Her question was interrupted by the sound of Nicole’s sandals scuffing against the pavement. Jenna glanced at Nic only to find her friend staring at Claire offering another homeless man a cup of coffee. One glance and Jenna knew this man wasn’t quite right. He shuffled in nervous circles in front of a bus stop avoiding Claire’s eye. He wore a stained T-shirt and a pair of pants that slid low enough on his hips to show the ragged gray band of his underwear. He’d intentionally cut the front of his sneakers open. The toes of his shoes curled up like smiling mouths. His dirty socks flopped out like thick tongues.
“I read a statistic once,” Nicole said, “that sixty-six percent of the homeless suffered from some sort of mental illness.”
Jenna looked at the man more closely as Claire stood, calm, proffering the coffee with a steady hand. A patchy beard softened the line of his chin. One of last summer’s interns at the hedge fund had sported that kind of beard. That young man had been a college student trying so hard in his ill-fitting suits to look like a future Master of the Universe. This young man was thin also, but in a different way. His ribs pressed against the worn weave of his T-shirt as he shifted his weight and eyeballed the cup of coffee. The man raised an arm and waved it through the air as if he were erasing something from a chalkboard with his forearm.
Nicole visibly relaxed after Claire placed the coffee at the man’s feet and moved on. She said, “About that professional advice, Jenna.”
“It’s about Zoe.”
“I figured as much.” Nicole dropped her gaze to stare into the four coffees, as if they held the secrets of life. “If you’re looking for professional advice about how to deal with a troubled teenager, you might want to go to someone with an actual degree. But if you want advice from a friend, I’m all ears.”
Jenna bobbed her head as Claire returned for a moment and relieved her of her coffee burden. Nicole’s distinction seemed a thin one. Jenna figured that beyond Nicole’s work as a life coach, her eighteen months of personal experience dealing with Noah had to earn her the equivalent of a PhD.
“Last night,” Jenna began, shifting Lucky to her better arm as Claire led them down a side street, “I didn’t tell you everything about what happened in Seattle.”
“I figured there was a lot more to the story.”
“All along, I had assumed that Zoe didn’t know about anything,” she said. “But it turns out Zoe already knows about Nate and Sissy’s relationship.”
Coffee gurgled through the plastic tops as Nicole momentarily fumbled her grip. “Really? How?”
“Zoe came home from school one day to find her father bending a naked Sissy over the couch.”
That wasn’t really the truth. She didn’t know the truth. Nate had gone tight-lipped about the nitty-gritty details of what he and Sissy had been doing when Zoe burst through the front door to find them together. Since then, Jenna’s mind had filled in the blanks about a hundred different disturbing ways. Still, the words left a bitter taste in the back of her throat. Jenna tried to swallow it away as she followed the bounce of Claire’s braid.
Then Jenna realized that she was walking alone. Nicole had stopped paces behind her, dead in her tracks.
“When,” Nicole breathed when she caught up, “did this happen?”
“I’m not sure.” She had tried to put herself in Zoe’s shoes. She’d wondered how she would have reacted, at the age of thirteen, if she’d come home to find her own quiet, book-loving father making the beast with two backs with, say, old Mrs. Handley down the road. The image always turned absurd. Maybe it just wasn’t within her mental or emotional capacity to imagine that kind of mind-blowing betrayal. Then she remembered how she felt when Nate pushed that petition across the kitchen table. She had packed her bags and run far, far away.
Zoe had had no place to run.
A familiar shudder vibrated through Lucky. Jenna slipped him down near a spindly tree just as he let loose.
Nicole stood in front of her, all wide brown eyes. “You’re telling me that Zoe has known about this for a while.”
“I think it happened nine months ago.”
Nicole covered her mouth with a shaky hand.
“I’m guessing because my bastard of a husband went mute when I asked. I suspect it was in early December. I remember that Zoe wouldn’t come downstairs to decorate the Christmas tree. All her young life, she’d marked that first Saturday in December in red ink on the family calendar; it was one of her favorite days of the year. But she wouldn’t come down, and Nate was wound up tight. He told me some boy had broken up with Zoe. I hadn’t even known she had a boyfriend. Nate said it had only been a few weeks, a lifetime for a twelve-year-old. He wouldn’t let me go up and see her. He kept saying she needed privacy. Fool that I was, I just accepted it.” Guilt like a sucking sinkhole. “I accepted too many things.”
She’d always ceded to Nate’s judgment in issues of parenting. He was home with the baby all day. So if he insisted on letting a fourteen-month-old cry herself to sleep, it wasn’t Jenna’s place to countermand him at one in the morning while Zoe wailed. Nate was the one who’d have to deal with a cranky toddler the next day. Yes, she’d thought it harsh when he refused to let Zoe wear the sparkly red shoes to school every day, or gave her a time-out for not making her bed. But it was Nate at home who’d have to deal with the fallout of those disciplinary choices, so Jenna had deferred to his judgment, time and again.
She’d been determined not to be one of those working moms. The ones who come home to doubt and criticize and, out of guilt for not baking cookies, micromanage every move her husband made. So over the years, she’d watched Zoe grow up to be a lovely, confident, loving creature, even-tempered until about nine months ago. She could only assume that it was Nate’s discipline that helped shape Zoe this way.
Jen buried her face in the back of Lucky’s neck as she heard Claire’s jogging steps. Claire arrived on a wave of cucumber-mango scent, the aroma of the hotel shampoo she’d used that morning.
“Hey, Nic, I’ll take that flat. After we give these away, let’s go find another coffee shop.”
Then Claire was gone, her footsteps echoing as she headed farther down the side street.
Her hands free, Nicole slapped them both on Jenna’s shoulders. “You’re not the fool here, Jenna.”
“Oh, I definitely am.”
“Think about this. Zoe knew about Nate and that woman a long time ago, and yet Zoe never said a word.”
Jenna squeezed her eyes shut. She’d spent days trying not to think about the consequences of that truth.
Nicole said, “That means Nate forced Zoe to keep it secret.”
She shook her head. She couldn’t believe Nate would do that. Not the man she’d once come home to find stirring a pot at the stove while his hair stood up sporting twenty-three crooked plastic barrettes.
“Nate probably told her that he’d made a mistake with that woman.” Nicole let go and paced a little between the tree and the shaded edge of the building, her mind working. “I’d bet, when she witnessed it, he told Zoe that it was one incident, one moment of idiocy, something that would never happen again.”
“Oh, God.”
“How else would he justify it? If this fling were just a mistake, then there would be no reason to tell you. In fact, it’d be dangerous to tell you. Who knows how you’d react? It could end in divorce.”
“I can’t believe he would do that.” No, not from the man who’d played airplane with Zoe in the backyard, risking elbow dislocations because he couldn’t resist the happy pleading of the girl who loved to fly.
“Zoe complied,” Nicole continued, “because Nate promised it wouldn’t happen again. What else could he do? What girl wouldn’t want to believe her father?”
Jenna closed her eyes and saw a gap-toothed, seven-year-old Zoe sprinkling her bedroom sheets with black pepper because Daddy said it would make the tooth fairy sneeze and lose extra change from her fairy pockets.
“Imagine,” N
icole said, “if it happened again, how betrayed she’d feel, how angry at you for not noticing.”
The thought sent a seismic tremor through her. Lucky, sensing it, pressed against her ankle and whined.
Nicole pressed her fingers against her head as if holding in the pulsing of her brain. “You do realize that this explains all of Zoe’s angry behavior for the past nine months.”
You’re so stupid! You’re so blind!
She cringed. She didn’t want this to be true. She wanted Zoe’s fury to stem from some normal reason that she’d read about or heard about in her desperate search for understanding. She’d rather Zoe grew angry because her mother interrogated her about school over dinner. She’d rather Zoe felt besieged by the suffocating pressure of being an only child, the sweet beating heart of the family. She’d rather that Zoe’s hair-trigger temper be due to something biological and passing, like the usual early-teen fluctuation in hormones, or even to some Freudian idea that Zoe was competing with her mother for affection from Nate.
Jenna thought about all the times Nate waved away her concerns, insisting Zoe’s behavior was just a phase, as he changed the topic of the conversation.
Nicole lifted her fingers and started counting. “Zoe was afraid she wouldn’t be able to keep the secret. So she avoided you.”
All those days rushing home through Seattle traffic in time for seven p.m. dinner in the hopes of a few minutes with her daughter. Only to come home to see Zoe’s face close up tight before asking permission to be excused from the table.
Nicole bent back her second finger. “Then when you tried to get close to her, she lashed out at you in order to push you away.”
“She didn’t want to slip up,” Jenna said. “She didn’t want to be the one held responsible for destroying our family.”
The tendons in the back of her knees softened. She felt a scorching heat on her palm as she braced herself against the hood of a parked car. She ignored the burn as she leaned her weight against it so she wouldn’t sink into a puddle on the dirty street. Her bad leg slipped out from under her. She twisted and banged her hip against the car.
Nicole seized her shoulders and held on until Jenna felt the ground beneath her feet again.
“I want you to think about this, Jenna.” Nicole’s fingers dug into her skin. “Your husband manipulated Zoe. Rather than coming clean, he made his twelve-year-old keep a terrible secret.”
Jenna’s humorless laughter certainly came from someone else’s mouth. “And all these years, I believed I was the bad parent.”
“Oh, Jenna, we all believe we’re bad parents.”
Her mind rolled back to when she came home from work to have Nate show her the video of Zoe rolling over for the first time, of Zoe scooting across the floor on her belly, of Zoe rising to stand, all the precious moments she missed. She remembered an evening when Nate said something to Zoe about her preschool teacher and Zoe laughed. She’d laughed, too, not understanding the joke but so aching to be part of it. She also remembered skipping out of an office meeting to make a six p.m. grammar school basketball game in order to catch Zoe sitting on the bench for all but one minute and sixteen glorious seconds. She remembered the rhythm of early shopping trips to the mall, pennies tossed in the fountain, a quarter to crank out a plastic egg holding a gummy lizard.
Had the situation been reversed—had Zoe come upon her in flagrante delicto with one of her coworkers, say—Jenna would have confessed the infidelity to Nate that same night. Then she would have set her sights on doing whatever it took to see forgiveness in Zoe’s eyes.
“I’m not the bad parent,” Jenna heard herself say. “Maybe I never was.”
Then she dropped her head back to stare at the blue sky between the Chicago skyscrapers, feeling the first shimmering sliver of comfort, an unexpected gift out of the fissure of a broken heart.
Chapter Eighteen
To: Paulina, Alice, Zuza Petrenko
From: Nicole Eriksen
Subject: Dancing with Rastafarians in Cleveland
Attached: NicoleAirGuitar.jpg; JennaMovesLikeJagger.mov; BuddhistsCantDance.mov
Paulina, so glad you loved the photo we sent yesterday of Claire mugging by a Grateful Dead poster in Cleveland. That was taken at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, and we were thrown out of the museum for it. Go ahead and share it on the blog like the others. After our adventures there, we spent the evening at the House of Blues listening to Zydeco and enjoying gumbo and some amazing baby back ribs. Then we walked the East Fourth Street neighborhood and listened to a street band. Here are a few short clips of Claire and Jenna dancing with a busker.
We’re heading for Niagara Falls today. I want to scare the wits out of Claire by showing her real waterfalls before she tackles the rapids of the Hudson Valley Gorge.
As Jenna mentioned in an earlier e-mail, we haven’t been arrested yet, so we should make it to Pine Lake before long.
Niagara Falls, New York
Claire,” Nicole whispered. “We’re attracting the kind of attention usually reserved for cults.”
Claire shifted on the wooden boards of one of the viewing platforms on the United States side of Niagara Falls. The three of them were sitting cross-legged in a close triumvirate, so close that their knees touched. “Just ignore them,” she said. “Tune out every sensation around you. Close your eyes and concentrate only on your breathing.”
Nicole sighed. “We couldn’t do this in the privacy of our hotel room?”
“Open air,” Claire said. “Open mind.”
Jenna ventured, “Can I concentrate on Lucky’s breathing? The walk from the hotel killed the poor guy. He’s slobbering all over my lap.”
“Just concentrate on the movement of your diaphragm and then acknowledge in your mind any other distractions.”
Claire admitted there were a lot of distractions. The air swirled with a palpable mist. The waterfall roared just past the edge of the wooden platform. Though this cataract was a noisy, angry beast, the vitality of it reminded her of a much smaller one back at the wat, the little trickle of a waterfall whose gurgle she used to concentrate on during her first desperate attempts to still her mind.
Breathe in, breathe out. Breathe in, breathe out.
She acknowledged the sound of footsteps coming toward the railing. The boards vibrated under her bottom. A family standing somewhere to her right kept up a muted conversation. Mom, what are those people doing? Resting, dear. Come and look at the rainbow. Claire felt another vibration, a tinny one she couldn’t identify that came in through her knees.
She peeped an eye open to find Nicole sneaking her cell phone out of the pocket of her capris.
Nicole grimaced. “I know, I know. Just one more text, I promise.”
Claire shifted her weight to give Nic’s knee a nudge. “Is there some kind of crisis going on? Your phone has been pinging and ringing nonstop.”
“Today it’s a cleat crisis. Julia can’t find hers.” Her fingers flew over the screen keyboard. “Lars needs to know where to buy them. I’m telling him that Julia probably left them under the sofa in the TV room downstairs.”
Claire said, “He can’t wait half an hour?”
Nicole’s shrug was sheepish.
“Let me guess,” Jenna said, scratching a grateful Lucky under the collar. “The game’s in twenty minutes.”
“It’s in ten. Okay, done.” Nicole shoved the phone back in her pocket and straightened to schoolgirl attention. “Sorry about that. Before that text, I was sort of falling into a zone.”
“Yeah,” Jenna teased, “the hangover zone.”
Jenna leaned away from Nicole as Nicole gave her a harmless slap. Lucky startled as his lap chair tipped, and Jenna released him to protect her head with her hands. All innocence, Nicole brought her hand right back down on her knee like she hadn’t done a thing, then settled into perfect meditation position.
The peace lasted no more than a minute.
Claire chided, “Jenna, you’re squirming
.”
“Lucky’s heavy on my leg.”
Nicole laughed. “He weighs, like, ten pounds.”
“Just note the sensation,” Claire insisted. “Think, Warm dog on my leg. Keep noting the sensation over and over. Eventually, the sensation will slip to your subconscious, and your mind will drift to more important things.”
“My aunt is twitching in Quebec.” Nicole raised her chin as the mist started to thin under the heat of sunshine. “I’m not sure she’d approve of me doing this without a rosary in my hands.”
“I promise,” Claire said, “your soul is in no danger.”
Jenna picked Lucky up and rearranged him on her lap. “Okay, I’m trying to do what you say. So I’m breathing in, and I’m breathing out. I’m thinking, Warm dog on my leg. Then I’m thinking, Dog lifts head, followed by, Dog sniffs the scent of a waffle cone. Then, I sniff the scent of a waffle cone. And then my stomach rumbles.”
Claire said, “Great observations.”
“I just don’t get it,” Jenna said. “Exactly what are we trying to accomplish here?”
“Mindfulness.”
Jenna repeated, “Mindfulness.”
“It’s the ability to be intensely present.” Claire noted the dampness of the boards soaking the seat of her jeans. “It’s a way of being aware of everything you sense and feel. It’s a way to shut off the constant roll and tumble of your thoughts so you can finally identify what you’re really thinking. You’ll recognize how you feel. You’ll acknowledge those feelings. Then you can respond to them better.”
Splinters plucked at the fibers of Claire’s jeans. The mist churned up by the falls bathed her skin and gave her a chill. The August sun broke through long enough to burn a swath across her forehead and lighten the space beyond her eyelids. Soon all sound became subsumed by the roar of the falls. Behind them, she heard the muffled shouts of children and the thud of feet upon the deck, as if her own consciousness had slipped amid the foam.
She willed herself to remember all this. The air had an iron-tang taste to it. She heard the rumble of wheels as a vendor passed, trailing with him a roasted-honey scent. She became conscious of the slight pressure of their knees touching. She made herself feel the strength in her own still-supple spine, the force of life as her heart pumped blood through her body, the ease at which she could suck in a breath.
Random Acts of Kindness Page 19
