Random Acts of Kindness (6 page)

He couldn’t meet her eyes.

When they’d first met, fifteen years ago, it had taken her nearly two weeks before she could muster the courage to look directly at his face. It had been beyond her comprehension why any man so attractively disheveled and so very
normal
would take an interest in shy, crippled little Jenna Hogan. But those days he was hanging artwork in her building lobby, he specifically looked for her. He greeted her by name, once he had teased it out of her. He complimented her on her hair. He grinned when she blushed. He’d asked her for coffee, and when she’d stuttered excuses, he just asked again the next day, promising he’d keep asking so she may as well just say yes and get it over with.

Later, after she’d tumbled in love with the man, they scraped together enough money to take a trip to Massachusetts to visit the artist colony in Cape Ann. They wandered among the galleries. They spent hours sitting on the rocks listening to the cold surf sucking and swirling in the caverns beneath, all while picnicking on whole-grain bread and artisanal cheese and cheap wine. He was a quiet man, fathoms deep, who liked to run his hands over the surface of things: rocks, weathered driftwood, her naked back.

You’re an oasis, Jenna. When I’m with you, I can think.

Her purse suddenly rattled.

Nicole stared at Jenna’s handbag vibrating on the table. “That’s him again, isn’t it?”

“At four thirty p.m. Pacific Time today, I was supposed to meet Nate in his lawyer’s office to discuss custody issues.”

Nicole raised one eyebrow. “One week after he served the petition?”

“I have thirty days to respond. Nate’s hoping to move things along.”

Let’s not drag this out.

After he’d left the house that terrible Saturday morning, she’d sat at the kitchen table with the papers in front of her. She might have sat for an hour, maybe more. She didn’t count the ticks of the clock over the kitchen sink—the clock he’d installed in a crosscut of white pine not long after they’d bought the place. She’d sat trying to process what had just happened. She remembered that she didn’t feel quite
right
. The walls of the room bowed and shifted as if she were in a Salvador Dalí painting. Her head was a helium balloon, and the string was slipping. At one point, she’d shuddered in the seat and glanced down, only to realize that she’d lost control of her own bladder.

Nicole’s voice, unexpectedly reedy. “Oh, no, no, Jenna. Don’t tell me he’s asking for full legal custody of Zoe?”

Jenna pressed her thighs together and felt the same dropping queasiness as when Nate had spoken those same words aloud.

“He’s the primary caregiver, isn’t he?” Nicole spoke to herself, as if she were just beginning to grasp the rapid tumbling of the consequences. “It’s the same as if a full-time mother requested legal custody of the children in a divorce. Only here, the genders have been reversed.”

Jenna’s purse rattled on the table again.  She waited for Nicole to insist that she answer it. Like every other therapist she’d ever spoken to, Nicole would certainly implore Jenna to face what she feared instead of collapsing back into her shell. That was what all the therapists always told her, and always in a tone of voice that suggested this should be the easiest task in the whole wide world.

Instead, she raced ahead of her fear.

She stood up so fast she felt the blood rush from her head. She reached in her purse and pulled out the phone. She rounded the sofa and strode toward the window. She pushed aside the billowing sheers and glanced at the photo lighting up her screen. It was a picture of Nate in the garage workroom. Black grease streaked his forehead just above the strap of his face shield. The pulled cotton collar of his work T-shirt revealed the sawdust-flecked hollow of his clavicle.

After Nate had left her alone last Saturday, she had scrolled desperately through the contact list of this phone, pausing once on her mother’s name, considered the conversation that would arise when she told her mother about the divorce, and then continued swiping. The names flew by—the clients she called for algorithm updates, the work colleagues she could occasionally be dragged to lunch with, the carpool moms she exchanged brief, to-the-point changes-in-plans with, the cable company, the newspaper subscription number, the electric company, Zoe’s soccer coach, and yes, even Sissy Leclaire—all the while searching for someone she could talk to. Someone to take her and shake her and tell her it would be all right. A three a.m. friend, an I’ll-bring-the-wine friend, a
true
friend.

“Turn it off, Jenna.”

Jenna started. Nicole stood so close that Jenna could see the little starbursts of gold edging Nicole’s pupils.

“You’ve been hit by a sledgehammer,” Nicole said. “You’re still seeing stars.”

The phone vibrated in her hand.

“You’ll have to face him eventually.” The breeze from the window blew up the fringe of Nicole’s hair. “But he has absolutely no right to choose the schedule. That’s something
you
get to do.”

Claire moved behind Nicole, closing in, nodding in agreement.

Then, in one quick motion, Nicole pushed a lock of Jenna’s hair behind her ear. Nicole did it so fast that Jenna wasn’t sure if it had really happened or if she were only imagining the fading pressure of her touch.

“So go ahead and shut off that phone.” Nicole nodded in encouragement. “You were right to run away.”

Lucky made a high whining noise and leaned his weight against her ankle. Jenna glanced at Lucky, then glanced at the phone one more time, taking a deep breath of the Chinook wind as she absorbed the sight of Nate’s face.

She shifted her grip. “You’re right. I’m going to need a lot more than thirty days.”

Then she leaned back and hurled the phone out the open window, watching it spin in an arc that cleared the near sidewalk and reached the yellow midline of the street, where it bounced once, twice, the pieces scattering just as a pickup truck zoomed by and crushed it under its wheels.

Nicole gave her a nod. “Nice curve.”

Rapid City, South Dakota

C
laire flexed her bare toes on the glove compartment while the fan flirted with the hem of her skirt. Outside the car window, the grasslands of the high plains waved like the glossy fur of some wild animal. She cracked the window and let the hot wind tug her hair, experiencing the same light-headed elation that she’d once felt motoring through the Thai landscape, past dry paddies of golden rice, into towns with stucco houses dripping with bougainvillea.

Claire scooped up another handful of cheddar cheese popcorn and closed her eyes in mindful gratitude. After their dispute in Cheyenne about visiting Sydney, Claire had doubted her ability to convince Nicole to take a detour all the way to South Dakota. But this morning, after feeding bison at a ranch ten miles outside Cheyenne, Nicole had agreed—abruptly and with no explanation—to veer 250 miles off her mapped route.

In Claire’s mind, her friend’s Karmic change of heart proved the old wisdom that every good journey was a creature of its own making, a bronco that would buck against all efforts to rein it in.

“Hey, navigator.” Nicole nudged Claire with her knee. “There’s a turn coming up, and I suspect my GPS isn’t programmed to find archaeological digs. Do you have Maya’s directions?”

Claire leaned over and dug under an empty bag of jalapeño chips and two discarded water bottles. She pulled up a few slips of hotel stationery and feathered through them. “Here they are. You need to find the sign for the—”

“—the Fort Pierre National Grassland. We just passed it.” Nicole turned the fan down to lessen the white noise in the car. “Read ahead to the part about the turnoff to River Runt Dam.”

Claire guided Nicole over ever-narrowing roads while the tires kicked up gypsum to ping against the undercarriage. Around a bend in an area of shrubby and stunted hillsides, she caught sight of a collection of canvas tents. Among the tents stood a large canopy with the side walls tied back, open to the elements.

“Unless that’s some sort of revival meeting,” Claire said, “I think we’ve found Maya’s dig.”

Nicole pulled the car to a stop by a cluster of mud-splattered pickup trucks, a dented Volvo, and a food truck belching blue-gray smoke. Claire glanced out through the haze of the upper windshield and caught sight of a shadow wheeling in the sky. “Jenna, you might want to be careful with Lucky out here. From on high, he’ll look like a really tasty groundhog.”

Claire stretched out of the car. She switched out the cheesy pink cowboy hat she’d bought in Cheyenne for another she’d purchased at a rest stop just over the South Dakota border. This one was a wide-brimmed Stetson made out of felted bison fur that cost her about a month’s worth of egg money. For a good twenty minutes, she’d debated whether she should buy it, petting the soft brim, mentally calculating. Cancer patients whose stats ran low for five-year-survival rates didn’t have much use for 401(k)s, but still, the old penny-pinching habits died hard.

Jenna clutched Lucky close as she fell into step beside Claire. “Okay, can I admit that Maya always made me nervous?”

Claire gave her a look. “Hon, everyone makes—”

“Yeah, I know, I know, but Maya’s different. Once, in biology class, she brought in the boiled bones of a raccoon.”

“I got one better. In Global Studies, she used to tell stories about her mom in Peru digging up mummified children.”

Jenna gave a shudder that Lucky echoed. “I never knew if Maya was going to grow up to be a Nobel laureate or a serial killer.”

Claire scanned the half-dozen people kneeling in the dirt under the canopy. One khaki hat popped up as the three of them stepped into the shade. Maya Wheeler, who’d appeared twice in the glossy pages of
National Geographic
for her ongoing work on the Zapotec cultures of ancient Mesoamerica. Fluent in a half-dozen languages, she bore a bullet scar on her leg from a tussle with drug dealers in the jungles of Guatemala. The archaeologist unfolded herself from the ground and made her way around the roped-off area. She walked in the easy, loping gait of a woman who knew people were watching. Her slim, black tank top slipped up to show a wink of navel.

“Damn,” Maya said as she approached. “Look what the prairie breeze blew in.”

Claire stepped into Maya’s open arms, knocking her friend’s hat off her head with the brim of her own. Maya smelled of musk and earth and rain and sweat and something spicy, like cardamom or star anise. Tracking this friend’s world-skipping adventures had become something of an embarrassing hobby of hers. Back in Pine Lake, Maya had been a college brat, the daughter of an anthropology professor at Saint Regis College, a few miles outside of town. Maya had missed whole months of high school following in her own mother’s footsteps. Jenna may have questioned Maya’s path, but in Claire’s opinion, this particular Pine Lake friend was the only person she knew who never doubted her life’s purpose.

Claire pulled back to get a better look at her, from the scar cutting across Maya’s chin to the silver studs winking along the arc of her right ear. “Do you have a portrait aging in an attic somewhere?”

“What’s an attic? I’m still renting an apartment.” Maya hugged Jenna then turned to Nicole and paused. “Did somebody die?”

Nicole gave her a quizzical look.

“I’d never imagined you’d cut off that long, gorgeous hair.” Maya shrugged. “And chopping off hair is a universal sign of mourning.”

“It’s not universal in San Mateo.”

“C’mon, Nic, you remember CCD. Jeremiah 7:29:
‘Cut off your hair and cast it away; raise a lamentation on the bare heights…’
No?” Maya’s brows rose high. “And I always thought you were the
good
Catholic of the crowd.”

Nicole ran her fingers up her nape. “I did it about eighteen months ago. On a whim.”

“Well, it suits you, anyway.” The suntanned creases by Maya’s eyes deepened. “Gawd, it’s
so
good to see you guys. You have no idea how exciting it is to get nonacademic visitors when you’re living in the back of the beyond. Did you ladies come ready to camp?”

Nicole grimaced as she hefted the tent pack. “My pup tent was meant for my three kids, so we three are going to be cozy. We’d better pray for no rain.”

“I’ve already danced to my Mohawk ancestors for good weather.” Maya linked her arm through Claire’s and tugged her deeper into the shade. “Come on, let me show you the glamorous life of an archaeologist.”

Maya led them to the edge of a grid. Spikes jutted from the ground in geometric precision. Strings stretched between them, demarcating the large area that was being unearthed. Within, a dozen people kneeled, gently scraping away at the damp soil with small tools. Maya launched into her explanation, pointing to some depressions in the ground as evidence of a dry moat fortification—suggesting that, a thousand years ago, this had been a Mandan or an Arikara Indian village of some sort.

“So,” Jenna piped in, “have you found any bodies yet?”

“No.” Maya pulled a face. “We’re hoping when we dig deeper we’ll find a jawbone or at least some teeth.” She tilted her head at the food truck. “Are you guys hungry? I wouldn’t trust the burgers but the chicken fingers rock. If we’re going to eat, we have to get food now because Pedro leaves at six sharp.”

Claire murmured assent for all of them. Maya turned to one of the college kids and directed him to set up Nicole’s tent near her own. By the time they all purchased food, that minion had assembled the pup tent and started a small campfire carefully banked by stones. Half of the volunteers piled into a pickup truck and waved their farewells, while the other half—mostly college students from what Claire could discern—tucked into dinner around their own tents a bit farther away.

As they ate and chatted, the enormous western sky put on a show of colors, fading from blue to mauve and indigo, the sunset lighting up the scudding clouds in shades of rose. Claire chewed on a juicy chicken finger and dropped her head back against the bar of the lawn chair. She drank in the wide-open sky, so overwhelming for a woman used to only a sliver of blue glimpsed through trees in Oregon. She felt the same giddiness she’d known the first time she glimpsed a
wat
and heard birds singing in bamboo cages and geckos clicking across the roof, while clusters of the saffron-clad monks engaged in peaceful walking meditation.

She decided she would wake early tomorrow morning and sit atop the shrubby little knoll just beyond the tents. She’d listen to the rustle of wind through the grass and try to meditate. Maybe in this vast place, the space behind her eyes would go dark and her breathing would grow shallow. Maybe here the whole world would fall away into the stillness that still evaded her, the place of stopped time that, before she’d quit the Thai temple, she’d been assured would leave her feeling sated, loose, happy.

“Some Buddhist you are,” Maya gestured to Claire’s chicken fingers with a chicken finger of her own. “Aren’t you supposed to live on rice and flower petals?”

Nicole snorted. “You should see her dig into the Slim Jims.”

Claire raised a chicken finger to the sky like a sacrifice. “Now you know why I abandoned the temple life.”

“Well, I wish I could have fed you better.” Maya swung one leg over the arm of her director’s chair. “But honestly, Pedro’s food truck is Nirvana compared to last summer in Belize. We were fishing for our dinner until a boy in the nearest village started walking three miles each way just to sell us tortillas and beans.” She leaned back to rifle through a bag by her chair. “Fortunately, I did bring libations.”

Claire grinned as Maya pulled out a bottle. For one shimmering moment of heightened consciousness, she was transported
back there
. Back on the fallen log by the fire pit on Coley’s Point, listening to the pine logs snap and hurl sparks toward the darkness of the sheltering boughs. Sitting with warm mittens on her hands and warm bodies on either side, excitement thrummed through her body as someone thrust a bottle in her hand while Jenna leaned over and whispered a secret into her ear. She could almost taste the minty flavor of schnapps on the back of her tongue.

“Holy junior year,” Claire laughed. “Just tell me it isn’t cheap applejack.”

“Only the purest Slovakian vodka, my friend. I’ve been hiding it for weeks from the undergraduates. I’m doubly glad you’re here, because it would have been really pathetic if I had to drink it alone.”

“No repeat of prom night.” Claire had hoped for oblivion that night, and she had gotten it in spades.

Maya said, “I’m sure you’ve all learned to drink in moderation since our misspent youth.”

“Not me.” Jenna fed crumbled little bits of hamburger to Lucky on her lap. “I never drink.”

“You of all people should take a nip now and then,” Maya exhorted. “Vodka makes extroverts of all of us. Now”—Maya cracked open the cap—“there’s a game I play whenever I come to a new dig with a brand-new crew. It’s an icebreaker. The four of us haven’t really spoken for too many years, so I propose we give this a go.”

Claire said, “The last time you proposed a game, Maya, Theresa Hendrick nearly set the school on fire.”

“That was Truth or Dare.” Maya shrugged. “And Tess was just starting to go off the rails. This game is more cerebral. More spiritual. So I’ll take the first swig and ask a question, and then the person of my choice will have to answer it.”

Claire noted that Maya didn’t wait for debate. She raised the bottle and took an impressive gulp.

“Okay.” Maya coughed, her voice rough. “My first question to all of you is: why are you here?”

Maya thrust the bottle at Nicole. Nicole, looking baffled, seized it. “Why am I here?”

“There’s nothing wrong with your hearing,” said Maya.

“Clearly,” Nicole said, starting to stand, “you meant to start with the Buddhist.”

“She’s on the other side of the fire.” Maya touched Nicole’s arm to keep her in her chair. “I’m asking
you
.”

Claire’s heart skipped a little as Maya’s grin went sly. That look reminded Claire of an evening on Coley’s Point when Maya, limned by fire, looked Claire straight in the eye and asked her what she planned to do with the rest of her life. Maya had been fixed, intense, questioning. The next day Claire found herself starting projects she’d never before considered. Both Maya and Nicole had that effect on people. So Claire settled herself more comfortably in the rickety chair in order to watch the clash of the titans.

“Do you want something existential,” Nicole asked, “or another Bible quote?”

“No need to please me.” Maya curled into her chair. “Just answer it honestly, any way you’d like.”

“I’m here to make sure these two sheep”—a careless flip of her hand toward her and Jenna—“don’t get eaten by wolves before they reach Pine Lake.”

Maya cocked her head to the other side. “That’s kind of a literal response. You’re not doing this at all for yourself?”

“Well, it’s a vacation.” Nicole took a sip of the vodka and wiped her mouth on her sleeve. “I haven’t had a vacation in nearly two years.”

“So you’re not on some soul search.” Maya rolled her hand toward the grasslands beyond the circle of firelight. “You’re not seeking some essential truth in American life?”

“Wow,” Nicole sputtered. “How long have you been living in academia?”

“Only a couple of months a year. Aren’t you a therapist, Nic?”

Nicole paused a beat. “I started a business as a life coach.”

“How is that different?”

“Therapists have about as many letters after their name as you do. They’re licensed. They can deal with clinical situations. For example, my fifteen-year-old son won’t talk to me no matter how hard I try to coach him, so he is seeing a therapist.”

Claire felt that little bit of news hang in the air for a moment, like a spark amid a cloud of smoke.

“My daughter won’t talk to me, either,” Jenna said abruptly. “Maybe I should have her see a therapist.”

Claire glanced at Jenna in surprise. Her friend usually stayed quiet in groups, preferring to whisper personal details rather than state them in an open forum, notwithstanding yesterday’s extended confession in Cheyenne.