Reckless Hearts

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.

3 (#ulink_a29980db-0d76-51f9-9bc8-7deb27709b42)

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!”