Random Acts of Kindness (15 page)

Claire supposed no place stayed the same forever.

She felt a shudder of uneasiness. She’d chosen her Pine Lake goal on a whim—but Karma was never random, was it? Deep down, she had a reason for returning home. Her heart yearned to return to the place where friends once surrounded her, where they remembered her as someone strong and determined, someone worthy, someone who could change the world. Her heart wanted to return to that moment of infinite possibilities. Her heart ached to return to a time when her family was still whole.

She wanted to travel back in time.

“Sorry about that.” Nicole slipped back into her seat. “Lars likes to call me in the car on the way home from work. Did I miss anything?”

Her throat was tight as she shook her head. She stared past the banks of lights to the slowly dimming sky, willing Nicole not to see that her eyes were full of tears. She couldn’t believe it had taken her thousands of miles to figure this out. All along she’d been running back toward a moment when she felt young and healthy and safe, a time that had long gone. She would
never
find that when she arrived in Pine Lake.

And once again, that wave of sinking dread subsumed her, as it had after Jenna went back to Seattle and their triumvirate crumbled, when Paulina arrived from the past, when the car broke down, when she stood in the Laundromat in Nevada, Iowa, with those cloudy skies pressing down upon her, feeling this same sucking darkness.

Claire ran a hand up her right arm. She probed under her short sleeve for the ridge of the scar that extended to her bicep. Her sister Melana had felt the first tightening of the skin around her upper arm only six weeks after her double mastectomy. Claire had forced her to do everything the nurse had advised, elevating the limb, using compression bandages, concerned when the nurse brushed away Claire’s suggestion that the swelling might be an infection so long after the operation. Then one day, Claire had woken up to find Melana moaning. Her swollen arm was streaked mauve and hot to the touch, permanent tissue damage from the lymphedema already done.

Claire squeezed her own arm until it felt sore. She could tell Nicole any medical excuse she wanted. The C card was Claire’s ace in the hole, the one card she could play so that even Nicole would agree it was time to turn away from their hometown. Maybe that would be for the best. With just the two of them bouncing around an altered Pine Lake, their arrival couldn’t help but be a disappointment.

Nicole suddenly jerked straight in her seat. “Well, well, Claire. Look who the cat dragged in.”

Claire glanced up to see a woman sidling down the row toward them. A woman edging closer in a halting, awkward, uneven gait. A woman with a tousled blonde head of upswept hair, hiding behind a huge pair of sunglasses.

“Yup, it’s just me, the soon-to-be-merry divorcee.” Jenna shoved her sunglasses atop her head. “So, did either one of you road warriors save me a beer?”

Chicago, Illinois

J
enna said, “Can we get arrested for this?”

Nicole rolled her eyes as she dropped onto the sand of Pratt Beach, leaning back as she tried to untie her knotted shoelaces. “I suppose Chicago has laws about public nudity. But that won’t matter as long as we don’t get caught.”

“For the love of Buddha.”

Nicole could see Claire’s frown by the glow of the distant streetlights. Claire still hadn’t risen completely out of the black mood she’d been in since Iowa, although Jenna’s arrival had taken the edge off it, thank God. Nicole was just about out of tricks to keep her friend motivated and on track.

“Claire, baby,” Nicole said, “you should have had a few more beers at the Cubby Bear.”

“Maybe you should have had a few
less
.”

“Three beers,” Nicole retorted, “over the entire evening. You don’t think an ex-jock can handle that?” She stuck her index finger in the back of her sneaker and yanked until she set one foot free. “Besides, I don’t have to be drunk to consider taking a swim in the nude.”

“Employment applications,” Jenna muttered. “They have all those pesky questions about arrests.”

“You know I’m always up for fun,” Claire said, “but we’re in the middle of suburbia.” She waved beyond the tips of the park trees toward the glow of a business district. “And until this moment on the road trip, you’ve always been the sensible one.”

Nicole attacked the other set of laces. She wasn’t feeling much like the sensible one right now. She didn’t know what she was feeling, really, except that it had become vitally important to finish something she wasn’t sure any of them should have started, just because instinct told her it was the right thing to do.

“C’mon, ladies.” Nicole kicked off the other sneaker. “Are you telling me you’ve never gone skinny-dipping?”

“Well,” Claire confessed, “there was that one time in Sihanoukville on the Gulf of Thailand—”

“Then strip.”

“I was a lot younger. There was a hot, young New Zealander involved. And I still had breasts.”

Nicole tossed her socks aside. “We’ve been sharing cheap hotel rooms all the way across country. I’ve seen your scars.” Two wobbly, persimmon-pink crescents tilted across Claire’s chest like the stitched edges of closed eyes.

“I’ll just stay covered,” Claire said. “I wouldn’t want to scare the wildlife.”

“You should show them off like battle scars.” Nicole struggled up from the cool sand, loving the silky feel of it as it shifted between her toes. “Or tattoo them into something dramatic.”

Jenna leaned into Claire. “Did someone slip her a roofie when we were in that bar?”

“Damned if I know.” Claire shrugged. “There was that weird guy eyeballing us across the room.”

“She was only drinking beer,” Jenna said, “but who knows what happened between the time the bartender cracked the bottle open and that Frankenstein of a fan handed it over to her?”

“Wait a minute.” Claire pointed at her. “This is it, isn’t it? This is that thing you’ve been teasing me about since Iowa. The thing you wanted to do that you’ve never done before?”

“I married young,” Nicole said, grabbing the hem of her T-shirt. “I missed the chance to do all those embarrassing things young adults are supposed to do.”

Jenna said, “Clearly I missed something.”

Claire explained, “It’s not a roofie that tipped Nic over the edge. Nicole told me there was something she really wanted to do in Chicago—”

“—and this is it.” Nicole hefted her shirt over her head. “I’m not hanging here all night, ladies. Let’s dive in.”

Jenna sucked in a gulp of air. “Oh thank God, you’re wearing a sports bra.”

“Not for long—”

“Stop.” Claire held out a palm. “Just stop and think about this for a moment.”

Nicole paused with her fingers underneath the elastic band of her sports bra as she caught sight of a jogger heading down the beach. She wasn’t shy about nudity in front of her friends, but once she got naked, she wasn’t hanging around for the show—she was going
in
.

“What Jenna and I are trying to figure out,” Claire said, “is exactly what time during the last few days the pod people invaded your body.”

Nicole expelled a breath. In high school, she used to be known as the fun one. “You guys really think I’m a stick in the mud.”

“I say it must have happened in Iowa,” Jenna said. “If I were a pod person, that’s where I’d hide.”

“Calling yourself a stick in the mud is a little harsh,” Claire added. “But you can definitely be rigid.”

“
Rigid
is too strong a word,” Jenna countered. “Still, she’s not the kind to normally do something impulsive.”

Nicole smothered a ripple of irritation. The jocks at Pine Lake High School weren’t exactly paragons of virtue. They were usually the ones caught at Coley’s Point at three in the morning with two empty bottles of blackberry brandy, scattering like deer at the sight of the police aiming the beams of their flashlights into the woods.

She thought about her truncated first year as a graduate student at the University of Chicago. Like so many other students before her, she spent a lot of time trying to live in the moment and avoid the big decisions. One night she came to Promontory Point with a crowd. Instead of laughing and fooling around, she stared deep into the inky waters of Lake Michigan in the hopes of an answer to a dilemma she—the consummate planner—had never expected to have to make. Then her friends all came and fetched her, shucking clothes in the process, racing one another to the shore as they dared one another to jump into the frigid April waters.

Though she’d wanted to, she hadn’t gone skinny-dipping then. She’d had a good reason. Her friends would have seen the evidence if she’d stripped off her clothes. They hadn’t yet known she was three months pregnant.

Nicole blurted, “Why do you think we’re all here?”

Claire said, “Because after we left that stinking bar, you were the first one to talk to the driver when we stepped in the cab?”

“No, no.” Nicole dropped her hands to her hips. “Not why we’re on the shores of Lake Michigan. I mean ‘why are we here’ as in what Maya asked all of us back in South Dakota. Why did we all decide to go on this road trip?”

“Personally, I attribute it to taking advantage of Jenna’s good intentions,” Claire said. “And maybe a little too much Percocet after the surgery.”

“Claire, I can practically see your nose growing.”

“Honey, my secrets are all out.” Claire rolled her shoulders and turned her face to the silvery whoosh of Lake Michigan, away from what little light fell onto the beach. “I just wanted to get the hell away from my sisters and their grand medical plans.”

Nicole glanced at Jenna, who just shrugged and said, “My life is a disaster and I want it to disappear in the rearview mirror.”

Nicole waited for Jenna to say something more. During the baseball game, the only news that Claire managed to tease out of a reticent Jenna was the fact that her efforts to save the marriage had failed and that Nate had a pregnant girlfriend. Then Jenna clammed up. Nicole had hoped—wrongly, it turned out—that a postgame noisy bar would be the perfect place to give Jenna a chance to confess whatever other details she seemed to be hiding. But Jenna had kept her secrets to herself.

She decided to cut her friend a little slack. “Okay then,” she said, her heart tripping, “I’ll confess that I’m here to get away from the reality that in a few more weeks, my son will bring home his behavior and mood issues again, and despite all his sweet promises and honest intentions, his condition will get the better of him just like all the other times before. Once again he’ll be suspended from school, and there’ll be police at my door, and our whole family will have to watch this boy that we love just
spiral
.”

Nicole dropped her gaze to her bare feet. She heard Claire’s footfalls in the sand as she tried to close the few feet between them. Nicole shifted away, took a few steps toward the water. It rippled under the light of a sliver of moon. She focused on the glare of the red light at the end of the far pier and tried to parse everything she was feeling, this rush of emotions she’d been suppressing, she supposed, for longer than she would have liked to admit.

Back in Des Moines, Claire talked about finding the seeds of joy in the middle of heartache. Now Nicole stared at the lake and smelled the damp and sand and the vague scent of waterlogged wood from the nearby pier. She listened to the cars rumbling by, muffled by the distance. Water gurgled against the pylons. She used to jog along this area when she was in school, running miles and miles, clearing her mind of worries, opening her thoughts to contemplate her future as the cold Midwestern sun rose over the horizon.

She’d made a life-altering decision back then. She’d taken a turn in an unexpected direction. And every good, difficult, and neutral aspect of her life arose from that terrifying, dangerous choice, in ways she had only begun to understand.

Nicole said, “We’re doing this road trip all wrong. We can’t keep dragging all these problems along behind us.”

In the pause, Jenna murmured, “Like Marley’s clanking chains.”

“We’re worrying too much about the past,” Nicole continued, “when we should be living in the present.”

Claire’s voice, low and sly: “I’ll make a Buddhist of you yet.”

“We need to crack open our thinking. So let’s start right now.” Nicole turned to Jenna. “We’ve got days before we reach Pine Lake. If you could do anything at all, Jenna, what would it be?”

“I asked myself the same question just yesterday.” Jenna hugged her elbows as a breeze swept off the lake. “I spent that day talking to a three-hundred-dollar-an-hour lawyer going over the divorce papers and plans for our response. When that was done, I found myself tooling around in a hotel room with nothing to do but watch
Law and Order
reruns.”

Nicole said, “That gave you lots of time to think.”

“Exactly. I have ten days or so before I have to face Nate in a divorce lawyer’s conference room.” Jenna traced patterns in the sand with the toe of her sneaker. “I decided that more than anything, I’d rather be hanging around with friends.”

A flash of headlights set Jenna’s blonde hair momentarily alight. Nicole felt the tingling awareness that told her there was something more Jenna wanted, something bigger, but now didn’t seem the right time to probe.

“All right then.” Nicole turned to Claire. “If you could do anything, Claire, what would it be?”

“Change the world.”

Claire chased those words with a sarcastic smile. Her teeth gleamed in a flash of light that swept quickly over them, the headlights of some distant car turning. Nicole sensed her friend meant them, bone deep, meant them so much that it hurt too much to take them seriously.

“That’s a tall order,” Nicole said, “but tomorrow morning, we’ll all sit down and brainstorm. For now, what I want to do,” she said, as she flicked the button of her jeans, “is take a nice, long swim in Lake Michigan.”

Jenna looked away in sudden embarrassment as Nicole shimmied out of her jeans.

“Are you guys in?” She stood on the dark beach in her underwear and a sports bra. “Or are you just going to stand here and watch me from the shore?”

Claire groaned and reached for the hem of her T-shirt. “Promise me absolutely no pictures.”

Nicole grinned. “Not even shoulders up?”

Jenna muffled a laugh as she kicked off a sandal then wriggled like a kid trying to tug her shirt over her head.

Claire tossed her shirt on the sand. “I just know I’m going to regret this.”

Nicole yanked her sports bra over her head and shot toward the surf. “No more regrets.”

“Stop.”

At the sound of the masculine voice, Nicole froze and slapped her hands over her chest as a beam of light rolled past her, casting her shadow on the sand.

“Ladies,” the voice said, “I’m going to need you to come away from the water. This is the Chicago PD.”