The Trillionaire Chapter One: We Don't Need Money Baby

This time last year, things had begun to go drastically wrong.

Tori had spent most of her life on the wrong end of luck, but luck no longer seemed like the right word for what was happening to her mother. The lung cancer had become more aggressive by the day, and eventually Tori had been forced to accept what everyone around her already seemed to know.

Her mother was not going to recover.

Hope had given way to sadness, sadness to anger, and anger, finally, to a numbness Tori almost welcomed. Each time she looked at her mother's withered face, there was less room left for pretending.

Her mother had been getting weaker for years. Tori hadn't understood how gradually it had happened until she looked through their old photographs and saw the evidence arranged chronologically before her. In the earliest pictures, her mother seemed almost luminous—laughing, overdressed, holding Tori against her chest as though there were nothing in the world she would rather possess. Then came the later photographs. The cheeks grew thinner. The clothes hung differently. The smile remained, but the woman behind it seemed to retreat a little farther each year.

On the quietest nights, Tori could almost feel her mother's suffering.

Sometimes there was nothing in the trailer but darkness and the sound of her breathing.

In.

Out.

A pause that lasted too long.

Then another strained breath.

Chemotherapy was over. So were the hospital visits and the doctors who passed Tori in waiting rooms with the same solemn expression. There were no more treatments to try, no more specialists to see, no more procedures hidden somewhere over the horizon. Every reasonable effort had failed.

Her mother had accepted this before Tori did.

Toward the end, she even seemed to welcome the simplicity of it. She liked sitting beside the window, watching the weeds sway beyond the trailer, waiting for whatever came next. There was nothing left to bargain with and no one left to bargain against.

This was her end.

When Tori was a child, they had lived in a modest house with a tiny yard. Her mother worked nights at a casino then. By Tori's middle-school years, the two of them had moved into a studio apartment after her mother's shifts were cut and steady work became difficult to find.

Now Tori was in high school, and they called an abandoned trailer home.

Her mother jokingly referred to it as their "squatter's-rights move." A nurse working a second job had told them about an elderly woman who had lived there alone before being taken to a convalescent home the previous spring. The woman had died there without any known next of kin, and the trailer had sat vacant ever since.

So they moved in.

It wasn't much, but it had walls.

Even with public assistance and medical coverage, the expenses surrounding a terminal illness accumulated relentlessly. Housing assistance could involve waiting lists measured in years, not months, and Tori's mother had another fear besides homelessness: that her declining health would cause the state to separate them.

She had heard enough stories about foster care to be terrified of where Tori might end up.

So she held on.

Tori watched her do it every day.

For a person like Tori, emotional attachment had begun to seem dangerous. Care about something enough and the world eventually discovered where to hurt you. One disappointment became another, then another, until misery stopped being something that happened to a person and became something they carried.

Tori thought she could recognize the people who had surrendered to it.

She saw them around the trailer park: people who moved through their days angry at anyone who still seemed to expect something from life. Some drank. Some fought. Some sat outside their trailers from morning until night and seemed to age without ever going anywhere. Tori sometimes imagined them screaming somewhere behind their own eyes, unable to stop whatever had taken hold of them from seeping into everything else.

Over time, the people became indistinguishable from the place.

Or perhaps the place became indistinguishable from them.

An outsider probably wouldn't have understood the difference.

Tori did.

She considered herself a resident of the trailer park.

She did not intend to become a permanent inhabitant.

Still, she liked coming home to their shanty of a dwelling, though she would never have admitted it freely. Unlike their old apartment complex, the trailer park contained people who noticed when someone needed help. Nearly everyone there had some private burden to carry, and perhaps because of that, they were less inclined to stare at somebody else's.

On this particular afternoon, Tori stepped off the school bus and saw her mother watching from the kitchen window.

Tori waved.

Her mother lifted one hand.

That was enough.

Her mother hadn't eaten the day before. The medication had destroyed what little appetite she had left. Instead, she watched Tori eat oatmeal before falling asleep in their musty recliner while Tori worked through a chapter in her history textbook.

When her mother woke, the sun was setting.

Tori was laying out her clothes beside the bed for school the next morning. Their old, fat-backed television was playing an episode of Friends on mute.

Her mother found the remote and turned up the volume.

Tori sat on the floor beside her.

"You know," her mother said in her scratchy voice, "when I was these girls' age, I lived in New York too."

Tori looked up at her.

"My roommate always told me we'd get jobs and make it big."

Tori knew the stories.

According to her mother, she had modeled in New York before getting pregnant and deciding to reform her life for Tori's sake. Tori had never been sure how much of it was true, how much was nostalgia, and how much had been softened by years of retelling and painkillers.

If her mother had really known all the people she claimed to know, where were they?

Where were the photographs?

Where were the connections?

When Tori was little, she used to ask whether they could visit some of her mother's old friends.

"We don't need people like that, baby," her mother would say.

As Tori got older, she became more practical.

Why not ask them for help?

If they had money and she and her mother didn't, what was wrong with asking?

"We don't need money, baby. It's more poison than any drug."

To a child who had been poor her entire life, this sounded ridiculous. Money bought groceries. Money kept the electricity on. Money bought medicine. Money meant not having to wonder whether the landlord was coming.

But her mother distrusted anything that suggested wealth.

Other women in the trailer park talked about shopping or the things they would buy if they ever had enough. Tori's mother could find something wrong with every luxury Tori admired.

A perfume sample in a magazine was nothing but chemicals sprayed onto paper.

Pretty makeup clogged pores and caused acne.

Expensive clothes were made by somebody being paid pennies somewhere else.

Every small luxury Tori desired seemed to contain some hidden ugliness her mother could see and Tori could not.

None of it mattered much anymore.

Her mother was dying.

So Tori listened.

She tried to remember everything.

Before bed, Tori helped her mother to the toilet because she could no longer stand without assistance. Her mother's arm rested across Tori's shoulders, and Tori was startled once again by how little she weighed.

An adult woman should have weighed more.

A mother should have weighed more.

There should have been more of her left.

Tori helped her back into the recliner and pulled the blanket over her legs.

By then, grief had been with Tori for so long that sometimes it felt as though her mother had already died and her body simply hadn't received the message.

Tori turned away before wiping the tear from her cheek.

She climbed into bed.

Her throat hurt from everything she refused to say.

Tomorrow frightened her more than any day before it.

In the morning, a van would come to take her mother to hospice.

There was nothing more to do except let her go.

Her mother had insisted that Tori attend school as usual. She said it mattered that whatever happened to her, Tori continue living. There would be no farewell party, no gathering, no parade of people making speeches over a woman who was still alive.

Her mother wanted her final days to belong to the two of them.

The arrangements had already been made.

A social worker had walked Tori through the process of emancipation. Through a charitable program connected with a cancer organization, arrangements had even been made for the miserable little trailer to become hers legally to use while she finished school.

Her mother had been delighted by that.

A broken-down trailer with a leaking window and a recliner that smelled faintly of mildew was, to her, a triumph.

"You've got somewhere to live," she'd said.

Tori had wanted to tell her that this was an unbearably low standard for victory.

But she understood.

Cancer had been only one horror in a long procession of them, and her mother had managed one final victory over circumstance.

She had lived long enough.

Not long enough to see Tori graduate.

Not long enough to see who she became.

Not long enough to grow old.

But long enough to get her daughter to an age when the courts could recognize her as capable of surviving without being handed over to strangers.

Her mother had held on for that.

Tori had no grandparents she knew, no aunts or uncles she could call. Her mother had been disowned sometime before Tori was born.

The story had always been fragmented.

Her grandmother, supposedly, had been married to a lawyer. There was an aunt too, whom her mother described as spoiled and petty. Years ago, when her mother's partying in New York became an addiction, she had finally called home and asked for help.

Her family had been horrified.

Not by what was happening to her, according to her mother, but by what association with her might do to them.

Eventually they stopped answering.

Tori didn't even know their names.

When the cancer worsened, Tori once asked whether her grandmother's money could get her mother better doctors.

Her mother had gone quiet.

Then she told Tori she had already asked.

"They said I'm getting what I deserve."

Tori hadn't believed her.

So her mother played the voicemails.

Then she showed her the letters.

Whatever history existed between those people and her mother, their message was unmistakable: they wanted no part in her illness or its cost.

Tori cried.

She said she would call them herself. She said nobody could be that merciless once they heard the voice of a child asking them to save her mother.

Her mother only looked tired.

"It's too late anyway," she said. "We don't need money, baby."

For once, Tori didn't argue.

Now, on the last night in the trailer, Tori lay awake listening.

In.

Out.

Pause.

In.

Out.

She wanted morning never to come.

Morning came anyway.

The van arrived exactly when it was supposed to.

Tori helped her mother into clean clothes. She combed her hair. Her mother complained that Tori was fussing over her and then quietly allowed her to continue.

Outside, one of the neighbors pretended to sweep a porch that did not need sweeping. Another stood beside his truck with his hands in his pockets. Nobody came over.

They understood.

At the door, Tori's mother stopped.

For a moment, neither of them moved.

Then her mother wrapped her arms around her daughter.

Tori held on.

There would be no miraculous recovery. No wealthy relative arriving at the last moment. No doctor running down the road with a forgotten cure. Nothing waited beyond this moment except hospice, and then the thing neither of them could bring themselves to name.

So Tori stopped waiting for someone to save them.

She simply held her mother.

Her mother kissed the side of her head.

"Keep going, baby."

Tori closed her eyes.

Then she let go.

She watched her mother climb into the van with assistance. The door closed. The vehicle pulled away slowly, passed the row of battered trailers, and disappeared beyond the entrance to the park.

Tori remained outside long after it was gone.

Behind her stood a rusting trailer that should never have counted as an inheritance.

But it had a roof.

Inside were her schoolbooks.

Beside the bed were the clothes she had laid out for tomorrow.

Tomorrow.

Her mother had spent what remained of her life making certain Tori would have one.

Tori went back inside.