Random Acts of Kindness (24 page)

Yet, despite her fatigue and the ache in her lower back, she felt an almost uncontrollable urge to ease up on the gas. These miles with Zoe—now dozing, her head rocking on the seat, her eyes finally clear of the eyeliner that had rimmed them since Pine Lake, her face creased with the press of piping against her cheek—had been some of the best times she’d ever spent with her daughter. Yet every mile closer to the house that was once her home brought her closer to the troubles she’d run so far away from.

She would have closed her eyes against those troubles if she wasn’t going seventy-six miles an hour. She would have blocked them out of her mind if, every time she tried, Nicole’s face didn’t rise up in her mind to insist she stop avoiding conflict, if Claire’s voice didn’t remind her to live mindfully, to acknowledge her thoughts and feelings rather than push them aside. Her friends hadn’t been in the car for the last three thousand miles, but they were traveling with her nonetheless.

It was 6:30 in the evening by the time Jenna turned the balding tires of the bug-splattered, mud-stained Lumina onto their street. She pulled the car into the driveway next to Nate’s Prius, but not before noticing the
For Sale
sign on the front lawn of Sissy’s house.

She turned the key, and the car shuddered off. Zoe straightened up, shoved her iPod in her backpack, and bounded out of the car. Jenna pulled the key out of the ignition. Through the curtained window, she saw Nate’s familiar shadow moving in the kitchen.

“Mom, pop the trunk.”

Jenna realized she was still gripping the steering wheel, immobile. She hit the yellow button and the trunk opened. She pushed open the driver’s-side door and unfolded herself from the seat, slapping a hand on the gritty car roof as her cramped legs nearly gave out beneath her. She shook them out and noticed that the small front lawn had been neatly mowed. Nate had edged the flower beds and added a fresh heap of mulch.

She heard the front door squeal open. Nate walked out to the edge of the porch. A dish towel lay over his shoulder. He rested his hands on his hips, his gaze and his smile fixed on Zoe.

Zoe didn’t acknowledge him at first. With Lucky tucked under one arm, Zoe tugged her enormous camp duffel out of the trunk to hit the driveway with a thud. She strode down the sidewalk toward the walkway, her chin puckered in that stubborn, I’ll-do-it-myself way as she rolled the heavy duffel on its back wheels. When Zoe turned into the walk and finally looked up at her father, her face was stone.

Nate padded down the steps to intercept. “Hey, pumpkin,” he said, reaching for the handle. “How was your trip?”

Zoe turned a shoulder so her father couldn’t reach the duffel. “It was fine.”

“C’mon, hand it over.” He reached for the strap again. “Something tells me it’s full of laundry—”

“Dad, you don’t make it out of Wolf Cubs without knowing how to do your own laundry. Right, Mom?”

Not waiting for an answer, Zoe shot by her father and yanked the duffel one-handed, bump-bump-bumping it up the stairs before disappearing into the house.

The small muscles of Jenna’s neck tightened as the plates of her mental armor clattered into place. Now that the Zoe buffer was gone, she braced herself for the angry accusations she’d known would fly from the moment she decided to short-circuit Nate’s end-of-camp plans and instead drive cross-country alone with Zoe.

He stood empty-handed in the driveway looking through the open door. “Now I know what it feels like.”

“What?” She threw the word like a gauntlet.

“To have Zoe angry at me instead of you.”

Jenna swayed from bracing for a hit that never came. She took a hard look at Nate as he jerked his hand through his hair. His T-shirt formed loose folds across his abdomen. Mauve hollows set off the color of his eyes. He looked like he needed a shave, a haircut, a good meal, and about twenty hours of sleep. He certainly didn’t look like a man upended by love.

His mouth moved in what may have been an attempt at a smile. “I know Zoe hasn’t been acting like that the whole trip.”

“She’s been wonderful.”

“She’s grown about four inches.”

“She also dyed her hair purple.”

He raised his brows.

“You’ll see when she takes off her baseball cap. Plus the new piercing.”

She didn’t add anything more. She had a feeling Zoe would be displaying a lot of war paint and attitude in the days to come.

He said, “Anything left in the car?”

“Nothing but chip bags and half-filled water bottles.”

And Jenna’s own luggage, of course. Plus the box of
memento
s—Zoe’s old lovey, Pinky Bear, and the photos she’d taken off the mantelpiece. The French press. And trinkets she’d gathered from Salt Lake City, Cheyenne, Chicago, Niagara Falls, nothing but pinpoints on a coffee-stained map that now held a hundred thousand memories.

She heard a happy yelp from inside the house and, with a twinge, she realized that Zoe had taken Lucky inside with her. It was a seven-year-old Zoe who’d insisted on rescuing the ragged little creature from the pound all those years ago. Lucky was Zoe’s dog. Suddenly Jenna understood the impulse three weeks ago to sweep Lucky into her arms and make Zoe’s pet her buddy on the road trip.

Nate still hesitated where he stood on the walkway. He shifted his stance and rubbed his jaw, as if he were searching for something to say. She didn’t know what to say, either. Maybe it would be better if they didn’t say anything outside the presence of lawyers.

She swung back to the car, resting her hand on the open door. “The mediation meeting is still set for next Friday, I assume?”

“Yes.”

“Tell Zoe I’ll see her after school tomorrow.”

“Wait. Where are you spending the night?”

“A hotel,” she said. “As usual.”

“I’ve seen some of those hotels you’ve been staying in.” He thumbed the scruff on his chin. “The Silver Dollar in Reno. The Hotel No-tell in Iowa? That sleazy honeymoon place in Niagara Falls? Hell, I know you’re out of a job, Jen, but we’ve got enough savings. You could have kicked it up a notch.”

Jenna froze with her hand flat on the roof of the car. Her mind stumbled, raced. She knew that Zoe had been posting photos of their road trip online. She knew that Nate would be able to see those updates. In fact, she’d taken a measure of guilty vengeance in knowing he would see her having a great time on vacation with the daughter he’d all but
sing
le-h
andedly
turned against her. She ran her hand over her head and felt again the soft peach fuzz. He hadn’t made a single comment about her baldness.

Then she realized that she hadn’t been in Reno, or Iowa, or Niagara Falls with Zoe. But she’d been all those places with her friends.

If Jenna had to guess, she’d say Nicole must have invited Nate to subscribe to Claire’s cancer blog.

Nate said, “Stay here, Jenna.”

He spread a hand toward the open door. She looked at him, at the house, not understanding.

“Stay here,” he repeated. “Sleep tonight in your own bed.”

Out of the house drifted a mouthwatering smell. A sirloin roast, she was sure of it, that lovely blend of juices and rosemary and thyme, dissonant now, because this was once the smell of homecoming. Jenna looked at him more closely. She saw the shame sweep over his expression like a shadow. Once again he couldn’t meet her eyes. His shoulders bowed as he found great interest in something lost in the grass by his feet.

He said, “I fucked it all up, didn’t I?”

The admission should have filled her with self-righteous triumph. It just made her feel sad.

“This past week I’ve been doing a lot of thinking.” He swayed back on his heels as he shoved his hands into his pockets. “Someone has to leave this house. That someone has to be me.”

B
ertha the goat
baa
ed an enthusiastic greeting as Claire pulled her luggage out of the trunk of Paulina’s car. As the goat, teetering on three spindly legs, strained against the leash, Claire approached and dropped her bags on the grass in order to grant the little beast a vigorous scratch. Behind her, the tires of Paulina’s car bit into the gravel as her sister pulled away, Paulina’s promise to return early tomorrow still ringing in Claire’s ears.

Now she lifted her face to the sunshine and looked at her thirty-acre wood. This cabin had always reminded her of the forest hut where she’d lived in Thailand, a natural Nirvana, a sanctuary of serenity that she could retreat into should the secular life once again wear her down.

Now she looked at the sagging porch, the tingling wind chimes, and the morning glory vines choking the posts. She realized if left unattended, in a year or two this whole place would be swallowed by the forest vines so thoroughly that no one would ever remember it had existed.

Claire huffed out a humorless little laugh for finally seeing what had always been right in front of her eyes. Long before she’d been diagnosed with cancer, she’d set out to bury herself.

She shook the thought out of her head and headed to the cabin. She had a bag full of laundry and a forest garden that needed tending. The floorboards creaked as she stepped up the stairs, waking the crow. He cocked a black eye in her direction. She pulled out a handful of corn from the bin by the door and tossed the grains on the porch. Jon Snow did his awkward glide-drop to the boards to fill his belly.

Inside, the house smelled mediciney and musty. Dust whirled in the shafts of light pouring through the front window. Her tattered slippers lay discarded on the braided rug, as if she’d just stepped out of them. Through the hall, she saw a stack of mail teetering on the butcher-block counter of the kitchen along with a note from the teenager who’d been looking after the animals. Claire dropped her bags and pulled open the cabinet in search of cat food. Then she wandered to the porch, where she sang in Pali until she saw the blind possum poke his nose from underneath. She left him to his dinner and then got to work.

She stripped every linen in the house, pulled down the towels, and piled them up. While the washing machine vibrated in its alcove, she pulled a stool by the counter and used a butter knife to open the bills and the credit card offers, the belated get-well cards, tossing the outdated grocery circulars and the mail-order catalogs into the recycling bin. She cleared a shelf of books she would never read and placed in their stead her new collection of hats. When that had all been taken care of, she booted up her computer and took a rag to the smudged front window while she waited for updates to load.

The square of light coming through that window had passed from one side of the room to the other by the time she finished her e-mail. She ate a dinner of grilled zucchini from her own garden while she clicked through the photos of the reunion in Pine Lake that the ladies continued to post to the blog. Her favorite shot showed all of them posed in the same formation as the high-school graduation picture. She set that picture as the background on her computer.

She gazed at her friends as her throat started to tighten. She’d set out on this trip convinced she’d been a fool to believe that one person could ever change the world. And yet seven people had managed to make a profound change in hers.

Maybe, after you’ve thrown enough good Karma into the universe, it gathers and boomerangs back.

And maybe it wasn’t the world that needed changing.

Claire reached into her pocket and pulled out the business card that Jin had slipped her last night. Scrawled on the back in Jin’s messy script were a name and a phone number for an oncologist in Portland. He was a colleague, Jin had told her, working on a stage IV double-blind clinical drug trial for a targeted form of chemo for a certain type of breast cancer. Jin warned that she might not qualify. Jin warned that it might be too early in her treatment to even think about something like this. Still, Jin encouraged her to call and get more details. Every promising new drug ever developed, she said, began with a trial just like this one.

Claire glanced out at the afternoon light. Her sisters would visit tomorrow morning. They would sit on the couch while sunlight set fire to the frizz of their hair. They’d perch on the edge, the three mages, trembling with hope and fear, to deliver the speech they’d no doubt been planning from the moment Paulina returned from Kansas with the news that Claire was bypassing radiation and chemo altogether.

We’re going to beat this.

Claire glanced at her computer screen to check the lateness of the day. Office hours were not yet over. She still had time.

She picked up the phone.

R
ise and shine, Noah.”

Noah’s face was buried in his pillow, but Nicole could sense the rolling of his eyes. She understood his annoyance. Anyone would be pissed off at being woken up at six fifteen in the morning to the sight of their mother shaking a bottle of pills.

“Come on.” She cracked the bottle open and tipped a pill into her palm. “You’ve got fifteen minutes before your father leaves without you.”

Noah took his time rolling over, grunting all the while. The neck of his T-shirt stretched to one side. His black hair stuck up at odd angles, not much longer than her own hair, now coming in thick. After Noah’s release from the residential facility, they’d determined through trial and error that morning was the best time for him to take his meds. In these few moments in the semidark, Nicole could still see a glimmer of the amenable young boy lurking behind the stubble.

He opened his mouth like a bird. She laid the pill on the back of his tongue. His throat flexed as he swallowed. He rose up on an elbow to take the glass of water she held out for him. After much discussion, Noah’s main therapist had agreed to whittle Noah’s meds down to a single mood-st
abilizing
drug. Nicole had promised her son that if he took this one drug, she would forgo the usual tongue inspection. They could reboot their relationship on a basis of mutual trust.

So far, so good.

“Turkey or ham for lunch?” She slipped the bottle of pills in the pocket of her bathrobe as she stood up. “I bought some soft rolls yesterday.”

He swung his legs out from beneath the covers and answered with another grunt.

“Turkey then,” she said, swiveling on a heel.

“No chips.”

She paused. “Are you sure?”

“I have to cut back or I’ll never make the team.”

Since Noah had begun jogging with Lars, he’d lost some of the puffiness from the long merry-go-round of potent meds. She held on to the hope that Noah’s surprising urge to try out for the track team would serve the dual purpose of getting him to a healthy weight as well as start a lifelong habit for the sake of the all-natural, mood-smoothing endorphins.

“An apple then. Get dressed fast. Your father’s already stretching.”

She closed the door and padded down the stairs toward the kitchen, where she’d set coffee to brewing. Christian and Julia didn’t have to wake up for another half hour, which gave her enough time to slice strawberries and cook up some real oatmeal.

Lars wandered in, shaking his legs as he paced in a little circle in the kitchen. “Is he coming down?”

“Five minutes.”

“He take his meds yet?”

“Half-asleep. Just like the doctor ordered. Do you think his crankiness at dinner last night was a blood-sugar thing?”

Lars grimaced. “He’ll tell me if there’s anything going on in school.”

She nodded, grateful, as she poured herself a cup of coffee and added some half-and-half. Within a matter of weeks, it had become clear that Lars had a way of coaxing Noah to open up emotionally that was far more successful than anything she’d ever tried. A simple precept, but one she’d nearly forgotten: a teenage boy needs the advice of his father.

She took a quick sip of her hot coffee and let herself enjoy a moment of hope that even though she still spent every moment with Noah trying to gauge his emotional temperature, there might be long, blissful stretches bereft of mood swings and school suspensions and dismayed calls from teachers.

Her son now bounded down the stairs with all the grace of a water buffalo. He popped his head into the kitchen. “Dad?”

Lars straightened. “Ready.”

Nicole heard Noah say, “Beat you to the park.”

“Like hell you will.”

Lars bolted out of the kitchen, and then they were off, pounding out the door and slamming it in their wake, their voices fading as they tore down the street.

Then Nicole’s day began as it usually did, as Julia stumbled down the stairs complaining about how noisy Noah had been, followed by Christian rubbing his eyes. Nicole served them hot oatmeal and juice, then emptied the dishwasher and put away the pots drying on the rack. She officiated the bathroom fights as she picked up towels and dirty clothes. By the time Lars and Noah returned from their run, Julia was fixing her bangs in her room and Nicole was sorting laundry while testing Christian in Spanish. Noah showered quickly and then charged down the stairs, hair wet, for the mad dash for backpacks, purses, lunches, car.

Lars, wrapped in a towel, grabbed her arm before she ran out the door. “Good luck today.”

Her breath faltered, remembering the day’s plans. “It’ll be fine.” She nodded. “I know I’ll be fine.”

“Good luck anyway.”

He smelled of hot water and soap. He tasted like bubble-gum toothpaste.

She dropped the kids off at two schools and then swung by a bagel store to buy her second cup of coffee. She lingered in her car before setting the cup in the holder and heading toward the local hospital. In the parking lot, she ran her hand nervously over her head, feeling the crisp growth feather through her fingers. She became mindful of the return of that old balking reflex. The idea that she didn’t need to do this, that she had everything under control at home, that her life was clipping away at its usual frantic but controlled pace.

For now.

Nicole signed in at the front desk and took the elevator to the second floor. Her heels clicked on the linoleum floor and echoed down the corridor as she searched for the right room. She zeroed in on a schedule taped up on the wall beside one door.
9 a.m. Support Group for Parents of Troubled Teens.

As she walked in, Dr. Jayson, her therapist, waved to her from the donut table. Four other women and two men were already present.

Nicole joined them amid the circle of chairs.