Yet when they’d first left Maya’s dig this morning, Nicole had kept scanning radio frequencies for talk of a tornado watch. The skies had been low and ominous. She’d driven eighty miles an hour along the infinite ribbon of highway, and every shiver of wind sent silt pinging against the chassis. Every two minutes, she glanced in the rearview mirror so she could spot any change in the shape of the underbelly of the clouds, foresee the pea-green twist of a chasing funnel.
Crack!
The impact shuddered all the way up her arm. If only she could have connected as easily with the other fastballs, sliders, and curves that had whizzed by her on this road trip. Last night, Maya’s potion of wood smoke and Eastern European vodka proved so much more potent a psyche opener than any of her halting, bumbling, straight-from-the-life-coach-handbook questioning techniques. Her failures just kept chasing her. Her friends’ confessions in the South Dakota grasslands had made it official: how fortunate it had been for all of Nicole’s potential psychotherapy patients that she’d been forced to leave graduate school when Lars knocked her up.
Crack!
“Oh, great.” Claire’s voice came from somewhere behind her. “You camped in the wild last night, and now you’re working up a sweat. You’re going to stink like a bear when we get back on the road.”
Claire leaned against a post just outside the chain-link fence of the cages. Her T-shirt was splattered with colorful balloon creatures and said, I Support Balloon-Animal Rights.
Nicole turned her attention back to the ball launcher. “Are you going to answer your cell phone, Claire?”
“Is that darn thing ringing again?”
“I can hear it buzzing from here.”
“I swear, my sisters have some kind of radar. Whenever we come rolling into any town big enough to have a cell tower, they decide it’s time to call Claire to make sure I’m urinating clear and often.”
The vibrating sound distracted Nicole, so much so that she didn’t hear the drop of the mechanical arm. She swung but caught nothing but air.
She rolled the bat back over her shoulder as Claire made a clucking noise.
“It’s just Paulina again. That girl can hold her horses. I spoke to her an hour ago, while you guys were listening to that banjo band. She wouldn’t let me off the phone until I counted how many more pills I had left in my prescription and I swore to do my stretching exercises.”
Crack!
Nicole cast a glance over her shoulder long enough to see Claire bite the head off a corn dog. “I see you’re doing your best to keep to Jin’s suggestion of a macrobiotic diet.”
“No actual dogs were harmed in the making of this corn dog.”
“Aren’t cows sacred to Buddhists?”
“You’re confusing Buddhism with Hinduism. And I am certainly not breaking one of the five Buddhist precepts that all good laypeople are bound to follow.”
“I pass no judgment.” She crouched and leaned heavily on her left foot as she heard the drop of the metallic arm. “During Lent, I’m not supposed to eat meat on Fridays, but somehow sausage appears on my pizza.”
Crack!
The fence links clinked as Claire slipped her fingers through them. “Some Buddhists believe that even cracking an egg is killing a living thing. So the wife of the house orders a servant to crack the eggs. The wife is absolved because she didn’t do the actual cracking; and the servant is absolved, too, because he was forced to do it for someone else. Of course, in most Thai markets, the eggs are sold precracked anyway.”
“It’s a strange, strange world you live in.”
“This corn dog is delicious, by the way. You want me to get you one, once you’re finished taking out your frustration on those baseballs?”
Crack!
Nicole didn’t need to turn around to know that Claire was twirling the half-eaten corn dog like a lollipop. Claire’s head would be tilted, her long auburn braid falling over one shoulder, one leg crossed over the other with a toe of her battered boot dug into the dirt. For a woman who had no therapist training, Claire knew how to give a welcoming look while her body screamed I know there’s something on your mind.
Nicole fixed her attention on the open box where the balls were hurled, setting her stance, shifting her weight, settling the bat at just the right angle over her shoulder. Yeah, there was something on her mind. It was the memory of last night, when Claire through smoke and sparks confessed a lifelong series of failures with easy cynicism—while Nicole sat still, guilty, hotly embarrassed at her vain urge to keep her catastrophes to herself.
Crack!
Claire said, “You still got some whopping power in those arms.”
Nicole rolled her shoulders, feeling a pull in the tendons of her right shoulder. “Where’s Jenna?”
“She’s trying to win a stuffed animal for Zoe.”
“For a thirteen-year-old?”
“Compensating, I guess. Or maybe Jenna is imagining Nate’s face on the bull’s-eye when she hefts that plastic rifle to her shoulder. Maybe target shooting is her version of pounding a dozen baseballs.”
Nicole switched to the other side of the plate, pointedly not commenting, because this life-coach-fraud-of-a-therapist didn’t know a damn thing about how to help a haunted, traumatized woman like Jenna. Nope. Nicole was just here with her friends. She was just taking a break from Interstate 90 to enjoy a state fair. She was just working on her left side swing, her weaker side as a switch-hitter.
Crack!
Nicole dropped the bat off her shoulder. The end hit the ground and puffed up a cloud of dust. “Claire,” she blurted. “Are you going to quit on me?”
Claire stilled with the corn dog halfway to her mouth. “Quit on you? How do you mean?”
“I mean are you going to decide halfway to Pine Lake that this trip isn’t what you expected? That you can’t afford the gas anymore, or that Lucky has to pee too often, or that it’s too much dealing with Jenna the bundle-of-nerves and that I’m too”—her mouth moved but the words didn’t come out at first—“emotionally constipated?”
Claire twirled the stick of the corn dog in a perfect little circle. “You really think I’m going to bail.”
“I really, really need to get to Pine Lake.”
Nicole twisted away to hide her weakness and then dropped into her stance and waited for the next ball. How could she explain the feeling that if she just walked barefoot over the old pier and dove into the waters of Bay Roberts, she would somehow emerge psychically clean? If she just swam across to the little island, that spit of a thing with a half-dozen pines, she would somehow emerge as confident as the high school girl she once had been? One day was all that she needed. One day basking under the mountain sun, and her will would strengthen, her insecurities would melt, her spirits would rise to meet the challenges waiting for her when she returned home.
The ball hissed by her. She hadn’t even heard the mechanical arm drop.
Claire said, “I did shoot my mouth off last night, didn’t I? I never could hold my liquor.”
“Forget it.” She wiped the sweat off her brow with her forearm. “I shouldn’t have mentioned it. I’m just jonesing for a nice cold Corona on Coley’s Point—”
“You’ve got every right to wonder. I do have this thing about commitment. There’s a reason why I didn’t marry that Kiwi with the sheep farm outside of Wellington.”
Nicole blinked. She’d never known Claire had had a fiancé.
“Hell,” Claire continued, “I even chose Thai Buddhism because, unlike most other forms, it allows temporary ordination of monks and nuns.”
“Shaving your head sounds like a commitment to me.”
“Hair grows back quicker than you think. Don’t stop hitting balls for me, Nic. You’ve only got a few more minutes in the cage.”
Claire suddenly squinted in the direction of a carnival game clear across the fairway, watching a squealing group of kids as if she had money on their water pistol competition. Nicole recognized the body la
nguage. Apparently, the chain-link fence between her and Claire wasn’t enough of a scrim, so Nicole turned away and dropped back into position to give Claire some emotional space.
“You may be surprised by this,” Claire said, “but sometimes there were good reasons for me to quit. I didn’t really leave Buddhism just because of a passion for mesquite-flavored beef jerky.”
Nicole wiped the sweat off her brow with her forearm. “The six a.m. meditations would have put me off. And the celibacy.”
“For me, I had serious problems with the Dharma itself. Buddhism is the study of suffering. Where it comes from, why it exists, and most importantly, the path one must follow to end it. When I took off for Thailand, I had this crazy idea that if I just followed the precepts, I’d make some sense out of the mess of my own life. And Melana’s suffering.”
The mention of Claire’s sister’s name split Nicole’s attention. The mechanical arm dropped, and a ball zipped by, but she caught only a piece of it.
“Long before I got my own diagnosis,” Claire continued, in the kind of airy voice Nic had heard her use to point out a wind farm amid an alfalfa field, “I had a front-row seat to the joys of stage IV breast cancer. With my mother, but more so with Melana. I saw the blisters from the radiation. I saw what lymphedema can do to a slim, graceful arm. I wiped her down when she was feverish, tried to get water into her when the sores in her mouth were the most severe.” Claire’s humorless laugh sounded more like a clearing of her throat. “Yes, those were good times.”
Nicole undercut the ball, cracking it with the top of the bat so that it flew straight up, tenting the netting before dropping at her feet. She was breathing hard, realizing how far she’d already pushed the softness of her out-of-shape body. Her mind scrambled back, trying to remember what Claire had told her about discovering her own disease at an earlier stage than her sister—was it stage III?—and realizing in the process how very little Claire had actually shared with her.
Realizing how little she’d asked.
“Right up to a few days before Melana died,” Claire continued, “she kept telling me that she was fine. That it really wasn’t so bad. She’d caught the disease a tick earlier than our own mother, you know, so that meant she would be the Petrenko woman that would survive. I’d be researching treatment strategies and she would ask me in her reedy voice, ‘What have you found, Claire? What new vitamins should I try?’”
Nicole stood with her bat on her shoulder with her head turned away, but she saw nothing in front of her, nothing at all.
“In the end, I realized that me holed up in a Siamese temple eating pea pods wasn’t going to change anybody’s suffering. Melana’s suffering was long over, and walking the Middle Path sure didn’t seem to be helping mine. I just couldn’t accept the idea that happiness and suffering are nothing more than states of mind. I just didn’t believe the idea that if I could control my mind, then I could be happy.”
For Nicole, the world went a little mute, as if someone had tossed a thick blanket over the barks of the carnies, the sizzling grill of a hamburger stand, the clanging bells of an arcade win, and the tinny music of a nearby carousel.
If you can control your mind, then you could be happy.
Her mind drifted to Noah in his residential facility, sitting in circles with other sufferers, seeking patterns, mulling over the loops and twists of his broken thoughts, the swell and surge of his unruly emotions. Like Claire once had been, Noah was tucked away from the world. But unlike Claire, Noah had all the strength of Western medicine to teach him ways to control his mind. He had skilled doctors leading him through therapy; he had experienced professionals offering him new tools to deal with the stresses of life.
He wouldn’t quit as Claire did. He couldn’t quit.
She wouldn’t let him quit.
“Anyway,” Claire said, “what I’m standing here chewing off your ear to say is that you don’t have to worry about me quitting. My diagnosis was like Karma holding a bullhorn to my ear. No more second chances.”
*
It was Nicole’s turn to drive again, so she slipped into the driver’s seat of Jenna’s car and put on her sunglasses. Her stomach sloshed with blue slushy and the grease of a funnel cake, well mixed after a group ride on the Tilt-a-Whirl. She was sure to regret that later, but for now she was determined to get them back on Interstate 90 to Minnesota without glancing in the rearview mirror for imaginary tornados. In her mind, she’d already hopped and skipped forward to the sight of the spires of Chicago and the lights of Wrigley Field.
A day or two at the most, and she’d be back on her college stomping grounds.
“Hey,” Claire said, tossing her Stetson at her feet, “do you guys ever wonder what happened to Theresa?”
Uh-oh. Nicole plunged the key into the ignition. “I assume you’re talking about Three-Tat Tess, yes?”
Claire said, “She’s probably Ten-Tat Tess by now.”
“All I remember is that she tooled around at community college for a while.” Nicole stretched her arm across the back of Claire’s seat then was speared by the beady black stare of a three-foot purple bear. “Hey, Jenna, are you sure you want to ride beside that thing? There’s still room in the trunk.”
“I like it here.” Jenna pressed up against it. Lucky, cowering on Jenna’s other side, gave a little whine. “It’s like a mascot, sharing the road with us.”
“Okay then.” Nicole eased out of the parking spot. “Anyway, after college as far as I know, Theresa pretty much fell off the face of the earth.”
“I had Theresa’s old e-mail.” Claire reached across the dashboard to flick on the air-conditioning. “But it bounced when my sisters tried to add it to the blog.”
Nicole ventured, “So what got you thinking about our rebel classmate?”
“Maya mentioned her the other night over the campfire, remember?”
Nicole straightened the car and headed for the fairground exit. “Let me guess. She lives just a few miles from here.”
“I wasn’t going to say that at all.” Claire gave her an eye while replaiting the tail of her braid. “I was just going to mention that Maya told me she got a Christmas card from Theresa just last year. She’s living on a farm.”
“Theresa is feeding chickens?” Jenna rustled in the backseat, kicking off her sneakers. “Our Tess, with the purple hair and the nose ring?”
“People change.” Claire clutched the Jesus strap as Nicole poked the nose of the car onto the country road. “And you’d have acted out, too, Jenna, if you lived like she did in one of those houses by the old cannery.”
“Saint Claire.” Nicole shook her head. “What a soft touch you are. You called her, I suppose.”
“You’d have killed me if I hadn’t.”
The car rumbled onto the gravel-scattered road. “One long detour just wasn’t enough for you, was it?”
“Unfortunately, nobody answered the phone at Theresa’s house. Maya did give me her address, though.”
“Good. Then you can write to her. Maybe on the way back—”
“Nicole, you’re a jet streaking across the sky, and I’m a bee seeking flowers.”
“I’ll get there faster.”
“But twenty bucks says I’ll have a much better time. Aren’t you curious as to where she lives?”
Nicole accelerated as they approached the on-ramp for Interstate 90. “I suspect it isn’t Chicago, which is where I want to go. And I know it’s a long way from here, or you wouldn’t be tiptoeing around the subject.”
“You’re so busy running here and there that you’ve forgotten that the goal of life is learning.”
“Wow, for a moment there you actually sound like a Buddhist.”
“And Buddhists teach that we only progress in life when we open up our attention to the universe. I didn’t go looking for Theresa—Maya mentioned her. Now, all day, she’s been prancing in my head.”
“There’s an image.”
“It’s Karmic. We have
to take action.”
Nicole glanced in the rearview mirror. “Jenna, you’re awfully quiet. Do you want to visit Theresa?”
“Theresa scared the hell out of me.”
Nicole gave Claire a nudge. “You’re outvoted.”
“But then again,” Jenna added, “any side trip that takes me farther from my cheating husband is a positive thing.”
Claire raised a slow eyebrow. “Well, Nic, aren’t you the least bit curious as to what happened to that wild girl we all once knew?”
Nicole was curious, yes, but not about Theresa. Nicole hardly knew the girl except by reputation. Claire had hung out with Theresa in middle school before the girl started breaking into hardware stores and setting garbage bins on fire. Three-Tat Tess had been suspended from school too many times for Nicole to remember. But Claire tended to keep her hooks in people, especially the broken ones.
Nicole’s curiosity ran on a completely different track. “You know,” she said, “when most people take a cross-country trip, they tend to map out their journey depending on the landmarks or the tourist attractions.”
“I’ve always had a deep suspicion of ‘most people.’” Claire slipped her bare feet up against the glove compartment. “They tend to be a downright boring bunch.”
“Just imagine everything we’ve passed by,” Nicole said. “We could have made a detour to Yellowstone, or the Grand Teton National Park. We didn’t see Devils Tower or the Crazy Horse Memorial. We hardly explored the Badlands, and back by Maya’s dig, we couldn’t have been more than a few dozen miles from Mount Rushmore—”
“Tourist trap.”
“Instead, Claire, you’ve got us on some kind of Pine Lakes cross-country magical mystery tour.”
“I haven’t the faintest idea what you’re talking about.”
Nicole raised a hand to count them off. “Jin, Sydney, Maya, Theresa. Even me.”
“Intelligent company.”
“And free beds.”
Claire gave her an all-knowing look. “Whatever you’re looking for in Pine Lake, Nic, it’ll still be there if we arrive just a few days later.”
Nicole flexed her fingers over the steering wheel. Claire spoke the truth, a truth that was just beginning to bite. Nicole didn’t want to be the rigid coach following some prewritten playbook. She certainly had never been like that in Pine Lake.
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