Senseless Acts of Beauty (9 page)

“I’ve been thinking about this for a long time.” Her mother placed both hands on Riley’s shoulders. “I will have my say.”

Her mother’s grip was strong, riveting Riley to the black-and-white laminate floor. Riley went mute.

“When your father and I first started our family, I was so sure I could handle anything that came at me, Riley. I thought I could mold my children like you were all made out of clay. But by the time you became young adults”—she squeezed Riley’s shoulders—“I wondered if I ever had
any
influence with any of you, ever. Sometime along the way, I just figured I’d stop wondering and just do whatever I think is best, whether it’s right or wrong. Like I’m doing today. You can hate me for it later, but I’d hate myself more if I didn’t try.”

The pressure of her grip eased. Her mother stepped back. Then she was gone, the chimes over the front door ringing.

Riley closed her eyes, but it didn’t help. Against the inside of her lids she could still see the tapering point of Declan’s hair on the nape of his neck.

She strode across the black-and-white tiles and tossed her purse on the far end of the red vinyl seat.

“Don’t blame your mother,” he said, settling his cup back on the saucer as she slid in. “Both of us thought this would be easier than me showing up at the camp.”

“Mom always knows best, doesn’t she?”

His cheek twitched. She stifled a pinch of guilt. She had no reason to feel guilty. Showing up in a public place with her mother was an underhanded, manipulative thing for him to do. For maybe the first time in their relationship, she was on the moral high ground.

“Hey, Riley, can I get you something?”

Riley glanced up at Josey’s daughter, April, the twenty-something who ran the place now that her mother had decided to retire to Trinidad. “I’m fine, April. Short on waitresses?”

“I can’t always depend on these college girls.” She hefted the coffeepot. “What’ll it be today?”

“Just coffee.”

April filled the cup. “I’ve got a maple-pecan pie coming right out of the oven.”

“Tempting,” she said, “but I won’t be staying long.”

Declan didn’t respond. He just raised a brow as he looked into his coffee and somehow that old politeness only made Riley feel worse. Declan had always been so well bred, so diplomatic, so kind in the face of what others thought of as her quirks—her hesitance in making even the smallest decisions, her shyness amid his boisterous friends, her obsession with birding. There was good reason for why she’d fallen for him straight out of college. It didn’t help that right now he looked so good, even just wearing a faded Villanova T-shirt over a pair of khaki shorts. It was the easy athletic build, the barber-tamed black hair, the low brow, and the steady blue eyes that made women think of movie stars.

Everybody always told her she’d chosen well.

Riley looked away from those eyes. “Dec, I thought we agreed it was better if we did our talking long distance.”

“If you’d pick up your phone whenever I called, I wouldn’t have to hike up here and conspire with your mother.”

“I get your messages. I’ve called the lawyers whenever they needed something. I’ve done everything you’ve asked.”

“You don’t call me back.”

“There’s nothing left to talk about.”

“Isn’t there?”

He gazed at her with those vivid blue eyes, and whatever moral superiority she had shriveled. Until the day she destroyed their marriage, their life had been ticking along nicely. She’d been pulling down a respectable income, he had a healthy 401(k) plan and had just received a raise at his architectural firm. Only when the keys to Camp Kwenback were dropped into her hands had she realized that their future had been imagined, drafted, and created by his dreams.

Declan leaned forward. “I keep waiting for the lawyer to call me and tell me that this is all over. But he still hasn’t received your signed copies.”

It’d be easier if she could claim those divorce papers were lost in the mail, but the tracking labels were right there on the envelope, sitting on the reservation desk at Camp Kwenback amid the rest of the mail she just couldn’t open because it meant she had to make decisions. She had no rational explanation to give Declan, so she didn’t bother making one up. She dropped her gaze to his hands instead. He’d always had lovely draftsman’s hands, wide-knuckled, long-fingered, flecked with pencil lead, peppered with splinters on the days he visited worksites.

“Riley?”

Mechanically she picked up a spoon. “I’ve been busy.”

“So your mother told me. Three banks have rejected your business plan.”

Thanks, Mom.
“There are a lot of banks in the world.”

“I know the finances. The details were in the divorce papers. After all this time you can’t have much more capital on hand—”

“It’s my business, not yours.”

“I want you to succeed at this, Riley. I really do.”

She didn’t bother to call him out on the lie. He’d just say he’d forgotten how doubtful he’d been after they’d received the news that Riley was the heir to the camp.

“I’m serious.” His fingers flexed around the coffee mug. “I’ve been thinking about this. When your grandparents left you that camp, I guess you must have seen it as an opportunity to run your own business. I was ready for a different future, but I understand the urge.”

She laid her spoon on the saucer and suppressed a sigh. Ambition was Declan’s specialty—it had never been hers. She just wished he could slip into her skin for one moment and see the world through her eyes. Then again, nobody seemed to be able to understand the world through her eyes.

“If you make this camp viable,” he continued, “then you’ll have checked that box. That’s why I want you to succeed. Because after you’ve succeeded, maybe you’ll be willing to move on to other things.”

“I don’t want children, Declan.”

His eyelids twitched like he’d been hit by a blast of sand. He’d heard these words before. The first time she mustered the courage to tell him—a few weeks after their engagement—a smile had flitted across his lips, like surely she must be joking. But she hadn’t been, and she’d braced herself for the condemnation she expected—that sense that she couldn’t possibly be a
natural
woman if she didn’t want to take the next logical step in life.

The truth was that she understood the sacrifices a woman made when she committed to a family. With three sisters, she’d seen up close the full-body, twenty-four-hour, never-ending immersion, the crazy three a.m. feedings, the emergency room visits, the moments when you thought you lost them, the fears that kept you up all through the night. Society questioned why a woman would choose to be childless, when considering the stress, level of commitment, and sacrifices involved in raising children, Riley always thought the real scrutiny should be about why a woman would choose to have babies at all.

But poor Declan. She must have seemed like a natural mother, having been raised the youngest child in a big family, growing up among dozens of cousins, working as the children’s activity coordinator at Camp Kwenback from the age of fourteen on, saving enough money from babysitting gigs to afford her own car at eighteen. She adored other people’s children. She loved being a godmother, a favorite aunt. She’d known the truth about her feelings for a long time, but Declan had convinced her that her feelings would change. He didn’t want children, either, at least not right away, he said. But that urge to have kids snuck up on everyone eventually, didn’t it? She found herself thinking maybe he was right. Maybe someday she’d feel that womb pull of maternal instinct, that fecund hormonal rush that made people ooh and aah over newborn babies, that overwhelming need to breed.

Riley figured that if she hadn’t felt that burning urge in bed beside this wonderful man, she likely never would.

He said, suddenly, “I just made partner.”

“Oh?”

“Effective last month. No corner office yet, but…someday.”

“Congratulations, Dec.” She felt a rush of warmth. “I know how much you wanted this.”

“It means a good step-up in pay.”

“Don’t worry, I won’t amend the papers—”

“It means that you wouldn’t have to work.” He brushed imaginary crumbs off the red laminate table. “You could stay home. I could take care of you, until you…decide.”

Riley looked at the face of the man she’d vowed to love through sickness and health, till death do us part, and felt a twist of regret. Declan wasn’t wrong. There was a part of her that still wanted to return to their lovely apartment with a sliver of a view of the East River, to settle into the easy routine of sharing coffee in the morning, walking to the subway together, coming home after picking up Thai food at the corner hole-in-the-wall, watching home improvement shows and talking about the dream house he wanted to build someday—yes, one part of her, deep inside, still wanted to burrow in someone else’s nest, to have someone else to make all the hard decisions for her.

But she’d spent a lifetime doing what her family wanted her to do, and then what her husband wanted her to do, like a mute brown wren tumbling helplessly in the gale-force winds of other people’s advice.

She reached across the table and took his hand, warm, just like she remembered. “My feelings are not going to change.”

“You’re not your birth mother, Riley.”

Riley froze. The words had a taste like vinegar on her tongue. She tugged her hand away, but he just tightened his grip.

“You have a mother who loves you,” he said. “She’ll do anything to make you happy, even if it pisses you off—”

“Stop.” She yanked her hand so hard that, when he released it, she slammed her elbow into the back of her seat. “I don’t want to talk about this.”

“You never do.”

Of course she didn’t. Who would want to talk about a biological mother who’d given her away with all the care of putting a TV on the curb for recycling?

“I shouldn’t have pushed so hard,” he said, reaching across, trying to touch her as she dug out her wallet. “That was my mistake. But your birth mother is in the past, Riley, and you’re letting her destroy your future—”

“This isn’t about my birth mother.” Not in the way he thought, anyway. “This is about us.”

“Weren’t we good together, Riley—”

“I can’t do this.”

Riley threw a couple of dollars next to the coffee. She slipped out of the booth and made a wide berth so Declan couldn’t grab her arm. He called her name but her legs kept moving. She ignored the looks cast her way by the folks at the counter as she pushed out through the front door and into the sunshine.

She was fumbling in her purse to find her car key when he finally caught up to her in the side parking lot.

“Riley, stop.”

“You shouldn’t have come all the way up here.”

“You’re just scared.”

“I’m not scared. I’ve never been scared.”

“Then why haven’t you signed those papers?”

She found her key in her purse and pressed the button to unlock the car door. The beep echoed in the parking lot. She slipped into her car, closed the door, and put it in gear. As she backed out of her parking spot, she came up beside him. She pressed the button to lower the window.

She wanted to yell at him to get a wife who wanted the same things that he wanted—the satisfying career, the domestic life, the dinner parties with colleagues. She wanted to tell him to find a sane, smart woman who’d decorate his dream house with care and style and enjoyment, not with odd red-lacquered knobs, not with wallpaper covered in roosters. A man like Declan deserved someone who shared his ambitions, someone very different from herself.

She deserved something different, too, if she could just figure out whatever the heck that was.

“Declan,” she said, her heart filling her throat, “I’ll get to the papers. Don’t ambush me like this again.”

O
n the beach of Bay Roberts, young boys raced down the length of the dock to hurl themselves into the water, only to swim back to shore and do it again. A clique of teenage girls planted their blankets close to the lifeguard’s chair, talking behind their hands and giggling and trying not to get caught looking up at him. Toddlers struggled to stay upright on the sand, clutching pink plastic shovels, followed by their mothers. White clouds like cotton candy floated across the sky.

Sadie lay on her stomach on a towel with her chin propped on her hands. Nearby, under an umbrella, three kids sat in front of their mother playing Old Maid. They hid their smiles behind oversize playing cards while their mother tapped her chin and screwed up her face as she eyed the backs of their cards. The mother reached out and pulled a card out of the middle boy’s hand, looked at it, gaped, and then rolled back on the towel in mock horror. The boys squealed in high-pitched unison, bouncing and laughing.

A weak, shivery sensation started in her stomach. It was like when she picked up that photo of her parents and held it real close to her face. In the picture her mom’s and dad’s smiles were fixed, but Mom’s hair was all messed up like the wind was tossing it. When Sadie brought the photo real close, she could imagine that wind blowing. She could almost hear her mother laughing. Sometimes she swore she smelled a sweet scent, an apple and dirt scent, the kind that used to cling to Daddy’s clothes.

Sadie sat up and swung her legs under her. It didn’t do any good to think about Mom and Dad. It wouldn’t do any good to think of Nana, either, alone in the hospital. If she spent too much time thinking about them, she’d end up brooding in a corner somewhere. She had to think about her future while she still had time to make it for herself. So she opened her composition notebook and flipped through the pages—eyeballing the scribbled notes, sketches of the Camp Kwenback logo, eye color inheritance diagrams—until she found the first empty page.

She flicked the end of the pen, seeking other subjects.

Sadie lifted her pen from the paper as a thought struck her. She really had to sign onto one of the public computers at the library. Izzy had promised not to say anything, but if Sadie didn’t send her a message soon, her friend might get all scared and do something stupid.

“Writing poetry?”

A shadow fell over her. She looked up to find that Tess-woman, that interfering friend of Riley’s who’d threatened to call the police. She was dressed in cutoff jeans and a tank top with her face half hidden behind a pair of sunglasses. Except for the baseball cap, Sadie thought Tess looked like the singer Pink on an angry day.

“Poetry sucks.” Sadie closed her notebook. “The disguise isn’t working, you know.”

“Disguise?”

“Riley told me there were people in Pine Lake who wouldn’t be happy to see you’re back.” Sadie pulled an imaginary cap. “A hat and a pair of glasses aren’t going to hide those tats.”

“Pine Lake hasn’t seen these tats.” Tess’s flip-flops hit the ground and then Tess did, too, dropping down in the sand right next to Sadie like she’d been invited or something. “So have you found any likely suspects?”

“Suspects?”

“Riley told me you’re looking for your biological mom.”

Sadie stilled. A tingling swept up the back of her neck. Riley shouldn’t have said anything. The fact that she did made Sadie want to curl in on herself, like the turtle she’d seen the kids playing with by the reeds. Instead she pressed her notebook against her chest and gave the woman her best back-off glare. But all Sadie could see in the shiny surface of the woman’s sunglasses was her own distorted reflection.

“You’re in Pine Lake, Sadie.” Tess shrugged a shoulder. “It’s tough to keep a secret here.”

Sadie turned away and squinted over the water like it didn’t matter, though she couldn’t help wondering what else Riley had told this woman.

“I’ve been away from this town for fifteen years, but I’ve been recognized at least twice since I arrived.” Tess wrapped her arms around her knees. “Now the whole town knows I’m here. I give it a day or two before folks start asking who the young redhead is who’s hanging around Camp Kwenback.”

“Riley’s got my back.”

“And I’ve got hers.”

“What’s your problem?” Sadie reached for her backpack. “I’ve got nothing to do with you.”

“You’re putting my friend in a difficult situation. And you’re putting yourself in a worse one.”

Sadie fumbled for the zipper. “You don’t know anything about my situation.”

“Have you thought about what you’re going to do when you’re done here?” Tess rocked herself back so the sun fell on her face. “There’s still enough summer left to stay on the northern circuit, but big cities are better to hide in. Will you be hopping a train to Buffalo? Or will you be jumping the freight train that cuts through the southernmost part of town, the one that goes direct to Cleveland?”

Sadie twitched at the mention of that Ohio city, but she figured it was just coincidence that Tess mentioned it. No way did Tess know about her cousins in Ohio, because she hadn’t even told Riley about them.

“I’d advise against Cleveland,” Tess continued. “You can usually depend upon a train station for a safe public place to sleep, but not that one. Not while I was last there, anyway. I had to dodge a lot of junkies and some tough guys looking for lost young girls to pimp out. And the Dumpster-diving wasn’t so good, either. You’d do better in Cincinnati—”

“I’ve got no reason to go to Cincinnati.” Sadie shoved her notebook into her backpack and zipped it back up. “Or Cleveland or any of those places.”

“Yeah, it’s all the same, right? Whether you go to St. Louis in November or New Orleans in December. It’s just the weather that’s different. Every day you wake up, beg for change, hang out, and then, if you’re lucky, score some happy-happy.”

Sadie eyeballed her. “Oh, I get it now. This is the scared-straight talk, right?”

Oddly, Tess laughed. “Someone tried that on me once. Didn’t work. So just consider this a little advice from one runaway to another.”

“I don’t go anywhere near drugs.”

“Glad to hear that.”

Tess’s smile was thin and Sadie couldn’t help but squint at her more closely. When she’d first seen Tess at Camp Kwenback, she’d pinned her as a hard-working woman. It showed in the ropiness of her arms, built like she used them all the time doing something real physical, like the guys always fixing the roads under the elevated train in Queens. The woman had a face that didn’t like to smile, and Sadie thought she might work a little too hard to radiate hard-assness. But a runaway? Being a runaway implied being young and a little clueless, and looking at this woman, Sadie just couldn’t imagine that.

“You’ve got me all wrong.” Sadie swept the backpack over her shoulder. “I’m no runaway. I’m here for a reason.”

“Then you’ll be going home soon, right? Because there’s nothing out here that’s worth leaving home for.”

“Depends on the home, doesn’t it?”

Tess turned her face away to look down the far end of the Bay. “You’ve got me there.”

Sadie flexed her hand over the strap of her backpack, hesitating. She didn’t want to leave the beach, but the library closed early on Wednesdays and there wasn’t anything else she could do except wander around town. And it was nice on the lakeshore, warm and quiet. She’d come here to write descriptions of the folks on the beach, but she also had a couple chapters of
War and Peace
left to read. She didn’t like the idea of this woman running her off.

Then Tess murmured, “I know why you like this place.”

“Who wouldn’t like this place?” Sadie squinted across the shore, to the bristly island in the middle, the one she could see so sharply with Riley’s borrowed binoculars. “Cool water, soft sand.”
Cute lifeguard.

“This side of town is a hell of a lot nicer than Cannery Row, where I grew up.” Tess let go of her knees and threw her hands back to support herself. “I imagine Disneyland would be like this, full of clean-scrubbed people.”

Sadie had been to Disney World once. She remembered it because it was noisy, full of people and scary robotic creatures in the dark.

“I used to sit right here, too.” Tess shifted her butt deeper in the sand like she was putting down roots or something. “I used to smoke cigarettes and watch everyone having a good time. I used to wonder why the hell I couldn’t have been born into a nice, shiny, happy family.”

A startling thought popped into Sadie’s mind. “Are you adopted?”

“Nope.”

“Then stop talking like you were.”

“There were plenty of times I wished I had been.”

She groaned aloud, not caring if it was rude, because what did this woman know about having a huge part of yourself kept secret forever?

“The first time I wished that,” Tess said, “was when the cops arrested my mother. They called the house in the middle of the night, looking for an adult to come fetch her from the holding pen.”

“Wow. TMI.”

“Public knowledge.” Tess shifted her weight onto one arm as she swept her hand across the expanse of the lakeshore. “Talk to any of the locals and they’d tell you the same story about Mrs. Hendrick.”

“Should I break out the tiny violin?”

Tess’s lips stretched into a grim smile. Then she motioned toward the mother and three kids, still playing the card game. “Do you think she’s a possibility?”

Sadie squinted down the far end of the beach, like the question wasn’t worth the bother.

“A woman like that,” Tess persisted, “the kind who takes her kids to a sandy lakeside on a midweek afternoon…she’s your ideal birth mother, isn’t she?”

Sadie shot to her feet, not caring that she kicked some sand on Tess. Her spine straightened like someone had stuck a ruler up her back. “You can talk, talk, talk all you want, but you’re not getting rid of me. Not before I find my birth mother.”

Sadie realized how stupid she sounded, like a little girl looking for Mommy, but she couldn’t help herself. This woman couldn’t possibly understand. Even Izzy didn’t understand. Sadie wasn’t sure that even Riley understood, not completely, because Riley’s adoptive parents were still alive.

Sadie’s first vivid memory was of her mother. Sadie had been strapped into something, a toddler seat or a bouncy chair, she supposed. She had a stuffed rabbit in her hand. It had pink fur and Xs for eyes. She knew the memory was real and not something she’d thought up later because she still had this toy, Bunzy, back in her room at Nana’s, now gray and worn and sour-smelling.

But in her memory Bunzy smelled like vanilla. In her memory Bunzy was in her hand, and then Bunzy was gone. She must have cried out because, a little while later, her mother came into the room. Sadie didn’t remember anything her mother said, just the tone of her voice, the way she made her forget about the rabbit. And then suddenly Bunzy was in her hand again. But when she looked up, her mother had disappeared.

“Sadie.”

Sadie flinched. The Tess-woman’s voice was soft and round. At first she couldn’t believe the voice had come out of a hard mouth like that. But Tess was looking up at her from under the bill of her cap, and the sun at that angle cut through the lenses of the sunglasses, so Sadie could see that Tess was looking at her—searching her face—with the strangest, tightest, and oddest of expressions.

“We all want perfect parents,” Tess said. “Hell, I did, too. But the truth is, your birth mother may not be one of them.”

Sadie swallowed down her own sigh. She had had this conversation with the guidance counselor at her middle school, the social worker who followed up once a year after she’d been transferred into her nana’s custody, and all the well-meaning adults who felt they knew what was best for her—to wait, always wait, until she was mature enough to handle the “possibility of failed expectations,” and what they called “the inevitable emotional upheaval.”

One set of parents dead and a grandmother in a nursing home. Uh-uh, don’t talk to Sadie Tischler about emotional upheaval.

“I’d settle for a mother who just didn’t disappear.” Sadie wiggled her feet into her flip-flops and turned away.

“Sadie.”

Over her shoulder she barked, “What?”

“Ask Riley.”

“Ask Riley
what
?”

“Ask Riley what happened when she found her own birth mother.”