Senseless Acts of Beauty

by Lisa Verge Higgins

  “Sadie.” Riley’s head weaved as she sought her gaze. “It’s clear to me that you had a loving family once—”

  “Once.”

  “There has to be someone. A distant relative, maybe. Or,” Riley ventured, “maybe someone you haven’t yet met, but who’d—”

  “I’m not doing foster care.”

  Sadie shook her head so hard she felt a muscle pull in the back of her neck. She had stayed in temporary state care once, for two days. Two days she wished she could wash forever from her mind.

  “Oh,” Riley said, “I didn’t mean—”

  “It doesn’t matter.” Sadie dropped the spoon on the sticky table. “I just came from the library, where I did some research. Now I think I’ve got a better idea.”

  Sadie breathed deeply, though it seemed every breath took in less and less air. She told herself the answer to this problem was simple. It made perfect sense, as she sat here under the shade of an umbrella outside an ice cream shop, a light breeze rustling the leaves of the tree above them. The solution was easy and logical…if she could just make her throat and tongue and mouth work.

  Riley leaned forward in encouragement. “Don’t keep me in suspense.”

  “I just found out,” Sadie said, “that you don’t have to adopt someone to take custody.”

  “Oh?”

  “In fact, anyone can be my legal guardian.” Sadie met Riley’s chocolate-brown eyes. “Even someone like you.”

  Chapter Fourteen

  Riley sat frozen in the molded plastic chair listening to the cars lurching over the speed bump, the excited chatter of the kids at the next table, the plink of spoons hitting ice cream glasses—and, above all of that, the ringing in her head of Sadie’s words, even you, even you, even you.

  “It’s not a lifetime thing,” Sadie ventured, her sneaker patting staccato against the sidewalk. “It’s only until I’m eighteen. Hardly more than three years. Legal custody isn’t permanent like adoption.”

  Permanent like adoption. Beads of sweat slid down her neck, but Riley felt oddly cold, all the way to the tips of her fingers.

  “The way I figure, you could use the help at the camp.” Sadie excavated a chunk of chocolate out of her ice cream. “You’ve got that tatted trucker setting up that mini-golf. You’re going to need someone to sit in the booth and work it.”

  Sadie slipped the piece of chocolate in her mouth and Riley watched her jaw working it like a marble. She watched the little lump pass from one cheek to the other. She watched Sadie struggle to swallow it down.

  “If I lived here in Pine Lake,” Sadie continued, clearing her throat, “I’d go to the local public high school. I’d go to the library to study after school, or join clubs. You’d hardly ever see me during the day.”

  Riley knew she should say something, anything, but she couldn’t absorb the magnitude of what Sadie was asking.

  “I’m no freeloader, you know.” Sadie speared the spoon upright into the ice cream. “I can cook, I can clean, I can make beds, and I can do laundry. You’ve got lots of laundry. Heck, I can pay bills and run the registration desk when you need to be somewhere else—”

  Riley lifted her palm, dizzy. “Sadie—”

  “Listen. Listen. I’ve researched this. It’s not complicated like getting approved to be a foster home or whatever. It’s not like everything you’d have to do to get approved for adoption. For legal custody, it’s easy-peasy. I guess this is what my nana must have done when I first came to live with her. All you need is power of attorney so you can enroll me in school and stuff.”

  “Power of attorney.”

  “Yes, power of attorney. And you’d get that from my current guardians.”

  “Current guardians.”

  “Yeah, they’re the ones who took me after my parents died. My parents must have had it in the will or something.” Sadie pushed the ice cream away. “Believe me, they’d hand me over to you like I was a hot potato.”

  Riley felt a pinprick of cold on her lap. She’d been holding her spoon in midair, and now it was dripping melted ice cream onto her skirt. She clattered her spoon onto the table and discovered that she’d forgotten napkins. So silly to forget napkins at an ice cream shop. She never understood why the Creamery didn’t keep dispensers right on the tables.

  Riley dove into her purse to find a tissue. The effort gave her something to concentrate on that wasn’t Sadie’s anxious face. The effort gave her something to concentrate on other than the fact she knew exactly how Sadie felt. How many times in her youth did she ache to fly away to any place where she might just belong?

  Tess had been right. The minute Riley discovered Sadie in that shed, Riley should have called the authorities.

  Oh, God.

  Riley rubbed at her skirt, rubbing, rubbing, rubbing it all over her, making a bigger mess than before. But that’s what Riley Cross always did, right? It was never intentional; she never meant to cause harm. She’d spent a lifetime trying to keep everyone happy, even if it meant avoiding making changes or decisions. For thirty-odd years, she’d just bobbed right along, afraid to churn the waters, uncertain even in the face of facts, unable to give up the possibility of choice, until, like a tsunami, events knocked her ass over tit. Thus she let her marriage linger for years knowing she never wanted kids. Thus her divorce papers were still sitting, unsigned, on the registration desk. And whenever she did dare to make a decision—like leaving her job, like taking on the albatross of Camp Kwenback—the world rolled its eyes at her, holding its collective breath in anticipation of disaster.

  And here she was, sheltering a runaway, giving Sadie rising expectations that the girl could find a stable home and live in blissful domestic harmony when that was the most impossible thing in the world. Riley tossed the sticky tissue on the table and pressed the butt of her hand against her forehead. She wished Claire hadn’t left Camp Kwenback this afternoon, boarding a train to visit a New York City friend. Riley could use some of Claire’s wisdom, because right now Riley was overwhelmed by all the reasons this absolutely couldn’t be. Sure, Riley might be able to overcome the fact that she’d be a terrible excuse for a guardian, but how could she ever explain something like this to Declan? If Declan ever heard that Riley was taking legal custody of a teenage girl, it would make everything she’d told him a lie.

  It would rip his heart to pieces.

  Then her gaze fell upon the spray of pamphlets in the tote by her feet, the ones that addressed the foggy, difficult, inevitable issue of her immediate future, and she pounced on the lesser problem.

  “See this, Sadie?” She tugged out a pamphlet and shook it so that the paper crackled. “It’s a resort in the Catskills.”

  Sadie, stone-faced, barely grazed it with a glance.

  “Today I met the man who runs this place.” The front of the flyer was a logo of a naked silhouette against a yellow sun. “He wants to tear down the swing sets and turn the cabins into massage rooms. They want to clear-cut ten acres of woods and landscape a golf course.”

  “Was I just speaking Swahili before?” Sadie’s lips whitened. “Because this conversation just took a weird turn.”

  “This man told me,” Riley persisted, “that he’d bring Camp Kwenback into the twenty-first century by making part of the lake a nudist beach.”

  “They know there are snapping turtles in that lake, right?”

  “He said a nude beach is a major draw. He said people want to do yoga at sunrise. He said people want mud wraps and juice cleanses.”

  Sadie went quiet and looked at Riley like you’d look at an old lady mumbling to herself on a park bench. “I don’t have a problem with a nude beach,” Sadie began carefully. “I don’t really want to look at naked old people, but that’s your business, and you gotta do what you gotta do to—”

  “I don’t want to do this.”

  “Okay.”

  “No.” Riley shook the pamphlet. “I mean I really don’t want to do this.”

  Her grandparents were
dead, and Camp Kwenback was dying, and Riley’s heart was shriveling up with it. She’d tried to revive the place in her halting, half-assed way, and look where that had gotten her. She was about to witness her biggest failure—and here was Sadie, fragile, vulnerable Sadie, asking to be a part of it all.

  You just can’t build a solid life on a rotting foundation.

  “The point I’m making,” Riley ventured, “is that, come winter, I won’t have a home, a job, or a future. I won’t have the means to take care of—”

  “What you’re trying to say,” Sadie retorted, shooting to her feet, “is no.”

  Riley watched the walls slam down behind those pale green eyes, the layers and layers of defenses, each one more opaque than the last. Riley’s heart leaped to her throat, because the sight reminded Riley of the name she’d found in that ledger and the suspicions blossoming in her mind.

  “Sadie, I’m—”

  “Thanks for the ice cream.” Sadie swept her backpack on her shoulder. “It was a stupid, stupid idea anyway.”

  *

  Riley needed to talk to Tess.

  She hugged a light sweater to her body, the floorboards creaking as she paced barefoot in the darkened lodge. She’d spent the early evening shuffling papers by her computer, surreptitiously watching her runaway from over the top of the registration desk as Sadie played chess with Mrs. Clancy. Sadie had acted as if nothing had changed between them, but Riley could tell that she was hurting. Squatting with her feet on the seat of a wooden chair, Sadie looked like a red-tailed hawk, solitary and untouchable, observing the world from on high through a hooded gaze.

  Now Riley paced alone in the main room, waiting for Tess to return from wherever she’d disappeared to, wondering—not for the first time—if she was crazy to have such suspicions. She just couldn’t get out of her head the way Sadie’s face had shuttered this afternoon. Tess looked exactly the same way whenever Riley dared to venture a question that bordered on the personal. Sadie had even removed herself from the conversation—just as Tess had done so many times, in her case pleading fatigue, an aching shoulder, a migraine. Maybe it was just something all traumatized runaways did.

  But then there was that other issue. Tess’s name in the Camp Kwenback ledger, the dates fitting perfectly. Riley’s mind flashed white whenever she dared to consider the possibility—no. Tess was a difficult woman to know, but she wasn’t cruel. After all this time, Tess would have said something.

  A flash of light swept the room. Riley glanced out the window and saw headlights hover at the end of the drive, then fade out. A moment later, she heard the faint slam of a car door and saw the shape of a woman’s silhouette stride toward the construction zone that would soon be the renovated mini-golf.

  Riley slipped her feet into a pair of canvas sneakers and stepped out onto the porch, closing the door behind her. Cicadas sang in the trees, their buzz rising as she descended the stairs to the graveled parking area. A cloud passed across the moon, darkening the world to indigo. Bracing herself for a difficult conversation, she head out across the driveway, her steps muffled as she stepped into the woods.

  All she could see of the old mini-golf were a tumbling pile of shapes, rolls of artificial grass, stacks of two-by-fours, and the rusty dismembered parts of metal clowns and sun-bleached windmills. The new mini-golf was covered by tarps against a brief afternoon rain. As she came closer, she heard the scrape of plastic tarp being yanked and saw its shiny wrinkled creases catching starlight before falling to the ground.

  Then the cloud cover thinned and moonlight fell through the clearing, illuminating the scene. Riley drew in a long, slow breath as the lumps between the trees resolved into figures. Silver light limned one furry upturned face and caught another bear’s raised paw. The pale moonlight gleamed on a vest, winked on a stubby tail, and painted the raised leg of a ballerina bear. Grouped to face each other, the bears stretched out their arms as if leaning back in a dance, while smaller bears peeked out of the shadow of their elders, heads tilted, and their faces wide with toothy grins.

  There they were, Tess’s tribute to Bud and Mary, the old wooden bears dancing under the moonlight.

  Riley paused, drinking in the sight of the bears, as well as the sight of Tess as her friend stood motionless, contemplative, unguarded. Then Tess brushed her bangs off her brow and raised her face to the sky. Her profile, bathed in moonlight, stood in stark relief.

  And suddenly Riley knew what it felt to be a soaring bird hitting the clear surface of a glass window.

  Not seeing, until the end, what had always been right in front of her.

  Chapter Fifteen

  Why didn’t you tell me?”

  Tess startled as Riley’s voice came out of the darkness. She shoved her hands in her back pockets just as Riley emerged from the woods.

  “I wanted it to be a surprise.” Tess tilted her head at the collection around her. “I knew the dancing bears was Bud’s favorite story so I figured I’d set it up this way.”

  Riley’s face was pale, pulled in an expression Tess couldn’t quite read. Her friend was clutching her sweater close although the night was balmy. For a heartbeat, Tess wondered if she’d misread Riley’s signals when Riley first gave her the green light for this project—she wondered if she’d overstepped her bounds. She was acutely aware that Bud and Mary were Riley’s family, and Tess was just a temporary intruder.

  Riley said, “I’m not talking about the bears, Tess.”

  “Oh?”

  “I’m talking about Sadie.”

  Tess blinked, and for a moment her mind went blank, until she realized what Riley must be referring to.

  “I guess she told you about our discussion at Bay Roberts.” Tess cocked her hip. “I didn’t take that girl for a snitch.”

  Riley paused. “You talked?”

  “I did most of the talking. I tried to knock some sense into her, but that girl’s stubborn like I’ve never—”

  “Then you didn’t tell her.”

  “To go back home? I sure as hell did.”

  Riley took a deep breath. “I saw the ledger, Tess. Grandma kept great records. You stayed in Cabin Ten during the year Sadie was conceived.”

  Tess tried not to flinch as the words sank in. Her thoughts stumbled, skittered, raced. She could say her mother had gone on another bender. She could say there’d been another fire in their Cannery Row house. She could say that her mother had shacked up with another fly-by-night boyfriend. It should be simple to stand here and dream up a reason she’d stayed at Camp Kwenback for those weeks while Riley was off at college.

  Any half-truth would do.

  “You and Sadie have the same nose,” Riley said into the silence. “You both have the same jaw—”

  “Does Sadie know?” The words flew out of her, launched by terror.

  “No.” Riley tightened her grip on her sweater. “I didn’t figure it out until just a moment ago.”

  Tess felt her whole body deflating like air flooding out of a balloon.

  Riley whispered, “So it’s true then.”

  Yes.

  Yes, it was true, even if the word wouldn’t pass her lips. This secret had shielded her and Sadie for so long that even thinking the truth started a roaring in her mind, like the shudder of a tin roof under the assault of high plains winds.

  Riley whispered, “What happened?”

  Tess stiffened her spine. “Figure it out. I got pregnant. I had a baby. I gave her up.”

  “But she’s here now.” Riley gestured to the dark shape of the lodge through the pines. “She came here just to look for you—”

  “Not me,” Tess interrupted. “She’s looking for someone who bakes gingersnap cookies. Sadie’s not looking for a tatted-up big-rig driver who lives out of her cab.”

  Tess threw her arms wide to show the scars she had dug into herself on the outside to match the ones within, the inscription crawling up the inside of her arm in Latin, My tears would drown the world, as my inner fire would r
educe it to ashes.

  Riley’s voice, breathy, uncomprehending. “But why else did you come back to Pine Lake?”

  “To make sure she gets home safely.”

  “But she doesn’t have—”

  “Yes she does. I’ve been trying to tell you this all along.” Tess caught herself, forced her voice to be calm. “Sadie does have a family, an aunt and uncle who live outside of Cleveland. They’re good people. They have an acre of land and four kids, Sadie’s cousins.”

  “How do you know?”

  “I’ve been watching her since the day I gave her up.”

  Tess wished she could suck up that slip and swallow it whole. She turned away from Riley and curled her fingers into the mama bear’s shoulder, bracing herself, seeking an easy way to explain. She’d been keeping tabs on Sadie and her adoptive family for years. One Christmas season she’d even parked outside Sadie’s grammar school on Long Island and watched her mother hustle Sadie into the Catholic school. Sadie had dressed up as a sheep for the Christmas pageant. As Sadie skipped inside, she bounced her head back and forth so that her sheep ears danced.

  Tess squeezed her eyes tight. She’d always wondered if it would have been easier to give her baby up if Sadie hadn’t been born a girl.

  “I don’t understand,” said Riley, pacing in the pine needles behind her. “How could you watch her without anyone knowing?”

  “The Internet. Social media.” Tess forced her feet flat on the ground, the better for balance. “Her grandmother should have monitored her better. Sadie got online young. Sadie knows me as Mindy from Minnesota, a goth with an interest in origami.”

  “So…you know Sadie’s aunt and uncle?”

  “I know who they are. Sadie has known her cousins since they were born. Her aunt and uncle took Sadie in after her parents died, and then, a couple of months later, she was sent to live with her grandmother in Queens.”

  “She told me they don’t want her. She told me,” Riley repeated, “that they’d hand her off to me like a hot potato.”