Random Acts of Kindness

by Lisa Verge Higgins

  “Washington State plates.” Jenna could just see the pale ghost of Theresa’s abandoned house as they came up fast upon it. “She probably drove around this road until she found my car. There aren’t a lot of those license plates here in Kansas.”

  “But how did she know I was in Kansas?”

  “Why wouldn’t she know?” Nicole’s voice went up in pitch. “You’ve been talking to Paulina all during this trip. You didn’t tell her?”

  “I told Paulina what she needed to know and not one iota more—”

  “—yet you knew Paulina was looking for you!”

  “As the firstborn, Paulina believes this bequeaths upon her the royal right to control every detail of her siblings’ lives.”

  “Oh, my God.” The teeth of a zipper clinked as Nicole opened her purse. “Has your sister been following us clear across the country?”

  “No, no.” Claire huffed in frustration. “She’s not that crazy. At least, I didn’t see her truck in the parking lot. That means she’s got a rental car. That means she must have flown in to Wichita or something. Come on, Jenna,” she urged. “I know you have a heavier foot than that.”

  Jenna glanced uneasily at the speedometer as she dared to press it harder. There was a reason why Nicole did most of the driving. This was Jenna’s father’s old car. Every time Jenna edged over seventy miles an hour she conjured the ghost of her father in the backseat, admonishing her to keep within the speed limit.

  Suddenly from the backseat came a blue glow. Startled, Jenna glanced in the rearview mirror to see Nicole’s face illuminated by a cell-phone screen.

  “Well, for what it’s worth, I can guess where Paulina got her information,” Nicole said. “Look at this.”

  Out of the corner of her eye, Jenna saw Nicole’s cell phone thrust in the space between the front seats.

  Claire leaned over to look only to groan and flop back. “That damn cancer blog.”

  “Maya must have e-mailed the picture of us to Paulina. Paulina must have posted it on the blog.” Nicole withdrew the phone and ran her fingers over the screen. “I didn’t mention it yesterday because you’ve made your feelings about the blog quite clear.”

  “For the love of Buddha, I hate it.”

  “I’m glad Maya sent the photo to be posted,” Jenna said. “People start to worry if a cancer blog goes silent.”

  “Well, that’s how she found me for sure. Paulina must have contacted Maya to ask where we were going.”

  From the backseat came a sharp intake of breath. “You were that sure that I’d come to Kansas.”

  “Nic, not long ago I called you a jet streaking across the sky, but I lied.”

  “You lied.”

  “You’re a hang glider susceptible to a well-placed gust of wind. After our little talk in the pool hall, at least I finally understand why. Jenna, why don’t you take that left at that intersection up ahead? Like Nicole, we need to get off the straight-and-narrow path.”

  Nicole said, “Explain why Paulina is in Kansas, Claire.”

  Nicole’s voice had dropped down to that soft, dangerous timbre that made Jenna’s shoulders tighten, even when she wasn’t the focus of Nicole’s interest. Still, this time her curiosity was piqued. She waited in the silence, wondering what kind of impulse would send Paulina on an airplane to track her sister down. Jenna made the turn and bumped onto the side road, heading toward a distant glow that was the promise of another small Kansas town.

  “Paulina and I don’t see eye to eye on a lot of things.” Claire twisted to glance out the rear window, scanning the dark road for headlights. “Paulina thinks I should be sitting in my sick chair with a blanket tucked around my knees. She thinks I should be taking medications at the first strike of the hour. She thinks I can’t possibly be taking the cancer seriously if I’m not eternally grateful and smiling through the tears. Is it too much to ask—for a week or two or three—to just leave Cancer Woman behind?”

  Jenna found her breath growing shallow. That speech was perhaps the longest thing Claire had ever said about the disease in the two thousand miles they’d driven together. The high-pitched whirr of the engine seemed all the more noticeable. Lucky’s tags rattled as he shifted in his puppy bed.

  Jenna knew how this would end. Claire would have to confront Paulina. For all the hijinks in leaving the pool hall, Jenna couldn’t imagine Claire would really abandon her sister to wander in search of her among the Kansas cornfields. So Jenna focused on the yellow line dividing the road, seeking a good place to turn off, waiting for Nicole to find the right words. The headlights cast their light only a few dozen yards ahead.

  The blue glow came from the backseat again. “Hit the gas, Jenna,” Nicole said. “We have to get Cancer Woman out of here.”

  *

  Jenna woke up knowing what she had to do.

  She sat in the breakfast room just off the hotel lobby, digging granola out of a paper cup while she waited for the sluggish communal computer to refresh. Behind her, a family of native Kansans settled in for the free breakfast. A youngish man bit into a donut as he read the paper alone by a window. The TV mounted in the high corner of the room droned the local news, every ten minutes breaking for a weather report, as commodity futures scrolled in a ticker across the bottom of the screen.

  She’d been here for the better part of an hour, choking down unbelievably bad coffee while she debated her options. Now she leaned in as the page loaded, then glanced at the clock behind the reception desk and pondered the best path to take, as the Indian clerk briskly tucked a pencil behind his ear. Her finger hovered over the Enter key. With Nicole’s pool-hall confession still fresh in her ears and Claire acting all night like a twitchy fugitive, Jenna knew her timing couldn’t possibly be worse.

  She watched the website timer tick down to less than a minute before she pressed the Enter key.

  She didn’t have a choice now but to wake up Claire and Nicole. Jenna snagged a bowl, a banana, two tea bags, and some instant oatmeal for Nicole. She’d use the room coffeemaker to make hot water for the oatmeal and tea. For Claire she took a pint of milk and then filled another bowl with two scoops of Cocoa Krispies. Juggling all this, she stepped onto the elevator to the second floor and jiggled her key card in the slot until the light turned green. The room was just as she left it: pitch-dark and filled with snoring.

  She allowed them a few more minutes as she turned on the coffeemaker and set the food on the table. Then she crossed the room and flung open the drapes.

  Nicole curled up and tried to burrow under the tangled sheets. Claire, her back to the window, shot straight up from the other bed.

  In the bright light, Claire’s pupils contracted to pinpoints. “Paulina?”

  “No, Paulina’s not here.” Last night, they’d found this run-down hotel about twenty miles from the pool hall. They’d parked the car in the back lot. Claire had insisted that they remove the license plates until morning. “I’m waking you because it’s ten o’clock, and checkout time is in an hour.”

  Nicole groaned as she flung an arm out from beneath the covers. “Oh, my God. What the hell was in that drink last night?”

  Claire swung her legs off the bed. “At least you didn’t spend last night getting kicked by Jenna.”

  Nicole said, “I had that pleasure the night before—”

  “Hey,” Jenna objected. “I don’t kick.”

  The two of them, in unison: “Oh, yes you do.”

  Jenna gaped at them. “Well, Claire snores, and, Nicole, you steal covers like an anaconda twisting around its prey.”

  A pillow sailed across the room and hit her in the midriff. Her friends laughed. It reminded her of the laughter that used to come out of the basement in the wee hours of the morning whenever Zoe had a sleepover.

  The thought made her feel even more guilty for what she was about to do.

  “I can’t get up,” Nicole muttered. “I’ll pay for another night.”

  Jenna said. “Can’t do that.”
<
br />   “Can.” Nicole swiveled her wrist and pointed in the general direction of the bureau. “Credit card right there.”

  “It’s not the money, it’s the time.” Jenna pulled the chair out from beneath the desk and sank into it. “I have to be in Des Moines by five p.m.”

  In the stillness that greeted this announcement, the coffeemaker gave that long, gurgling breath that indicated it had discharged the last of the water from the filter basket. Nicole raised her head out of the covers like a groundhog out of its burrow. Then she clutched her forehead as if she’d moved too fast.

  “Des Moines.” Nicole eased herself up. “Isn’t that, like, two hundred miles away?”

  Jenna said, “Closer to two hundred and twenty.”

  “And what’s waiting at the end of it?”

  “An airport.”

  Nicole came to blinking attention. She squinted at Claire, who shrugged and then went back to hiding in the shadow of a curtain to scan the parking lot for her sister.

  Nicole asked, “Who are we meeting at an airport?”

  “I’m taking United Airlines flight 792 to Seattle.” Jenna stood up as every muscle in her body went tense. “I’m going to tell Nate that I don’t want a divorce.”

  She walked to the coffeemaker to give the two of them time to absorb that information, to glance at each other the way she had known they would in order to telegraph their mutual shock and dismay. Meanwhile, she ripped the plastic bags off the polystyrene cups. She opened the tea bags and dropped them in. She pulled out the carafe of hot water and filled each cup three-quarters full.

  By the time she turned around, Claire sat against the pillows on her bed and Nicole had shuffled to the bottom of hers.

  “Frankly, Jenna, my head is still swimming with fumes.” Nicole took one of the cups. “A lot happened yesterday, between our talk, coming upon Theresa’s house, running away from an angry sister—”

  “Six calls,” Claire remarked, clanking her phone on the bedside table as she took Jenna’s offered tea. “Eleven texts. Determined little bugger.”

  “The point is,” Nicole continued, “I think maybe I piled too much pressure on you about that divorce petition.”

  “You didn’t cause that pressure. Nate did.” Jenna retreated to the safe distance of the bureau. “And if I’m going to stop the divorce, I have to do it now.”

  Nicole kept squeezing the bridge of her nose. “I thought we’d hashed this out yesterday in the car. Leaving now seems odd, too sudden—”

  “I don’t want to leave you guys.” Jenna splayed her fingers on the bureau, feeling the grit of spilled sugar. “I know it’s a terrible time. Paulina is out there somewhere.” Jenna watched as Claire once again glanced out the window to the pothole-pocked parking lot. “I know you need to call her today.”

  Claire clanked her tea on the bedside table. “I’m not calling.”

  “Let’s table that issue for later,” Nicole said. “Right now you have to explain what’s going on, Jenna.”

  Jenna’s neat, prepared speech flew right out of her head. Her reasons swam in her mind, a strange stew formed from three events, mostly the visit to Theresa’s burned-out house. It was while poking around the weeds in front of that house that Jenna couldn’t help imagine what Three-Tat Tess would have done had she found herself in Jenna’s situation. Theresa wouldn’t have filled a suitcase and a box, swept up the dog, and thrown everything in the backseat before taking off across country. No, Theresa probably would have done exactly what Nicole had suggested: doused the porch in gasoline and tossed a lit cigarette upon the stairs.

  Unless Theresa had a daughter who was part of that same home and that failing marriage. When there was a child involved, it was selfish to indulge in an act of escape or destructive fury, and a child of Zoe’s—or Noah’s—age was particularly susceptible. You had to think. You had to be smarter.

  You had to be strong.

  “Nic,” Jenna sputtered. “I spent most of my adolescence watching you with awe from the grandstands. You would step up to the plate when the bases were loaded and there were two outs, and you just grinned like you knew you were hitting a single to left field.”

  “Wait.” Nicole clawed her fingers through her hair. “Are you talking about baseball now?”

  “My mom was a Red Sox fan,” Jenna explained. “My firm has season tickets to the Mariners.”

  “How your mind works,” Claire commented as she came to the bureau to retrieve milk and Cocoa Krispies, “is one of the universe’s great mysteries.”

  “What I’m trying to say is that I know Nicole is strong and competent and a great mother. And what I saw of Lars makes me think he’s the most amazing father. And yet you two still struggle as parents. Together.”

  Nicole said on a breath, “Please tell me your decision to leave has nothing to do with what I told you about Noah.”

  “Then I’d be lying—”

  “We struggle with Noah,” Nicole said. “Chris’s and Julia’s issues are garden-variety. But Noah’s issues require medication. Zoe won’t—”

  “Zoe’s got a few mood problems herself.”

  “As does every teenage girl.” Nicole leaned forward. “Listen, I know you think I’m some sort of expert. I’m really not. But from what you’ve told me about Zoe, it seems like you’ve got a daughter who has pinpointed all her rage on Mama—not an uncommon thing. All other aspects of Zoe’s life function absolutely normally, yes?”

  “For now.” Jenna shoved her fists deeper into her pockets as the small muscles of her neck started to tighten. “Theresa’s whole personality changed dramatically between the ages of thirteen and fourteen, to the point of setting things on fire—just,” she added, “as her parents divorced.”

  “Zoe isn’t going to be like Noah or Theresa. You can’t think that way. Just because Zoe has some anger issues, just because she has slammed a few doors—”

  “More than a few.”

  “I should have kept my mouth shut.” The cup shook as Nicole lowered it to her knee. “I’ve scared you to death by telling you the details about Noah. And I still don’t understand why you’re doing this now.”

  “You will. I told you something in the car yesterday.”

  Nicole bobbed her head as she pressed her fingers into her eye sockets. “You still love Nate.”

  “Who do I love more than Nate?”

  No one spoke Zoe’s name, but Jenna saw it in their eyes, she heard the name like an echo in the room.

  She said, “Zoe deserves to be protected from the kind of domestic disruption that can turn a perfectly normal adolescent girl into an angry stoner. Zoe deserves a chance to deal with her garden-variety issues in a stable, supportive, two-parent household. The only way that’s going to happen is if Nate and I sit down—now, before these papers have to be dealt with—and work out our differences.”

  Jenna watched Nicole exchange a look with Claire, a look that made Jenna’s heartbeat stutter. She’d never been a good reader of body language and swift, silent communications, but she understood this kind of look. She’d been on the receiving end of it since the age of ten. It was a look of empathy that bordered on pity, a look that suggested that Jenna in her social incompetence didn’t fully grasp the consequences of her decision.

  She blurted, “I know what you’re both thinking.”

  Nicole braced her hands on her knees and creaked her way into a standing position. “We’re worried that this may not work out the way you want.”

  “The situation is already worse than I ever imagined.”

  “What you’re planning to do will be painful—”

  “Is divorce ever a happy process?”

  Nicole looked for a nod from Claire. “Considering how fast Nate’s pushing this through, it’s likely that his feelings for you have long changed.”

  Her throat constricted. “Of course his feelings have changed.”

  “You’re setting yourself up for failure, Jen.”

  Jenna looked up
at the ceiling, at the blinking light of the smoke detector, seeking a way to explain her new determination in words that would make sense to folks who lived outside her head.

  “Nearly two weeks ago, I abandoned my home and my husband to knock on the door of a friend I hadn’t seen in years.” A watery laugh bubbled up in her throat. “I had this crazy idea that the reason why I’d screwed up every relationship in my life was because I’d never really given myself over. I hid. I was too ashamed to share because, if I did, people like you, Nicole, would know that I was on the inside what I appeared to be on the outside: clueless, awkward, and unworthy of affection.”

  “Jenna—”

  “Something had to change. So I flung myself upon Claire.”

  Claire sat as still as stone, a Cocoa Krispie stuck to her chin. Jenna wanted to thumb it off her face.

  “Now I don’t have a choice but to do what I’m afraid of doing. If I fail, I fail for Zoe’s sake. And at least I won’t spend the rest of my life wondering what could have happened if I’d just had the courage to fling myself at Nate’s feet.”

  Claire stood up. She set her bowl of cereal on the bureau. She walked the length of the bed and took Jenna’s hands in hers.

  “If we have to break every speed limit on every highway in Iowa, Jenna, we’ll get you to Des Moines by five.”

  *

  “There’s security.” Nicole fast-walked toward the security area that led to the airport gates. “Thank God the line is short. You know what gate, right?”

  Jenna said, “A4.”

  “You’ve got your liquids separated?”

  She tugged the edge of a plastic ziplock bag out of her purse for what she figured was the third time Nicole had asked.

  “Boarding pass?”

  “Enough, Nic.” Claire slowed down near the line entrance. “Jenna’s got twenty minutes at least. She’ll make the flight before the doors close.”

  “With no phone,” Nicole said, “how are you going to let us know when you’re on the flight?”

  Jenna fumbled with the strap digging into her shoulder. “If I don’t make this flight, I’ll just make the next on standby.”

  “That could be hours stuck in this place.”