Random Acts of Kindness (21 page)

Claire pulled her oar out of the foaming water and smiled at the camera as she lifted the oar above her head.

Moments later the run was done. Claire paddled down a calm, deep section of the river and wondered why her clothes were still dry. Her feet were barely wet, and only from a thimbleful of water that had sloshed into the boat. She bent over the edge of the blow-up raft and slipped her fingers through the water to scatter a school of silver fish.

She glanced behind as the other rafts came into view. “I guess the real white water comes closer to Elephant Rock, right?”

Nicole twisted to meet Claire’s gaze, and there was a gleam in her eyes that Claire didn’t quite understand.

Nicole said, “Do you remember when you last did this?”

“High school, of course.”

“No, what
month
.”

“April. A frigid, sleety, nasty, mountain April.”

“And what month is it now?”

“August.”

“Uh-huh.”

Nicole held her gaze for another moment, eyebrows raised so high as to nearly disappear under her helmet, until what she was saying began to dawn on Claire. Then Nicole, with a triumphant smile, turned away to dig her oar back into the water.

“It’s summer,” Claire muttered, “and this river is at its lowest ebb.”

Nicole wielded the oar in a way that proved she’d earned some special canoeing patch at Camp Paskagamak. “This little excursion is going to be nothing but a little raft ride down a lazy stream.”

Claire sagged against the rear of the boat. She pulled the dripping oar onto her lap, not caring that it was soaking her jeans. Had she paused long enough to think about this, she would have realized this was true.

She lifted a wet foot and nudged Nicole’s butt. “You knew this all along.”

“Yes, Claire, I did.”

“More than four thousand miles in the car and you never once said a thing to me.”

“I made sure you got a good look at
real
rapids at Niagara Falls.”

“You’re a sick, twisted bastard, Nicole Eriksen.”

“What we fear, Claire, is mostly in our minds.”

Claire shoved her oar back in the water and yanked it so hard that a wave of river water rained down upon Nicole. While Nicole squealed, cringing, Claire did it again to soak Jenna, too. Not long after that, in a hail of squeals, there wasn’t a piece of clothing on any one of them that remained dry.

Riley’s boat sailed by, and Lu cupped her hands over her mouth. She shouted, “Last boat to Elephant Rock has to buy the first round tonight.”

Claire, Jenna, and Nicole weren’t the first to reach the outcropping of rock where everyone beached the boats for lunch. But Claire was the first at something.

She outraced everyone to leap off Elephant Rock.

Camp Kwenback, Pine Lake

M
aya said, “I brought a little game.”

Nicole groaned good-naturedly along with the rest of the crowd as Maya flourished a silk drawstring bag. They’d all just come in from the great lawn of Camp Kwenback, Riley’s family compound on the wooded edge of Pine Lake, after watching the sun set. The lodge had originally been built by Riley’s great-grandfather for the Teddy R
ooseve
lt–era titans of New York to enjoy lavish, weeklong hunting parties. Riley had recently inherited the main lodge and all the outlying buildings. Over the past year, she’d been doing her best to make the camp habitable, with the hope, eventually, to restore the place to its former glory.

Now they all gathered in the pine-forest cathedral of the main hall, their bellies full after dinner and their moods mellow from the local white wine. Under the perusal of the enormous moose above the stone fireplace, Nicole dropped into one of the overstuffed chairs only to sink into the hole of a broken spring.

“Aren’t we a little long in the tooth,” Nicole said, slipping a foot on the glass-top coffee table, “for Truth or Dare?”

Lu barked, “Speak for yourself!”

“There are no dares in this.” Maya pulled the drawstrings loose. “Just truth, however you want to tell it. It’s an icebreaker.” Maya winked. “Just like in South Dakota.”

Nicole smiled more widely to hide how her stomach did a sudden flip.

“Claire, you’re the guest of honor.” Maya held out the bag. “You go first.”

Claire sat in the middle of the most exuberant plaid couch that Nicole had ever seen. It was a relic from the nineteen seventies, Riley had explained, which was the last time the camp had turned a profit. In the midst of this vintage décor, Claire raised her glass for a toast before putting it down, her cheeks flushed with happy color.

Claire pulled a slip of paper out of the bag and read, “What is the strangest decision that you’ve made, postgraduation?” Claire swept an incredulous gaze across the room. “You mean other than taking a road trip to find all of you bald?”

Nicole laughed along with the crowd. She saw Sydney adjust the bill of the baseball cap she’d taken to wearing. She witnessed Riley running a distracted hand across her head as if she’d forgotten amid the details of hosting that she was actually bald. And Nicole caught Jenna’s look from across the room, a steady, questioning look as Jenna adjusted the clip that held her hair. Tugging the short ends of her own hair, Nicole let her gaze skim away, pretending she didn’t understand what Jenna was mutely asking her.

“Well, the strangest decision I made postgraduation,” Claire said, “had something to do with shaving my head, too.”

“Yes, yes!” Jin bounced in place on the couch beside her. “What in the world made you take Buddhist vows?”

“Now there’s a story…”

Claire launched into a description of her decision to take vows, beginning with the agonizing months when she took care of her sister Melana. To Nicole’s surprise, Claire shared details that Nicole had never heard during the road trip. Claire described her sense of dislocation after Melana’s burial, about the irresistible urge to leave the familiar behind, and then about the thrill of traveling in Thailand. The women leaned forward in their seats, rapt, nodding, injecting their own observations, and just when Claire started to get a little weepy, she shifted the mood by relating an anecdote about the pit toilet in her
guti
.

Nicole had already heard this tale while traveling somewhere through Wyoming. Three weeks into her stint as a nun, Claire woke up to go to the bathroom only to catch sight of something popping out of the pit toilet.

It was the hooded head of a cobra.

The group collectively gasped and lifted their feet off the ground and then squealed in horror.

“I couldn’t pee in that hole for
weeks
.” Claire described how the cobra slithered out and flopped against the wall until it found a chewed-out hole in the corner where it slid out to disappear into the forest. “I kept wondering if the thing had laid eggs.”

When the chatter finally died down, Maya stood up and shook the bag at Jin.

“Me? How am I ever going to top
that
?” Shaking her head, Jin reached in the bag and pulled out a sliver of paper. She read, “Fill in this blank: None of you know this, but in my twenties I…”

A chorus of eager
ooooooooooh
s rose up. Jin flushed as she raised her eyebrows and covered her mouth.

From across the room, Sydney said, “I want to know about that Ukrainian guy you were dating when we were living in the city.”

“Wait, wait.” Maya leaned forward in interest. “Was that the guy in that band we saw at the dive bar on the Lower East Side?”

“Let Jin answer.” Riley slipped a tray of cookies on the table. “I had no idea the good doctor had a wicked past.”

“All right, I’ll confess.” Jin dropped her hands to her lap and let out a theatrical sigh. “For about nine glorious months on a break from medical school, I was an indie-band groupie.”

Nicole couldn’t help laughing as Jin told her story, a tale of backstage antics that occurred during a year of what Jin called “existentialist confusion about my career as a pediatric oncologist.” Jin dished frankly about the mistakes she’d made during her first year of medical school, as well as the grief and the miracles she’d witnessed, both of which had sent her in a tailspin.

As the tale unwound, Nicole found herself admiring Jin’s honesty even as her own throat closed up. Soon it would be her turn. She’d already mentally flipped through her own life’s stories to find one with an appropriate mixture of humor and pathos that would satisfy any question. She would talk about the day Lars proposed to her. She’d tell these friends about the unplanned pregnancy that had thrown her for a loop. She’d tell them how he dropped to his knees when she told him about the baby. She’d tell them about the engagement ring that he’d plucked from a candy bowl in his dorm room, a bright purple, grape-flavored Ring Pop left over from Halloween.

She drew her knees up to her chest and held them tight, just as she did under the South Dakota sky when Nicole had turned from the light of the campfire to find Maya’s wise eyes upon her. Nicole had chosen the proposal story because she knew it had a happy ending.

She was too much of a coward to share the truth about Noah.

Nicole hauled herself out of the chair and murmured an excuse. She slipped between the couch and a taxidermic black bear to wind her way in the general direction of the bathroom. Halfway there, she changed direction and slipped out the back sliding doors.

She wandered to the edge of the porch and leaned against a pillar. Riley had given them a brief history of the camp when they arrived this afternoon, entertaining them with tales of bootleggers during Prohibition slipping Canadian whiskey over the border in canoes they paddled across the lake that now spread before her. The cabins, a row of dark shadows beyond the trees, had once been used for storage, and the boathouse on the shore had been built as an unloading dock.

Now, moonlight cast a strip of silver upon the water. She closed her eyes and soaked in the ambiance of Pine Lake. Katydids sang in the trees. She smelled the tang of lake water, the earthiness of damp moss, and the scent of smoke.

Cigarette smoke.

Her eyes flew open. A creak of a floorboard drew her attention to the porch shadows where the end of a cigarette glowed bright red.

“Another escapee, I see.” Lu spoke through a blue cloud. “Welcome to the club.”

Nicole hadn’t seen Lu leave the room. Lu must have slipped out just as silently as she herself had. Now she lifted the wineglass that until now she hadn’t realized she still held in her hand. “I needed to clear my head.”

“That’s a good excuse, too.”

Nicole gave Lu a long look. Some of the women who’d shaved their heads could pull off the cue-ball look. Jin, for example, was petite and confident enough to get away with it. Maya looked exotic, her Mohawk cheekbones far more prominent without her hair hiding her features. Sydney took to wearing a baseball hat and long, dangling earrings that showed off her Cleopatra neck. But Lu was not so fortunate. Gristle-thin and angular, Emma Lu of Cannery Row looked like she hadn’t lived the easiest of lives.

Lu said, “You know, I’ve checked out your website.”

Nicole tensed. “It’s a work in progress.”

“Well, some of those women back there called it their bible, you know, like they couldn’t raise their kids without it.”

“They’re just being kind.”

“They’re proud to see another Pine Lake girl done good. Of course, everybody always knew you’d do great things, Nic.” She slapped the arm of the Adirondack chair beside her. “Come sit. For a woman who’s been on vacation for almost three weeks, you look like you could use some rest.”

Nicole hesitated, gazing past the eaves to the smear of stars, so many that she couldn’t pick out the usual constellations. “I’ll sit if you promise you won’t talk about my job.”

Lu’s laugh was like gravel. “I’ll welcome you as long as you don’t lecture me on the evil of cigarettes.”

“We have a deal.”

Nicole crossed the porch and settled in the chair, stretching her legs out as she leaned back.

“It’s strange,” Lu said, “how a bunch of women who haven’t seen one another in ages can just get together, and suddenly it’s like we’re all in high school spilling our deepest, darkest secrets.”

“Well, not everyone spills so easily, right?” Nicole gave Lu a pointed look. She remembered the tough teen that Lu had tried to be in high school, the enforcer on the hockey team, the small, combative woman with the snarky attitude and the bruised eyes. “It’s a beautiful thing, though. The way things are going, we’ll have a crying couch by Sunday.”

“But you and I won’t be on it, will we?”

Nicole hesitated. She thought about the hours and hours she and Claire and Jenna spent in the Chevy Lumina. She thought about the long nights they spent exhausted in sketchy roadside hotel rooms, eating fried chicken on the beds for the lack of a table. Could this three-day gathering of the tribe—no matter how miraculous—possibly encapsulate the same intensity of a three-week road trip?

Claire’s words floated back to her.

Your mistake is thinking you always have time.

“Nic, Nic, Nic.” Lu made a tsking sound. “I never thought I’d see the day when you and I would have so much in common.”

“Well, we were both pretty good athletes.”

“You know what I’m talking about. I’ll tell you what. I’ll show you my troubles if you show me yours.”

The truth Nicole could barely admit rose to her throat like a hard capsule of poison. Her first reflex was to swallow it down, deep down, and resist the urge to bring it into the light. That was what she’d been doing every day for eighteen long months. This time she made herself resist the urge to push. This time she let the words she couldn’t bear to say rest there, a hard lump lodged in her neck.

In the end, she didn’t know exactly what alchemy gave her the courage to finally speak the truth about Noah. Maybe it was the quiet, patient woman sitting next to her, a wise and solemn old friend who was still part stranger, a woman who’d seen hard times and yet seemed willing to listen with empathy and without judgment.

But more likely it was the lake breeze that chose that moment to sift through her hair like a mother’s comforting hands. It was the soothing haze of darkness, the rhythmic music of the katydids, and the air that smelled of river reeds and damp leaves and white spruce. As a girl, she’d sprouted amid these woods like a sapling aiming straight for the sun. Now, with her life in shadows, she’d shot clear across the country just to experience the old magic, to find, in the familiar natural rhythms of her hometown, some measure of bravery.

She took a long, deep breath and finally admitted what had always been too painful to confess.

“Eighteen months, three weeks, and six days ago,” she heard herself saying, “my oldest son attempted suicide.”