The Other Side of Blue (10 page)

“I am.” Her tone says that she knows I've been in her studio.

“I'm so happy for you.” I cover my head with the scarf. It shields the sides of my face like a prayer shawl, and the sunlight filters through it. I study the notebook in my hand, flip the pages. Tiny perfect squares of blue-lined graph paper blur as the pages cascade. “I should write that down.” I'll keep a diary of my mother's special events. Someday, she'll want to write her memoir, and she'll want to know all the important dates. I'll be sure to underline June 23 several times so she won't forget it.

“Write what down?”

“The day you started painting again.”

She glares at me.

“You write this down,” Mother says. “‘My mother knows I've been lying and stealing.'”

I laugh. “Strong words, Mother. ‘Lie' and ‘steal.' What have I stolen? What have I lied about?”

“Lied, past tense? You're still lying.” Her face tightens. “The blue paint.”

“When did you see it last?” I hold my pencil over the tiny boxes, touch the point to the inside of one, prepared to fill it in.

Mother doesn't answer.

“You should check your studio,” I say. “You've probably just misplaced it.” In my mind I see the Prussian blue safe in her tackle box, ready for the next project. When she finds it, she'll learn that another color is missing.

I can't get the view of the sea from the widow's walk out of my head. “Why did you let him go out alone?” I ask Mother. That day, Dad took a bucket of ice and a bottle of champagne with him. No champagne flutes were found on the boat—just some shards—but two wineglasses were missing from the house. Martia reported them lost to the commissioner when he came to interview her. Otherwise, the missing items would have been charged to her, the cost deducted from her wages.

“What do you mean?” Mother asks, stepping back.

“Dad. You should have gone with him.”

“He liked fishing alone,” Mother said.

“With champagne?”

“You think I knew about the champagne ahead of time?”

I don't answer her. I believe she did.

When she sees the expression on my face, she moves toward the door.

“You did know.” It's not a question. Dad asked her to go out on the boat that day and she turned him down. That much I know. I overheard them by accident. What else did she say to him when she turned and left him standing there?

“I don't have to be interrogated by you.”

“You knew Howard back in October. Before then, too, didn't you? Did you tell Dad about Howard?”

Her face goes slack. She opens her mouth, maybe to tell me something, something honest. But she doesn't speak. Her lips narrow, sealing her mouth closed.

“Did you tell the commissioner about Howard?” I ask.

Mother could tell me that Howard only came later, after Dad died, whether it's true or not. She could say that they got together only after Dad died and because she was lonely. She could say that's what she told the commissioner.

She doesn't.

The French doors slam shut.

K
AMMI FINDS
me lying on the sand underneath the deck, where I've retreated. From here, I can hear the ocean but I'm away from the light, from the sea breeze. Looking up through the slats, I see shadows crisscross over me. Kammi's standing in the sun, shading her eyes to look at me. Her head is covered by a straw hat, and I can see her zinc-oxide-tinted nose. She clutches a drawing pad to her chest.

“Why didn't you tell me?” she asks.

I roll onto my side to face her. “Tell you what?”

“About your dad.”

“What about him?”

Kammi squeezes the drawing paper closer, like a shield. “My dad told me he died. But you should have told me about
the boat—” She stops herself. “You should have told me the
way
he died. I made such a big deal about the boat. You could have warned me. I kept trying to get you to show me the boat.”

I say nothing.

Her voice wobbles. “I said something about the boat to your mother.”

I sit up. “You did? What'd she do?”

“She twisted around and knocked over her easel. Her painting ended up in the sand. I picked it up. I tried to brush the sand off. But everything smudged. It was supposed to be a harbor scene, with all the boats in the distance. It's ruined.” Her voice rises at the end.

“Did you tell Mother it was ruined?” I try to imagine the scene, what happened, the melding of paints and sand.

Kammi's voice catches. “You should have told me. You knew I wanted to paint that boat.” Tears glide down her face. “You did it on purpose. To make me look bad.”

I stare at her. Her pretty pink skin appears blotchy, the way fair people get when they're upset. Their feelings erupt out of their skin like measles.

“My mother told me you'd be wicked,” Kammi said. “She used just that word. ‘Wicked.'”

I laugh. “Wicked” should hurt. “Why'd she say wicked? She doesn't even know me.”

“She said you'd be angry about your mother marrying my
dad. That it was natural you'd be jealous.” Kammi scratches her hands up and down the sketchpad.

I tie the scarf over my hair. “Jealous? That shows how stupid your mother is. Or maybe that's how she feels about it.”

Kammi blinks.

“Jealousy would mean I care what my mother does,” I say.

Kammi exhales hard. “You don't...”

“No. She can marry the man in the moon and live happily ever after.” But there is no happily ever after. Not for her and Dad. Not even for her and Howard. Dad and I will always be between them.

Kammi stands there, staring at me as though I'm a strange lizard that slithered across the sand into the shade. I bet boarding school didn't prepare her for this, for a stepsister-to-be who isn't competition, someone who sidesteps all her thrusts.

“You didn't say why you didn't tell me.” Kammi rubs at the tears and ends up smudging zinc oxide off part of her nose and onto her wet cheek. If it were a Prussian blue smudge, she'd seem more like an artist.

“I thought it best not to say anything.”

Kammi holds the force field of drawing paper in front of her as she leaves.

I close my eyes, pull the scarf over my face. Through
the layers of cloth, the light is even dimmer when I open my eyes again. Two lizards circle each other along the retaining wall.

I think about Mother's easel collapsing into the sand, the gritty images forever marred. The Christmas after the episode with the salt-dough ornaments, my grandmother didn't come—she was too feeble—but she sent me a long box with an easel inside. The gift was for me, though Mother checked the label three times to make sure it was my name on front. She thought Grandmother Betts had made a mistake because of her growing dementia; she kept mixing up people's names and she did things like put her glasses instead of the juice bottle into the refrigerator.

Dad screwed together the easel parts, but one leg always seemed shorter than the others, and it tottered if I wasn't careful. I positioned the easel in my room so the light came through my window over my left shoulder. Between Christmas and New Year's, I splashed bold watercolor marks across the paper, just to see the colors tumble and blend. Mother didn't “interfere,” as she called it, with the artistic process to tell me to work with form and shadow. She didn't tell me about the Golden Mean, the balance of the longer side of the image to the shorter. Or explain negative space. I either had talent or I didn't. She didn't want to encourage another artist. After New Year's, I folded the easel and put it away. Only a few spatters of blue paint like spilled
sky still stained the carpet. Mother said, “It's good you quit so soon. Nana shouldn't have encouraged you. She never encouraged me.”

 

Martia clambers down the stairs from the deck above. She slips into the shadows with me. Maybe Kammi told her where I was, or maybe she just knew, like she knows about other things.

“Your mother, she is very upset.”

I shrug.

“Is no right, you and she.”

I still don't say anything.

Martia mutters to herself in Papiamentu. Then she starts again in English. “Tomorrow is the party at the Bindases'.”

“Does Mother want to cancel?” She can't. I have to confront Mayur, to see what he thinks he knows.

“No, no, is important to go. The Bindases are big people here. Some are with the government.”

Yes, Dr. Bindas is associated with the hospital in Willemstad, and his cousin is supposed to be in government. Mother never mentions the connection, though Mayur brags about it when he can. Mother will want people to think there is nothing wrong, so she won't cancel, even if she doesn't want to go.

Martia sighs and smiles. She holds her hand out as if I am a small child who's threatened to run away and she wants to pack a lunch for me so that after I find a hiding place down
the block, I'll eat my lunch and go back home. Home, where they're supposed to love you and want you back.

“Everybody today is in bad mood,” she says. “It's time to
kome,
to eat. Come now.”

I'd say I'm not hungry, but Martia would know that I'm lying.

A
T FIVE
the next afternoon, Mother, Kammi, and I follow the shell road to the Bindases' house. Before Mother can fix her everything-is-fine face, Mrs. Bindas waves us onto the beach from the edge of the green lawn. She smiles, her head tilted at an angle, as if she's seen a family argument she's not meant to witness.

Only we aren't saying anything out loud.

We're a silent trio. We've been that way for a whole day, since the plein air trip, since Kammi asked Mother about the blue boat. We are three corners of a triangle, sharp-angled and equidistant.

Mother steps first onto the sand, shakes off her slides. Kammi follows, picking up her shoes and tapping the heels together gently just like Mother. I wonder if she knows she's
mirroring Mother or whether it's just instinct. She already seems to have fallen into the rhythm of living here.

“Come, we have soft drinks. Coco Rico, Fria. Ice cold.” Mrs. Bindas leads us to a tent sheltering coolers of drinks. Beer in one cooler and bright orange and green bottles of sodas in another.

Down the beach, away from the bonfire and the tents, six boys throw Frisbees to each other in a relay. One of them, the short one, stops when he turns around and looks our way, heads toward us.

Mayur.

Mrs. Bindas beams. “Mayur, see your special guests, they have come. You should bring your cousins over, introduce them to the American girls.”

“They're busy. Come on, I'll take you to them,” Mayur says to us, and turns to walk back down the beach. He assumes we'll follow. On command, Kammi does. I grab a glass bottle of Coco Rico, my favorite coconut-flavored soda, from the ice. A servant—not the boy from our first visit—opens it for me, tossing the metal cap into a basket behind him without looking. Ignoring me, except I see his gaze slide over my chest. He steps past to rearrange the ice around the bottles in the cooler.

Mrs. Bindas and Mother wander over to a cluster of beach chairs where other women sit drinking, their scarves and skirts fluttering like birds around them. The men gather
around another fire, their laughter but not their words carrying between the crashes of the surf.

Yards behind, I trail Mayur and Kammi.

When I catch up, Mayur has gathered all the other boys around. His cousins from Trinidad. Some other boys, too; locals. Not so rich, I can see it in their eyes. Several don't usually get a whole soda for themselves. They stand in a semicircle, looking at their bare feet, taking chugs from soda bottles they've planted in the sand. They won't look directly at Kammi. Because she's a girl, because she's American, because she's pretty. One boy looks up when I kick sand over his foot; then his gaze skims over Kammi before he looks away again. He's thin and rangy, like the other boys, except for Mayur. Dark-skinned, too, with brown eyes that seem to miss little.

“This is Roberto, Tibor, and Saco. They're my cousins. Some others are over there.” He points to the men around the far bonfire. “And the others here, Loco, Alonzo, and Klaus.”

“Cyan says you're from Trinidad,” Kammi says to Roberto. “What's that like?”

The boys shrug, then grin, still looking at their feet or out to sea. How to explain the difference? Another island in the same sea.

“Do you want to play?” Mayur asks. His mother probably bribed him to say that. I look over my shoulder, see Mrs. Bindas wave. Mother has her back to us, her hand holding a glass of wine in the air, perfectly balanced. Posed. Mayur doesn't return his mother's wave.

Despite herself, Kammi looks at me.

“No thanks,” I answer. “I'll watch.” I hate running after the Frisbee when the wind grabs it from my reach. I hate missing it, chasing it as it rolls zigzagging down the slope toward the surf.

Mayur holds out the Frisbee to Kammi. “You go first.”

He's playing host. This is his party, after all. He's the big man. The other boys know it, too.

Kammi takes the Frisbee. “Thanks. I used to play this with my Dad's black Labrador. Have you ever seen dogs that can jump and catch them midair?”

Some of the boys nod. Saco grins, his black hair flopping over his eyes. His is the kind of face most girls like. Soft and cute, his eyes are those of a black Lab.

“
Claro,
we've seen that,” Mayur says, shrugging, acting bored. “I had a dog once, he was a champion Frisbee catcher.” Sure he did.

I squat in the sand, spread my skirt around myself like a picnic blanket. Howard has a dog? Mother has never mentioned that. Neither has Howard, and he's never brought one around in Maine. Mother doesn't even like dogs. I wonder where it is now. Maybe in Atlanta with Kammi's mother. I can hear Howard saying it. “Kammi needs a dog. With the breakup, this is just the thing. I'll miss Old Pete or whatever his name is, but it's for Kammi. Nothing's too good for Kammi.” Howard doesn't really talk that way—his voice is way too business-school to sound so breathless—but I can
imagine him almost saying it like that. Getting rid of the dog and making it sound like he's doing it for Kammi, when he's really doing it for Mother. Has Kammi's mother figured that out?