Random Acts of Kindness (20 page)

C
laire first felt the cold edge of a razor against her scalp in a Bangkok barber shop on the night before her ordination. Her sponsor, Narupong, had made a party of it, inviting a motley assortment of her Thai and traveling friends. As curls of her auburn hair whispered to the floor, Claire began to realize how radical a decision she’d really made. The French eco-traveler who hadn’t been back to Lille in seven months hung back in horror. The two Aussies who’d narrowly missed being shot during a forest trek in the Golden Triangle covered their mouths as the buzzing continued. She’d seen the same expressions on their faces when they witnessed the bloody cheek-piercing rituals at the vegetarian festival in Phuket.

At first, all she’d felt was cold. The metal edge of the clipper mowed a path across her scalp. It left a chill in its wake. The buzzing continued, unrelenting, tufts of hair brushing her neck before slipping to the floor. As the barber worked his way to the top of her scalp, the spaces between her neck vertebrae were no longer compressed by the weight of her hair. Her throat lengthened; her head felt helium-light.

When it was all over and she finally glanced in the mirror, she looked Bambi-eyed. She saw the true shape of her head, the funny curve of her ears, and the length of her neck. It was odd to see oneself shorn of a universal indicator of femininity and yet feel more intensely feminine than ever.

She felt naked, vulnerable, exposed.

She felt like herself.

Now Claire watched five shorn women hurry up the slope from the water’s edge. Her mind balked at what her eyes were seeing. What were a clutch of Buddhist nuns doing at a river-rafting company on the Hudson Valley Gorge? But they weren’t swathed in white robes. And they weren’t walking the serene pace of venerable
maechi
s. They were struggling up the hill and laughing and slipping in the mud and trying to outrace one another.

Leading the charge was a tiny pip in a bikini top with her arms outstretched. Claire had a sharp, sudden flashback to a photo of a bald doctor leaning over the hospital bed of a thin, young patient.

Jin.

Not. Possible. Jin was in Salt Lake City with her husband and her twins, holding vigil for a pediatric cancer patient.

The woman-who-couldn’t-be-Jin stopped short in front of her, vibrating like a hummingbird. She ran her hand over her bald head while dropping into a pose.

“Like my new do?”

Claire saw Jin’s almond-shaped eyes and the winged brows and the impish chin and the little brown mole just above her left eyebrow. Claire willed her mind to accept the evidence of her eyes, while the midday sun beat on her hair, while she felt a sliver of gravel biting into the sole of her foot, while she heard the faint pop and crackle of the car engine as it cooled behind her.

Then Jin couldn’t wait any longer. With a laugh, she launched herself into Claire, sending her stumbling back. Over Jin’s shoulder, Claire saw a dark-haired woman with a hairline of sharp stubble.

Maya.

Maya, who hadn’t told Claire in South Dakota that she was planning to join them. Maya, who had insisted that soon she’d be returning to her wooden drawers of old bones and the musty lecture hall to terrorize the next crop of archaeology students.

Claire looked beyond Maya, to the other women rubbing their hands over their heads with bashful awareness. That couldn’t be Sydney, because Sydney hadn’t returned her calls when Claire was only a hundred miles away from her hometown of Denver. That couldn’t be Riley, because Riley no longer had her fire-red hair, though she still had freckles that stretched over her pale, pale scalp. Another woman stood separate from them all with a smirk on her face and a cigarette dangling from her fingers. Claire didn’t recognize her as Lu until she got a glimpse of the dragon tattoo on Lu’s forearm.

Sometimes in meditation, especially in those last few weeks before she left the
wat
, Claire had gone so deep into the dusky silence that she’d caught flashes of imagery—of her sister Melana as a girl climbing a tree to return a fallen starling’s nest, of Pine Lake just as the first drops of a summer storm pattered the lake, of two strangers in yellow scarves riding a motorbike through Bangkok. She’d become a conduit for both past and present, where distance made no difference. The images rolling through her consciousness like the flipping of television channels in which she had tuned in, watching.

Like now.

But with each hug, she felt her senses come back to this place. With each greeting, memories flooded her senses. Unable to speak, she ran her hands over one bald head, and then another, and then another, two heads at the same time, gazing into those laughing faces as her mind worked the features into familiarity.

Jin leaned in. “We thought about dying our hair pink again, just like in high school. But then we remembered, heck, you lopped off your boobs. We can lose a little hair.”

Claire couldn’t gather enough air in her lungs to speak. It was all too much. Five of them here, and all of them bald. She imagined them each feeling the cold bite of the clippers against the napes of their necks as they, too, committed to exposure, vulnerability.

“Solidarity.” Jin held her by the shoulders and gave her a little shake. “Remember?”

One guilty part of her wanted to confess the truth—
I’m not going to go through chemo; I won’t be going bald
—but she couldn’t. She wouldn’t disrespect their sacrifice, or the fact that Nicole and Jenna had honored her secret when they arranged this.

Because it had to be Jenna and Nicole who’d arranged all this. Claire glanced over her shoulder and saw Jenna standing with Nicole a little apart from all the others. Claire remembered all the calls to “Lars” this past week, the text messages that couldn’t be ignored at Niagara Falls, the midnight arrival of e-mails marked by the dinging of phones, and Jenna’s insistence on sending travelogues and pictures to Paulina so that the cancer blog would not go silent. Now the two of them leaned in the shade against the office, flicking worried glances in Claire’s direction.

Maya said, “Nicole was a jackhammer. She texted and e-mailed and badgered until she got a yes from every one of us.”

Lu added, her voice whiskey-rough, “It was Jenna’s posts on the blog that hooked me. It reminded me of the old days. I wouldn’t have missed this for the world.”

Jin bounced into the conversation, cocking her head toward the bank where the guides waited by several blow-up rafts. “I knew how important it was for you to do this white-water rafting thing. We weren’t going to let you and Nic and Jen have all this fun on your own.”

Claire crossed the small distance between her and her road-trip buddies as they both pushed away from the wall.

Jenna smelled like the menthol-sunburn cream they’d both used this morning.

Nicole did, too.

“It’s a gathering of the tribe,” Nicole said as she pulled away from Claire’s hug. “Isn’t this what you wanted all along?”

The last time Claire had dipped an oar in these waters, rain had tapped frigid needles into the back of her neck. The last time she’d braced her feet against the bottom of a blow-up raft, her toes had gone numb with cold in spite of the wool socks and rubber boots. The last time she’d dared this route, she’d been with many of the same women, and to the last one, they’d been grim with purpose.

Now in sun-dappled waters, they razzed one another across the river, amusing the guides by shooting spray at one another with their oars. Sydney bleated like a herded sheep when they all piled up at a narrow channel. Jin’s high-pitched, never-ending chatter was interrupted by Maya teasingly asking her if she ever took a breath. Lu piped in to ask if anyone remembered to bring a flask of blackberry brandy.

Claire allowed herself to enter into the same lightheartedness. It was easier to act unafraid at the beginning of a run, anyway, when the river still gurgled gently around them. In places, the water became so shallow that the guide wove them single file through the deeper channels so they wouldn’t be beached. As they edged closer to the banks, she distracted herself by gazing through the tea-colored water speckled with skimming bugs and alive with frogs. Here she could hide her face for a while. Here she could try to get a grip on how grateful she was for the lengths to which Nicole and Jenna had gone to bring her friends together.

Amid this momentary calm, the memories flooded in like the white water she knew they would ride soon. The sound of Sydney’s rolling laugh reminded her of a night when a bunch of them had gathered in her attic under the boards of the eaves—the only place she could get privacy from her sprawling family. While the printer spewed out posters that they’d tape throughout the high school the next day, they chatted over a freshly delivered pizza about the unfairness of some assignment or relative hotness of the high school boys. The attic had smelled of sauce and cheese and drying ink long after it had gone silent.

Most of all, she remembered coming home afterward to the scent of a roast wafting out of the kitchen, blessing the house with sage and thyme. She remembered coming home to her brothers racing up and down the stairs and all her sisters arguing over shoes and her mother wearing that silly green apron with the frills.

Her mother, before cancer took her.

Claire plunged her oar into the water, forcing her attention back to the task at hand. She heard a rumble in the distance, a thrumming vibration in the atmosphere. She flexed her fingers around the oar. She was ready for this. Maya and Jin led the way in the front raft. Lu and Riley and Sydney were in the raft behind her. No matter how swift the raft flew across the current, no matter how close they skimmed the collection of water-worn rocks, no matter how the thin floor of this vessel buckled and bucked against the churn of the waters, she would stay in this boat. Her friends all knew she’d come here to complete something she’d abandoned years ago. They were watching.

This time she would not let them down.

At the first gentle dip of the riverbed, the water gripped the bottom of the raft. A breeze lifted the hair around her helmet as the raft skimmed the surface. She raised her oar when the guide directed and dipped it back in when he commanded. She eyed the foaming eddies around the rocks for whirlpools, the ones she’d been so terrified of getting caught in. Jenna occasionally shouted “Rock” before twisting her oar to guide them away from it. No sooner had they crested the first run when they sluiced all the way through it.

Her feet were still dry.

She sat nonplussed. She remembered the shock of that first run much differently. It had been a snarling roller coaster of spray and foam. Now she twisted in the raft to look upriver. She must have conflated it in her mind with a later, longer, more perilous run. She faced forward in search of that run but found herself in a part of the river that bulged wide into a pond. Maya and Jin paddled in circles around Riley’s raft to make it twist backward. Riley and Lu collapsed in laughter at their uncoordinated efforts to face forward again.

Nicole cast a glance over her shoulder. “Are you guys getting hungry?”

“I’m thirsty,” Claire said, though she wasn’t sure she could keep anything down until they were done.

Nicole thrust a water bottle at her.

Claire said, “Tell me there’s whiskey in there.”

“Whiskey’s against the rules,” Nicole said, rolling her eyes at the guide. “And we’re not eating until Elephant Rock.” Nicole poked the guide with the end of her oar. “About how far away is that?”

“A good half hour,” he said. “Longer if your friends keep horsing around.”

Nicole said, “Well, I’m starved. We should take the lead and show those clowns how whitewater rafting is
really
done.”

Goose bumps rose on Claire’s skin. She blanched at the idea of being in the front raft, the boat that blazes the trail that all the other rafts follow, but with a word to their guide and a little whoop of excitement, Nicole plunged her oar into the water before Claire could object. The guide with his young-man’s shoulders braced himself in the front as Jenna pulled hard. Claire joined them with a shivering lack of enthusiasm. When they ripped past the two rafts twisting idly in the shallows, five bald women lifted their heads. With shouts and exclamations the race was on.

She strained her ears, listening for the roar of the white water downstream and looking for a curl of mist rising between the trees. Then she saw it loom right ahead, like the rim of the world.

The oar nearly slipped through her hands. She tightened her grip as the guide shouted to veer to the right, and then to the left. Then the boat dropped out beneath her. Her stomach slammed into her throat. The floor of the raft bowed as they hit water again and skimmed down the current, following the sluice to one bank and then steering to avoid an outcropping of rocks. She didn’t have time to think as they took a channel around a sand bank before escaping through an easy drift into another run so shallow it was like sliding over a pit of balls.

In the midst of all this, Jenna nudged her, shouting, “Look!”

Jenna gestured to the opposite bank. A young man sporting the T-shirt of the rafting company waved an arm where he stood atop a boulder. He lifted a camera into view. The guide in the front shouted something that sounded like “Smile!” Nicole twisted her oar to bring them closer for a better shot.

Claire squinted as she looked up at the blue sky and thought about the poster board her sisters would eventually display in the McCreery Funeral Home. It would be like the boards they’d scrapbooked for Mom and Melana after they’d died. Claire had already made a file for her sisters that now lay on her desk in Roseburg. It held a copy of her baby photo, a few shots of her as a gap-toothed child, the one with her father in the canoe holding up a brook trout, a group shot on a rope swing with her sisters, the high school graduation photo of her and her pink-haired friends, and one picture of her bald-headed in the white robes of a Buddhist nun.

She’d always known that the board lacked one last photo, the vivacious, triumphant one that her sisters would need to pin in the middle.