Senseless Acts of Beauty

by Lisa Verge Higgins

  Tess sat back in the chair, willing there to be a hit. A few Sadies popped up, but none of them were her Sadie, and the hourglass still spun. It spun and spun and spun. It felt as if it were spinning her anger into a tighter ball just under her ribs. What kind of family didn’t keep tabs on a fourteen-year-old girl? No matter what lies Sadie might have told to shake free of her guardians, wouldn’t they have checked on the “friends” whom Sadie was spending the summer with? Wouldn’t they have expected an occasional phone call? How much effort did it really take to track a teenager these days? Tess herself had managed it over the years just by connecting with Sadie through social media. To Sadie, Tess was Mindy, a quiet ninth-grader who lived in Minnesota with two dogs, someone who friended her because of the pictures of Sadie’s cool origami. Mindy rarely posted, but she occasionally “liked” one of Sadie’s pictures, and she sure did monitor that page. Mindy had pinned the exact moment that Sadie decided it was time to hunt down her biological mother. It was written right there, a plain text post, blinking.

  I’m not waiting anymore, Izzy. I’m leaving today to find her. You won’t hear from me for a while, not until I can get to a computer again.

  The hourglass stopped. She scanned the list twice, sighing. None of these Sadies were her Sadie.

  Tess tried a different set of search parameters. Her anger at the Tischler family was becoming a burn under her sternum. She kept thinking about the bundles of photos she’d reviewed while under the care of the adoption agency all those years ago. Tess hadn’t even wanted to look at them when she first stumbled into the hospital, half-starved and five months pregnant with a child she wasn’t supposed to be carrying. But the adoption agency preferred open and semi-open adoptions, and the adoption counselor didn’t want to hear when Tess insisted on a closed adoption, sealed, done, forever. The folks at the agency were feeding her and clothing her and giving her a place to stay that wasn’t behind a garbage dump under the dubious shelter of a fire escape with one or another boyfriend of the moment. The counselors kept telling her that she’d feel differently after the baby was born. They urged her to make an adoption plan. So they left laminated photo albums from potential adoptive parents on her bedside table. They left DVDs by the television. Bored and constantly under curfew, she’d page through those pictures of happy couples, pristine homes, sweeping lawns, educational wooden toys, TV-ready versions of families too perfect to exist.

  Tess knew what these airbrushed, prepackaged lives were for. They were meant to give the birth mothers some sense that they were handing their precious babies over to Mary Poppins—and not Ted Bundy. They were meant to give the birth mothers some measure of comfort.

  The screen refreshed. No hits again.

  Damn it.

  Tess pulled the chair closer to the desk. Think think think. Someone in the Tischler family had to be looking for Sadie. She paged through their photos in her mind, trying to remember the relatives. She hadn’t known the family was called Tischler when she first looked through their leather scrapbook. She discovered that only later, talking to another pregnant girl at the agency who was looking at some of the same profiles. This ever-weeping sixteen-year-old had opted for an open adoption. She recognized the portfolio Tess had been looking at, referring to it as the Tischler photo album. Then she wrinkled her nose and called them weird.

  Tess had known them only as George and Rose, whose getting to know us letter talked about how long their family had lived on their apple orchard. The album was full of black-and-white pictures of pale-faced ancestors with their pants pulled up above their ribs, of women with wild, curly hair, laughing with their mouths open. There were pictures of parties held in the orchard, checkered tablecloths on old picnic tables, men with pipes, and generations of soft-bodied relatives laughing over pie with friends. Their opening letter was a chronicle of Tischler genealogy coming down to its very last twig.

  But what seized Tess in a way she didn’t understand were the pictures of the family’s dried apple doll collection. And the shots they took every winter of the snowmen they dressed in sequins and feathers. She couldn’t stop looking at their quirky autumn display of hipster scarecrows in thrift-store tuxedos.

  Such strange, senseless acts of whimsy.

  “No luck?”

  Tess startled. She glanced up to see Rodriguez leaning in the doorway. She shot a glance at the clock and realized it had been over an hour since she’d sat down to search. She had an odd feeling that he’d been standing there for a while.

  She closed the computer window. “No luck. Maybe she was just a kid walking in the rain.”

  “Or you’re seeing ghosts.”

  “Whatever.” She stood up and slipped around the desk. “It was big of you to help out, Rod, though I can’t say it was a pleasure—”

  “You’re not even going to ask?”

  Tess approached the door but he made no effort to move aside. She met his eye, and her stomach did a looping drop.

  She hadn’t come here to talk about this.

  “Come on,” he said. “Aren’t you in the least bit curious?”

  “Nope.”

  “I figured that’s why you made up this flimsy excuse about a runaway.” Rodriguez still had a gaze that could cut through bone. “Just so you could access my old files, see how things stood after all this time.”

  “I didn’t touch your files.”

  “Not even the Hendrick file that I left sitting right on the desktop?”

  She hadn’t looked at the desktop. She didn’t want to know anything. But now she remembered how he’d hesitated earlier, before he opened the window of the missing children database, as if he wanted her to see something on the screen.

  Her ribs contracted. “It’s a cold case, Rodriguez.”

  “Not necessarily—”

  “The statute of limitations has already passed.”

  “So you’ve done your research.”

  “I’m gainfully employed and a taxpaying citizen. What is past—is over.”

  “I know you don’t believe that.”

  Oh, but she did. She stepped right up to him. She looked into those hard eyes, into the face of the man who’d thrown her in cuffs and subjected her to dozens of scared-straight talks. She looked at the man she’d laughed at, even while he was fingerprinting her, and spoke her mind.

  “Just leave it alone, Rodriguez. Let the muck stay on the bottom of the pond.”

  Chapter Nine

  When Riley went searching for Tess, she found her friend perched on a stump outside the last of the cabins, her arms banded around her knees, rocking. Dappled light flowed over Tess’s colorful tattoos. Riley thought she looked like a hummingbird, suspended but anxious with thrumming.

  “Hey,” Riley said as she came close, “you’re up early.”

  “Old habit.” Tess let go of her knees, then tucked a pack of cigarettes into the breast pocket of her denim button-down shirt. “When I’m working, the earlier I’m on the road, the quicker my route is done. I can’t seem to shake the schedule, even on vacation.”

  “How’s the migraine?”

  “Better.”

  Riley reserved comment. She had a suspicion those migraines could be summoned at will. Her and Tess’s friendship had always been an uncertain thing, born as they were in the same town but worlds apart. Riley didn’t want this dispute over her resident runaway to drive a wedge between them.

  “If you’ve got a minute,” Riley said, “I’d like to show you something.”

  Tess snorted. “Last time I heard you say that, you showed me a box full of baby birds.”

  Riley remembered that spring when a clutch of fledgling starlings had been knocked out of their nest during a storm. “When I find them hopping around here now, I just put them back in their nests.”

  “Such a softie.”

  “It doesn’t always work. Half the time their nests are in pieces on the ground.”

  “Still,” Tess said, brushing off her jeans as she stood up fro
m the stump, “it’s always a good idea to return ‘fledglings’ to wherever they belong.”

  Tess looked at her from under the swoop of those bangs, and Riley suddenly remembered that hummingbirds were believed to be the reincarnated spirits of Aztec warriors.

  “You and I are talking about different kinds of fledglings, I think.” Riley gave her a sideways squint. “We seem to be talking across each other a lot lately.”

  “What we have here is an honest difference of opinion.”

  “Our little runaway isn’t any trouble.” Riley turned toward the path, gesturing for Tess to follow her. “You’ve noticed that, right?”

  Tess fell into pace beside her. “I haven’t seen her much.”

  “She’s sitting in the kitchen right now polishing off blueberry pancakes while she reads War and Peace.”

  “Can’t say I ever cracked that book.”

  “I’m just saying, I can’t imagine many child grifters read Tolstoy.”

  “Riley, you’ve made your decision. You don’t have to justify it to me.”

  “I’m not.”

  “Then why do you sound defensive?”

  Riley blinked, nonplussed. “Maybe because you told me that I was crazy not to call the police?”

  “Look.” Tess raised her hands, and the way the light moved over her tatted shoulder gave Riley the impression of a bird ruffling its wings. “I see situations like yours and I think up worst case scenarios. That’s what I do. But, hey, this is your business, Riley. I wish you and Sadie luck.” Tess peered ahead. “Where exactly are we going?”

  “To the barn. Trust me; you’ll want to see this.”

  Riley led Tess across the sun-blazed lawn, past the table feeder and the pole with the house for martens, to the opposite side of the clearing. She felt a little off balance at Tess’s swift dismissal of their dispute. Riley wasn’t used to people ceding disagreements, accepting differences of opinion, and breezily changing the subject.

  She’d better not get too used to this behavior. She was meeting her mother for lunch this afternoon.

  At the barn she flung open both doors so light flooded through to the back wall. One side was cluttered with the usual machinery: a sturdy ride-on mower, an industrial snowblower, rakes and shovels and hoes and gardening equipment, tins of oil and bottles of blue windshield wiper fluid. Fishing tackle and rods were lined up against the wall by the workbench, which had a clamp on the edge for making flies. In the corner leaned a fleet of rusted bikes she should really put out for bulk waste collection, but she kept thinking she could restore some of them. Scattered all about were old canoe paddles, boxes of shotgun shells, bear mace, and a new plastic kiddie pool, bought when Riley’s nine nieces and nephews visited for a summer afternoon.

  Riley breathed it all in for a minute, the mildew of the old wood, the faint scent of her grandfather’s pipe tobacco, the aroma of oil and rust, the perfume of a half century of a well-lived life.

  Tess’s whistle pierced the hush. “He was a bit of a pack rat, old Bud, huh?”

  “He’d say he was a ‘collector of American art.’” Riley picked her way between the lawnmower and a pile of inflatable rafts to an area covered by a canvas painter’s tarp. “Grandma wouldn’t let him put any of these in the house, but that didn’t stop him from buying them.”

  She lifted one end of the tarp and Tess took the other end. Dust billowed in a shaft of light flowing in from a high window. They rolled the canvas back until it collapsed into a heap on the floor.

  Riley saw Tess take a sudden breath and then walk over the tarp to stride among the carved wooden bears, the five-foot-tall ones as well as the smaller foot-and-a-half baby bears that nestled up against the larger ones.

  Tess flattened a palm over the surface of the largest sculpture. “I can’t believe you still have the bears.”

  “Teddy’s looking good for his age, don’t you think?” Riley knocked on the shoulder of the one closest to her. “Winnie’s over here.”

  Tess said, “Do you remember when—”

  “Absolutely.”

  “—we dressed them in cheap beads and old hats and whatever we could find in Mary’s old trunk in the attic—”

  “It was raining that day, and we had to push them away from the corner of the barn where it was leaking—”

  “—we held a wedding ceremony for Winnie and Teddy—”

  “—and we stole one of Bud’s shirts and tried to tape a pipe on Teddy’s mouth but it kept falling—”

  “—and we jumped every time it hit the ground.” Tess made a little sound deep in her throat. “I thought your grandmother was going to kill us when she came in to see what we were up to.”

  “She was just furious that her clothes fit Winnie.”

  “Bud was standing right behind her, and he couldn’t stop laughing.”

  Tess covered her mouth, and Riley realized that Tess was hiding a smile, maybe the first smile Riley had seen on her face since she’d arrived. She wished Tess would drop her hand. Just the way Tess’s eyes crinkled made Riley think of young Theresa—not the brooding girl in her eighth grade class who liked to carve the wooden desks with her penknife, or the sullen runaway her grandparents had taken in the second time, but the imaginative younger playmate who’d been a lot more fun than Riley’s cousins and most of the summer visitors.

  When Tess dropped her hand, the smile had faded to a twitch. “I haven’t thought of these bears in years. I see they’ve been breeding.”

  “Grandpa never stopped collecting. He found a chainsaw artist from Saratoga and bought a bunch from him. Others were gifts from some of his friends, his guests, or pieces he picked up at county fairs or roadside stands.”

  When she was little her grandfather used to tell her stories about them. He said they were originally local black bears who’d been frozen into place because of a woodland witch, and once a month, when the light of the full moon fell upon them from the window above, they twirled into life.

  How many hours had Riley spent staring out one of the windows, watching the barn through the trees in the hope of seeing the doors open and the wooden bears sneak out to dance by the light of the moon?

  Then Riley heard herself say, “I have to sell all of them.”

  The words dropped like lead in the silence. Riley felt Tess’s sudden attention.

  “I figure that I could get a good price if I sell them as a set. Maybe it’d pay for a plumbing upgrade or new roofs on the cabins.”

  “Things are that bad?”

  Riley ran her finger down a furrow of fur on Teddy’s belly, debating how much she should say about her shrinking bank account, the dearth of summer reservations, the struggle to get a business loan, and every other questionable decision she’d made since she’d packed a suitcase and walked out of her New York apartment. “If I could spruce up the place, fix those rusty swing sets, buy some new paddleboats, advertise some specials for the young families of my grandparent’s former clients, I might be able to lure in more bookings, which would bring in more cash.”

  “I noticed the place looked a little…tattered.”

  “I prefer ‘well-loved.’”

  “You know I live out of a semi half the year, right? I’ve got no place to put these.”

  “I wasn’t trying to sell them to you, Tess.”

  “Why did you show them to me then?”

  Riley shrugged. “Because you know them, that’s all.”

  Tess dipped her head so her bangs covered her eyes. Riley knew it was always the guests who loved Camp Kwenback the best. The folks who wrote long apology letters about how their teenager’s schedule didn’t allow them to reserve a week’s vacation, but how we loved those long, lazy summer days at the camp. She never felt the same kind of nostalgia among her family. The folks who truly loved the place were like this former runaway, who still rubbed Bob’s belly for luck when she didn’t think anyone was watching.

  Now Tess wandered amid the maze of the bears, the heels of her san
dals scraping across the debris on the floor. “What about that old mini-golf area down by the entrance to the camp?”

  “Other than that it’s on my very, very long list to be repaired, what about it?”

  “Your grandfather let my first grade class have our end of year party there.”

  “I remember those days. The clown with the rust-streaked face used to scare the crap out of me.”

  “That’s a good reason to pull down all that rusty stuff.” Tess ruffled her fingers through the short hair at the nape of her neck. “I thought…maybe you can replace all that with these bears.”

  Riley blinked at the sculptures, most of them mounted on solid poly-coated stumps. “How?”

  “I could saw some holes in the bases for the balls to go through. It wouldn’t take much effort.”

  Riley had a vision of Tess in a high school woodshop, bent over some machine spitting sparks that reflected in her safety goggles.

  “I used to work for a contractor,” Tess explained as she walked to the workbench, poking around the tools in search of something. “He was a friend of my father’s. I ended up at my father’s house after…after I’d had enough of the runaway circuit. His friend took me on his crew as a favor, and I picked up a lot of skills.”

  “I thought you just drove eighteen-wheelers.”

  “Being a Jill-of-all-trades has its advantages in a tough labor market. Ah.” She lifted a silver box. “I knew Bud would keep a measuring tape here.”

  “It’s an interesting idea,” Riley said, as Tess strode back to the bears, “but the mini-golf has always just been another perk of staying at the camp. Even if I had it fixed up, it won’t draw in more bookings.”

  “Make it public.”

  Riley blinked, surprised at the idea.

  Tess asked, “Isn’t the Putting Palace the nearest mini-golf around here?”

  “Y-yes.”

  “That’s ten long miles up the road. You could call your mini-golf the Bear’s Den.” Tess crouched by Winnie’s base and pulled out the metal measuring tape. “I’d be happy to fix it up for you.”