Senseless Acts of Beauty

by Lisa Verge Higgins

  Riley said, “What do you mean, you’re coming with us?”

  “To Ohio. Today.”

  “But Sadie thinks it’s just her and me on this trip.” Sadie had darted back to the lodge about ten minutes ago, claiming she’d forgotten something in her room.

  “I know,” Tess said, “but I’m going anyway.”

  Riley eyed her unmoving friend. Emotions were running high at Camp Kwenback. Yesterday, after Riley had promised Sadie she’d take her back to Ohio, Sadie had retreated to her room and refused to come out. Tess, on the other hand, had retreated to the mini-golf, hammering away by the light of her car headlights, not eating a bite of the food Riley had brought out to her, muttering something about needing to take care of unfinished business.

  Riley sank against the car. “I don’t know if that’s a good idea.”

  “I have to meet this aunt. I have to know I’m leaving Sadie in good hands.” Tess pulled off her sunglasses to reveal the dark smudges beneath her eyes. “Please, Riley.” Her throat worked. “We might not get another chance.”

  Riley’s stomach tightened. Her heart broke for both of them because she knew what it was like to be an adoptee yearning for a birth mother, and now she knew that there are birth mothers who yearn just as deeply for their children. But the issues between these two were wide and deep. If they were stuck in a car for a nine-hour trip to Ohio, they might find a way to communicate. Or they might leave deep, bloody wounds on each other like two wild turkeys caught in a cage.

  Then the front door to the main lodge banged open and Tess slipped her sunglasses back on. Sadie bounced down the stairs, her ponytail bobbing. She stumbled as she caught sight of Tess, then she swiftly looked away.

  Riley pushed away from the car. “Got everything now?”

  Sadie waved her toothbrush and then rounded to the passenger seat, where she’d insisted on stashing her backpack. “Can we go?”

  Riley hesitated. If Sadie went back to her aunt and Tess took off for North Dakota, the chances that these two prideful people would ever have a relationship were slim to none.

  Riley blurted, “Tess is joining us.”

  Sadie’s head popped up. “What?”

  “She’s coming along.” Riley heard Tess swivel in the gravel and shuffle a few steps away. “To Ohio.”

  “When did this happen?”

  “Just now.”

  “Who said she even gets a vote?”

  “Sadie—”

  “Do I even get a vote?”

  A wave of emotion passed over Sadie’s face, the same angry, hurtful betrayal that she had revealed yesterday in this parking lot when the truth came out.

  “Listen,” Riley said, lowering her voice, “Tess quit her job to come find you. She drove across half the country to make sure you were safe.” Riley tilted her head to her friend pacing circles in the gravel. “Do you think there’s any changing that mind?”

  Sadie’s gaze shifted past her. The expression on Sadie’s face rippled like the patterns on the surface of a wind-swept lake.

  “I don’t have any choice, I suppose.” Sadie gestured toward Tess’s car. “She’s got her own car; she’s just going to follow us no matter what I say.”

  “She’s coming in my car.”

  “Hell no.” Sadie’s ponytail flew as she shook her head. “She can take her own car. She’ll be halfway to North Dakota by then, or wherever the hell she lives, and she can just keep on driving.”

  “Sadie, I’ll be driving eighteen hours out of the next thirty-six. You don’t think I could use another driver to take a turn at the wheel?”

  Sadie’s jaw hardened. “I shouldn’t have let you talk me out of taking the train.”

  “C’mon, Sadie, I couldn’t put you on a train alone—”

  “It’s not like I haven’t done it before.”

  Riley closed her eyes, willed patience. “Both Tess and I want to make sure you make it to your aunt’s house safely.”

  “I don’t want to talk to her.”

  “She’s not exactly a blabbermouth.”

  “I’m telling you I’m not going to talk to her.” Sadie bent her head to slip into the passenger seat. “Let’s just get this over with.”

  *

  Hendrick women, Riley discovered, kept their word. Except for Riley pointing out landmarks along the highway, asking if anyone needed a bathroom break, or attempting lame jokes about songs on the radio, the first four hours of the trip were made in ever-thickening silence. Sadie didn’t open her mouth until a fast-food picnic lunch at a travelers’ rest stop—and only after Tess set off to stretch her legs by the dog run.

  “So,” Sadie said, pulling out her ear buds as soon as Tess was out of earshot, “how much longer is this awful ride anyway?”

  “It only seems long, Sadie, because it’s done in silence.”

  “Are you going to answer my question or do I have to go dig up a map and, like, make calculations?”

  “We won’t be at your aunt’s house until the early evening at best.” Riley eyed the food spread across the picnic table. “Are you going to eat those fries?”

  “Not hungry.”

  Riley reached for a fry and dipped it in ketchup. “Why don’t you tell me something about this aunt and uncle of yours before we knock on their door?”

  “Other than Aunt Vi is furious after you and that cop made me call her yesterday?”

  “You lied to her. You can’t blame her for being angry.”

  “If you’d gone along with my cover story, she would have never known I’d made it all up.”

  “You’d make me part of the deception.”

  “So? It’s not like you haven’t lied to me before.”

  Riley took a deep breath and contemplated a response. In truth, Riley hadn’t had time to lie to Sadie. But considering everything the girl had gone through over the past twenty-four hours, Sadie’s flippant comment just didn’t seem worth disputing.

  So Riley decided to change the subject. “Tell me how your aunt and uncle are related to your mom and dad.”

  “Aunt Vi is my mother’s sister. She and Uncle Bill had triplets a couple of years before my parents died.”

  “Wow. Triplets.”

  “Three boys. Using something called the turkey baster method, according to Nana, when she was just starting to forget how to put the brakes on anything that came out of her mouth. Boy, don’t I wish I never looked that up on the Internet.”

  “Ah.”

  “My aunt and my mother both had trouble getting pregnant. My mother chose adoption to make a family. Aunt Vi chose to spend a fortune to have kids who would carry on her oh so precious genes.”

  Riley chose to ignore that ripple of bitterness, too happy that Sadie was finally talking about something. “Triplets are a lot of responsibility.”

  “Yeah, well, she didn’t stop there. She had Ruby just before my parents died.” She picked up a French fry and whirled it in her hand. “Izzy was right.”

  “Izzy was right about what?”

  “She said it was stupid to come to Pine Lake.” Sadie squinted down the sweeping lawn outside the travelers’ rest stop to the cars whizzing by on the highway. “Maybe I got exactly what I deserved. Some nose-pierced, smart-mouthed trucker for a bio-mom who can’t wait to run back to a home she doesn’t have.”

  Riley’s breath stopped. “That’s harsh.”

  “Is it? She’s been riding my butt since the minute she saw me. The only reason she came to Camp Kwenback was to rush me back to my aunt.”

  “Or get a runaway off the streets—”

  “That’s an excuse. She’s not exactly telling me to come live with her, you know.” Sadie made a snorting noise. “She can’t wait to push me back to the family she dumped me on, all those years ago.”

  “Sadie, I know the news was a shock—”

  “Oh, don’t even go there.”

  “It was a shock to me, too. Never in a million years did I think Tess had a child, never mind that you
were that daughter.”

  “Right.” Riiiiiight. “You two, best of friends, and she hid it for how many—”

  “We were friends, good friends, when we were younger. Things changed when her father took off with our grammar school English teacher.”

  “Oooh, small-town drama.”

  Riley thought of the transformation, a girl who once loved to splash through the marsh and hunt for frogs, to the one six months later dying her pale hair black, sporting a spiked neck choker, and giving her an eye like a dare. “It didn’t feel like ‘small’ drama to Tess.”

  “You know what?” Sadie tossed a fry toward a cluster of sparrows. “I don’t give a damn about her problems.”

  “I get that,” she said, “but if you just take a moment, take a deep breath, and step back from the situation—”

  “Is that what you did after you spoke to your birth mother? You just”—Sadie curled her fingers into air quotes—“stepped back from the situation?”

  Riley stared at the battered wood of the picnic table and tried to remember exactly what she did after she spoke to her birth mother on the phone. Her husband had been there, staring at her, talking to her, telling her how sorry he was. The microwave timer was beeping. It kept beeping and beeping and beeping until her husband left to go hit the keypad to stop it. When he came back, she must have told him it was okay, she was okay, but she wasn’t. She’d felt numb, dissociated, like she’d mentally been wrapped in cotton.

  When she’d finally emerged from that muffled cocoon, whole months had already passed, and for a long time she felt ungainly, off-center, like a broken-winged bird.

  “Uh-huh. Just what I thought.” Sadie shifted her weight. “You can’t pull that over on me, Riley. I know your story, remember? I know you didn’t just ‘step back from the situation.’”

  “I tried to.”

  “Oh, sure you did. You came home to Pine Lake the first chance you got, right? You came running back to your family and your hometown.”

  “Sadie, it was almost a year after I contacted my birth mother when my grandparents died and left me Camp Kwenback.”

  “Maybe it didn’t happen right away, but the minute the opportunity showed itself, you seized it, didn’t you?”

  Riley opened her mouth but she couldn’t think of what to say because that sounded pretty right.

  “I’m telling you”—Sadie patted her chest—“that if you felt back then like I’m feeling right now, right this minute, then all you wanted to do was run back home. Or at least to the next best thing—to someone you trusted.”

  Riley rejected the explanation even as it needled her. “I trusted my husband.”

  “You left him, too.”

  But not because of that. It wasn’t his fault that, after the phone call, she found herself mentally upended, contemplative, questioning, reexamining every one of those steps and wondering how they led her to such restless discontent.

  “Well,” Sadie added, “I don’t know much about guys. I’ve only kissed a boy once, at the St. Patrick’s Day dance in seventh grade, and it was so sloppy that I had to wash afterward.”

  “I assume,” Riley said, struggling to put the conversation back on track, “that what you’re telling me is that you’re going to Ohio because you can trust your aunt.”

  “Oh, I trust her. She tells me right out when I’m a pain in her neck. That’s the good thing about family. Living under the same roof, you can’t keep a lie for long.”

  Riley rubbed her brow, wincing. How long had she lived in that Upper West Side apartment with her husband, maintaining the lie that she wanted to have children? How many years did she muffle her own discontent, happy to follow Declan’s lead because Declan was strong and smart and good and handsome, and when she followed his lead, it was all good…until the day she spoke to her birth mother.

  She shook herself. This wasn’t about her. This was about the young woman brooding on the bench beside her, the young woman who didn’t know the full story of how she came to be. But Riley knew the full story. With that in mind, she tried to think of some way she could talk around it to make Sadie understand.

  “Yesterday, how much did Tess tell you,” Riley ventured, “about the days after she found out she was pregnant with you?”

  “Only that she didn’t know until it was too late to get rid of me.” Sadie twisted on the bench and lifted her knees to her chin. “And something about shooting heroin between train cars in a Midwestern depot.”

  The words took Riley’s breath away.

  “What?” Sadie exclaimed. “She didn’t spill that little detail yesterday? While you two were hanging around the mini-golf talking about me?”

  “I knew things were bad during those years…but she didn’t go into detail.”

  “She saves that for her ‘scared straight’ talks.”

  “That shows just how overwhelmed she’d been by—”

  “Oh pul-ease.”

  “Sadie, I’m trying to make a point.” Riley watched a couple of sparrows fight over crumbs on the grass by their feet. “You know what it’s like to feel overwhelmed. You’ve had plenty of reason. When your parents died—”

  “You don’t get to talk about them.”

  “When your parents died,” she repeated, “do you remember how you felt?”

  “I was only eight years old.”

  “I bet you felt dizzy, nauseous, like everything was beyond your control, rolling right over you.”

  “So I’m supposed to think a pregnancy did that to some tough, tatted chick?”

  “It wasn’t just the pregnancy.” Riley bit at her thumb, skittering around the details. “Her mother treated her badly. Tess couldn’t believe, after all the years she took care of her, that her mother chose alcohol over her.”

  “See this.” Sadie raised a hand close to her squinting eyes and rubbed two fingers together, imitating the world’s smallest violin.

  “So,” Riley pressed forward, “imagine Tess in a dorm in some Ohio adoption agency, waiting out the days of her pregnancy, counting down the minutes until she could get out of there, and then you were born.” Riley hesitated, not quite sure how to explain what Tess had told her about that moment. “You were born,” Riley said, “and Tess told me that everything changed.”

  Sadie made a long, scoffing raspberry.

  “Tess told me that the pregnancy was one thing, but birth was something different. Suddenly she didn’t want to go back to that train depot, to the false friends, to the false happiness, to everything she’d been jonesing for before. She told me that she’d been dead all those months. And yet, suddenly, there you were, emerging from her very much alive. Do you understand what I’m saying?” Riley reached over and put her hand on Sadie’s knee. “You saved Tess.”

  Sadie yanked her knee away. “Then why the hell didn’t she save me?”

  *

  Sadie didn’t think she could stand the silence anymore. It felt like she’d been sitting in this car for a month, bracing an unopened bottle of water on her thigh. She had one foot kicked up on the dash, and she was angry that she had nothing to do but gaze out the window at the wooded verge flying by and wonder why her biological mother just sat in the back, silent, like some kind of tatted oracle waiting to be consulted.

  Enough.

  “So,” Sadie said, slapping the bottle of water against her thigh, “you’re coming to meet my aunt.”

  The hum of the tires changed pitch as they traveled across a bridge, bumping, bumping, bumping. Neither woman answered at first. Out of the corner of her eye, Sadie saw Riley flex her fingers against the steering wheel and then glance in a sort of panic in the rearview mirror.

  The Tess-woman said in a flat voice, “Yes, Sadie, I’m going to meet your aunt.”

  “She’s not going to like you, you know. Aunt Vi hates tattoos. Says they make a girl look cheap. So what are you going to do when you meet her? Are you going to beat her up?”

  “Of course not—”

  “
Are you going to threaten her if she doesn’t act nice to me?” Sadie twisted in the seat, peering at her from around the side. “And what are you going to threaten her with? Taking me away?”

  The blonde didn’t even look up, absorbed with tugging a string dangling from the end of her cutoffs.

  “Aunt Vi would love if you took me away,” Sadie said, “but that’s the problem. You aren’t offering to take me in.”

  The woman’s shoulders rose and fell. “If I had a—”

  “Even if you did,” Sadie interrupted, not wanting to hear any more lies, “I wouldn’t go with you anyway.”

  The Tess-woman flinched, and because of that Sadie didn’t turn away like she was intending to, having said her piece, because that looked like a real flinch and she hadn’t expected that at all.

  “I just want to make sure you’re safe at home,” the blonde said, speaking the words like she’d memorized them or something. “I just want to see that you’re settled in a decent place.”

  “Too bad you couldn’t give me a decent place.” There was something growing hot in Sadie’s chest, something burning that swelled. “Too bad you were too busy sleeping around with strange men and not thinking about the consequences. Heck, I passed eighth-grade sex ed, and even I know better than to do that—”

  “Sadie!”

  “Riley, maybe you can stop being her mouthpiece for five minutes,” Sadie retorted, “and let her talk for herself.”

  Tess murmured, “It wasn’t like that.”

  “It wasn’t like that? Some guy you were with for one night and didn’t know his name?” Sadie nudged her seat belt off her shoulder and twisted so she kneeled backward on the seat, gripping the headrest in her hands. “Do you even know what my father looks like? Or could I be, like, the child of any number of random guys?”

  Riley barked, “Enough.”

  “It’s all right, Riley.” The woman’s voice was irritatingly quiet, and she sat as calmly as a social worker. “It’s an honest question. Yes, Sadie, I know the man who made me pregnant with you.”

  “You sure?” Sadie pulled a curl from her own ponytail. “He got hair like mine?”