Lies of the Heart Page 4

  The late-afternoon sun made a perfect spotlight for her sister, highlighting the thick auburn hair that framed her delicate face, turning her light brown eyes almost green as she stared up at Michael. Katie watched as Michael turned Dana’s hand around, leaned down and pressed his lips into her palm, half serious, half for effect; her relatives murmured their approval anyway, their faces bright and knowing.

  —Dana pretty, Jerry would always say here, the sigh in his voice suspiciously familiar, like the sighs of the boys who had paraded in and out of their house from the time Dana was thirteen until she went away to college.

  —Yes, Katie would say simply.—Dana has always been beautiful.

  That afternoon Katie waited patiently until the crowd dispersed a little, and then she walked over, gave Dana a sticky hug.

  Lucky, Katie accused in her sister’s ear.

  You, too, Dana whispered with feeling, and Katie instantly knew what her older sister meant: Someday you’ll be lucky, too. You’ll meet him even if it doesn’t feel like it now.

  Where’s Mom? Katie asked, pulling away, and Dana smiled, pointed to the back door: inside the kitchen still, micromanaging food and drinks and her own sisters, bossing around their aunts and everyone else and then doing it all herself anyway.

  After the burgers and antipasto and endless platters of food, after the toasts and gifts and thank-you speeches, Katie retreated under the tree again, thinking of ways to stay out of her mother’s direct path until she headed back to school that night—leaving behind the unspoken but always present accusation that she was wasting her time, because a degree in filmmaking was useless in the real world. It didn’t help any either that Katie was already twenty-two and taking extra time to finish because of a disastrous semester of mono and dropped classes: ever since the announcement a few months ago that she wouldn’t be graduating in June, that she had to take a summer class and then return in the fall, her mother had hinted endlessly at Dana’s tireless work ethic—finishing her master’s in social work at twenty-three, a year early! And now four straight years with the same agency, and not a single personal day! Her father had only smiled patiently at Katie, winked at her. Said later, when their mother left the room, It’s okay, sweetie, you know how your mother gets.

  Dana’s exaggerated coughing interrupted Katie’s cloudy plans of avoidance; she looked up, saw her sister pointing, her eyes wide with warning: their mother was barreling out of the house, had finally given up her oven mitts and spoons and directives and was pushing her way through the crowd. Small and compact, her dark hair rolled up on top of her head, she charged forward, searching the yard. Her mother had held back long enough.

  Has anyone seen Katie? she demanded from no one in particular.

  The people stationed around the grill with Katie’s father were shrugging, watching her determined progress through the backyard. Her mother ignored them all, eagle eyes roaming.

  Katie knew that look—she rose quickly, caught Dana’s eye again. Gave her sister the customary grimace and eye roll, and then they held each other’s glance for a moment. Dana waved her away—Go, go, it’s almost over anyhow—and then Katie was moving fast, ducking around the side of the house and heading for her car. There was a party on Patience Island tonight—her friends Jill and Amy had called and told her about it this morning—and while she hadn’t had the slightest desire to go then, it sounded like the perfect plan now. Maybe she could still catch up with them before they left the marina.

  She jumped into her car, cast one look back. Imagined her mother’s indignant voice over the phone tomorrow or the next day, the miles between them collapsing: You went where? I can’t believe you just left without saying good-bye, for God’s sake! Your father almost had a conniption!

  —Chance? Jerry would ask here, and Katie would smile.

  —Yes, she’d say, and she shivered just a little, each time.—Nick and I met completely by chance.

  She told Jerry this story so often that it became his, too. Meeting Nick again and again with Katie, their story merging effortlessly with Jerry’s over time.

  And maybe this is why Nick won’t leave her, why he comes back to her even in the smallest moments she should be able to claim for herself: she had offered the discovery of Nick, and of Nick’s love, to Jerry without question. She stands in her kitchen, sipping her coffee, and hears Jerry’s excited voice:

  —More, Katie. You tell more.

  Yes, she thinks now, placing the mug on the counter. She had given Nick to him right from the start.

  3

  Katie and her friends flew across the bay, the bow of the boat slapping up and down as they crashed through the gray, choppy water on their way to Patience Island.

  —Your mother is going to freak! Jill shouted over the engine and churning water, her long hair flying around her face.

  Behind the wheel, Amy shook her head, grinning.—No shit, Katie, are you crazy?

  Katie grinned back at her friends, shrugged. Two beers and skidding across the ocean made her brave, but she wasn’t stupid: there would be a withering phone call tomorrow or the next day, a punishingly long Memorial Day weekend at her parents’ coming up. But for now she just laughed and opened another button on her shirt so the still-cold ocean could spray against her skin. Feeling powerful and free and reveling in the commiserating laughter of friends who had spent their teenage years terrified of her mother, even when they weren’t doing anything wrong.

  It was about an hour before sunset when they beached the boat beside four others on the pebbly shore of Patience Island. They hopped out with their beer and ice, joined the crowd milling near a long row of coolers set up on a small dune. Two guys started stacking wood on the sand, and Katie and her friends helped gather the tall grass beyond the dune to ignite a fire.

  —Look at that one, Jill said, elbowing Katie.

  He was tall and blond and tan, and when he looked at them, he tilted his head to the side with a “these are my teeth” smile. Before Katie and her friends went off to set up their blanket on the narrow beach, he caught Katie’s eye, nodded at her in a way that said he appreciated more than her pulling up dead grass. She caught the surprised looks between Jill and Amy, pretended not to notice or care about this unexpected switch in the natural pecking order: Jill chosen first, always first, because of the cascading strawberry-blond hair and big blue eyes, the easy, quick laughter. And then Amy next, with her athletic body, her bold teasing. As early as junior high, this order was established—Katie last, and sometimes not even that, which gave the other two a chance to be benevolent, to happily sympathize with her the next day. Guys are such idiots anyway. You didn’t miss a thing. Katie always laughed it off, told them she didn’t mind a bit, because back then it really was okay at times just to have two friends sitting close, declaring their loyalty. It would have been way more fun if we stayed in and watched a movie with you, they’d tell her, and Katie accepted the lie for what it was—a compliment nonetheless.

  The smiling guy wandered over to their blanket later, just before sunset, and introduced himself: Dave, a native southerner staying with cousins for the summer and waitering at the Coast Guard House in Narragansett Beach.

  —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 immedia
tely: 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.

&nbs
p; —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.