Senseless Acts of Beauty

by Lisa Verge Higgins

  “What the hell does that mean?”

  “Sadie asked if I’d be her legal guardian.”

  Something struck Tess in the shoulder, and Tess grabbed where it hurt only to realize she’d staggered a few paces back and bumped into Winnie. She breathed hard, feeling the first creeping tendrils of jealousy, knowing they were unworthy, undeserved, even as they tightened around her heart. Her head told her that her daughter was no fool. Sadie grasped the worth of Camp Kwenback just like Tess had all those years ago. Sadie saw a kind-hearted protector in Riley, and her heart had led her right. Tess told herself that the situation could be worse, that there were a lot more difficult places to grow up than in Camp Kwenback, doing homework in the main lodge, swimming in the lake, and playing among these dancing bears.

  Tess forced her voice to be even. “Sadie knows a good thing when she sees it.”

  “Come on, you know I can’t be her guardian.”

  Jealousy was like acid in her mouth. “Because Sadie already has a legal family.”

  “Plus she has you.”

  “I’m no guardian.”

  “That can change.”

  “I signed a consent form.” The words were branded in her mind. I fully realize that I relinquish forever any and all rights as parent of said child. “When you sign a consent form, you legally abandon a child.”

  Riley made a strange, choking sound.

  “Sadie’s the adopted daughter of a couple of nice, honest apple farmers,” Tess insisted. “Let’s keep it that way.”

  “No.”

  Tess felt a kick of anger. “What would you tell her then? That she’s the spawn of a messed-up trucker with a juvenile criminal record and a failed marriage?”

  “I would tell—”

  “Should I tell her she’s the granddaughter of an alcoholic?”

  “—her the truth.”

  “The truth?” She shuddered at the word. “The truth? Should I tell Sadie that she only exists because pharmaceuticals failed?”

  Tess remembered those pills she’d choked down, among many pills she’d taken that day, the ones they told her she should take, the ones that would reduce the possibility, and she’d taken them because, on that day, that was what she’d wanted and she’d been a shaking mess.

  “Sadie knows that.” Riley’s voice was flat and hard. “Every adopted kid knows that. We’re the lucky ones.”

  Tess couldn’t look at her. In her mind, she saw Sadie’s face, red cheeks buried behind a hood in the cold of winter. She saw a girl in striped stockings kicking her legs on a swing in the grammar school playground. She saw a tween slinging a backpack over her shoulder, striding out of the little house in Queens. She saw grainy social-media pictures showing experimentation with brown eyeliner.

  Her blood ran cold sometimes, thinking about the fragile series of events that brought Sadie into this world.

  “Should I even ask how all this happened?” Riley pushed away from a bear, the small button at the top of her sweater caught between agitated fingers. “In high school, you wore the birth-control patch like it was a badge of honor.”

  “My father’s support payments stopped after my eighteenth birthday. Some weeks I had to choose between dinner, medicine, and vodka.” The tendons in her shoulders tightened. “That was an unlucky week.”

  “But you went through with the pregnancy.”

  She hadn’t known she was pregnant until four months later. When she found out, she had slapped her belly right in front of all the nurses, calling the fetus a little parasite.

  “Once I knew,” she said through a tightening throat, “I made an adoption plan.”

  “An adoption plan.” Riley tugged violently on her sweater button. “Everyone uses such careful words these days. Our mothers made an ‘adoption plan.’ There was a ‘transfer’ of custody. But you know what? At the bottom of all that is the truth every adopted kid I know slams ourselves against, over and over, until we’re mentally bruised and bloody: Our birth mothers willingly gave us away.” Riley glared at her. “You gave Sadie away.”

  “That’s not fair.”

  A flash of guilt shot across Riley’s face.

  “I did it,” Tess said, “to protect her.”

  She spoke the words with a stiffening of her spine but she wanted to crouch down and hide her head between her knees. The truth was that Tess hadn’t wanted to hand Sadie over to the Tischler family, in the end.

  But if she told Riley that, she’d have to tell her why.

  Sometimes Tess felt that her life was a huge scale and she spent every moment of her day struggling to balance it. In the hospital she wanted it all to be over. She wanted that baby out of her body and out of her life. She wanted to be back on the streets with her fly-by-night friends, looking for some happy-happy. But the instant Sadie eased out of her body, bloody and slippery, her daughter’s cry shot a hundred thousand hooks into her heart. Tess knew with a force like a bright light, This is my daughter. She remembered bracing herself on her elbows, gasping for breath, unable to take her eyes from the creature moving in the doctor’s gloved hands, realizing with a shock that the arms now stretching out for that child were her own, that she was reaching for the baby that only moments earlier she’d been counting down the minutes to be rid of.

  “Tell her, Tess.” Riley’s voice, hard in the night.

  Tess heaved like she’d run for miles. She’d wanted Sadie so much after she was born. She’d wanted to protect this little girl the way she herself had never been protected. But as the days passed, and the adoption counselors asked hard questions as they pressed her to sign the papers, the doubts and insecurities multiplied. How could she ever take care of this child, alone, unemployed, homeless? Was she even capable of loving her? She’d screwed up every decent relationship she’d ever had—with her old Pine Lake friends, with her asshole boyfriends, with her hopeless mother. Would she screw things up with this fragile girl? So she’d given Sadie away.

  But Tess feared that at the bottom of that decision lay an ugly complicity, a complicity that chipped off a piece of her heart whenever she dared to face it.

  Maybe what she’d done wasn’t for the best.

  Maybe it was just easier.

  “Tess,” Riley said, softer now. “Tell her.”

  “I can’t.”

  “Yes, yes, you can.”

  “Sadie will hate me.”

  “Sadie won’t be happy you took so long to say something, but she won’t—”

  “Your mother put you up for adoption. Don’t you hate her for it?”

  “No.”

  That “no” ended on an up tone, and Tess knew there was more to the story. She waited for it while the cicadas sang in the trees, the volume of their song rising.

  “I didn’t hate her,” Riley continued, digging furrows in her arms. “Not at the beginning, when I didn’t know her. Not until she told me she didn’t want me. That she didn’t even have a daughter.”

  “Maybe she said that to protect you.”

  “Protect me? From what?”

  “I don’t know. But I’d like to meet the birth mother who managed to escape guilt.”

  Riley flipped her hand in dismissal. “Well, maybe you and my birth mother can discuss that over tea one day. In the meantime, you’ve got a chance to make this right. This secret is a hollow in Sadie, don’t you understand? Sadie will fill it up with a million nightmares—”

  “Or she can fill it up with dreams.” Tess glanced to the lodge in the distance. “Dreams of mothers who smell like gingerbread, and—”

  “Damn it, Tess, what kind of woman are you to skulk around here, keeping such a secret from your own daughter?”

  She wanted to speak, she really did. The urge was overwhelming, a tide dammed up just under her sternum. But every time the truth rose, it slammed against the constriction of her throat. She’d kept all of this inside for so damn long. She couldn’t open her mouth. The hinges of her jaws had seized.

  She wouldn’t tell
this story.

  “Tell her, Tess.” Riley stepped in front of her, all angry brown eyes. “Because if you don’t, I will.”

  Chapter Sixteen

  Sadie woke up in the middle of the night. She lay blinking on the bed, listening to the cicadas singing, crickets chirping, and, from the deep woods, the sound of an owl hooting. But the sound that woke her up hadn’t come through her open window—it came from the creaking floorboards in the hallway outside her room.

  Sadie swung her legs over the side of the bed. Nana used to putter around the house in the middle of the night, and Mrs. Clancy had proved no different. Once Sadie had caught Mrs. Clancy rattling the locked handle of the lodge’s sliding back doors. Since then Sadie had been alert to late-night noises. Sadie knew well that all it would take was one little distraction, one little mistake, for there to be a real disaster. After all, had Sadie not been in such a dumb hurry to get to school one morning, she wouldn’t be here in Pine Lake right now, doing crazy-ass things like begging a stranger to take her in.

  She poked her head outside her door but the hall was empty except for the spill of moonlight pouring in from the far window. Sadie stepped out and padded barefoot down the stairs and into the dim main lodge. She caught sight of Mrs. Clancy standing by the front window. The moonlight flooded through her nightgown, setting it aglow.

  Sadie made loud footsteps as she crossed the room so she wouldn’t startle the older woman. “Hey, Mrs. Clancy,” she said, “is there a party going on out there?”

  Mrs. Clancy turned and put a finger to her lips. She summoned Sadie closer and pointed out the window.

  “Look,” Mrs. Clancy whispered, “the bears are dancing.”

  Sadie squinted into the darkness but saw nothing but starlight glinting off the roof of Riley’s car. Everything beyond the tree line was a blur.

  Mrs. Clancy pressed her palms together and drew her shoulders up in excitement. “Remember how Mr. Cross used to tell us that this would happen someday? How the bears would come alive by the light of the moon and dance together under the stars?”

  Sadie looked at Mrs. Clancy, sleep ruffled, giddy. Nana’s hair was that same pure white, wispy and thin, like cotton candy. No matter how many times Sadie had combed it, she couldn’t keep it neat. Sometimes she caught Nana pulling at it in agitation, gathering puffy piles in her lap.

  It was going to be hard on Mrs. Clancy, Sadie thought, when Riley lost this place for good.

  “You’re not looking.” Mrs. Clancy curled strong, bony fingers around Sadie’s wrist. “Can you see them?”

  “Not really. But—”

  “Here, look through these.” Mrs. Clancy grasped for something against her chest and then struggled to pull a pair of binoculars over her head. “You’ll see the bears as plain as day down in that little clearing.”

  Sadie obliged, if only to get Riley’s precious binoculars out of Mrs. Clancy’s hands. Tossing the strap over her head, Sadie lifted the binoculars to her face and nudged the dial to put them in focus—

  —and, oddly enough, there was something out there, a pile of shapes by the mini-golf area. She rotated the dial until she saw the collection of figures—yes, they were bears—some with their arms raised toward the sky.

  “How Bud loved to collect those bears.” Mrs. Clancy rubbed her hands together, a dry rusk of a sound. “Bud always denied it, you know. He used to say that they found him. He’d tell me how he’d come upon one on a trip farther upstate, and it would remind him of another one that he’d owned. He just had to buy it, never mind Mary shaking her head. They were like lost family, he said. He was just bringing them back together.”

  Sadie’s finger paused over the focus dial as she saw something else in the moonlight—two human figures moving among the bears. They were too far away, and the light was too dim, to make out faces. But Sadie could guess that they were Riley and Tess.

  She lowered the binoculars. She told herself Riley and Tess could be out there talking about ex-husbands or money troubles. Maybe Tess had just lost her car keys around the construction site and that’s why she had crouched down. Maybe Sadie was just full of herself, thinking that they might be talking about her.

  Then Sadie remembered the flare of alarm in Riley’s eyes when Sadie had uttered the words legal custody.

  Mrs. Clancy leaned in close. “Do you see them, Sarah?”

  “Yes,” Sadie said, jerking the binoculars back to her face. “They’re the bears from the barn.”

  “Why, yes, of course they are.”

  “I guess that woman Tess must be using them to make the new mini-golf.”

  “Well, that woman best catch them quick before those bears disappear into the woods.”

  Sadie watched Riley and Tess pacing and stopping, crouching and standing, while a sick feeling settled in her chest. No way were they out there just talking about the weather. Sadie didn’t have to be a psychic to know that right now they were making plans to hand her over to the authorities.

  “Poor Riley,” Mrs. Clancy mused, pressing so close to the window that her words made a circle of fog on the glass. “Bud’s not going to like that she left the barn door unlocked and set the bears free.”

  Sadie didn’t bother to correct her. Why would she bother? Mrs. Clancy lived in a nice place, where people took care of her and wooden bears really did dance to life in the moonlight.

  “It’s late, Mrs. Clancy.” Sadie took Mrs. Clancy’s hand in her own. “Let’s let the bears dance in peace.”

  “I’m so glad I finally got to see that.” Mrs. Clancy let Sadie turn her toward the stairs. “I feel like I’ve waited all my life to see that.”

  Sadie walked her through the main lodge, past Bob the Bear, whose balding tummy bore the burden of so many wishes, past the moose antlers that, during Christmas, were covered with tinsel, or so she was told. She walked Mrs. Clancy through the room that had held wild parties, where Riley’s great-grandparents had served moonshine in little white teacups and the place had been raided four times by the police.

  Such pretty stories, Sadie thought, as something dark and ugly curled inside her. Maybe Riley would feel less torn apart about losing Camp Kwenback if she just took a good hard look at the truth. These were really some other family’s stories. Riley’s real family story was a big mystery, and Riley had gotten so close to it that she’d run right back to her adoptive family.

  But Sadie was different. She knew that the family she’d grown up in wasn’t really hers. Her mom and dad had loved her, but they were dead and gone now. Her aunt and uncle had rejected her. Just like her biological mother had rejected her.

  Just like Riley had rejected her.

  When she turned eighteen it wouldn’t matter who her birth mother was. At eighteen she could forget both families, and she’d forget Riley and Camp Kwenback, too, and she’d run away far enough from everyone and everything she’d ever known. She’d fly away someplace new, so she could make up her own stories.

  Sadie let go of Mrs. Clancy’s hand just outside the door of the older woman’s room. “Good night, Mrs. Clancy.”

  “Good night, my dear.” She patted Sadie’s arm. “I’m so glad you’re here to take care of me.”

  Mrs. Clancy closed the door behind her. Sadie stood in the hallway, her heart a stone suspended in her chest.

  She had to make a new plan. There was no way around it. Nobody was ever going to take care of her.

  Chapter Seventeen

  Tell her, Tess.”

  Riley gripped her arms so hard she knew she would have bruises later. Something angry was curling up within her, something harsh and unforgiving for the woman standing defiant before her, unwilling to acknowledge the most fundamental of human responsibilities and confess the truth to the child she brought into the world—and then gave away.

  Riley watched Tess pace a few steps and then crouch down. The muscles in Tess’s shoulders flexed, and from this vantage point, Riley recognized Sadie’s own narrow-boned frame, the same curve
of neck and shoulder. The fact that Riley hadn’t noticed this earlier only made her angrier.

  “My grandparents didn’t know, did they?” Riley said, already knowing the answer to the question.

  Tess shook her head once.

  “If they’d known,” Riley said, “they would have let you stay. They would have moved mountains to help you keep—”

  “I didn’t know I was pregnant when I was staying here.”

  Riley paused and did a mental calculation. Tess was probably in her third month by the time she left Pine Lake. “How could you not know?”

  “I had other things on my mind.”

  “I’d like to know what was more important than a pregnancy—”

  “Would you?” Tess shot to her feet. “It must be hard to imagine life in Cannery Row from the vantage point of your backyard swing set.”

  Riley went mute.

  “By the time I realized the truth,” Tess continued, “I was far away from here, living on the street, and it was too damn late to do anything about it.”

  The anger curled a little tighter inside Riley. She did another mental calculation. Since Tess hadn’t been able to terminate this pregnancy, Tess had to have been past four months when she supposedly found out, at a point where the baby would have been moving inside her.

  The gaps in her story were growing deep and wide.

  “I found out by accident, when I went into the hospital for a cut on my hand.” Tess stared at her open palms. “It was deep and wouldn’t stop bleeding, otherwise I’d have ignored it. In the hospital the nurse gave me a look-over and asked how far along I was. Far along for what? I asked. Then I called her a bitch for thinking I was knocked up just because I was homeless.” Tess rubbed those palms together, like she was trying to grind pine tar off her skin. “Is this what you want me to tell Sadie?”

  “I want you to tell her the truth.”

  “The truth is ugly.”

  Riley dug her nails into her biceps as she began to tremble with something more than anger. She understood that there were times when a woman couldn’t keep her baby, especially a young woman with no one to lean on in the world. She understood that the adoption system was set up to take care of the innocent child. She also understood that the separation that resulted from adoption wasn’t clean, wasn’t joyous, wasn’t without repercussions, that both birth mother and adopted child bore lifelong scars that pulsed, itched, ached.