“Thank you,” Kammi says, smiling, a bigger smile than when she saw the pink-flowered bedroom.
“Such a pretty little girl come to Curaçao,” Martia says. “You will be liking it here. You come see Martia you need anything. I make your favorite foods. So you no homesick.” She shows Kammi the glass bowl. “Tonight we have shrimp and mango and a big salad. You like it?”
“Yes,” Kammi says. I wonder if she is telling the truth or just being polite. The way she smiles, I bet she thinks Martia is unbiased, an ally.
She’s wrong. Martia is mine.
Chapter Three
“COME ON, there’s more to see,” I say, motioning Kammi away from Martia, who is still smiling as she turns to continue preparing dinner.
Kammi follows me into the living room. Nature books and shells are arranged on the side tables. Big cushions with palm-tree prints line the white rattan furniture. Island décor just like something out of a magazine. Martia keeps everything looking that way. She sweeps the sand, fluffs the pillows, and repositions the shells.
“What’s up there?” Kammi points to the metal staircase.
“You’re not allowed up there.” Like Bluebeard’s castle.
Kammi’s face goes sour.
“I’m not allowed up there, either,” I say. “No one is. Except Mother. It’s her studio.” I picture the bottles and tubes of blue. Will Mother notice the Prussian blue is missing? Maybe she’ll assume the paint dried out in the bottom of the tube and she threw it away. Or maybe she’ll think that she forgot she threw it away, because she drank too much. Yesterday, before she was even fully unpacked, I stole a nearly empty tube of Scarlet Lake from her art bin and dropped it in the garbage. If she missed it, she didn’t say. It wasn’t one of the blues, after all. The Prussian blue is still in my pocket. Evidence of a crime committed right under Mother’s nose, but I can’t bear to destroy it.
“Oh, I hope I get to see her work,” Kammi says, and smiles. Her face lights up. “Before I came, she said I might. I want to paint, too.”
The breath goes out of me. Before she came. All spring in Maine, Mother encouraged me to send Kammi a “get-acquainted e-mail.” Kammi sent one to me, along with a photograph of herself under a beach umbrella. I couldn’t make myself reply. I didn’t have anything to say.
“Mother’s very busy.” That’s a lie, but I say it anyway. “Come on. I’ll show you the beach. There are places where you have to watch the riptide.” I want out of the house.
I want her out of the house.
Before I open the French doors to the patio, the phone rings. Martia answers it in the kitchen. Her words turn stiff.
I hate it when the phone rings now. How the voice on the other end can change Martia with a simple hello. It’s been that way since last year when the phone finally rang after Dad disappeared. Mother had been standing at the window facing the sea, as if she could will the boat to appear on the horizon. She didn’t even turn when Martia answered the phone on the fourth ring, but I saw her face.
Martia walks into the living room. “It is Mayur Bindas. For you,” she says, frowning. “I tell him you are busy. You have a guest.” Martia is my ally, but Mayur and his parents are rich. They know the Dutch owner of this house. They might make things difficult for Martia if she were rude to Mayur.
“I’ll take it.” Mayur. I’ve been wondering when he’d call. He’s waited until three days after we arrived. Mayur would wait just to make me wonder.
Kammi stands by the French doors, looking toward the sea, as if she’s trying to give me some privacy. If she’s curious about Mayur, she doesn’t show it.
“Hello,” I say into the phone.
“Bon.” Not “good afternoon” or “hello,” just “good.” Shorthand. I haven’t heard Mayur’s voice in a year. Not since the day before Mother and I left Curaçao. The day when we stopped at the Bindases’ house to thank Dr. Bindas for his help with Dad on the beach. The day I pushed Mayur into the pool, still dressed in his best clothes from a family wedding he’d just attended, because of what he said to me.
“What do you want?” Last year, he said he had a secret I would want to know. He didn’t get a chance to tell me and I didn’t ask. So he has kept it for a whole year.
“Mamí said you were back. With a new girl.” Without your father. He doesn’t say it. But he pauses, so my mind fills the silence.
I don’t say anything. Silence is a tactic I learned from the counselor Mother sent me to after we got back to Maine. Counselors like empty spaces. They know if they wait, the other person will fill up the space with words. Now I wait.
“Mamí told me you and the new girl must come to visit. You must come tomorrow,” he says.
We haven’t spoken in a year and he’s already ordering me around. Or trying to.
“The new girl is Kammi.” At her name Kammi turns around and cocks her head at me. She was listening after all.
“Kammi,” he says. “Mamí says you and Kammi must come. Three in the afternoon. She says to bring your swimsuits.”
“Your mother is very nice.” Meaning he is not. “Tell her we’ll come.”
Kammi raises her eyebrows at me, asking me a question without speaking.
I shrug. After yelling to his mother that we’re coming, Mayur starts to brag about some new game gadget he bought. How much it cost. I listen without hearing.
Then his voice gets low. “You remember what I said? Last year?”
Air rushes in my eardrum, as if the phone has become a shell and I can hear the sea.
“I’m hanging up,” I say. I don’t wait for Mayur to finish.
Mother’s voice carries down the metal stairs. “Who was that?”
“Mayur.”
“Bindas?”
“Yes.” As if there were any other Mayur. “His mother invited Kammi and me over tomorrow at three.”
Mother doesn’t say “That’s nice” or “I’m surprised after what happened.” She just changes the subject. “Have you shown Kammi around?”
“We’re going to the beach now.” I shoo Kammi out the French doors. I’m closing them as I hear Mother start, “Be—”
Careful, she means to say.
I am past that point.
Outside, the sun is so bright it hurts my eyes. Kammi slips her sunglasses back on, but I just squint into the glare. I don’t believe in sunglasses.
“Let’s go,” I say as we walk down the wooden steps of the deck and onto the sand. It squishes between my bare toes, so soft it almost tickles. Magic sand, Dad called it.
“Wait.” Kammi pauses, tugging off her slides. Tiny, leather-soled, the shoes are a smaller version of Mother’s. Like Mother, Kammi won’t want them to get wet or covered in sand.
I feel Mother watching us, but I refuse to look up to the windows or the widow’s walk beyond.
Instead, I dig my toes into the sand and wait. I brought only two pairs of plastic flip-flops to wear, no nice shoes. For clothes, I packed two broomstick skirts, five T-shirts in pastel colors, enough underwear for a week, and a bathing suit with a ruffle at the bottom that Mother made me buy the week before we left. She said it would be flattering. She didn’t say the ruffle would hide the roll of fat around my waist, the one I see her look away from whenever I lean over. Or that it would visually balance my growing breasts, which have expanded along with the rest of me this past year. She watched me slip the suit into my suitcase, on top. That’s all I brought, though. Most of my summer clothes from last year don’t fit anymore. Instead of telling Mother, I just stuffed towels in my suitcase to make it look full. I hate shopping, hate how nothing on the hangers looks right on me. As if the clothes belong to someone else and I’m just borrowing them.
Shoes off, Kammi nestles her pale toes in the sand. Even her toenails are pink.
Perfect. I laugh.
“What’s so funny?”
I shake my head, glancing down at her feet and then at the water. “Nothing.”
“What?” Frowning, sh
e looks at her toes. “You don’t like my nail polish?”
“No, I mean ... sure, it’s fine. Pink’s perfect, really.” For her. She’s soft and easily burned.
But if I can see Kammi’s pink, why can’t I tell what color I am? Yesterday, I asked Martia what color she thought I was.
“Color?” she asked, as if she thought she’d heard me wrong.
“Yes, color. Like the way my name means ‘blue,’” I said. “But what color do you think I am?”
She squinted at me, as if narrowing her vision until I appeared as just a color, no shape.
“Yellow,” she said.
“Like sunshine?”
“Yellow like kibrahacha. Flowers, you know.”
Actually, I didn’t. Later I looked up the word in the guidebook to the flora and fauna of the Dutch Antilles. After the spring rains come, the western hills blaze up with yellow kibrahacha. Persistent, rangy, and rugged, they’re all bloomed out by June when we arrive.
What did Martia mean? Am I really yellow?
At home in Maine, I have a book my father gave me about color. Goethe, a German philosopher, wrote it two hundred years ago. I keep it by my bed, moving the bookmark a page or two each night to keep Mother guessing about whether I’m reading it or not. Most of it bores me, and I skip pages, but I understand some of Goethe’s ideas. He said color isn’t just light hitting an object. Color is how we perceive light hitting an object. The color closest to light, he said, is yellow. The opposite, the color closest to the darkness—the absence of light—is blue.
I look past Kammi to the sea, but I don’t say anything to her about the water or about color.
“Race you to the point.” I burrow my feet into the sand, giving me traction and propelling me forward. I’m taller, longer-legged, and older than she is. I have the advantage.
I beat her, but she’s not breathing as hard as me when she catches up. She turns to look back the way we came. Maybe she’s trying to get her bearings, figuring out landmarks, making a map in her head.
“You can see the point for a long way down either beach. You won’t get lost,” I say.
“I just wanted to see what it looks like from here. The house.”
I look, trying to imagine what it must be like to see it for the first time. From the beach side, you can see all three stories and the widow’s walk on top. From the main entrance and driveway, which faces the hills, the house looks smaller—you can’t see the ground floor. From here it looks like a castle, especially with the copper roof on the cupola, how it reflects the glare like a torch. I wonder if Dad saw it from the sea before the sun went down the first day he went missing.
“The Bindases live this way, around the point and along another cove. It’s quicker to get there by going along the road.”
“Who are the Bindases?” Kammi asks, still looking toward Blauwe Huis.
I know she’s asking about Mayur. “Dr. Bindas is a doctor. Mrs. Bindas is very nice; pretty, too. You’ll like her. They have a pool down by the sea.”
“And Mayur?”
“You be the judge.” I start to walk around the curve of the point, where I’ll be out of sight of the house. “You’ll meet him tomorrow. He’s about fourteen.” Older than Kammi, younger than me. All brat. What’s he going to try to tell me?
“Who’s waving? Is that your mother?” Kammi asks.
I turn around. Before I answer, Kammi starts waving back.
“Yes, it’s her.” I look down at the line of shells at the high-tide mark. I refuse to let Mother see me stare back at the house. Even when she is supposed to be painting, she is watching. I won’t wave. It’s not me she’s waving to anyway. She’s trying to impress Kammi, to make it seem as if we’re a happy family. Or will be, once she marries Howard, Kammi’s father.
Before Dad died, Mother’s art students—her protégés, anyway—were the ones she tried to impress. Every year or two, she had a new favorite. They all had wonderful names, as if they’d been born to be artists: Catrione, Kiera, Samantha, Philippa.
Catrione was the one I liked best. She took time when Mother wasn’t looking to show me things—how to arrange still-life objects to best effect, how to understand perspective. Things Mother lost patience in trying to explain to me. When Mother told me to think of an orchid in a vase as a cylinder, all I could see was the delicate lip of the blossom, the tiniest ruffles along the edges of the fragile petal, and the thin lines disappearing down its throat. I imagined the color turning darker and darker deeper inside the stem, and I wondered how that secret place could be painted. The next week, Mother bought a crochet hook and granny-square kit for me. “Some people are artists, some are craftsmen,” she told me.
Catrione had more patience. Once, she even sneaked to my room while Mother was out talking to a gallery owner. She looked over my sketch of the orchid, which I kept under the cloth runner on my dresser. Hidden, but close to the surface.
Philippa was Mother’s last student. She was around the longest and was the most like Mother. She trashed more canvases than all the other students combined. I’d find a canvas by the curb on garbage day, and I couldn’t see why it had been tossed away. Even Dad, who didn’t “involve himself” with Mother’s art, rescued a couple of Philippa’s paintings and hung them where the light showed them off.
“She’s a perfectionist,” Mother explained as she straightened one of Philippa’s rescued paintings. She said it as if that was a good thing. I thought of the tangled skein of yarn in the back of my closet.
I am tracing the outline of a broken whelk with my finger when Kammi’s shadow falls over me and blocks the light. I hold the shell up for her to see. The inside is still shiny lavender.
“Do you go shelling?” she asks, picking up an open coquina, still connected at the center so it looks like wings.
“I go out early.” Not to collect shells but to scavenge for sea glass. “It’s best in the morning, just after high tide. Before anyone else gets there.” I hate it when I find fresh footprints there before me. I always wonder what treasure others have stolen.
“These are all over Florida. We stay at Sanibel Island every summer. Mom once made a soup out of coquinas I gathered. I wouldn’t eat it.”
I reach down and scoop up a still-whole scallop shell. I hold it out to Kammi, who takes it in both hands.
Kammi’s parents are both still alive. Every time Mother tried to tell me about Howard saying “Kammi did this” or how “Howard and Kammi did that,” I wouldn’t listen. I didn’t want to hear about her or her father, especially not about them together.
“Come on.” I want away from the sight of the house. I start running.
“Wait up!” Kammi’s voice is broken by the wind in my ears.
Chapter Four
I JOG ALMOST all the way to the beginning of the Bindases’ property, but I stop before crossing over onto it. I don’t want Mayur to see me. He might think I’ve come to talk to him, that I’m eager to hear his secret. Last year, when he claimed he knew something about what happened, I thought he was lying. What could he know? When he tracked me down by e-mail, I blocked his messages. Back here on the island, I still think he’s lying, but I need to know what he thinks he knows.
Walking back toward Blauwe Huis, I meet Kammi, who apparently followed me. She isn’t running, just walking, as if she knew she’d find me.
“Where’d you go?” she asks.
I shrug.
She waits a moment for me to answer. When I don’t, she asks, “Is that a canal?” She points to a dry ravine coming from the hillside all the way to the shore.
“When it rains hard—not all that often—the water runs off down the hills and out to sea. Once, we found a dead goat on the beach there.” Last year, Dad and I took a walk every morning down to this area where, if there wasn’t any haze, we could see another island.
“Yuck,” she says.
I ask, “Do you swim?”
She beams. “Sure. I took lessons. Last year I swam at
the country club where we belong. What about you?”
“I know how.” I don’t swim, though. Not anymore. “Watch for undertow here.”
Kammi’s smile fades.
My lips turn up. “We better go back. Martia’s making a special dinner. For you.”
For Martia’s sake, I don’t want to be late.
We walk in silence, listening to the surf. Kammi’s steps start to match mine, even though my stride is longer. I wonder if it really is true, that women who live together start to have periods at the same time, and they aren’t even aware of it happening. Does Kammi have periods? Is she too young? Mother and I don’t discuss periods anymore. I buy extra supplies so I don’t run out and have to ask her.
“Hey, look.” Kammi points to a wooden building tucked into the manchineel. “Is there a sailboat? Can we take it out?” She doesn’t wait for an answer. She runs to the boathouse and pulls on the door. Padlocked. I could have told her that. She stands on tiptoe and peers through a cloudy window, cupping her hands around her eyes so she can see inside.
“We don’t have a sailboat.” I know what she’ll see, even though I haven’t looked myself this summer. Fishnets nailed to the wall, as if they’re still drying after a long day in the water. A fishing boat, yes, but the motor’s gone, and the blue paint’s chipping off.
Mother painted The Nautilus two summers ago as a favor to the Dutch owner. He’d named the boat after the submarine in Jules Verne’s 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, his favorite book. Dad took the boat out twice last summer to fish in deep water when he heard the fish were running.
Once, he came back with fish.
The second time, he did not come back.
Unlike the blue boat, a real nautilus shell has dozens of chambers filled with air. The animal inside lets out air to maneuver itself into the depths of the sea, taking oxygen with it to the bottom. Is there enough air for a person to breathe? If you could cup the shell to your mouth under water and inhale, could you get enough air to get to the surface if you were drowning?
The Other Side of Blue Page 2