Lies of the Heart (6 page)

—Y’all should come in sometime, he said to them, then looked meaningfully at Katie, his eyes skipping to her open shirt. She nodded, tugging her shirt closed, and thought of the dozens of girls in bikinis and barely-there skirts he’d be waiting on all summer, girls who would giggle and sigh at his accent and then write their phone numbers on checks and cocktail napkins and his tanned arms. Dave stayed by her side for about twenty minutes, just enough time for Katie to hope, to make hazy plans inside her head to come home for the weekends, enough time for Jill and Amy to wander away for more beer even though their bottles were still half full. Just enough time for a stumbling, blushing girl in tight shorts to trip over their blanket.

Within minutes Dave was disappearing into the tall brush to help the girl look for her earring, and Katie understood immediately: he wasn’t coming back.

She sat on the blanket alone, facing the channel that separated Patience and Prudence islands, and watched the sun turn the sky a rusty haze before sinking below the horizon. Her legs and arms bumped up whenever a warm breeze whistled gently between the islands, and she listened to the sounds of the emerging night: frogs burping into the descending darkness, the buzzing of nighttime bugs just waking, the distant, colorful carnival music from the Rocky Point Amusement Park that traveled to her on the wind. There, in the dusky light on the far eastern shore of the mainland, the red and blue and yellow lights of the Ferris wheel blinked on and off as it circled into the sky. Sitting there with her arms around her knees, Katie suddenly remembered what it was like to be ten again, sitting in one of the rectangular rocking chairs with Dana’s protective arm around her, slurping something sticky and pink. Thinking she could see the whole world from up there—the whole big, hopeful world that was just waiting for Katie to grow up and be a part of it like her popular teenage sister.

She pictured Dana then, and her family clapping, saw again the admiration and love in their eyes. Dana deserved it all, she really did, but it was hard being Dana’s little sister sometimes, now and growing up—Dana just enough older to be a protector, a role model instead of a playmate. The beautiful, accomplished older sister who would hit the milestones first—the A’s in school, making the cheerleading squad, dating boys who called nonstop and showed up with yearning faces. These five years too much for any true companionship or secret-sharing, and then not enough when it seemed to count: the memory of Dana’s accomplishments overshadowing the little sister who was a whiz at writing essays in her English and history classes, who was asked twice to tutor her classmates; the little sister who was smart and pretty, too, but not
quite
as pretty as Dana at that age, who didn’t make friends quite so easily and who wasn’t as friendly or
something
Katie could never name.

—Such a smart, thoughtufl girl, her aunt Ginny said once, cupping Katie’s chin in her hand, and Katie turned to her mother, saw her benign smile. A look that said,
Of course my Katie is smart,
but revealed little else.

Katie had spent years watching her family admire Dana, listening to their whispers (
Keep your eye on this one, Such a special girl
), and even if she agreed with them, she hated the jealousy—and then the shame—their words and looks could summon. Maybe, Katie thought now, it was this devotion that gave Dana her poise, her confidence and ease with the world, because Katie never felt that ease—not at school, even when she was singled out, or with her family, and especially not with her mother, whose critical eye would find Katie wandering away by herself, on the outskirts of their family still; the perennial outsider lurking on the fringes, looking in.—You need to make more of an effort, her mother said often back then and even now, and Katie would nod, knowing that her mother was right—wanting so badly to be different, to be
better.
Still, as much as she wished for this, as much as she loved Dana, she also wished her older sister didn’t shine so brightly, didn’t pull everything and everyone into her orbit so completely.

Katie turned away from the colored lights of Rocky Point, looked down the beach. About a hundred feet away, the fire snapped and popped into the sky, smoke and wispy ashes wavering in and out of the flames. Farther along, on the other side of the fire, the boats tipped back and forth on the shore, slowly losing ground. Katie couldn’t see Jill or Amy in the mass of moving, swaying bodies, couldn’t hear their voices in the shouting and laughter and clinking of bottles. Probably hooking up already, she thought, and tilted her head back to scan the dark sky. Just as in childhood, and later as a teenager, Katie would cast her eyes upward like this, wondering if God could see her. Wondering now if He noticed her sitting there, thinking too much again, tired of waiting for love to come—hoping He might finally show her how to make her life feel important anyway, to make it begin.

But even God was a million miles away tonight, His eyes skipping over Katie, missing her there in the dark with her feet plunged into the cold sand, wishing for
more.
She listened to the small waves curling onto the shore, the plink of restless fish cresting the water, and then the loneliness flooded back to her, too fast, like it always did: alone again, always alone, it seemed, even when she was in a crowd. She wanted so much, so little, it made her body hurt.

But she wouldn’t cry.

She wouldn’t be one of
those
girls, the kind who drunkenly sobbed at parties, splotchy-faced and leaking mascara, stumbling into their friends’ arms. In high school and even during the past four years of college, there was always one at every party, and Katie wasn’t sure what bothered her more: the crying girl and her need to be publicly petted and consoled, or the friends who ushered this girl away with too-serious faces, with hooded looks thrown over their shoulders to see who was interested in the unfolding drama. Katie prided herself on never being that girl, on never needing Jill and Amy or anyone to console her, drunk or otherwise, and she knew, even long ago in the eighth grade when she first met her friends, that this was part of her allure: Katie accepted life with barely a complaint, was easy to be around because she demanded so little most of the time. Even when they were in high school, and Amy and Jill had one of their epic fights and went to Katie to bitch about the other one, Katie simply listened and soothed and kept most of her own sadness and frustrations about life to herself. Always accepting, later, how her friends seemed to make up magically—Amy pulling in to the driveway with Jill already in the passenger seat, even though Katie lived closer, right around the corner from Amy.

—Pretty girls, her mother said once when they pulled up. But not great beauties. Katie knowing what left unsaid (
not stunning like Dana)
watching the same unhappiness cloud her mother’s face ever since Dana had left for college. Seeing this made Katie grateful once again for meeting Jill and Amy so soon after Dana had left, when so much was missing in their house, when her mother would walk through rooms, sighing. And while Katie had always recognized that her friends were just very pretty girls and not gorgeous like her sister, when she saw Jill there in the front seat, she knew: it didn’t matter what they looked like, or how much the guys preferred them because of their boldness, their spunky self-assurance, because even in their intimate circle of three, Katie was sometimes the third wheel.

Stop it,
she thought now.
Stop feeling so damned sorry for yourself!

She heard the rumble of the engine first, saw the quahogging skiff slicing through the dark water at the last minute; the engine cut off, and it slid onto the shore alongside the other boats beyond the fire. It was too dark to see much, but when the wind shifted and the embers and smoke from the fire cleared momentarily, she saw the guy on the boat—tall, dark-haired, shirtless. He was wearing jeans, and when he hopped up onto the bow, she saw that he was barefoot. Heads turned, a few hands went up in greeting as he hopped off the skiff. He grabbed a roped anchor off the bow, walked up the beach a ways, dug the prongs deep into the sand. When the crowd shifted, blocking her view, Katie sat up on her knees, straining to catch another glimpse.

She watched this man, crouched down now, his cupped hands pulling sand up against the anchor; she watched the muscles in his back, the way they moved in the light and shadows of the fire; she watched the dark curls slip up and down the nape of his neck; she watched him. Something slow and liquid and warm formed inside her stomach, expanded gradually throughout her body.

—Nick! someone yelled.

He walked toward the crowd slowly, restlessly, as if he were already forming a plan to escape. If he kept walking in this direction, Katie thought, if he ignored the crowd and walked straight through the fire and kept going, he’d walk right up to her.

She watched him. Waited.

The bonfire had burned down to a small pile of crackling embers, the laughter quiet and conspiratorial now. Couples wandered to the other side of the island or sat in the sand, hands exploring. Jill and Amy had disappeared long ago, too, but Katie had to get back to school.

—Will you hold these? Nick asked her, and Katie nodded, took the keys to his skiff and squeezed them hard. Her heart was beating out of control, and she tried to laugh at herself—stupid, it was just a ride back to the marina.

In the two hours they had sat beside each other, watching the crowd and listening to the drunken banter, they’d exchanged only the basics. Yes, she was a student in filmmaking, and she was going back tonight because she was taking a summer class; he, too, was a student, just finishing his master’s degree in speech pathology. She was twenty-two, he twenty-five. And then, after a prolonged silence, Katie had turned to him, surprised herself. Said, without censoring herself for once, how she wished she were somewhere else tonight but couldn’t really say where; how it always seemed this way, but one day she hoped she’d know exactly where she wanted to be. Her heart beat painfully inside her chest as she spoke. But Nick had only nodded pensively at these words, kept his dark eyes on hers longer than before. Like he understood exactly how this felt.

And now he was taking her back to the marina, where she had parked her car, and in a few minutes they would be completely alone.

Yes, she had been alone with men before, had twice allowed clumsy gestures to lead to sex, but both times it was the same; instead of feeling closer to them, instead of discovering her own body through their touch, she felt as if every move, every whisper and kiss, had been studied and practiced before, and that she was simply there as a part of their ongoing training.

And now Nick.

Standing above her there on the bow, coiling the anchor rope around his arm. She could feel him—she could feel
herself
—in every inch of her body, in every nerve ending, in her pulsing blood and skin and teeth and even in her hair and fingernails. Just watching him made her body feel like it was becoming her own, and her mind quickly took inventory of places she’d barely considered before: the dip in the small of her back, the tender skin around her ankles, the soft indents behind her ears. She imagined Nick discovering them with her, his fingers tracing those places, how his touch would help her finally own them
. Is this what love does to you?
she wondered, shaking her head. She wanted to laugh it off as childish, to remember that she had met him only two hours before, but there was the wind blowing against the backs of her knees and in an instant she pictured Nick kneeling down, caressing her slowly there, his eyes studying those small spaces on her body. A shiver at the base of her spine grew and traveled upward. Katie wanted to bolt into the tall brush and hide, she wanted to jump up and down and call out to her friends, she wanted to race headlong into the dark water and disappear into the perfect circle of moonlight that wrinkled in the water between the two islands.

Nick pushed his quahogging skiff back into the water, head bent forward, arms straining; he didn’t ask for Katie’s help, she didn’t offer it. When he was knee-deep in water, he put a foot on the ladder, pulled himself up, and hopped on board. He turned back without smiling, held out his hand to her.

She waded into the water, the cold, liquid circles climbing her legs, and placed an unsteady foot on the ladder. She reached for him, and he pulled her up and inside, held her elbow steady as she stepped beside him.

—Careful of the quahog rake, he said, motioning with his chin at the seaweed-covered claws.

He took the keys from her, moved to the dash, started the boat. The engine hummed to life, the low bubble of the engine vibrating in her heels and up into her ankles.

—Hold on, he said, flicking his eyes to the water, so she moved beside him and held on to the metal bar right above the dash. Nick pointed the boat toward the lights of Rocky Point, and then the bow was lifting and they were gliding over the water in silence. Only then did she remember Jill and Amy, how she hadn’t tried to get word to them that she was leaving.