Reckless Hearts. Sean Olin

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       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 СКАЧАТЬ