Senseless Acts of Beauty (2 page)

When she reached the shed, she hurled herself in and shut the door. Her breathing sounded loud inside. The place had a tangy smell, a basement smell, copper and oil and dampness. Already it was warmer. Dropping her backpack, she sank to her knees next to the rumbling machine and flattened her cheek against the metal.

The rules screamed in her head—
shelter, food, then sleep
—but the hum of the machinery worked on her like a lullaby.

The kid looked like a nestling bird dumped out of a tree in a storm.

Riley Cross knocked off the hood of her slicker and then reached for the bulb chain. When the light flooded the shed, she smiled right away so that the girl wouldn’t be scared. Blinking, the girl had crouched into a defensive posture, backing up until she was practically behind the generator.

Riley said, “One heck of a storm, huh?”

Water dripped off the girl and joined the growing puddle at her feet. The rubber toe of one sneaker had separated from the canvas. The girl’s eyes, an unusual pale green, were bug-wide.

“It’s hard to know when a rain like this is coming,” Riley continued, glancing out the small, high window. “Sometimes you can smell it in the air. It’s ozone; it smells sweet, electric. Or if you look to the west, sometimes you’ll see a blue glow atop the mountains, which is the first of the lightning.”

The girl didn’t move as a wet shoulder slipped out of the neckline of her sagging hoodie.

“You can tell if you watch the birds, too.” Riley swiped at her wet coat, shaking her dripping hands dry. “They get real quiet. Still, I’ve lived here pretty much all my life and even I can’t always predict when a storm like this is going to come. But you’re not from around here, are you?”

Riley would know if she were. Pine Lake wasn’t a big town, and it seemed like half of it consisted of her own relatives. The rest she’d gone to school with. And she knew this girl wasn’t with the growing number of tourists renting the little cape houses or camping in the Adirondack woods beyond the borders of Camp Kwenback. She’d glimpsed the girl several times, at a distance, walking alone in the woods, her curly, puffed, and coppery ponytail bobbing.

The girl still didn’t answer. She tensed up, bracing her legs like a Carolina wren sensing the approach of a rival. The girl really could use a change of clothes, along with a solid meal. Maybe more than one. Riley remembered the sandwich that had gone missing from Mrs. Clancy’s lunch tray on the picnic table last week. And the chip wrappers she’d found discarded in the corner of one of the old cabins. It was probably a good thing that the girl was wary of strangers, but Riley wasn’t sure it was just wariness in that gaze.

“Listen, I’ve got a fire going inside.” Riley gestured in the direction of the main lodge. “And I’m about to make myself some hot chocolate. Why don’t you come on into the lodge and join me? You can use my phone if you want to call someone.”

The girl didn’t move. If anything, she shrank back deeper behind the generator. Wet as she was, Riley didn’t want her to press back too far and get tangled up in the wires. There was a good chance squirrels and chipmunks had made lunch out of the rubber insulation, exposing the live insides.

“Ok, then, come on in whenever you’re ready.” Riley pushed open the shed door and then pulled her hood over her head. “The sliding back doors are always unlocked. I’ll have some hot chocolate waiting for you, just in case.”

Riley walked out, letting the door bang shut behind her. She strode across the squishy lawn with the rain pouring over her bill-cap. This wasn’t Camp Kwenback’s first runaway. She’d figured the girl would be inside within five minutes, maybe ten.

It took forty.

Riley had all but given up when she heard the squeal of the sliding door. The girl slipped in and hesitated on the all-weather rug, shivering. When she was crouched back against the generator, Riley had estimated the kid to be about twelve years old, but the girl unfolded to a good five foot two, all stick-thin legs, awkward proportions, easily on the far side of a skinny thirteen.

“Go ahead and kick off those sneakers.” Riley gestured to a grilled cheese sandwich and a cup of hot chocolate sitting on the raised bricks of the hearth. “That’s been waiting for you. Glad you decided to join me.”

Riley took the soaking hoodie out of the girl’s hands and saw goose bumps riddling her thin arms. All the girl wore underneath the jacket was a ribbed tank and a pair of jean shorts. Riley held out a hand for the backpack, but the girl just held the strap until her knuckles went white.

Riley dropped her hand and hung the hoodie on a nearby hat tree. “I’m Riley. What should I call you?”

“Sadie.”

The girl spoke the name in a firm voice and then watched Riley’s face. Riley sensed that a great deal of thought had gone into the decision whether or not to tell her.

“Pleasure to meet you, Sadie.” Riley wondered whether the name was real. “First time in Pine Lake?”

“Yeah.”

The girl followed her to the fireplace, looking all around her. Riley took it all in, too, trying to see it through Sadie’s eyes, the soaring pine rafters with their glossy sheen and dark pine knots, the rustic hearth made with local stone, the six-foot taxidermy bear that flanked the fireplace on one side, and the wide, sweeping antlers of a moose mounted above. But Riley’s eye inevitably caught on the duct tape holding the antlers together, the floor that needed refurbishing, the game table held stable by a rubber-banded deck of cards under the leg, and the glass-topped coffee table with the nicked edges. The 1970s no doubt wanted those faded plaid couches back, if she could ever afford to buy new ones.

At least she’d lit a fire. A nice fire always drew attention away from the failing zoo vibe and made the room cozy, timeless.

Riley slid a hip on the raised hearth and gestured for Sadie to sit on the other side of the tray of food. Sadie sat, dropped the backpack between her feet, and then seized the cup of hot chocolate. After drinking deep, she palmed the grilled cheese and took an enormous bite. The girl’s eyes drifted closed like she’d never tasted anything so good.

“So,” Riley began, as Sadie swallowed half the sandwich, “is there anyone I can call for you? The phone lines aren’t down yet, but I wouldn’t count on that for long.”

Sadie shook her head and buried her face in the hot chocolate again. Riley wished she’d at least topped it with a layer of marshmallows. The girl needed some real meat on her bones. Riley considered making another sandwich in the kitchen, but she had a strange feeling that, if she left the room, there was a good chance Sadie would wolf down the last of the sandwich, shrug into Riley’s own slicker, and then disappear back into the rain. After all, the girl had stolen a lot of things in the past couple of weeks.

Ah, yes. One theft had to be addressed. “Hey, Sadie, you wouldn’t happen to have my Leica in that backpack, would you?”

Sadie froze with the mug between her hands.

“My binoculars,” she explained, shrugging. “I have several pairs, some old ones that I really should give away. I don’t mind if you borrowed a pair at all, especially if it were for bird watching. But the Leica are my particular favorite, and I’ve really been missing them these past few days.”

Placing the mug down, Sadie tugged on the zipper of her backpack. “I was going to give them back.”

“I know.”

“I borrowed them,” Sadie said, as she pulled out the binoculars, “because I heard something screaming in the middle of the night.”

“A screech owl, I bet. Scary call, I know.” Riley took the binoculars, cold and damp, hoping the rain hadn’t gotten into the optics. “Did you find him? By the big oak? By the marshy area?”

“He’s somewhere near that beaver dam.”

“He’s beautiful, isn’t he?”

Sadie shrugged and gave her a look like she was wondering if Riley were dealing with a full deck.

Riley was used to that.

“Well, that owl is almost as beautiful as the crane you folded for me.” Riley gestured toward the reception desk, upon which lay a bowl full of her mysterious visitor’s origami. “I put that crane in with his brothers and sisters.”

“I didn’t want you to think it was stolen.”

“I know apology origami when I see it.”

“It wasn’t—” Sadie stopped herself. She lifted the mug, then lowered it once she realized it was empty. She took a deep breath, her shoulders rising and falling. “Thanks,” she finally said, “for letting me…borrow your binoculars. Can I ask you,” she continued, as her gaze drifted to Riley’s hair. “Is that color real?”

Riley ran her fingers through her frizzed hair. After last fall’s drastic cut, it was taking its time growing back, and it had reached that awkward stage where it wasn’t quite long enough to pull into a ponytail but just long enough to make her look like she’d stuck her finger in an electric socket. “One hundred percent real. Can’t control it much in this weather. I guess we’ve got that in common.”

Sadie didn’t smile. In the silence, the fire crackled, something in the wood popping and shooting sparks up the chimney. Riley wished she could read the strange, fierce expressions flitting across this young girl’s face. There was only one way to get the truth out of her, and that was to ask.

“Sadie,” Riley put the binoculars aside, “I’ve stumbled upon a lot of critters in the generator shed during the years I’ve lived here. Raccoons, possums. Once I found a nest of barn owls. But a teenage girl? That’s a new one. Is there anything you want to talk about?”

The look Sadie gave her was one that Riley sometimes saw in the sparrows that gathered by the feeding table on the back lawn when she came out with a new bag of food. It was a steady, assessing look, a look that spoke of hesitancy, of burgeoning trust, but also fear at the approach of such a large predator. The birds crouched with their heads cocked, their gazes steady, while the little muscles under their feathers grew tight.

Sadie reached down and unzipped her backpack. She pulled out a white hand towel. Seeing it, Riley had a moment of embarrassment for not being a good hostess. She realized that the girl could probably use a nice, fluffy hotel towel to dry her skin and hair, instead of being forced to dig for some well-worn towel in her soaking backpack. Riley was about to get up and fetch a fresh towel when she caught sight of the Kwenback logo at the edge of Sadie’s towel.

“Wow. Are you planning a future in cat burglary?” Riley reached over to tug the fringed end of the towel. “I don’t remember which origami crane went with that.”

“I didn’t borrow this.”

“Oh?”

“I’ve had this towel my whole life.”

Sadie spoke into the threads of the fading logo. Riley looked at Sadie’s face more closely, trying to see in it the features of any one of the sixty or seventy families who used to come to Camp Kwenback on a regular basis, when this resort had teemed from June to October, when the back lawn was the center for fierce badminton competitions, when the lake was full of canoes and rowboats, and every swing was going full tilt from six in the morning when her grandparents served coffee on the back lawn, to midnight when they launched fireworks off the dock.

Riley had worked as the camp events director for six straight summers, herding the young ones for sack races and Red Rover, challenging the teenagers to shuffleboard competitions, playing bingo and Monte Carlo in the main lodge during the rainy days. Generations of families had spent summer weeks in the cabins that spread through the woods down to the lake. Riley could name every one of them, right down to the great-grandchildren, and some still sent Christmas cards. But she reasoned that Sadie was too young to remember any of that. It had been nearly fifteen years since Camp Kwenback had anything that looked remotely like a full house.

Sadie’s shoulders rose and fell. A little line deepened between her young brows, and color darkened in her cheeks.

Riley leaned forward. “Sadie?”

“My birth mother,” Sadie blurted, lifting the towel. “My birth mother wrapped me in this when I was born.”

The term
birth mother
skittered across Riley’s thoughts like a chip of flint sent flying over a lake, skipping in steps, spreading ripples in its wake, ripples that swelled as the implications became clear.

“I was just wondering,” Sadie said, “what you were doing fifteen years ago, on August twenty-second?”

S
adie had made a ritual of it. Standing in front of the bathroom mirror to brush her teeth, she’d find herself instead pulling her upper lip and noticing the two larger front teeth, the way the smaller ones on either side slipped slightly behind them. Or she twisted her head so that she could see the three freckles on the edge of her jaw. Or she pulled the little curls of her brass-red hair and watched them bounce back, noting the strands that were more gold than red, others more brown. Pressing close to the mirror to see her gray-green eyes and the streaks of rusty brown that splayed out from the center pupil, wondering as her breath fogged up the glass when she would come close to someone else’s face and see in their eyes the same starburst pattern.

Riley’s eyes were brown. Soft brown, melted chocolate chip brown. Sadie hadn’t expected that. But after forty minutes of thinking about it, she realized that Riley’s brown eyes didn’t mean Riley couldn’t be her mother. Sadie’s seventh-grade science teacher had shown the class diagrams of Mendel’s peas, and once Sadie realized what they meant, she’d made a beeline to the library to pour over eye color and hair color inheritance diagrams for people. So she knew brown eyes were dominant. But she also knew that if her father had green eyes and one of Riley’s parents had light-colored eyes, then Sadie had a fifty percent chance of having green eyes with a brown-eyed mother.

She’d worked it out a couple of times already, drawing diagrams in the dusting of dirt on the floor of the shed.

“Sadie.”

Sadie’s chest felt tight, like something was swelling up underneath her ribs. She’d been watching Riley since arriving in town by train more than a week ago. She’d followed her from a safe distance as Riley wandered the woods every morning, pausing for long instances to peer through her binoculars. Sadie liked Riley’s rolling laughter as she chatted with her guests on the back porch on sunny afternoons. Sadie liked that Riley spent most of her days barefoot. Now she stared at Riley’s face, taking it all in—the freckles that covered her skin, the curve of the lobe of her ears, the bow shape of her upper lip, the gleam of her two front teeth as she opened her mouth on a breath.

“Sadie,” Riley repeated, “I’m so, so sorry.”

Sadie grappled with that while the pressure under her ribs stretched so tight that she couldn’t suck in a breath. She grappled with that while the fire baked her right shoulder. Sorry for what? Sorry for not recognizing her own child right away? Sorry for giving her up for adoption? Sorry for not having stepped in after everything went wrong? Sorry for having wasted fourteen years they could have spent together under the rafters of this lodge, drinking the hot chocolate now curdling in her stomach?

Or sorry because it wasn’t Riley, nearly fifteen years ago on August 22, who’d pushed her into the world?

And all at once, the pressure under her ribs collapsed like a balloon popping, and she tightened her grip around her knees so she wouldn’t tumble off the hearth onto the hardwood floor.

Riley said, “You’ve been hanging around the camp all this time, working up the courage to ask me that, haven’t you?”

“I’ve been wasting my time.”

“How frustrated you must feel.”

Sadie mouthed the word
frustrated
. Frustration didn’t seem to say what she was feeling right now. For as long as she could remember, she’d been fed pretty much the same story told to every adoptee she’d come to know: That her birth mother had been a young woman, a brave woman, making a difficult choice when she was unable to take care of her own child. Her birth mother was someone like Riley, pretty in a country air, no makeup, soft in the middle kind of way.

Well, she should have known that script was a sketchy fairy tale meant to stop a boatload of ugly questions. She thought she’d prepared herself for all possibilities. But now she realized that, over the past two weeks, she’d opened herself up to dreaming again.

Sadie felt a tug and realized that Riley was pulling on the towel that Sadie had pressed between her knees. She loosened her grip enough for Riley to slide the worn terrycloth into her hands.

Riley fingered the fading logo. “I imagine you’ve done a lot of work to figure out where this towel came from.”

“Search engines are your friend.”

Sadie reached for the mug to hide her face behind it. She tipped the cup high, but there was nothing left at the bottom but thick, oversweet syrup. Her friend Izzy had been right. She’d been an idiot to think that when she skipped out of school, stashed her textbooks, and headed to the train station, that her birth mother would just be there, waiting, at the end of it.

“The camp has had the same logo since nineteen twenty-two.” Riley passed the pad of her finger over the dark green threads of the three pine trees, two small ones nestled against a taller middle one. “My grandfather paid a lawyer to have it trademarked a long time ago.”

Sadie knew that much was true. She’d saved up grocery money to pay for an online logo search two years ago, and up popped Camp Kwenback in Pine Lake, deep in the Adirondack Mountains.

Riley asked, “You said your birth mother wrapped you in this?”

Sadie tightened her grip around her knees. She supposed she’d opened the door to questions once she asked if Riley was her birth mother. She couldn’t exactly shut it tight now. But there were risks in telling too much, so she weighed the truth carefully.

“My parents kept that towel in a box with my other baby stuff.” Sadie remembered the little porcelain shoe from the Ohio hospital, painted with the date and time of her birth, along with a first-year calendar full of her mother’s silly comments about emerging teeth and when she first rolled over. “My parents saved all the stuff from the hospital, including that, which was underneath it all.”

“Wow.” Riley made a choking little laugh. “All my parents saved in my baby box was the knit hat that the hospital gave me. That’s the hazard of being the sixth kid. But this…this is kind of nice, isn’t it?” Riley brushed her hand over the towel. “To have something that you know your birth mother gave to you?”

Sadie shrugged. “It’s just a clue.”

“So I take it that your adoption was a closed one?”

“Of course.” Why else would she be sitting here, making such a fool of herself in front of a stranger?

“You haven’t seen your birth certificate.”

“You’ve got to hit the magical age of eighteen before the wizards will unseal it.”

“And your parents?”

Sadie’s jaw tightened. “They told me everything they knew, which wasn’t a lot.”

“Well”—she raised the towel—“you’re quite the resourceful one.”

You don’t know the half of it.
Sadie let go of her knees and dropped her feet flat to the floor. “So,” she said, “even though you’re not who I
thought
you were, maybe you can still help me out.”

Riley didn’t answer right away, absorbed in smoothing the towel while a wrinkle deepened above her brows. Adults thought they were so slick in hiding their feelings, but Sadie could read people. When Sadie had gone to the train station to buy a ticket, she’d taken one look at the faces of the three tellers and knew immediately which one wouldn’t blink an eye about selling an unattended kid a train ticket for someplace five hours away. When she loaded up at the local grocery store, she knew which cashier wouldn’t ask pesky questions about why she was buying so many groceries and how she got the money to do so.

So right now, looking at Riley, Sadie could tell the woman was hesitant about the idea of helping her.

Well, she didn’t come all the way to the middle of nowhere for nothing.

“Fifteen years ago,” Sadie ventured, “a woman must have visited this camp. I’d bet she was pregnant with me.” She gazed up at the rafters again, knowing that once, a long time ago, her mother had stood under them, too. “Someone who maybe even gave birth here, in one of the rooms—”

“I was in college fifteen years ago, Sadie, but I can tell you that the only story of a woman giving birth in this lodge dates back to Prohibition.”

“If you were in college, how would you know it didn’t happen?”

“Pine Lake is a small town.” Riley lifted a brow. “Something like that would have made the rounds for sure. How long have you been looking for your birth mother?”

“A couple of months, maybe.”

Sadie plucked at her wet socks and considered how much more to say. When she was in grammar school, she didn’t think twice about the fact that somewhere in the big, wide world was the mother who’d given birth to her. She was more concerned about whether Santa would ignore her parent’s no video game rule and leave her a Nintendo DS under the tree for Christmas. All she really understood was that she was special because she was adopted. She’d been
chosen
, her mom used to tell her.

Only recently had she come to understand that she’d been
given away
.

“A couple of months, huh?” Riley said. “Aren’t you a little young to be taking on such a difficult search?”

Sadie sighed. If she were just three inches taller, or ten pounds heavier, people wouldn’t give her so much sass. But she’d always been small and skinny no matter how much she ate. “I’ll be fifteen in six weeks. Isn’t there a way to check when a towel went missing?”

“Actually, no.”

“But you keep track, right?”

“A towel is a towel, Sadie. There’s no individual identifier. Here at Camp Kwenback, we just figure out how many have gone missing by the end of the season, and then we order a bunch from a company in Rochester that does the embroidery.”

Rochester.
Sadie frowned. She didn’t realize there could be another place that this towel might have come from.

“Every year,” Riley continued, “we lose some in the wash, we throw the stained ones out, and many a guest has left with a towel or two in their luggage, either unintentionally or as souvenirs.” She waved a hand around the room. “Maybe if my grandparents had searched luggage routinely all those years ago, we could have saved enough in the budget to buy new couches.”

Suddenly Sadie imagined the crowds of people who’d used those towels—lodgers, Riley’s family, friends, employees—and others, too, maybe a whole factory in Rochester. She had assumed that the towel meant something. Now she wondered if the towel was just a piece of cloth that a nurse had grabbed out of a lost-and-found box.

A shadow fell over her and Sadie realized that Riley had stood up.

Riley asked, “Is there someone I could call?”

“Nope.”

“A friend, family?”

Sadie tightened her jaw so she wouldn’t say too much. She probably should just make up a story about her parents camping in the woods. She could tell Riley she’d head back once the rain stopped. Then she could hike into the woods until Riley couldn’t see her anymore, then circle around and set up camp in the farthest cabin. She needed to sleep but most of all she needed to think.

But the words wouldn’t come. She felt odd, light-headed, sort of nauseous, like she’d drunk the hot chocolate and eaten the grilled cheese too fast. And it was weird having Riley standing right in front of her, smelling like vanilla and sugar.

Riley said, “The rain is likely to continue for a while. I’ve got a bunch of empty rooms upstairs. I’ve always found that everything looks better after a hot bath and a good night’s sleep. You want to stay for the night?”

Sadie began to tremble. It felt like months, not weeks, since she lay her head down in her own room and fell asleep to the rumble of cars passing on the street outside. She could imagine the inn’s bed, a real one, not the rain-slick, moldy, plastic-covered mattresses in the last cabin. A bed with a soft pillow under her head instead of her lumpy backpack. Clean sheets in a warm room with no blackflies or mosquitos.

But there was danger in falling asleep. She might wake up to find the police waiting for her.

“The room is free for weather refugees,” Riley said, winking. “Besides, I suspect you could use the sleep. Believe it or not, I know exactly how you feel right now.”

Sadie turned her face away. She’d heard words like that all her life, from social workers, teachers, and the principal at her school. She never understood why people said such things when they couldn’t possibly know.

“Three years ago,” Riley continued, “I asked someone a question very similar to yours, except I was too scared to do it in person.”

Sadie looked up, confused.

“Yes.” Riley pulled a little smile. “I was adopted, too.”