The Other Side of Blue (7 page)

“What's in there?” Kammi asks, nodding at the box.

“Sea glass. Mermaids' tears,” I blurt out without thinking.

“Mermaids' tears?” Her eyes go big, as if perhaps she thinks I really believe in mermaids.

“It's just trash. Glass that's been tossed into the sea. I collect it.”

“To do what with?”

I snap the lid shut. I'm not ready to tell Kammi how I make jewelry with it. I'm not ready to trust her with anything.

“Okay,” she says, not asking me again. She looks around the room, maybe looking for clues about me. But there's not much here to see.

Finally, Kammi says: “Your mother's going to take me painting with her tomorrow.” She says it casually, but I hear an edge to her voice.

“She asked you?”

“Yes, well, not exactly,” Kammi says. She sits on her hands on my bed. “I was talking to her about the pencils, telling her I liked them. How I wanted to try watercolor. Dad thinks watercolor is the best.”

“She didn't say draw first?”
Draw first
is Mother's mantra. Even Mother's star student, Philippa, had to prove her range of drawing skills before she graduated to paints.

“No. She's taking me to paint en plein air.”

I know better. It's an old trick. Kammi doesn't realize that this trip with Mother isn't really about her going. It's about Mother getting someone to carry her supplies and trail at her feet like a servant. Maybe Mother wants a student, even if relationships with her students usually end after a couple of years, for different reasons.

Kammi will sit in the sun and burn if she forgets her sunscreen. The backs of her thighs will stick with sweat to the plastic webbed lawn chair that she'll have to carry. She'll sit there and Mother won't want Kammi to look at what she's doing because it's a work in progress. Even if there's nothing on the canvas. Mother might reach over once or twice and dab some paint on Kammi's paper to make it look like she's helping her.

I don't warn Kammi. She wouldn't believe me. She'd think I'm just feeling sour grapes, that I hate her because she's here, because my mother sent her watercolor pencils before I knew she even existed. Because Howard's coming to take Dad's place. I don't hate her for all those reasons. I hate her because of the same gift of Caran d'Ache watercolor pencils stuffed into the back of my closet at home.

“Why don't you go with us?” Kammi asks me.

“Are you kidding?”

“You could.”

“Why would I want to?”

Her shoulders relax and she smiles, her even white teeth showing. She wants Mother all for herself, but she can't help being polite enough to ask me to come along.

“Don't you paint?” she asks. Now that it's safe, now that I have told her I don't want to compete with her for Mother's attention, she asks the important question.

“No. I used to.” The same way that I no longer swim, I don't paint or draw.

Kammi waits a minute. Maybe she thinks I'll say more, but I stand silent, holding the glass box, with my back against the bookcase. She doesn't ask why I don't paint. Maybe she's afraid my answer is like an illness that will infect her, too, and she won't be able to learn to paint and please her dad.

Finally, when I continue to stand mute, she slips off the bed and tiptoes out again.

After she leaves, I return the box to its place on the dresser and lie on my bed, staring at the ceiling. Suddenly, I feel tired from the heat outside. In my pocket, I feel for the Prussian blue oil paint that I took from Mother's studio. The
cool metal edge curls where Mother has rolled up the end like a toothpaste tube, squeezing out the dark blue paint in small smudges against her palette. I should have hidden it by now, but I like the cool feel of it in my pocket. Prussian blue was developed in the sixteen hundreds. It became favored among artists because it didn't fade like indigo, and it cost less than cobalt.

When I was little, I pretended to be an artist like my mother. On Christmas Eve when I was seven, my grandmother on my mother's side gave me dough she made herself with salt and flour. I cut out bell shapes with cookie cutters and we baked them while Mother painted in her studio. Back then, she had a studio at the university, and we lived in an apartment on campus. The ornaments smelled like bread coming out of the oven. After they cooled, Grandmother Betts let me decorate them with thick paint in red, blue, and yellow—primary colors—with a set of paints she'd bought just for me. We hung the ornaments that evening. When Mother got home, she said they smelled up the house and that I was too young to handle paints. Grandmother's voice got tinny and cold, but she didn't get into an argument. After Epiphany, after Grandmother had returned to her winter retreat in Florida, Mother threw out the dough ornaments along with the tree. From the frosted window, I watched Dad haul it down to the curb on a Thursday when the garbage men were coming to truck away all the dead trees. When I cried and asked why, Mother said the ornaments
wouldn't keep; they'd mold. My grandmother had said art was for children. But dough ornaments weren't even art, Mother said.

After Dad died last summer, I found one of the ornaments, a blue bell, in a pin box in his sock drawer at home. Bits of it had crumbled off, but I knew what it was. It still smelled clean, like salt. I hid the box from Mother before she cleared out his things.

I don't know why Dad kept that blue bell. Besides books, he saved little—his grandfather's hammer, his mother's wedding band after she died when I was eight, and an oil painting barely bigger than two inches square, with a scene of a gondola, a bridge, and clothes hanging on a line across a canal. He and Mother went to Venice on their honeymoon, so I assumed Mother had painted it herself. But when I held the small square frame to the Maine light, I saw the name Giuseppe along the edge. Someone else, not Mother, had painted it. So why did Dad keep it? What about Venice had stayed with him?

I want to ask him those questions. But now I will never know.

T
HE NEXT MORNING
, Martia knocks on my door—I know it's Martia because she taps in a special rhythm—two short raps, a pause, and two more raps. I pull my fingers through my tangled hair. Last night I changed into a fresh T-shirt from my suitcase. It still holds the scent of the dryer sheets we use in Maine.

When I open the door, Martia motions for me to follow her. Intrigued, I tiptoe after her. Her skirt and blouse smell as fresh as sunshine. Martia doesn't believe that we should use electric dryers for our clothes, not when the sun is “for free.” But how can I explain Maine to her? How the damp gray air almost never dries out?

Martia knocks gently on Kammi's door. Kammi opens it, grinning. Just like the first afternoon when we walked over to the Bindases' house, she's polished and ready to go, even
down to her plastic slides. She's hidden her hair under a bandana. This time, she looks the part of an artist. I can see her as a model for the front of an art-school brochure. All she's missing is a smudge of blue paint on her nose for effect.

“I come in? Yes?” Martia asks. “Cyan, too?”

Kammi nods. Her eyebrows lower when she looks past Martia at me. She backs away to let us both in. Martia stands just inside the door, and I slip behind her into the room that every year before this one has been mine.

“I come to explain,” Martia says, and she folds her hands gently in front of her, as if she is about to take the wafer from the priest at Communion. “Mrs. “Walters, she can no paint in the air today.” Martia calls en plein air “in the air.” I imagine artists weightless, suspended in midair, painting on floating canvases.

“What do you mean?” Kammi's face clouds. “Is she sick?”

Martia nods. “A headache.
Mala cabeza.
Mrs. Walters, she no go out today. I call Jinco already. He take you to Willemstad. Be tourists today, yes? Much better idea. Mrs. Walters has left some money for you to spend.”

Martia asks it as a question of Kammi, but it isn't. Be good girls and go into town and leave Mrs. Walters to recover. Don't make a scene. I tilt my head back, imagine Mother lying above us in her bed in her studio, her eyes squeezed shut against the light that almost won't be kept out up there. She should be in my room, tucked against the back
of the house in the cool green shadows. But down here is too close to her old room, the closed-off room she shared with my father when he came to the island.

I savor the taste of Kammi's disappointment. She doesn't cry or stamp her foot, but she looks at me sharply. Maybe she thinks it's my fault, that I did something to make Mother come down with a headache.

I shrug as if she's asked me a question out loud. Who knows? Maybe Mother doesn't really have a headache. Maybe she doesn't want to paint en plein air with a beginner, one who will look at her as if she's a goddess. Maybe it makes her uncomfortable, though that's hard to imagine, given the way Philippa used to hang around our house near the lake. She started out following ten paces behind Mother wherever she went, until she became more skilled herself. After a while, Philippa became an artist in her own right. Then she started to walk beside Mother, as if they were equals.

“Okay,” Kammi says, lowering her eyes. “If I can't paint today, going to town will be okay.”

Other than the day we arrived at the airport, I haven't been to Willemstad this year. It's my chance to take the sea glass I've collected so far to the bead shop to sell.

“Another day, you paint with Mrs. Walters. It is no problem.” Martia smiles and straightens the small silver pin, shaped like a palette, on Kammi's blouse. No doubt she is
wearing a gift from her grandmother. Only a grandmother would give that pin to anyone who truly wanted to be an artist.

Kammi smiles and Martia hugs her. I slip money from Martia's outstretched hand into my pocket.

 

Jinco looks in his rearview mirror when he should be watching the shell road twist and turn in front of the cab. He pretends he's looking at me, but he's staring at Kammi, because all the men will gaze at her in the way they're not supposed to, eyes turned away yet studying her sideways. She's just a child, they'll think. They'll be right, but Kammi already has a sexy look, whether she knows it or not.

I stare down Jinco when he looks my way. He remembers last year, I know, but he still showed up to meet us at the airport this year, as if this were just another summer and Dad was staying in Maine like he often did. Dad would say he shouldn't interfere, that Mother had to have her space. And her space didn't always include him. Maybe it didn't always include me, either. But she always brought me to the island. I came along like a barnacle attached to the hull of a sleek speedboat.

In Willemstad, Jinco jerks the cab to a stop near a banyan tree before the Queen Emma pontoon bridge.

“We'll meet you here at four o'clock,” I say. In the heat of the afternoon. I'm probably making him come for us just when he'd be taking a nap under a shade tree or having a beer.

Jinco shrugs and taps the car clock, the one that runs ten minutes slow compared to my plastic wristwatch. “Four,” he says. He'll be late. He and I both know it.

“Come on, get out on this side.” I slide out the door and motion to Kammi to follow.

She says thank you to Jinco. His eyes follow her in the side-view mirror. He can't help himself.

When Jinco speeds off, leaving a cloud of burned oil in our faces, we're standing on the pontoon bridge. The Queen Emma Bridge opens to let the big cruise ships in and out of the main harbor. Every summer, I come down at least once to wave as the ships inch out of port, saying goodbye to tourists pointing their cameras at us from the deck.

I lean over the side. Anemones cling to the pontoons and the bridge supports near the shore. “If you squint, you can see through the water at an angle.”

Kammi stares, a few strands of hair blowing across her face.

“There,” I say, pointing. “Just on the edge, see the parrotfish?”

Her gaze darts back and forth along the water. I can tell she can't see it.

“Look
through
the water. Follow the light.” I point again. “Quick, before a cloud moves in front of the sun.” The fish hovers just there, motionless.

Kammi throws out her arm, pointing. “I see it.”

Looking where her hand is pointing, I see nothing. The startled fish has moved away.

“Sure,” I say. Whatever. “Come on.” We pass the tourist shops closest to the cruise-ship dock, the ones that pay extra so they can be listed in the brochures. “Safe, friendly sales staff.” “Air conditioning.” “Extra-special prices,” they claim, “just for the ship passengers.” It's a lie. No one checks to see if I'm with a cruise ship when I claim a discount. Maybe they mumble, “Ship?” and I name whatever ship is in port. Only once last year, a nosy clerk, just a little older than me, asked me for my ship card, for proof, and she thought she had me. Her smirk and unbelieving eyes said so. I shrugged and claimed my mother had my ID card. Then I said loudly, so the manager would hear, “She's not coming to this shop, so I guess there's no sale.” The girl gave in and sold me the shell bracelets for ten percent of. Better a sale than no sale, and no skin off her nose if I cheated the owner. She'd have done the same. And the truth? The truth is the ten percent discount is no discount, but we all play the game.

Kammi darts under the shady overhang of a food stand, where the air smells of cinnamon, one of Curaçao's exports. An oscillating fan whips the scent into the air, and it wafts into the street, where it mingles with dust and diesel. Tourists slathered in sunscreen mill about, struggling behind tour guides with tasseled flagpoles, calling out for beach tour this and snorkeling tour that.

Kammi waits in line and buys a Coke with ice. She
hands over her money and then takes a second cup and passes it to me, without asking if I want one.