Lies and Lullabies

by Sarina Bowen

  I didn’t stop until I’d made it to my father’s house. But, panting with anxiety, I couldn’t go inside. Fighting for calm, I sat down on the porch steps and put my head in my hands.

  Seven

  Jonas

  I watched Kira ride off, wondering what the hell had just happened. Sure, she probably guessed that I wrote that song about her. But she’d only heard the first few bars before sprinting away like I was the devil himself.

  Spinning around, I located the lodge’s bike shed. I rolled a bike out and hopped on. The seat was too low for me, so I had to stand up on the pedals.

  But no matter. I rode off after Kira, my first time on a real bike in years.

  The road curved around to the left, and Kira’s house soon came into view. She was sitting on the front steps. She didn’t look all that surprised to see me biking toward her, but the look of pain on her face was so vivid that I could feel it in my gut. Something was wrong, and I still didn’t know what.

  “Feel any better?”

  She shook her head, and I thought I saw fear in her eyes.

  “Kira,” I said softly. “I know you want me to leave you alone right now, but I can’t—our conversation isn’t over. In twenty-four hours I’ll be back on that bus. Honestly, you’re scaring me. When I last saw you, things seemed like they were on the upswing for you. When I said I think about you all the time, I didn’t mean to be a creeper. I meant that I was picturing a happy ever after for you.”

  “Mama!” a little voice called from beyond the screen door.

  At the sound of it, Kira’s whole body went rigid. And then tears spilled down her cheeks.

  I heard little footsteps pounding onto the screened porch. And then a small set of hands became visible against the door just behind Kira. Quick as a flash, Kira leapt to her feet and spun around, darting through the door. It closed with a bang behind her.

  “Whoa,” a man’s voice said. “Deep breaths, Kiki. What did he say?”

  The hair stood up on my neck. I dropped the bicycle and covered the distance to the stoop in three paces. Leaping up, I opened the screen door. A little girl stood there, with fair, curly hair and blue-green eyes. I was no good with kids’ ages. She wasn’t an infant, but she wasn’t school-aged either. There was a babyish fullness to her face. She was three? Four? Five? I looked up at Kira.

  “I’m so sorry,” she squeaked.

  That’s when I finally understood. And I almost couldn’t draw breath to speak again. “I… She… What the fuck, Kira?”

  “That’s a very bad word,” the little girl said, accusation in her voice.

  “Sorry,” I said automatically. I raised my eyes to Kira’s. “You… She…”

  I couldn’t think. There was pressure in my ears, and my pulse was ragged. Dizzy, I thought, absently, putting one hand on the door jamb for support.

  “Breathe, man,” the guy behind Kira said. He wore a bright pink polo shirt and an expression of concern. “Sit down. Seriously, before you crash.”

  I bent over and grabbed my knees. “Oh my God.” The only thing I could hear was my own ragged breathing and Kira’s choked sobs.

  “Mama!” a little voice said, full of alarm. “Don’t cry!”

  The scary moment stretched on, until I heard yet another bicycle approaching outside. A moment later, another male voice called out, “Knock-knock!”

  The pink-polo-shirt guy answered him, his voice full of false cheer. “Hi, Luke!” Under his breath he added, “Wow. It’s raining men.” Then he scooped the little girl up in his arms, stepped around me, and walked out the screen door. It closed behind him with a bang.

  I just stood there, staring at my shoes, trying to catch my breath. Kira’s shoes moved into my visual field, but I wasn’t ready to talk to her yet. Not until my head could clear. Which would probably be sometime next week.

  We stood here, awkward and quiet for a couple of long minutes. There was some low-key chatter outside, and then I heard the sound of the bicycle departing.

  The guy in the polo shirt came back inside, alone.

  “You’re her brother.” I coughed, trying to reconstruct the world into a rational place.

  “Yup,” the guy said. “Uncle Adam.”

  “Where is Vivi?” Kira asked, her voice raw.

  “Luke is taking her for a little bike ride. There may be ice cream involved.”

  “Really, Adam?” Kira moved quickly to peer through the screen. “But that’s awkward.”

  “Oh, honey. We have first class tickets on the HMS Awkward today. And the ship has sailed. Luke even had a pink helmet for her, Kiki. Just go with it, okay? I told him you were having a moment.”

  I straightened up. “She’s having a moment,” I spat out. “Is that what this is?” My pulse was still pounding in my ears, but now from anger instead of shock.

  Kira was as pale as a sheet. “I was going to tell you today.” She pulled a photo out of her pocket. “Here. I was trying to find a way.”

  I snatched the picture from her hand. “She’s, what, four?” The photo shook as I tried to look at it. The little girl smiled up at the camera, a stuffed animal in her hands. It was purple. Somehow this detail made it all the more real. The little girl in the photo was clutching the purple cat I’d won at the fair all those years ago.

  “She’s four next month.”

  I forced myself to meet Kira’s gaze. “And what if I hadn’t run into you? Were you never going to tell me?”

  She wasn’t. I could see it in her face, where tears were drying on her cheeks.

  “I was…” she stammered. “I just didn’t know how. And I didn’t think…”

  “What, that I would care?” Fuck, that hurt. She was the only person alive that I expected to know better.

  “You made yourself unapproachable,” she said quietly. “You gave me a fake name.”

  “It wasn’t fake!” My voice shook. “John is the name my parents gave me. After they died, my aunt changed it because… she’s a bitch.” I still wasn’t getting enough oxygen. I took another deep breath, and it didn’t help.

  Kira wiped her tears. “Well, I didn’t know that. But if you were trying to blow off someone, and you wanted to be sure she wouldn’t ever be able to find you, what name would you choose? How does John Smith sound to you?”

  “Kira, that’s crap. You eventually knew who I was—you told me so yesterday. Any lawyer with use of a telephone could have gotten the message through. You never tried.”

  She dropped her eyes.

  “I thought we were…” Close. I couldn’t even finish the sentence, it was so pathetic. God, was there nobody on earth I’d ever been important to?

  “She was just afraid,” her brother said, his voice soft.

  “Afraid?” The word made my heart lurch again. “Fuck no. She wasn’t afraid of me. Not of me.”

  “But you didn’t see how it all went down here in the boonies,” Adam argued. “The whole town slut-shamed her. Our father shamed her.” Adam pointed outside. “Her ex-boyfriend called her a slut to her face. Seriously—it used to be me they sneered at, but for a couple years there they gave Kira their worst. First for getting raped, and then for getting knocked up.”

  And that was all I could take. My hand formed a fist, because I needed to shut Adam up.

  “Whoa!” Her brother took a step back. “Hands are not for hitting.”

  Kira grabbed my fist in both of her hands. “Please. I need you to calm down.”

  I dropped my eyes to Kira’s hands. I took another big breath through my nose, and I let it out. “I want to see her at least. You owe me that.”

  “You have every right to see her,” Adam said. “Except you’re losing your shit right now. And since we don’t want to freak out in front of the child—” He looked pointedly at me. “—everybody has to go back to his own corner and cool off.”

  “Later, then. Today,” I said.

  Kira still looked terrified. “I don’t think that’s a good idea.”

>   “Why?” I spat. “What did I ever do to you? Except exactly what you asked me to.”

  “That might be TMI,” Adam whispered.

  I turned around and opened the screen door. I walked down the three steps, but my knees felt like rubber. So I sat heavily on the bottom step, resting my head in my hands.

  Before this moment I’d thought that my life—while lonely and a little aimless—was under some semblance of control. But that was a lie. Because there was a little person in the world who might have filled in some of the crushing emptiness in my chest. And she’d never even seen my face.

  The door opened and shut behind me, but I didn’t move. Kira settled on the step next to me, wiping her face with the heels of her hands. “I feel terrible,” she whispered.

  “You should.”

  She pressed her hands to her mouth, and I realized that if I kept saying things like that, she’d quit talking to me.

  “Kira, was I good to you? Was I a good friend to you every day that summer?”

  “Yes,” she said, her voice shaky.

  “Then why would you keep this from me?”

  “It took me a year and a half to figure out who you were. I was already a mother to a little girl when I saw you on an album cover. And then there’s the fact that you blew off my letter. I thought if I wrote another one, the same thing might happen again.”

  Bitterness settled into my stomach. Because she made a good point. I was too stupid to return her love when I’d had the chance. I’d pushed her away. “I’d never turn my back on my obligations, though. You had to know that.”

  “But I didn’t want us to be an obligation,” she said quietly.

  Shit.

  Nobody said anything for a while. Minutes ticked by. I focused on my breathing, the way I might before a concert. Until finally I felt calm. Kira slapped at a black fly beside me, and it brought me back into the present. It was still a sunny afternoon in Maine. Even if my whole world was reshaping.

  “What a waste,” I whispered suddenly. A waste of time. And of a beautiful friendship that could have been so much more.

  “She’s going to be back soon,” Kira said. “We have to figure out what we’re going to say to her.”

  “What did you tell her before? Did she ask where her father was?”

  Kira gulped. “I told her that her daddy lived far away. That he was too busy making music to be someone’s daddy.”

  My eyes burned. “Would have been nice if you’d checked to see if it was true.”

  “John…” She cleared her throat. “Jonas. I’m sorry, okay? I did wrong. I can’t argue the point. But we need a game plan, and we need it now. I don’t think we should tell her you’re her father until she’s comfortable with you.”

  “Why not?” How could more lying be a good idea?

  She looked into my eyes, and my heart practically stopped. Her face was so serious, and so beautiful. Sitting next to her was like living in a time warp. “I just want meeting you to be less of a shock for her. If you tell her right off, she won’t know what to do with that information, and she won’t know what to expect from you.” Her silver eyes bored into mine. “Honestly, I’m just making this up as I go along. Parenting, I’ve learned, is all guesswork.”

  I took a deep breath and felt a little bit of the fury drain out of me. “I bet you’re pretty good at it.” And that was another reason Kira probably hadn’t told me about our little girl. I’d never been the sort of person who looked like I should be someone’s father.

  Her wide eyes still took me in. “I do all right. She’s easy, though. A little cocky sometimes, but sweet, too. She’s a good girl.”

  My heart gave an unfamiliar squeeze. I heard the telltale click of a coasting bicycle approaching.

  Kira leapt off the stoop and stood waiting as the bike slowed to a stop. “Hi,” she said, sounding breathless.

  “Hi, yourself,” the guy said, setting one foot on the ground. “You okay?”

  “Yes. Fine.”

  But I wasn’t even paying attention to them, because my eyes had landed on the little sandaled foot that was visible from behind the guy’s body. “You sure?” he asked Kira.

  “Of course,” she said quickly, ducking behind him to unclip her daughter from the kiddie bike seat.

  She stretched her short arms toward Kira, leaning out of the seat, confident that she would be caught before hitting the ground. The look on her face was so happy and accepting, it nearly made me lose my shit right there.

  Kira set her down and removed her bike helmet. Once I could see her properly, the rest of the world seemed to dim. She was wearing a green dress that had chocolate ice cream down the front of it. While her mother spoke in low tones to the man on the bike, she wandered towards me, and I held my breath.

  “Hi,” she said, an appraising look on her face. “I’m Vivi. What’s your name?”

  It came out as a rasp. “Jonas.”

  “Jonas,” she repeated, trying it out. “Your shoe is untied. You’re gonna trip.”

  I cleared my throat. “I should fix it, then.”

  “I’ll do it.” She knelt in front of me on the gravel and tugged on my laces. Her short fingers had dimples at the knuckle, the last vestiges of baby fat. As she worked on my shoe, her head tipped forward, revealing a porcelain neck. I’d never really studied a child before. Her skin looked brand new, like a little doll just out of the package. She tipped her face towards mine suddenly, her tongue caught in the corner of her mouth. “Do you like double knots?”

  I nodded, speechless.

  She returned to her work. A minute later, she stood back. “All done!”

  I looked down to see possibly the worst excuse for a knot in the history of mankind. “Thank you.” I took a deep breath in through my nose, trying to hold it together. The man on the bike had disappeared. Kira was standing back, arms folded across her chest, biting her lip.

  The only person who looked completely at ease was Vivi. “I want to go in the lake now, Mama.” She stomped over and put her hands on Kira’s hips. “Please. You said that after you got back from lunch I could go swimming.”

  I stood up. “Then let’s go to the lake.”

  Kira glanced at me, and there was a long moment where she said nothing. I stared right back, with a look that insisted I couldn’t walk away right now, even if she wanted me to. Finally, she looked down at her daughter. “You need a towel.”

  Vivi shot up the steps and stretched for the door handle. She pulled the screen door into her nose before maneuvering around it and then onto the porch. Seconds later, she was back, a pink beach towel in her hands.

  Kira was still rooted in place, an uneasy expression on her face. But Vivi took off toward the beach, so Kira had no choice but to follow. I fell into step with her and, wordlessly, the three of us set off down the street.

  As we passed Mrs. Wetzle’s house, I wondered if the old lady was still alive, and still serving bad food and passing judgment on musicians.

  Kira gave me a sideways glance. “Are you okay? Holding it together?” she asked, her voice low.

  I nodded. Barely. “You?” This was difficult for her, too. She looked nervous as hell. But the day’s stresses were of her own making, and I wasn’t about to disappear just to let her off the hook. Ahead of us, Vivi had begun to sing as she walked. I couldn’t make out what. “What’s that song?” I asked.

  Kira shrugged. “Maybe something from preschool. Usually, she just makes up her own.”

  My heart almost failed for the tenth time that hour. How could Kira think that a songwriting child would not be of any interest to me? Maybe all four-year-olds invent their own tunes. I had no fucking clue. But I sure as hell wanted the chance to find out.

  The path turned toward the beach, and the shimmering expanse of Nest Lake helped distract me from my turmoil. It was so beautiful here. My child has a nice life.

  That was something, right? That was what mattered most?

  Vivi went over to the roped
-off kiddie area. She dropped her towel on the strip of sand, then yanked her dress over her head, revealing a purple ruffled bathing suit. She chucked the dress down onto the sand without a backward glance, and then marched her little rectangular body into the shallow water.

  I checked Kira’s face. “Does she swim?”

  She nodded. “Adam says her stroke should be called the Drowning Dog, but she swims. You’ll see.”

  Sure enough, Vivi immersed herself up to the chest, then dropped down into the water up to her neck. With an indescribable wiggle, she began to swim around. Cutest thing I ever saw.

  “Kira, my heart is breaking.” It was a cliché, but it was true. My child, I thought, testing the words in my head. My little girl. And, most surprisingly, my family. Those were words that I’d been sure would never apply to me, but they already did, and I’d been clueless about it.

  “She breaks mine, too,” Kira whispered. “Every darned day.”

  Ten yards away, in deeper water, a couple of teenagers took turns splashing each other, oblivious to the awkward drama playing out on shore. Vivi swam to the edge of the kiddie area to watch them. She gazed past the rope, the way a prisoner looks through the bars of his cell. “Mama!” she called. “I want to jump off the dock.”

  “Sweetie, I don’t have my suit on,” Kira replied.

  Well. Here’s where it comes in handy to be a party boy. I pulled off my T-shirt and dropped it on the ground. Then I took my phone and my money clip out of my pockets and dropped those, too. “Vivi, I’ll go with you,” I volunteered.

  “Really?” Vivi began splashing her way out of the water.

  “Sure.” I undid Vivi’s knot in my shoelace and kicked off my shoes.

  Kira was frowning up a storm, but I turned my back on her and picked my way through the gravel toward the dock. As I walked out onto the dock boards, I heard Vivi pounding along behind me.

  I reached the end and turned around. “I should jump in first, right?”