Senseless Acts of Beauty (11 page)

If only Declan hadn’t been so insistent. If only Riley hadn’t been such a shy little wood thrush.

“Declan hired one of those firms,” Riley said. “The ones you pay to unseal the adoption records or else find the biological parents some other way? I think he sensed that if he left the search to me, I wouldn’t do it at all.”

“Why not?”

“Sadie, if your adoptive parents were still alive, how do you think they’d react if you told them you were searching for your biological parents?”

Sadie’s avid gaze faltered. She flipped over a page. Her jaw worked like she wanted to say something but thought better of it.

Riley said, “I love my parents, though they can be meddling and annoying. My mother tugged out my loose teeth, she took care of me when I had the flu, and she got me through Algebra Two.” Riley looked down at the ledger, swallowing hard. “She’s blood and bone to me now. Outwardly they’d support me, of course, but in some part of my mother’s heart, she’d always wonder if I were looking because she hadn’t been good enough for me. I didn’t want to hurt her that way.”

That was my initial excuse, anyway.

“Izzy’s like that.” Sadie sucked in a little breath as if she wished she could suck the name back. “Izzy’s a friend of mine. She was adopted, too. She says she doesn’t want to know the woman who gave her up. She says she has a mother and a father and that’s enough. But I think it’s something more though.” Sadie’s knee beneath the photo album bobbed. “I think Izzy is afraid her biological mother wouldn’t want to see her at all.”

“And who wants to be rejected twice,” Riley murmured, “by the one person who should love you most?”

This shouldn’t matter anymore.

Riley ran her fingers down the ledger page, glancing at the names,
Tom & Lisa Sibelius Room 8, kids Caitlin, Molly, and Maeve in Room 1.
She remembered the whole family playing a fierce, noisy, fast-paced card game—Gnome Toss—in the main lodge every night.

“Back then closed adoptions were more the norm than they are today,” Riley said, “so it was almost impossible to unseal the records. The people my husband hired had to find my birth mother through back channels.” She shrugged, but the movement ached. “Eventually they succeeded.”

The Diaz-Martins, Harry and Lexus, Room 4. Grandchildren, Ashley and Jennifer, 3 and 5, Room 6.

“I knew they’d found her because, well, I saw a picture of her online.” Riley tugged her bright, chin-length curly red hair. “There’s no hiding this, or the freckles, though hers were lighter, like they’d been bleached. From what I could tell from her Facebook page, she was married and lived in a big house outside Tucson. They gave me her address and phone number.”

“Did you call?”

“Not at first. I went old-school and sent a letter.” She’d agonized over every word before Declan finally took the paper from her, read it, and then stuffed it in the envelope. He’d hugged her afterward when all she wanted to do was to run back to the post office and yank the letter out of the mail slot. “I thought it might be easier that way, to give her some space to think about things.”

“And?”

“We waited four weeks but never got a letter or a call.”

Sadie asked, “You sent another?”

“Two.” Riley’s heart began a skittering little skip beat. “After that Declan insisted that I call.”

Her fingers shook over the numbers.

Schroen residence, Peg speaking.

“I introduced myself.” Riley’s ribs tightened. “I actually wrote down the words I needed to say. I was that nervous.”

Riley remembered the sudden hush on the end of the line. She remembered the sound of footsteps, a hurried rustle, and the click of a closing door.

Most of all she remembered the furious whisper.

How the fuck did you get this number? You’re after money, right? That’s what this is all about? You’ll never see a penny from me. And if I see you on my doorstep, I’m calling the police, do you hear me? Don’t send me any more fucking letters. I’ll just burn them. I don’t have a daughter. I’ve never had a daughter.

You are
not
my daughter.

The words were like fangs full of venom, rendering her so numb that she hadn’t been able to feel her fingers as the phone fell out of her hand, clattered to the hardwood floor, to the scream of the dial tone.

A sharp pain brought Riley back to the attic. She realized she was digging her fingernails into her biceps. She let her arms go and took a deep breath of the scent of pine resin, old books, and warm paper.

“She didn’t want to talk to you.” Sadie’s eyes were round and disbelieving. “She didn’t want to meet you.”

Riley’s throat closed to words. She considered which was worse: divulging the terrible truth or letting Sadie continue on in blissful ignorance. Some calmer, more rational part of herself—a consciousness hovering over her shoulder, separated from the memory of pain—realized that this was one of those moments a parent must encounter all the time. Do you tell the vulnerable child the harsh truth? Or do you instead make up some cotton-wrapped version of it so she’s not made bloody by the sharp edges?

“Sadie,” she heard herself say, “are you absolutely sure you need to find your birth mother?”

Sadie ducked her head so that Riley got a good look at the part in her hair and the springy curls around it that wouldn’t be confined. Sadie riffled the corners of the black photo album pages as her leg continued to bob, bob, bob. A filmy spiderweb floated down from the rafters and drifted over her shoulder until she reached up and brushed it away.

“If everything were perfect,” Sadie said, talking into the photo album, “I’d want to get to know my birth mother before I met her, and I’d want to do it on my own time. I’d want to know how old she was when she had me, where she lived, whether she’s married now or single or has other kids or lives with her parents.” Sadie tilted her head, like she was just stretching it, to one side and then the other. “I’d want to see a picture of her. I’d want to know what she does all day. Whether she likes to read. Whether she has a lot of friends or just a few.” She breathed hard, her nostrils flaring. “That’s kind of what I was doing in the woods, before you found me in the rainstorm.”

When you thought I was your mother.
Riley felt a pang in her heart that burrowed deeper than she thought possible.

Sadie continued, “I’d be pretty mad if my birth mother was an alcoholic or a drug addict or something. It would totally suck to have come all this way just to find out she didn’t care about anything but her next fix. That she didn’t want anything to do with me. Maybe didn’t even remember me. Your birth mother is an idiot, by the way.”

Riley tried to muster a smile, but she couldn’t control the muscles of her face when all she could think about was the same emotional wallop that she’d experienced in her early thirties transferred to a fourteen-year-old who, Riley suspected, was as soft as an unborn bird inside that sturdy shell.

“But,” Sadie said, closing the photo album, “my situation is different from yours. My parents are gone so I don’t have to worry about how they feel. My nana is in a nursing home and hardly remembers her own name, never mind me.” She rose to her knees to pull another photo album out of the ledger box. “I need to find my birth mother, because she’s really all I’ve got left. And I have to do it soon, or else I’ll be shuttling through foster homes for the next four years until I age out of the system.”

Riley admired Sadie’s conviction. It was so simple, so solid, and so very pure, and you couldn’t argue with the logic. Riley wondered how different her own life would have been if she’d possessed only a fraction of Sadie’s force of will, of Sadie’s fierce determination, of Sadie’s fearlessness.

And in any case, Riley figured there was no true harm in continuing the search like this, pawing around ledgers, looking at old photo albums. Such a search—without professional help—would likely never bear fruit. So she bent her head over the ledger, running her finger down the familiar names, turning page after page.

Then Riley sucked in a breath so fast that spit hit the back of her throat.

“I know,” Sadie said, rubbing her nose as Riley coughed and coughed. “This dust is just unbelievable.”

Riley covered her mouth and continued coughing so Sadie wouldn’t see the surprise on her face from stumbling upon an all-too familiar name in the ledger.

N
ow that’s exactly how I expected to find you after all these years, Tess Hendrick. Sweaty, dirty, and spitting nails.”

Tess straightened up, letting the nails she’d been holding between her teeth drop into her hand. She looked at the woman in a cotton batik skirt coming toward her through the trees. Riley had warned her that Claire Petrenko was coming to Pine Lake for a weekend. Had Tess not known, she wasn’t sure she would have recognized her.

Well,
she thought, with a strange kick in her chest,
maybe I would have recognized the grin.

“Claire Petrenko.” Tess rattled the nails in her palm. “Come to save my soul after all these years?”

“Oh, I’m sure it’s too late for that.”

Claire kept striding right at her, and Tess had that feeling that she got sometimes, driving at night on a winter-iced road in North Dakota, seeing the headlights of another truck heading at her from the opposite direction, fearing there wasn’t a damn thing she could do to stop a collision no matter how steady she kept the semi on the right side of the double yellow line. Now all she could do was brace herself as her former schoolmate zoomed in for a full-body hug.

Fortunately, with nails in one palm and the grip of a hammer in the other, there wasn’t much she could do but stand and wait it out as Claire pulled her tight, laughing, rocking her from left to right while Tess tried not to be as stiff as the boards she was nailing.

“Lord, Tess,” Claire murmured, pulling away. “The last time I saw you, you had a pink streak in your hair. I believe you were standing over a garbage can, burning your high school diploma.”

“Good to see you, too.” Tess took the opportunity to step away and toss the nails toward a box with the others. “Riley tells me you’re here for a weekend.”

“I’ve been gadding about the country again, imposing myself on friends.” Claire patted her flattened chest. “The good thing about cancer is that people open their hearts
and
their doors.”

“I was sorry to hear about—”

“Oh, please.” Claire waved a hand. “I’ve been milking it. Milking it?” She waved to her own missing breasts. “Get it?”

Tess had a close-up view of those dancing brown eyes, close enough that suddenly she could see past the boyishly short hair, the thin cheeks, to the vibrant, laughing teenager Tess used to hang out with, before Tess gave up one set of friends for another. The familiarity sent a strange pang through her, a jolt of unexpected loss.

“Hey,” Claire said, “don’t give me that look. It’s a bad pun, but I’m laughing. When I stop laughing, then everyone should worry. So,” Claire gazed over the construction site, “when you were raising hell in the Cannery, did you think you’d ever find yourself renovating the Camp Kwenback mini-golf?”

“It’s just a project to keep me from tormenting Officer Rodriguez.”

“Well, Riley tells me you’re doing it for her late grandparents. I think that’s a beautiful thing.”

“You always did wear rose-colored glasses.” Tess bent over to pick up one of the two-by-fours—and to hide a quick flash of embarrassment. “I’d think, after all you’ve been through, they’d have scratched or cracked.”

“Oh, I lost them for a long while.” Claire wandered to the pile of lumber, brushed the top off, and gingerly sat down. “But last year Jenna Hogan—do you remember her? Our class, a little thing with a bad leg? No? Well, Jenna showed up at my door and pretty much gave me those glasses back.”

“Good for Jenna Hogan.”

Tess hefted the two-by-four and brought it to the other edge of the putting green, memories rushing back to her, trying not to think of all the times Claire had shown up at the Baptist church in her Cannery neighborhood with bags of donated clothes or shoes, setting aside a special bag with Tess’s name on it. There were warm coats and brand-name snow boots that Tess couldn’t bring herself to wear, just because they were given out of pity, out of some rich folk’s charity, and Claire knew it.

That was the trouble with coming back to Pine Lake. You couldn’t hide here. The past rushed up and punched you right in the face.

“So,” Claire said, “I heard you got married.”

Tess flinched. She settled the new two-by-four into the trough left when she’d pulled out the old one.

“Maya told me,” Claire explained. “I saw her in South Dakota when Nicole, Jenna, and I drove across country last summer.”

Tess knew Maya. Maya was an archaeologist on the faculty at Cornell University, a star graduate of Pine Lake High, who happened to be scouting a new dig at the same time Tess was driving trucks in North Dakota. They crossed paths at some greasy spoon diner and Maya, delighted, had planted herself beside her at the counter. The archaeologist had poked, scraped, and brushed at Tess like she was trying to coax a Jurassic jawbone out of tightly packed clay.

“Boy,” Tess said, as she knocked the board deeper in the trough, “you Pine Lake girls love to talk.”

“Seeing that you’re not wearing a ring—”

“It didn’t work out. Which you should know, since I heard you saw our farmhouse in Kansas.”

Best to just get that out there now, Tess thought. Best to just confess to the greatest sin rather than go through the agony of having Claire Petrenko, in her sweet-faced, calm-as-butter way, inevitably tease the truth out of her.

Claire said, “It was some shock coming on that place.”

Tess picked up a rubber-headed mallet to bang the two-by-four deeper. “Because it was in ashes? Or because you couldn’t imagine me sweeping that porch, running a tractor in those fields, or baking pies?”

Tess felt the weight of the mallet as she swung it at the two-by-four, smacking it at six-inch intervals to secure it in the narrow trench. She’d met Erik Callahan a few times on Route 29 out of Fargo. A giant of a blond, a Viking without the attitude. He was charming, self-effacing in that farm boy kind of way. He drove trucks to save up for a spread of his own. He had gazed at her across the counter seats like she was a wet dream come to life. They hooked up. Multiple times. She figured it was like some of the other guys she’d connected with on the road over the years—a quick, efficient, purely physical transaction. That’s all she’d ever wanted from any man after the trauma of that other bastard. Eventually, she figured, she and Callahan would drift their own ways.

Except they didn’t.

“Oh, Tess,” Claire said, “did you really make pies?”

Tess kept banging the two-by-four, though it was lodged in good and tight. She kept banging because it made her heart beat harder. It hurt to think about that year, in a different way than it hurt to think about that
other
year. Thinking about Callahan stung in the way your eyes stung when you tried to stare at the sun. One day, she was driving her semi, and then the next thing she knew, she was married and living on a Kansas farm, wringing the necks of chickens, plucking feathers, and cooking them up as the sun poured through the kitchen window. It was like she’d stepped into some sort of prairie novel. A sappy, romantic prairie novel, because in the mornings with the curtains billowing, she’d wake up in the same bed, her head on the massive chest of the same man, his smile slow and wonderful.

The memories tumbled over one another, rocking her, like a High Plains wind battering the cargo of her rig.

“I made rhubarb pie,” Tess said, examining her work with more attention than it needed. “I made apple pie, I made blueberry pie—”

“I’d give a lot of money to see you making a pie.”

“The marriage was like those pies,” she said. “It was piping hot out of the oven, but too quick to cool, and the crust too easily broken.”

Once settled and domestic, Tess had felt an uneasiness grow. She knew Callahan was faithful but she didn’t like the way his high school flame eyeballed him in the local pub. That woman looked more his type, pleasantly round and well-liked. It didn’t help that the neighbors didn’t take to Tess’s arrival very well, either, some skinny, tatted northern girl who drove trucks and snagged their favorite son. Once again Tess found herself in a place that didn’t like her, didn’t want her, an outsider again. It only made her get another tat, avoid the church fair, wear leather pants, smoke inside the house.

She had just been waiting for it all to collapse anyway. So she fought with him, tested his patience, saw how far she could push him, waited for him to be another bastard. In the end she realized that the only way to make sure that Callahan didn’t leave her was to abandon him first.

Claire’s voice, soft and even: “After seeing that farmhouse, I worried about you. You always did have a bad habit of setting things on fire.”

Tess laughed but it sounded hollow even to her own ears. Of course Claire thought she’d burned the house down. Anyone from Pine Lake would. Callahan certainly did. Right now she felt the bulk of a pack of cigarettes lying in a pocket in her cargo shorts, a pack that had only one cigarette missing. Callahan had always hated when she smoked in the house, so she smoked in the house whenever she was mad at him. She’d smoked one cigarette more than a pack that terrible night, while she paced for him to come home after their argument. She’d woken coughing on the couch hours later, the house in flames.

Even after the arson investigation came back inconclusive, Callahan had always blamed her for destroying his dream.

Which was pretty much what she had done anyway.

Claire’s voice interrupted her thoughts. “You know I’m a good listener. If you want to talk—”

“Don’t think so.”

Still, her mind worked trying to explain, if only to herself, the abrupt turns her life had taken since she left Pine Lake. Two pivotal events came to mind. Once in the moonlight, surrounded by the stench of diesel and strong coffee and bacon grease, with the roar of cars and trucks whipping by on the nearby interstate, when Big Erik Callahan had kneeled in front of her and asked her to marry him. The second was years earlier, quivering after hours of labor, when the doctor placed on her distended belly her infant daughter—Sadie—still warm from her womb.

Both times there’d been a shimmering moment when it felt like a scrim had peeled off her eyes, and she could see the whole, wide world in all its goodness and badness, all its capricious randomness, complicated and full of senseless acts of beauty. Both times her chest had filled with the strangest pressure, and all she could do was gasp,
yes.

Yes.

Never in a million years could she explain that. Never in a million years would she admit that she’d give just about anything—
everything
—to feel that way just one more time.

Tess tossed the mallet aside and wiped her forearm across her forehead. “Tell me about your cancer, Claire. I take it that you’ve been through chemo.”

Claire, to her credit, waited only a fraction of a pause. “One round of chemo and radiation, too. If I’m deemed healthy enough when I get back to Portland next month, I’ll get the thumbs-up to be a guinea pig in a clinical trial.”

“Something tells me there’s more to the story.”

“Of course there is.” She let her head drop back, her face in a dappled circle of sun. “But honestly, it’s all good.”

Tess gave her an eye, but Claire just curved her lips in a mysterious little smile, giving her the serene face of a Buddhist nun.

“Trauma is a kind of mystery, Tess.” Claire squinted out to the far trees. “It latches on to you in ways that aren’t easy to undo. It’s hard to explain to folks who haven’t really experienced it. It…changes you.”

“Changes you enough to have your head shaved in Thailand?” Tess hefted up some lumber. “Riley told me you did something crazy like that.”

“Yes, well, taking Buddhist vows seemed the reasonable thing to do at the time. My sister had just died; I felt a little unhinged. But something tells me you know exactly what I’m talking about.”

Tess felt dangerous tentacles of communal experience tighten around her.

“Sometimes I wonder,” Claire mused, “how folks who’ve felt battered by life can be successful at any relationships—friends, family. Husbands. Not that I consider myself to be completely successful—”

“You’re kidding, right?” Tess pulled some nails out of the bag, preparing to join the joists. “You just told me that friends have been opening doors all across the country.”

“Yes, but that’s now.” Claire gave her that Buddha smile again. “You didn’t see me just after I was diagnosed. My friends pulled me out of a very bad place, Tess. They made me realize I had to stop letting old traumas shape my life.”

Tess positioned a nail and reached for the hammer. She was glad for Claire, she really was, for finding comfort in friends.

Tess, on the other hand, preferred to fix things on her own.

“Speaking of trauma,” Claire said, “have you seen your mother yet?”

Tess craved a cigarette so hard it made her teeth ache. Something about being back in Cannery Row stirred the need for a hit of nicotine. That, and seeing the house where she’d grown up.

She tapped her fingers on the steering wheel, watching eagle-eyed for the stir of a curtain in the front window. Nothing moved but the lazy twirl of a whirligig in the postage-stamp-size front yard. But Tess knew her mother was in there. Her mother hadn’t worked an honest day in the whole of her life. She spent most Tuesday mornings still sleeping off the weekend before.

Tess blew out a long breath and glanced at the clock on the dashboard. This, here, was the power of Claire Petrenko. One simple discussion and Tess found herself compelled to come back to the old neighborhood. On the back of her neck she could sense furtive stares through the windows of other houses. Folks stepped out onto their porches, sweeping, glancing up over the ends of their brooms to eyeball the car. Men came out to sit on the front stoop, to smoke a slow cigarette. It was like she could hear their thoughts because she remembered thinking the same things as she used to peer through the sheer curtains at strange cars parked on the road. Who was this woman in the battered Volvo? A local cop undercover? Someone come looking for trouble? What did she want?