Random Acts of Kindness (10 page)

“So,” Claire prompted, “did Noah ever give any kind of explanation for what he did?”

Nicole shook off the troubling thoughts then lined up another ball for a side pocket. “Do you have any teenage nephews, Claire?”

“Paulina has two.”

“Have you ever had a conversation with either one of them?”

“Briefly.”

“Precisely. That was one of Noah’s blessedly normal traits. When Noah spoke in sentences longer than three words, we served dinner on china.”

Jenna piped into the conversation. “Honestly, Nic, after all that time in therapy, he was probably all talked out.”

“I wouldn’t be surprised,” Nicole said. “I think teenage boys have a daily word quota. Once that’s used up, pfft, that’s it for the day.”

“No, I mean, talk therapy itself is overrated.” Jenna leaned down and aimed. “Maybe it’s good for you, for some people. But for me, it’s like a cow chewing cud over and over, only to be forced to vomit it back up before chewing it down into a different stomach. After a while, it all turns to some formless soup in your mouth.”

Nicole let the odd image sink in. She thought about the weeks after Noah finally came home when she posed more and more direct queries. Why had he lit the rags in the garage?
It was stupid.
Why had he waited until she was out of the house?
I dunno.
Not only had Noah’s attitude become more sullen and dismissive, but the more she probed, the more his responses became muddled.

She remembered sitting by his bed in the hospital the evening of the fire. She remembered how Noah had opened his bloodshot, sooty eyes in the ER, blinked at his surroundings, and then, when he realized where he was, his whole face crumpled.

She’d plunged her hand through his dark curly hair, gritty with soot.

Why? Why, my baby boy?

Nicole dropped into a chair. The shock joggled her spine. She gripped the cue so she wouldn’t slip right down to the sticky floor, so she wouldn’t let Claire and Jenna see how bad it all really was.

A shadow fell across her, and she glanced up to see Jenna standing between her and the pool table light. “Did they ever classify him?”

Nicole felt the grit of the blue chalk on the smooth wood of the cue. First they’d classified him with depression, which was what she’d expected, but then they suggested he suffered from a more serious mood disorder. One therapist proposed that he might have a borderline personality disorder. The next considered him mildly bipolar.

“Noah has always been an outlier.” She shrugged, hoping it looked casual. “He never fit into a neat diagnostic box.”

“In my teens, my mother dragged me to dozens of child psychologists.” Jenna set the pool cue standing right in front of her. “I think the sixth doctor finally satisfied her by saying I had ‘pervasive development disorder not otherwise specified.’ It even has an acronym, PDD-NOS.”

“Better known as ‘physician didn’t decide.’”

“Exactly.”

“Noah got that one, too, early on.”

“I tell you, my mother was so relieved. It explained everything. I had a
condition
.
Inherited from my father, of course. He had the same strange affliction that I did, the one that made him prefer to stay indoors and read.”

Claire scraped her chair so she sat beside her. “So how long have you been dealing with this, Nic?”

“Eighteen months.”
Two weeks. One day.

“How’s he doing?”

Behind her eyes rushed the series of doctors she’d brought him to, the group therapy she’d insisted on, the litany of medicines they’d tried—sertraline, fluoxetine, lorazepam, risperidone, divalproex—measuring side effects against how they affected his moods, watching her once-a
ctive
, happy little boy grow sluggish and sullen and plump. Some antidepressants, she’d been warned, can cause morbid thinking, and his room contained a light fixture and shoelaces.

That was the problem that kept her up at night, every night, when he was home. Listening for movement in the small hours of the morning. Watching him over breakfast for signs that he’d tucked his pills between his cheek and gum. Checking his room to see if he was obsessing over his sketch pad, or, more frighteningly, lying slack-jawed and catatonic on his bed, wearing earbuds that leaked the scream of heavy metal.

“He’s spending six weeks in a treatment center.” She reached for her drink and sucked the last of that cotton-candy sweetness off the clinking ice cubes. “We’re trying something called dialectical behavior therapy. It’s specialized for teenagers with a mixture of mood and behavior issues.”

Claire raised her beer. “I was so sure you were running away from something. A malpractice suit, maybe. Or a midlife crisis. Maybe an angry ex-lover.”

“If only. And I didn’t run away,” she reminded her. “I was pushed out by Lars.”

“Like Bilbo the Hobbit,” Jenna piped in, “nudged into an adventure by Gandalf.”

“That explains things,” Claire laughed, “because life was so much simpler back in the Shire—I mean Pine Lake.”

Nicole caught Claire’s wink, and the memories tumbled over one another. Noah, eight years old, laughing as he splashed into Bay Roberts. Noah painting his body scalp to foot and playing the mud monster to send his sister squealing. Noah, falling asleep wrapped in a towel by the bonfire, whispering how he wanted to live in Pine Lake forever.

“Personally,” Claire remarked, “I think you should take up meditating.”

“I’m not sure that’ll help Noah much.”

“I’m talking about
you
right now. Noah will be home before you know it, but right now, it sounds to me he’s in good hands. But Buddhism could teach
you
a little about how to handle anxiety and suffering.”

“I’ve got a religion, thank you.”

“The untrained mind is so vulnerable. If something good happens, all is glitter and joy.” Claire leaned toward her. “And when something bad happens, it’s in pain.”

“You read that in a fortune cookie.”

Claire’s laugh was honest. “I think you’d make a great
maechi
.”

“I’m not moving to a place with cockroaches the size of llamas.” Nicole rattled the ice in her empty drink. “And I’m
not
shaving my head.”

“You look me in the eye and tell me you don’t believe it was Karma that sent us to Theresa’s burned-out house today?”

Nicole had to admit that the coincidence was odd. Then she tugged on the cross hanging from her neck. “The Roman Catholic Church might give me another reason for that coincidence.”

“Fair enough. So how do you feel, Nicole, now that you’ve confessed your so-called sins?”

Nicole stopped jiggling ice cubes at the waitress. She froze with her glass in midair. She took a long, deep breath. When she exhaled, she felt a new looseness in her ribs as the air rushed out of her, right to the bottom of her lungs. She felt loose-jointed, elastic, like she did after a long, leisurely Pilates session. She glanced into the pink dregs amid the ice in her glass as her senses tingled. Some realization eluded her, hovering just outside her now well-lubricated mental grasp.

It was probably the liquor, she told herself, shaking the cubes again. Yes, it was the liquor giving her this unexpected lightness of being.

“Are we done playing pool?” Jenna clattered the stick on the table behind her. “I see a crowd on the dance floor, and I think they’re line dancing.”

Claire stood up. “We can’t leave Kansas without line dancing.”

Nicole laid her pool cue on the table. Jenna led the charge, and Nicole followed Claire. She floated in Claire’s wake as they headed past the bar toward the dance floor where a crowd had already gathered.

Then Nicole slammed into Claire’s back.

Nicole stumbled. “Hey, Claire—”

Claire flung out one arm to hold her back, and then Claire lunged forward to seize a fistful of Jenna’s shirt. Claire dragged Jenna bodily back, pulling both of them around the curve of the bar.

Jenna said, “Claire, what—”

“Shhh!”

Claire shoved them behind her. Then she stretched up on her tiptoes, bobbing her head perilously close to the bald pate of the nearest bar patron, who stopped sipping whiskey long enough to give them all a baleful look.

Nicole ignored him and followed Claire’s gaze. She saw a woman standing just inside the doorway to the pool hall. Nicole shook her head and looked again.

Maybe one Cody’s Revenge was all she could handle. The woman at the door looked a lot like Claire’s sister Paulina.

“Come on.” Claire swiveled on a heel and darted back toward the pool tables. “Every pool hall must have a back door.”

Getting the heck out of Kansas

J
enna shot out the back door of the pool hall and slammed into a white apron. The white apron stumbled back. She glanced up at the man wearing it as he flung his cigarette out of the way and shot blue smoke toward the moon. Above the shouts of cooks, the clatter of pots, and the plunging hiss of frying oil, she mumbled an excuse, only to have Nicole and Claire barrel out behind her. The young man gave her a shrug as if women escaped through the pool hall kitchen every day.

Jenna caught up with her friends as they raced to the corner of the building. The sky was gray in the gloaming just after sunset. Claire hesitated, peering around the corner, then minced down the narrow alley between the pool hall and what smelled like a dry-cleaning establishment, rounding the garbage cans as if hitting them would alert the hounds.

At the front corner of the building, Claire pressed her back against the wall. “Jenna, take out your keys.”

Jenna plunged her hand into her purse and curled her fingers around the Hello Kitty key chain Zoe had gifted her on her thirty-second birthday.

“Nicole,” Claire said, “you take the backseat. I’ll ride shotgun.”

“But you don’t know how to use the GPS—”

“You don’t need a GPS when you’re fleeing an angry sister.”

“So that really was—”

“We’ll talk on the road. Jenna, are you ready?”

Jenna jingled the keys.

“Lightning-fast. Let’s go.”

Jenna shot out behind her friends and followed the tail of Claire’s braid. Claire skidded to a stop as the front door of the pool hall opened. Jenna braced herself to dive between parked cars—she figured that was what Claire would want her to do, though Jenna didn’t know why—until she saw a couple emerge, too wrapped up in each other to notice the three women frozen in the glow of an overhead fluorescent light.

She had a quick flashback to senior year. That freezing winter night when she sat with Claire and a bunch of fellow Key Club members sharing a bottle of peppermint schnapps around a fire at Coley’s Point. They’d heard a shout beyond the firelight. They’d squealed and scattered willy-nilly into the winter woods, outracing the scanning beam.

As the door of the pool hall slammed shut, they zipped back into action. Jenna shuffled around the car to unlock the doors. She hauled her purse over her head and tossed it in the back. Lucky’s tags rattled as he jerked awake. Jenna dove into the driver’s seat. She plunged the key into the ignition, and the engine roared to life.

She put the car in reverse and slapped her arm on the passenger seat behind Claire to scan the parking lot behind her. “Where to?”

“West.”

Jenna hit the gas. “Which way is west?”

“Hell if I know.” Claire’s gaze was glued to the front door of Fast Eddy’s. “Just get on the road, we’ll figure—”

“Take a right out of the parking lot,” Nicole said. “As if we’re going back to Theresa’s house.”

Jenna cranked the steering wheel to turn out of the parking spot, and then cranked it the other way to head toward the exit. She eased up just long enough to notice no cars coming then slammed the accelerator. The tires squealed.

Jenna’s heart pounded, but she felt a tickling urge to laugh. That was the first time she’d ever burned rubber.

Claire’s whole body twisted in the seat as she kept an eye on Fast Eddy’s until she couldn’t see the front door anymore. “We have to put some miles between us. A thousand would work. How the
hell
did she find me?”

From the backseat, Nicole blurted, “
Find
you?”

“Washington State plates.” Jenna could just see the pale ghost of Theresa’s abandoned house as they came up fast upon it. “She probably drove around this road until she found my car. There aren’t a lot of those license plates here in Kansas.”

“But how did she know I was in
Kansas
?”

“Why wouldn’t she know?” Nicole’s voice went up in pitch. “You’ve been talking to Paulina all during this trip. You didn’t tell her?”

“I told Paulina what she needed to know and not one iota more—”

“—yet you
knew
Paulina was looking for you!”

“As the firstborn, Paulina believes this bequeaths upon her the royal right to control every detail of her siblings’ lives.”

“Oh, my God.” The teeth of a zipper clinked as Nicole opened her purse. “Has your sister been following us clear across the country?”

“No, no.” Claire huffed in frustration. “She’s not that crazy. At least, I didn’t see her truck in the parking lot. That means she’s got a rental car. That means she must have flown in to Wichita or something. Come on, Jenna,” she urged. “I know you have a heavier foot than that.”

Jenna glanced uneasily at the speedometer as she dared to press it harder. There was a reason why Nicole did most of the driving. This was Jenna’s father’s old car. Every time Jenna edged over seventy miles an hour she conjured the ghost of her father in the backseat, admonishing her to keep within the speed limit.

Suddenly from the backseat came a blue glow. Startled, Jenna glanced in the rearview mirror to see Nicole’s face illuminated by a cell-phone screen.

“Well, for what it’s worth, I can guess where Paulina got her information,” Nicole said. “Look at this.”

Out of the corner of her eye, Jenna saw Nicole’s cell phone thrust in the space between the front seats.

Claire leaned over to look only to groan and flop back. “That damn cancer blog.”

“Maya must have e-mailed the picture of us to Paulina. Paulina must have posted it on the blog.” Nicole withdrew the phone and ran her fingers over the screen. “I didn’t mention it yesterday because you’ve made your feelings about the blog quite clear.”

“For the love of Buddha, I hate it.”

“I’m glad Maya sent the photo to be posted,” Jenna said. “People start to worry if a cancer blog goes silent.”

“Well, that’s how she found me for sure. Paulina must have contacted Maya to ask where we were going.”

From the backseat came a sharp intake of breath. “You were that sure that I’d come to Kansas.”

“Nic, not long ago I called you a jet streaking across the sky, but I lied.”

“You lied.”

“You’re a hang glider susceptible to a well-placed gust of wind. After our little talk in the pool hall, at least I finally understand why. Jenna, why don’t you take that left at that intersection up ahead? Like Nicole, we need to get off the straight-and-narrow path.”

Nicole said, “Explain why Paulina is in Kansas, Claire.”

Nicole’s voice had dropped down to that soft, dangerous timbre that made Jenna’s shoulders tighten, even when she wasn’t the focus of Nicole’s interest. Still, this time her curiosity was piqued. She waited in the silence, wondering what kind of impulse would send Paulina on an airplane to track her sister down. Jenna made the turn and bumped onto the side road, heading toward a distant glow that was the promise of another small Kansas town.

“Paulina and I don’t see eye to eye on a lot of things.” Claire twisted to glance out the rear window, scanning the dark road for headlights. “Paulina thinks I should be sitting in my sick chair with a blanket tucked around my knees. She thinks I should be taking medications at the first strike of the hour. She thinks I can’t possibly be taking the cancer
seriously
if I’m not eternally grateful and smiling through the tears. Is it too much to ask—for a week or two or three—to just leave Cancer Woman behind?”

Jenna found her breath growing shallow. That speech was perhaps the longest thing Claire had ever said about the disease in the two thousand miles they’d driven together. The high-pitched whirr of the engine seemed all the more noticeable. Lucky’s tags rattled as he shifted in his puppy bed.

Jenna knew how this would end. Claire would have to confront Paulina. For all the hijinks in leaving the pool hall, Jenna couldn’t imagine Claire would really abandon her sister to wander in search of her among the Kansas cornfields. So Jenna focused on the yellow line dividing the road, seeking a good place to turn off, waiting for Nicole to find the right words. The headlights cast their light only a few dozen yards ahead.

The blue glow came from the backseat again. “Hit the gas, Jenna,” Nicole said. “We have to get Cancer Woman out of here.”

Jenna woke up knowing what she had to do.

She sat in the breakfast room just off the hotel lobby, digging granola out of a paper cup while she waited for the sluggish communal computer to refresh. Behind her, a family of native Kansans settled in for the free breakfast. A youngish man bit into a donut as he read the paper alone by a window. The TV mounted in the high corner of the room droned the local news, every ten minutes breaking for a weather report, as commodity futures scrolled in a ticker across the bottom of the screen.

She’d been here for the better part of an hour, choking down unbelievably bad coffee while she debated her options. Now she leaned in as the page loaded, then glanced at the clock behind the reception desk and pondered the best path to take, as the Indian clerk briskly tucked a pencil behind his ear. Her finger hovered over the Enter key. With Nicole’s pool-hall confession still fresh in her ears and Claire acting all night like a twitchy fugitive, Jenna knew her timing couldn’t possibly be worse.

She watched the website timer tick down to less than a minute before she pressed the Enter key.

She didn’t have a choice now but to wake up Claire and Nicole. Jenna snagged a bowl, a banana, two tea bags, and some instant oatmeal for Nicole. She’d use the room coffeemaker to make hot water for the oatmeal and tea. For Claire she took a pint of milk and then filled another bowl with two scoops of Cocoa Krispies. Juggling all this, she stepped onto the elevator to the second floor and jiggled her key card in the slot until the light turned green. The room was just as she left it: pitch-dark and filled with snoring.

She allowed them a few more minutes as she turned on the coffeemaker and set the food on the table. Then she crossed the room and flung open the drapes.

Nicole curled up and tried to burrow under the tangled sheets. Claire, her back to the window, shot straight up from the other bed.

In the bright light, Claire’s pupils contracted to pinpoints. “Paulina?”

“No, Paulina’s not here.” Last night, they’d found this run-down hotel about twenty miles from the pool hall. They’d parked the car in the back lot. Claire had insisted that they remove the license plates until morning. “I’m waking you because it’s ten o’clock, and checkout time is in an hour.”

Nicole groaned as she flung an arm out from beneath the covers. “Oh, my God. What the hell was in that drink last night?”

Claire swung her legs off the bed. “At least you didn’t spend last night getting kicked by Jenna.”

Nicole said, “I had that pleasure the night before—”

“Hey,” Jenna objected. “I don’t kick.”

The two of them, in unison: “Oh, yes you do.”

Jenna gaped at them. “Well, Claire snores, and, Nicole, you steal covers like an anaconda twisting around its prey.”

A pillow sailed across the room and hit her in the midriff. Her friends laughed. It reminded her of the laughter that used to come out of the basement in the wee hours of the morning whenever Zoe had a sleepover.

The thought made her feel even more guilty for what she was about to do.

“I can’t get up,” Nicole muttered. “I’ll pay for another night.”

Jenna said. “Can’t do that.”

“Can.” Nicole swiveled her wrist and pointed in the general direction of the bureau. “Credit card right there.”

“It’s not the money, it’s the time.” Jenna pulled the chair out from beneath the desk and sank into it. “I have to be in Des Moines by five p.m.”

In the stillness that greeted this announcement, the coffeemaker gave that long, gurgling breath that indicated it had discharged the last of the water from the filter basket. Nicole raised her head out of the covers like a groundhog out of its burrow. Then she clutched her forehead as if she’d moved too fast.

“Des Moines.” Nicole eased herself up. “Isn’t that, like, two hundred miles away?”

Jenna said, “Closer to two hundred and twenty.”

“And what’s waiting at the end of it?”

“An airport.”

Nicole came to blinking attention. She squinted at Claire, who shrugged and then went back to hiding in the shadow of a curtain to scan the parking lot for her sister.

Nicole asked, “Who are we meeting at an airport?”

“I’m taking United Airlines flight 792 to Seattle.” Jenna stood up as every muscle in her body went tense. “I’m going to tell Nate that I don’t want a divorce.”

She walked to the coffeemaker to give the two of them time to absorb that information, to glance at each other the way she had known they would in order to telegraph their mutual shock and dismay. Meanwhile, she ripped the plastic bags off the polystyrene cups. She opened the tea bags and dropped them in. She pulled out the carafe of hot water and filled each cup three-quarters full.

By the time she turned around, Claire sat against the pillows on her bed and Nicole had shuffled to the bottom of hers.

“Frankly, Jenna, my head is still swimming with fumes.” Nicole took one of the cups. “A lot happened yesterday, between our talk, coming upon Theresa’s house, running away from an angry sister—”

“Six calls,” Claire remarked, clanking her phone on the bedside table as she took Jenna’s offered tea. “Eleven texts. Determined little bugger.”

“The point is,” Nicole continued, “I think maybe I piled too much pressure on you about that divorce petition.”

“You didn’t cause that pressure. Nate did.” Jenna retreated to the safe distance of the bureau. “And if I’m going to stop the divorce, I have to do it now.”

Nicole kept squeezing the bridge of her nose. “I thought we’d hashed this out yesterday in the car. Leaving now seems odd, too sudden—”

“I don’t want to leave you guys.” Jenna splayed her fingers on the bureau, feeling the grit of spilled sugar. “I know it’s a terrible time. Paulina is out there somewhere.” Jenna watched as Claire once again glanced out the window to the pothole-pocked parking lot. “I know you need to call her today.”