Senseless Acts of Beauty

by Lisa Verge Higgins

  Now she mentally ran through her list of friends on the forum for adoptees, realizing she didn’t know even half of them. She always hit “confirm” whenever someone tried to friend her because who didn’t want to have lots of friends?

  Now she felt exposed, one-upped, like she was lying naked in the bright sun. “You’ve been watching me like a spider.”

  “It’s lucky I did.”

  “Lucky?”

  “Running away from home is a stupid thing to do. One wrong move and you could have found yourself shooting heroine between cargo cars in some Midwestern depot.”

  “Is that what you did when you were pregnant with me?”

  “Not while I was pregnant.”

  A breeze riffled the leaves in the trees in the silence, and the blonde turned her face away.

  “Well, maybe I’m smarter than you.” Sadie slipped her fingers under her thighs, warming them between the boards and her skin. “It’s wrong what you did. Creepers watch girls like that, you know. Pedophiles do that.”

  “Mothers do that.”

  “You’re not my mother.”

  Her mother used to walk her to the school bus, hand her a lunchbox with homemade oatmeal raisin cookies, kiss her on the head, and then wave good-bye. Her mother used to blow cool air on her knee scrapes before slathering them with antibiotic lotion and stretching a superhero Band-Aid over them.

  Then another thought came to her. “Did you know when my parents died in that accident?”

  “Not right away.” The Tess-woman plucked at a string on her jeans. “It was harder to keep track of you back then. I didn’t find out until you’d already been settled with your nana.”

  “Would you have come running to claim me otherwise?”

  “I knew you had a family. Aunts, uncles, cousins—”

  “Oh, just admit it. You didn’t want me.”

  “I saw you one Easter at church.”

  Sadie started at the change in subject.

  “You were in fifth grade. You played a wailing woman,” Tess said, “during the Stations of the Cross.”

  Sadie remembered the blue cloth she’d wrapped around her head, remembered crowding against her friends, the whole church watching.

  “And I saw you in your sheep costume one Christmas,” Tess added. “You were on your way into your grammar school for the nativity play. You kept shaking your head to make the ears flop.”

  Sadie’s lungs seized. She remembered that costume. Her nana had sewn it. She’d let Sadie push down the foot pedal of the old sewing machine while she stitched the seams. Sadie mentally shook herself and shoved the memory away. She didn’t want to spoil that memory with the thought of some stranger lurking behind a car.

  “You’re not going to believe me,” Tess said, “but I didn’t want this to play out like—”

  “Right.”

  “I’d hoped to tell you the whole story someday when you were older.”

  “Screw that.”

  “I was a woman who didn’t expect to be pregnant, and I didn’t even know about you until I was pretty far gone.”

  “Oh, so you couldn’t abort me then.” Sadie took some satisfaction in seeing Tess flinch. “Well, I know you’re no church-going Catholic, so someday you’ll have to explain how you managed not to know you were pregnant for so long.”

  “Let’s just say it had something to do with sleeping between cargo cars in a Midwestern train depot.”

  This time Sadie flinched.

  “What we really should be talking about,” Tess said, her voice low and even, “after you’re finished unleashing all that anger on me—”

  “I’ve got a reason to be pissed—”

  “—is what you want to do going forward, now that you’ve met your sad, creepy excuse for a biological mother.”

  A noise lurched out of her, a noise that was a laugh but wasn’t a laugh at all. “I guess I’m not going to be invited to stay in your nice house in your good neighborhood.”

  “I had that once. A farmhouse in Kansas. Complete with chickens and enough land for a dozen kids to run around on.”

  “It’s nice what you can achieve when you’re not saddled with a kid.”

  “But since my marriage imploded,” she continued, “I’ve mostly been living out of man camps and the backseat of my car.”

  “What the hell is a man camp?”

  “It’s a bunch of prefab trailers in North Dakota that house oil rig workers. It’s a pretty rough place.”

  “Was my father an oil rig worker?”

  A cloud passed across the sun, darkening the lake, casting a sudden chill. Sadie glanced up and saw the gray underbelly of it, bringing with it the faintest smell of rain.

  “No, Sadie,” Tess said, “he wasn’t.”

  “Was he some guy you were all moon-eyed over, who took off the moment he found out you were pregnant?”

  “Do I look like the kind of girl who goes moon-eyed?”

  “Izzy tells me her mom and dad are probably still together because they adopted her,” Sadie said, wondering why her heart was pressing up her throat, wondering why she was babbling so much. “They wanted kids and they got her, so they were happy. She’s Chinese, and in China they have a one-child policy. Her biological parents didn’t want her because she was a girl. So,” she continued, reaching the limit of her breath, “let’s just say I’ve heard some pretty bad stuff about parents not wanting their kids. So I can handle the truth if my father didn’t want me.”

  If Sadie could make a language out of choking sounds, it would probably sound very much like the noises Tess was making right now. Choppy little half words, swallowed down before they were spoken. Sadie dared a glance from beneath her lashes and saw that Tess had drawn her feet out of the water, crossed them at the ankles, and now she’d buried her head in the vee between her knobby knees.

  Sadie said, “I’ve got a right to know who my father is, you know.”

  “It’s not easy to tell you, Sadie.”

  Once, when she was little, her parents had brought her to the Jersey shore. She’d raced right down the shoreline with her mother calling out behind her. She raced right to the edge where the water thrust up the slight incline of the sand. And, ankle deep, she remembered the pull of that water on the backs of her ankles, the way her feet suddenly sank like quicksand into the ground, and how, when she looked up, an angry white spray of a wave knocked her right in the belly, dragging her with the undertow a few feet farther, into someplace cold and full of choking sand.

  “It was one night.” Tess turned to meet Sadie’s eyes. “I don’t even know your father’s name.”

  Tess’s gaze was steady and straight, but Sadie understood what it meant when someone stared at you stone-faced like that, like it hurt not to move a muscle, like it was costing her to stay silent. Sadie understood that what the woman had said was at best a half-truth, at worst, a complete lie.

  Then angry words gathered in her throat, but they didn’t come, they wouldn’t come, because Sadie wouldn’t let them come. She felt overwhelmed, undone, numb. And suddenly she shot up to her feet, bare on the hot boards, the whole world around her warped like she was blinking at it through a fish-eye lens.

  She’d been happy once, when her mother and father were alive, when her mother used to come in in the mornings and wrestle her into tights, and her father used to swing her up in his arms whenever he came home from work. The world had been full and safe until suddenly it wasn’t. Suddenly she was living at her aunt’s house, a place of noise and confusion. She hadn’t been happy, she hadn’t been wanted, but at least her aunt hadn’t lied about how she felt, at least Sadie had always been sure of where she stood. She’d dealt with that, finagling her way to Nana’s house where everything had been good again—cream soda at lunch and black-and-white movies in the evening. Nana, while she still could, taught her how to talk with confidence on the phone and use the ATM. When Nana couldn’t, Sadie just adapted, making her own lunch, cleaning her own clothes, w
ashing her own hair and Nana’s, too. She was happy then, too, in a way. Nana had always smiled up at her after she brushed her hair, her white face had been beaming and calm, and the two of them had been together. Yes, she’d done well enough, went to school, had friends, and realized there was nothing she could do about her situation. But no matter what happened, Sadie definitely could take care of Sadie. Sadie would find a way to make herself happy.

  “Sadie?”

  But all those social workers, the guidance counselors and the principal, even Izzy, they had all been right about this. She should have waited until she was eighteen. By coming here she’d opened Pandora’s box, and now she didn’t know how to shove all the demons back in. Maybe there was something magic about waiting until that age because now, having found out what she’d come looking for, there was a ringing in her ears and a numbness in her tongue and she wasn’t sure if she could stop herself from keeling right over the edge of this bay into the murky water.

  “Sadie.”

  The voice was sharp, clear, right up against her ear, and Sadie startled but couldn’t look at the figure looming up just to her right, like there was that doorstop on her eyes again. Funny, all her life she’d wanted to stare into the face of her birth mother and see herself in those features. Now that birth mother stood so close she could feel her breath against her shoulder, hear the wheeze in her throat, and she couldn’t bring herself to turn because she was afraid of exactly what she’d see.

  And she thought about something for a minute. Her aunt’s house hadn’t been that bad for the few months she’d lived in it, if you could forget the noise and the mess and her cousins getting into her stuff and pulling her hair and throwing peas. Suddenly it seemed like such a small thing, to have cousins who didn’t know better than to throw peas.

  “I want to go home.” Sadie turned her back on the Tess-woman and headed out of the boathouse. “I’m going home.”

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  I bet North Dakota is looking pretty good right now.”

  Rodriguez’s voice came from the shadows. It startled Tess so much that she felt—all at once—the hot sun on her head, the cool water around her ankles, and the hard boards beneath her. She was at the boathouse, alone, without Sadie. For all her fervent wishing, she hadn’t turned back the last two hours. She could no longer pretend that everything that had happened had just been a dream.

  “So, Rodriguez,” she said, her voice raw, “do you still think I should press charges against the bastard?”

  “I didn’t come down here to talk about that.”

  At the sound of his low, rumbling voice, Tess’s vision blurred. He knew. Of course he knew. Riley must have filled in all the blanks. His knowledge intensified the hot-breath shame of being Theresa Hendrick, the Cannery Row troublemaker who’d been caught sticky-fingered at Ray’s, smoking weed with shiftless twenty-two-year-olds, the ungrateful daughter who drove her mother to the bottle, then abandoned her by leaving town for good.

  Tess Hendrick, the hard-hearted bitch who handed off her own daughter to complete strangers.

  Rodriguez said, “Teenagers are a tough breed.”

  A small voice inside her blurted, You’ve been harassing them so long, Rodriguez, that you should know, but she couldn’t risk speaking because she was trembling too much.

  “I’ve got two of those monsters at home,” he said, “so I know what I’m talking about.”

  She peered down the narrow end of the lake so he couldn’t see her face. Tess remembered the picture in his office, a couple of young boys frolicking in the leaves. Two natural sons, raised by their natural parents, probably in a neat colonial home with a white picket fence. Rodriguez the good cop would do things right. Rodriguez would do things by the book.

  “One of them has a really bad habit,” he said into the silence. “Every time I catch him breaking the rules, every time I force him to face consequences, he threatens to go live with my ex-wife.”

  Can’t say I blame him, she thought, even as her mind caught on the word ex-wife.

  “Teenagers can’t help themselves,” Rodriguez persisted. “Their brains aren’t fully formed. They act on impulse. They do what’s easy, instead of what’s right.”

  It wasn’t only teenagers who did that. Here she was in her thirties and maybe her brain wasn’t fully formed yet, because she still didn’t know if she’d done the right thing. Was it really better for Sadie to think that her biological mother was a liar, rather than know that the father she’d never met was a rapist?

  “Do you ever wonder why I pulled you out from among your Cannery friends all those years ago?”

  Tess squeezed her eyes shut, wishing Rodriguez away along with the last two hours. She didn’t want to play interrogate the delinquent game, because he was too good at it and the memory he’d invoked rose unbidden—of the group of neighborhood dropouts ruffling her hair as they let her join them in the old abandoned factory, of the vinegar smell of the place, the strange echoes, and the red glow at the end of the joint they shared, the one that made her feel floaty, the one that helped her forget what she’d run away from. She remembered the door swinging open, too, and the way Rodriguez threw her against the wall.

  “I took you aside,” he said, “because you looked as shell-shocked as Sadie just did, when she pulled up in front of that porch. You looked about as shell-shocked as you do now.”

  Tess wrapped her arms around her knees and drew them closer, though no matter how tight she held she couldn’t make herself disappear, or erase the memory of Sadie’s hurt, accusing eyes.

  “I see in Sadie what I saw in you all those years ago. You both think the world is fucking you over because you’re bad, you’re not worthy, because you don’t deserve anything better. Meanwhile, inside, you’re both screaming for someone to—”

  “So,” she interrupted, just to make him stop, “you had some kind of superhero complex, is that it?”

  “I followed you around to watch over you. You understand that. It’s the same reason you’ve been following Sadie.”

  Tess absorbed the hit and blinked up at the trees, wondering why she was sitting outdoors yet there didn’t seem to be enough air to breathe.

  “You deserved better back then, Tess,” he said. “You still do.”

  “Sadie deserves better.” Sadie deserved a bed to sleep in, cousins to play with, a backyard to read in. That’s what they should be talking about, not this nonsense about teenagers and ancient history. “That’s why Sadie’s going back to Ohio. That’s where she belongs.”

  “And you’re going back to North Dakota.”

  The muscles in her shoulders tightened. Rodriguez was a bastard to stand there and unpeel her like this. In her mind she’d already packed her bag and thrown it in the trunk of her Volvo. In her mind she’d already headed west, passing at high speed the green signs that marked the change of highways from here to Bismarck, and maybe farther, maybe north to Manitoba. There were lots of remote places where big-rig drivers were in great demand, where she could disappear into the world, so Sadie would never have to worry about running into her sad, creepy excuse of a biological mother again.

  “I came to Pine Lake to make sure Sadie didn’t end up on the streets like I did.” The muscles of her jaw clenched. “Now she’s going home to her people. Mission accomplished.”

  I’m not running away.

  “Riley tells me she has some concerns about the aunt.”

  “Better an aunt who doesn’t want her than a biological mother Sadie doesn’t want.”

  “The aunt doesn’t want Sadie? You know this?”

  Tess’s vision blurred and no amount of blinking put into focus the curving shoreline at the narrow end of the lake. She’d meant to ask Sadie about her aunt, but they never got that far in the conversation. Tess had been more concerned that Sadie would somehow find out about her father. Sadie needed to be kept in the dark, and Tess had been determined save her yet one more terrible shock. In the process of keeping that i
n mind, she’d subsumed all other concerns.

  Tess heard the crack of one of Rodriguez’s knees as he crouched down, so close that she imagined she could feel the warmth of him behind her.

  “The way I see it,” he said, “you’ve still got a whole lot of unfinished business here in Pine Lake, Tess.”

  Her heart pattered oddly in her chest. She felt the first throb of a migraine above her right eye. “You know damn well how hard it is to convict a rapist. You know damn well that rapists rarely serve more than a couple of years—”

  “I’m not talking about that.” He laid a hand on her shoulder and held firm as she tried to flex from under it. “That’s unfinished business for another day.”

  She shook her head. Thinking about sitting in court talking about the rape was somehow easier than remembering all that she’d left unspoken with Sadie. Like the confession she’d wanted to make. The confession that she’d never loved anything—anyone—even a fraction as much as she loved her only daughter.

  He said, “You are not your mother, Tess.”

  The words cut deep.

  “You were never like your mother,” he repeated, tightening his grip. “Despite all the terrible things that happened, you never abandoned your daughter.”

  “I did—”

  “Never,” he repeated. “And my gut instinct tells me you’re not going to start now.”

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  I’m coming with you.”

  Riley startled, banging her head on the raised trunk lid of her car. Tess came up beside her and swung a rucksack into the space Riley had just cleared. Her friend hid half her face behind a pair of sunglasses, but Riley recognized that set of jaw. She’d seen it just a moment ago on Sadie.