Senseless Acts of Beauty (5 page)

Riley knew what the developers wanted to do. They wanted to chop down the wild woods that encroached on the back lawn, pull out the old slide as a safety hazard, rip up the obstacle course her grandfather had built through the forest, pull down the tree house by the beaver dam. They wanted to clear-cut twelve of the fourteen acres to build a golf course.

She couldn’t explain to those developers any more than she could explain to the banks and credit unions what it meant to grow up running wild through the woods, playing manhunt amid the trees, making stick figures with acorns and milkweed, and watching birds teach their young to fly.

She couldn’t explain to the developers that reviving Camp Kwenback was her Plan Z, and if it failed, she was out of luck, ideas, and a future.

“Riley, my darling daughter, there’s no way to revive this broken-down place.” Her mother’s manicured finger tapped the business card. “Time has already passed it by.”

Y
our turn, Mrs. Clancy.”

Sadie dropped the dice into Mrs. Clancy’s hands, then stretched back in the cushioned wicker chair to feel the sun on her face. She felt like a snake warming herself on a rock, her belly full of the half quart of orange juice, a banana, and two bagels she’d eaten after rolling out of her soft bed at eleven a.m.

Mrs. Clancy’s bracelets rattled as she tossed the dice across the board. “Hah! I crapped out. How much did I lose?”

“You didn’t lose anything yet. You’ve got a five and a two.” Sadie glanced at the Parcheesi board, stained and warped, with two different colors of wooden elephants in a dead heat for the finish. “You can move both your pieces.”

Mrs. Clancy raised her chin to peer at the board through her reading glasses. “Which one is mine, Sissy?”

“The blue ones are yours.”

Sadie didn’t bother to correct her name. This was the second time Mrs. Clancy had gotten it wrong since Sadie had finished breakfast in the kitchen and come outside, only to find her sitting on the porch perusing a local newspaper. Now she watched Mrs. Clancy pick up a green elephant and move it forward seven spaces, plus a few more. This was the third time they’d switched colors.

She gave Mrs. Clancy a look-over as the older woman reached for the dice out of turn. She was wearing only one earring. There was a stain that looked like ketchup on her Camp Kwenback T-shirt. Under the paisley scarf knotted carelessly at her nape, her wispy hair needed a good brushing. It looked soft and cotton ball white, just like Nana’s.

Sadie felt a sudden ache in her chest, a hollow that no amount of breakfast could fill.

“Snake eyes!” Mrs. Clancy smiled at the dice on the table. “That’s always lucky you know.”

“Lucky?” Sadie pushed each of the blue pieces up a space. “It doesn’t get me very far on the board.”

Then the sliding doors squealed open and Riley edged out, laden with a tray.

“I made your favorite, Mrs. Clancy, Cape Cod chicken salad.” Riley walked to the wicker seating area and nudged the Parcheesi board to make room. “I thought you might be ready for lunch.”

“Just one more minute,” Mrs. Clancy said. “I’m beating Susan in parmesan.”

Riley gave Sadie a smile. “I hope you don’t have money on the game, Sadie. Mrs. Clancy is a shark.”

“Yeah, I’ve noticed.”

Mrs. Clancy threw the dice again. “Hah!” With a sweep, Mrs. Clancy gathered all the elephants to her side. “Better luck next time, kiddo.”

“Maybe Sadie will play another game later, but right now I’m stealing her from you.” Riley raised an eyebrow at her. “After that enormous late breakfast, I figured you and I could use a little trail walk.”

“Sure, I’m game.”

Sadie spoke the words lightly, but there was nothing calm about her nerves. Riley was looking at her like second period had just ended and it was time to hand over the test.
Here comes the grilling.
Sadie just wished she’d left her backpack in a safer place than her upstairs room so she could make—if necessary—a quick escape.

Riley headed down the porch stairs, sweeping up a paintbrush and a small can of paint perched on the rail. “The markers on the red trail need freshening,” she explained, as she headed full stride across the back lawn. “It’s a bit more than a mile, there and back. Are you up for that?”

“Bring it on.” Sadie put her head down and did her best to keep up with Riley’s athletic pace, waiting until they were out of earshot of Mrs. Clancy before launching into a safe topic in the hope of avoiding a dangerous one. “So,” she said, “is Mrs. Clancy a relative of yours?”

“No. Why do you ask?”

“You’re feeding her. That’s a little weird, in a hotel, isn’t it? I mean, do you cook for all your guests?”

Not that there were many, Sadie noted. In all the time she’d been checking out the place, she’d seen no more than four.

“Mrs. Clancy is a special case,” Riley said. “Her whole family used to visit Camp Kwenback every summer for the last two weeks in August. The Clancys have been guests for decades. Mrs. Clancy still has good memories of those summers so her family sends her here for a couple of weeks every year. But there was a time,” she added, “when we used to feed breakfast and dinner to more than fifty guests and ten employees. We didn’t bother with lunch because most folks would be canoeing on the lake or hiking through the woods or swimming at Bay Roberts. They’d go into town and get some of Josey’s maple pecan pie or bag a lunch on their own.”

Riley’s description pretty much synced with what Sadie had supposed long before she’d come here. She’d spent late evenings waiting for her slow computer to upload all those pictures on the Camp Kwenback website: photos of folks eating on tables under the shelter of the boathouse, swinging on ropes in the woods, fishing in rowboats just off shore, and gathering in the main lodge by the fire.

Pictures that had convinced her that the woman who’d wrapped her in the Camp Kwenback towel had to be someone who really loved this place. How else did a towel from some Adirondack camp end up in an Ohio hospital?

Then Sadie thought of another subject she could bring up to avoid the grilling a little longer.

“So, Riley,” Sadie said, as Riley paused before a tree, “do you have a library card?”

“A library card?” Riley ran her fingers over the traces of pale red paint remaining on the furrowed bark. “I guess all those potboilers and romance paperbacks in the lodge aren’t to your taste?”

“Oh, I’ll read
anything.
” The longer and thicker the book, the better. “But I thought I might go to the reference desk of the Pine Lake library and look at the birth announcements in local newspapers or page through some old high school yearbooks.”

“To look for your birth mother.”

The instinct to make some sassy remark was strong but Sadie squished it down. She still needed something from Riley.

Two somethings, really: a library card and time.

Riley pulled at the top of a can of paint until the lid popped. “Don’t you think that’s a stretch, Sadie?”

“Did you forget you’re talking to a girl who chased down a logo on a towel?”

“Yeah, but what do you expect to find?” Riley dipped the brush into the can and then painted one solid, thick line. “They don’t exactly make birth announcements for babies placed for adoption. As for the yearbooks, you’re assuming your birth mother was a local teenager. You’re going to have to try to look past the hairstyles and bad clothing choices for any vague resemblance—”

“It’s a start.”

Riley dipped the paintbrush back in the can and did another coat. Sadie wondered if Riley remembered that you didn’t need a library card to use the reference section. You
did
need a library card to use the computers though, and Sadie really had to find a way to update her online status before her friend Izzy got nervous and started asking questions about her to the wrong people.

“Listen.” Sadie climbed on a log just off the path, throwing out her arms to keep balance. “I’ve been thinking about this for a long time. I figure that the person who had that towel—my birth mother—could be someone who came here every year for vacation. Someone who loved it, like Mrs. Clancy does. But I figure it’s even more likely that it was someone local. Someone more like yourself.” Her face warmed. What an ass she’d made out of herself last night, half blubbering with the hope that Riley would be
the one
. “The town Fourth of July parties used to be held at Camp Kwenback every year, right? And the Labor Day picnics?”

“Wow.” Riley scraped the brush against the inside edge of the can. “I guess you saw the photos upstairs.”

Sadie nodded. Old photos of Camp Kwenback lined the hallway on the upper floor. She’d fogged them up with her own breath this morning, looking for any teeny-tiny face that resembled hers. “My point is,” Sadie said, hopping off the end of the log into a cushion of leaves, “that the library is a good place to continue my search. But…I just need a little time.”

“Ah.”

Sadie tried to read the meaning of Riley’s “ah.”’ She watched as Riley took care in settling the metal top back onto the paint can, tapping it in good with the butt end of the paintbrush.

“I’m not a charity case, you know.” Sadie kicked around a few leaves. “I can pay.”

Riley looked up sharply.

“I’ve been saving up.” She squinted back down the path they’d come on, not in search of a glimpse of the lodge, but just to dodge that look. “I spent a long time planning this.”

“So you did.”

Riley picked up the can by the handle and headed back on the trail, falling into that athletic, loping stride again. Sadie had to walk double fast to keep up, which she did, just to stay beside her so she could glance at Riley from beneath her lashes and try to figure out what the woman was thinking.

“Here’s the thing,” Riley finally said, exhaling deeply. “Most people wait until they’re eighteen to find their birth mother. Then they request a copy of the original birth certificate.”

“Is that what you did?”

Riley stumbled a bit, but Sadie didn’t notice any roots on the ground.

“I was a lot older when I started my search.” Riley gazed in the far distance, though Sadie didn’t see anything ahead but trees and more fuzzy trees. “When I was your age, I was terrified my birth mother would show up and steal me away from my family.”

Sadie remembered that Izzy had said something like that once, before Izzy really understood what the “international” meant in international adoptions, and thus how far away her Chinese birth mother really lived.

“Life was good in my house,” Riley continued. “I have five brothers and sisters. I was on the softball team in high school. I spent summers at this camp, playing with the come-aways—the visitors—and then I worked here as a teenager. I was terrified that a stranger would show up, call herself my mother, and disrupt all that.”

“It didn’t happen, did it?”

“No. But my feelings about my birth mother were so different from yours at the same age…I’m just worried that you’ve set out on this quest for the wrong reasons.”

Here we go.

“The truth is, every teenager looks at herself in the mirror and wonders where she came from.”

Sadie rolled her eyes.

“I saw my sisters do the same thing,” Riley continued, “and they were brought up by their own biological parents—”

“They were just being idiots.” Sadie caught herself. “No offense or anything.”

“None taken.” Riley’s smile was a little sad. “Right now one of them, my sister Olivia, is acting like an incredible idiot.”

“What I meant,” Sadie rushed on, “is that they don’t have any reason to ask those questions. But you and me, we’ve got a mystery in our past, so we have a reason to be curious.”

“Oh, yeah, curiosity. I used to imagine that my father was a professional baseball player. Did you ever do that?”

“Mine was a professor.” She dragged the toe of her sneaker in the needles to kick up a spray. “In my head I could see him, wearing a tweedy coat, round glasses, in a house full of books.”

Riley said, “Once you find your natural parents, you know, you won’t be able to imagine anymore.”

“Imagining is for little kids.”

“And then you’ll get the answer to that other question, the harder one.” Riley looked down at her. “You know the one.”

Why was I given up?

Sadie nodded. The question didn’t need to be spoken aloud. She heard it in her head all the time. The fact that Riley had the same question in her head made Sadie tremble a little, like she and Riley were the two tines of the tuning fork Mrs. Schein sometimes struck in music class.

But that didn’t change her mind.

“Here’s what I figure,” Sadie said. “When I was ten years old, I really,
really
, wanted a puppy.” Sadie remembered the pokey, unsteady mutt she’d wanted so badly, rust brown, licking her hand through the cage at the animal shelter. “But I knew that I couldn’t take care of a dog. Not at that time, anyway, no matter how badly I wanted to.”

Riley paused by another faintly marked tree. “A puppy is a lot of responsibility.”

“Yeah, I heard that a lot.” Sadie could still hear the puppy plaintively yipping as Izzy carried his brother away. Sadie’s arms had felt so empty. “Later that night, while I was lying in bed trying to figure out a way I could keep that puppy, thinking about how much I wanted him…it just kind of hit me. Like when you play dodge ball, and you get hit right in the stomach and you can’t breathe for a little while? My birth mother must have felt the same way I did when I had to leave the puppy behind.”

The can of paint opened with a subtle pop. Sadie watched as Riley swirled the bristles of the brush inside, frowning. She straightened to sweep the color in a block over the old, faded paint. And then Riley stopped painting. She crossed her arms with the brush still in her hand, as the paint oozed to the end and dripped on the forest floor.

“If you find your birth mother,” Riley said, “what are you going to do then?”

“What do you mean?”

“You know you can’t just change one set of parents for another.”

“Like,
duh
.”

“Your family may seem like the enemy now—”

“Oh, please.”

As if her issues had to do with parents who refused to buy her a cell phone, or sign up for a social media account, or buy a hot pair of sneakers. As if Riley knew anything about what she was dealing with.

But, of course, Riley didn’t. Sadie hadn’t told her a thing. It dawned on Sadie that the best way to get Riley to do exactly what she wanted was to tell Riley some small part of the truth.

Sadie closed her eyes and took a long, deep breath.

“I couldn’t exchange my parents,” she said, “even if I wanted to.”

“Oh?”

“I don’t have parents anymore.” She balled her hands into fists. “Both of them are dead.”