Page 30 of Lost Dreams

Lorelei was sitting alone on the veranda with a glass of rosé and a feeling in her gut that told her she had to say yes. “They want more of us, huh?”

“It’s just like old times,” Carter said.

Lorelei closed her eyes. She couldn’t gauge her own emotions. “I don’t see why not,” she said finally.

“Great. Should I come to the Lodge to practice?” Carter asked. It was what they’d always done when they were teenagers, as Carter’s parents’ place hadn’t had a piano, and Carter’s guitar was more portable.

“You’re welcome any time,” she said. “You know that!”

That night, the dining room was empty, as the weather was so good that everyone wanted to be outside. Lorelei sat at the piano for a while, warming up her fingers while she waited for Carter. She was reminded of being a teenager, her heart pounding as she waited to hear his footsteps in the hallway. Usually, they’d practiced for an hour or two before escaping somewhere in the Lodge to make out, hiding from her brothers and sisters and parents.

Life had felt so magical back then. Before the pregnancy. Before the miscarriage.

Oh, but Lorelei didn’t like to think about that.

When at last she heard Carter, Lorelei stood to greet him. She flinched, knowing that he wanted to hug hello, and knowing that she didn’t want that. Sometimes it was difficult not to give people what they wanted from you. She knew that especially from her brief days of piano fame.

Carter removed his guitar from its case and strummed it gently. Without saying much, they began to warm up before diving into a few of the songs they’d performed the other day, including “Bridge Over Troubled Water.” After the devastation of Roberto’s text message, and as the intensity of the practice filled the air around them, Lorelei felt her voice go wobbly. Carter stopped abruptly and narrowed his eyes.

“Are you all right?” he asked.

Lorelei faked a smile. The last thing she wanted was for Carter to sense how uneasy she was, how brokenhearted. “Oh yes. I’m fine. I’m just under-practiced, is all.”

Carter removed his guitar from his shoulder. “Why don’t we take a break? It’s a beautiful night.”

Lorelei followed Carter out to the veranda, where they grabbed a table and ordered a glass of wine each. It was surreal to sit at a table with her ex-boyfriend from so long ago. She wondered what they were meant to say to one another. She wondered if he had children or if he’d been married. He wore no wedding ring, which was something she’d noticed earlier, of course.

“How is the music camp going?” she asked, remembering that he was here to work a music camp for children.

Carter laughed. “Well, it’s sometimes more like a glorified babysitting center. Nantucket parents want to take their kids somewhere so they can go sailing all day, which I get. But sometimes there’s a glint in the kids’ eyes that says they’re really getting it. I like bringing music into their lives. Hopefully, some of it sticks.”

Lorelei smiled, remembering how desperate she’d been to get her kids excited about music. Nothing had stuck.

“What made you fall in love with music? In the beginning, I mean,” Carter asked her.

“Oh, I don’t know.” Lorelei tried to peer back, back, back to the beginning of her life. “It felt like a language I’d always known how to speak. It was strange to learn that so many people didn’t know how to speak it too.”

“I remember, when we first played together, it felt like we’d been playing all our lives,” Carter said. “I still feel like that now.”

Lorelei blushed and sipped her wine. She didn’t know how to respond to something like that, something so romantic, something that touched on her heart in a way that it reminded her of how lonely she currently felt. Roberto can’t be honest with me, she thought now.

“Can I ask you something?” Carter asked.

“Okay.”

“Why did you stop playing, Lorelei? You were at the beginning of a brilliant career. I was excited to watch you shoot into the stratosphere of fame,” Carter said, his eyes buggy with disbelief.

Lorelei let her shoulders drop forward. “Oh, it’s not such a dramatic story,” she said. But she truly didn’t want to get into it. She truly didn’t want to share the biggest devastation of her life with the likes of Carter—not when he’d abandoned her during her time of need, so many years ago.

Carter laughed. “You’re not going to tell me.”

“There’s nothing to tell,” Lorelei assured him.

And as their conversation gently shifted to other topics, topics about Carter’s ex-wife and his daughter, who lived in Seattle, topics that firmly planted them as different people in different universes, Lorelei considered the weight she’d once felt in her womb. She considered the morning sickness that had taken her from class to the bathroom and back again so many times during the final months of her senior year. She considered the age their baby would have been, if only he or she had lived. The baby would have been born in the early months of 1997—a year and a half before the fire that had engulfed the White Oak Lodge. She shivered.

“Let’s get another glass of wine,” Carter said, beckoning for the server to return. “I’m having a great time catching up.”

15