The Kindness of Strangers (2 page)

The mother robin hopped to a lower branch and continued the staccato warnings. Sarah felt bad prolonging the bird’s worry, so she stepped down from the bench. As she did, she reached for a branch, for balance, and in a flash the robin dove at her. Sarah jerked her hand away, but not before she felt the stab of beak and the surge of adrenaline at the attack. The robin flew one more swipe at Sarah before settling defiantly back onto her nest. Sarah examined the wound. A drop of blood welled on the back of her hand but washed away in the rain. More blood rose from the tiny puncture when she clenched her fist. The entire hand throbbed, and the slight pain felt almost good. This was pain from outside, not from within. And not only did her hand ache, but she shivered, aware of how wet and cold she was, skin tight with goose bumps, nipples erect.
She felt something.
She was alive.

There. That was a blessing. She looked up at the tree, wanting to thank the bird for this sensation. This apple tree belonged to her younger son, Danny, who was eleven. Roy and Sarah had planted trees for both sons, in the ancient tradition that the branches from the trees would later be used for the chuppahs at their weddings. Danny used to be as sweet and cheerful as the tree’s early-April bloom, but a crab apple tree might have suited him better lately. He’d changed. They’d all changed. And Sarah didn’t know how to stop it, how to go back to the family they’d been before.

Sarah walked across the yard, through the rain, to Nate’s dogwood tree and touched the trunk. This tree was planted nearly seventeen years ago. Now it stood taller than Nate.

Thank God, Nate’s suspension from school was over—that would be the second blessing of the day. He’d already been suspended twice this year for truancy; once more and he’d be expelled. Actually, this was the second for which he’d been
caught.
She knew he’d skipped more than that, because she’d seen him in the middle of a school day. Once, visiting Roy’s grave at Temple Israel cemetery, she’d been outraged to see someone sitting on Roy’s stone, smoking, but when she recognized Nate, she’d slunk away before he saw her. She’d never told him she’d seen him there, never scolded him for cutting class. And from the cigarette butts that accumulated at the grave, she knew he went frequently. She never mentioned the butts, for fear he’d cover his tracks, and she took comfort in knowing some small thing about his life. Plus, her approval of the visits might make him stop. Everything she said to Nate these days seemed only to insult and anger him. That’s why she was making his favorite burritos this morning. She hoped they could be a peace offering.

The back door opened, and Nate stood at the screen. “What are you
doing
? You’ve been standing out there forever.”

Sarah laughed. An excitement rippled through her, a vaguely familiar sensation—of looking
forward
—and she wished she could articulate it to Nate but decided not to bother. He stood and stared at her as she came back into the kitchen and grabbed a dish towel to dry her hair and dab at her soaked clothes. Her heart caught, as she realized afresh she now had to look up to face him. His green eyes, so like his father’s, met hers, then darted away, a blush obscuring his freckles. He had the same straight, gingerbread-brown hair as his father, too. Danny had inherited Sarah’s thick, black curls.

Nate poured himself some coffee. He took his cup and the paper into the living room, spreading the paper on the coffee table.

After changing into dry clothes and putting a Band-Aid on the back of her hand, Sarah returned to the kitchen. This huge room painted ripe-tomato red was the only modern and completely renovated room in the old house. She and Roy had knocked out a wall and combined the existing kitchen with a downstairs bedroom. It was state-of-the-art, with two wide, blue marble-topped kitchen islands—both with sinks—two industrial-size refrigerators, double ovens, and a walk-in floor-to-ceiling pantry.

Remembering the damaged chick, Sarah opened six other eggs and inspected their yolks before whisking them. She rolled homemade salsa, scrambled eggs, and cheese into flour tortillas and garnished them with avocado slices.

“Here.” She handed Nate his plate in the living room.

He wrinkled his nose. “Eggs?” he asked, as if she’d handed them to him raw.

“There’s bagels or cereal if you don’t want it.” She tried to keep her voice light, her buoyant new sense of purpose already waning.

Danny came in, yawning, his wiry black curls poking up like porcupine quills. She ruffled his hair and set a plate for him on one of the kitchen islands. “Burritos? Cool,” he said, and began to eat standing up. She reveled in his grin, a sign that the day was at least beginning on a bright note, and in the fact that she could still make him happy.

Sarah leaned in the doorway, where she could see both the kitch-en and living room, and sipped her coffee. Nate skimmed through the sports section, eating the offensive eggs after all. Sarah didn’t want any eggs herself, still unsettled by the baby bird she’d found, its gnarled claws reaching up to her like little hands.

She missed Roy all the time, but the mornings were when she missed him the most. Mornings when he’d been home to eat with the kids had always been minor celebrations, with stacks of pancakes or waffles, bad jokes, and wild stories from the ER where he worked. She reached out and touched the bright walls he’d helped her paint. She’d actually taken a tomato with her to match the paint. She and Roy had made a ritual of bringing a salt shaker out to the garden each summer to eat the first ready tomato off the vine. She remembered kissing him, with the tangy juice still on their lips.

That’s enough,
she told herself.
No point in going there.
She left the door frame and walked back into the kitchen, where Danny still stood. He held open his vocabulary workbook with his left hand and ate with his right.

Sarah touched his arm. “Sit down and eat your breakfast.”

He puffed air through his lips. “I gotta study. I get extra credit on the test today if I can use these in sentences.”

“I’ll help,” she said, “but sit down at least.” He did. The words were fairly simple, although she tried to put herself back into a fifth-grade mind. “Review.” “Deceive.” “Salvage.” She looked over his shoulder at the remaining list.

“ ‘Epiphany’? That’s a hard one.” She checked the cover of his workbook, skeptical that it could be a fifth-grade text. Oakhaven, an affluent suburb of Dayton, was known for its excellent schools, but she often felt frustrated that Danny seemed to be challenged too much and Nate not at all. “Can you think of a sentence for ‘epiphany’?”

“I don’t have to know that one. Only the smart kids have to know the ones with stars.”

Sarah swallowed. “You’re a smart kid.”

Danny shook his head. “I’m in Track Three. The retards. Only the Track One kids have to know ‘epiffle’ . . . whatever that word you said was.”

An ache unfurled through Sarah’s rib cage, as if she’d pressed a bruise. Of her two boys, Danny was the more obviously affected by Roy’s death. In the last two years, he’d lost all confidence, all sense of himself. And in the last two weeks, he’d apparently lost his best friend at school, too. And he didn’t have that many friends to start with. “You are not a ‘retard,’ Danny. I don’t want to hear you say that again.”

He lifted one shoulder and dropped his head back over his workbook.

“Did you get
your
assignments?” she asked Nate, crossing to the doorway again.

“Yup.” He didn’t look up from the paper. “There’s a chemistry test I can’t make up, but I have, like, a hundred and five percent on every other assignment in that class, so I’ll still get an A in there, I bet. I’m going to Mackenzie’s, and she’s gonna help me catch up before practice tonight.”

A weight spread across Sarah’s shoulders.
Why, why, why
did he have to do this? “No, Nate. You know the new rule.” He turned to her with that look on his face. The look she saw at least ten times a day. The look one might give a person who wasn’t just insane but who also reeked of body odor and spoke with her mouth full of rotten food.

He snapped the sports section closed and dropped it on the coffee table. “Why not?”

“Her parents aren’t home until ten.”

“I thought that rule was about Tony!”

“No. It’s about you. I don’t need to trust Tony.” She managed not to raise her voice, but heat burned in her cheeks. He knew all this already; why did he insist on making her the villain over and over again?

“Who’s Tony?” Danny asked.

“So I can’t go anywhere? I’m still grounded?”

“Don’t act like this is some brand-new thing I just made up.” Nate wouldn’t have dreamed of pulling this crap if his father were still here, even though Roy had rarely handled the kids’ discipline. He was gone too often, even before he was gone for good, and they’d grown used to that fact, as all doctors’ families do. But there had never seemed to
be
any discipline problems when he was still here. Everything seemed fun and adventurous then. Without him Sarah was just a nag. She felt like a mean, haggard harpy. She took a deep breath. “As we discussed after your court date, you can’t be at a friend’s house without adult supervision for a month. At least. If you keep—”

“Look, Mackenzie doesn’t even like Tony, okay? He won’t be there.”

“Which Tony?” Danny asked. “Tony Harrigan?”

“Well, good for Mackenzie. I like her even more for not liking Tony. But you still—”

“Tony Harrigan?” Danny repeated.

“Yes, Tony Harrigan!” Sarah snapped. “What other Tony do we know?” Danny looked crestfallen, and she immediately felt guilty. She breathed deep again. “Please don’t interrupt, Danny. You know that makes me crazy.”

“Is Tony who you skipped class with?” Danny asked Nate.

“That’s a lie!” Nate yelled at Sarah, as if she’d said it. “He wasn’t with me. I was by myself. But you don’t care. You just decided you hated him after his party. You always make these sweeping generalizations about people based on zero facts.”

“Okay. This discussion is over,” Sarah said. She couldn’t say any more, or she’d be yelling, too, and if she did that, she felt she would have lost.

“This
sucks
!” Nate bumped the table as he stood, slopping his coffee. Sarah entertained a brief fantasy of hurling the coffee cup at his head. He stomped upstairs.

She looked at Danny, who still held his vocabulary book open. “Oh,” he said. “Tony had that party, right? The party where Nate got . . . where the police brought Nate home?”

Sarah paused and sighed. She was so tired. Danny knew that story; there was no reason for him to ask. She tried to remind herself to be patient, but this new habit of asking questions he already knew the answer to made Sarah wild. “Yes,” she said, forcing a neutral tone. “You know that party was at Tony’s house. Now, finish your breakfast, sweetie.”

Danny nodded happily. How could he be happy when he’d just been screeched at? When every morning began with this friction and nastiness in the house? Is that all he wanted—a reaction from her, any reaction? She had to do better, she had to get it together.

She shook her head as she poured more coffee. She told herself those things every morning.

Nate had gotten trashed at Tony’s party on one of Sarah’s rare evenings of solitude since Roy’s death. Danny had been spending the night at his friend Jordan’s house. Sarah had sunk up to her chin in a bubble bath and drunk three vodkas with cranberry juice in a row. She’d thought of Roy without her customary anger—anger that infuriated her further with its irrationality. It wasn’t as if he’d gotten cancer
on purpose.
She’d even managed to think of him without crying. That made her bold, and she ventured into memories that warmed her with a heat quite different from the bathwater and steamed walls. She’d allowed her hands to slip beneath the bubbles when the police had banged on the front door, bringing a stumbling-drunk Nate home from Tony’s.

Bad enough to be interrupted. Even worse to face the Oakhaven police. Sarah imagined they were disdainful of her disheveled hair, flushed cheeks, and clutched-closed robe, certain they could sense she was tipsy herself and knew just what they’d caught her doing.

Nate had been too far gone to notice and had puked for half the night.

The worst of it, though, was juvenile court. Sarah had refused to plead for leniency, as Tony’s father had. She liked to think she and Roy would have done the same thing if Roy had been alive, but especially with him gone, she wanted a punishment that would be a genuine deterrent to this stupidity. But that day in court, Nate had whispered to her, and seared into her brain, “Why couldn’t you be the one who died?”

She’d wanted to die; that’s what he didn’t understand. She would have gladly died instead of Roy if she could have. She would have done anything in her power to save him. And to hear Nate whisper those words made her wish she
was
dead. She forgave Nate, though. She remembered telling her own mother “I hate you” and meaning it with all her heart in the second she said it—but not after. Those memories of her thoughtless cruelty pained her, and she hoped the day would come when Nate was pained as well. But all the same, it hurt to hear, and remembering it made her blink back tears.