Senseless Acts of Beauty

by Lisa Verge Higgins

  Riley said, “Everyone blamed you for leaving your mother.”

  “Of course they did. No”—Tess raised a hand to stop Riley from speaking—“don’t say you’re sorry. I’m not sorry.”

  “But—”

  “It was a relief.” Tess laid her head back and blinked at the stars. “In the end, it was for the best that my mother didn’t help. I’m glad the bastard was never found.”

  Riley turned incredulous eyes on her. “Tess, he still needs to be found. He needs to be convicted, thrown in jail, and marked as a sexual offender—”

  “That’s not so simple.”

  “But there’s physical evidence—”

  “There’s evidence that I was knocked around and we had sex. If he has any kind of defense lawyer, he’ll claim the sex was rough but consensual.”

  Riley seemed to have swallowed her tongue.

  “I’m sorry to be the one to clue you in on the ugly side of the criminal justice system, Riley. I’m not exactly a lily-white defendant, some sweet creature who played softball at Pine Lake High. I’ve got a juvy record as long as my arm. And the only other witness—my mother—is an alcoholic who swore to a cop that I’d made the whole thing up to send her away to rehab. Do you think we could get a felony rape conviction from he-said-she-said?”

  “But…that’s what happened.”

  “Even if he were caught, he’d plead the charges down to some nth degree sexual assault misdemeanor. He’d get off with maybe eight months’ time.”

  “But he’d have a record—”

  “Which would likely be barred from other criminal cases. All that effort, useless.”

  Tess squeezed her eyes shut and remembered the months that followed, when she’d run away from everyone and everything she’d ever known. She’d hopped trains and slept in stations, her days a blur of motion, the start of the restlessness, the bad times. The pregnancy came as a shock, but at least it got her off those streets. And when Sadie was born and lying in her arms, she couldn’t help but think, Here’s another victim.

  No. Tess’s jaw tightened. Sadie would not be a victim.

  Not then, and not now.

  “So now you know.” Tess squinted toward her car, debating, jonesing for a long, deep suck on a lit cigarette. “Now you understand why I can’t tell Sadie I’m her mother.”

  Riley didn’t say anything. A cloud passed over the moon, casting Riley’s face in shadows, but not before Tess got a glimpse of it, stricken, but unconvinced.

  “I had to cut all ties between us.” Tess tried to loosen the tightness in her chest, her own body’s lingering resistance to confession. “It was the only way to protect her from that bastard, just in case he was ever found.”

  “He’s a rapist,” Riley said. “He’d never have any connection to Sadie.”

  “Men get custody of their natural children all the time.” Tess thought of her old Cannery Row neighbor, Mr. Winter. “Even wife-beating bastards can steal their kids away—”

  “But not rapists.”

  Tess felt a smile twitch at the corner of her lips. She looked beyond the spiky tips of the pines, thinking how nice it must be to live in Riley’s world.

  “In thirty-one states in these United States of America,” Tess said, “rapists can claim parental rights to their biological children.”

  The rest of the story tumbled out of her in pieces. After she’d given Sadie up, she’d run. She tried the runaway circuit for a while, but her heart kept stretching back to the daughter she’d left behind. She couldn’t bear wondering if the rapist had been caught, if he’d somehow found out about Sadie, if he’d gone to court to challenge the dismissal of his parental rights. Tess knew the name of the family who’d taken Sadie in, she knew the state they lived in, she knew she needed money to track Sadie. So she swallowed her pride and did something she’d sworn never to do—she showed up at her father’s house in Minnesota.

  There she recuperated, worked odd jobs, collected enough cash to get herself a car. There she suffered her stepmother’s wary eye and her father’s guilt for as long as she needed to save the five grand to pay for the course to get a commercial driver’s license. The moment she found a company that’d hire a woman driver, she lit out, went as far away as she could from anyone she knew.

  That’s when her home became the cab of whatever rig she was driving. That’s when the most permanent thing in her life was a drop-box in Bismarck.

  The bastard would never find her this way.

  And he’d never find out about Sadie.

  Tess started at the feel of Riley’s hand on her arm. Riley had edged close enough that their hips were bumping. Riley looked off to some dark distance, but Tess could see a gleam of tears in her eyes, and her jaw working like she was trying to find the right words.

  “I get it now,” Riley finally said. “I understand why this has been so difficult. Why you feel you can’t reveal yourself to Sadie.”

  Tess let out a breath that she hadn’t known she’d been holding. She let it out and felt her spine bend as she pressed her forehead to her knees.

  “But, Tess, there’s still one thing I can’t wrap my head around.”

  Later Tess realized she should have seen this coming. The question struck her so hard she felt jackknifed.

  “After all that happened,” Riley asked, “how could you love his child?”

  Chapter Nineteen

  Sadie had a plan.

  She wandered through the aisles of the grocery store, picking up boxes of granola bars and putting them back, trailing her fingers along cartons of individual serving portions of vanilla pudding, feeling the weight of her basket shift on her forearm as two Granny Smith apples rolled around inside.

  Last night, staring at the ceiling in her room, that plan had finally come together. She would get up early, dress, and fill her backpack tight. She would wait until she heard Riley leave through the sliding back doors to go bird-watching in the woods. Sadie would sneak into the barn, take the bicycle, and pedal into town. When Sadie didn’t come down for breakfast, Riley would assume she was sleeping in. And while ignorant Riley was taking care of things at the lodge—maybe even calling the cops to come on over and pick up the runaway—well, that runaway would be double-checking the train schedule at the station, shopping for snacks, getting some cash using Nana’s ATM card, and slipping onto the 10:30 a.m. train to Manhattan.

  Now she frowned at a bottle of mayonnaise, wondering why she was weighing it in her hand. She didn’t feel guilty about skipping out of Camp Kwenback without saying good-bye. No, she didn’t feel guilty about stealing the bike, either, because she intended to leave it leaning against the big oak in front of the library, where Riley would eventually find it when she realized Sadie was gone for good.

  Riley had been nice to her for a while, Sadie granted her that. Good to her in the way someone was good to a stray cat. Best to feed it for a little while and then hope it’ll wander away to find a permanent home.

  Preferably in Ohio.

  Now she found herself staring at a bottle of Tabasco sauce, wondering why she’d pulled that off the shelf. No one seemed to be paying her any mind, but she felt like everyone’s eyes were upon her nonetheless. A lone young girl with a too-heavy backpack carrying a basket full of mayonnaise, barbeque sauce, and black olives couldn’t help but be suspicious. She didn’t even like olives.

  Riley liked olives.

  Her throat went dry, like it did sometimes when she was coming down with a cold. A prickling started at the back of her eyes. What was she thinking, anyway, running around in this goose chase, staying here in this hick town for so long? She didn’t even like this little grocery store with its green cardboard bins of mountain berries and precious little mason jars of local honey with the honeycombs still in them. She couldn’t stand all these happy, shiny folks wandering through in flip-flops and terrycloth cover-ups. That library with its showy green lawn was so tiny that, if she hung around here, she’d read through every book wit
hin the year, if the clanging bells of the church across the street didn’t drive her crazy first. The place was as fake as Disney World, right down to the stupid hipsters at Ricky’s Roast and the fat tourists at the ice cream store and the bearded hikers digging into lunch at Josey’s. And without Izzy, what fun would she have dipping her toes into the water of Bay Roberts or sitting in the great room at Camp Kwenback choking on the smoke of a hearth fire while it rained?

  Sadie clattered the bottle of olives back on the shelf. Nope, it was the 10:30 a.m. train back to Nana’s house for her, just as she’d planned last night. She would live there on her own, whether her aunt liked it or not. She’d show Aunt Vi that she could handle money, find a job at a restaurant, she figured, or a pizza place, someplace that would feed her as well as pay her. Her aunt would be a pushover, signing any forms that would release her from any responsibility for her sister’s adopted child. And then Sadie would have all the proof she needed to file with the court for youthful emancipation.

  Emancipation. She rolled the word around in her mouth and tried to ignore that this was the part of the plan that had cracks. You had to be sixteen to go before the courts to ask for emancipation, a detail that kept rising out of the corners of her mind. And there was always the possibility that she’d arrive home to find a For Sale sign pitched in the little front yard of Nana’s house. Her aunt would probably want to sell the old house so she could use the money to help pay for the St. Regis nursing home.

  And yet…there were easier ways to be emancipated that didn’t involve depending on the stupid law. There were other trains she could catch. She knew no one would give a damn if she just hopped the one that came first and set off for places unknown. Maybe it was better to leave the disaster of this broken life behind and then go make another of her own. The train that kept rumbling through her mind was the freight train that used the tracks just south of town, a freight train that, according to that Hendrick woman, headed to all kinds of points west.

  She reached for another jar as someone shuffled around the aisle. Sadie looked at the jar with great interest, even though she didn’t know what she was holding. The jar felt cold. It was full of ghostly white vegetables floating in water or oil or something. She couldn’t read the label through the blurring of her vision.

  A rubber sole squeaked against linoleum in a way that made her shoulders flinch, and then Sadie heard someone gasp. Sadie didn’t bother to look up to see who’d stopped just a few feet away from her. She just figured she’d startled the woman who came around the corner and found a fourteen-year-old staring at a bottle of…Sadie twisted it…artichoke hearts. Whatever the heck they were.

  Until she heard a tremendous crash.

  Something wet sprayed her ankles. Sadie skittered back. She grasped the handles of her own basket, relieved that it wasn’t hers that had fallen. A vinegary smell rose up from the puddle on the floor, a pool of liquid peppered with green glass and what looked like sliced pickles. Sadie looked up and saw an older woman standing frozen in place, pressing her hand against her mouth.

  “Here,” Sadie said, setting her basket on the floor away from the puddle. “Let me help you with that.”

  Sadie used the edge of her sandals to push a path through the broken glass so that she could reach the fallen basket. Nana hated loud noises; they always sent her into a panic, so maybe the shock of the spill had unnerved this woman, too, because she didn’t move. Sadie crouched down at the woman’s feet, tilted the basket level and examined what remained within—a few withered apples from the bargain bin, off-label cereal, a couple of cans of soup on sale, and a quart of tonic water.

  Sadie thought, Living on Social Security. A voice on the loudspeaker announced, Clean-up in aisle four.

  “You’ll need a new box of cereal.” Sadie rose up from her crouch and held out the basket. “It’s got some pickle juice on it. But everything else looks okay.”

  An odor of neglect billowed from the armholes of the woman’s faded cotton dress. The woman’s hair was dyed that brassy shade of red that never looked real, and she was staring at Sadie with so much crazy that Sadie wondered if she had dementia like Nana. The older woman took a tentative step toward Sadie and inadvertently kicked a chunk of green glass into a spin across the floor.

  Sadie reached out and seized the woman’s arm, to stop her from slipping in the puddle. “Are you okay?”

  The woman’s gaze widened. She mumbled something under her breath, something weird like you’re not a ghost.

  Sadie said, “Ma’am?”

  Sadie peered at her more closely and noticed—past the collapse of wrinkles and the bloodshot whites of the woman’s eyes—that there was no dementia here, no fogging of the senses, just an alert, oddly troubled woman who couldn’t seem to believe what she was seeing.

  Odd. The woman had bright, gray-green irises.

  Green eyes with a starburst of rusty-brown filaments.

  The overhead lights seemed to dim. The floor felt slick beneath her sandals. Beyond this woman’s green gaze, the world turned fuzzy and began to spin.

  “Ladies.” A guy with a mop rolled his bucket close. “If you’ll just let me by, I’ll clean this up—”

  The woman blinked, startled. She yanked her arm out of Sadie’s grip and stepped back. A word stuck in Sadie’s throat—wait—but the older woman kept moving. The woman’s wet sneakers squeaked as she swiveled and rounded the end of the aisle.

  Sadie moved to follow.

  “Whoa there.” The young man held out an arm, keeping her in place. He pointed at the glass at her feet. “You’d best go around the other way.”

  “But that woman—”

  “Don’t you worry about that old crow, she’s just fine,” he said. “Old Mrs. Hendrick is always breaking something.”

  Chapter Twenty

  The first time Tess opened a hatch atop a dirty water storage tank, the fumes hit her like a bomb blast. Her grip on the steel rails had been the only thing that prevented her from tumbling over the catwalk three stories to the ground. Since then she always wore a gas mask when checking the water levels, even though the mask was heavy and suffocating. It protected her from caustic fumes and toxic vapors, but wearing it, she saw little through the scratched Plexiglas, heard less, and smelled nothing.

  Sometimes it felt like she’d spent her whole life muffled in that gas mask, filtering out the ugly.

  Now, lying flat in the backseat of her car where she’d spent a restless night, she turned that gas mask over in her hands as the morning light sifted through the pines and winked through the bug-like lenses. Even through the closed window she heard the screech of the jays and the chiva-chiva-chiva call of some mouse bird Riley had once pointed out to her. The backseat smelled faintly of oil and old leather. Though she lay still, her thoughts careened far and wide in new and dangerous directions.

  A sudden knock on the window startled her. She arched her neck and saw a Camp Kwenback coffee mug, then beyond, a familiar face surrounded by a cloud of red hair.

  “Rise and shine, pumpkin.” Riley raised the cup. “It’s a new day.”

  Tess made a snort of a sound, more out of habit than snark. She uncurled her legs and pushed herself up to a sitting position, raising her voice so Riley could hear her through the closed window. “I love the customer service around here.”

  “I aim to please.” Riley stepped away from the door as Tess pushed it open. “That couldn’t have been comfortable, sleeping there all night.”

  “I needed a womb.”

  Riley barked a sudden laugh. “That’s not what I expected to hear.”

  “I’m used to sleeping in the cab of my truck.” Tess unfolded herself and then stretched her arms above her head to remove the kinks. “My cab is a lot more comfortable than the backseat of this car, but at least it had that familiar, pod-like feel.”

  Riley held out the mug. “After I left my husband and moved in here, I slept a few nights in the tree house by the beaver dam.” She gestured
to some far point beyond the woods. “I was eaten to death by mosquitos, but I also located the hiding place of an eastern screech owl.”

  “Priorities.”

  “It was a reminder of what I most love to do.”

  Tess raised the cup. “Industrial strength?”

  “Brewed just for you, black, no sugar. Come inside and have breakfast with me.”

  Tess hesitated. She glanced past Riley toward the lodge, feeling a deep-body prickly sensation. After last night’s confession, Tess wasn’t sure how she felt about laying eyes on the object of that confession, sitting on a café chair swinging her legs.

  “Sadie’s not in the lodge.” Riley shrugged. “She took the bike into town about half an hour ago. I saw her leave.”

  Tess buried her face in the cup so her relief wouldn’t show. “So,” she said, swallowing the hot brew, “what’s on the menu?”

  “Blueberry pancakes.”

  Riley’s smile crinkled all the way to her eyes, like Mary’s used to, as crazy as that was. Tess’s first urge, like always, was to hide any expression of gratitude. Instead she stopped herself, paused, and then mumbled a half-volume thanks.

  “You’re welcome.” With a wink, Riley swiveled and headed toward the lodge.

  Tess fell into pace beside her, thinking it was so much easier to hold people at arm’s length and pretend that little things like blueberry pancakes in the Camp Kwenback kitchen didn’t matter. The sharing of her darkest secret had shifted her friendship with Riley in new and still uncertain ways. The path beneath her feet was rutted and uneven, and Tess told herself that’s why she felt like she hadn’t quite found her balance.

  “So,” Riley said, kicking up some gravel as she walked, “did you give any thought to what’s next?”

  “Finish the mini-golf?” Tess gripped the cup with two hands, less to prevent spilling than as a crutch. “Go back to my job hauling fracking wastewater across North Dakota?”