Dreamland(40)

The sky was continually changing colors, and there were still hundreds of people out and about, wading in the surf at the water’s edge and slowly gathering up their belongings. I walked beside Morgan, studying the way the rays of the sun brought out red-gold highlights in her dark, lustrous hair. I couldn’t help feeling that something in my world had shifted in the short time I’d known her. I’d more or less thought I had my life figured out; spending time with Morgan had changed all of that. I couldn’t say why or when it happened, but I felt undeniably different.

“You’re thinking about something,” Morgan offered.

“It’s been known to happen.”

She nudged my shoulder, like she had at the hotel the other night.

“Tell me,” she urged.

“I’m thinking about the song,” I hedged.

“Me, too,” she agreed before turning to study me. “Do you want to work on more songs together? I’ve worked with other songwriters before, but it’s never been like it was today.”

I watched her pick her way forward, the breeze flattening her clothes against her willowy figure. “Sure,” I said. “I’d like that. But I think I’d like doing almost anything if it meant spending time with you.”

My words seemed to catch her off guard. Staring out over the water, she took a few steps in silence and I realized I had no idea what she was thinking. “So,” she said brightly, as if to cover her unease. “Where’s this place with the cheeseburgers?”

I pointed a little way up the beach where a thatch-covered roof behind the dunes was barely visible. “Right there.”

“Do you think we’ll be able to find a seat?” She wrinkled her brow. “Since it’s sunset hour, I mean? Or will it be too crowded?”

“You do know you tend to ask me questions that I have no idea how to answer, right?”

She threw her head back and laughed, baring the brown expanse of her neck. My mind flashed to the feel of her lips on my own.

“Okay, then let’s go with something you do know. Do you have any funny farm stories?” she asked.

“Like what?”

“Like…there was this chicken once, and his owner chopped off his head because he was going to eat the chicken. But the chicken lived for over a year afterward. I guess the brain stem wasn’t affected? But, anyway, the farmer fed it with an eyedropper since it had no head.”

“That’s not true,” I said.

“It is! I saw the video once when I was in New York City. It was at Ripley’s Believe It or Not! in Times Square.”

“And you believed it, obviously.”

“You can google it. The farmer even did a traveling show with the chicken, which was named Mike, by the way. I’ll show you when we’re eating, okay?”

I shook my head. “I don’t have any headless-chicken stories. I could tell you about tobacco worms, but they’re not funny.”

“Gross.”

“They definitely are,” I said. “So why don’t you tell me something I don’t know. Like…I know you used to come here with your family, and you went to the lake house in Minnesota, but did you take vacations to other places?”

“Why does that matter?”

“It doesn’t. Since this is my first vacation, I’m trying to live vicariously through your childhood. So I know what I missed.”

“You didn’t miss much,” she assured me.

“Humor me.”

She kicked up a bit of sand, making whirlwinds in her tracks. “Well,” she began, “we traveled a lot when I was a kid. Once every couple of years we’d visit the Philippines, where my paternal grandparents live. When I was little, I hated it. I don’t speak Chinese or Tagalog—my dad’s family is ethnically Chinese but has lived in the Philippines for generations—and it’s so hot there during the summer! But as I got older, I came to appreciate the visits more…seeing my cousins, and the food that my grandma cooked. They always spoiled my sister and me, since we saw them so infrequently.” She paused, a nostalgic smile on her face. “My parents love to travel, so sometimes we took trips to Hawaii or Costa Rica, but the biggest trip I took was after my freshman year in high school, when my parents took my sister and me to Europe. London, Paris, Amsterdam, and Rome.”

“That sounds exciting.”

“At the time, I wasn’t as excited as you might think. Mainly we toured museums and churches, and in retrospect I can understand the value of seeing works by Da Vinci or Michelangelo, but back then I was bored silly. I remember staring at the Mona Lisa and thinking, This is it? What’s so great about it? But my parents believed such cultural things were important in the molding of young minds.”

I smiled as we veered toward Sandbar Bill’s. Though every table was filled, we lucked out, catching a couple leaving their seats at the bar, which also happened to offer a view of the sunset.

“Look at that,” I said. “It must be our day.”

She smiled. “No doubt about it.”





We ordered iced teas, making us the only two who weren’t drinking beer or cocktails. When the bartender put the menus in front of us, we both ordered cheeseburgers without bothering to examine them.

As we waited, she showed me the video of Mike the headless chicken on YouTube, and at my urging, she told me more about her childhood. She’d attended private school the whole way through—no surprise there, since her parents obviously valued education. She described the familiar cliques and insecurities and students who surprised her in both positive and negative ways, and while our experiences couldn’t have been more different, it was clear that—like me—music was the underlying thread in all her experiences. Music was, I thought, a way for both of us to take charge of shaping our identities and to escape our traumas, and when I said as much to her, her brow furrowed slightly.