s words until they take on the look of a foreign language, transform into a sort of emotional Rosetta Stone. This cluster of straight lines and curved loops, open arches and simple dots, is the key to my sense of belonging. The roots of my tree.
“I love you,” I say to Soledad and Joaquim, Christina and Amelie, Ricky, Charlotte and George, Tim, Owen and my dearest Ally.
Then I crack the Bible again, landing on the words I have been groping for since the day Ricky died:
Deliver me from sinking in the mire; let me be delivered from my enemies and from the deep waters. Let not the flood sweep over me, or the deep swallow me up, or the pit close its mouth over me.
With my heart thumping in my ears, my lungs constricted, regret burrowing into my soul, I ask Him to grant me this. And in His infinite mercy, He does.
Discussion Questions
1. Although her life is idyllic at the beginning of the novel, Claire is haunted by traumatic events of the past: her brother’s death; her father’s desertion of the family; and her mother’s mental collapse. How do these events affect Claire’s marriage? Her fertility choices? Her response to Owen’s illness?
2. The author chose to tell this story in the first-person perspective. How does this affect the emotional impact of the novel?
3. What is the role of fate in the novel?
4. Claire and Tim’s marriage is a reversal of the norm (she works; he stays at home). How does this affect their relationship dynamics?
5. Claire’s reaction to learning she has been raped is understated. What stops her from responding more intensely?
6. Many novels feature likable protagonists. How do you feel about Claire? Is she relatable? Do you empathize with her? Pity her? Condemn her?
7. Claire is convinced Owen has Dukate Disease. At her trial, it is suggested Owen may have been suffering from seizures related to late-onset group B strep instead. This question is never fully resolved in the novel. Does it matter?
8. Claire commits one of the most reviled acts in our society: infanticide. Is this an act of mercy? Selfishness? Something else?
9. The novel cannot be fully discussed without raising the topic of euthanasia. Which side, if any, of the euthanasia debate does the novel favor?
10. The novel ends with Claire in prison. Is this ending realistic? Justified? Explain.