Random Acts of Kindness (23 page)

Jenna and Nicole sat so still beside her that Claire couldn’t even hear them breathing. A fish leaped out of the water and splashed back down. A birch leaf descended, twirling and sweeping, skidding to rest with its edges curled up.

“Now I realize that when Melana said, ‘We’re going to fight this,’ or ‘We’re going to beat this,’ she wasn’t just talking about surviving her own disease.” Claire remembered Melana covered in a hand-sewn quilt sitting in that big chair, her eyes too large for her face. “She knew she was second in line—but there might easily be a third. Melana meant ‘we’ as in
all
her sisters. We
all
had to find a way to survive this disease. She just happened to be the one suffering from it at the time.”

Claire sensed their silent understanding as she watched three loons descend from the sky. They cut close to the water and then skidded across the surface of the lake. Tucking in their feathers, they glided in perfect collusion to the far bank.

“Anyway, I thought you two might want to know that you didn’t shave your heads in vain.” Claire handed Lucky over to Jenna as the first tones of the dinner bell rang. “I’m not giving up this time. What the Petrenko sisters need is a survivor.”

L
eaving Pine Lake was harder than Jenna expected.

Just yesterday, she’d glanced in the rearview mirror as she pulled out of Camp Kwenback and watched her friends waving good-bye on the porch. Her trunk had rattled as her single suitcase jostled against the plastic crate of mementos. The car had felt silent, hollow, as she tried to focus on the road ahead. Lucky had felt the loss, too, lifting his head from his puppy bed in the passenger seat, rattling his license tags as he pleaded with her with bulging brown eyes.

Now, a day later, she took the highway west through New York State. Claire’s and Nicole’s absence in the car was like a pulled tooth, an ache in a space she kept probing. Her daughter had made no effort to fill the void. Zoe sat slumped in the passenger seat, tapping her feet against the glove compartment to the tinny beat buzzing from the buds buried in her ears.

Jenna had been getting this silent treatment since she’d showed up at Camp Paskagamak as bald as any of the fathers. Zoe had convulsed with embarrassment and hurried them both away as if her mother’s shorn head was a personal affront. During the afternoon and evening at her mother’s house, no amount of calm explanation could shift Zoe’s sense that Jenna’s choice had been a selfish bid for attention. And Jenna’s mother, aghast, didn’t help matters by suggesing that Jenna start therapy again. Their combined reactions had irritated Jenna to the point of dismissal.

She figured that was a step better than feeling guilty.

Now she ran her fingers over the peach fuzz on her head, still flashing hot and cold with the boldness of what she’d done. It was unfortunate that this act had put yet another wall between her and her daughter. With Zoe silent and Nicole and Claire ever farther away, Jenna felt very much alone.

The next day as they pulled out of Chicago, Jenna remembered something Nicole had suggested to her during long discussions on the Kwenback porch. Figuring she had nothing to lose, Jenna rifled in the papers between them and then tossed a ragged, coffee-stained map of the United States into her daughter’s lap. Zoe startled and caught it. Seeing what it was, she gave her mother one of those world-weary looks.

Reluctantly, Zoe tugged the buds out of her ears. “You know I failed map-reading, right?”

“I’m driving. It’s your job to navigate.”

“I managed to get six Fox Cubs lost in a wood full of marked paths, and now you’re putting this on me?”

“It’s not rocket science. Besides, we’ve got two hundred miles before we have to make a decision.”

Zoe huffed out all the annoyances of the world, but at least she opened the map. For a brief, glorious few months in third grade, Zoe had been obsessed with a project that involved collecting postcards from as many states as possible. She and Nate had elicited the help of family all over the country. They’d bought a map so Zoe could see where the postcards came from. The little girl who gleefully put pins in the map hadn’t completely suffocated under the thickness of eyeliner, apparently. As the miles flew by, her daughter became increasingly absorbed.

“Both northern routes bring us close to Yellowstone and Little Bighorn,” Zoe finally announced, furiously thumb-t
ypin
g on Jenna’s smartphone. “What route did you take to get here? I remember a postcard from Sioux Falls.”

“We were on Interstate 90 through just about the whole of South Dakota, but then we went south to Kansas.”

“Kansas?” Zoe traced a finger over the map. “Are you kidding me?”

“We were searching for an old friend. All we found was her burned-out house.” Jenna dropped that little breadcrumb then moved right on. “In any case, I flew back to Seattle out of Des Moines. I didn’t meet up with Nic and Claire again until I flew into Chicago for a Cubs game.”

“I thought you hated baseball.”

“I just say that to piss off your grandmother.”

Jenna didn’t know what caught Zoe’s attention more, the mild profanity or the statement itself. In any case, Jenna made a point of ignoring Zoe’s surprise. “So just pick whatever route you prefer, Zoe. It’ll be new to me, too.”

Zoe returned her attention to the map, but Jenna noticed that now and again she glanced out the passenger-side window to watch the traffic passing by on the interstate before returning to her task.

Later, sucking on a straw as they sat at a laminate table at yet another fast-food rest stop, Zoe said, “I think we should take Interstate 94. It’s the northernmost route, and it takes us past Teddy Roosevelt National Park. There’s also Powwow in North Dakota in a couple of days, and that would rock.”

“Sounds like a plan.”

“I suppose it’s not every day you get a chance to see Bismarck, North Dakota.” Zoe took the burger in her hands and examined it, her voice casual. “So, what ever happened to that woman you and your friends were looking for in Kansas?”

Jenna took her time unwrapping her grilled chicken sandwich. She felt an unfurling in her chest like the damp wings of a newly hatched bird.

“You mean Theresa.” Jenna took a healthy bite and waited until she’d chewed it down good. “Now there’s a girl who had a lot of reasons to piss off her mother…”

The long stretch of the northern prairie, with its unrelenting fields of alfalfa, prodded Zoe to ask the first hard question. Just as Nicole had predicted, there was no more warning than the sight of Zoe pulling a bud out of her ear.

“I suppose,” Zoe said, “that there’s no chance that you and Dad will get back together?”

The question yanked Jenna out of the zone she’d been drifting in. She turned the volume down on the radio, set on a country station that reminded her of Nicole. Her heart heard the ribbon of hope in Zoe’s voice despite the effort her daughter made to sound nonchalant. Zoe wasn’t going to like her answer, but somehow it was a small comfort to know that Zoe could still dream of miracles.

“I’m afraid not, Zoe.” What had Nate been thinking when he got Sissy pregnant? Had he been thinking at all? “There’s a baby in the picture now. Your father takes his responsibilities seriously.”

“Some of them, anyway.”

That was the end of the conversation. Zoe popped her earbuds back in as the alfalfa gave way to a field of heavy-headed sunflowers.

Later that evening, as they settled down in a nondescript motel in Bismarck, Zoe spoke into the dark. “I hope the baby is a boy.”

Jenna rolled over and peered at the lump in the other bed. “You don’t want a little sister?”

“Dad already has a daughter.”

A sharp little burn in the center of her chest. It had never occurred to her that Zoe would fear being replaced. Jenna supposed it should have. Zoe was the only child, the princess of the house. How could she convince Zoe that she wasn’t going to be loved any less for the new sibling that came into her life?

“There is going to be a lot of excitement when the baby is born.” Jenna hoped Zoe wouldn’t be there to witness it. “But your father is never going to love you less.”

“If there wasn’t a baby, would you have forgiven Dad for cheating on you?”

Jenna lay back against the pillow to better absorb the next blow to her solar plexus. Would she have forgiven Nate if he’d come clean before the pregnancy? Would she have forgiven Nate for having slept with a neighbor? Would she have forgiven Nate for putting her daughter in a position of hiding a secret from her own mother?

Yes.

God help her, she would have tried.

Jenna heard a rustle as Zoe turned her head on the pillow. She debated the wisdom of telling Zoe everything, and then knew, instinctively, that it wouldn’t be fair to drag Zoe into the muck. She also suspected that if she told Zoe the whole unvarnished truth, she’d be handing her daughter a scapegoat.

“That’s all hypothetical, Zoe. What matters now is that your father kept a terrible secret from me. Secrets tend to build walls between people. Like the wall this secret built between us.”

“Mom, just answer.”

“Don’t blame the pregnancy,” Jenna said. “That baby is an innocent in this mess. Just like you.”

A day later, hiking through the wind-sculpted sandstone of Theodore Roosevelt National Park, Jenna was sucking on her water bottle as Zoe hit her with another tough one.

“You’re going to move out of the house now, aren’t you?”

No.

She screwed the cap back onto her bottle. “I don’t know yet.”

“What do you mean you don’t know? We can’t all live in that house. Sissy and you and Daddy and me and Natalie and the new brat.”

“New
sibling
.”

She debated how much to say. Nate had asked for the house in the divorce petition. He’d argued that the garage was his place of self-employment. He argued that it would be a great hardship for him to move it or refit a new workshop. Jenna suspected that argument—along with Nate’s position as the main domestic partner—would go a long way in convincing the family judge to grant him full legal custody as well as the house.

She wouldn’t mind Nate living in the house with Zoe, but she couldn’t bear the thought of Sissy Leclaire in her marital bed.

Jenna reached out to touch Zoe’s hair, slowly fading to its natural caramel color. “I won’t move far, I promise,” she said, drawing her hand back as Zoe ducked out of reach. “Like it or not, you’re stuck with me.”

The hardest question came a day and a half later, standing amid a crowd of tourists in Yellowstone Park. They’d spent the morning hiking to the observation point for a view of the Grand Basin. Zoe’s ponytail bounced as she took the trail by leaps and bounds. They’d passed by evidence of a large quadruped. That had Zoe chatting about the disgusting job of having to identify animal scat as part of the Master Rangers badge. That led to a debate on Mrs. Garfunkle’s tutorial about how to be safe from bears. Soon they were whistling and stomping about until they laughed so hard they couldn’t whistle anymore.

But now, waiting for Old Faithful to erupt, Zoe went silent where they stood on the edge of the crowd.

Zoe said, “Why did he ruin everything?” She kept her gaze fixed on the hole in the ground, granting her mother no more than a three-quarter profile.

Jenna thought how ironic it was that Zoe had been spending this whole cross-country trip staring out the car window asking the exact same question that Jenna had spent the whole journey trying to answer herself.

She knew she hadn’t been the perfect wife. She didn’t bake cookies, or cook dinner, or go to all the soccer games. After twelve-hour days she rarely mustered the energy to cuddle up to him when they were finally together in bed. It was likely she’d rarely told him how much she admired his sculptural artistry, how much she appreciated coming home to a house that smelled of bay leaves and thyme, to a dinner warm on the table, to Zoe done with her homework and bathed and ready for a story.

But she’d come to believe that these were the slicing knife points of her own insecurities. These were the faults she’d magnified in her own mind. When she stepped out of herself and looked at them objectively, they bore little relevance to reality. She made omelets most Sunday mornings. She went to every weekend soccer game. She even bought lingerie once in a while, swinging it merrily home in little pink store bags.

She’d spent a lifetime caught in the thrall of insecurities. She couldn’t allow them to rule her anymore.

Her daughter’s smooth brow grew furrowed as if she were confused at her mother’s stretching silence.

Jenna could tell Zoe that this was the oldest, saddest story in the book. The bored housewife takes up with the milkman. The boss sleeps with his secretary. Somehow, Nate had put himself into a situation where he spent too much time with a free spirit who decorated her house with the branches of pussy willows because she knew they’d burst into fluff on Easter. Jenna could tell Zoe that her father had been thinking with his limbic brain. He’d acted like a thirsty man who reached for the nearest beer.

What was it that Claire once said? It was okay for a Buddhist to tell a little white lie, as long as it was done for the greater good. Well, Zoe was thirteen years old. She was just starting to feel the tidal pools of emotional attraction. The last thing Jenna wanted was to see her daughter poisoned with cynicism. Love came only with trust and faith and hope. This situation mustn’t destroy Zoe’s sense of goodness in the world.

So Jenna drew her hoodie closed and fixed her gaze on the stretch of pines beyond the geyser. “Honestly, I’ve been asking myself that same question, Zoe, over and over and over, for close on to five thousand miles. Maybe someday I’ll realize I played a part in what happened.”

“He’s ruined
everything
.”

“Not everything.”

Zoe peered into her mother’s face as if she were trying to gauge the weather. “You’re forgiving him.”

Jenna’s jaw muscles tightened. She certainly hadn’t reached a state of forgiveness, but she was willing to take a step on the road to trying.

Then Jenna did what she’d wanted to do since she followed Zoe to the observation point for the Grand Basin. She reached out and threaded her fingers through the hank of choppy hair that obscured her daughter’s face, surprised when Zoe didn’t jerk away. Jenna didn’t want Zoe to hide behind all this hair anymore. So she pushed it back, back, so she could better see those beautiful, hurt eyes.

“No matter what happens,” Jenna said, “I’ll forever be grateful to your father that he gave me
you
.”

Zoe’s nervous chattering about the first day of the school year sputtered to a stop just outside Spokane. The kid who’d sprawled in the passenger seat cradling Lucky in her lap, crunching on SunChips, and pointing out the rainbows in the fog-shrouded foothills of the northern Rockies popped her buds back in her ears once she realized they’d be in Seattle before nightfall.

Caffeine was the only thing keeping Jenna alert at the wheel. The last stretch since Yellowstone had passed in a two-day blur of quick rest stops and the scent of exhaust and burning rubber. She’d promised Zoe she’d get her back home before the first day of school, which was tomorrow. The next two hundred and thirty miles loomed before her, miles and miles to go.