Random Acts of Kindness (17 page)

“Nate probably told her that he’d made a mistake with that woman.” Nicole let go and paced a little between the tree and the shaded edge of the building, her mind working. “I’d bet, when she witnessed it, he told Zoe that it was one incident, one moment of idiocy, something that would never happen again.”

“Oh, God.”

“How else would he justify it? If this fling were just a mistake, then there would be no reason to tell you. In fact, it’d be
dangerous
to tell you. Who knows how you’d react? It could end in divorce.”

“I can’t believe he would do that.” No, not from the man who’d played airplane with Zoe in the backyard, risking elbow dislocations because he couldn’t resist the happy pleading of the girl who loved to fly.

“Zoe complied,” Nicole continued, “because Nate promised it wouldn’t happen again. What else could he do? What girl wouldn’t want to believe her father?”

Jenna closed her eyes and saw a gap-toothed, seven-year-old Zoe sprinkling her bedroom sheets with black pepper because Daddy said it would make the tooth fairy sneeze and lose extra change from her fairy pockets.

“Imagine,” Nicole said, “if it happened again, how betrayed she’d feel, how angry at you for not noticing.”

The thought sent a seismic tremor through her. Lucky, sensing it, pressed against her ankle and whined.

Nicole pressed her fingers against her head as if holding in the pulsing of her brain. “You do realize that this explains all of Zoe’s angry behavior for the past nine months.”

You’re so stupid! You’re so blind!

She cringed. She didn’t want this to be true. She wanted Zoe’s fury to stem from some normal reason that she’d read about or heard about in her desperate search for understanding. She’d rather Zoe grew angry because her mother interrogated her about school over dinner. She’d rather Zoe felt besieged by the suffocating pressure of being an only child, the sweet beating heart of the family. She’d rather that Zoe’s hair-trigger temper be due to something biological and passing, like the usual early-teen fluctuation in hormones, or even to some Freudian idea that Zoe was competing with her mother for affection from Nate.

Jenna thought about all the times Nate waved away her concerns, insisting Zoe’s behavior was just a phase, as he changed the topic of the conversation.

Nicole lifted her fingers and started counting. “Zoe was afraid she wouldn’t be able to keep the secret. So she avoided you.”

All those days rushing home through Seattle traffic in time for seven p.m. dinner in the hopes of a few minutes with her daughter. Only to come home to see Zoe’s face close up tight before asking permission to be excused from the table.

Nicole bent back her second finger. “Then when you tried to get close to her, she lashed out at you in order to push you away.”

“She didn’t want to slip up,” Jenna said. “She didn’t want to be the one held responsible for destroying our family.”

The tendons in the back of her knees softened. She felt a scorching heat on her palm as she braced herself against the hood of a parked car. She ignored the burn as she leaned her weight against it so she wouldn’t sink into a puddle on the dirty street. Her bad leg slipped out from under her. She twisted and banged her hip against the car.

Nicole seized her shoulders and held on until Jenna felt the ground beneath her feet again.

“I want you to think about this, Jenna.” Nicole’s fingers dug into her skin. “Your husband manipulated Zoe. Rather than coming clean, he made his twelve-year-old keep a terrible secret.”

Jenna’s humorless laughter certainly came from someone else’s mouth. “And all these years, I believed I was the bad parent.”

“Oh, Jenna, we all believe we’re bad parents.”

Her mind rolled back to when she came home from work to have Nate show her the video of Zoe rolling over for the first time, of Zoe scooting across the floor on her belly, of Zoe rising to stand, all the precious moments she missed. She remembered an evening when Nate said something to Zoe about her preschool teacher and Zoe laughed. She’d laughed, too, not understanding the joke but so aching to be part of it. She also remembered skipping out of an office meeting to make a six p.m. grammar school basketball game in order to catch Zoe sitting on the bench for all but one minute and sixteen glorious seconds. She remembered the rhythm of early shopping trips to the mall, pennies tossed in the fountain, a quarter to crank out a plastic egg holding a gummy lizard.

Had the situation been reversed—had Zoe come upon her in flagrante delicto with one of her coworkers, say—Jenna would have confessed the infidelity to Nate that same night. Then she would have set her sights on doing whatever it took to see forgiveness in Zoe’s eyes.

“I’m not the bad parent,” Jenna heard herself say. “Maybe I never was.”

Then she dropped her head back to stare at the blue sky between the Chicago skyscrapers, feeling the first shimmering sliver of comfort, an unexpected gift out of the fissure of a broken heart.

Niagara Falls, New York

C
laire,” Nicole whispered. “We’re attracting the kind of attention usually reserved for cults.”

Claire shifted on the wooden boards of one of the viewing platforms on the United States side of Niagara Falls. The three of them were sitting cross-legged in a close triumvirate, so close that their knees touched. “Just ignore them,” she said. “Tune out every sensation around you. Close your eyes and concentrate only on your breathing.”

Nicole sighed. “We couldn’t do this in the privacy of our hotel room?”

“Open air,” Claire said. “Open mind.”

Jenna ventured, “Can I concentrate on Lucky’s breathing? The walk from the hotel killed the poor guy. He’s slobbering all over my lap.”

“Just concentrate on the movement of your diaphragm and then acknowledge in your mind any other distractions.”

Claire admitted there were a lot of distractions. The air swirled with a palpable mist. The waterfall roared just past the edge of the wooden platform. Though this cataract was a noisy, angry beast, the vitality of it reminded her of a much smaller one back at the
wat
, the little trickle of a waterfall whose gurgle she used to concentrate on during her first desperate attempts to still her mind.

Breathe in, breathe out. Breathe in, breathe out.

She acknowledged the sound of footsteps coming toward the railing. The boards vibrated under her bottom. A family standing somewhere to her right kept up a muted conversation.
Mom, what are those people doing? Resting, dear. Come and look at the rainbow.
Claire felt another vibration, a tinny one she couldn’t identify that came in through her knees.

She peeped an eye open to find Nicole sneaking her cell phone out of the pocket of her capris.

Nicole grimaced. “I know, I know. Just one more text, I promise.”

Claire shifted her weight to give Nic’s knee a nudge. “Is there some kind of crisis going on? Your phone has been pinging and ringing nonstop.”

“Today it’s a cleat crisis. Julia can’t find hers.” Her fingers flew over the screen keyboard. “Lars needs to know where to buy them. I’m telling him that Julia probably left them under the sofa in the TV room downstairs.”

Claire said, “He can’t wait half an hour?”

Nicole’s shrug was sheepish.

“Let me guess,” Jenna said, scratching a grateful Lucky under the collar. “The game’s in twenty minutes.”

“It’s in ten. Okay, done.” Nicole shoved the phone back in her pocket and straightened to schoolgirl attention. “Sorry about that. Before that text, I was sort of falling into a zone.”

“Yeah,” Jenna teased, “the
hangover
zone.”

Jenna leaned away from Nicole as Nicole gave her a harmless slap. Lucky startled as his lap chair tipped, and Jenna released him to protect her head with her hands. All innocence, Nicole brought her hand right back down on her knee like she hadn’t done a thing, then settled into perfect meditation position.

The peace lasted no more than a minute.

Claire chided, “Jenna, you’re squirming.”

“Lucky’s heavy on my leg.”

Nicole laughed. “He weighs, like, ten pounds.”

“Just note the sensation,” Claire insisted. “Think,
Warm dog on my leg
. Keep noting the sensation over and over. Eventually, the sensation will slip to your subconscious, and your mind will drift to more important things.”

“My aunt is twitching in Quebec.” Nicole raised her chin as the mist started to thin under the heat of sunshine. “I’m not sure she’d approve of me doing this without a rosary in my hands.”

“I promise,” Claire said, “your soul is in no danger.”

Jenna picked Lucky up and rearranged him on her lap. “Okay, I’m trying to do what you say. So I’m breathing in, and I’m breathing out. I’m thinking,
Warm dog on my leg
. Then I’m thinking,
Dog lifts head
, followed by,
Dog sniffs the scent of a waffle cone
. Then,
I sniff the scent of a waffle cone
. And then my stomach rumbles.”

Claire said, “Great observations.”

“I just don’t get it,” Jenna said. “Exactly what are we trying to accomplish here?”

“Mindfulness.”

Jenna repeated, “Mindfulness.”

“It’s the ability to be intensely present.” Claire noted the dampness of the boards soaking the seat of her jeans. “It’s a way of being aware of everything you sense and feel. It’s a way to shut off the constant roll and tumble of your thoughts so you can finally identify what you’re really thinking. You’ll recognize how you feel. You’ll acknowledge those feelings. Then you can respond to them better.”

Splinters plucked at the fibers of Claire’s jeans. The mist churned up by the falls bathed her skin and gave her a chill. The August sun broke through long enough to burn a swath across her forehead and lighten the space beyond her eyelids. Soon all sound became subsumed by the roar of the falls. Behind them, she heard the muffled shouts of children and the thud of feet upon the deck, as if her own consciousness had slipped amid the foam.

She willed herself to remember all this. The air had an iron-tang taste to it. She heard the rumble of wheels as a vendor passed, trailing with him a roasted-honey scent. She became conscious of the slight pressure of their knees touching. She made herself feel the strength in her own still-supple spine, the force of life as her heart pumped blood through her body, the ease at which she could suck in a breath.

There would come a time when the cancer would migrate to her vertebrae, stealing the strength and flexibility from her spine. There would come a time when the effort of consciousness would drain the life force from her body. There would come a time when it would be a chore to suck in air, and Paulina and Alice and Zuza would sit vigil waiting, like Claire had for Melana, for the rhythm of her breathing to slow to a stop like the unwinding of an old clock.

Until then, she would vacuum-pack these memories in imaginary snow globes to put up on high shelves until the time she needed to take them down and shake them back into vivid life again.

I mustn’t think of that yet.

Yet that singular thought had kept rising into her mind ever since they drove along the southern shore of Lake Erie out of Cleveland, through Pennsylvania, to the wooden placard that announced
Welcome to New York
. Only about three hundred miles now separated them from Pine Lake.

Not yet.

The air had grown thin, as if she stood again at the top of Thailand’s highest mountain. Doi Inthanon was only a bus ride away from Chiang Mai. She’d gone there before her Buddhist vows. On arrival she and her friends had roamed around a Hmong roadside market before discovering that there were no hiking trails to the summit, so they paid their two hundred baht to hire a private car and drove their way up. They stopped at Sirithan Waterfall and oohed and
aahed
over the ornate twin temples built in honor of the king and queen of Thailand. Finally, at the peak of the mountain, they waited in line for a good hour to get their picture taken in front of a teak sign, only to be hustled away to make room for the next tourists. Then they’d milled about, admiring through the haze the blue outlines of the mountains. The return trip to Chiang Mai was an uneventful slide back to the youth hostel.

This was the problem with goals, Claire thought. Once accomplished, they were chased by disappointment. The moment the three of them turned their faces back west, Jenna would summon her energies to the upcoming fight for custody, and Nicole’s worries would shift to Noah’s return from the residential facility. There would be no more moments contemplating mountains or waterfalls in blissful peace.

Claire tried once again to clear her mind. Perhaps she could talk them into a side trip to the wineries of the Finger Lakes region. Maybe she could convince them of the fun they could have swinging through the Catskills. Maybe she could pass out coffee in New York City before heading to Pine Lake. For as long as possible, she wanted to delay her return to her thirty-acre wood with Jon Snow, her raven, and the three-legged goat and the blind possum under the porch, and her forest garden, where she would stay until the end of all things.

Breathe in, breathe out. I hear the rush of the water. I feel the chill upwind seeping from under the railing. Goose bumps spread along my arms. I smell a pink smell—cotton candy, carnival-sweet. I hear Lucky whining.

“Jenna?”

Nicole’s voice was full of concern. Claire blinked her eyes open to find Lucky with his notched ears perked. The dog stretched up to his full height licking Jenna’s jaw. Jenna sat with her wrists limp on her knees, trembling.

“I’m okay,” Jenna said, but her voice was shaky. “I feel sort of strange. Like I’m riding a swing.”

Claire raised her brows. She hadn’t expected this out of Jenna—out of anyone—and certainly not on the first try. Only after three months of intensive meditation did she herself experience this kind of physical reaction. Her teacher called it “the rapture,” one step closer to the tranquility and sharpness of mind that all good Buddhists sought, and it came with shivering gooseflesh.

Jenna said, “I know what I want.”

Nicole said wryly, “A jacket, I assume.”

“No, not that. Back in Chicago,” Jenna said, gripping Lucky, “Nicole asked us both what we really wanted to do on this trip. Now I know what I want.”

Claire felt a pinch of envy at Jenna’s good fortune. In the silence of meditation, wisdom sometimes snuck up on you, like a bubble working its way through a viscous consciousness until finally it exploded to the surface, only to leave you wondering why it took so long.

“I should have known from the beginning,” Jenna said. “After what Nate has done, he has no right to keep me away from Zoe. That’s what I want more than anything else: to speak to Zoe.”

“Seeing Zoe isn’t going to be easy.” Nicole wrestled out of her sweater and then draped it over Jenna’s shoulders. “Camp Paskagamak is like Fort Knox for teenagers. We’ll have to figure a way past Master Ranger Garfunkle.”

No, please.
Claire’s spine tightened as she realized what they were planning.
Let’s stay here. Just a little longer.

“I don’t care if we have to lock Ranger Garfunkle in the janitor’s closet,” Jenna said. “I am going to see my daughter.”