Lies and Lullabies

by Bowen, Sarina

  “Can I ask you a favor?” I said the third time I found him relaxing on the porch an hour after he’d eaten his dinner.

  “Shoot.”

  “If you’re walking back to the B&B, can we walk together?” I’d been nervous to ask, so all my words tumbled out in a rush. “There hasn’t been a… mugging here for years. But I’m creeped out anyway. And I asked the guy at Kreemy Kone to walk me home a couple of times, but he thinks I’m hitting on him.”

  John laughed. “The teenager who wears that Metallica T-shirt with the arms cut off? He ought to know better than to think you’re hitting on him.”

  “You’d think.” I smiled at him to cover my own embarrassment.

  “Happy to help,” he said, rising to go.

  And that’s how our friendship began. Never mind that he was devilishly handsome, with wind-tossed hair and a sinful mouth. Even though he let his beard grow out all summer, that brilliant level of attractiveness could not easily be dimmed.

  I’d begun to worship him even before June turned into July. But we remained strictly friendly, even as our chats grew longer, night by night. Instead of walking home after the store closed, I began sitting with him at the table. Sometimes he bought a six-pack of beer and we’d drink it on the porch after I locked up. We spent hours just shooting the breeze and talking about our lives.

  Of course, John/Jonas left out some very crucial details. In the beginning, I left out a few doozies, too.

  Even so, we never lacked for conversation. I told him that I was majoring in hospitality. “Although I hate that word,” I said with a giggle. A giggle! Like a school girl. But it was hard to keep my head when he was nearby. “I want to open a restaurant someday.”

  “If you’re opening a restaurant, I’m eating there,” he promised.

  He told me he was a composer in Seattle. That explained the strains of the guitar that I often heard drifting into my window in the morning. Or late into the night. He had the most beautiful hands, with long, supple fingers. I was dying to watch him play the guitar, but he never volunteered, and I was too chicken to ask.

  Even if I’d managed to gather enough courage to ask for a private concert, I still wouldn’t have figured out the man playing the guitar had already been nicknamed “the golden kid,” by Rolling Stone. Or that his first album had been compared to early work by U2.

  He was just a guy named John, who I was crushing on.

  One evening, he bought a Maine souvenir pack of playing cards. That’s when we started playing rummy and canasta on the rickety little porch table. The card games somehow made my secrets flow faster. I told him that my on-again off-again high school boyfriend would soon be back from a two-year deployment in Afghanistan, and that I wasn’t sure I wanted to get back together. But I was considering it.

  And John confessed that he’d just been dumped by his girlfriend.

  “She… left you?” I asked, disbelieving. Even then, when I had no idea that the man sitting in front of me was a rock star, it was impossible for me to imagine a woman rejecting him. Not only was he outrageously sexy, but there was a light in his eyes that I knew was special. He was smart, as well as warm and funny. How could any girl turn that away?

  “Well, I was a rat bastard,” he admitted, his voice low.

  “Maybe you just slipped up once?” I asked, embarrassed for him.

  “Nope. Honestly, I’ve been going through a dark time. I would have dumped me, too. I don’t even know if she ever loved me.”

  I was dumbfounded. “Then why are you…?”

  “Thinking about her?” He smiled ruefully. “I don’t know. Maybe I don’t want to be the jerk she’s accused me of being. Maybe I want to call her when I get back, just to let her know that I’m not the thoughtless whore she thinks I am.”

  “Maybe she’ll take you back,” I said. And he just shrugged, like it didn’t matter.

  But after that, I was careful to keep the discussion away from girlfriends or sex. Because I didn’t want him to read my raging crush right off my face.

  Each night, after our card game, or a stroll by the moonlit lake, he walked me fifty yards past the B&B, to my front door. Sometimes we’d pass Mrs. Wetzle sitting on the front porch of the B&B. I didn’t appreciate the way the old woman stared at us as we walked by. It made me feel oddly guilty. Like I was a teenager again, and out past curfew.

  “She doesn’t like me,” John whispered under his breath. “She actually said, ‘If I’d known you were a musician, I wouldn’t have rented you the room.’”

  “That’s weird.”

  “Yeah. I mean… it’s not like I’m practicing drum solos, you know? It’s just a little strumming here and there.”

  I stopped myself from saying how much I enjoyed hearing the sound of his guitar on the nighttime breeze. I had my pride to maintain. “She’s a little judgmental,” I whispered instead.

  And it was true. I’d already experienced Mrs. Wetzle’s judgment firsthand.

  When I’d decided to take a semester off after being attacked in Boston, I’d begun helping my father with the grocery deliveries. My ugly little story got around town awfully fast, as these things always do. The first time I brought a delivery to Mrs. Wetzle’s house, the old woman had grabbed my wrist. “You have to learn to be more careful in the big city.”

  I’d felt all kinds of shame that I didn’t even have a name for.

  “I think she makes me bad lunches on purpose,” John had complained. “She hopes I’ll leave.”

  That made me laugh. “It’s not personal. She’s a famously bad cook, with one exception.”

  “Really? What’s the exception?”

  We’d arrived at my screen porch already, which meant that it was time to go into the sleepy house alone. But we paused for a last bit of conversation. “She makes really good homemade popcorn balls with molasses. She delivers them to the neighbors at Christmastime.”

  John crossed his arms over his muscular chest and smiled at me. “Maybe she’ll make me one when I leave in September. But I won’t hold my breath.”

  I thanked him for walking me home. He gave me a friendly wave and walked away as I climbed the porch steps.

  He did that every night except for the one that changed my life.

  And what happened that night hadn’t even been his decision. This whole scandal was all on me.

  Three

  Jonas

  After those precious minutes on the dock with Kira, I herded Quinn back into the canoe, and then launched it, feeling great. I was in the best kind of shock. Not only was Kira in Nest Lake, I could still taste her on my tongue.

  I never thought I’d see her again. But some kind of wish-granting goddess had smiled down on me, offering me another chance to reconnect. I wouldn’t let it go to waste.

  My elation lasted about four minutes.

  “So…” Quinn started from the front of the canoe. There were questions in her voice.

  “So.” I repeated flatly. There was no way I felt like sharing. Quinn and I were close, but the hope I was feeling was too fragile for friendly dishing.

  “An old friend?” she pressed.

  “Yeah.” Please let it go.

  “She’s your sweetness, huh? Just like in the new song?”

  Fuck. Leave it to a female to overhear that and make the connection. “Quinn, I’m not talking about it, okay? Just let me be. And if you say anything to anyone else, I’ll kill you dead.”

  “It’s just that…” She bit her lip. “Did you see her before she turned her car around?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You were reading your magazine. Which I brought back with me.” She patted her back pocket. “You can thank me later. But anyway, first she pulled up in front of the general store, and a guy with a baby got out of the car.”

  My whole body went cold. “What?”

  “You heard me, Jonas. They went into the store together. And then your girl turned her car around and passed us.”

  The ea
rth lurched beneath me. “She wasn’t wearing any rings,” I said stupidly. It was the first thing I’d checked when I walked out onto the dock.

  “Not everybody likes jewelry, Jonas.” She said it in a perfectly gentle voice, but it shredded my heart anyway. Because she was right. And Kira didn’t go out for bling. She was beautiful in a completely natural, unadorned way.

  Fuck.

  Chewing on this revelation, I paddled the canoe back across the lake in silence until the front of the lodge came into view. So did Ethan and Nix. My guitar player was lying in a hammock in front of the lodge, and Ethan was doing some pushups on the lawn.

  But I didn’t even greet them. I shoved the canoe onto the bank and went inside, looking for someplace to think. I’d rented out the whole place for the weekend, so nobody would bother us. Poking my head into a couple of rooms, I found my luggage beside a quaint double bed. I shut the bedroom door and dropped myself onto the quilt.

  Someone—probably Ethan—had opened the windows already, so sounds of my friends’ voices drifted in. The afternoon ticked by slowly. Tomorrow I’d be able to see Kira again. But tomorrow seemed like a long way away. As the light began to fade, the voices on the deck grew louder and more raucous. The smell of burgers on the grill eventually wafted through the window, but I did not get up to join the others.

  My mind was too full of memories of that other summer—the one when I’d pulled myself together. All day I’d worked on songwriting, pausing only for Mrs. Wetzle’s lousy lunch offerings and a quick dip in the lake. Then, feeling good about myself, I’d eaten some of Kira’s excellent cooking, and smiled across the table at her for a couple of hours over a beer or four.

  I’d kept my head down, filling the pages of my notebooks with lyrics and chord progressions. My phone remained powered down and stashed in a drawer. No producer nagged me, and there were no conference calls with the record label. I grew the most outrageously ugly beard, and didn’t get a haircut all summer. By Labor Day weekend, I’d been shaggier than I’d ever looked in my life, but I’d felt so much better about myself that it wasn’t even funny.

  On the second-to-last night I was in Maine, Kira asked me if I wanted to go to the county fair. “Sure,” I’d answered. I would have followed her anywhere.

  Preserving my last moments of anonymity with a baseball cap pulled down over my eyes, I went to the fair with Kira in her father’s car. The whole evening was silly and glorious. First I talked Kira onto the Himalayan ride. And as it spun us senseless, I held Kira’s wrist in a death grip. She just laughed and threw her head back, thrilled with the motion.

  Then, as the sun set, we ate corn dogs and caramel apples. We attempted to pop balloons with darts. I was a terrible shot, but after a dozen tries, and probably fifty bucks, I won a purple stuffed cat. We laughed at how ugly it was, but Kira tucked it under her arm anyway, and we got in line for the Ferris wheel. The queue inched forward as couples boarded.

  “How about that view?” I joked when we were finally aloft.

  “It’s killer,” Kira whispered from her side of our little metal bench. In the daylight, we could have seen for miles. But Maine was so rural that all we could see beyond the fairgrounds was the blackness of distant valleys and lakes.

  Perhaps it was the novelty of seeing Kira away from the general store. But as we went whirling through the night air, hip to hip, I felt a new kind of electricity between us. Turning, I studied Kira’s wide-eyed profile. And it suddenly became very difficult not to kiss her. I’d be leaving in less than thirty-six hours, and I wasn’t happy about it at all.

  Do it, my subconscious begged. You know you want to. I was pretty sure that she wouldn’t mind at all. The way she held my gaze a little too long when we laughed, and the way she blushed when I complimented her? Those were signs. Reading girls was one of my talents.

  Somehow I had resisted, held our attraction at bay. But just when I was complimenting myself on my self-control, she opened her mouth and broke my heart.

  “John?” she said softly. “I just want to tell you that hanging around with you this summer was a great help to me.”

  “Yeah?” I croaked.

  “This year was really terrible, and you helped me forget about it. You took me out of my own head. Because you…”

  “I what?”

  “It’s too weird. Too hard to say out loud.”

  “Well, now I’m desperately curious. But no biggie.”

  She’d laughed, but it held a nervous edge. “Okay, fine. I needed to have a guy friend, one who didn’t hit on me. Because…” She swallowed. “Last year. It wasn’t my pocketbook that was stolen that night in that parking lot.”

  My body went cold, and I stared at her for two beats of my heart. “Kira, are you trying to tell me that you were…”

  She nodded, eyes wet. The lights from the Ferris wheel were reflected in her tears. “See? You can’t even say the word.”

  “Forced?”

  “Raped,” she said, her voice flat.

  “Come here.” I’d spent the summer trying not to touch her, but now I wrapped an arm around her shoulders and pulled her against my body. There was nothing sexual about it. I buried my nose in her hair. “I’m so sorry, sweetness.” I tipped her head to rest on my shoulder and took a shaky breath. “Goddamn it, Kira. I would do anything to make that not be true.”

  Miraculously, I kept my voice gentle, but my insides were tight with anger and helplessness. I’d felt a surge of blood in my ears, like nothing I’d ever experienced. I thought of myself as a rational man, but at that moment I would have killed the guy who hurt her. No question.

  My free hand curled into a fist in my lap, but Kira picked it up, softening my fingers. “I didn’t mean to freak you out. I just wanted you to know how much you helped. You made me feel safe. And you reminded me that men aren’t terrifying.”

  Her words did nothing to lessen my uneasiness. I was hit by the same sort of shock that comes after swerving to narrowly avoid a car accident. Because every time I’d restrained my desire for Kira, it had been at my own whim. Holding back was something I’d done for my own selfish reasons. I’d had no way of knowing that my actions—or lack of them—were important to her.

  It was just incredible luck that I hadn’t fucked it up.

  I felt dizzy as the old Ferris wheel spun us through the darkness. I held her tightly, privately sick with the idea that anyone could do that to sunny Kira. “I don’t know what to say. I could blather on about how nobody has the right to hurt you. But you know that already. Please tell me this bastard is in jail.”

  “He is. But not because of me. The guy got caught a month later, when he tried it on someone else. But that girl’s boyfriend heard her screaming. John? You’re kind of squeezing me…”

  I eased my grip. “Shit. Sorry. Not what you need.”

  She shook her head before resting it on my shoulder again. “No, I’m not afraid of you. That’s what I’ve been trying to tell you.”

  We sat quietly for the rest of the ride. No more words were necessary. I stroked her hair, and tried to breathe through the tension in my chest. When our turn on the Ferris wheel ended, the carnies opened the car’s door. We disembarked, our evening over. I held Kira’s hand as we walked back to the car. It wasn’t a conscious act. I could barely let go to allow her to drive home. And when we pulled into her driveway, it was all I could do not to follow her into the house.

  I’d fallen for her, but I’d been too stupid to realize it. As we reached her door, I wished I could spend my last thirty-six hours in Maine holding her. Instead, I gave her a single, tight hug goodnight. “I’ll see you tomorrow,” I said, my voice raw. “We need to play one more hand of cards before I go.”

  She nodded against my chest. “I hope I didn’t freak you out.”

  “You could never.” I kissed the top of her head. “Goodnight, Kira.”

  * * *

  On my last day in Maine, I spent an hour trimming and then shaving off my beard. My ne
wly smooth face had unattractive tan lines striped down it, but it was nothing that a few sunny days in Seattle couldn’t fix.

  When I whistled my way into the general store for the very last time, Kira gasped. “Oh my God, you look so different!” She ran out from behind the counter to put her palms on my cheeks, and my eyes fell shut from the warmth of her touch. I would have happily stayed right there forever, but she darted away.

  “I made you a lobster roll for dinner,” she said. “I know we’re not on the ocean, but it’s something you’re supposed to eat when you come to Maine.”

  “Awesome.” I smiled at her and accepted my dinner plate. “And there are whoopie pies, right? I can’t leave without one more of those.”

  “Do you even have to ask?” She gave me an eye-roll. “This is your last meal in Maine. I’d get kicked out of hospitality school if I didn’t throw in a whoopie pie.”

  “We can’t have that,” I said, carrying my plate toward the front porch.

  “I made myself one, too. I’ll be right out,” she called.

  I took my seat at the table, feeling sad. A limousine was coming before dawn to whisk me away to the airport. And by the end of tomorrow, I’d be back in my Seattle apartment. Back to the demands of a record label. The recording dates, the business meals, the A-list parties, and exclusive restaurants that had almost begun to seem ordinary.

  My life in Seattle was never dull. But it never felt like mine. The end of a work day never brought the promise of a warm glance from a familiar face, and a meal thoughtfully prepared by someone who’d been expecting me.

  Back in June, I’d wandered into this store in search of food. But truly, it was a different kind of sustenance that Kira gave me. God, I knew I was going to miss it.

  We ate together that night. The lobster rolls she’d made were delicious, and we washed the food down with my favorite Maine beer. But our walk home later was sad and strained.