“If I’d known the whole terrible story,” her mother said, “I would have been much kinder to that woman.”
Riley froze.
“I’m afraid,” her mother said, noticing her reaction, “that the whole town knows about the sexual assault now.”
Riley tried to form the word how but she’d somehow lost the ability to speak.
Her mother said, “Tess’s mother had a fit, some kind of breakdown, just last week. Not alcohol related, so I hear, but they’re keeping her in the hospital under supervision. Since then she’s been talking to anyone who’ll listen. Nurses, orderlies, candy stripers. She’s blaming herself for not protecting her own daughter from the man who assaulted her. I hear that she’s asked to see Officer Rodriguez.”
“Mom,” Riley said, “this is Tess’s private business.” How Tess would hate to once again be the subject of discussion among the ladies over lunch, or during a round of golf, or while planning for the next charity event for the Daughters of Old Pine Lake.
“You know,” her mother continued, “I knew something about Tess’s home situation when she stayed here. But I had no idea it was so bad.” Her mother rolled a charm up and down the chain around her neck. “Bud and Mary were right. Tess would have been better off if she’d taken up their offer.”
“Offer?”
“They asked her to stay.” Her mother looked up at her. “You two being so close back then, I thought you knew about that.”
Riley shook her head. “Why didn’t she stay?”
“We don’t get to choose our mothers.” Her mother gave her a wan smile. “And when you’re that young, I guess you have to believe that you can fix the one you’ve got.”
And suddenly Riley remembered her own mother on her knees in the grass squeezing the glitter glue around Riley’s social studies poster. Riley thought of her mother marching into her sixth grade teacher’s conference, her chin high, holding Riley’s hand tight. Riley thought of the anger in her mother’s eyes when she caught Riley’s older brother teasing her over her homework. Riley thought of her mother jumping up and down in the stands at every softball game, cheering her on as Riley rounded the bases.
Riley heard herself saying, “There’s one more thing I have to tell you, Mom.”
Her mother groaned and reached for her glass. “I should have asked for something stronger than sun tea.”
“I signed the divorce papers.” Riley imagined she could still taste the gum of the envelope on her tongue. “I mailed them last week.”
“Oh, dear.”
“I held on to them for too long. I gave Declan false hope that I would return to a relationship that had serious problems from the very start.” She spread her arms to encompass the land that would soon belong to someone else. “It turns out I have a bad habit of clinging to broken things.”
Her mother listened in stillness. Condensation dripped on her mother’s capris. Her mother made no attempt to wipe it off.
“I know,” Riley ventured, “that you and Declan blame my behavior on the whole thing with my biological mother. You’re right, but not in the way you think.”
Those finely trimmed eyebrows raised a fraction.
“That woman’s reaction to me was so much worse than I’d ever expected that, eventually, I realized the problem was all hers. I mean, really. No baby is that unlovable.”
“Oh, Riley.” Her mother’s voice broke. “You’re the most lovable soul I know.”
“You have to say that,” she teased. “You’re my mother. My real mother.”
Her mother’s head bobbed a little. A faint flush rose to her cheeks. Her lips moved but no sound came out. The Cross women rarely spoke in such sentimental terms, but Riley figured that was one old habit she could break.
“Well,” her mother said, “I wish you’d told me about signing the papers earlier.” Her mother peered into her glass with more intensity than the drink seemed to warrant. “Moments like that should be enacted with some kind of solemnity. I’d have taken you out.”
“To mourn?”
“To honor the passing. Though I would have tastefully celebrated with you, if that’s what you really wanted.”
Riley blinked back a sudden prickle of tears.
“So this idea of yours, for the camp,” her mother said, in a brighter voice. “It’s vintage Riley Cross, you know.”
“I…guess.”
“It hovers in that gray area between crazy and genius.”
“Is that a vote of confidence?”
“Are you sure this is what you want?”
“Yes.” The word came out, swift and unbidden, a reflex that just barely beat out the ripples of doubt.
Her mother said, “I think I might have waited thirty-odd years to hear you say that.”
“Say yes?”
“To say it like you mean it.” Her mother raised a glass in a toast. “In that case, bombs away, Riley. I’m glad you’re moving forward in the direction you want, even if it’s not in the direction I would have chosen for you.”
As Riley absorbed those words, a great, swelling affection rose up in her, a wave of emotion that compelled her across the porch to perch her hip on the arm of her mother’s chair.
“Riley, what are you, six years old?” Her mother chuckled as she got nudged. “There are plenty of chairs—”
“I know.”
Then Riley pressed her nose in that fine blond coif, fiercely grateful for the opinionated, exasperating, magnificent woman who’d chosen to be her mom.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
During the long summer days in Ohio, Sadie did a lot of hard thinking.
She had no real complaints about living in her aunt’s house. Her aunt couldn’t cook to save her life, but there was always something on the table at 6:30 p.m. There was food in the fridge that Sadie didn’t have to shop for and clean clothes in her drawers that she didn’t have to wash. She didn’t have to make everyone’s bed—she didn’t have to make anyone’s bed if she didn’t want to because Aunt Vi didn’t care about things like that. She didn’t have to pay any bills or clean the bathroom, even if Aunt Vi made her take in the garbage cans and occasionally watch the kids after day camp in the afternoon. And her cousins were like oversize puppies, rolling over one another, often making her laugh even if sometimes she wanted to crack them on the nose with a rolled-up newspaper.
The problems really began when Aunt Vi brought her to the high school to register for the new academic year. She’d soaked it all in—the just disinfected smell, the gleaming black tables of the labs, the way the halls echoed every voice. But when she tried to cast her thoughts toward her future here, the images that tumbled in her mind looked a lot like Riley’s stupid pictures.
She’d mentioned this to Izzy online—Izzy, whom she missed like a lost tooth, though there was nothing that she could do about that now that Aunt Vi was selling the house in Queens. Izzy had confessed that she sometimes had dreams about green, terraced hills she’d never seen before. They’d looked up the phenomenon online, found terms like “genetic memory” and “ancestral memory,” and marveled at the possibility that they could have remembrances in their heads that were not their own. Sadie thought—no way. But that itchy, restless feeling just wouldn’t disappear. Pine Lake was like a book she hadn’t finished, one that promised adventure, mystery, or at least some kind of happy ending.
So one Saturday, despite Aunt Vi’s reservations, Sadie took a bus to the local library, found a quiet cubby, opened her notebook, made two columns, and came up with a plan.
And now…here she was.
Sadie laid that same notebook on the weathered boards of the boathouse and then squinted up at the sunshine winking through the trees. When she’d arrived in Pine Lake last week, Riley had warned her that it got cold quick in the mountains and the chill could start even in September. Sadie had been skeptical at first, but now she could feel it. The sun was warm on her hair, the boards hot beneath her palms, the light bright on the paper of her notebook, but the l
ate afternoon breeze raised goose bumps on her arms.
She loved it, all of it, the way the water gurgled against the piers, the way she could sit here in the quiet while still hearing Riley and her friends hooting in laughter on the back porch of the lodge, chattering in high-pitched excitement at seeing each other again. The laughter reminded her that she’d see Izzy again, eventually. Riley said Izzy could come next summer and stay with her in the attic room they’d built after tossing some of the old boxes. She and Izzy could make a little money working in the mini-golf if they wanted to. Riley also said Sadie could go back to Ohio any time she wanted—Christmas, Easter, February break, too. People should always have options, Riley said. Choice was good.
Some choices were harder than others, Sadie suspected. She was just beginning to understand that.
Sometime later Sadie heard footsteps whoosh-whooshing on the grass down the hill. She slid her book off her lap. Riley had told her that Tess would be in town to say hello to her old friends from school. With her stomach lurching, Sadie had told Riley that she wouldn’t mind. She was cool with Tess being around.
Still, her heart did a little stop trip as she stood up.
Tess came into view, a blur in the boathouse shadows. Sadie patted her chest to grab the prescription glasses she’d hung on the collar of her T-shirt, the glasses she hadn’t even been aware she needed until Aunt Vi took her to the optometrist. She still marveled how they put the distant world into sudden focus.
Sadie looked through the glasses at Tess pushing the sleeve of a fuzzy white sweater higher on her arm. The sweater looked so odd on Tess’s black-clad figure that Sadie figured she had to have borrowed it from Riley. The sweater covered all the tats and reflected a strange light onto Tess’s face.
That must be why Tess looked so pale.
“Riley tells me,” Tess ventured, “that you’ve decided to stay here and go to Pine Lake High.”
“Uh-huh.”
“I almost lived at Camp Kwenback once, too.” She stopped fussing with the sleeve and instead shoved her hands in her back pockets. “I wish I had, actually. This is a very good choice, Sadie. I’m happy for you.”
Sadie nodded, looking at her feet, feeling a pressure growing in her throat, the pressure of so very many questions. About the troubled grandmother she’d met by accident in the grocery store, about the grandfather she didn’t know at all, about the ancestors before them, where they’d come from, how they’d ended up in the mountains of upstate New York. She wanted to know the difficult things, too, how Tess managed living with an alcoholic for so long, whether Tess would be willing to come back to Pine Lake once in a while, you know, just to visit.
Instead Sadie blurted, “You can’t be my mother.”
Tess blinked and then dropped her gaze to her feet. The folds of her sweater caved around her abdomen.
“I mean,” Sadie stuttered, “I know you’re my birth mother. But I just can’t call you ‘Mother.’”
“Of course not. You already have a mother.” Tess cleared the hoarseness from her throat. “I understand that.”
“I’m just saying—”
“I remember her, you know. I remember when she came to the hospital to bring you home.” Tess’s brow furrowed. “She wore a blue skirt and sneakers. She had long black hair and a great laugh.”
Sadie bobbed her head. Of course Tess knew her mother. Tess had chosen her mother. Tess had placed Sadie in her mother’s arms.
“Sadie,” Tess ventured, “I’d like to visit the camp now and again.” Tess tugged on her fingertips, looking up at the twig work of the boathouse. “I know you’re going to be living here now, but I hope you don’t mind if I pop in occasionally. I’ll make sure Riley lets you know when I’m coming so it won’t be a big, ugly surprise.” Tess wandered a step closer, stepping into the brightness of the bay, looking at her with odd, hopeful eyes. “We don’t even have to talk when I’m here, if you don’t want to.”
Maybe it was the way the sunlight hit Tess’s face, but Sadie noticed a certain pattern of freckles on her jaw. She saw the way her nose wrinkled right at the bridge when she squinted. She saw in those hesitant, questioning eyes the same tentative hope that she felt curling within her own heart.
Sadie didn’t remember crossing the space between them. She just heard Tess make a strange, choking sound. She saw Tess’s arms fly open.
Then, against her pressed ear, she heard the racing of her mother’s heart.
A Note from the Author
Dear Reader,
Some stories flow like cool, clear water and other stories flow like tears. I knew, as a mother of three wonderful daughters, that writing Senseless Acts of Beauty would be the latter. So I just want to say to those daughters—if any of you dare to pick up Mom’s book—that there are no secret babies I gave up for adoption, and you were all born happily from a loving relationship. This book isn’t about you.
And yet this book is all about them.
When Tess sees her daughter for the first time “it felt like a scrim had peeled off her eyes, and she could see the whole, wide world in all its goodness and badness, all its capricious randomness, complicated and full of senseless acts of beauty.” That was the feeling that gripped my labor-addled mind when the doctor first put each daughter squalling into my arms. When Riley talks about the “full-body, twenty-four-hour, never-ending immersion” that is parenthood, the “crazy three-a.m. feedings, the emergency room visits, the moments when you thought you lost them,” that was my anxiety hidden behind a smile from the days when I had to free them so they could learn how to dive, to drive, and to date.
But as I researched the many issues in this book—sexual assault, the reproductive choices a woman faces, the fate of children born of rape, and the intricacies of open and closed adoptions—I discovered a deep level of pain beyond the everyday highs and lows of parenthood. For some, the experience of becoming a mother is so fraught with confusion, complexity, and conflicting emotions that many women still can’t talk about it.
To the mothers and children who so bravely shared your experiences, I thank you. I hope I did your stories justice. I hope I reveal to others the same wisdom you gifted me—that every child born is an act of beauty.
Andto my readers, thank you for joining me on this journey. I hope my story will help you appreciate all the beauty in your life.
Discussion Questions
Lisa Verge Higgins loves to meet readers. If your book club has chosen a book by Lisa and you’re interested in arranging a phone or Skype chat, feel free to contact her at http://www.lisavergehiggins.com/contact.
Senseless Acts of Beauty circles around the idea that beauty and reason don’t always coexist, that beauty is inexplicable, often random, always in the eye of the beholder, and that the most heartbreaking, amazing creations can arise out of whimsy as well as serious intent—or even from no intent at all. In your own life, can you pinpoint a moment when you’ve witnessed a senseless act of beauty?
Tess’s discovery of her pregnancy months after the rape extends her emotional and psychological trauma, but also forces her off the streets. What if Tess had never become pregnant from the assault? How do you see her life evolving if Sadie never existed?
“Mothers cast long shadows,” Tess tells Sadie as she explains why she felt compelled to make an adoption plan. Certainly Tess’s mother, an unrepentant alcoholic, gave Tess no good example of parenting. But other mothers in this novel cast long shadows, too. Who do you think wields the most influence over Riley during this story—her adoptive mother or her birth mother?
Sadie sets off to find her birth mother claiming she has no expectations. (“I’d be pretty mad if my birth mother was an alcoholic or a drug addict or something. It would totally suck to have come all this way just to find out she didn’t care about anything but her next fix.”) But considering her reaction to meeting Riley, the research Sadie tackles, and later her reaction to discovering Tess, what do you think Sadie was really hoping for in a
birth mother?
Tess and Officer Rodriguez have a long, contentious, and complicated relationship. That relationship begins to change as Tess realizes how deeply he regretted not stepping in to remove her from a dysfunctional home. How do you see that relationship evolving? Will Rodriguez become a father figure? Will they become friends? Or is there a possibility for a deeper relationship, among equals?
Riley describes herself as “a mute brown wren tumbling helplessly in the gale-force winds of other people’s advice,” yet when we meet her at the start of the novel, she has already quit a good job in New York City and left her husband. What combination of factors instigated this first startling life change?
Sadie said a lot of terrible things about her aunt Violet not wanting her in her house, yet when Riley and Tess reach Ohio they discover a woman doing the best she can for the many young children under her care. Why do you think the eight-year-old Sadie didn’t like living in Aunt Violet’s house in the first place?
Mother-daughter relationships, in all their fraught complications, inform many of the themes of Senseless Acts of Beauty. Considering all the examples in the book—the dysfunction of Tess and her mother, the fraught but loving relationship between Riley and her adoptive mother—how do you envision Tess’s relationship with Sadie evolving as time goes on?
When Riley hesitated to sign the divorce papers, her husband, Declan, nurtured hopes for a reconciliation. He even coaxed Riley’s own mother—who adores him—into arranging a meeting at the diner. What did Declan do wrong in this marriage? What did he do right? Was there any chance that they could have worked things out?
One of the major themes of Senseless Acts of Beauty is that no matter how smoothly and well thought out an adoption plan, it’s all but impossible to avoid anxiety, lasting emotional trauma, and doubt on the birth mother’s side and—later—a range of hard questions on the part of the adopted child, no matter how well loved by her adoptive family. Is open adoption the answer to these issues? Then what about situations like Sadie’s, where the pregnancy was brought on by terrible violence? What are the mother’s rights? What are the child’s?
Senseless Acts of Beauty Page 26
