Senseless Acts of Beauty

by Lisa Verge Higgins

  The Tess-woman swallowed, and it looked like she was swallowing down a really big pill. “You’ve got hair like my aunt,” she said. “If I had to guess, I’d say my mother was shocked to see you in that grocery store because you look like her sister, who died when she—”

  “Yeah, yeah, great story, but you’re just changing the subject. What I want to know is what part of me looks like my father.”

  “I don’t remember him clearly enough.”

  Sadie saw the way Tess met Riley’s gaze in the rearview mirror, saw the odd expression that passed over Tess’s face, sensed some story being woven tight between them.

  “You’re lying.” That ball of heat in her chest was starting to burn. “If he was just a nobody, you wouldn’t act all weird every time I ask about him.”

  Tess rubbed her forehead. “This conversation isn’t easy—”

  “I’m going to find him someday, just like I found you,” she said, determination rising. “I’m going to come back to Pine Lake and look in yearbooks again, and newspapers. I’ll ask about who Tess Hendrick hung around with back before I was born. Maybe I’ll even talk to that cop friend of yours and see what he knows—”

  “Sadie,” Riley interrupted, “haven’t you learned anything about doing this before you’re ready?”

  “Oh, I’ll be ready this time. I’ll be eighteen or maybe even twenty, but I’ll track him down just like I tracked you down, Miss Eighteen-wheeler. I’ve got a right to know my father—”

  “Don’t call him that.” The woman turned away but not before Sadie saw her face collapse. Sadie raised herself up off her knees because now she knew she was onto something.

  Riley said sharply, “Sadie, sit down.”

  “I’m fine.”

  “It’s dangerous—”

  “You just keep your eyes on the road, Riley.”

  “I think”—Riley tugged on the waistband of her shorts—“we’ve all done enough talking for now.”

  “You’re the one that set up this little car ride, right?” Sadie glared at Riley. “You’re the one who wants us to talk—”

  “It’s all right, Riley.” The Tess-woman’s voice was smaller than before. “I’ll answer her questions.”

  “Will you really give me a straight answer?” Sadie asked. “Because I’m half of that man, whoever he is. He’s in my blood and my bones and my brain, and I’ve got a right to know who he is. Just like I had a right to know who you are, no matter how bad that ended up.”

  “He’s not a good man, Sadie.”

  Sadie’s heart leaped. “He’s alive then.”

  Tess’s brows drew together under the swoop of her bangs, and the woman found something interesting to stare at on the car floor, but she didn’t say anything, and Sadie figured not answering at all meant that she was right.

  “So what does that mean, exactly,” Sadie said, her mind tripping over possibilities, “that he’s not a ‘good’ man?”

  “Hey,” Riley said, her voice weirdly high, “why don’t we pull over at this next stop up ahead and take a breather—”

  “Seriously, though,” Sadie leaned over and the headrest bit into her throat, “is he what made you into such a hard-ass, Miss Hendrick? Was he a bad boyfriend, beating on you or something?”

  “Yes.” The word came out with a spray of spit. “Yes, he beat me,” she repeated. “He beat me bad enough to put me in the hospital.”

  Then the woman drew her legs up on the seat to hide her face between her knees. Riley made a strange sucking noise between her teeth so Sadie glanced over and saw the stricken expression on her face, too.

  An odd thought came to Sadie, a thought that caused her mind to slow down, her thoughts to skitter in strange directions.

  “You’re lying to me,” Sadie said. “You’re both lying to me.”

  Tess’s eyes were swollen. “I’ve never lied to you, Sadie.”

  “But you told me before that my father wasn’t your boyfriend.”

  “He wasn’t.”

  “You told me that you were with him only one night.”

  “Yes.”

  “Now you’re telling me he beat you. That he put you in the hospital.”

  Tess hesitated, and a honk startled them all. Sadie gripped the back of the seat as Riley swerved the car out of the left lane in time for a truck to zoom by her. Sadie watched the panicked way Riley glanced at the controls and then eased her foot off the gas. Sadie saw the worry on Riley’s face as clearly as she saw the tears.

  And all the considerations that Sadie had barely formed—of a faceless father who went on to become a professor or a baseball player or an accountant like her real father and just never knew about the child he’d helped conceive a child he’d welcome if Sadie somehow showed up on the doorstep of his big suburban house—they all crumbled as her thoughts slid to something she balked to consider.

  “You told me,” Sadie said, her throat going dry, “that you don’t know his name.”

  The blonde was silent.

  “You told me,” she whispered, “that you don’t remember his face.”

  And then all the pieces of what she knew and what she didn’t know swirled in her head—the nameless father, the one single night, the violence that put Tess in the hospital, the secret told in the moonlight to Riley, the angry cop confronting a shaking Tess—and it all coalesced into an ugly, incomprehensible whole she wished she could forever push out of her brain.

  It couldn’t be true. The Tess-woman would tell her it wasn’t true.

  Sadie blurted, “You were raped.”

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  S-s-stop the car.”

  Sadie tumbled back into her seat. Her whole body went numb cold, and it wasn’t because of the air-conditioning blasting out of the vent near her shoulder. She wanted to stand up, pace, move, escape. There wasn’t enough air. It flooded through the vents but she couldn’t breathe it in. Black spots winked before her eyes, and her stomach dropped as a burning began right under the bone in the middle of her chest.

  She said, “I’m going to throw up.”

  The car made a sickening swerve that swished the contents of her belly. The whole car vibrated as it rumbled over the warning strip. Sadie was thrown back against the seat as Riley pressed on the brake. The car churned up dust as it came to a lurching stop on the shoulder of the road.

  Sadie blindly grasped for the handle, shoving it open so fast that she tumbled out. She heard a shout as she fell hard on the ground. Gravel bit into her knees. Her body heaved, a hard heave that made her arch her back as she struggled to all fours. She managed to crawl a few steps away from the car before the chewed-up contents of a hamburger and fries launched out of her, spraying down the grassy slope.

  She heard two car doors slam, a confused patter of feet, a twist of a cap, a gurgle of water. She heaved again, a tightening of her diaphragm that strained her throat but brought up nothing but bile. Someone pulled her ponytail out of the way and slapped something wet and cold on the back of her neck.

  “Breathe, Sadie.”

  The shock of hearing the Tess-woman just above her made her flinch. She heard a sharp intake of breath as the pressure on the back of her neck eased. Riley murmured something, and then Sadie sensed the touch of a different hand on her neck. She heard Tess move away.

  “I should never have asked,” Sadie said, her mouth burning. A whoosh of air flooded over her as a truck zoomed by on the interstate. Rocks bit into the palms of her hands, and streams of cool water dripped down her neck to make a pattering of dark spots in her shadow. “It’s like when you kick over a rock. You always find something slimy.”

  A water bottle loomed in her vision. Riley said, “Drink.”

  Sadie checked the state of her stomach, waiting for another surge of bile. She leaned back, shook the gravel off her hands, and then grasped the bottle. It was slippery with condensation.

  The water swished in her mouth, acid-tainted. She turned her head to spit it out. Then she gulped t
he fresh water down, watching as—a dozen steps beyond Riley—Tess stumbled and then dropped to her backside like she’d lost control of her legs. The blonde caught herself by throwing out a hand.

  Sadie heard herself stutter, “I’m a rape baby.”

  “Don’t.” Riley seized her knee. “Don’t call yourself that.”

  The words echoed through her head like the shriek of a fire alarm through the halls of her old school.

  “Three things,” Riley said, stepping into the line of her vision. “There are three things you have to remember.”

  “I don’t want to talk anymore.”

  “I’m not asking you to talk. I’m telling you to listen.”

  Sadie pressed the bottle against her sweaty forehead, closing her eyes, suddenly very tired.

  “First,” Riley said, “never ever refer to yourself as a rape baby.”

  “It’s what I am.”

  “It’s not what you are.” Riley gripped her arm then shook it, forcing her to open her eyes. “The rape is something that happened before you were born.”

  “And I’m what came of it.”

  “What makes you think it matters,” Riley said, as she tugged Sadie back into the shadow of the car, “how we came into this world?”

  “Who the hell is we?”

  “You, me. Adoptees.” Riley sank down beside her. “We have this great secret in our lives, a mystery we’re compelled to solve, right? Maybe we make that mystery more important than it deserves to be.”

  “So, what, are you a rape baby, too?”

  “Maybe.”

  Sadie caught her breath.

  “My birth mother never told me her story. I never got that chance.” Riley’s gaze shifted to where Tess was leaning on an elbow. “After hearing what Tess told me, it got me thinking that maybe my birth mother had a reason to put me up for adoption. Maybe she was even trying to protect me, in a strange, brutal way.”

  “Did you hurl?”

  “Hurl?”

  “When you spoke to your birth mother,” Sadie said, jerking her chin to the unloaded contents of her stomach, “did you throw up?”

  “Later. When my husband wasn’t around to witness it.”

  Sadie picked at the edges of the damp label of her water bottle, trying to stop her breath from sawing through her throat, trying to absorb what Riley was saying, but all thinking stopped at rape baby.

  “The problem with calling yourself names,” Riley said, “is that the words will stick. They’ll burrow into your brain until you can’t think straight anymore, then you’ll fix on the stupid idea that you’re less worthy than other people—or worse, not worthy at all.”

  “I don’t feel like that.” It was a lie because there was a dark haze around her vision now, a black void that threatened to swallow her up, and a strange reluctance to look in the direction of that woman. “Are you sure you didn’t smoke something funny before we left Pine Lake?”

  “There’s proof. You’re the exact same smart-mouthed girl now as you were when I found you in the generator shed trying to keep warm.”

  That seemed like ages and ages ago, a hundred thousand years. “Can we just get back in the car and get this whole trip over with?”

  “Not yet.” Riley’s brows were drawn so hard that a deep line appeared between them. “This is important, Sadie. My run-in with my biological mother was years ago, but it taught me one thing. I’d spent my whole life pleasing other people at all costs. You know why I did that, I know you do.”

  So they’d like you. Sadie peeled off the label of the water bottle as a new burn began in her belly. So they wouldn’t abandon you.

  “A lot of people do crazy things because they don’t feel they deserve any better,” Riley said. “This isn’t just about adoptees like you and me. The first step down the wrong road is to pin yourself with the label ‘rape baby.’”

  A wave of sensation rolled over her, an itching that irritated her skin and made her fingers curl, that made her want to dig her nails into her arms and legs and belly and sides and scratch off a layer.

  “What matters,” Riley persisted, “has nothing to do with biology. What matters are the choices you make, and how you treat the people you love. Like how you sat with Mrs. Clancy and played those board games. Like how you went to the library and did the research you needed—”

  “Research I wish I’d never done.”

  “You set a goal, and you achieved it. That’s my point. We are what we do, Sadie. Not what we are born into.”

  “Maybe it’s different if you’re born from a rape—”

  “It’s not.” Riley shook her head so hard her ponytail whipped the side of the car. “It’s no different even if your biological mother is like mine, who wishes I’d never been born. There was never a baby born on this earth, Sadie, that didn’t deserve to be unconditionally loved.”

  The water bottle slipped out of Sadie’s hands. She watched it roll through the dirt. Then she pushed herself to her feet, stepped over it, and kicked at the scrubby grass. Her ears rang, a high-pitched whine that threatened to block out the sound of the pinging gravel, the whoosh of the cars as they zoomed by. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw the blonde look over her shoulder at both of them.

  “I look like him, don’t I?” Sadie looked down at her own hands, spread her fingers, and found them trembling. “She avoided me as much as she could these past weeks. Like she couldn’t bear the sight of me, like I reminded her of everything bad that happened.”

  “Oh, Sadie, Sadie, you’ve got this wrong in so many ways.”

  “From the moment she arrived,” Sadie said, her voice rising, “that woman has been scheming to get rid of me.”

  “Not because of how you looked. Tess just wanted you to be off the streets and safe at home.”

  Sadie’s heart hardened. “Of course you’d defend her.”

  “I defend her because I understand her.” Riley rose to her feet. “Some people come off real gruff. They’re even more gruff when they’re around the folks they care about—”

  “Gruff? She’s spiked like a stegosaurus.”

  “She’s got good reason. Everyone she has ever cared about—both her father and her mother—have betrayed her.”

  “Boo-frickin’-hoo.”

  “So she acts like it doesn’t matter, like nothing can cut through her skin, like everything is a joke. In fact, she acts exactly like you’re acting right now.”

  Sadie crossed her arms in front of her chest even as the memory came, unbidden, of the blonde making the same gesture at the boathouse yesterday.

  “I can’t believe I didn’t notice how similar you two are earlier.” Riley startled her by brushing her cheek with one quick finger. “The shape of your jaw, your nose, your shoulders. Both of you took care of a family member, without question, without complaint—both of you so devoted—”

  “She wasn’t devoted enough,” Sadie heard herself say, “to have kept me.”

  “She was devoted enough to figure out the identity of the family who adopted you. She’s still loyal enough to follow up on you. She was devoted enough to give you away because she truly believed that would be the best for you.”

  “Every birth mom says that—it’s the perfect excuse.” The ringing in her ears was starting to cause a pounding behind her eye, and weariness overwhelmed her again. All she wanted to do was get away from here, get home. “You said there was a third thing.”

  “What?”

  “You said I had to remember three things. I heard ‘don’t call yourself names’ and ‘you are what you do.’ Let’s finish this. What’s number three?”

  Sadie watched Riley’s soft chocolate-chip eyes as her gaze skittered to her friend again. Part of Sadie wanted to swivel on one foot and storm up to her biological mother and yell at her for not telling her everything—or yell at her for telling her everything—her brain couldn’t decide.

  “Sadie…” Riley stared at the ground as if the answer to all life’s mysteries resi
ded in the pattern of scattered gravel. “I don’t know if I can tell you this.”

  “What, are you afraid of breaking a promise?” The muscles of her shoulders clenched. “Breaking a promise isn’t much worse than lying.”

  “I wouldn’t be breaking a promise, and I sure wouldn’t be lying,” Riley said. “I know Tess wants to say this directly to you, but with the way things are right now, she’s afraid she’ll screw it up and make things worse.”

  “Then don’t tell me anything else.” Sadie walked to the car door and yanked it open. “Let’s just go to Ohio, okay?”

  “When I found out about all this, I asked Tess how she could love you.”

  Sadie flinched.

  “Tess was in labor for thirteen hours,” Riley said. “They wanted to do a cesarean section but she refused, because she knew that surgery meant a longer recovery. She didn’t want to spend one more minute in the hospital than she had to. She said…” Riley hesitated, grimaced, and then released a shaky sigh. “She said she couldn’t wait for the day that you were born. So she could leave.”

  Dark spots winked before her eyes. She tightened her grip on the passenger-side door to keep herself on her feet

  “Thirteen hours in labor,” Riley repeated, tracing patterns in the dust with the toe of her sandal, “and then you were born.”

  Sadie noticed the sudden lack of cars on the highway, the silence of the deep woods, the distant roar of other highways, other cars, and more than that, a silence among them, a space that echoed in her ears, which peeled open despite herself to hear the story every child wanted to hear, the story of the day she was born.

  “Tess didn’t intend to look at you when they put you on her stomach. She was sure—convinced—that you’d look just like him.”

  Sadie’s hand slipped off the grip. She tumbled onto the passenger seat with a painful bounce. She became conscious of the other woman, a smear of darkness she could just see out of the corner of her eye, looming closer.

  “But there you were,” Riley said, raising her face to the sky, “kicking and squeezing your hands, and there was a ropy cord still connecting your bodies together. Then Tess looked at you stretching your face up like you were trying to open your eyes and see her. The first thought that flew into her head—unbidden, unexpected—was that she had a daughter.”