Senseless Acts of Beauty (12 page)

A gut-kick instinct told her to run away.

Her damn heart raced in her chest like it did sometimes at work, when she had to check fill levels on a wastewater tank before pumping some into her truck. As she was climbing those spindly metal stairs up the side of a tank, the Canadian wind swept down over the prairie and battered her against the metal walls. One good gust, one wrong step, and she’d be over the edge falling three stories. Depending on her boss’s trucking schedule, it might take a day or two before she was found by anyone or anything but wolves.

Two sharp raps on the passenger-side window and she all but leaped out of her jeans. A woman bent over, peering through the glass, on her face an unspoken question. She mouthed something that Tess didn’t hear.

Tess lowered the window and the woman repeated, “Theresa, she’s not home.”

Tess registered three things at once. One, that the woman knew her name. Two, the woman knew she was looking for her mother. And three, the woman eyeballing her with a tilted smile had the kind of big, blue, slightly protruding eyes of a girl she once knew.

Tess said, “Emma Lu Skye.”

Her lips twitched. “I heard you were in town, Hendrick.”

Tess glanced beyond her, to the old house where Lu used to live when they were in school together. “Are you visiting your mom?”

“She’s gone four years now. The place is mine.” Lu raised her brows. “You want to stop sitting in your car like a creeper and come shoot the breeze?”

Tess glanced over at her mother’s house, still as death, shingles missing from the roof, the crooked stairs. She’d come here to get this done in a rip off the Band-Aid manner, so she wasn’t in the mood to linger.

Lu murmured, “Your mother’s working today.”

“Working a bottle?”

“No. Not anymore.”

Tess laughed. She heard the bark of it echo in the car.

“I’m dead serious,” Lu said. “She’s three years sober now.”

Tess didn’t believe it, and the old house was proof. If a woman was sober for that long, you’d think she’d clean the gutters or plant some flowers or slap a coat of paint on the place. The last time that place got a coat of paint was when her father did it. He spruced it up before lighting out for ten acres in Minnesota, leaving her and her mother behind.

Even the paint was slapped on and forgotten.

“She’s working thirty hours a week as a home health aide,” Lu continued. “She won’t be off until late tonight.”

“How late?”

“There’s no use stalking the place. Your mother isn’t returning anytime soon.”

Tess thought—a boyfriend of course. The one thing about her mother, she never lacked for boyfriends.

“Join me for a smoke.” Lu tilted her head toward the house. “You look like you could use one.”

Tess pushed the driver’s door open, straightened, and squared her shoulders. Suddenly she was sixteen again, scanning the whole place, eying every dark corner, making sure she knew her surroundings. She strained her ears as she passed the Winters’ house, half expecting to hear rising voices, breaking dishes, the slam of a body against a wall, the usual late-afternoon music of Cannery Row. Tess wondered if the brute had finally won custody of his two kids.

She forcibly shook off the memories as she approached Lu’s old house, a mirror of Tess’s mother’s, except this house had trimmed hedges, a straight porch, and what looked like geraniums blooming in hanging baskets. The first step creaked under her weight, just like it had years ago when the two of them used to hang out right on this stoop, before Lu found hockey in high school and Tess found stoners at the Cannery. Tess swiveled and sat on the porch, feeling the sun-warmed boards through the seat of her jeans. Lu offered her a lit cigarette, and Tess hesitated for only a moment before she took it, sucking in a deep drag, feeling the ashy smoke hit the deep part of her lungs. She and Lu used to sit here and watch the world go by, the sun sinking down over the far trees.

Lu said, “Never thought I’d see you back in Cannery Row. When you lit out, I thought you lit out for good.”

“Didn’t expect to see you here, either.”

“Hard to say no to free housing. Why did you come back?”

“Would you believe I’m visiting for old-time’s sake?”

“I heard you were driving trucks out in Minnesota or something.”

“North Dakota. Hauling waste water from fracking.”

Lu whistled through the gap in her two front teeth. “That’s got to pay well.”

“I get along. You?”

“Working the casino at the res.” Lu flicked ash toward the hedges. “Pays well but I work strange hours. Not complaining.”

“Where’s
she
working?”

Lu chose that moment to take a long drag, so deep that her cheeks hollowed as she sucked. Lu had the whip-thin leanness of someone who preferred cigarettes to food, and the deeply ingrained tics that suggested she’d probably always be a smoker. With her hair cut surprisingly short, Lu’s blue eyes looked more prominent than ever, though now they avoided Tess’s gaze as Lu took her time blowing out the smoke.

Finally Lu said, “I can’t tell you that.”

Tess took another hit of the cigarette, felt the woozy head rush of the nicotine. “You know I could find out in a Pine Lake minute.”

“If you start asking questions, people are going to start asking questions back. And from what I’ve heard, you’re pretty much keeping to yourself over at Riley’s place.”

“I’m sure Riley knows where my mother’s working.”

“But she hasn’t told you or you wouldn’t be here asking me.”

“What’s the big secret?”

“Your mother asked me to keep quiet.” Lu leaned her elbows on her knees. “I’m your mother’s sponsor.”

It took Tess a minute to figure out what Lu was saying. It dawned on her as she eyeballed Lu’s hollow cheeks, at the way Lu dodged her gaze and found interest in how the ash grew on the tip of her cigarette, and then, with the lightest of flicks, scattered to the wind.

She and Lu had drifted apart during high school, which was pretty much the story Tess had with all the girls at Pine Lake High. Their worries about chemistry tests and whether that boy in English really liked them just didn’t measure up on the problem scale when Tess went home every day to find her mother sobbing over the kitchen table clutching the neck of a bottle of cheap vodka, raging about her bastard of a father. Perky invitations to join the track team or come to the Raise Money for Darfur Dance just added to her resentment when she had to spend the evenings doing laundry, food shopping, cleaning up the house, or trying to make sense of the bills her mother let pile up in the mail. When she couldn’t handle it anymore, she didn’t head off to high school parties. She headed to the Cannery, where one guy offered weed and another offered a certain form of quick affection to help her forget that, when she got home, she’d probably discover her mother boozy and giggling, upstairs in the bedroom with a new boyfriend.

“Started in hockey,” Lu said, shrugging. “The high school jocks had a lot of boozy parties. I liked them. Liked them so much I started throwing them for myself on weekdays after I graduated.”

“I don’t know what surprises me more. That you’re her sponsor or that she’s finally in AA.”

“Did you read the letter she wrote to you?”

Tess’s jaw tightened. She remembered receiving the letter. It came in the Kansas mail with the seed catalog and the bills for fertilizer, a sliver of her past sliding into her golden life like a shiv.

“I didn’t open it.” God knows how her mother had found her after all these years. Tess had made an art out of living off the grid. “In fact, like most things I don’t like, I burned it.”

“You’ve got good reason to be angry.”

Tess flushed prickly and hot. She wondered how much Lu knew—or thought she knew. Her mother got to be a really good liar toward the end there. Tess wondered whether her mother ever gave her any credit for all those years keeping her fed, clothed, and, in some cases, sober enough to face the police so that Rodriguez wouldn’t call social services. Funny thing about that. Her mother always had just enough self-possession to sober up in time. Somehow she knew that if Rodriguez had called social services, then Tess would have found herself living on those acres in Minnesota. That would have been a hell of a lot better for the twelve-year-old she’d been. But then her mother would be left without someone to clean up her messes.

In the end, no matter how drunk, Bette Hendrick always knew how to take care of Bette Hendrick.

“I know you probably don’t want to hear this,” Lu said, “but it took a lot for her to climb out of the hole she was in.”

Tess heard the sound that came out of her, the bitter scoff of contempt. Climbing out of that hole came about twenty years too late.

“That’s why she’s not here,” Lu continued, nodding toward the sagging house. “Lately she’s such a wreck she’s seeing ghosts.”

“Oh, she used to see all kinds of things when she was on the rotgut—”

“It’s your aunt she’s seeing,” Lu interrupted. “She’s seeing her own dead sister as a teenager, walking around town as if she’s still alive. That’s how much it’s killing her, Tess. She lost both of you, and the guilt is destroying her.”

“Maybe I should dress up in chains when I see her. Rattle them a little and see what happens.”

Lu’s gaze fell to her blue-painted toenails, and Tess felt a stab of guilt. If Lu was her mother’s sponsor that meant Lu might be seeing ghosts, too. For a moment Tess wondered exactly what regrets haunted Lu’s conscience.

“She’s afraid of you, Tess.” Lu took another deep drag and spoke through the smoke. “She’s afraid of how angry you are.”

“Glad to hear she’s finally met her own conscience.”

“She’s got a lot to atone for, and she knows it.”

“I’m sure my mother is doing a fine job of playing the victim. It’s a performance I’m very familiar with.”

Lu ran a hand through her short-cropped hair, riffling it so that it stood up on end in places. Her thumb flicked at the filter of the cigarette burning low between her fingers. She seemed to be searching the front lawns of the houses for something she couldn’t quite find.

“Here’s the thing,” Lu said. “Your mother knows her limits now. She knows them very well. And she believes seeing you again is the one trigger that’ll send her right back to the bottom of a bottle.”

Tess sat for a moment while the words sank in. “Are you saying she won’t see me?”

“Recovery is a fragile thing, Theresa—”

“Tess.” Her back teeth began to chatter as a terrible anger rose up in her. “You call me Tess. My mother killed Theresa long ago.”

“She knows she failed you. She knows that’s why you left her. But she knows she’s not strong enough to face you, and she doesn’t want to take the risk.”

Tess looked down and saw her hands curled into fists, the knuckles white, feeling the rage like a red haze before her eyes. “She’s still playing the victim.”

“Your mother has never forgiven herself for everything she’s done, and everything she failed to do.” Lu ground the cigarette out on the porch boards, three deep furrows in her brow. “She knows she’ll have to live with that pain—”

“I don’t give a fuck about her pain.”

Tess shot to her feet. She stood on the porch with the sun on her face and the old house in her sight. She stood there staring at the dysfunction she’d lived in from the moment her father crouched down in front of her and asked her what she wanted to do. She could come with him to Minnesota, he’d said, while behind him his lover, her English teacher, looked down at her with that ruler slap of an eye. Minnesota, some far place where she’d have to live with the woman who couldn’t stand the way she wrote essays about dead cats. Realizing that, if she went, she’d be leaving her mother alone. Her mother, who couldn’t seem to get up in the morning. Her mother, who crawled into Tess’s bed every night smelling bad and sobbing about how Daddy was leaving them both.

Tess stepped off the stairs onto the cracked concrete. “I don’t know what I was thinking, coming back here. Nothing has changed. I was a fool for thinking it ever would.”

P
aging through her notebook, seeing the lists of names and reading the descriptions she’d written from observations around town, Sadie finally came to the realization that her grand plan was a failure.

She slumped in the hard wooden chair, tugging on the binoculars around her neck as she brooded. When she was back home laying out her grand plans, she’d figured that the little town of Pine Lake wasn’t Queens, where she could bike the same route every day and not see the same person twice, where about a quarter of her own classroom turned over in any given year. She figured if she stood on a street corner in this Podunk upstate town long enough, she’d probably see the entire population pass by. Certainly someone would pause and look at her and say,
are you related to…

Now she had to admit she’d discovered more information about her birth mother online at home than she had in all her time here.

She squinted toward the computer terminals. There were only four of them, and every time Sadie came to the library, the sign-up sheets were already filled for hours, mostly by mothers who then sat their kids in front of the monitor to play some stupid learning games. But today, Sadie noticed, there were fewer moms hanging around. There was just one bearded guy who looked like a college student, wearing a pork-pie hat as he slumped over his laptop. So when Sadie noticed a woman gathering her things, she waited a moment for someone else to claim the terminal where the woman had been sitting. When nobody did, she hurried across the room and slipped into the metal computer seat like she belonged there.

She logged into her instant messaging account and sent out a text.

Izzy responded right away.

Sadie! You’re alive!

I’m in a library,
she typed,
safe in that place we talked about before.

I was soooo worried about you! Your aunt called here yesterday.

Sadie sat with her hands hovering over the keyboard as a cold, prickly sensation swept through her.

Izzy typed,
She thought you were vacationing with us. My mom got all wiggy. I told her that your aunt was wrong, that you went away with someone from school.

Sadie typed,
from school?!

My mom was staring, I had to say something!

Sadie pressed a palm against her stomach where the pancakes and maple syrup she’d had for breakfast churned. She’d been counting on the fact that her aunt would be too preoccupied with Nana to think about her at all.

Sadie typed,
so what did
you say?

I said I couldn’t remember the friend’s name. I said it was Jones or Johnson or something. Someone in a different class. I had to make something up quick!

Sadie squeezed her eyes shut. Think.
Think.
And when she did, a terrifying question came to mind.

She typed,
What about Nana? Did my aunt say anything?

Sadie stared at the curser as it blinked once, twice, three times.

Your aunt put your nana in St. Regis.

Sadie made a sound in the back of her throat that she swallowed down before it drew attention. Nana had always hated that place, back when Nana knew what it was. But for the past two years, Nana had had sudden urges to catch the bus into Manhattan to work at the sweet shop she’d managed thirty years earlier. Nana had sometimes talked about her husband in the other room fixing the window locks, when he’d been dead for forty years. The Nana who’d taken her in six years ago had been subsumed by a woman who looked at her with a stranger’s eyes and asked,
Little girl, what are you doing in my house?
Sadie told herself that Nana wouldn’t even notice where she was.

Sadie?

Sadie typed,
Did Aunt Vi say anything else?

Not really. Just that your aunt couldn’t believe how bad your nana was. That she didn’t even recognize her. (((HUGS)))

Sadie’s throat tightened. Her aunt knew things had been getting bad fast. After her last visit, Aunt Vi had looked Sadie in the eye and asked,
Is this too much for you?
If Sadie told her it was too much, then Aunt Vi would have put Nana in St. Regis, and with sighs of martyrdom, she’d squeeze Sadie into that tiny, noisy Ohio house. What choice had Sadie had?

She closed her eyes tight. She couldn’t think about this, not right now, not when she might get caught before her work here was done.

Listen Izzy,
she typed.
Was my aunt upset that she didn’t know where I was?

Yeah. She sounded embarrassed that she didn’t know who you were staying with.

That was her aunt. Always overwhelmed, even during simple phone conversations, when the noise of children screaming in the background tended to draw her aunt’s attention away from listening to anything Sadie was saying. Sadie had depended upon her aunt’s distraction, in fact, when she first called her aunt to tell her about Nana’s little walkabout and roundup by the police. When her aunt began to breathe in short, nervous little puffs, stuttering about flights and schedules and babysitters, Sadie had let her talk. After her aunt finally came around to asking about her, Sadie told her that a friend had offered to take her to their lake house for a few weeks. They were leaving tomorrow, and maybe Sadie should go so she wouldn’t get in anyone’s way.

Now Sadie wondered if her aunt, having shoved Nana in a nursing home, had finally stopped to think about her sister’s child for more than five minutes. She wondered if Aunt Vi was rifling through Sadie’s bedroom, finding phone numbers, making calls, or, worse, alerting the police.

Sadie? Are you mad at me?

Sadie typed,
No, no. You did good!
Maybe I’ll call my aunt this afternoon. Give her a story so she doesn’t go crazy.

Are you okay? Like, is everything all right?

Yup. I’ve even got a place to stay that isn’t a tree house.

ROFL. Any luck finding you-know-who?

Sighing, Sadie paused a moment before she typed,
I was crazy to think this would work
.

Called it!

But I got to see where my mother lived before I was born.

What’s it like?

Lake beaches and ice cream stores and woods everywhere.
Sadie twisted in the seat to squint out a far window at the flurry of activity on the library lawn. She raised the binoculars to see more clearly.
There’s a band setting up right now outside the library,
she typed.
They do this, like, every week.

I wish I was there with you! It’s hot here and the air-conditioning isn’t working. I’ve got no one to go to the city pool with but my sister and it’s boooooorrrrrrring.

With a pang, Sadie remembered other summers, taking the bus with Izzy to the public pool, lying out on the concrete, the smell of chlorine so thick you could choke on it.

Izzy typed,
I want to have summer with you! Tell me when you’re coming home.

Sadie curled her fingers into her lap and stared at them, the cuticles bitten to the quick. What was home? The house where she used to live with her nana? Nana would never live there again. Her aunt was probably already sticking a
For Sale
sign in the front lawn. It’d be great to keep on living there, but who ever heard of a fourteen-year-old living alone? Anything was better, Sadie thought, than going to live with her cousins in a family who didn’t want her.

Sadie?

I’m not coming home yet,
she typed. Sadie glanced up at the clock over the big windows, her mind rushing, that cold prickly feeling washing through her all over again.

Sadie typed,
I have another plan
.

Sadie sat on her bike across the street from Ricky’s Roast until she saw Riley step out into the sunshine. A man in a suit followed her out. He handed Riley something and flashed a white smile. Sadie was relieved when they shook hands and headed off in different directions. After the research she’d done in the library, she needed to have this conversation with Riley alone and
right away
, before Aunt Vi got over her embarrassment enough to call for official help.

“Hey,” she said, as she rode up beside Riley, dropping her feet off the pedals to keep pace.

“Hey, you.”

“So,” Sadie said, “how did your meeting with your mom’s friend go?”

“Oh, like every other meeting my mother sets up. Did you know,” Riley rushed on, as she raised a hand to show a card wedged between two fingers, “that you could soar to higher spiritual perspectives using up-flow vortices and organic mud wraps?”

Sadie didn’t know how to respond to that. Riley was fast-walking, like a city girl, and she was sort of dressed like one, too, her suit jacket flapping, her heels clicking on the pavement. The binoculars bumped against Sadie’s chest as she struggled to keep pace.

“Did you also know,” Riley repeated, “that meditation labyrinths and relaxation courtyards and treatment terraces are essential to create an atmosphere of natural peace?”

“Ah…”

“Of course you didn’t,” Riley said, fluttering the card. “You and I, we’re un
informed.
But he can tell, because someone of my ‘body shape’ could sure use a two-week organic juice cleansing—”

“Riley, how much coffee did you have?”

“I had a little too much of something, that’s for sure.” Riley flicked the card in a public trash can and kept walking. “And right now this body shape of mine is craving some ice cream. Want to join me, Sadie?”

Sadie’s heart leaped. “Yes!”

Outside the Creamery, Sadie leaned the bike she’d borrowed against a sycamore tree. She didn’t bother to lock it, though she still felt strange leaving it out like that. No one ever locked their bikes around here, and yet the bikes never seemed to get stolen. While Riley went in to order two Pine Lakes Spectacular Sundaes, holding the nuts on one, Sadie saved a tiny table with a tiny umbrella. All around tourists in beach cover-ups wandered in from nearby Bay Roberts to sample the forty homemade flavors or just to plunge inside for a minute to get out of the heat.

When Riley returned, she slid an enormous bowl in front of Sadie, another in front of herself, then plopped down and kicked her heels up on the third chair. “So,” Riley said, digging into the fudge with a plastic spoon. “Update me on how the search is going.”

“Not good,” Sadie conceded. “But I did learn one thing. Your classmates had terrible taste in clothes. What was up with all the plaid?”

“Mountain fashion.”

“Nobody tell you that grunge went out, like,
decades
ago?”

Riley pointed a dripping spoon at her. “You wait. You’ll be howling about your classmates’ fashion sense in ten years.”

“No way.” Sadie twirled her spoon into the creamy vanilla, the morning’s pancakes still sitting like a lump in her stomach, trying to figure a way to bring up a subject that made her queasy. “But honestly, about this project. I think I’ve been going about this all wrong. I’ve been wasting my time—”

“A girl your age shouldn’t be worried about wasting time. You should be building tree houses and painting your toenails and having swim races to the island in Pine Lake.”

Sadie suddenly felt like she was in a Japanese anime and the frame had just panned back to show her alone in a big white space. Painting toenails and swim races? Is that what normal fourteen-year-olds did? Is that what Riley did with her time when she was fourteen years old?

“Unless,” Riley continued, “there’s some deadline coming up that you’d like to clue me in on?”

“Well, I want to go back to school in September.”

“There’s a string of words that never left my lips.”

“Why? Was your high school bad or something?”

“It’s like any school, I suppose. Some kids do great, and some kids don’t. One of the women I graduated with is an archaeologist, Maya Wheeler. She’s been on the cover of
National Geographic.
But I wasn’t much for sitting in a classroom listening to teachers drone on. I’d much rather be out looking for birds or playing softball.”

Izzy played softball on the school team, Sadie remembered with a pang. Sadie had tried to join two years ago, but with Nana, she just couldn’t make practices.

“I take it,” Riley continued, “that you liked your school and you want to go back?”

“I miss my friends. And I don’t want to fall behind. The problem is,” Sadie said, her chest rising, “if I can’t find my birth mother, then my choices of where to live narrow down to zippo.”

Sadie concentrated on the ice cream dripping from the sides of the bowl, scraping it with a spoon and then pouring the drippings over the top. She could feel Riley’s gaze on her head. Riley wouldn’t understand what she was feeling. Riley had Camp Kwenback, Pine Lake, and a large family. No one could possibly understand this unhinged sensation that Sadie felt sometimes, the growing sense that there wasn’t a place in the whole wide world where she really belonged.

Sadie often wondered if this dizzy sensation was born the moment her own mother put her into the arms of a stranger.

“Sadie.” Riley’s head weaved as she sought her gaze. “It’s clear to me that you had a loving family once—”

“Once.”

“There has to be someone. A distant relative, maybe. Or,” Riley ventured, “maybe someone you haven’t yet met, but who’d—”

“I’m not doing foster care.”

Sadie shook her head so hard she felt a muscle pull in the back of her neck. She
had
stayed in temporary state care once, for two days. Two days she wished she could wash forever from her mind.

“Oh,” Riley said, “I didn’t mean—”

“It doesn’t matter.” Sadie dropped the spoon on the sticky table. “I just came from the library, where I did some research. Now I think I’ve got a better idea.”

Sadie breathed deeply, though it seemed every breath took in less and less air. She told herself the answer to this problem was simple. It made perfect sense, as she sat here under the shade of an umbrella outside an ice cream shop, a light breeze rustling the leaves of the tree above them. The solution was easy and logical…if she could just make her throat and tongue and mouth work.