Senseless Acts of Beauty (10 page)

R
iley’s old friend from high school Claire Petrenko had a certain effect on people. Riley figured it had something to do with the fact that Claire had once been a Buddhist nun, because during the six-mile ride back from the Pine Lakes train station, Riley had opened up like a spigot, telling her everything that had been going on at Camp Kwenback.

“So let me get this straight.” Claire sat in the passenger’s seat of Riley’s car. “You’re telling me that Camp Kwenback is now housing a dementia patient, a teenage runaway, and ex-juvenile delinquent Theresa Hendrick?”

“Just another day in the life of Riley Cross.”

“You poor thing.”

“Trust me, I didn’t plan for this.” Riley turned the car onto the graveled road that led to the lodge. “It just happened. One moment it was just Mrs. Clancy and me, and the next—”

“The next you know, the universe is sending you lost souls.”

“That’s a Buddhist thing, right?”

“Sort of.” Claire ran her fingers through her short hair, just growing back after the last round of chemo. “Last year, when Jenna showed up at my door, she said she wanted to help me after my mastectomy—but really, she was just running away from her divorce. She was broken, the poor woman, and in desperate need of support.”

Riley tried to keep up with Claire’s thought processes. “So you think Tess is running away from a divorce?”

“I haven’t the faintest idea what Tess is running away from, though I know she was once married. I was actually talking about you.” Claire hung her elbow out the window and gazed off toward the debris piled around the old mini-golf. “Every once in a while, whether you’re ready or not, Karma sends you lost creatures. Since I was diagnosed with breast cancer, I’ve got a farm full of blind possums, three-legged goats, and one crippled raven, and darned if I know why.” Claire gasped as she caught sight of Tess working amid the piles of wood. “In Buddha’s name, she’s gone blond.”

“It suits her, don’t you think?” Riley could just glimpse Tess walking between the trees. “The ink-black hair made her look like a vampire.”

“Did you ask her?”

“Ask her what?”

“About the burned-out farmhouse in Kansas.” Claire turned, the whites of her eyes bright. “When Jenna, Nicole, and I went looking for her last year, all we found was an abandoned wreck. It was practically still smoking.”

“I mentioned it once.” Riley turned into the parking area in front of the lodge and took the far spot. “She didn’t answer, and it was like the walls came down hard. And, honestly, I haven’t had more than a fifteen-minute conversation with her since, and it has all been about the renovation of the mini-golf.”

“We’ll have to do something about that, won’t we?”

Riley stepped out of the car, then pulled Claire’s suitcase out of the backseat. Claire came around and pushed the button for the handle. Claire hadn’t opted for reconstructive surgery after her mastectomy so her T-shirt billowed over her chest. In pink letters it said
Chemo Ninja.

“You’re back!”

Riley glanced up to see Sadie’s head pop up over the railing of the porch.

“Thanks for holding down the fort, Sadie.” Riley squinted across the empty parking lot. “Any chance a busload of vacationers arrived to check in?”

“Um…no.”

“A minivan full of hikers?”

“I didn’t see—”

“How ’bout an SUV full of bicyclists?”

Sadie screwed up her face. “You said that the only one coming this week was your friend Claire.”

Apparently not all fourteen-year-olds picked up on sarcasm. “Claire, this is Sadie,” Riley said, as they bumped the luggage up to the shade of the porch. “Sadie, this is another good friend of mine from high school, Claire.”

Claire thrust out her hand. “A pleasure to meet another redhead. The three of us should have some kind of secret handshake.”

Sadie’s face pinched in perplexity as her gaze grazed Claire’s short hair. Riley realized that Claire’s hair had come in dark, and it was too short yet to see the auburn highlights.

“So,” Riley asked, “is Mrs. Clancy still awake?”

“She’s dozing on the back porch. I made some of that Cape Cod chicken salad for her. She ate it right up.” Sadie bounced on the balls of her toes. “Her hair needed a good brushing so I took care of it while she ate.”

“I’m sure she loved that,” Riley said as she pushed open the door to the lodge. “I’m going to get Claire settled and then—”

“Riley?”

Sadie stood on one foot, pulling on her fingers in agitation.

“Yes?”

Sadie said, “I’ve been thinking.”

“Uh-huh?”

Sadie’s gaze skittered to Claire, and then that gaze searched for a landing spot somewhere on the porch floorboards.

Claire caught the vibe. “Riley, I’ve been dying to give Bob’s belly a good rub ever since I hopped on that train. You come fetch me when the room’s ready.”

As Claire’s footsteps receded, Sadie slid her hip onto the porch railing. “So I was thinking,” Sadie repeated, “I noticed that you’ve got those ledger things that you write in to track reservations and who is registered and what room they’re in, right?”

“One for every year,” she conceded, “though I’ve been doing both ledgers and the computer registration since eighteen months ago because the new program is glitchy—”

“Do you save past years’ ledgers? Like in a big box somewhere?”

Riley thought about the low-beamed attic over the guest rooms, the boxes and boxes of photo albums and memorabilia and stuff from her grandparent’s bedroom she hadn’t had the heart to throw away.

She knew where this was going. “You know you’re looking for a needle in a haystack, right?”

“That’s such a weird expression. I mean, if you’re looking for a needle in a haystack, why can’t you just use a magnet?”

“You know what I’m talking about.” It pained her to think that Sadie’s search would probably lead to one dead end after another. “In these ledgers, they’ll all just be names to you. They won’t mean anything—”

“You’d know them though. All those people who stayed here.”

“Many of them, but not all.”

“Maybe you’ll see a name and remember something you’d forgotten. Maybe I can make a connection with the research I’ve been doing.”

Riley hesitated. Sadie had been here a week now. She’d left just about every morning to bike to the library and returned each night sunburned from the beach. She’d also tagged along a couple of mornings when Riley went bird-watching, peering through the binoculars with the awe of a newbie. She’d been a great help around the lodge, playing cards with Mrs. Clancy in the evenings, keeping watch at the reservation desk when Riley had to pop into town. Riley had to admit that she liked the young girl’s company. But with each passing day, Tess’s concerns about legal complications weighed more heavily on her.

In for a penny, in for a pound.
“Let me take care of Claire first,” Riley said. “Then get ready to get dusty.”

A half hour later Claire headed to the mini-golf to say hello to Tess, and Sadie bounced behind Riley as she led the way up the stairs to the second floor. In the ceiling halfway down the hallway hung a chain that connected to the pull-down stairs to the attic. She tugged on the porcelain grip and unfolded the stairs. Testing each creaking wooden riser, she made her way into the gloom.

The central air conditioning her grandparents had reluctantly added to the lodge twenty years ago didn’t quite reach this space, so climbing the stairs was like walking into soup. The air smelled of pine resin and musty books. Decorations for various holidays were stacked up on one side, Fourth of July taking up a goodly amount of space. Riley had a moment’s thought that there might be some decaying old fireworks in some of those boxes, until she remembered that it was her grandfather who took care of the fireworks, and he kept a separate storage space in the barn. These eaves were mostly Grandma’s, and the boxes were packed so tight there wasn’t enough space between them to slip the width of a pencil.

“Wow.” Sadie ran her fingers across the boxes. “Your grandmother would have been epic at Tetris.”

“She once told me that there were ledgers up here dating to the turn of the twentieth century.” Riley sought among the boxes for her grandmother’s round Palmer-method handwriting. “She said they were part of the camp’s history and refused to throw them away, so she shoved them farther back to make room for more. I keep meaning to go through them myself, but I can’t seem to find the time.” Riley paused and tapped a lower box. “That’s my grandmother’s writing. The ledgers in this box date back to the nineteen forties.”

“We shouldn’t go back more than fifteen years.”

“Just so you know,” Riley said, as she tugged one box out to eyeball the dates on the one behind it, “my grandmother wasn’t the gossiping type. She wouldn’t record if someone was pregnant. She just kept lists of names, the numbers of adults and kids, and what rooms or cabins they were in.”

Sadie tapped a box close to her. “This one is marked photos.”

“Oh, wow, I remember those. For a while I made photo albums for every summer.” Riley shoved one box aside, still looking for the ledger box labeled with the right span of years. “What a lot of work that was. It’s not like now, when you can go online and click and drag and make a photo album in an instant. We had to take pictures, get them developed, pin them in, label them by hand, and add cute scrapbooky things. It was a serious project. But everyone loved paging through them so much that, after I left, Grandma hired a teenager to be Camp Kwenback’s official summer photographer.”

“Photo albums are awesome.” Sadie’s voice went high with excitement. “This box covers the right dates.”

Sadie hauled the box down and tugged the top open, flicking away dust-heavy strands of old spiderwebs. Inside were ten photo albums made of faux leather, the earliest over twenty years old.

Settling cross-legged on the floorboards, Sadie cracked one open. Riley caught sight of the first picture and stuttered, “Oh, lord.”

Sadie’s mouth dropped open. “That’s you?”

“Yup, braces, skinny legs, bad hair, and all.”

“Love the shorts.”

“Hey, pleated fronts were all the rage back then.” Riley reached over and flipped the page. “You want to see funky shorts? Get a load of those. Those are my grandparents holding court by the bonfire on opening day.”

“Seriously?”

“They’re wearing lederhosen,” Riley explained. “This camp came down through my maternal grandmother’s side. She was German through and through. She could cook pastry like nobody’s business.”

“She’s round.”

“And short. Grandpa sometimes called her ‘dumpling.’”

“And your grandfather was so tall. Knobby knees!”

“Yeah, he was a bit of a giraffe. Apparently my grandmother’s parents never liked him. He was
Episcopalian
, you know.”

Sadie said, “You talk about them as if you’re German, too. As if they were your own birth grandparents.”

Riley didn’t comment right away. She pulled a box off the pile and settled it in the alley between them, using the exertion as an excuse. The pine resin scent of this attic reminded her of when she used to climb here with her grandmother to haul down the holiday decorations, her grandmother batting at the dust with a dishtowel, muttering now and again in German. She remembered sprinkling the butcher-block table downstairs with flour as Grandma made dough. She remembered sleeping in a cot in the laundry room during the busy season, the scent of humid air and clean sheets, the
thwump-thwump
of the drier white noise to snooze by. Whenever Riley felt like an oversize cowbird in the nest of tiny Crosses, she would retreat to this camp where, for reasons unknown, she always felt like she belonged.

“They helped raise me,” she said, debating how to sit comfortably in the narrow alleyway. “They were my grandparents. The only ones I ever knew.”

“But you found your birth parents, right?”

Riley’s sneaker caught on one of the uneven boards and she sat down clumsily, hitting the attic floor with a force that she knew would leave a bruise.

She should have known Sadie would ask her this question sooner or later.

“Eventually I did.” Riley reached into the ledger box and pulled up one of the books. “Do you want to start on one of these?”

“Are they dead?”

Riley settled the book on her lap and wiped the dust off the cover. “No.”

“Did you meet them?”

The spine of the ledger cracked as she pressed it open. Riley stared blindly at the pages in front of her, realizing she was tracing the old ink with a hand that had begun to tremble.

This shouldn’t matter anymore.

“I’m on this website for adoptees,” Sadie ventured into the growing silence. “We share stories. Most are adoptees who want to find their birth mother but we’re too young to go through the process or we’re having trouble opening the records. Some of the kids manage to break through the roadblocks, one way or another.” Sadie shifted her seat. “But sometimes the mother doesn’t want to be found. Sometimes she doesn’t answer the phone or letters.”

“Everyone’s experience is different.” Riley gave the ledger a little lift. “Why don’t we just focus on yours?”

It had all gone very still in the room. No noises from downstairs. The air conditioning generator in the corner of the attic hadn’t yet kicked on. All she could hear were the pops and creaks of an old wooden house and a rustling outside, of birds coming in and out of nests tucked in the nooks of the roof.

And Sadie, perched across from her like a curious little starling, canting forward, her clear green gaze bright.

Riley sighed and watched the movement of tiny dust motes through the light pouring through the small window. “My husband started the search.”

“Husband?”

“Ex. Soon to be.” Riley raised her left hand and wiggled her fingers, the pale swath across the ring finger evidence of the band she once wore. “He wanted to start a family. Before we did, he thought it would be smart to contact my biological parents and get all the medical history, like some kind of…prescreening.”

When Declan had first badgered her about this, she’d put in a phone call to her old friend Nicole. They’d been on the softball team together in high school. With Nicole as the pitcher and Riley as the catcher, they’d made an unbeatable team that had won the regional finals for the first time in Pine Lake history. Nicole went on to graduate school in psychology and ultimately ended up working as a life coach. She’d seemed the right person to call for such a serious issue. Nicole had assured Riley that her feelings were absolutely valid. She should seek her biological parents only when
she
was ready.