Reckless Hearts

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.

3

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.

4

Even with her headphones on and the volume turned up as high as it would go, Elena could hear her father and sister going at it on the other side of her locked bed-room door.

Sitting at the drafting table she used as a desk, she tried to ignore them, to fill her headspace up with the new clips her friends on AnAmerica had uploaded. There was a spoof of Hello Kitty by EvilTwin82 in which the cute pillowy cat was mutilated into a cartoonish sea of blood. There was an amusing journey through the daily life of an ant by NaNo_NoLa. An abstract dance of colored lights choreographed to a Yo-Yo Ma song by CelloMello. Another installment in the ongoing saga of “The 98-Pound Weakling” by ImNotNervous. But none of them held her attention the way she needed. None of them could compete with the never-ending soap opera of her family.

They were arguing over the remote now. Her dad was saying something about the Heat, how there was a crucial game against the Pacers tonight and no way was he going to let Nina stop him from watching it, even if she was pregnant. Elena didn’t even want to know.

She watched a clip of a crime-fighting dog and cat who solved their cases, usually involving evil squirrels, by accident as they chased each other around the neighborhood. She liked this one. FranSolo was the name of the girl who’d created it. Elena wrote a comment on her page. “I always knew those squirrels were up to no good!”

Having run out of clips to watch, she got down to work uploading her new animation—the one she’d made for Jake—to the site.

Electra, her online tag, was a kind of celebrity on AnAmerica, and she knew a lot of love would be coming her way soon. With nothing better to do with herself, she sat back and stared at the screen, waiting for the outpouring of likes and comments to rack up under her new clip.

And here they came. One, two, three, fifteen, twenty, twenty-five likes. It felt good to see them every time, though she didn’t know why—it’s not like they really meant anything. The comments started rolling in.

“Toy Story is the best movie ever!”

“So sorry to hear Jaybird is moving away!”

“Very cool, Electra!”

As usual, everyone was so nice to her here. So why did she still feel so empty inside? Stupid question. She knew why.

The sound of the basketball game blasted from the TV in the other room. And her father’s voice: “So go somewhere else, Nina. It’s not like you forgot how to walk when you got pregnant.”

She whipped out her phone and shot a text to Jake. “YOUR VIDEO IS LIVE.” Then she immediately sent him another one. “I MISS YOU!”

His response came within seconds. “I MISS YOU TOO! RICH PEOPLE ARE WEIRD!”

For the first time all evening she felt in some small way connected to the world.

5

Jake had trained himself to know when a new song was coming on. He could feel the rhythm in the fingers on his strumming hand. He’d unconsciously start miming out the chords and catching strings of lyrics in his mind. He’d learned to take note of these phenomena, to mark them and memorize them and hold them tight until he could begin doodling around them and teasing them into a musical form. Or better, to drop what he was doing immediately and follow the music wherever it was leading.

And tonight, after that uncomfortable dinner, he’d caught sight of the night view of the ocean from his new bedroom window for the first time—all that endless black water beyond the gray moonlit dunes—and known a sweet and slightly sad new melody was beginning to form in him.

Sitting on an unpacked box, surrounded by stacks of other unpacked boxes, he strummed at his favorite guitar, a worn old Gibson his father had given him way back when he was twelve, and tested various chord progressions. He had two phrases in his head—everything a boy could want, everything but you and don’t let the sea wash me away. He knew they went together but he hadn’t figured out exactly how.

He gazed out the window again and studied the way the blackness of the sky met the even darker blackness of the water. A new line came to him. I carved your name in the sand with a stick. Maybe it could be the first line. He tested the line out, fingerpicking in a slow minor key beneath it.

To inspire himself, he’d propped his computer on one of the stacks of boxes and pulled up Elena’s AnAmerica page. Her talent, and the energy she put into developing it, always inspired him. He had a notion that this song could be a response to the beautiful video she’d made for him, though he still wasn’t sure if he’d admit this to her. For now, it might be better to continue pretending he was pining for “Sarah,” the free-spirited Key West beach bunny he’d invented to explain to her where all his love songs were coming from.

A new fragment came to him as he stared at her page: don’t hate me for loving you. He knew this one would find its way into the song. It was the most honest line so far. It described what was going on inside him exactly.

Don’t hate me for loving you

Oh-o’delay

Don’t let the sea wash me away

Maybe that could be the chorus. It was a start.

He sang the lines again and again, changing his intonation and phrasing in little ways, running through the possible variations in search of the perfect version.

When he looked up from his guitar again, he was startled to see Nathaniel sitting on the sleek Scandanavian dresser across the room, slouching against the wall, smirking at him. His feet dangled off the edge and he tapped the drawers rhythmically with the heel of his polished black shoe. He seemed nervous, like there was a bundle of energy trapped inside him, bucking against his skin, trying to get out.

“Not bad,” he said. “Where’d you learn to pick like that?”

Jake clutched his guitar as though he could hide the music he’d been making. He didn’t like being distracted when he was composing. But like everything else about this foreign house, the bedroom didn’t feel like it belonged to him enough for him to tell Nathaniel to leave.

“I … My dad’s a musician,” he said. “He taught me.”

“Oh yeah?” said Nathaniel. “Have I heard of him?”

In his right hand, Nathaniel held an ornately decorated silver flask that had been inlaid with an image of a stalking tiger, delicately carved in ivory. He raised it to his lips and poured a nip of whatever it contained into his mouth as he waited for Jake to respond.

“He used to be in a band. Hope Springs. Kind of folky-bluesy stuff. They had a song called ‘Dandelions.’ You might have heard that one.”

“That song was huge. That guy’s your dad?”

“It wasn’t that huge. Nobody got rich off it. It went to number eighty-six.”

Jake glanced at his guitar, wishing he could get back to work.

“Still …” Nathaniel warbled a few lines of the chorus to Jake’s dad’s minor claim to fame. Then, tipping the flask toward Jake, he said, “Want some forty-year-old, oak-cask rum?”

Jake shook his head no, but then realizing that since Nathaniel showed no signs of leaving, he wouldn’t be getting any more work done on the song, he changed his mind. He felt like he should probably get to know his new stepbrother, anyway. “Know what, sure,” he said.

Popping down from the dresser, Nathaniel handed Jake the flask. The ivory inlay was impossibly intricate. It depicted some sort of Chinese landscape complete with mountaintop and weeping trees and a wise old man with a cane climbing a lonely path.

“How do you like the room?” Nathaniel asked, wandering around and poking his nose in the various boxes Jake had opened but not unpacked.

“It’s okay, I gu—”

Cutting him off, Nathaniel went on. “It used to be mine. That dresser? Mine. That bed? Mine. That bookshelf? Mine. I guess what’s mine is yours now, though, brother. Enjoy it.”

This was news to Jake. “They gave me your room?” he said, wincing at the burn as the rum hit his throat.

He felt a tug of guilt over having taken Nathaniel’s room, though Nathaniel didn’t seem all that upset about it. He just kept on poking around in the boxes, lifting things out to study them and then putting them back.

“Fuck it. That’s what happens when you don’t come home for two years.”

Every new detail Jake learned about this guy led to a hundred more questions. “Two years. Wow. That’s a long time. You didn’t come home once?”

Nathaniel threw him a look as if to say, Isn’t it obvious? “You’ll see,” he said. “Once you know Cameron like I do, you won’t be asking questions like that.” He peered at the screen of Jake’s computer. “Who’s this?”

Jake blushed. He felt exposed, like just having Elena’s profile open like this was a betrayal of the secrets of his heart. Instead of answering, he said, “Did something happen between the two of you?”

“You’re hilarious,” Nathaniel said. He took the flask back and downed a large shot of rum. “He’s my father. Is that not enough?” He went back to studying Elena’s profile. “Electra. And that makes you Jaybird.”

Jake could tell that he shouldn’t push the topic too hard, but he had to ask. “Why aren’t there any photos of you anywhere? I mean, I didn’t even know you existed. That’s sort of weird.”

“Ask Cameron, not me.” Nathaniel pulled up a box and sat in front of Jake. “Let’s talk about Electra. She’s obviously much more interesting to you than the ongoing saga of Nathaniel and Cameron. That song you’re writing for her is pretty sweet. But eventually you’re going to have to come clean with her.”

Just the thought of telling Elena how he felt made Jake’s heart swell until it almost cracked in half. Immediately defensive, he said, “She’s my friend, that’s all.”