“Sure, I’m game.”
Sadie spoke the words lightly, but there was nothing calm about her nerves. Riley was looking at her like second period had just ended and it was time to hand over the test. Here comes the grilling. Sadie just wished she’d left her backpack in a safer place than her upstairs room so she could make—if necessary—a quick escape.
Riley headed down the porch stairs, sweeping up a paintbrush and a small can of paint perched on the rail. “The markers on the red trail need freshening,” she explained, as she headed full stride across the back lawn. “It’s a bit more than a mile, there and back. Are you up for that?”
“Bring it on.” Sadie put her head down and did her best to keep up with Riley’s athletic pace, waiting until they were out of earshot of Mrs. Clancy before launching into a safe topic in the hope of avoiding a dangerous one. “So,” she said, “is Mrs. Clancy a relative of yours?”
“No. Why do you ask?”
“You’re feeding her. That’s a little weird, in a hotel, isn’t it? I mean, do you cook for all your guests?”
Not that there were many, Sadie noted. In all the time she’d been checking out the place, she’d seen no more than four.
“Mrs. Clancy is a special case,” Riley said. “Her whole family used to visit Camp Kwenback every summer for the last two weeks in August. The Clancys have been guests for decades. Mrs. Clancy still has good memories of those summers so her family sends her here for a couple of weeks every year. But there was a time,” she added, “when we used to feed breakfast and dinner to more than fifty guests and ten employees. We didn’t bother with lunch because most folks would be canoeing on the lake or hiking through the woods or swimming at Bay Roberts. They’d go into town and get some of Josey’s maple pecan pie or bag a lunch on their own.”
Riley’s description pretty much synced with what Sadie had supposed long before she’d come here. She’d spent late evenings waiting for her slow computer to upload all those pictures on the Camp Kwenback website: photos of folks eating on tables under the shelter of the boathouse, swinging on ropes in the woods, fishing in rowboats just off shore, and gathering in the main lodge by the fire.
Pictures that had convinced her that the woman who’d wrapped her in the Camp Kwenback towel had to be someone who really loved this place. How else did a towel from some Adirondack camp end up in an Ohio hospital?
Then Sadie thought of another subject she could bring up to avoid the grilling a little longer.
“So, Riley,” Sadie said, as Riley paused before a tree, “do you have a library card?”
“A library card?” Riley ran her fingers over the traces of pale red paint remaining on the furrowed bark. “I guess all those potboilers and romance paperbacks in the lodge aren’t to your taste?”
“Oh, I’ll read anything.” The longer and thicker the book, the better. “But I thought I might go to the reference desk of the Pine Lake library and look at the birth announcements in local newspapers or page through some old high school yearbooks.”
“To look for your birth mother.”
The instinct to make some sassy remark was strong but Sadie squished it down. She still needed something from Riley.
Two somethings, really: a library card and time.
Riley pulled at the top of a can of paint until the lid popped. “Don’t you think that’s a stretch, Sadie?”
“Did you forget you’re talking to a girl who chased down a logo on a towel?”
“Yeah, but what do you expect to find?” Riley dipped the brush into the can and then painted one solid, thick line. “They don’t exactly make birth announcements for babies placed for adoption. As for the yearbooks, you’re assuming your birth mother was a local teenager. You’re going to have to try to look past the hairstyles and bad clothing choices for any vague resemblance—”
“It’s a start.”
Riley dipped the paintbrush back in the can and did another coat. Sadie wondered if Riley remembered that you didn’t need a library card to use the reference section. You did need a library card to use the computers though, and Sadie really had to find a way to update her online status before her friend Izzy got nervous and started asking questions about her to the wrong people.
“Listen.” Sadie climbed on a log just off the path, throwing out her arms to keep balance. “I’ve been thinking about this for a long time. I figure that the person who had that towel—my birth mother—could be someone who came here every year for vacation. Someone who loved it, like Mrs. Clancy does. But I figure it’s even more likely that it was someone local. Someone more like yourself.” Her face warmed. What an ass she’d made out of herself last night, half blubbering with the hope that Riley would be the one. “The town Fourth of July parties used to be held at Camp Kwenback every year, right? And the Labor Day picnics?”
“Wow.” Riley scraped the brush against the inside edge of the can. “I guess you saw the photos upstairs.”
Sadie nodded. Old photos of Camp Kwenback lined the hallway on the upper floor. She’d fogged them up with her own breath this morning, looking for any teeny-tiny face that resembled hers. “My point is,” Sadie said, hopping off the end of the log into a cushion of leaves, “that the library is a good place to continue my search. But…I just need a little time.”
“Ah.”
Sadie tried to read the meaning of Riley’s “ah.”’ She watched as Riley took care in settling the metal top back onto the paint can, tapping it in good with the butt end of the paintbrush.
“I’m not a charity case, you know.” Sadie kicked around a few leaves. “I can pay.”
Riley looked up sharply.
“I’ve been saving up.” She squinted back down the path they’d come on, not in search of a glimpse of the lodge, but just to dodge that look. “I spent a long time planning this.”
“So you did.”
Riley picked up the can by the handle and headed back on the trail, falling into that athletic, loping stride again. Sadie had to walk double fast to keep up, which she did, just to stay beside her so she could glance at Riley from beneath her lashes and try to figure out what the woman was thinking.
“Here’s the thing,” Riley finally said, exhaling deeply. “Most people wait until they’re eighteen to find their birth mother. Then they request a copy of the original birth certificate.”
“Is that what you did?”
Riley stumbled a bit, but Sadie didn’t notice any roots on the ground.
“I was a lot older when I started my search.” Riley gazed in the far distance, though Sadie didn’t see anything ahead but trees and more fuzzy trees. “When I was your age, I was terrified my birth mother would show up and steal me away from my family.”
Sadie remembered that Izzy had said something like that once, before Izzy really understood what the “international” meant in international adoptions, and thus how far away her Chinese birth mother really lived.
“Life was good in my house,” Riley continued. “I have five brothers and sisters. I was on the softball team in high school. I spent summers at this camp, playing with the come-aways—the visitors—and then I worked here as a teenager. I was terrified that a stranger would show up, call herself my mother, and disrupt all that.”
“It didn’t happen, did it?”
“No. But my feelings about my birth mother were so different from yours at the same age…I’m just worried that you’ve set out on this quest for the wrong reasons.”
Here we go.
“The truth is, every teenager looks at herself in the mirror and wonders where she came from.”
Sadie rolled her eyes.
“I saw my sisters do the same thing,” Riley continued, “and they were brought up by their own biological parents—”
“They were just being idiots.” Sadie caught herself. “No offense or anything.”
“None taken.” Riley’s smile was a little sad. “Right now one of them, my sister Olivia, is acting like an incredible idiot.”
“What I meant,” Sadie rushed on, “is that they don’t have any reason to ask those questions. But you and me, we’ve got a mystery in our past, so we have a reason to be curious.”
“Oh, yeah, curiosity. I used to imagine that my father was a professional baseball player. Did you ever do that?”
“Mine was a professor.” She dragged the toe of her sneaker in the needles to kick up a spray. “In my head I could see him, wearing a tweedy coat, round glasses, in a house full of books.”
Riley said, “Once you find your natural parents, you know, you won’t be able to imagine anymore.”
“Imagining is for little kids.”
“And then you’ll get the answer to that other question, the harder one.” Riley looked down at her. “You know the one.”
Why was I given up?
Sadie nodded. The question didn’t need to be spoken aloud. She heard it in her head all the time. The fact that Riley had the same question in her head made Sadie tremble a little, like she and Riley were the two tines of the tuning fork Mrs. Schein sometimes struck in music class.
But that didn’t change her mind.
“Here’s what I figure,” Sadie said. “When I was ten years old, I really, really, wanted a puppy.” Sadie remembered the pokey, unsteady mutt she’d wanted so badly, rust brown, licking her hand through the cage at the animal shelter. “But I knew that I couldn’t take care of a dog. Not at that time, anyway, no matter how badly I wanted to.”
Riley paused by another faintly marked tree. “A puppy is a lot of responsibility.”
“Yeah, I heard that a lot.” Sadie could still hear the puppy plaintively yipping as Izzy carried his brother away. Sadie’s arms had felt so empty. “Later that night, while I was lying in bed trying to figure out a way I could keep that puppy, thinking about how much I wanted him…it just kind of hit me. Like when you play dodge ball, and you get hit right in the stomach and you can’t breathe for a little while? My birth mother must have felt the same way I did when I had to leave the puppy behind.”
The can of paint opened with a subtle pop. Sadie watched as Riley swirled the bristles of the brush inside, frowning. She straightened to sweep the color in a block over the old, faded paint. And then Riley stopped painting. She crossed her arms with the brush still in her hand, as the paint oozed to the end and dripped on the forest floor.
“If you find your birth mother,” Riley said, “what are you going to do then?”
“What do you mean?”
“You know you can’t just change one set of parents for another.”
“Like, duh.”
“Your family may seem like the enemy now—”
“Oh, please.”
As if her issues had to do with parents who refused to buy her a cell phone, or sign up for a social media account, or buy a hot pair of sneakers. As if Riley knew anything about what she was dealing with.
But, of course, Riley didn’t. Sadie hadn’t told her a thing. It dawned on Sadie that the best way to get Riley to do exactly what she wanted was to tell Riley some small part of the truth.
Sadie closed her eyes and took a long, deep breath.
“I couldn’t exchange my parents,” she said, “even if I wanted to.”
“Oh?”
“I don’t have parents anymore.” She balled her hands into fists. “Both of them are dead.”
Chapter Six
Tess lurked by the sliding glass doors of the main lodge, pressed against the wall in the shadow of the curtains, watching her natural daughter stride behind Riley as they both headed toward the lodge.
The last time Tess had laid eyes on Sadie, her daughter had been only three days old. Tess had been so loopy from pain medication that she’d somehow convinced herself if she just swaddled her daughter right, then the Camp Kwenback towel would protect her baby from all harm. But Sadie kept stretching her legs—plump with rolls—as Tess tried to bundle her. The baby girl inadvertently nudged away all the careful folding, making Tess laugh, making the whole process a wonderful game. Just when Tess thought she’d finally done it right, the nurse had swept in, startling Tess, startling Sadie. Sadie had let out a cry that released a slow, sliding weight in Tess’s chest that she later recognized as her first milk dropping.
Help me, Tess had said to the nurse, who stood there implacable, holding out her arms.
Help me. Tess had fumbled to gather Sadie and all her twisted blankets close.
Help me.
“Hey, there you are.”
Riley stepped through the sliding door, leaving it open for the shadow coming in behind her.
“You were starting to worry me, Tess.” Riley toed off a sneaker. “How’s the headache?”
Tess pressed her thumb against the throb pulsing behind her right eye socket, the medicine-muffled remnant of the migraine that had descended with a vengeance last night. Her palm obscured her vision—and her face—as Sadie stepped into the room.
“It could be better,” Tess said, blinking. “I could use some industrial-strength joe.”
“I’ve got some of that made already, as well as some cranberry muffins in the kitchen. Let me just take care of Sadie here. Sadie, don’t bother taking off your sneakers, it’ll only take me a minute to fetch the library card.”
Riley set off toward the reception desk. Tess held her breath as she lowered her arm and faced her daughter. She tensed against a thunderclap of recognition, a lightning flash of womb-deep acknowledgment of shared blood and body and bone, expecting it, dreading it, and hoping to God that it wouldn’t happen.
Then the reality of Sadie came at her in a rush: The sharp jaw, the narrow shoulders, the wide cheekbones just starting to emerge under the rounded face she recognized from the social media photos. Sadie’s nostrils flared as if she sensed she was under perusal. She crouched to tighten the laces of her sneakers, the ridge of her spine visible under the ribbed tank top. Her hair was a bright red, the legacy of an aunt Tess had only seen in pictures in her childhood home—her mother’s only sister, the one who’d died in her teens.
Sadie’s ponytail dangled with bead charms.
Tess had rehearsed a little speech last night as she struggled to sleep, and now it stuttered out, her voice artificially high. “Sadie, is it? Is this another niece, Riley?”
“No, she’s a guest,” Riley said, from where she dug into some drawers across the room. “Sadie, this is my friend Tess. Tess, Sadie. Tess and I go way, way back to our high school days.”
“Sadie.” Tess spoke the word like it was foreign, like she hadn’t rolled it over a thousand times in her mouth. “That’s not a name you hear often.”
“My parents met each other at a Sadie Hawkins dance.”
Her daughter’s voice was monotone and husky low, as if the girl was reciting something she’d memorized by rote.
“Are they around here right now?” Tess asked. “Your parents?”
“Nope.”
Sadie’s reply was hard on the p and offered up no other explanation. Tess didn’t really need an explanation. She’d learned many months after it happened that Sadie’s parents had died in a car accident, a wreck on the interstate six years ago involving an eighteen-wheeler like the ones Tess drove across North Dakota.
Then Sadie stood up, sweeping up the backpack poised by the door. The girl gave her a baleful look, and with a gut kick, Tess realized that the eyes Sadie turned upon her were pale green—green like alfalfa fields in the early spring when the shoots first rise out of the ground—and without stepping any closer, Tess knew there would be a rust ring around those pupils.
Those were her mother’s eyes.
Just then the migraine shot a shiv through her skull, a cold, sharp pain that buried deep in her brain.
Sadie said, “Hey, are you all right?”
Tess squeezed the skin between her nose and brow, hoping Sadie didn’t notice that it was the sight of Sadie’s green eyes that had cut right to the soft unprotected pith of her, cracking t
he shell of numbness she’d spent fifteen years developing.
“Tess gets migraines,” Riley explained as she approached and handed Sadie a card. “The library’s only open for a few hours today, so you’d best head into town now. You can take one of the bikes in the barn.”
“Okay…thanks.”
And then Sadie was gone, her shadow slipping out the back door and into the sunshine as swiftly as if she’d gone up in smoke.
“Wow.” Riley came close, folding her arms and peering at her in concern. “You really don’t look so good.”
Tess closed her eyes and fought to pull her shattered self together. “About that coffee…?”
“Right.”
Tess stumbled after Riley, resisting the urge to glance out the sliding back doors, telling herself the worst was over because she’d made it through the initial contact and Sadie hadn’t recognized her. She told herself that it was good that Sadie hadn’t recognized her, even as she felt some lonely ghost of herself peel away to trail the young girl toward the barn.
She’d been lucky, she thought, as she pressed her thumb against her eye socket. She shouldn’t risk another face-to-face. She had to get this wayward runaway back to her home before Sadie got herself in real trouble. And Tess had to do it without revealing herself, something she could do only if she played her cards right with Riley.
So she followed Riley into the kitchen, which looked exactly the same as it had all those years ago, right down to the long butcher-block table and the battered white cabinets. Tess turned and gripped the edge of the table. With a little push, she lifted her backside onto it.
“Ancient reflex,” Tess said, catching Riley’s over-the-shoulder grin. “I don’t see any health inspectors around.”
“No health inspectors. This is no longer a commercial kitchen.” Riley poured the last of the coffee into an old mug emblazoned with the faded letters CK. “And keeping up to code is the least of my worries these days.”
Senseless Acts of Beauty Page 5
