“Started in hockey,” Lu said, shrugging. “The high school jocks had a lot of boozy parties. I liked them. Liked them so much I started throwing them for myself on weekdays after I graduated.”
“I don’t know what surprises me more. That you’re her sponsor or that she’s finally in AA.”
“Did you read the letter she wrote to you?”
Tess’s jaw tightened. She remembered receiving the letter. It came in the Kansas mail with the seed catalog and the bills for fertilizer, a sliver of her past sliding into her golden life like a shiv.
“I didn’t open it.” God knows how her mother had found her after all these years. Tess had made an art out of living off the grid. “In fact, like most things I don’t like, I burned it.”
“You’ve got good reason to be angry.”
Tess flushed prickly and hot. She wondered how much Lu knew—or thought she knew. Her mother got to be a really good liar toward the end there. Tess wondered whether her mother ever gave her any credit for all those years keeping her fed, clothed, and, in some cases, sober enough to face the police so that Rodriguez wouldn’t call social services. Funny thing about that. Her mother always had just enough self-possession to sober up in time. Somehow she knew that if Rodriguez had called social services, then Tess would have found herself living on those acres in Minnesota. That would have been a hell of a lot better for the twelve-year-old she’d been. But then her mother would be left without someone to clean up her messes.
In the end, no matter how drunk, Bette Hendrick always knew how to take care of Bette Hendrick.
“I know you probably don’t want to hear this,” Lu said, “but it took a lot for her to climb out of the hole she was in.”
Tess heard the sound that came out of her, the bitter scoff of contempt. Climbing out of that hole came about twenty years too late.
“That’s why she’s not here,” Lu continued, nodding toward the sagging house. “Lately she’s such a wreck she’s seeing ghosts.”
“Oh, she used to see all kinds of things when she was on the rotgut—”
“It’s your aunt she’s seeing,” Lu interrupted. “She’s seeing her own dead sister as a teenager, walking around town as if she’s still alive. That’s how much it’s killing her, Tess. She lost both of you, and the guilt is destroying her.”
“Maybe I should dress up in chains when I see her. Rattle them a little and see what happens.”
Lu’s gaze fell to her blue-painted toenails, and Tess felt a stab of guilt. If Lu was her mother’s sponsor that meant Lu might be seeing ghosts, too. For a moment Tess wondered exactly what regrets haunted Lu’s conscience.
“She’s afraid of you, Tess.” Lu took another deep drag and spoke through the smoke. “She’s afraid of how angry you are.”
“Glad to hear she’s finally met her own conscience.”
“She’s got a lot to atone for, and she knows it.”
“I’m sure my mother is doing a fine job of playing the victim. It’s a performance I’m very familiar with.”
Lu ran a hand through her short-cropped hair, riffling it so that it stood up on end in places. Her thumb flicked at the filter of the cigarette burning low between her fingers. She seemed to be searching the front lawns of the houses for something she couldn’t quite find.
“Here’s the thing,” Lu said. “Your mother knows her limits now. She knows them very well. And she believes seeing you again is the one trigger that’ll send her right back to the bottom of a bottle.”
Tess sat for a moment while the words sank in. “Are you saying she won’t see me?”
“Recovery is a fragile thing, Theresa—”
“Tess.” Her back teeth began to chatter as a terrible anger rose up in her. “You call me Tess. My mother killed Theresa long ago.”
“She knows she failed you. She knows that’s why you left her. But she knows she’s not strong enough to face you, and she doesn’t want to take the risk.”
Tess looked down and saw her hands curled into fists, the knuckles white, feeling the rage like a red haze before her eyes. “She’s still playing the victim.”
“Your mother has never forgiven herself for everything she’s done, and everything she failed to do.” Lu ground the cigarette out on the porch boards, three deep furrows in her brow. “She knows she’ll have to live with that pain—”
“I don’t give a fuck about her pain.”
Tess shot to her feet. She stood on the porch with the sun on her face and the old house in her sight. She stood there staring at the dysfunction she’d lived in from the moment her father crouched down in front of her and asked her what she wanted to do. She could come with him to Minnesota, he’d said, while behind him his lover, her English teacher, looked down at her with that ruler slap of an eye. Minnesota, some far place where she’d have to live with the woman who couldn’t stand the way she wrote essays about dead cats. Realizing that, if she went, she’d be leaving her mother alone. Her mother, who couldn’t seem to get up in the morning. Her mother, who crawled into Tess’s bed every night smelling bad and sobbing about how Daddy was leaving them both.
Tess stepped off the stairs onto the cracked concrete. “I don’t know what I was thinking, coming back here. Nothing has changed. I was a fool for thinking it ever would.”
Chapter Thirteen
Paging through her notebook, seeing the lists of names and reading the descriptions she’d written from observations around town, Sadie finally came to the realization that her grand plan was a failure.
She slumped in the hard wooden chair, tugging on the binoculars around her neck as she brooded. When she was back home laying out her grand plans, she’d figured that the little town of Pine Lake wasn’t Queens, where she could bike the same route every day and not see the same person twice, where about a quarter of her own classroom turned over in any given year. She figured if she stood on a street corner in this Podunk upstate town long enough, she’d probably see the entire population pass by. Certainly someone would pause and look at her and say, are you related to…
Now she had to admit she’d discovered more information about her birth mother online at home than she had in all her time here.
She squinted toward the computer terminals. There were only four of them, and every time Sadie came to the library, the sign-up sheets were already filled for hours, mostly by mothers who then sat their kids in front of the monitor to play some stupid learning games. But today, Sadie noticed, there were fewer moms hanging around. There was just one bearded guy who looked like a college student, wearing a pork-pie hat as he slumped over his laptop. So when Sadie noticed a woman gathering her things, she waited a moment for someone else to claim the terminal where the woman had been sitting. When nobody did, she hurried across the room and slipped into the metal computer seat like she belonged there.
She logged into her instant messaging account and sent out a text.
Izzy responded right away.
Sadie! You’re alive!
I’m in a library, she typed, safe in that place we talked about before.
I was soooo worried about you! Your aunt called here yesterday.
Sadie sat with her hands hovering over the keyboard as a cold, prickly sensation swept through her.
Izzy typed, She thought you were vacationing with us. My mom got all wiggy. I told her that your aunt was wrong, that you went away with someone from school.
Sadie typed, from school?!
My mom was staring, I had to say something!
Sadie pressed a palm against her stomach where the pancakes and maple syrup she’d had for breakfast churned. She’d been counting on the fact that her aunt would be too preoccupied with Nana to think about her at all.
Sadie typed, so what did you say?
I said I couldn’t remember the friend’s name. I said it was Jones or Johnson or something. Someone in a different class. I had to make something up quick!
Sadie squeezed her eyes shut. Think. Think. And when s
he did, a terrifying question came to mind.
She typed, What about Nana? Did my aunt say anything?
Sadie stared at the curser as it blinked once, twice, three times.
Your aunt put your nana in St. Regis.
Sadie made a sound in the back of her throat that she swallowed down before it drew attention. Nana had always hated that place, back when Nana knew what it was. But for the past two years, Nana had had sudden urges to catch the bus into Manhattan to work at the sweet shop she’d managed thirty years earlier. Nana had sometimes talked about her husband in the other room fixing the window locks, when he’d been dead for forty years. The Nana who’d taken her in six years ago had been subsumed by a woman who looked at her with a stranger’s eyes and asked, Little girl, what are you doing in my house? Sadie told herself that Nana wouldn’t even notice where she was.
Sadie?
Sadie typed, Did Aunt Vi say anything else?
Not really. Just that your aunt couldn’t believe how bad your nana was. That she didn’t even recognize her. (((HUGS)))
Sadie’s throat tightened. Her aunt knew things had been getting bad fast. After her last visit, Aunt Vi had looked Sadie in the eye and asked, Is this too much for you? If Sadie told her it was too much, then Aunt Vi would have put Nana in St. Regis, and with sighs of martyrdom, she’d squeeze Sadie into that tiny, noisy Ohio house. What choice had Sadie had?
She closed her eyes tight. She couldn’t think about this, not right now, not when she might get caught before her work here was done.
Listen Izzy, she typed. Was my aunt upset that she didn’t know where I was?
Yeah. She sounded embarrassed that she didn’t know who you were staying with.
That was her aunt. Always overwhelmed, even during simple phone conversations, when the noise of children screaming in the background tended to draw her aunt’s attention away from listening to anything Sadie was saying. Sadie had depended upon her aunt’s distraction, in fact, when she first called her aunt to tell her about Nana’s little walkabout and roundup by the police. When her aunt began to breathe in short, nervous little puffs, stuttering about flights and schedules and babysitters, Sadie had let her talk. After her aunt finally came around to asking about her, Sadie told her that a friend had offered to take her to their lake house for a few weeks. They were leaving tomorrow, and maybe Sadie should go so she wouldn’t get in anyone’s way.
Now Sadie wondered if her aunt, having shoved Nana in a nursing home, had finally stopped to think about her sister’s child for more than five minutes. She wondered if Aunt Vi was rifling through Sadie’s bedroom, finding phone numbers, making calls, or, worse, alerting the police.
Sadie? Are you mad at me?
Sadie typed, No, no. You did good! Maybe I’ll call my aunt this afternoon. Give her a story so she doesn’t go crazy.
Are you okay? Like, is everything all right?
Yup. I’ve even got a place to stay that isn’t a tree house.
ROFL. Any luck finding you-know-who?
Sighing, Sadie paused a moment before she typed, I was crazy to think this would work.
Called it!
But I got to see where my mother lived before I was born.
What’s it like?
Lake beaches and ice cream stores and woods everywhere. Sadie twisted in the seat to squint out a far window at the flurry of activity on the library lawn. She raised the binoculars to see more clearly. There’s a band setting up right now outside the library, she typed. They do this, like, every week.
I wish I was there with you! It’s hot here and the air-conditioning isn’t working. I’ve got no one to go to the city pool with but my sister and it’s boooooorrrrrrring.
With a pang, Sadie remembered other summers, taking the bus with Izzy to the public pool, lying out on the concrete, the smell of chlorine so thick you could choke on it.
Izzy typed, I want to have summer with you! Tell me when you’re coming home.
Sadie curled her fingers into her lap and stared at them, the cuticles bitten to the quick. What was home? The house where she used to live with her nana? Nana would never live there again. Her aunt was probably already sticking a For Sale sign in the front lawn. It’d be great to keep on living there, but who ever heard of a fourteen-year-old living alone? Anything was better, Sadie thought, than going to live with her cousins in a family who didn’t want her.
Sadie?
I’m not coming home yet, she typed. Sadie glanced up at the clock over the big windows, her mind rushing, that cold prickly feeling washing through her all over again.
Sadie typed, I have another plan.
*
Sadie sat on her bike across the street from Ricky’s Roast until she saw Riley step out into the sunshine. A man in a suit followed her out. He handed Riley something and flashed a white smile. Sadie was relieved when they shook hands and headed off in different directions. After the research she’d done in the library, she needed to have this conversation with Riley alone and right away, before Aunt Vi got over her embarrassment enough to call for official help.
“Hey,” she said, as she rode up beside Riley, dropping her feet off the pedals to keep pace.
“Hey, you.”
“So,” Sadie said, “how did your meeting with your mom’s friend go?”
“Oh, like every other meeting my mother sets up. Did you know,” Riley rushed on, as she raised a hand to show a card wedged between two fingers, “that you could soar to higher spiritual perspectives using up-flow vortices and organic mud wraps?”
Sadie didn’t know how to respond to that. Riley was fast-walking, like a city girl, and she was sort of dressed like one, too, her suit jacket flapping, her heels clicking on the pavement. The binoculars bumped against Sadie’s chest as she struggled to keep pace.
“Did you also know,” Riley repeated, “that meditation labyrinths and relaxation courtyards and treatment terraces are essential to create an atmosphere of natural peace?”
“Ah…”
“Of course you didn’t,” Riley said, fluttering the card. “You and I, we’re uninformed. But he can tell, because someone of my ‘body shape’ could sure use a two-week organic juice cleansing—”
“Riley, how much coffee did you have?”
“I had a little too much of something, that’s for sure.” Riley flicked the card in a public trash can and kept walking. “And right now this body shape of mine is craving some ice cream. Want to join me, Sadie?”
Sadie’s heart leaped. “Yes!”
Outside the Creamery, Sadie leaned the bike she’d borrowed against a sycamore tree. She didn’t bother to lock it, though she still felt strange leaving it out like that. No one ever locked their bikes around here, and yet the bikes never seemed to get stolen. While Riley went in to order two Pine Lakes Spectacular Sundaes, holding the nuts on one, Sadie saved a tiny table with a tiny umbrella. All around tourists in beach cover-ups wandered in from nearby Bay Roberts to sample the forty homemade flavors or just to plunge inside for a minute to get out of the heat.
When Riley returned, she slid an enormous bowl in front of Sadie, another in front of herself, then plopped down and kicked her heels up on the third chair. “So,” Riley said, digging into the fudge with a plastic spoon. “Update me on how the search is going.”
“Not good,” Sadie conceded. “But I did learn one thing. Your classmates had terrible taste in clothes. What was up with all the plaid?”
“Mountain fashion.”
“Nobody tell you that grunge went out, like, decades ago?”
Riley pointed a dripping spoon at her. “You wait. You’ll be howling about your classmates’ fashion sense in ten years.”
“No way.” Sadie twirled her spoon into the creamy vanilla, the morning’s pancakes still sitting like a lump in her stomach, trying to figure a way to bring up a subject that made her queasy. “But honestly, about this project. I think I’ve been going about this all wrong. I’ve been wasting my time—”
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“A girl your age shouldn’t be worried about wasting time. You should be building tree houses and painting your toenails and having swim races to the island in Pine Lake.”
Sadie suddenly felt like she was in a Japanese anime and the frame had just panned back to show her alone in a big white space. Painting toenails and swim races? Is that what normal fourteen-year-olds did? Is that what Riley did with her time when she was fourteen years old?
“Unless,” Riley continued, “there’s some deadline coming up that you’d like to clue me in on?”
“Well, I want to go back to school in September.”
“There’s a string of words that never left my lips.”
“Why? Was your high school bad or something?”
“It’s like any school, I suppose. Some kids do great, and some kids don’t. One of the women I graduated with is an archaeologist, Maya Wheeler. She’s been on the cover of National Geographic. But I wasn’t much for sitting in a classroom listening to teachers drone on. I’d much rather be out looking for birds or playing softball.”
Izzy played softball on the school team, Sadie remembered with a pang. Sadie had tried to join two years ago, but with Nana, she just couldn’t make practices.
“I take it,” Riley continued, “that you liked your school and you want to go back?”
“I miss my friends. And I don’t want to fall behind. The problem is,” Sadie said, her chest rising, “if I can’t find my birth mother, then my choices of where to live narrow down to zippo.”
Sadie concentrated on the ice cream dripping from the sides of the bowl, scraping it with a spoon and then pouring the drippings over the top. She could feel Riley’s gaze on her head. Riley wouldn’t understand what she was feeling. Riley had Camp Kwenback, Pine Lake, and a large family. No one could possibly understand this unhinged sensation that Sadie felt sometimes, the growing sense that there wasn’t a place in the whole wide world where she really belonged.
Sadie often wondered if this dizzy sensation was born the moment her own mother put her into the arms of a stranger.
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