Reckless Hearts (2 page)

She flipped her lower lip down, trying to be cute as she made her sad face. When he didn't respond, she said, “Is everything okay?”

“Yeah. I've . . . I just have to lock up the house.” He knew himself. He felt itchy. He had to get away. To go somewhere alone and lick his wounds. “And then I've
got to go. I'm already late meeting Mom. Can you grab that chair?”

Leaving her computer on the lawn, she swung her chair above her head and carried it inside.

When it was time for them to say good-bye, he awkwardly held open his long arms for a hug. She fell into his chest, squeezing him tight, which was nice, but he couldn't bring himself to squeeze her back. He was afraid, if he did, that she'd see through him and learn his real feelings. Instead, he patted her chastely on the back.

“Don't forget us little people,” she said.

“I won't. I'll see you soon,” he said. “I'll call you every day. You'll see.”

Even though Jake
had said nothing would change, by that afternoon, it felt to Elena as though everything already had.

She was trapped at home—her least favorite place to be. Her sister, Nina, had closed the curtains tight across the half-moon living room window, shutting the house in darkness, and she sprawled in her crater on the plush yellow leather couch in front of the TV, shoveling Cool Ranch Doritos into her mouth. She didn't move once. She just lay there, watching episode after episode of
Storage Wars
, which she'd turned up so loud that Elena couldn't hear herself think, much less focus on editing the animation she'd made for Jake. She'd tried hunkering
down in the kitchen. She'd tried locking herself in her bedroom. She'd even tried the bathroom, sitting on the floor with her computer propped on the closed lid of the toilet.

When, finally, Elena tried asking her sister to turn it down, Nina stared, her mouth open just enough to show her disinterest, and said, “I'm pregnant, Elena,” as though that explained anything.

“And I'm trying to work,” Elena responded. “I want to get this anime up on the site tonight.”

Nina shrugged. “So do that, then,” she said. She glared at Elena, challenging her to push the topic. “But I have to keep my feet up, so . . .” She jutted her chin out like she was putting a period on her statement.

Elena knew how this went. Her sister hadn't done much of anything but lie on the couch for the past month. She was overweight—by a lot—and being pregnant bloated her more. Her ankles had swelled when she'd hit her second trimester and her doctor had told her she needed to keep her feet elevated as much as possible. In the past month, Nina had done almost nothing but lie in her command center on the couch, her feet propped on one arm, her head lolling on the other. She wore the same pink Juicy Couture sweatsuit almost every day.

And what was Elena supposed to do? Argue with her? Tell her to get some exercise? Remind her that this
was her house, too? She was pregnant! Being pregnant trumped everything.

“Fine,” Elena said. She gave in, plopped on the tiled floor in front of the white fake Christmas tree draped in so much silver tinsel that the red balls hanging from it were barely visible, and watched the show with her sister.

Not five minutes later, Nina nudged her on the shoulder with a socked foot and said, “Can you get me a Diet Pepsi? Pretty please?” She smiled with a coy helplessness that was as annoying as the question.

“Nina! I'm not your maid,” Elena said.

Nina rubbed her pregnant belly and readjusted the expression on her face to convey her helplessness with more conviction.

“Okay. But only if you turn it down.”

As Nina made a show of playing with the volume buttons on the remote, Elena hopped off the floor and wiped the tinsel off the butt of her jean shorts. She padded around the couch and up the single step into the kitchen area. She grabbed a can from the fridge and faked throwing it at Nina's head before handing it to her.

“Should you really be drinking this while you're pregnant?” Elena asked.

“What's wrong with you today, anyway?” said Nina, defensively. “You're all pissy. If you want to do your thing, go over to Jake's house. You like it better there, anyway.”

“You really don't know?”

Nina's face was blank.

“Today was the day. The movers came this morning.”

“Oh!” said Nina. She reached out and squeezed Elena's shoulder, a quick massage, just enough to convey that she understood how sad this must make her.

“So I can't go over there.”

“Tell you what,” Nina said. “You take the controls. We'll watch what you want today.”

Elena appreciated her sister's gestures toward sympathy and understanding. She knew Nina cared, in her lazy way. But her attempt to comfort her felt more like a burden than a gift. They were just so different. Elena had unending supplies of energy. She liked making stuff, using her imagination to explore her reality and transform it into extravagant cartoons. She liked the sunshine. She liked jangly music played live on the guitar, especially when she was near the ocean and there was maybe a campfire nearby. Her sister just sort of let her life happen to her.

More than anything else, it made her depressed. She hated the thought of being condemned to this house, wasting her life away in front of the TV, shutting down her brain and passively letting the world close in on her.

Of course, she couldn't tell her sister all this. Instead she said, “I don't care what we watch. Whatever you want. It's not like a different show will bring Jake back. Here—” She lobbed the controls back to her sister.

For the next three hours, they sat there, not moving, barely speaking, just staring at the obsessive freaks on the screen as they bid on box after box. Elena felt like a huge metal plate was being pressed down over her head, crushing her, pushing her into the floor. She felt both bored and trapped. She wondered how Nina could live like this all the time.

Then she wondered what was wrong with her that she was so ready to judge her sister—her pregnant sister! Life was just such a disappointment sometimes. Jake would understand how she felt. Jake would know how to make her feel better. But then, if Jake were around she probably wouldn't be feeling this way. She wouldn't even be here! She'd be outside somewhere with him, imagining, like they sometimes did, all the ways that, when Nina's baby was born, the two of them would make sure it had good taste, teaching it about art and music and culture.

Eventually, the familiar sound of her father jangling the spring-loaded clip on which he kept his keys broke the monotony. Elena could hear him futzing with the door before realizing it was already unlocked, and then there he was standing in the room with them, a look of exhaustion and smoldering frustration weighing down his face. His white guayabera shirt was stained with sweat at the armpits and his pleated linen pants had inched under his gut.

He flipped his keys back and forth around his finger,
slapping them repeatedly in the palm of his hand, taking in the situation at the house.

“
Hola
,” he said. “Good to see you're all doing something constructive with your day.”

With three great strides, he moved to the window and dramatically pulled the curtains open, filling the room with streaming evening sunlight. Elena and Nina shot quick wincing glances at each other, blinking in the suddenly bright light and bracing themselves for what was about to come. He was in a mood.
Everybody
was in a mood today.

“What's wrong with you?” Nina said bullishly.

He brushed his hand from the top of his bald head down over his bushy salt-and-pepper mustache, reigning in his thoughts. “What's wrong with me is, one, I've been zipping back and forth from one Super Suds to the other, dealing with all kinds of
mierda
—Selina locked her keys in her car on the south side and I had to open up for her, then the basement flooded on the west side . . .
uno, dos, tres, quatro
. Every single one of my Laundromats had something go wrong today. And then while I'm dealing with all this, what do I get? I get a call from a Mr. Ricardo Colon. You know that name? You should. That's Matty's parole officer—”

At the mention of her boyfriend's name, Nina shot up into a sitting position, ready to fight. “No, no, no, no,” she said, waving her finger at her father. “I'm not his keeper.”

“You see? Why don't you tell me why this Colon guy called me, hey?”

“I don't know,” said Nina, defensively.

“Sure you do. Matty missed his appointment. Matty hasn't been to work. Matty this, Matty that. Matty's blowing it again.” His voice rose a tick with each new item on his list. “Where is he? He heard me coming and snuck out the back door?”

“He's not here,” said Nina.

“Oh? We must have run out of food, hey?” Elena's father shot back.

And then they were both shouting, rapidly, in Spanish. Elena was caught between the two of them, ducking as their words zipped back and forth above her head. She'd
so
had enough of this. All they ever did was fight, and always about Matty.

God, get me out of here
, she thought. But where would she go? She couldn't flee to Jake. It's not like she could ride her bike all the way across town and show up at
Cameron Pendergrass's
estate, begging to be let in. He'd think,
Who's this crazy Cuban girl and why's she on my lawn?

Her dad was stalking around the room now, circling Nina. And Nina was wagging her finger all over the place. Elena couldn't take it anymore.

“Everybody! Shut up for a second!” she said. She leaped to her feet, putting herself physically between
them. Turning to them one at a time, she said, “Dad. Matty hasn't been here all day. I've been sitting right here. I would have seen him. And Nina. Dad's right. You have to get Matty under control. What are you going to do when the baby is born and he disappears for days on end, or shows up drunk in the middle of the night shouting for you to come out and party with him? He's the father of your child. Tell him to get it together. Jeez.”

She didn't usually get involved in their fights like this, and the two of them stared at her in surprise for a beat. Then they turned right back to each other and commenced shouting again.

“You people are hopeless!” Elena said.

But neither of them even heard her. They didn't notice when she slinked out of the room, either. They just kept on yelling. It was almost like they
liked
the drama.

She padded down the hall to her room, feeling with each step how wrong it was to head in this direction, farther into the house, when she should have been moving in the other direction, out into the crisp night air, toward Jake's place next door, where they'd find a way to remind each other that laughing about their troubles always made things better. But she couldn't do that. For the first time since Jake had driven away with his guitar and the duffel bag of clothes in the backseat of his beat-up
old Jeep, which they affectionately called the Rumbler, Elena sadly understood how her life would be different without him living next door.

Locking the dead bolt she'd placed on her door, she sparked up her computer, put on her headphones, and checked out the new animations her virtual friends had posted on AnAmerica, hoping they'd be distracting enough to drown out the drama on the other side of the door.

Jake had never
seen a house quite like this one. It was like something out of a magazine. It had been featured in a magazine, actually.
Luxury
, it was called. Jake had never heard of it, but the name said everything he needed to know. It was hidden from the street by a solid white gate and the first time Jake had seen the surreally lush lawn he'd wondered how many thousands of dollars Cameron spent every month on landscaping. There were no trees, just this vast flat green space perched above the beach and the house sitting there like a sculpture.

From the outside it looked like a set of blindingly white boxes, each one set off-center from the ones above and below it, like children's blocks that had been placed
precariously on top of one another. Inside, it was a cavernous, flowing open space with different platformed levels connected by brushed concrete stairs that seemed to float free in the air.

The interior was so tasteful that there weren't any Christmas decorations, not even a wreath. Jake felt like he was in an art gallery, not someplace people lived. But people did live here. He lived here now. It would take some getting used to.

That first night, as he sat at the hand-carved, blond-wood dining table—positioned in just the right off-angle location in the big oblong main room that was, all by itself, larger than his old house across town—he had the strange feeling that he and his mother and Cameron were guests at a five-star restaurant that only served one party a night.

They were served by a waiter with artfully mussed hair and a carefully untucked linen shirt, which he wore over crisp jeans and white no-brand sneakers. He looked casual but brought their duck confit and shaved fennel salad to the table with regimented efficiency. Jake wished Elena were here to see it—he could imagine the arched eyebrow she'd throw his way, the way she'd poke him under the table and slowly twist her silver custard spoon in the air, studying it like a mystifying artifact from an alien civilization until she finally got Jake to chuckle over the pomposity that was surrounding him.

Cameron didn't seem to notice the waiter was even there. He held court, telling stories about the various adventures he'd had over the years, most of them involving the yacht he owned and small islands in the Caribbean. He was a small guy with big hair, a smaller guy than he seemed like he should be, given how much space he took up. He was the kind of man who never buttoned the top two buttons of his shirt, even when he wore a suit. Throughout the meal, he'd been leaning all over his seat and sprawling into the empty chair next to him, stretching his arms and legs out like he was inviting everyone to take their shoes off and chill.

“So, we looked out from the top of the cliff and Wickman points toward the bay and says, ‘Hey, check it out. Someone's boat is floating away,'” Cameron was saying now. “And I look, and holy fuck. It's
my
boat!”

Jake could tell his mom was in awe of him, that this new life she'd pulled Jake into was a kind of fantasy to her, a life of stylish leisure that she'd always dreamed of. The way she gazed at him, her chin on her hand, barely blinking her big blue eyes—it was like she was disappearing into his aura. Cameron hardly noticed how starstruck she was. He seemed to assume that women would respond to him this way.

“It was drifting sideways, a good hundred yards out already. The bay was so deep that the anchor hadn't reached the bottom. So we had no choice, we had to
dive. Operation Save the Boat. My first foray into extreme sports.”

Pouring with one hand while gesticulating and illustrating his story with the other, he almost unnoticeably kept Jake's mom's wineglass full of pinot gris.

Jake quietly took it all in, trying to make sense of his new reality. His mom's romance with Cameron Pendergrass had been a whirlwind of frantic change. She'd met him only four months ago, when he'd hired Tiki Tiki Java to cater a reception at StarFish, the glitzy hotel he owned in Dream Point. Jake had barely met the guy before they'd suddenly gotten engaged and then, two weeks later, married, in a secret ceremony that not even Jake had been invited to on that yacht somewhere off the coast of St. John. He was happy for his mom, of course. She'd been lonely for a long, long time. But he was baffled by how to relate to Cameron. The guy intimidated him.

“You want a pour?” Cameron asked Jake, pointing the half-empty wine bottle at Jake's glass.

Jake glanced at his mother, who subtly shook her head no. “No thank you, sir,” he said.

“It's Cameron to you, Jake. We're family now.”

A voice from the other side of the room called out, “I'll have a glass. Since you're offering.”

Everyone turned to see a guy Jake's age leaning against the wall near the front door to the house like
he'd been there for a while, watching them. He was tall, though not as tall as Jake, and fit under his formfitting rich-navy-blue T-shirt in a metrosexual way. He had stylishly cut blond hair and was wearing sunglasses that must have cost as much as Jake's car.

The way Jake's mom lightly touched Cameron's hand, as though to brace him and calm his nerves, made Jake think that the guy wasn't welcome. He wondered who he was and how he'd gotten here.

“Glad you could make it,” Cameron said. “You're only, oh”—he made a show of checking his Omega watch—“two hours late.”

When the guy smirked it was like he was flashing a switchblade. “Well, you know, anything for you, Cameron,” he said. “How 'bout that wine?”

He sauntered toward the table like he owned the place and the waiter appeared out of nowhere to silently set a fourth place setting at the table.

As Cameron grudgingly poured a dollop of wine into the glass that had appeared with the new place setting, Jake caught his mother's eye and mouthed,
Who's that?

She cleared her throat. “Jake, this is Nathaniel. Cameron's son. He's in town from the Roderick School in Atlanta. Nathaniel, this is my son, Jake.”

With a flourish, Nathaniel reached out his hand to shake. “How are you,” he said, and then after a pause he added, “brother.”

His grip was a vise, like he'd been told by someone—Jake couldn't imagine it would have been laid-back Cameron—that a firm handshake was the key to success in the world and he'd turned this wisdom into a competitive dare.

“Sorry I'm late,” he said, glancing at his father. “I had, you know, other things to do.”

Cameron patted him on the back, shot him a sharp glance, and said, “You'll do better next time.”

Jake's mom chimed in. She'd always been good at playing the gracious hostess. “We're just glad you could make it at all,” she said. “It means a lot to your father. And I can say, for me, I've been dying to meet you since he first mentioned you.”

“Oh,” Nathaniel said drolly, “he mentioned me?”

“Of course he did. He loves you, Nathaniel.” She gave Cameron's hand one last pat and then withdrew her own hand back into her lap.

Nathaniel grinned at this, showing off his sharp white teeth, and seeming, briefly, touched by what he'd heard. “Aww. Shucks,” he said.

The tension between Cameron and Nathaniel was overpowering. Jake could sense it in the way Cameron subtly adjusted his posture to make more room between himself and his son. He could feel it in the sharp end to Nathaniel's charm, the way he was displaying his refusal to defer to his father.

He again wished Elena could be here to see this. He tried to imagine her making one of her silly faces at him, secretly letting him know she was noticing the same weirdness he was and reminding him simply by sticking out her tongue that he shouldn't take it too seriously.

“Now—” Nathaniel took a swig of wine, downing the small amount his father had allowed him in one swallow. “That cliff. It was a hundred-foot sheer drop. The water was so clear that you could see the floor. I have this right, Cameron? Should I tell them how it ends? They survived. They saved the boat. That's Cameron for you. He'll do anything to save that boat.” He raised his empty glass and said, “But cheers to that, hey?”

Cameron met his challenge and graciously, indulgently, touched glasses with him. “Cheers to that,” he said.

Jake got the sense that Cameron could squash Nathaniel any time he wanted and it was just his good heart that stopped him from doing so. He wondered what had brought the two of them to this point, and how long their antagonism had persisted. Nathaniel's behavior didn't seem like the usual teenaged rebellion.

It felt uncomfortable just being in the room with them. There was a story here, a lifetime of resentments and secrets that Jake might never know. If Elena were here, she'd be taking mental notes so they could go over it all together later, dreaming up explanations filled
with dangerous intrigue. But she wasn't here. And even though she was just a couple miles across town, she seemed farther away than she ever had. It struck him that this was the first time in forever that he'd have spent an evening away from her.