Random Acts of Kindness (9 page)

She stuttered, “F-Fault?”

“The fact that he’s cheating on you. With a woman who lives in your own neighborhood.”

“The mother of Zoe’s best friend.”

“Oh, God.”

Sissy Leclaire, who still sported the long, straight, part-in-the-middle hair of a girl of eighteen. She had a honking laugh and wore vintage clothes of patterns that didn’t match, beads hanging from her neck, a compass tattoo on the back of her hand. Sissy Leclaire, an unmarried mother who’d bought the house with an inheritance from an aunt. She cobbled a living working as a doula, or bartending private events, or throwing parties selling candles. In the autumn, she made fantastical forest creatures out of acorns, sticks, and a bit of moss and glue. Miniature whimsical sculptures.

How long did Nate resist?

“As horrible as it is, Jen, that’s your key to custody.” Nicole had tumbled into a heap in the corner of the seat, rubbing her brow with one hand. “I have to believe that if you stand in front of a judge and state that Nate committed adultery with the mother of his daughter’s best friend, the judge will raise questions about whether he’s an appropriate role model to be the full legal custodian of a teenage girl.”

“But Nate’s an amazing father.”

A vision of him bathed in multicolored lights from the Christmas tree, twirling Zoe in a dizzy dance, sweeping her in his arms before she could fall.

“Nate,” Nicole pointed out, “is trying to keep Zoe away from you. Why do you think that is?”

“Zoe hates me. We’ve done nothing but fight for the past year.”

“Is there a reason why?”

“Other than she’s thirteen years old, rules her seventh-grade world, and thinks her socially awkward mother is an idiot?” Jenna’s chest rose, defying the unspoken question. “Why else would she hate me?”

“Neglect.” Nicole shifted. “Abuse.”

Jenna glared at her. “I’m a breadwinner but not a beast. Just because I’ve given over the main child-rearing responsibilities doesn’t mean I’ve neglected her any more than any other traditional household. Nate knows this, too.”

“I’m not so sure you know what’s going on in Nate’s head.
This
is why you need a lawyer.”

“I don’t want a lawyer.”

“If you don’t get one, he’ll steal everything you’ve worked for your whole life, including—”

“I don’t want a divorce.”

She gripped the steering wheel. Her blood swelled inside her ears, tightened her throat, rushed to her scalp and to the very tips of her toes. Nate’s face flashed in her mind, the smile he gave her as he lifted his head from his work, the way his left canine was twisted a bit, the dimple deepening into shadow. The way he cradled her hand in his at the office parties she’d dragged him to, the way he ignored her dismissive bosses, pumped the flames of the other women’s curiosity as he called himself a “ho” man and pulled her onto the dance floor, seducing her in front of the entire office. She still heard him, teasing her, tugging a piece of hair free of a clip right before he sauntered across the driveway to the garage to work. She let that piece hang all through the day as a promise.

The memories wobbling, wobbling.

“I should hate him, I know.”

“Pull over, Jenna.”

“I should hate that he betrayed me.”

“You’re veering onto the shoulder—slow
down
.”

Then the world really was wobbling as the car vibrated over the shoulder strip.

“It’s crazy,” she breathed, lifting her foot from the gas. “But I’m still in love with him.”

Kansas

W
ell, this is not what I expected.”

Claire stepped out of the car in front of the once-white house, standing solitary amid acres of flat Kansas farmland. The gravel of the driveway poked into her sandals. The house must once have been a proud, two-story testament to farming grit, but now weeds sprung through the slats of the front stairs. The door hung from a hinge. A few soaring rafters remained of the roof. Soot streaked up from the broken windows, making them look like eyes dressed with the thick mascara that her old friend Theresa used to favor.

Claire eyeballed the scorched furniture discarded by the porch. “To think my major worry visiting Theresa was that she would greet me with a loaded shotgun.”

Nicole came up beside her. “Is that about your fourteenth birthday party? After all these years, she wouldn’t load you up with buckshot for not inviting her.”

“Maybe. Then again, maybe not. Are you sure that GPS of yours didn’t steer us wrong?”

“It’s the right address.”

“Maybe Maya switched the digits or something—”

“Sorry to disappoint you, Claire, but the numbers are on the mailbox out front, stenciled right next to her name.”

“But she would have told Maya if she’d moved away. She would have sent her a text, an e-mail, or left a forwarding address, something.”

“People aren’t always so eager to share bad news.”

Claire kept blinking the Kansan dust out of her eyes, wishing she could clear her vision of what stood before her. Back in South Dakota, Maya had told her she’d received a Christmas card from Theresa just last year, a picture of a scarecrow sporting a Santa hat. The news had given Claire hope that maybe her troubled friend had finally fallen in love with some strapping farm boy and was now riding tractors and birthing litters of roly-poly little boys.

Jenna limped her way toward them holding Lucky, who raised his snout to the wind. “It still smells charred. The fire couldn’t have happened all that long ago or the rain would have washed the smell away.”

Claire eyed the parched brown fields. “Lord knows when it last rained around here.”

Nicole pressed her forearm against her nose. “Ugh, that burned-plastic smell. I hate that smell.”

“This farm is just begging for a mistress in a ruffled apron,” Jenna said. “Can you see her dressed like that? Can you see her hanging wash out on those lines? Tending a garden? Sweeping the floorboards in the evening?”

Claire had to admit the task stretched her imagination. In high school, Theresa had always been on the edge of expulsion. She carved symbols into the wooden desks with the point of a Swiss army knife. She smoked brazenly on the front stairs of the school. On a dare, she tossed a lit match into a garbage bin and watched while the flames grew. The only reason Theresa had made it into the group graduation picture was because she happened to already sport hot-pink streaks in her hair. When they’d all lined up to fluff their dos for the camera, she’d leapt in to photo-bomb them.

Claire had always liked that particular shot the best.

“People change.” Claire made her way toward the porch, stopping to gather a couple of daisies from the weeds. “Theresa once told me that after everything she went through with her parents’ divorce, she would never get married. Yet clearly she married.”

Jenna let Lucky down in the clearing to sniff around. “I didn’t know her parents divorced.”

“Her father screwed around with Theresa’s middle-school English teacher.” Claire eased onto the first step of the porch, testing the board with her weight. “You don’t remember that?”

Jenna’s brow puckered. “I guess. Vaguely.”

“It was a huge scandal.”

“I was out of the loop.”

“Well, I could time-stamp the changes in that girl from the moment of the divorce proceedings.”

Theresa the mischievous prankster that Claire had adored had suddenly turned brooding; her pranks, dangerous. She spurned Claire’s efforts to clean the wooded trails in favor of beer, black clothing, and the stoners who hung out behind the old cannery.

“So those divorce proceedings,” Jenna ventured, “they wouldn’t have happened to have started when Theresa was say, twelve or thirteen years old?”

“No, no.” Theresa had been fourteen when her parents divorced, but Claire figured Jenna didn’t need to know that fact. Claire cast a glance at Nicole for help, but Nicole had swathed her mouth and nose with the sleeve of her T-shirt and seemed grimly fascinated by the bits of charred wood on the ground. “I was just speculating. In any case, the old Theresa we knew certainly isn’t the same woman who ended up here.”

Nicole added, “In a burned-out shell of a house.”

“I’ll take precautions anyway.” Jenna crouched down by Lucky. “No matches. And black eyeliner is now banned from my house.”

“Let’s head back to town.” Nicole’s voice was muffled behind her hand. She swiveled toward the car. “We can ask some locals what happened, if they know where—”

“—not just yet.” Claire raised the daisies to her nose as Nicole stuttered to a stop. “Just give me a minute to think this through.”

Claire paced past a rocking chair to the end of the porch, seeking some evidence of her friend among the torn cushions and broken chairs. She peered through the cracked window to the cobwebbed interior, blackened and in shadow. She kept thinking there should be odd sneakers or lost jackets or scattered tools cast about. Fast-food wrappers or empty cigarette cartons or milk jugs. But no tire swing hung from the oak by the barn. No tricycle stood rusting underneath it.

Claire turned back to the porch. She ran her hand across the gritty back of a rocking chair. The wooden joints creaked as she settled into it. She nudged the floorboards to send herself rocking. Claire squeezed her eyes shut and remembered the young Theresa pretending not to shiver as she sat on the front porch of her old Cannery Row house. Claire remembered the sight of Theresa blowing out cigarette smoke, glaring, as Claire unloaded boxes of clothing donations from the trunk of her mother’s car.

Then Claire opened her eyes and took in the new view—Theresa’s view—of the long, empty ribbon of highway. She wondered how long Theresa had sat here staring down this road after her house burned down, trying to wrap her mind around the grim truth that there was no guarantee in life that everything and everyone would come out all right.

The rocking chair creaked as Claire stood up. She stared at the daisies in her hand, scentless with their petals spread wide. She thought about when she’d traveled through Thailand and had witnessed supplicants leaving betel nuts in a house where a woman had died in childbirth. She’d watched her Buddhist sponsor, Narupong, pull over to the side of a dangerous road in order to lay a painted figurine at the Tree of 100 Corpses. For a long time, Claire had assumed that these signs of respect were no different from the Western custom of laying flowers on a grave. But the Thai didn’t pray for the repose of the souls of these hungry ghosts—no, they came for other reasons. Supplicants came to pray for a good harvest, a healthy baby, or the winning numbers of the next underground lottery. The Thai believed that great luck can arise from terrible tragedy.

Claire placed the daisies on the seat of the rocking chair and hoped that Theresa’s tragedy—whatever it was—would someday gift her troubled friend with an equal measure of luck.

The porch steps creaked as Jenna took a seat, twirling a dandelion in her hand as she kept an eye on Lucky. “What do you think happened here?”

Claire eyed the drainpipe that hung off the porch eaves. “It could have been so many things.”

“Maybe a grease fire?” Jenna bent down and plucked a sliver of glass out of Lucky’s path. She tossed it behind her, into the hole in the upholstery of a broken love seat. “Or maybe lightning? The roof is caved in.”

“I vote for arson.” Nicole stepped into the conversation, her arms crossed tight, making trails in the gravel with her heels.

Jenna said, “Arson?”

“Absolutely.” Nicole eyed the house as if she were spoiling for a fight. “Burning down a house is a physical manifestation of anger or frustration.”

Jenna tossed the dandelion into the grass. “I know Theresa used to be crazy, but that sounds a little harsh—”

“You don’t think our old friend was capable of dousing her issues in gasoline and then tossing a match?”

Claire hadn’t smelled gasoline when they’d driven up, but now the scent seemed like a ghost in the air.

“People deal with difficult issues in different ways.” Nicole eyeballed the wreckage. “Some people have difficulty dealing with the stresses of the world. Sometimes, nothing will make a teenage boy feel better but to strike a match and toss it into an iron barrel full of gasoline-soaked rags.”

Claire froze, not sure she’d just heard right, rerunning that statement over in her head as Nicole’s face blanched.

Nicole turned her back and headed for the car. “Can we just leave now?”

M
om, I think the garage is on fire.”

Her daughter’s high-pitched voice rang in Nicole’s head. When Julia had phoned her that terrible day, the words hadn’t made an immediate impact. Nicole had raised three kids. She’d learned that “Chris fell off his scooter doing tricks on the deck rail” didn’t mean her son was paralyzed from the neck down. It meant a scrape on his shin or, at worst, a broken hand. So at the sound of Julia’s news, Nicole’s heart had skipped one beat, maybe two. She didn’t click into full emergency mode until Julia mentioned the black smoke seeping around the garage door.

She’d made Julia call 911 on the landline while she abandoned her shopping cart in aisle six. She’d fast-walked to the car thinking about the gasoline in the lawn mower and the paint solvents lined up on the shelves. She told Julia to cross the street to a neighbor’s house and not to hang up her cell phone until she got there.

Nicole arrived home before the firemen. Just as Julia had described, smoke seeped from the seams, but she didn’t see any flames. She did a mental accounting of her children and remembered that Noah wasn’t in school today. He’d spent a restless night with a stomach virus, so she’d let him stay home. She swung through the front door and bounded up the stairs to rouse him—only to find the bed empty.

Listening to the rising wail of sirens, she noticed that the desk was clear of gum wrappers and pencil shavings and the gummy pink erasers he wore down to nubs. She stood in the hall and felt a tickle of mother’s intuition as she noticed that no dirty jeans or cast-off socks littered the floor.

She didn’t remember running outside as the fire engines pulled out front. She didn’t remember fighting a fireman who bodily yanked her away from where she struggled to pull up the garage door. She remembered screaming that her son was in there. She remembered the sound of the ax digging into the wood. She remembered the men hauling him out, sooty, her son’s arms dangling. She remembered the paramedic saying
smoke inhalation
.

Later, she remembered the doctor saying,
He’ll live.

Back home, the smell of charred wood in the air, in the grass, in the trees, in her skin, in her throat, grit in her hair no matter how many times she washed it, a clinging remi
nder
of how much she’d failed him.

Now, curled up in the passenger’s side of Jenna’s car, Nicole blinked up at the scudding clouds trying to force the scent of charred wood out of her lungs. She breathed in the car’s aroma of stale potato chips and damp dog and the reedy scent of old peppermint from the worn Christmas-tree air freshener dangling from the mirror. The engine whined, a high-pitched and vaguely alarming sound, and though she was grateful for the noise, she found herself worrying about the car’s transmission fluid levels or wondering if there was a problem with the power steering. Those were worries she could check. Those were problems she knew how to fix.

Then Nicole caught sight of a low building up ahead, and she slapped a hand on Jenna’s shoulder. “Take a right up there.”

Jenna, driving, flicked on her directional. “At Fast Eddy’s?”

“The pool hall, yes.”

“But I thought we were looking for a restaurant—”

“It serves burgers.” Nicole gestured to a sign that said
Burgers as big as Kansas
, as Jenna turned into the parking lot. “More importantly, it has a bar.”

As Jenna pulled to a stop beside a dusty pickup truck, Nicole uncurled herself from the passenger seat and tumbled out. During the short trip from the car to the pool hall door, she tried to shrug the tension out of her shoulders. She wished that the skies would open just long enough to wash her face clean so she wouldn’t look like such a panicked wreck.

Fortunately, the pool hall lived up to nationwide pool hall reputations. The sun could be going supernova outside these blacked-out windows, and not a sliver of light would penetrate. The place had a long bar and a recessed wooden dance floor with an area for a DJ. Some Top 40 country hit played on the speakers, twangy background noise for the two-dozen folks eating burgers and playing keno. Nicole passed a row of cowboys with their heels hooked on the bar’s boot rail. She followed her instincts to the back, where she found three pool tables, two of them open. She breathed in the scent of cigarette smoke and stale beer, the perfume of another time, and it worked like Prozac to loosen her up.

She pulled her wallet out of her purse and slapped a dollar on the first table. “You guys know how to play eight ball?”

Jenna shrugged off her purse. “I worked for a hedge fund, remember?”

“Then let’s lag.”

Nicole seized two balls and lined them up behind the cue line. When Jenna was set, they struck their balls down the length of the table to bank off the short rail and return. Nicole’s ball landed closest to the shooter’s side rail.

Nicole said, “I’ll break.”

She racked the balls and then decided to pick a different pool stick from the selection on the wall. She rolled the new one in her hand with her back to the ladies. Nicole wondered how long Claire would hold her tongue. She figured she had one game, one drink, and maybe a half a game more.

When she turned around, Claire was seated by the pool table giving drink orders to a waitress in a gingham skirt and a denim snap-front shirt.

“A Coke for that one,” Claire said, pointing to Jenna, who was dusting the tip of her cue, “and I say Nicole will want one of your specials. A Cody’s Revenge.”

Nicole lifted her stick. “I’ll take two.”

“Two’s the house limit,” Claire warned. “That means, Jenna, you’re driving. In the meantime, I’ll have a cold and frosty, whatever you’ve got on tap.”

Nicole broke the balls to a satisfying crack. She watched two solids fall into the pockets, then waited for the balls to stop rolling before focusing on her next shot.

“You got yourself some competition,” Claire said to Jenna, as Nicole pocketed another ball. “So, Nic, where did a mother of three learn how to play pool?”

“Chicago, graduate school days, at a hall called Get a Cue. They had ratty pool tables and watered-down beer by the pitcher.” Nicole stepped back to eye the whole table. “They also had biannual tournaments for a fifty-buck prize.”

Claire leaned back in the chair. “Fifty bucks will buy a lot of ramen noodles.”

“That’s where I met Lars.” She squinted down the cue at an orange ball, sliding the stick over her bent fingers. “I played against him in the finals one semester.”

“Lars won, I bet.” Claire shrugged at Nicole’s surprised look. “He’d have to impress you or you wouldn’t have given him the time of day.”

Nicole hadn’t realized she was quite so transparent. She bent over the table, eyeing another ball, as the waitress slid an electric-pink drink on a nearby table. She hit the ball but with too much force, wondering how much of her troubles Claire and Jenna had already guessed despite the fact she’d let them grow like mushrooms in the dark.

“So,” she said, raising her voice above the guitar twang of a Merle Haggard song on the speakers, “have you both heard the joke about the so-called family therapist who put her son in a lockdown facility?”

She hit the solid ball but it spun out and missed the pocket. She stepped away from the pool table, out of the spread of light cast from the overhead lamp, out of the direct scrutiny of Claire sprawled back in her chair. She wished she could take another step back.

She wished she could back up to, say, Idaho.

“I’ve been waiting about two thousand miles to hear this story,” Claire said. “You finally up for sharing?”

“With about the same enthusiasm I’d have if I were facing a mammogram.”

“Fortunately, I don’t have to think about those anymore.”

Jenna grunted as she lined up a shot.

“This isn’t the kind of story you bring up over fast-food tacos. I blurted out the truth once before, and I paid a price for it.” With half an eye, Nicole watched Jenna’s technique as her friend knocked a ball into the side pocket. “Back when it happened, I unloaded my troubles on a woman I considered a friend. That friend had a son Noah’s age. I figured she’d relate. I miscalculated.” She tightened her grip on her pool cue. “That friend spent the next six months performing Cirque du Soleil acrobatics in order to sidle out of my sight in the hardware store.”

“Oh, hon,” Claire said, “I promise we won’t leave you by the side of the road. Right, Jenna?”

“Right.” Jenna frowned as she missed the shot. “Anyway, I’m starting to like your humming.”

Nicole dropped her chin to her chest. A prickling started at the back of her eyes. Her friends’ easy attitude was like a shot of vodka, straight up. The last thing Nicole wanted right now was to be drawn to some intimate corner table where the two of them would listen to her story with watery eyes filled with pity.

“The official version,” she said, “is that Noah had seen some crazy web video about making colored flames. He’d imitated it by putting gasoline-soaked rags in a metal drum. He didn’t mean to burn the garage down or anything. It was just a mindless teenage experiment. Ha ha. Ha ha. Oh, look at the time.” The balls clattered as she took another shot, but nothing dropped into a pocket. “The truth was that my son was in the low-point swing of one of his moods. He wanted to see something burn. In the process, he nearly set the neighborhood on fire.” Nicole tapped the edge of the pool table. “Call ten in the side pocket, Jenna.”

Jenna startled and then made a quick, careless shot. The ball spun, badly hit, but torqued into the pocket nonetheless.

“The neighbors didn’t exactly call out the casserole brigade even when they heard the official version,” she continued. “There were no bagel deliveries or rotisserie chickens left at my door. That was my first hint that I would have to be very careful about whom I commiserated with.” Nicole moved around the table, searching for a good angle. “Secrecy was a way to protect Noah, so at some point, when he learned a measure of control, he could come back home and pick up his normal life.”

Normal life.
Nicole flattened the cue against the side of the pool table and then bent over to squint down the length. The stick quivered under her grip. Noah had once had a normal life. She thought of the preadolescent Noah, the intense boy bent over pads of paper almost as big as he was, kicking his feet up as he sketched vegetable gnomes and imagined dragons in cloud formations.

Nicole bobbled the shot then reached for her drink. It was sticky-sweet. The kind of drink loaded with liquor that tasted like cotton candy. She felt the attention of both women, even if Claire seemed intent on Jenna lining up her next shot. Nicole debated how much to tell them. Should she go all the way back to the forced forty-eight-hour lockdown? She’d been so furious, even knowing that it was standard procedure in situations the doctors deemed suspicious. She was more furious when the psychiatrists reassessed him after that time and decided to keep Noah for another two weeks. She had been adamant. She knew her son. He was an intense, curious, artistic young man struggling under the flux of hormones.

He was
not
mentally ill.

During a cocktail party at a college reunion, Nicole had once met an old graduate school friend who’d finished the clinical path Nicole had long abandoned. The colleague now worked in private practice. Her old friend had expressed frustration about her own struggling business, how no one really wanted to have years of weekly psychotherapy sessions with no guarantee of success, no guarantee of change. What people wanted, she’d said earnestly, was what Nicole was giving them—enthusiasm, practical advice, and quick-and-easy solutions to real-world problems. Nicole had left that conversation numb. Her friend had essentially called life coaching the therapy equivalent of McDonald’s.

But even a drive-through therapist should be able to see signs of mental illness in her own son.

“You’re up, Nic.”

Nicole startled at Jenna’s voice, then walked around the table and stared at the setup of the balls. Her brain made no sense of them. “Do you guys know that moment in a horror movie when the main character is creeping down into the dark basement?”

Jenna bobbed her chin against the felt tip of her cue. “You just know there’s someone down there with a chain saw.”

“Well, that’s sort of how I felt when Noah got sucked into the system. I knew what they were going to do to him in that ward. He had ECGs to check his brain waves and MRIs to make sure he didn’t have a tumor and a million other tests, physiological and psychological. They were looking for some reason for his ‘aberration in behavior.’”

Jenna hissed, “Holy Clockwork Orange.”

“I was so crazy with worry during those months that there came a point where I actually hoped they
would
find a tumor.”

She shouldn’t have said that. She’d never spoken those words before, too ashamed of the feeling. She hadn’t even shared the sentiment with Lars. And here she was blurting it out in front of a woman who’d just had a double mastectomy.

Claire didn’t seem the least fazed. “A tumor can be cut right out,” Claire said, patting her flat chest. “A tumor means the possibility of a cure.”

Nicole sagged against a post. That was the heart of it, she supposed. Noah’s issues were deeper, fully embedded, more complicated. She’d thrown herself into them. The months that followed had been a flurry of research. In order to keep fed and clothed, her vegetarian daughter learned to make baked macaroni and cheese, and her two-sport younger son, Christian, learned how to bleach the whites. Lars had been a rock, keeping the house running and keeping track of Noah’s meds. Meanwhile, she’d lined up therapists—only the best of the best—and researched troubled adolescent behavior as if she were in graduate school again.

Why, why,
why
, after dropping out of her PhD program, hadn’t she pushed to at least become a licensed professional counselor? It might have taken three years to finish the sixty credits required, maybe a few months more in supervised training, but then, at least, she might have been able to
help
Noah. She pointedly ignored the fact that she and Lars had started a family young and therefore had to build a life from scratch. If she’d only been more determined, she could have done it. Then she might have been able to pick up the subtleties between normal adolescent behavior—the occasional angry outbursts, a slammed door, increasing
withdrawa
l—and the something-more-complicated that was the fascinating, frightening mind of Noah.