Senseless Acts of Beauty (21 page)

S
ADIE’S HERE!!!”

Riley stepped off the stairs as the front door to Sadie’s aunt’s house swung open to a chorus of squeals.

“Geronimoooooooooooooo!”

Four dark-haired blurs launched out the front door, whipping by Riley and Tess to head straight for Sadie. Riley winced as the four cousins tried to knock the girl to the scrubby lawn.

“Mikey, get her down.”

“I’m trying. You gotta grab her by the arms!”

“Push,” said the third, “just push.”

“Huh! That’ll be the day you knock me down,” Sadie said, weaving in place. “No one can knock Sadie down.”

Over their heads, Sadie gave Riley a weary, baleful look. The boys grunted and pushed and seized handfuls of her T-shirt. Sadie held her ground enough to reach over and muss the hair of the smallest attacker, a five- or six-year-old girl clinging to the back of one of her brothers.

The little girl piped up, “Mum says you’re going to live with us! Is that true, Sadie?”

“Looks like it.”

“I cleared you a bed in the attic! I put Jo-Jo there and some blankets and all my books.”

“Thanks.”

“And I’ve got a kitten. Of my own!”

“That’s awesome, Rubes.”

Riley thought Sadie sounded exhausted but resigned. During the last hundred miles in the car, Riley had been encouraged by Sadie’s thoughtful calm. It was Tess she worried about now, Tess standing behind her bearing the dazed, bewildered look of a bird that had flown full speed into glass.

“I see you’ve met the monsters.” A woman squeaked open the screen door and held out her hand. “I’m Violet,” she said. “You must be Riley.”

Violet was a tall woman a little bit older than herself, wearing a cotton skirt and an orange tank top, braless, without a stitch of makeup on her face. Riley gripped her hand. “Pleased to meet you. This is”—Riley hesitated—“my friend Tess.”

Riley could tell by the look that passed across Violet’s face that Sadie’s aunt wasn’t as pleased to meet Tess. Riley sometimes forgot how physically intimidating Tess could be to those who didn’t know her.

“Sorry we’re late,” Riley said. “We ran into some rush-hour traffic coming past Cleveland.”

“Are you hungry?”

“We stopped for fast-food about an hour ago.” Riley glanced at Sadie, still struggling to keep upright, her clothes being pulled in all directions. “I hoped we could have a talk while Sadie gets settled in. Something happened during the trip that we think you need to know about.”

Vague worry passed across Violet’s face “All right, then. Boys, get off your cousin, now.” Vi pulled the screen door wide as the boys redoubled their efforts to knock Sadie over. “MIKEY, MARK, MITCHELL, ENOUGH.”

Riley blinked as her ears rang.

“Ruby,” Vi continued, “show Sadie up to the attic where you made our little vagabond a bed.”

“Who’s a vagabond?” Sadie tried to disentangle herself from the boys.

“You are, kiddo.” Aunt Violet gave her wink. “You had yourself quite an adventure. I want to hear all about it. Later.”

Sadie straightened her clothes and then passed Tess and Riley, rolling her eyes as she trudged after a bouncing Ruby up the stairs. The boys pushed one another and then chased themselves around the side of the house.

“I’ll make us some tea.” Vi raised a brow and glanced warily beyond, to Tess. “Or will I be needing whiskey?”

A crossed-armed Tess didn’t seem capable of a response so Riley said, “Tea will be fine.”

The house had that vague smell of cat. Just walking through the den, Riley eyed two of them, perched on top of what appeared to be a guinea pig cage. Shoving toys aside with the edge of her foot, Vi cleared a way through the den and the narrow hallway cluttered with sports equipment to a small kitchen in the back.

“Bill—my husband—isn’t home right now,” Vi said, shoving the faucet on to fill a teakettle as Riley took a seat by the breakfast nook. “He’s off on a job on the other side of the state. I can’t tell you how grateful I am that you two drove Sadie all the way here. If I’d tried to take these monsters with me for a ride that long, I’m not sure all of them would have survived.”

“Sadie did mention that you had triplets.” Riley glimpsed them just outside the kitchen window, bent over a rabbit hutch.

“Bunch of hooligans.” Vi pulled three cups out of a cabinet and shoved them on the table, where they slid across with a gritty sound, like there was a layer of old sugar underneath. “Where’s your friend?”

“Oh, probably checking out your animals,” she lied. “She loves cats.”

Violet gave her an odd look. Riley didn’t know what else to do but smile. She figured Tess was probably taking stock of the place. Riley had noticed that the house was unkempt, the paint dinged and chipped, scratches on the cabinets, pale crayon marks on the walls, but she sensed that it didn’t so much give off an aura of dirtiness as it did of well-used chaos.

Tess might think differently.

“If you don’t mind,” Riley said, pushing past the awkwardness, “I have a couple of questions about when Sadie first came to live with you. She was sketchy on details, and I wondered—”

“You can ask,” Vi said. “But frankly, I don’t remember much.”

Uneasiness twitched inside Riley, like the pull of a muscle between her ribs.

“What I mean,” Vi said as she sat down across from her, “is that the details of those months when Sadie first lived here are hazy. I had four kids in diapers, three of them starting to walk when my sister and her husband died.” Just then the back door slammed open and the three boys came tearing through the mudroom, yelling all the way through the kitchen and then out through the front door. “Some parents fill up these books about their kids’ first year, marking the first step, the first rollover, the first tooth. Me? I just tried to keep them fed and changed enough so I wouldn’t unintentionally starve one or the other to death. Sadie arrived in the middle of that panic.”

“Sadie mentioned that she had some trouble adjusting when she was here,” Riley said.

“Oh, Sadie hated it here.” Violet pulled a grimace. “Part of it was from the shock of her parents’ death. She’d wake up screaming, sleepwalking, and acting out in school to the point that the school guidance counselor was calling me and recommending therapists.”

Therapists
.

“Sadie wasn’t here a week,” Violet continued, “before she ran away.”

Riley didn’t have any explanation, really, for the slow sinking of her heart.

“Honestly, I don’t blame her.” Vi looked out the window to where the boys had turned on a water hose. “Heck,
I
wanted to run away. There were babies crying all day and all night.”

“Where did she run to?”

“She was trying to get back to her parents’ house on Long Island. Yes, from here, from Ohio.” Vi ran a hand through her hair, and Riley noticed that her fingers shook a little. “She scared the life out of me. She ended up spending a couple of nights in some group foster care home.” Vi stood up at the sound of the water gurgling in the teakettle, but not before Riley saw her chin quiver. “For two days I was sure I’d killed my sister’s only child.”

Violet turned off the flame under the kettle and then opened a cabinet. A box of tea bags tumbled out onto the counter and fell to the floor. Violet ignored the fallen box as she stood in front of the open cabinet, flexing her hand over the handle, staring at the contents within but making no selection. Violet said softly, “I suppose what you really want to know is why I sent Sadie to Queens to live with my mother.”

Just then Riley noticed a shadow standing in the doorway from the living room. Tess stood framed there, just outside the light, grasping her own arms. She looked twitchy and red-eyed and unhinged.

Riley stood up to fetch the fallen box of tea bags from the floor. “Please sit, Violet—”

“You have to understand.” The teakettle rattled as Violet picked it up from the stovetop. She poured water into the teacups, leaving a trail of boiling water from stove to table and then back to the stove again. “When my mother heard about Sadie being so unhappy here, she insisted that Sadie live with her. Sadie couldn’t pack her bags fast enough. At the time there was no reason to fight.”

Riley went mute, sensing the rush of a coming confession. In the shadows of the living room, Riley saw Tess digging her fingers into her arms.

“Back then, my mother was as healthy as a horse. Oh, she’d forget to pay a bill now and then. She lost her car once, in a parking lot, had to call the police because she was convinced it had been stolen. My sister Rose had been taking care of those incidents. Protecting me, I guess.” Violet fell so hard into a chair that the legs scraped across the linoleum. “By the time I realized how bad my mother had become, years later, Sadie refused to come back to Ohio. She didn’t want her whole life upended again.”

Riley tightened her grip on the cup, willing Tess to stay out of sight.

“I visited Queens as much as I could,” Violet continued. “I handled the bill paying from here. I tried to coordinate my visits with school conferences but…” Vi gestured to the window where her three boys, fully dressed, were now soaked to the skin from playing with the water hose. “I did what I thought was best for that girl. She’s my sister’s only child—she may as well be my own blood. I would never,
ever,
hand her off to a stranger.”

Something fell in the living room, the clatter of something heavy tumbling to the hardwood floor. Violet’s anxious gaze shot toward the shadows where Tess stood amid a cluster of fallen hockey sticks, bracing a hand on the wall, looking as if one more emotional wallop would knock her flat.

“I’m just going out back,” Tess waved to the backyard. “To have a smoke.”

After Tess left, Riley turned back to see in Violet’s expression a growing realization that there was more going on here than two good Samaritans driving home a wayward child.

“Am I in some trouble or something?” Vi’s expression turned to alarm. “Why are you asking all these questions, anyway? Are you two social workers?”

“We’re not social workers.” Riley sank back in her chair. “Do you remember when we spoke on the phone yesterday? When I told you that Sadie came to Pine Lake looking for her birth mother?”

“I remember.”

“Well…Sadie found her.”

Violet’s gaze shot to the backyard, beyond the frolicking boys, to the blond, tatted woman now leaning against the back fence, holding a cigarette in a shaking hand.

“Those therapists the school counselor recommended?” Riley murmured. “I hope you kept their names.”

It was nearly nine o’clock at night by the time Riley saw the tips of two cigarettes extinguish in the backyard by the darkness of the fence. Tess and Violet strolled into the light cast through the kitchen window. Violet called for her boys and directed them into the house, where they stormed in slapping wet footprints on the kitchen floor. Violet excused herself to put the boys in their bath upstairs, said her good-byes, then promised to shoo Sadie down from where she was playing with her cousin’s kitten so she, too, could say her farewells.

As Riley and Tess exited the house, an evening breeze ruffled the grass. Katydids chirped in the trees. Tess kept her back to the door, her face in shadow, nudging the wheel of a bike left abandoned on the front lawn.

Riley ventured, “Aunt Vi was not at all what I expected.”

“No witch’s hat,” Tess murmured. “No warts.”

“For a while in the kitchen there, I thought you were going to lunge at her, like, with a machete.”

“The thought did pass my mind.”

Riley put her hand on Tess’s shoulder. “Sadie will be fine here, Tess. She gave us only part of the story.”

Tess let her head fall back to look at the stars. “I’m not one to judge a mother for doing her best for a child.”

Under her hand, Riley felt the tremor that shuddered through her friend and found herself wondering if her own biological mother had also buried her sorrow this deep. For some folks maybe it was just easier that way—easier than admitting guilt or the truth that the decision, for better or worse, still hurt.

Then the screen door squealed open.

“Aunt Vi told me you’re leaving now.” Sadie stepped onto the porch and let the door slam behind her. “I thought you were staying the night.”

Riley dropped her hand from Tess’s shoulder and noticed two things—the tense timbre of Sadie’s voice and the way Sadie’s gaze lingered on her birth mother.

“You’ve got a full house here,” Tess said. “And you probably can’t wait to see the back of me anyway.”

Sadie didn’t deny it. She shoved her hands in the back pockets of her shorts, and the motion reminded Riley so much of Tess that her heart squeezed.

“I spoke to your aunt Violet,” Tess said. “I want you to know that I gave her my cell phone number and my drop box address in Bismarck—”

“Yeah, yeah, okay.”

“If you ever want to talk,” Tess said, “tomorrow or next week or next month or even next year—”

“I got it.”

“—I’ll be there to answer. I’ll be there to tell you whatever you want to know. That’s a promise, Sadie.”

“Okay. Bye.”

Tess swayed a moment, looking stunned at being so abruptly dismissed, but Sadie made no move to come closer or to say anything else. The girl just stood there on the porch and then scraped at something on the stairs with her sandal. Tess flashed Riley a defeated look before turning to walk to the car.

Riley took some comfort in the sight of Sadie lifting her head again, of Sadie’s gaze following Tess into the darkness.

“I have something for you.” Riley opened her purse and poked around inside. “I want you to have these.”

Sadie’s eyes widened at the sight of the Leica binoculars. “But those are your favorite.”

“You squint all the time, did you know that?” Riley held them out as Sadie came down the stairs. “These will help for now, but I told your aunt Violet that she should make you an appointment to get your eyesight checked.”

Sadie wrinkled her nose. “Glasses?”

“You’ll rock them. I know you will.”

Sadie looked unconvinced. She frowned down at the binoculars, idly unwinding the strap.