Random Acts of Kindness (7 page)

Nicole must have sensed the change, too, because she shifted her attention to Jenna. “With teenagers,” Nicole said, “it’s hard to know what’s normal and what’s not. Exactly how old is your daughter?”

“Thirteen.” Jenna slipped Lucky onto the ground and then placed the napkin full of hamburger meat in front of him. “Do you guys remember what it was like to be a teenager?”

Claire certainly did. At thirteen, she was the new girl in Pine Lake, seasoned enough to hang back until she got a bead on these folks with the flat northern accents who kept calling her a come-away. She was used to having to work to fit in. Her father had shipped his family of eight across the country several times as he moved his way up into better-paying park ranger positions. He’d made a conscious decision to stay in the Adirondacks after Claire’s mother’s terrible diagnosis.

She remembered
that
day. She’d been only seventeen years old.

“What I remember,” Nicole said, “is that the softball coach finally gave me a chance to pitch. That’s the year we won the regionals. Jenna, didn’t you run for class treasurer or something?”

“My mother thought it’d help me be more popular. She made those stupid posters with the glitter glue.”

Maya barked a laugh. “I’ve heard that being an American teenager sucks. I spent so much time overseas I hardly remember those years.”

“Being a teenager didn’t suck for all of us.” Jenna hugged her own knees. “Nicole didn’t suffer.”

“God, no,” Nicole said. “Those were some of the best years of my life. The hot lights during a spring softball game, the maple pecan pie after school on Fridays, swimming out to the island at Bay Roberts. Long after I moved away and my parents retired to Boca Raton, Lars and I used to visit every August. It hasn’t changed, you know: the lake shore, the uptown drag, Coley’s Point, the tiny aisles in Ray’s general store—”

“—the drunks down by the cannery, the seasonal unemployment,” Claire added, “the occasional alerts about the mercury levels in the fish.”

Nicole gave her a raised brow from across the fire.

“I’m just trying to point out that your idealized town of our mutual past had its problems, too.”

“You never let us forget it,” Jenna said in a rush, “even when Nicole pulled you over in the hall and asked you to help at her fund-raiser car wash, and you agreed only if
she
would join
us
in your winter coat drive.”

“That sounds like just the kind of idealistically futile thing I’d do.” Claire’s gaze drifted to the hollow of the open sky beyond the flames. “You’ve got quite a memory, Jenna.”

“I remember it,” Jenna continued, “because I was standing there right next to you, and Nicole didn’t think to invite me.”

The firewood popped and collapsed in the subsequent silence. Maya snagged Claire’s eye in curiosity. Nicole looked like she’d been hit upside the head.

“That wasn’t fair.” Jenna stiffened in her seat. “You were a popular softball star who dated Drake Weldon. I was just a gimp who dragged a thousand middle-school gaffes behind me like Marley’s clanking chains.”

“And apparently, I was an oblivious jerk.” Nicole tossed the last of her boneless chicken fingers in Lucky’s direction and then thrust the bottle at Jenna. “Now it’s your turn. Tell us why you’re here.”

Jenna reached for the bottle. “I’m here because of Zoe.”

Claire had expected Jenna to say she was here to get away from the situation in Seattle. Jenna hadn’t said much about Zoe, other than the fact that Nate was trying to get full custody of their daughter. The surprises just kept coming.

Claire asked, “Is Zoe having trouble in school or something?”

“No. Trouble in school I could handle.” Jenna, raising the lip of the bottle to her mouth, winced as she took a sip. “I mean, really, what awkward situation
haven’t
I experienced as a teenager? The problem is that Zoe hates me.”

Claire raised a hand in protest. “She doesn’t hate you, Jenna. She’s thirteen, right? Helloooo, hormones.”

“No, she really
hates
me. She slouches downstairs to family dinner wearing attitude and then only picks at Nate’s parmesan chicken.”

Maya murmured, “My God, you have a husband who makes parmesan chicken.”

“His sirloin roast is better,” Jenna said. “But all I ever see is Zoe just moving it around on the plate.”

“Classic teenage behavior.” Nicole took great interest in a thread that had come loose in the side seam of her shorts. “She probably thinks you’re probing. She’s misinterpreting your efforts at conversation as an invasion of privacy.”

“Is that why Zoe’s calling me dumb, blind, and stupid?”

Nicole glanced up, raising her brows. “Jenna, when a teenager says something like that, it sounds to me like…well, like she’s dragging a thousand troubles behind her like Marley’s clanking chains.”

“If she is, Zoe’s certainly not telling me.” Jenna leaned forward, watching Lucky struggle to choke down the last of the chicken. “And that’s why a week ago, I set off to find Claire.”

Claire was starting to wonder if Maya hadn’t spiked the fire with something more than dried old brush. Jenna was rarely this voluble—and she certainly had never
really
explained why she’d decided to show up at Claire’s door a week ago. At the time, Claire had been too excited about the prospect of getting away from her sisters to probe too deeply. In fact, she hadn’t wanted to probe—the gift Jenna offered was a juicy ripe plum, and Claire had lived in the fear that her friend would have second thoughts and snatch it away.

Jenna leaned down to scratch behind Lucky’s ears as he sniffed around the grass for more food. She scratched and scratched, making no indication she was going to elaborate, even as Lucky stretched out from under her hand to wander farther afield. So both Maya and Nicole then looked straight at
her
, as if Claire might have an explanation. All Claire could do was shrug to mutely confess her own ignorance. Jenna’s mind had always run in strange, concentric circles. Sometimes it took a little while to hit the bull’s-eye.

“I’ve screwed up every relationship I’ve ever had in my life,” Jenna finally said, with Lucky out of reach. “My father’s dead. I’ve never gotten along with my mother. My husband is leaving me, and my daughter hates me. In the middle of all that, the thought came to me that I needed to go back to the
beginning
of things.” Jenna pulled her knees to her chest and then hugged them so close that she could rest her chin on them. “The beginning of things is Pine Lake, where I once had a really good friend. Someone who seemed to like me, even if I was a freak.” A flicker of a gaze, swift and nervous, across the flames. “I thought, maybe if I connected with Claire again, I could finally learn how to stop screwing up all my relationships.”

Claire’s face started to burn with a hot shyness as her friends’ gazes shifted back and forth from Jenna to herself. She didn’t quite know what to say. She didn’t dare admit how uncomfortable it made her feel to be so needed, to be the central object of so much hope. There were reasons why she’d retreated to the isolation of a Buddhist temple after her sister’s death. There were reasons why she’d come back to America only to hide in a cabin in the Oregon woods. Too many times she’d grappled with failed expectations, not the least of which were her own.

“Damn, Jenna,” Maya murmured. “It’s always the quiet ones, you know?”

Claire heard rustling, and a shadow passed between her and the fire. A bottle appeared in her lap. Before Claire could lift her head and raise her arms for a hug, Jenna pulled away and hustled back to her chair.

Then she noticed six eyes fixed upon her.

“No, no,” Claire said, hiking the bottle. “It’s end of game. No way am I going to be able to top that.”

Maya said, “It’s not a competition.”

So Claire looked at Maya, still wearing her battered khaki hat with its wooden bead though the sun had gone down. The archaeologist sat at ease with her fingers laced on her belly, looking like the modern female version of Indiana Jones.

Maya, who never doubted.

Claire stretched her legs out toward the flames, flexing her bare arches as she felt the heat on the soles of her feet. “Did I ever tell you all what I did after I graduated from Saint Regis?”

Nicole leaned sideways in her chair toward Maya, forming a wall of inquisitive solidarity. “Tell me it has to do with why you’re here.”

“I’ll get to that. After college, I ended up in a roach-i
nfested
studio apartment in Hell’s Kitchen along with three other idealistic young pips. We were so eager to move to one of the most expensive cities in the world for the joy of working at a nonprofit.”

Maya snorted. “That’s so Claire.”

“It took me almost two years at a land preservation company to realize that only about eight percent of the funds we raised actually went toward conservation. What was left was sucked up by the mortgage on my boss’s penthouse on Central Park West.”

Jenna piped up, “That doesn’t sound legal.”

“It wasn’t. He was indicted and spent a few years in jail. But long before then, all my pretty illusions about the good work done by nonprofits had been shattered. So I quit.”

Maya said, “Good for you.”

“So I flew back to the nest, which, by then, was in Oregon. After a few years slinging hash at a diner, I decided to go back to school and get my master’s in education.”

Nicole’s brow furrowed. “I remember. Second grade?”

“Special ed.”

“There goes Claire again.” Maya clasped her hands around one knee. “Running into burning buildings when most people run away.”

“I intended to mold malleable minds.” Claire swirled the bottle until she could feel the weight of the liquid shifting inside. “I was going to reach the most unreachable children. I was going to lift the disadvantaged out of poverty. You know, I was going to turn water into wine.”

Then Claire’s mind turned to Jason. A five-year-old covered in freckles with a mop of tangled red hair. He had quick eyes, agile in avoiding her gaze.

“There was this one boy there,” Claire said, “the sweetest five-year-old you could ever know. Until you broke his routines. And then he’d completely
lose it
. He’d throw a full-body, screaming-at-the-top-of-his-lungs, all-out, flailing tantrum.”

From across the fire, Nicole murmured, “Autistic.”

“He hadn’t been diagnosed because he was new to the school system. The teacher I was working with was at her wit’s end. She had twenty-seven other kids in her class. I was a student teacher and the only one available to take him on.” She had spent most of her time talking to the top of his head. He spoke in short sentences, in a flat voice, and he’d rock himself whenever the world became too much for him to handle. She’d labored to find the rhythms that kept him calm. Every once in a while, he’d rise up and say something almost poetic, like,
This morning I woke up inside a flower.
“It took about three months before it all came crashing down on me. Jason ended up in the hospital with a concussion. The mother accused me of being the one who gave him the bruises all over his body.”

Around the silent fire, Claire could see the luminosity of their eyes. She didn’t want to talk about the hellish details of those following weeks. The quick suspension, the small-town rumors, the suspicions of the weary social workers, the legal wrangling, the multiple interrogations.

“The truth is I probably did give Jason some bruises. You had to hold tight when he lost control. If you didn’t, he might wriggle free and throw himself through the glass door. He’d tried once before.”

Nicole sank her head into her hands. Claire supposed Nic had seen such things before, maybe in grad school.

“I was told that the investigation was mercifully quick, though it didn’t feel that way at the time. Within a week, Jason was taken away from his mother and given over to social services. I was cleared not long after. But by that time, I’d seen enough. With three more classes to finish my master’s, I quit.”

Claire’s throat went dry. That was the beginning of the hardest time, when her sister Melana got sick and everything went to hell.

Maya said, “Is that when you went to Thailand to become a nun?”

“No. That was a little later. But I quit that, too.”

Crickets in the grass chirped. A breeze swept across and teased the fire. If she looked away from it, she could see the breeze rippling over the grass, silvery in the starlight. An expectant silence settled around the campfire.

“It looks like Jenna and I have something in common.” Claire lifted the bottle to her lips and took a good, long swig. “I need to go back to the beginning of things, too. To the very first time I quit.”

Sioux Falls, South Dakota

S
tepping into one of the dusty batting cages at the Sioux Falls Empire Fair, Nicole eyed the selection of baseball bats. The aluminum bats gave a hollow clang that probably pleased the tween boys who were the main frequenters of these carnival cages. But aluminum bats always felt odd in her palms, slippery and cold. So she curled her hand around the neck of a battered wooden bat, hefting it up.
Ashwood
, she thought, as she rolled it to sense the balance. Then she lifted it to her nose to sniff the cinnamon grain, dusted with alfalfa pollen and sticky with pine tar.

In batting cage number three, she dug her front foot into the fairgrounds’ dust. The bat felt heavy as she swung it over her right shoulder. She heard the drop of the metallic arm at the other end of the cage just before the ball shot out. Instinct kicked in, and she swung at the white blur.

Crack!

Nicole glared at the far opening and tried to concentrate on the next ball instead of the troubles that kept rattling in her head. Road trips were supposed to be about leaving those troubles behind. They were supposed to be about immersing yourself in the world you were in, like here in South Dakota with its crowds of brawny ranchers at every truck stop, its dusky, multihued horizon, its billboards advertising Wall Drug three hundred miles ahead. Yesterdays weren’t supposed to exist when you were flying through fields of sunflowers listening to Jesus stations and soft country rock.

Yet when they’d first left Maya’s dig this morning, Nicole had kept scanning radio frequencies for talk of a tornado watch. The skies had been low and ominous. She’d driven eighty miles an hour along the infinite ribbon of highway, and every shiver of wind sent silt pinging against the chassis. Every two minutes, she glanced in the rearview mirror so she could spot any change in the shape of the underbelly of the clouds, foresee the pea-green twist of a chasing funnel.

Crack!

The impact shuddered all the way up her arm. If only she could have connected as easily with the other fastballs, sliders, and curves that had whizzed by her on this road trip. Last night, Maya’s potion of wood smoke and Eastern European vodka proved so much more potent a psyche opener than any of her halting, bumbling, straight-from-the-life-coach-handbook questioning techniques. Her failures just kept chasing her. Her friends’ confessions in the South Dakota grasslands had made it official: how fortunate it had been for all of Nicole’s potential psychotherapy patients that she’d been forced to leave graduate school when Lars knocked her up.

Crack!

“Oh, great.” Claire’s voice came from somewhere behind her. “You camped in the wild last night, and now you’re working up a sweat. You’re going to stink like a bear when we get back on the road.”

Claire leaned against a post just outside the chain-link fence of the cages. Her T-shirt was splattered with colorful balloon creatures and said,
I Support Balloon-Animal Rights.

Nicole turned her attention back to the ball launcher. “Are you going to answer your cell phone, Claire?”

“Is that darn thing ringing again?”

“I can hear it buzzing from here.”

“I swear, my sisters have some kind of radar. Whenever we come rolling into any town big enough to have a cell tower, they decide it’s time to call Claire to make sure I’m urinating clear and often.”

The vibrating sound distracted Nicole, so much so that she didn’t hear the drop of the mechanical arm. She swung but caught nothing but air.

She rolled the bat back over her shoulder as Claire made a clucking noise.

“It’s just Paulina again. That girl can hold her horses. I spoke to her an hour ago, while you guys were listening to that banjo band. She wouldn’t let me off the phone until I counted how many more pills I had left in my prescription and I swore to do my stretching exercises.”

Crack!

Nicole cast a glance over her shoulder long enough to see Claire bite the head off a corn dog. “I see you’re doing your best to keep to Jin’s suggestion of a macrobiotic diet.”

“No actual dogs were harmed in the making of this corn dog.”

“Aren’t cows sacred to Buddhists?”

“You’re confusing Buddhism with Hinduism. And I am certainly
not
breaking one of the five Buddhist precepts that all good laypeople are bound to follow.”

“I pass no judgment.” She crouched and leaned heavily on her left foot as she heard the drop of the metallic arm. “During Lent, I’m not supposed to eat meat on Fridays, but somehow sausage appears on my pizza.”

Crack!

The fence links clinked as Claire slipped her fingers through them. “Some Buddhists believe that even cracking an egg is killing a living thing. So the wife of the house orders a servant to crack the eggs. The wife is absolved because she didn’t do the actual cracking; and the servant is absolved, too, because he was
forced
to do it for someone else. Of course, in most Thai markets, the eggs are sold precracked anyway.”

“It’s a strange, strange world you live in.”

“This corn dog is delicious, by the way. You want me to get you one, once you’re finished taking out your frustration on those baseballs?”

Crack!

Nicole didn’t need to turn around to know that Claire was twirling the half-eaten corn dog like a lollipop. Claire’s head would be tilted, her long auburn braid falling over one shoulder, one leg crossed over the other with a toe of her battered boot dug into the dirt. For a woman who had no therapist training, Claire knew how to give a welcoming look while her body screamed
I know there’s something on your mind.

Nicole fixed her attention on the open box where the balls were hurled, setting her stance, shifting her weight, settling the bat at just the right angle over her shoulder. Yeah, there was something on her mind. It was the memory of last night, when Claire through smoke and sparks confessed a lifelong series of failures with easy cynicism—while Nicole sat still, guilty, hotly embarrassed at her vain urge to keep her catastrophes to herself.

Crack!

Claire said, “You still got some whopping power in those arms.”

Nicole rolled her shoulders, feeling a pull in the tendons of her right shoulder. “Where’s Jenna?”

“She’s trying to win a stuffed animal for Zoe.”

“For a thirteen-year-old?”

“Compensating, I guess. Or maybe Jenna is imagining Nate’s face on the bull’s-eye when she hefts that plastic rifle to her shoulder. Maybe target shooting is her version of pounding a dozen baseballs.”

Nicole switched to the other side of the plate, pointedly not commenting, because this life-coach-fraud-of-a-therapist didn’t know a damn thing about how to help a haunted, traumatized woman like Jenna. Nope. Nicole was just here with her friends. She was just taking a break from Interstate 90 to enjoy a state fair. She was just working on her left side swing, her weaker side as a switch-hitter.

Crack!

Nicole dropped the bat off her shoulder. The end hit the ground and puffed up a cloud of dust. “Claire,” she blurted. “Are you going to quit on me?”

Claire stilled with the corn dog halfway to her mouth. “Quit on you? How do you mean?”

“I mean are you going to decide halfway to Pine Lake that this trip isn’t what you expected? That you can’t afford the gas anymore, or that Lucky has to pee too often, or that it’s too much dealing with Jenna the bundle-of-nerves and that I’m too”—her mouth moved but the words didn’t come out at first—“emotionally constipated?”

Claire twirled the stick of the corn dog in a perfect little circle. “You really think I’m going to bail.”

“I really, really need to get to Pine Lake.”

Nicole twisted away to hide her weakness and then dropped into her stance and waited for the next ball. How could she explain the feeling that if she just walked barefoot over the old pier and dove into the waters of Bay Roberts, she would somehow emerge psychically clean? If she just swam across to the little island, that spit of a thing with a half-dozen pines, she would somehow emerge as confident as the high school girl she once had been? One day was all that she needed. One day basking under the mountain sun, and her will would strengthen, her insecurities would melt, her spirits would rise to meet the challenges waiting for her when she returned home.

The ball hissed by her. She hadn’t even heard the mechanical arm drop.

Claire said, “I did shoot my mouth off last night, didn’t I? I never could hold my liquor.”

“Forget it.” She wiped the sweat off her brow with her forearm. “I shouldn’t have mentioned it. I’m just jonesing for a nice cold Corona on Coley’s Point—”

“You’ve got every right to wonder. I
do
have this thing about commitment. There’s a reason why I didn’t marry that Kiwi with the sheep farm outside of Wellington.”

Nicole blinked. She’d never known Claire had had a fiancé.

“Hell,” Claire continued, “I even chose Thai Buddhism because, unlike most other forms, it allows
temporary
ordination of monks and nuns.”

“Shaving your head sounds like a commitment to me.”

“Hair grows back quicker than you think. Don’t stop hitting balls for me, Nic. You’ve only got a few more minutes in the cage.”

Claire suddenly squinted in the direction of a carnival game clear across the fairway, watching a squealing group of kids as if she had money on their water pistol competition. Nicole recognized the body language. Apparently, the chain-link fence between her and Claire wasn’t enough of a scrim, so Nicole turned away and dropped back into position to give Claire some emotional space.

“You may be surprised by this,” Claire said, “but sometimes there were good reasons for me to quit. I didn’t really leave Buddhism just because of a passion for
mesqui
te-f
lavored
beef jerky.”

Nicole wiped the sweat off her brow with her forearm. “The six a.m. meditations would have put me off. And the celibacy.”

“For me, I had serious problems with the Dharma itself. Buddhism is the study of suffering. Where it comes from, why it exists, and most importantly, the path one must follow to end it. When I took off for Thailand, I had this crazy idea that if I just followed the precepts, I’d make some sense out of the mess of my own life. And Melana’s suffering.”

The mention of Claire’s sister’s name split Nicole’s attention. The mechanical arm dropped, and a ball zipped by, but she caught only a piece of it.

“Long before I got my own diagnosis,” Claire continued, in the kind of airy voice Nic had heard her use to point out a wind farm amid an alfalfa field, “I had a front-row seat to the joys of stage IV breast cancer. With my mother, but more so with Melana. I saw the blisters from the radiation. I saw what lymphedema can do to a slim, graceful arm. I wiped her down when she was feverish, tried to get water into her when the sores in her mouth were the most severe.” Claire’s humorless laugh sounded more like a clearing of her throat. “Yes, those were good times.”

Nicole undercut the ball, cracking it with the top of the bat so that it flew straight up, tenting the netting before dropping at her feet. She was breathing hard, realizing how far she’d already pushed the softness of her out-of-shape body. Her mind scrambled back, trying to remember what Claire had told her about discovering her own disease at an earlier stage than her sister—was it stage III?—and realizing in the process how very little Claire had actually shared with her.

Realizing how little she’d asked.

“Right up to a few days before Melana died,” Claire continued, “she kept telling me that she was fine. That it really wasn’t so bad. She’d caught the disease a tick earlier than our own mother, you know, so that meant she would be the Petrenko woman that would survive. I’d be researching treatment strategies and she would ask me in her reedy voice, ‘What have you found, Claire? What new vitamins should I try?’”

Nicole stood with her bat on her shoulder with her head turned away, but she saw nothing in front of her, nothing at all.

“In the end, I realized that me holed up in a Siamese temple eating pea pods wasn’t going to change anybody’s suffering. Melana’s suffering was long over, and walking the Middle Path sure didn’t seem to be helping mine. I just couldn’t accept the idea that happiness and suffering are nothing more than states of mind. I just didn’t believe the idea that if I could control my mind, then I could be happy.”

For Nicole, the world went a little mute, as if someone had tossed a thick blanket over the barks of the carnies, the sizzling grill of a hamburger stand, the clanging bells of an arcade win, and the tinny music of a nearby carousel.

If you can control your mind, then you could be happy.

Her mind drifted to Noah in his residential facility, sitting in circles with other sufferers, seeking patterns, mulling over the loops and twists of his broken thoughts, the swell and surge of his unruly emotions. Like Claire once had been, Noah was tucked away from the world. But unlike Claire, Noah had all the strength of Western medicine to teach him ways to control his mind. He had skilled doctors leading him through therapy; he had experienced professionals offering him new tools to deal with the stresses of life.

He wouldn’t quit as Claire did. He couldn’t quit.

She wouldn’t let him quit.

“Anyway,” Claire said, “what I’m standing here chewing off your ear to say is that you don’t have to worry about me quitting. My diagnosis was like Karma holding a bullhorn to my ear. No more second chances.”

It was Nicole’s turn to drive again, so she slipped into the driver’s seat of Jenna’s car and put on her sunglasses. Her stomach sloshed with blue slushy and the grease of a funnel cake, well mixed after a group ride on the Tilt-a-Whirl. She was sure to regret that later, but for now she was determined to get them back on Interstate 90 to Minnesota without glancing in the rearview mirror for imaginary tornados. In her mind, she’d already hopped and skipped forward to the sight of the spires of Chicago and the lights of Wrigley Field.