Senseless Acts of Beauty

by Lisa Verge Higgins

  “The truth,” Riley said, “is that Sadie’s a miracle. Women have choices. So my existence, and Sadie’s, too, they’re both miracles.”

  Tess didn’t say anything, hiding behind her bangs.

  “You’ve been watching her.” Riley stepped closer, the dry pine needles crackling under her feet. “You’ve spent some time with her. You know what a smart, level-headed, even-keeled young woman she is. Your daughter, Tess. Your flesh and blood.”

  “That had nothing to do with me. She’s made that way because of the family I placed her with.”

  “Then let’s talk about that family you placed her with. Their deaths, the way she was bounced around to her aunt and uncle and then her nana’s house, and then having to take care of her grandmother—”

  “Take care of her grandmother?”

  Riley saw the surprise in her eyes. So Tess didn’t know everything. “Her nana has dementia. Sadie has been taking care of the older woman for years.”

  “Dementia?”

  “Sadie would still be there, in that house, if her nana hadn’t gone wandering. She wandered straight into the hands of the authorities, and Sadie’s cover was blown.”

  Tess bent over and put her hands on her knees. She seemed to be having some trouble breathing. The sight gave Riley hope that she was finally breaking through Tess’s tough-girl shell.

  “The family you put Sadie with is dead,” Riley repeated. “Her nana is in a home of some sort. You’re her only family now, the only one—”

  “They were vetted.” Tess’s voice was harsh. “I chose them from a dozen families.”

  “That’s in the past. Now you can make this right.”

  “Nothing can make this right.”

  Riley closed her eyes and willed patience. Why else was Tess here, if not to make things right?

  The answer came to her like a bolt of lightning. “You think she’ll reject you.”

  “She’s smart, so I know she will.”

  “You’re afraid she’ll reject you.”

  Afraid like Riley herself had been afraid, when she wrote the first letter to her own birth mother. Anxious like Riley had been when she picked up a pen to compose the second. Black spots in front of her eyes, terrified, when she picked up that phone to dial her birth mother’s number.

  Riley had never considered the possibility that a birth mother, seeking first contact, could be just as fearful as an adopted child.

  “You’re such a Girl Scout, Riley.”

  Tess’s voice was full of disdain, and Riley felt a prickling of defiance toughen the tendons of her neck.

  “My father left me behind when I was twelve years old,” Tess retorted. “He left me alone with an alcoholic to take care of. That alcoholic later sold me out for a cheap bottle of vodka. You think there’s anything a fourteen-year-old can say to hurt me?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then you don’t know me very well.”

  Riley balked at that, but she didn’t deny it. Yes, they hadn’t hung out in high school. Yes, they’d only had a few weeks together in total. Summer weeks, too, outside of the strictures of school. But she’d never believed that their relationship was no more than a camp summer thing, preserved in amber. She’d always thought they’d shared something special—Camp Kwenback, Bud and Mary, a certain sensibility that Riley hadn’t found among any of her other Pine Lake girlfriends. More than once since Tess had returned, Riley had glimpsed the puckish, imaginative girl she’d played with in their youth beneath the attitude and the barbs.

  But even as Riley convinced herself she was right, the doubts came rushing in, as they always did. The queen of good judgment Riley was not. Maybe she was just fooling herself about the woman who stood before her, like she had fooled herself about so very many things. Maybe the years—and the mileage—had changed Tess so much that the softer creature Riley had once known had grown a shell of its own.

  Well, if Tess wasn’t going to take responsibility for Sadie, then Riley was determined that someone else would.

  Riley asked, “What about Sadie’s father?”

  “Sadie doesn’t have a father.”

  More denial. “Everyone has a—”

  “If Sadie’s lucky, her father is dead or rotting in prison.”

  The words struck Riley hard. She took three steps away from Tess, unnerved by the harshness of her voice.

  Riley ventured. “Do I know him?”

  “No.”

  “Did he…was he abusing you?”

  “Seriously?”

  “Then why—”

  “Why? Why what? Why did I leave Pine Lake?” Tess crossed her arms. “I left because Rodriguez wouldn’t let it go. That damn cop came to Camp Kwenback all the time, bringing all the ugly here, hounding me to get involved in the investigation, when I just wanted to put it all behind me.”

  Investigation.

  “Sadie doesn’t need to know her father,” Tess said. “Ever.”

  Tess turned away again, moving like she was caught in a box of her own making. Walls, walls, walls on all sides, she kept running into them, turning to find another. She planted her fists on her hips but they didn’t stay, they slipped off, and her spine bowed like she couldn’t bear the weight of the words.

  Riley’s heart began to pound. “Tess, Sadie is going to ask—”

  “She won’t. Because I’m not telling her who I am.” Tess jabbed a finger at Riley. “And after you hear my story, neither will you.”

  Chapter Eighteen

  Tess knew right away that her mother had brought someone home. Light poured through the windows onto the porch, and through the cracked glass of the front window—through the rag she’d stuffed there—she could hear the bluesy sounds of Nina Simone. Irritation needled her. She’d spent the evening working a rush job with a freelance contractor, unrolling insulation into an airless attic, itching as she crawled into small spaces to tuck it in between the rafters. Chaff and fluff stuck to her skin, and she was bone-deep exhausted. She needed a good night’s sleep, not the hassle of dealing with one of her mom’s drunken parties.

  The front door was ajar despite the December chill. Tess shoved it open and heard the clink of a bottle neck hitting glass. Her mother and some guy were sitting on the old couch, sharing the depression where the spring was broken. In one glance, Tess took in the bottle of no-name vodka, the dirty glasses, and the ashtray overflowing with cigarette butts.

  “Theresa!” The strap of her mother’s bra sagged on her arm. “Come in and meet my new friend.”

  Mom brought men home all the time, usually skinny, bleary-eyed, half-pickled, toothless types that Tess would find snoring on the couch the next morning. They had names like Bud and John and Mack. Her mother had already forgotten this one’s name, but when the burly stranger turned his gaze on Tess, he swallowed her up in one gulp.

  Hackles rising, Tess kicked her work boots onto the rug by the door. “The cops will be here in ten minutes if you don’t lower that music.”

  “Oh, don’t be like that, Theresa—”

  “Mrs. Skye is watching from across the street.”

  “That sour old prune?” Her mother playfully ruffled the guy’s shaggy blond hair. “I can handle her.”

  “Hey”—Tess raised her palms—“I don’t want the cops here, he doesn’t want the cops here, do you want the cops here?”

  With a sigh, her mother stretched back to tweak the music down a notch. The stranger ran his hand up her mother’s skinny chest to grab a boob while he grinned at Tess.

  Tess gave him a gimlet stare, the one she usually reserved for assholes like Rodriguez. She’d been looking forward to a shower, maybe even a nice long bath, but considering the sullen, sharp-eyed stranger drinking on her couch, that wasn’t going to happen. So she grabbed the banister and made a lot of noise going up the stairs. She washed up as best she could while her mother’s laughter rose above the music. Ever the watchdog, she waited for danger sounds—broken glass, raised voices, footsteps on the stai
rs.

  Tess hated that her mother could laugh so easily when trouble was all around her. On the kitchen table lay a pile of unpaid medical bills from when her mother had fallen on the concrete sidewalk last winter trying to make it home from a bar. Six stitches, ten months of payments, and her mother down there spending the last of her alimony on vodka.

  Tess wondered if this guy would use a condom, and then wondered why she even gave a damn.

  She slipped into her bedroom and shot the bolt. She’d been working twelve-hour days trying to prove herself to the contractor who’d chosen her over the Mexican, Ecuadoran, and Guatemalan day workers shivering behind Target, figuring, as he’d told her, that boobs didn’t matter as much having your own tool belt and speaking plain English. She figured she’d be asleep by the time her head hit the pillow.

  She woke up to the sound of shattering wood and a hand compressing her mouth and nose.

  “Tess?”

  Tess started in the moonlight. She blinked at the sight of Riley crouched beside her, her face tense and pale. Something prickled on her hands, and she lifted them up to find them sticky with pine needles. She breathed in the resinous scent, sharp in her nose, overwhelming the memory stench of cheap booze and onions and something fermenting, old beer or cabbage. She told herself she was sitting on the ground with Bud’s bears casting shadows all around her. She was here, in Camp Kwenback, safe.

  And there was Riley, staring at her, waiting for the story Tess wasn’t supposed to tell.

  Tess said, “My mother brought him home from some dive bar. He’d bought them a fifth of vodka to share.”

  Not a fucking word and this will go easy.

  Tess had kept a bat lodged between the bed and the wall—she’d put it there after their house had been robbed the prior year. While he pressed against her mouth with one hand and fumbled with his belt with the other, she stretched her arm out in an attempt to grab it. The head of the bat slipped against her fingertips and knocked against the bedpost. That got his attention. With a grunt he lifted his hand from her mouth, grabbed the bat, and threw it to the other side of the room. Then he cracked his knuckles against her skull.

  She saw stars, bright stars before her eyes, and not the glow in the dark ones she and her father had stuck on the ceiling when she was eight years old.

  Riley whispered, “Where was your mother?”

  “Passed out on the downstairs couch with her hand around the neck of a bottle.”

  Tess couldn’t move for a while after he’d hit her, blinking until she made out the cold, blue light of the streetlamp shining through her bedroom window. She could hear the clink and clatter of his studded belt as he tossed it to the floor, the whirr as he unzipped his fly. A metallic taste slid down her throat. Later she’d find out it was blood from where she’d cut the inside of her cheek. The thought kept passing through her mind—I have to stay conscious—even as he shoved her T-shirt up, mauled her breasts, then flipped her over.

  But she should have fought harder, even if her only weapon was her fingernails. She should have struggled until he’d left her bloody and half dead. She should have left scars on his face, dug her thumb into his eye and felt the jelly of it pop, instead of growing increasingly paralyzed by the thought that he might have a knife, that he might carve her into pieces, that he might kill her for kicks.

  Later, in the hospital, they told her she had a concussion, a cracked rib, two black eyes, abrasions on her wrists, and in her vagina, and a slight tear in the rectal wall.

  The sudden coolness she felt on her forearm was Riley’s hand.

  “After he took off”—Tess’s teeth ached from the memory of biting through her bonds—“I drove myself to a hospital in Albany.”

  “But you called the police first, right?”

  Her throat constricted again, and this time the tightness radiated up to her ears. During the trip to Albany, her whole body had begun to shake. She’d gulped air like there wasn’t enough of it, though it flowed freezing through her open window as she did eighty on the highway. She’d nearly driven off the road in the pink light of dawn, so she’d pulled over so fast gravel popped up and pinged beneath the chassis. She’d laid her bruised forehead against the steering wheel as shock gave way to shame gave way to fury, in a mix that threatened to smother her.

  She’d pulled out her phone, not really knowing what she was looking for. Looking for a friend, she supposed, as she scrolled through a contact list full of weed dealers and cannery potheads and contractors who’d take her on only for day work. Her fingers paused over the phone number of Camp Kwenback, hovered there as she thought of Bud and Mary, their welcoming faces, their smiles, their clean beds—and the thought of stumbling bloody into the lodge like some apocalyptic zombie, once again bringing dirty drama into their lives.

  And then, suddenly, there was Rodriguez’s name. Sometime in the past few years, maybe after a perp walk in plastic cuffs when he caught less than an ounce of weed on her or when he’d confiscated her phone during a raid on the Cannery, he’d added his number into her contact list, along with a note.

  Someday, Hendrick, you’re going to need this.

  “I called Rodriguez,” Tess confessed. “He came to the hospital.”

  She’d been wearing nothing but a hospital gown and the nurses had just finished violating her with the rape kit. She heard Rodriguez’s voice outside the curtains. When he came in, she couldn’t look into his face. He’d given her crap for so many years, warned her of what became of wayward juvies. She hadn’t wanted to see the grim, self-satisfied I-told-you-so.

  He pulled over a stool. He flipped open his notebook and started asking questions in a low, gruff voice that she couldn’t read. She looked at him from under her lashes for some hint of accusation, or weary sarcasm, or the pity she dreaded most of all. He fixed his gaze on his pen as he wrote, so all she saw was the spot on the back of his head where his dark hair whorled. He forced her to corral her swirling thoughts, to think linearly, to remember details. Think hard. This is important. She remembered the crescent scar next to her rapist’s eye, the chain-link tattoo around his neck, the split in the lobe of his left ear. Rodriguez read over everything, cold as a fish, like he was writing a speeding ticket. His coolness unnerved her and then made her furious. She taunted him with details, told him to write that down. He told her he’d only write that down if she wanted him to. He told her there’d be someone coming around soon for her to talk to.

  She’d tensed when he stood up. The skin was tight around his eyes, but looking at those eyes was like falling into a pit. She told him to go fuck himself, because if he had reached for her or said a single kind word, they would have had to put her in a padded cell.

  “If Officer Rodriguez knew,” Riley murmured, “that means every cop in town must have known. Rodriguez was a junior officer back then.”

  Tess pressed a thumb against the upper inside corner of her eye socket, where the usual stabbing migraine had begun. “I don’t know how he did it, but he kept it quiet. He promised me he’d distribute the report on a need-to-know basis.”

  “My grandparents never said a thing. Not a word, not a whisper, nothing.”

  Riley began to rock, pushing herself with her toes, burying her head on her knees. Tess wondered if she’d said too much, wondered if, when Riley raised her head, Tess would see the horror of the whole story reflected back at her.

  Tess never wanted to see that horror in Sadie’s eyes.

  Riley asked, “Did Officer Rodriguez ever find him?”

  Tess shook her head.

  “But he’s still looking, right?”

  “The statute of limitations for rape has run out in this state.”

  “But there must have been security cameras at the bar—”

  “The bastard probably slipped over the border before I was released from the hospital,” she said. “Rodriguez made me talk to a sketch guy, kept coming back to talk to me, but the bastard just disappeared into the world.”


  “It’s all making sense now. You leaving Pine Lake so abruptly, your mother going off the rails.” Riley sucked in a quick breath. “Your mother must have blamed herself. She must have been devastated.”

  An ugly laugh lurched out of her. In the weeks after the rape, as she slept long nights and longer days in the cabin, letting Mary feed her blueberry pancakes, sitting next to Bud, smelling his pipe as he rocked by the fireplace, she had bathed in their warmth and ignored the rest of the world. Tess had assumed that her mother was helping with the investigation. Even on her worst benders, when her mother accused her of stealing her vodka, her money, her food stamps, her boyfriends, when her mother called her a fucking spoiled princess, a greedy Daddy’s girl, or a lying whore, Tess had learned to let the words roll off her back. That was the bottle speaking, the devil on her mother’s back. Like every other time, the liquor would wear off and Tess would find her mother weeping at the kitchen table, begging for forgiveness.

  Tess said, “Do you know what my mother said when Rodriguez returned to the house to get an official statement? She told Rodriguez that I’d made the whole thing up.” Tess ran her fingers through her bangs, not caring about the pine needles sticking to her palm. “She claimed I was trying to steal the house from under her by sending her to rehab. I believe her exact words were that I was a lying, greedy bitch.”

  “But…but you were beaten. Your bedroom door must have been broken into pieces.”

  “Never get between an addict and her booze.”

  Her mother didn’t visit her at Camp Kwenback. Her mother didn’t recant her statement. And as the weeks went by, Tess refused to go to follow-up appointments, medical or otherwise. I’m fine. Really, I’m fine. She stopped talking to Rodriguez. She felt as if she were burrowing into a very dark place, until the difference between the brightness of Camp Kwenback and the darkness of her mind became too much. That’s when she left Bud and Mary. She told them she was going to her father’s house in Minnesota, when really she was just going.