Random Acts of Kindness (13 page)

Nicole swayed on the seat. When she’d been in labor with Noah, the anesthesiologist had set her up with a spinal epidural after four hours of painful contractions. He’d pumped into her meds so strong that she didn’t feel anything from the midriff down. Now, sixteen years after the obstetrician had been forced to use forceps to bring Noah into the world, Nicole felt the same sort of paralyzed numbness.

“Noah complained about his meds again, too.” The words pressed against her sternum. “He’s got a good reason to complain. The meds ease his dark moods and stop him from isolating himself and skipping school. On the meds, he spends less time closed up in his room. But all this time I’ve ignored the side effects.” She looked anywhere but at Claire. “Imagine a mother giving her son drugs that make him slouch in a chair and drool.”

The laugh that came out of her mouth didn’t belong to her. Her torso shook with it. It was a misfiring reflex, disconnected from her conscious brain.

Claire’s warm hand on her shoulder brought her back to herself. She shut the laugh right down.

“It’s a cruel twist,” Claire said softly, “that Karma would lay at your feet a problem that can’t really be fixed.”

Nicole tried to shake away the words. Of course there were problems that couldn’t be fixed. Claire’s disease, for one. Jenna’s marriage, for another, a terrible spectacle she supposed was being played out in Seattle right now. She just refused to believe that Noah’s condition was one of them.

Maybe that was the problem.

“I can tell you a story about problems that can’t be fixed.” Claire flopped onto the bench beside her. “Eight months into my stay at the Thai temple, a Buddhist scholar came to teach. Actually, I think he just came to see the
farang
—me,” she said, patting her chest, “the crazy foreigner who’d taken vows. He asked me why I had come, and in my arrogance, I told him I wanted to reach Nirvana.”

Nicole could tell by the faint flush that rose on Claire’s skin that the memory was still painful.

“He told me that most
farang
believe that pushing forward to reach Nirvana means that the future will stretch before us in unending happiness.”

Nicole ran her fingers over her brow, distracted. “Isn’t that what Nirvana is?”

“Nirvana is a state of past and present. Yes, the future is joyous. But to reach it, you also have to accept the most painful times in your past.” Claire’s knees bumped Nicole’s as she swiveled to face her. “But more than that, you have to understand that it’s in those most troubled times—like you’re having right now with Noah—where the seeds of happiness are sown.”

Nicole balked. What happiness could possibly come from a son who tried to set things on fire? A son who truly believed that his mother’s extreme efforts to help were a sign that she didn’t love the person he was? “I’m not getting it, Claire.”

“I didn’t either, not completely.” Claire frowned, two little lines appearing between her brows. “I’ve spent years waiting for some wisdom to rise out of my memory of those terrible days with Melana. It hasn’t come yet. But I guess what I’m trying to say right now is that you just don’t know what will come of all of this trouble. So put away the whips and the hair shirt. You’ve done what’s best for Noah.”

“Maybe I went too far.” She sank her elbows on her knees and then thrust her fingers through her hair. “Maybe, instead of forcing him to do hours of psychotherapy three times a week, I should have encouraged him to join a team sport.” Maybe she’d spent the last eighteen months trying to hack her way through a jungle with a steak knife when instead she should have nudged a clear path through the trees. “They haven’t been able to pin a label on him, you know; the diagnosis keeps shifting. Maybe, instead of jumping to conclusions, I should have waited, seen how his moods evolved, been patient.”

Claire gave her a gentle nudge. “Stop second-guessing yourself. You’re becoming your own worst enemy.”

Nicole straightened up and clutched her arms, digging her fingernails into her skin. For the last eighteen months, she’d been lashing herself for not recognizing Noah’s issues before he set the garage on fire. For the last eighteen months, she’d been nursing the idea that
if only
she’d finished her degree she would have been able to intervene earlier,
if only
she’d made the necessary sacrifices Noah would be all right now. That was all bullshit. Had she, after her unexpected pregnancy, continued to struggle through graduate school and two more years of training to finally become a licensed psychotherapist, she would have cracked and flamed out like a third world missile.

With Noah, she was in way over her head.

“Well, one thing is for sure,” she said on an unsteady laugh, “I would have been the world’s worst psychotherapist.”

“And your situation with your son isn’t clouding your judgment about this at all?”

“Oh, no, I would have
sucked
.”

Claire’s face held a ghost of a smile. “You would have mastered that discipline with your usual attention to detail, my friend. But I suspect, in the end, you would have been very unhappy.”

Claire stood up and wandered back to the folding table. Nicole waited for some sort of explanation, but Claire seemed content to pull a T-shirt out of her pile of laundry, carelessly fold it, and drop it straight into the oversize duffel bag yawning open on the floor. Nicole thought about Claire’s words. Would she have been unhappy doing what she’d wanted to do since high school? She couldn’t wrap her mind around the idea, so she stopped trying. Her head was like a bomb zone; Noah’s confession had left her thoughts in shards.

She stood up. The bag of chips crinkled to the floor. Lucky roused from his doze and eyed the bag, so she swept it out of his reach and tossed it in the trash. She strode by Claire and headed for the dryer, where her clothes lay tangled inside. She yanked the door open and pulled them out into a pile. She returned to the table and put them in a bundle next to Claire’s, tugging the jeans from the heap and folding them seam to seam.

“I have a confession, Nicole.” Claire plucked at her own laundry. “Remember when Jenna said yesterday that she used to admire you playing softball? Well, I was the one who first took Jenna to the stadium. I used to go to most of your softball games, too.”

Nicole smoothed the jeans and tried to reorient herself to the change in subject.

“I didn’t suffer through any other sport,” Claire continued. “Not the hockey games that obsessed half the school, or football, or track or basketball. But I went to so many softball games that I bought one of those stadium-seat pillows with the Pine Lake Beaver mascot symbol. You know which one I’m talking about?”

“Yeah, the thick vinyl one you could get at Ray’s General Store. So you wouldn’t freeze your butt off when there was still ice on the metal bleachers in the early spring. I had one for outdoor hockey games.” Nicole shook out a pair of capris. “So you were a true softball fan, huh?”

Softball hadn’t been a popular sport in high school until Nicole’s team started competing in regionals, so there had never been a huge fan base outside of the parents of the players. She remembered Claire’s presence only vaguely because she’d been focused on the game, on the team, on the next batter, the choice of the next pitch.

“The first time I went,” Claire continued, “I went purely because you talked me into it. It was the regional finals, and if you’d won, the team would play the next county or something. You were bounding up and down the halls, encouraging people to come to give the team moral support, just radiating excitement. I couldn’t resist.”

Nicole remembered. She’d loved being the captain of the team. She loved every moment of the season. The thrill of standing on the mound staring down to that imaginary strike box, reading Riley’s hand signals, feeling the sharp attention of the teammates around her like a multibrained living being.

“At the game, I didn’t know what the heck was going on,” Claire said. “But when it was toward the end and the Pine Lake Beavers were losing, I was close enough to your bench that I heard you giving the team a pep talk.” Claire took great interest in smoothing the wrinkles out of a folded T-shirt. “I don’t remember exactly what you said. Something about dragging up the will to do their best. Something about the game not being over until the very last out. Probably a bunch of clichés. For me, it was like you were speaking in tongues. What I really remember is how you said it.” Claire tossed the T-shirt with the others. “You were a
reviv
al-m
eeting
preacher, Nic. You were a general pinned down by enemy fire. With nothing but words and the tone of your voice and that look in your eye, you worked that team up into such a lather that they shot off the bench and raced across the field like they were soldiers shooting out of the trenches into a hail of lead.” She shook her head, remembering. “Heck, I wanted to put on a glove myself after hearing you. You were a sight to behold.”

Nicole found herself tugging at a string that had come loose from a seam. An embarrassing prickling started behind her eyes.

“The point I’m trying to make in my backass kind of way,” Claire said, “is that I think we are who we are, no matter how much we try to change. Jenna will always be an introvert, no matter how well she adapts. Maybe Noah will always have issues with his own temperament, whether he’s on the meds or no. And as for you…” Claire gave her an affectionate bump. “Inside, you’re always going to be that girl giving the softball team a pep talk, pushing people to excel to their limits, to take on dreams they’d never thought possible.”

Nicole cringed a little, recognizing the language of her own website.

“That’s why,” Claire continued, “I wonder if you’d really get that same sort of thrill in a clinical situation, with patients whose abilities to improve have more to do with better pharmaceuticals than sheer human will.”

A tingling suspicion took hold. “So you’ve been to a therapist.”

Claire gave a brief nod. “Paulina made me go after Melana died. He’s the man who encouraged me to go off to Thailand.” With one sweep of her arm, Claire shot the last of her laundry off the table and into the open duffel. “So after that confession, maybe now you’ll figure out why, ten days ago, I conned Jenna into taking a five-hundred-mile detour just to show up at your door.”

Nicole was wondering if Noah’s explosive confession had caused some actual concussive damage or if Claire was just toying with her with all these changes in subject. “I thought you came to see me for my wit and good humor. And a free bed.”

“Those were bonuses. Like the GPS. But I had an ulterior motive.” Claire wandered toward the plate-glass window. “When we set off, I knew Jenna would follow me wherever I led her. Jenna’s got a good heart that way. But I knew I needed someone who would make sure I would get to where
I
had to go. Someone who would shore me up when I wavered in my intentions. Like right now.”

“Now?”

“You feel it, don’t you, Nic?” Claire looked up through the window to the roiling of the gray skies. “Karma has shifted.”

Nicole wandered to stand next to Claire, trying to feel what she felt. She smelled the bleach-tinged scent of wet laundry and heard the
thump-thump
of a running dryer. She identified the skitter of leaves against the sidewalk, a sound muffled beyond the glass. She heard the baritone flap of the heavy awning and the whirr of a distant engine. She followed Claire’s gaze to the slate-bellied clouds, churning across the sky.

And for a brief, eerily vivid moment, she felt what Claire was referring to. A deepening of the air pressure, a faint ringing in her ears, a resistance more of the spirit than the body.

Claire murmured, “Maybe Jenna chose the right time to bail. Maybe even Noah’s breakthrough is a sign from the universe. I just have this terrible feeling that it’s time for both of us to go home.”

Home.

Nicole hesitated. Yesterday, she had all but begged Claire to return home on a plane with Paulina, to go back with the sisters who were so determined to take care of her health. And last night, she’d plunged the depths of her broken little arsenal of persuasive life coach tricks trying to clear the gears of Claire’s muddy thinking. And now, after Noah’s painful confession, Nicole felt her heart yearning to return home to Lars. They needed to sit across their kitchen table, where they always discussed family matters, and reevaluate their approach to Noah’s treatment. The time had come to reassess every single assumption she’d made. Maybe the time had come to revive the so-called revival-camp preacher she’d apparently left behind in Pine Lake—if only to prove to Noah how much she really loved him.

Yes, she and Claire should go home.

The muscles of her throat wouldn’t work. In the light pouring in through the front window, Nicole took a hard look at Claire. She thought about Claire alone on her thirty acres dealing with a sickness that had claimed her mother and her sister. Strangely, she thought of wood smoke, too, not the gasoline-tinged scent of a burned garage but the fresh fragrance of wood smoke on an open prairie. She remembered Claire’s confession in the velvet darkness of the grasslands. If Claire turned around before her goal of reaching Pine Lake, she’d be repeating the same self-destructive behavior that had her abandoning her education, her Buddhist vows, and now, perhaps, a chance at a long and fruitful life.

A strange, loosening sensation shuddered through her. Her thoughts began to zip down avenues she hadn’t dared to consider. Her mind somersaulting ahead of itself, dreaming up ideas, considering a strategy that now seemed too crazy
not
to consider.

Sometimes, you had to hold up an old goal like a lantern to guide the way—even if it brought you someplace you didn’t know you were going.

Seattle, Washington

I
n Seattle it was raining, of course.

Jenna stood outside her home garage with rain dripping off the edge of her hood. She stood motionless, feeling the warmth leach out of her body along with the last dregs of her hurling momentum. She stood dangerously close to the garage window, close enough to watch Nate wielding a blowtorch. A metal mask covered his face. Sparks made the faint, fair hairs on his arms glow.

She’d meant to observe for only a minute, just long enough to see if Sissy Leclaire sat on the old upholstered chair in the corner, laughing with both legs thrown over the arm. That chair was empty, but Jenna still hesitated, not sure whether Sissy’s absence was good or bad. This confrontation might have been easier if Jenna had walked in on the two of them rutting on the workbench, clawing at each other half dressed, just like in the mental film loop that ran in her head. It would have been a cauterization. Then she’d be freed of the ever-sinking impulse to tell him that she still loved him.

But the hesitation was a mistake. Gazing at Nate through the garage window allowed a different fantasy to unspool, the one where Nate called off the whole situation and set the divorce petition aflame.

She reached for the doorknob. The chill of the metal stole the heat from her hand. She turned it and pushed the door open. The hiss of the blowtorch was much louder than the squeal of the hinges, but Nate must have noticed a flash of light in the glass of a storm door leaning against the wall. The mask turned toward her. He stilled for a moment. Then he switched off the blowtorch.

The urge to run gripped her. Under her raincoat, she grew prickly-heat warm. The doorknob slipped out of her hand, and the door swung shut behind her. She wobbled a little, straddling the crack in the concrete foundation they’d never had repaired.

With greasy knuckles, Nate nudged the mask atop his head. “You’re back.”

Jenna heard his words and more clearly heard his tone, a combination of surprise and pleasure. It was the way he used to greet her when she’d come home early to find him in a paint-stained apron with an infant Zoe riding his hip.

Her hopes fluttered like a hundred thousand starlings.

“Did you call?” He tilted up his cell phone on the workbench. “I’ve been working—”

“I threw my phone under a truck in Cheyenne.”

“Ah, yes, I’d forgotten. Your friend Nicole told me that.”

Nicole?

He gave her a rueful microshrug. “She called and left a message on the home phone. She said I should contact her directly if there was an emergency.”

Jenna absorbed that tidbit. The knowledge that Nicole had butted into her private life didn’t bother her as much as she supposed it should have. She had a funny feeling—a strange, disconnected, floating, but not entirely uncomfortable feeling that friends sometimes do that for one another.

“I was working on a piece for the Stein Hall installation, but it can wait.” He tugged his mask off his head, the straps tugging his shoulder-length hair half out of the rawhide knot that held it away from his face. “Do you need to unload the car?”

“I don’t have the car.” He was acting as if she’d just driven up with a trunk full of groceries on a random Saturday afternoon. “I flew in last night from Des Moines.”

“Tell me the engine didn’t seize. The Lumina was due for an oil change before you left.”

“The car’s fine. Claire and Nicole are driving it to Pine Lake. I’ll pick it up when we fly out to get Zoe.”

He bobbed his head, but Jenna could see by the way he rubbed his hand across his mouth and chin that his mind was working, working.

“Don’t worry,” she said. “I’ve got a rental car and a hotel room by the airport. In case she’s here.”

No need to define “she,” or even raise her hand in the direction of the house.

He showed her a three-quarter profile as he reached for a rag. “She’s not here now.”

Now.
The little word was like the kick of a horse. Likely, Sissy had planned to come later. Maybe even sleep in Jenna’s house.

Maybe sleep in their bed.

She wondered when during their marriage he thought it was all right to start fucking another woman. She thought she might know the answer. There was a lot of time to pick over the bones of a relationship when you’re driving across the flat prairie in the middle of the country. She’d figured it had been a little more than a year ago when he’d sat at the table tearing a napkin apart over his untouched dinner. Zoe had already left the table. He’d seized Jenna’s hand as she’d jumped up to clean the dishes.
We need to talk
, he’d said. Then there’d been a pause, a strange, long pause, before he mumbled the good news about an offer for a new commission.

Nicole had warned her about probing about the details of the affair. Nicole said that it would only force his attention to the past instead of the future.

She bit the inside of her cheek until she tasted blood.

“I’m glad you’re here, Jenna.” With the rag still gripped in one fist, he leaned back against the workbench. “I’ve been hoping for a chance for a do-over.”

Her breath hovered in the back of her throat along with a laugh that she didn’t really want to release. “So you’ve decided to take a blowtorch to the divorce papers?”

He found new interest in the greasy rag. “I know I’ve handled this all wrong.”

“Oh.” A breath of a word. “Was it my disappearance or the dog’s that tipped you off?”

“You two are pretty inseparable.”

You and I used to be, too.
In the early days, anyway. Burrowing into their new house with their new baby, content to spend exhausted Saturday evenings on the couch watching black-and-white crime movies or the Japanese samurai films he preferred, while she lay on his lap and he threaded those work-hardened fingers through her hair.

Did he thread his fingers through Sissy’s red hair?

“When I approached you before, I was concerned about the wrong things.” He dropped the rag and crossed his arms. “The way I handled it…I should have figured I’d set you off running.”

The memory rippled between them. It was the day he’d asked her to marry him. He’d dropped on one knee on the rocky shore of Cape Ann with a backdrop of crashing waves and presented an engagement ring, a ruby sitting in the bud of a platinum rose, a setting he’d designed with the help of a friend. She’d been so taken by surprise that she’d run back to the car, leaving him to walk three miles to the hotel through the rain.

Now the raindrops on the roof of the garage hit like hail. The garage had a damp wood smell. She saw a ghost of a smile pass across his face—saw him remembering, too—and she was launched right back to the bed-and-breakfast that she’d returned to, four hours after he’d asked her to marry him, to throw herself upon him and say
yes
.

The ghost of a smile dissipated. He lowered his head and spoke to his ankles. “You and I have a lot to talk about.”

She said, “We can start with those papers.”

“Yeah, that would be reasonable.”

“Reasonable? There’s nothing reasonable about any of this. I still can’t believe that you handed me a petition of divorce.”

He pressed his lips together with a rueful tilt of the head. “I started off on the wrong foot, but this doesn’t have to be difficult. There are right ways to do this.”

“The right way,” she said, “is not to do it at all.”

He rubbed his jaw with his hand again, feeling up the jawline with his fingers, avoiding her eye altogether. It occurred to her that she’d spent twelve years studying the secret language of the fine muscles of Nate’s face. She understood him as she understood no other person in the world. The sudden but calculated stillness of his frame, for example, suggested a surprise he’d already braced himself for. The slow brush of his fingers along the edge of the workbench spoke of a man distracted by the direction of his own thoughts. The flex of that long muscle in his cheek showed his effort to muster patience, to hold back stronger feelings.

She knew what all this meant, and so she rushed ahead, because sometimes you can outrun your fear. “Listen, I know you have feelings for”—her tongue stumbled on the name—“Sissy. I’m not blind, I got that memo.”

He stopped rubbing his chin and instead dug the heel of his hand into the ridge of his brow.

“I think I know why, too.” Suddenly, she couldn’t quite look at him. “I’ve been working too much this past year. I thought I was fighting for my job—Scott gave me that impression, anyway. It turns out that he was just trying to raise the sell-out price so he could cash out.”

“Yeah, I heard about the layoff.”

Jenna paused. She’d forgotten that she’d never told him. So much had happened in so little time.

“I imagine all those times I worked late, you and she were thrown together a lot with the new travel sports schedule. And Zoe spends so much time over at Sissy’s house—”

“Jenna.” He winked an eye open. “Don’t do this.”

Words died in her throat. He was right, of course. Her mouth was running away on her. She didn’t want the details of the infidelity—they’d just stick in her mind, rise up when she slept, ate, and breathed.

She swallowed, and it was like swallowing a brick. “My point is, I know you have feelings for Sissy. But you once had feelings for me, too.”

Metal dust glittered upon his plaid flannel shirt. Debris flecked the curve of his ear. She could see by the way he’d turned his shoulder that he didn’t like what she was saying. She could see, too, that he was not unaffected by her words.

He was listening.

She should have let her hair down, the way Nate liked it. She should have stopped in the airport hotel’s salon and had it blown out so it would be loose and shiny. She should have parked the rental car at a mall before driving over here. She could have changed out of her travel-weary jeans and puckered T-shirt into something sexy. She could have bought a new lipstick. She’d rarely been the sexual instigator in their relationship, but she also wasn’t too proud to start.

Her own voice, husky and raw, surprised her. “You loved me once, Nate.”

“Jenna, don’t do this.”

“Despite everything you’ve done, pushing those divorce papers across the kitchen table at me,” she said, her chest tightening, “I
still
love you.”

“You shouldn’t.”

He pushed away from the workbench. He strode to the back of the room and tossed the dirty rag in a bin. He walked back, his hands low on his hips, dragging the waistband down to show the elastic waist of his black jockey shorts, shuffling in a circle until he finally blew out a breath like he was trying to clear the last bit of air from his lungs.

You shouldn’t.

Her mind tripped, tripped, tripped over the meaning of those words. She shouldn’t love him, so he said, but did that mean he didn’t love her?

He held up his hands. “We should keep this conversation fixed on the issues of the petition—”

“Like we’re in a lawyer’s office? Like there are no emotional consequences to all this?”

“I never wanted to hurt you—”

“Too late. You’re failing.” A rush of anger gripped her throat. “And I’m not the only one who’ll be hurt if you go through with this. Have you thought about Zoe?”

“Of course. The custody issues—”

“Custody issues.” The words sent a drip of cold down her spine. “Do you hear yourself? How do you think Zoe’s going to feel about ‘custody issues’?”

“If we remain calm and reasonable, Zoe won’t get hurt.”

“Then she’ll be the first thirteen-year-old in the world who hasn’t been affected by her parents’ divorce.”

“You know what?” He raised a hand in the air again, a flat palm against her. “Let’s keep Zoe out of this.”

“That’s not possible. I know you love Zoe more than me. I know you love Zoe more than
her
—”

“The issue here is not Zoe. It’s you and me and the decisions that we have to make to move forward.”

There was one person he left out of that equation, maybe the one person orchestrating this whole scene. He was willing to tear apart their family for the sake of some midmorning lust grown out of shared interests and proximity—but Jenna was willing to throw her pride on a pyre if it meant a chance to keep her family together.

“Here’s a decision we can make to move forward.” Jenna looked around her and nudged a metal pail. “Drop the papers in there and set them on fire.”

“Jenna, for God’s sake—”

“I know it’ll be a sacrifice. For
both
of us. First of all, I’d have to forgive you. I’m not always good at forgiving. Second, you’d have to give
her
up.”

“She’s not the only one I’d be giving up.”

A stillness came over her as Nate dragged his hand down his face. She became aware of something else in the room, another presence, so vivid that she found herself glancing more carefully around the garage as if Sissy were crouched behind the bikes or hiding under the overturned wheelbarrow. In the end, she returned to watching the twitch of the fine muscles of his face, until he tucked his fingers in his armpits and leaned forward to hide that expression from her altogether.

“You’re going to hear the news soon enough,” he said. “In a month, it’ll be obvious to everyone. Sissy is pregnant.”

Jenna took the hit like she’d once taken the hit of a paintball in the chest when she’d been forced to attend a corporate outing. The blow of that hard nugget had knocked her off her feet into a patch of mud as blue paint exploded and splattered across her goggles, blinding her.

“Sit down, Jen, please.”

Nate was speaking, or at least, she could see his lips moving. She was staring at him, and then suddenly she wasn’t. In front of her was the door of the garage where steam had misted the window. She couldn’t see outside. Beyond the door, her subcompact rental car was parked in the driveway. If she got into it, she could drive to her hotel and lay upon the bleached sheets of her hotel room.

Nicole and Claire had warned her that this could go very badly. Jenna wondered if they could have predicted how badly.

It all made terrible, terrible sense, of course. This was why he was rushing the divorce. Nate took his responsibilities as a father very seriously. He always had, right from the beginning. He’d probably demanded full legal custody of Zoe solely for the purpose of assuring their daughter that she wasn’t being replaced by the new baby.