Table of Contents
Title Page
Table of Contents
Copyright
Dedication
Map
Epigraph
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Acknowledgments
Sample Chapter from OPERATION OLEANDER
Buy the Book
About the Author
Clarion Books
215 Park Avenue South,
New York, New York 10003
Copyright © 2009 by Valerie O. Patterson
Map by Tom Patterson.
All rights reserved.
For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 215 Park Avenue South, New York, New York 10003.
Clarion Books is an imprint of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.
www.hmhco.com
The Library of Congress has cataloged the print edition as follows:
Patterson, Valerie O.
The other side of blue / by Valerie O. Patterson.
p. cm.
Summary: The summer after her father drowned off the island of Curaçao, Cyan and her mother, a painter, return to the house they stay at every summer, along with the daughter of her mother’s fiancé, but Cyan blames her mother and spends her time trying to find out what really happened to her father.
ISBN 978-0-547-24436-5
[1. Mothers and daughters—Fiction. 2. Grief—Fiction. 3. Artists—Fiction. 4. Stepsisters—Fiction. 5. Secrets—Fiction. 6. Curaçao (Netherlands Antilles)—Fiction.] I. Title.
PZ7.P278152Ot 2009
[Fic]—dc22
2008049233
eISBN 978-0-547-41740-0
v3.0514
Dedicated to
Tom
And to our nieces
Nicole, Leah, Emily
Annie and Patty
With love
and hope
“[A] blue surface seems to retire from us. But as we readily follow an agreeable object that flies from us, so we love to contemplate blue, not because it advances to us, but because it draws us after it.”
—Johann Wolfgang von Goethe,
Theory of Colors
Chapter One
WE’RE IN PARADISE, so the tourist brochures say. That’s what I thought, too, before last June, when the unspeakable happened, when Dad took the blue boat out and didn’t come back.
The Caribbean island of Curaçao beckons sun worshipers and cruise ships that sail up St. Anna Bay and dock near the House of the Blue Soul. Taffy pink, aqua, and lemon yellow buildings like squares of colored candies line the streets of Willemstad’s shopping district. Bon bini signs welcome arrivals at every port of call, the airport, and almost every shop in Punda and Otrobanda. They’re even plastered to the side of boats taking tourists out to scuba-dive in deep water. Paradise. Where the water is so blue, so calm, so deceptive.
“You’re sure you don’t want to come with me, Cyan?” Standing in the driveway outside our rented house, Mother says my name—Cyan—like a sigh. “I’m sure Kammi would appreciate your meeting her at the airport. You know, the first time. To welcome her.”
I shake my head while the dry wind billows my broomstick skirt like a sail. The girl in the photograph Mother showed me last night—the one she keeps in her art studio—is younger than I am. Thirteen, Mother said, two years younger. Her face in the photo appears fair and freckled across the nose, but she has brown hair, not blond like me. She’s thin, too, not fat. I studied every detail.
Mother opens the car door and folds herself into the back seat of Jinco’s rusty faded-denim-colored taxi. Untroubled by the wind, her spiky short hair sets off her sharp cheekbones. Today she’s highlighted them with a subtle peach color, but she’s still all angles, down to her creased linen pants, bony ankles, and pointy red leather mules.
“I’ll wait here,” I say, “with Martia.” I’d rather stay with the housekeeper, whose services have come with the lease for as long as I can remember. For Martia, who’s already abandoned us to prepare a welcome meal, everything centers on the kitchen. Mother and I aren’t even allowed inside except to get a glass of iced tea or to sample sweets from a tray.
Mother’s face goes flat, as if she’s smoothing out emotion the way she would layer paint with a palette knife.
The scent of plantains mingles with burning motor oil from Jinco’s taxi. As soon as Mother snaps the car door shut, Jinco punches the horn—his usual way of announcing his arrival or departure—and floors the gas pedal. I lose sight of the car in the fine dust of the shell driveway. I imagine Mother sitting straight, her feet planted, staying balanced even as Jinco careens toward the airport. She is so practiced, so centered.
Martia appears in the doorway, wiping her hands on her apron. When I was little, I imagined the spices she mixed were like voodoo. I told Dad that if she wanted to, Martia could poison us. Dad laughed. Martia, though, said I was a smart girl, that you can’t be putting the trust in just anyone. I trust Martia now.
“I’m okay,” I say before she asks.
She shrugs, motioning me into the kitchen. From nowhere she hands me a plate of kokada.
“Kome,” she says. “Eat.” I start to say no, but I don’t. I can’t. I lift the first pink treat to my mouth, sucking in the sweet coconut taste.
Mother always refuses Martia’s sweet offerings. She won’t eat them.
I can’t get enough.
Martia smiles and turns her back, leaving me the rest of the kokada. She starts to peel some just-cooked shrimp; their shells bubble like painful blisters in her hand. Her worn raffia scuffs sound like palm fronds as they brush the floor. She never seems to wear the new pairs Mother brings her every summer from Maine. Like mine, Martia’s middle is wider this year, but she is comfortable with it. Her apron is stained with papaya and the essence of almond. She belongs to the house more than the absentee owner, who lives in Amsterdam and visits here in the winter months when the European skies turn gray.
Come to Curaçao, blue heaven. But Martia is not what the tourist brochures advertise with their slick, modern photographs: Perfect smiles. Thin bodies in thong suits lying underneath beach umbrellas, sipping cold drinks.
Except for the thong, that could be my mother on the cover of the brochures.
Cupping two more pieces of kokada in a napkin, I flee the safety of the kitchen. Martia’s peeling mangoes now, letting the thin green skins plop into the sink. I hear her singing tambú, and I wonder what she thinks when she sings the old slave songs. I don’t ask, though. Martia acts as if she doesn’t know I’ve left the room, or where I might be going.
At the top of the metal staircase, I enter Mother’s studio, the forbidden room. Martia cleans here only under Mother’s direction, with any paintings in progress shielded from sight. Martia cannot risk looking and perhaps being fired.
From the studio windows, I notice the sea is the color of tumbled blue-green glass, roiled and unsettled. Last June after Dad died, his seat between Mother and me on the plane going home sat empty until just before takeoff, when a red-faced, sweating tourist weaved her way down the aisle and claimed it. She stuffed an oversized tote bag under the seat in front of her, leaving me to huddle against the window. As our plane rose into the sky, I couldn’t take my eyes off the sea. I thought the color of the water might change with the light, but it didn’t. It appeared deep blue, almost black, and dense as oil. No light penetrated the surface; we were left with the dark skin of the sea and no answers.
By now, the end of the first week of June at Blauwe Huis, Mother should be knee-deep in wet canvases, already ignoring me for the favorable slant of light under the eaves of the widow’s walk. This spring she said the hot, dry island has been her “artistic touchstone” ever since she started coming here as a girl, and she had to come back, even this year, even after what happened. She insisted I come, too. We would start over.
Her canvases remain stretched and ready but empty, and her mixing palette has dried out, the smudges of blue paint wavy and stiff under my touch like a bad van Gogh imitation.
The tubes and glass bottles of paint feel cool in my hand. Mother’s lined them up on the shelves like a display in a paint store, with the blues up front. She contemplates blue, collects it, honors it in every painting. Her marine blue appears steel gray, like a New England harbor in winter. Savannah blue acts sultry, with an undertone of indigo. Bahama blue seems paler than curaçao liqueur, more a bleached blue, the color of shallow water. It reminds me of the shade of Winslow Homer’s Caribbean water, but not quite—as if for Mother the sun has come on too strong, the glare blinding her to the undertones.
Mother chooses her blues carefully, with an eye toward the light, the swirl of colors on a glass palette tray. Fifteen years ago, she even named me for cyan, a fundamental blue.
On some mornings when she says she is working, I can stand down the beach, careful of the poisonous sap of the manchineel, and see her on the widow’s walk, hand raised, holding a glass. Martia keeps the shelf in the dining room stocked with blue curaçao, the national liqueur, made from the bittersweet peel of the apelsina. Mother drinks it with bitter lemon soda over ice—a Blue Bay. Sometimes the light catches her drink glass like a prism. Maybe she is toasting the sea. If she is, she never acts drunk, not like my best friend Zoe’s mother, who drinks when she thinks no one else is looking, but everyone knows.
Mother painted me blue, but as I look out over the sea, I think about Dad and wonder what color I really am.
What is the color for lost?
Chapter Two
JINCO’S HORN BLARES outside. I blink, realizing I don’t have any idea how long I’ve been standing here in Mother’s studio. I brush my hand across the paints as if I’m touching an enemy and escaping unharmed. Palming a half-empty tube of Prussian blue paint, I slip it in my skirt pocket and run downstairs. Has any of the blue smudged onto my fingers, my clothes? I’m almost hoping it has, like a dare to my mother to notice.
Martia meets me in the kitchen. Her face doesn’t give anything away. She knows where I’ve been, but she keeps it to herself. She opens the door and I step outside into the glare.
Looking like her photograph, Kammi exits the taxi’s back seat from the left, close to me, Mother from the right. Trim and brunette and neat, Kammi’s dressed out of Talbots down to the pink polo shirt and crisp capris. She’s wearing sunglasses, so I can’t see the color of her eyes, but I can tell there’s not a trace of blue in her. She is pink, shell pink, like the inside of a conch shell before the sun has bleached it. Tender-skinned, she’ll burn before the rest of us, turning the color of the cooked shrimp Martia peeled earlier.
The girl pulls a slim garment bag and a tote out of the cab. She has come with so little; I can’t believe she’s staying almost three weeks. Does she travel light because they teach that at her boarding school? Or is she simply like that, spare and contained? Though her bag is small, I imagine she’s packed it tightly, properly, as if she’s arranging small fish head to tail on top of each other. I shade my eyes with my hand, just to get a better view of her face around her sunglasses. Will she think Mother and I are allied against her for the rest of June at Blauwe Huis? She needn’t worry. A gulf as wide as the Caribbean has come between my mother and me.
Kammi carries her own bags. She doesn’t wait for Mother to help her, or even Jinco, who stirs himself only to carry Mother’s luggage on the day we arrive and the day we leave.
The first time I remember coming to Curaçao—Mother, Dad, and me—I didn’t understand where we were going or about beach living. I trailed beach sand into the rented house without thinking about it, Martia sweeping up behind me. I wanted to show Mother and Dad my sand castle, not realizing that it had slipped through my pudgy fingers with every step I took away from the water’s edge.
Dad stopped coming a few years later, spending his summers in Europe on language tours, teaching American university students on their semesters abroad. He tried to explain, “Curaçao is your mother’s place. There’s no room for me there.” I wanted to say there wasn’t a place for me, either, but I didn’t. Last year he finally came back, cutting short a tour through Italy to fly from Rome to Amsterdam to Curaçao. I traced the route on the map in the airline magazine I’d taken from our flight. Jinco deposited him at Blauwe Huis just before dusk and didn’t carry his bags. Jinco’s lack of interest in anyone’s bags but Mother’s bothered Dad, who was bleary-eyed from the flight. Mother told him to let it be. Jinco was reliable, she said, and had been so for years, and that was good enough for her. Dad grabbed his garment bag and left Mother to pay the fare.
Except for the luggage, Dad tried to make Mother happy those few weeks.
Kammi slips the garment bag over her bony left shoulder and walks toward me. As she does, a lizard skitters across the sand, trailing a shadow in front of her path. She doesn’t miss a step. Maybe she didn’t even see it. She extends her hand, almost as if she’s auditioning to be queen.
“I’m so sorry...” she says as her cool hand touches mine in not quite a handshake, not an embrace. What is she sorry for? About my father? For the fact we’ll be stepsisters?
I don’t say anything. I turn away and lead her inside while Mother pays Jinco. Indoors, Kammi stops behind me for a moment, as if she’s adjusting to the darker interior. I watch her as she takes off her sunglasses. Hazel, that’s what color her eyes are.
“The shades were my mother’s idea,” she says, laughing in a timid way, her vowels soft and southern.
“This is yours.” I point to the small room off the living area. “It was my mother’s idea.” I can’t resist saying it that way. It really was Mother’s idea to give Kammi my room, the nicer of the two small bedrooms. “Because,” Mother said, “for now Kammi is a guest, not family. We want to make a good impression.”
I put my things into the musty and unused second bedroom the day we arrived. The bedroom window faces the dry hills, not the water. I didn’t even look at my old room. Martia, unaware of Mother’s plan at first, had aired it out and tucked new hibiscus-colored sheets onto the bed. She told me she had found a pink paper fan shaped like a hibiscus blossom at a gift shop in Willemstad and she’d placed it on the pillowcase for me.
Perhaps it is destiny after all. The pink is perfect for Kammi. Dropping her bags on the bed, she smiles when she sees the fan and the sheets and the blue ocean beyond. The sea, it is the sea. Martia’s voice in my head corrects me when I even think “ocean.” To me, a sea sounds calm. An ocean doesn’t.
Kammi pushes the curtains aside and stares at the water.
“That’s the Caribbean,” I tell her. “Curaçao’s about forty miles from Venezuela.” I sound like I’ve memorized the tourist brochures. By now I have.
“I thought people here would speak Spanish. I studied Spanish in school, but I don’t like to spe
ak it.”
“Curaçao’s a Dutch island. But some people speak Spanish. Papiamentu, the local language, is part Spanish and Portuguese, but other languages, too.” Now I really sound like one of those tour guides who stand by the pier at St. Anna Bay and herd cruise-ship tourists on shopping trips that pretend to be cultural tours. Mother calls the tourists cattle. Another reason she says she won’t display her artwork at the galleries in Willemstad.
“Do you speak it?” Kammi asks, turning to look at me.
“Papiamentu? No. I studied Arabic last year.”
Her eyes go wide. I don’t tell her I took the class to make Mother angry—she wanted me to study French. We were a class of five in an elective taught by a refugee. I got a C. I wouldn’t turn in my homework.
I sense Mother listening from the hallway. Waiting to see how things go between us.
“Come on. I’ll show you around.” To my own ears, I sound polite. I hear myself as if I am standing outside my body, listening. “We’re not on the Internet here. Except for the phone, we’re in the Dark Ages.” It doesn’t bother me much, but I watch Kammi’s face to see if she reacts. She simply nods. Her father must have warned her.
Mother’s footsteps echo on the metal staircase as she goes up to her studio.
Kammi unfolds her bag onto the rattan luggage rack at the foot of the bed. She unzips it, shakes out a few sundresses, all but unwrinkled, and hangs them in the closet. I was right: she packs like Mother, and her clothes are so tiny. I’d never fit in them. She leaves the rest and then follows me.
In the kitchen, Martia is smiling like she always does when she sees children.
“This is Martia,” I say.
“Bon bini,” Martia says. “Welcome.” Martia wipes her hands on her apron and takes Kammi’s small hands in hers, giving them a big squeeze. Not for the first time, I wonder what Martia’s family is really like, what her children do while she’s here with us. Martia only goes home on Sundays. Does she wonder, too, whether they think of her here in the fancy house?
The Other Side of Blue Page 1