Random Acts of Kindness

by Lisa Verge Higgins

  A pulse throbbed just over her eye socket. “If I could wave a wand, I’d make you better. But until—”

  Crack.

  She jumped at the noise. It sounded as if he’d banged the phone hard against the hospital’s concrete-block wall. She pulled her cell phone away from her ear as she heard another crack, and then another. He stopped, and she heard him make a strangling noise. She heard a nurse’s voice in the background, a level, concerned query.

  “I’m fine. I’m fine!” His voice was hoarse as he pressed his mouth close against the receiver. “This is exactly what I told Dr. Kleinberg.”

  Her whole spine stiffened. “Breathe, Noah.”

  “Do you know what I hear when you say that?”

  “Say what?”

  “You want to make me better.”

  “Of course I want to—”

  “What I hear is that you wish I were someone else.”

  Nicole sat stunned. That wasn’t true. She didn’t wish Noah were someone else. No, she just wanted her active, off-center, curious, and intellectual son back. The little boy she used to read to every night. The young man who looked so much like Lars.

  Noah said, “I’m never going to stop being who I am, Mom. So you and Dad need to stop hoping that some stranger is going to move in behind my eyes.”

  *

  Nicole wandered back to the Laundromat to find Claire pulling a T-shirt from a heaping pile.

  “Holy Buddha.” Claire froze midfold. “Did you at least get the license number of the truck that hit you?”

  Nicole dropped down onto the bench where she’d left Claire meditating only a short while earlier. She pulled onto her lap a half-eaten bag of Doritos.

  She bit into a chip. “I just got off the phone with Noah.”

  “Ahh.”

  “He had a breakthrough.” She chewed but tasted nothing. “Apparently, the last year and a half of outpatient therapy with four different therapists, the six different drug regimens, and this four-week stint in a mental health recovery center are just my extreme efforts to change him into a son whom Lars and I can finally love.”

  Nicole swayed on the seat. When she’d been in labor with Noah, the anesthesiologist had set her up with a spinal epidural after four hours of painful contractions. He’d pumped into her meds so strong that she didn’t feel anything from the midriff down. Now, sixteen years after the obstetrician had been forced to use forceps to bring Noah into the world, Nicole felt the same sort of paralyzed numbness.

  “Noah complained about his meds again, too.” The words pressed against her sternum. “He’s got a good reason to complain. The meds ease his dark moods and stop him from isolating himself and skipping school. On the meds, he spends less time closed up in his room. But all this time I’ve ignored the side effects.” She looked anywhere but at Claire. “Imagine a mother giving her son drugs that make him slouch in a chair and drool.”

  The laugh that came out of her mouth didn’t belong to her. Her torso shook with it. It was a misfiring reflex, disconnected from her conscious brain.

  Claire’s warm hand on her shoulder brought her back to herself. She shut the laugh right down.

  “It’s a cruel twist,” Claire said softly, “that Karma would lay at your feet a problem that can’t really be fixed.”

  Nicole tried to shake away the words. Of course there were problems that couldn’t be fixed. Claire’s disease, for one. Jenna’s marriage, for another, a terrible spectacle she supposed was being played out in Seattle right now. She just refused to believe that Noah’s condition was one of them.

  Maybe that was the problem.

  “I can tell you a story about problems that can’t be fixed.” Claire flopped onto the bench beside her. “Eight months into my stay at the Thai temple, a Buddhist scholar came to teach. Actually, I think he just came to see the farang—me,” she said, patting her chest, “the crazy foreigner who’d taken vows. He asked me why I had come, and in my arrogance, I told him I wanted to reach Nirvana.”

  Nicole could tell by the faint flush that rose on Claire’s skin that the memory was still painful.

  “He told me that most farang believe that pushing forward to reach Nirvana means that the future will stretch before us in unending happiness.”

  Nicole ran her fingers over her brow, distracted. “Isn’t that what Nirvana is?”

  “Nirvana is a state of past and present. Yes, the future is joyous. But to reach it, you also have to accept the most painful times in your past.” Claire’s knees bumped Nicole’s as she swiveled to face her. “But more than that, you have to understand that it’s in those most troubled times—like you’re having right now with Noah—where the seeds of happiness are sown.”

  Nicole balked. What happiness could possibly come from a son who tried to set things on fire? A son who truly believed that his mother’s extreme efforts to help were a sign that she didn’t love the person he was? “I’m not getting it, Claire.”

  “I didn’t either, not completely.” Claire frowned, two little lines appearing between her brows. “I’ve spent years waiting for some wisdom to rise out of my memory of those terrible days with Melana. It hasn’t come yet. But I guess what I’m trying to say right now is that you just don’t know what will come of all of this trouble. So put away the whips and the hair shirt. You’ve done what’s best for Noah.”

  “Maybe I went too far.” She sank her elbows on her knees and then thrust her fingers through her hair. “Maybe, instead of forcing him to do hours of psychotherapy three times a week, I should have encouraged him to join a team sport.” Maybe she’d spent the last eighteen months trying to hack her way through a jungle with a steak knife when instead she should have nudged a clear path through the trees. “They haven’t been able to pin a label on him, you know; the diagnosis keeps shifting. Maybe, instead of jumping to conclusions, I should have waited, seen how his moods evolved, been patient.”

  Claire gave her a gentle nudge. “Stop second-guessing yourself. You’re becoming your own worst enemy.”

  Nicole straightened up and clutched her arms, digging her fingernails into her skin. For the last eighteen months, she’d been lashing herself for not recognizing Noah’s issues before he set the garage on fire. For the last eighteen months, she’d been nursing the idea that if only she’d finished her degree she would have been able to intervene earlier, if only she’d made the necessary sacrifices Noah would be all right now. That was all bullshit. Had she, after her unexpected pregnancy, continued to struggle through graduate school and two more years of training to finally become a licensed psychotherapist, she would have cracked and flamed out like a third world missile.

  With Noah, she was in way over her head.

  “Well, one thing is for sure,” she said on an unsteady laugh, “I would have been the world’s worst psychotherapist.”

  “And your situation with your son isn’t clouding your judgment about this at all?”

  “Oh, no, I would have sucked.”

  Claire’s face held a ghost of a smile. “You would have mastered that discipline with your usual attention to detail, my friend. But I suspect, in the end, you would have been very unhappy.”

  Claire stood up and wandered back to the folding table. Nicole waited for some sort of explanation, but Claire seemed content to pull a T-shirt out of her pile of laundry, carelessly fold it, and drop it straight into the oversize duffel bag yawning open on the floor. Nicole thought about Claire’s words. Would she have been unhappy doing what she’d wanted to do since high school? She couldn’t wrap her mind around the idea, so she stopped trying. Her head was like a bomb zone; Noah’s confession had left her thoughts in shards.

  She stood up. The bag of chips crinkled to the floor. Lucky roused from his doze and eyed the bag, so she swept it out of his reach and tossed it in the trash. She strode by Claire and headed for the dryer, where her clothes lay tangled inside. She yanked the door open and pulled them out into a pile. She returned to the table and put th
em in a bundle next to Claire’s, tugging the jeans from the heap and folding them seam to seam.

  “I have a confession, Nicole.” Claire plucked at her own laundry. “Remember when Jenna said yesterday that she used to admire you playing softball? Well, I was the one who first took Jenna to the stadium. I used to go to most of your softball games, too.”

  Nicole smoothed the jeans and tried to reorient herself to the change in subject.

  “I didn’t suffer through any other sport,” Claire continued. “Not the hockey games that obsessed half the school, or football, or track or basketball. But I went to so many softball games that I bought one of those stadium-seat pillows with the Pine Lake Beaver mascot symbol. You know which one I’m talking about?”

  “Yeah, the thick vinyl one you could get at Ray’s General Store. So you wouldn’t freeze your butt off when there was still ice on the metal bleachers in the early spring. I had one for outdoor hockey games.” Nicole shook out a pair of capris. “So you were a true softball fan, huh?”

  Softball hadn’t been a popular sport in high school until Nicole’s team started competing in regionals, so there had never been a huge fan base outside of the parents of the players. She remembered Claire’s presence only vaguely because she’d been focused on the game, on the team, on the next batter, the choice of the next pitch.

  “The first time I went,” Claire continued, “I went purely because you talked me into it. It was the regional finals, and if you’d won, the team would play the next county or something. You were bounding up and down the halls, encouraging people to come to give the team moral support, just radiating excitement. I couldn’t resist.”

  Nicole remembered. She’d loved being the captain of the team. She loved every moment of the season. The thrill of standing on the mound staring down to that imaginary strike box, reading Riley’s hand signals, feeling the sharp attention of the teammates around her like a multibrained living being.

  “At the game, I didn’t know what the heck was going on,” Claire said. “But when it was toward the end and the Pine Lake Beavers were losing, I was close enough to your bench that I heard you giving the team a pep talk.” Claire took great interest in smoothing the wrinkles out of a folded T-shirt. “I don’t remember exactly what you said. Something about dragging up the will to do their best. Something about the game not being over until the very last out. Probably a bunch of clichés. For me, it was like you were speaking in tongues. What I really remember is how you said it.” Claire tossed the T-shirt with the others. “You were a revival-​meeting preacher, Nic. You were a general pinned down by enemy fire. With nothing but words and the tone of your voice and that look in your eye, you worked that team up into such a lather that they shot off the bench and raced across the field like they were soldiers shooting out of the trenches into a hail of lead.” She shook her head, remembering. “Heck, I wanted to put on a glove myself after hearing you. You were a sight to behold.”

  Nicole found herself tugging at a string that had come loose from a seam. An embarrassing prickling started behind her eyes.

  “The point I’m trying to make in my backass kind of way,” Claire said, “is that I think we are who we are, no matter how much we try to change. Jenna will always be an introvert, no matter how well she adapts. Maybe Noah will always have issues with his own temperament, whether he’s on the meds or no. And as for you…” Claire gave her an affectionate bump. “Inside, you’re always going to be that girl giving the softball team a pep talk, pushing people to excel to their limits, to take on dreams they’d never thought possible.”

  Nicole cringed a little, recognizing the language of her own website.

  “That’s why,” Claire continued, “I wonder if you’d really get that same sort of thrill in a clinical situation, with patients whose abilities to improve have more to do with better pharmaceuticals than sheer human will.”

  A tingling suspicion took hold. “So you’ve been to a therapist.”

  Claire gave a brief nod. “Paulina made me go after Melana died. He’s the man who encouraged me to go off to Thailand.” With one sweep of her arm, Claire shot the last of her laundry off the table and into the open duffel. “So after that confession, maybe now you’ll figure out why, ten days ago, I conned Jenna into taking a five-hundred-mile detour just to show up at your door.”

  Nicole was wondering if Noah’s explosive confession had caused some actual concussive damage or if Claire was just toying with her with all these changes in subject. “I thought you came to see me for my wit and good humor. And a free bed.”

  “Those were bonuses. Like the GPS. But I had an ulterior motive.” Claire wandered toward the plate-glass window. “When we set off, I knew Jenna would follow me wherever I led her. Jenna’s got a good heart that way. But I knew I needed someone who would make sure I would get to where I had to go. Someone who would shore me up when I wavered in my intentions. Like right now.”

  “Now?”

  “You feel it, don’t you, Nic?” Claire looked up through the window to the roiling of the gray skies. “Karma has shifted.”

  Nicole wandered to stand next to Claire, trying to feel what she felt. She smelled the bleach-tinged scent of wet laundry and heard the thump-thump of a running dryer. She identified the skitter of leaves against the sidewalk, a sound muffled beyond the glass. She heard the baritone flap of the heavy awning and the whirr of a distant engine. She followed Claire’s gaze to the slate-bellied clouds, churning across the sky.

  And for a brief, eerily vivid moment, she felt what Claire was referring to. A deepening of the air pressure, a faint ringing in her ears, a resistance more of the spirit than the body.

  Claire murmured, “Maybe Jenna chose the right time to bail. Maybe even Noah’s breakthrough is a sign from the universe. I just have this terrible feeling that it’s time for both of us to go home.”

  Home.

  Nicole hesitated. Yesterday, she had all but begged Claire to return home on a plane with Paulina, to go back with the sisters who were so determined to take care of her health. And last night, she’d plunged the depths of her broken little arsenal of persuasive life coach tricks trying to clear the gears of Claire’s muddy thinking. And now, after Noah’s painful confession, Nicole felt her heart yearning to return home to Lars. They needed to sit across their kitchen table, where they always discussed family matters, and reevaluate their approach to Noah’s treatment. The time had come to reassess every single assumption she’d made. Maybe the time had come to revive the so-called revival-camp preacher she’d apparently left behind in Pine Lake—if only to prove to Noah how much she really loved him.

  Yes, she and Claire should go home.

  The muscles of her throat wouldn’t work. In the light pouring in through the front window, Nicole took a hard look at Claire. She thought about Claire alone on her thirty acres dealing with a sickness that had claimed her mother and her sister. Strangely, she thought of wood smoke, too, not the gasoline-tinged scent of a burned garage but the fresh fragrance of wood smoke on an open prairie. She remembered Claire’s confession in the velvet darkness of the grasslands. If Claire turned around before her goal of reaching Pine Lake, she’d be repeating the same self-destructive behavior that had her abandoning her education, her Buddhist vows, and now, perhaps, a chance at a long and fruitful life.

  A strange, loosening sensation shuddered through her. Her thoughts began to zip down avenues she hadn’t dared to consider. Her mind somersaulting ahead of itself, dreaming up ideas, considering a strategy that now seemed too crazy not to consider.

  Sometimes, you had to hold up an old goal like a lantern to guide the way—even if it brought you someplace you didn’t know you were going.

  Chapter Fourteen

  Seattle, Washington

  In Seattle it was raining, of course.

  Jenna stood outside her home garage with rain dripping off the edge of her hood. She stood motionless, feeling the warmth leach out of her body along with the last
dregs of her hurling momentum. She stood dangerously close to the garage window, close enough to watch Nate wielding a blowtorch. A metal mask covered his face. Sparks made the faint, fair hairs on his arms glow.

  She’d meant to observe for only a minute, just long enough to see if Sissy Leclaire sat on the old upholstered chair in the corner, laughing with both legs thrown over the arm. That chair was empty, but Jenna still hesitated, not sure whether Sissy’s absence was good or bad. This confrontation might have been easier if Jenna had walked in on the two of them rutting on the workbench, clawing at each other half dressed, just like in the mental film loop that ran in her head. It would have been a cauterization. Then she’d be freed of the ever-sinking impulse to tell him that she still loved him.

  But the hesitation was a mistake. Gazing at Nate through the garage window allowed a different fantasy to unspool, the one where Nate called off the whole situation and set the divorce petition aflame.

  She reached for the doorknob. The chill of the metal stole the heat from her hand. She turned it and pushed the door open. The hiss of the blowtorch was much louder than the squeal of the hinges, but Nate must have noticed a flash of light in the glass of a storm door leaning against the wall. The mask turned toward her. He stilled for a moment. Then he switched off the blowtorch.

  The urge to run gripped her. Under her raincoat, she grew prickly-heat warm. The doorknob slipped out of her hand, and the door swung shut behind her. She wobbled a little, straddling the crack in the concrete foundation they’d never had repaired.

  With greasy knuckles, Nate nudged the mask atop his head. “You’re back.”

  Jenna heard his words and more clearly heard his tone, a combination of surprise and pleasure. It was the way he used to greet her when she’d come home early to find him in a paint-stained apron with an infant Zoe riding his hip.