I’m weighted down with the ice chest, the sun tent, and my own towel.
Kammi trudges behind me, the wind snatching away the sound of her sandals flapping against the soles of her feet. When we pass the boathouse, I know without looking that she has stopped in front of it. I keep going. If I don’t look back, I can count on her following me like a puppy.
At the far end of the beach, just around the curve where Mother can no longer see us, even with binoculars, I stop. I turn around. Sure enough, Kammi’s following me, and I wait for her to catch up.
Chapter Eight
WHEN KAMMI reaches me, she says, “I want to paint that boat.” The wind flips her cover-up across her thighs. Her straw hat threatens to fly away, and she forces it down on her head.
I know the boat she means. I ignore her.
“This is just the shade of blue,” she says, holding up a watercolor pencil in her fist, not giving up.
“No, it isn’t.” Her pencil is delft blue. The blue of the boat is more vibrant, richer in tone. More like ultramarine. The name even sounds like it should mean the ultimate or the perfect sea, but it doesn’t. To medieval Italians, oltramarino meant “from beyond the seas.” Maybe that’s more accurate. A blue not of this world.
“Come on, it’s farther.” I start to walk again.
“How much farther?”
“The next beach over. Not far.” We cut across inland through scrub and cacti. Lizard tracks weave through the hot sand. I like the way the heat feels, the way it sinks over my head, anchoring me to the ground. Kammi falls behind, the art supply bag over her shoulder. At least she’s given up on the leather shoes and opted for plastic beach slides.
Down a long hill, the path opens up to another beach, a tucked-away cove. Too shallow for most boats, Boca Roja invites only swimmers who walk from the road at the top of the hill, or people who come from the grand houses, like the one we rent, along the shore. At dawn and dusk, the light here is almost reddish. I’m not sure why, whether it’s the slant of the sun or some base color under the sand that comes out only at the ends of day. The full sun bleaches everything out.
We’re the only beachgoers today. I pick a spot and start pounding stakes into the sand, the mallet making a hollow sound as it strikes.
“It is too the right color.” Kammi doesn’t give up. She plops down on her bottom on a red beach towel like a two-year-old child would. “It’s just this shade.”
“The light in the boathouse is no good.” The mallet strikes until the wood sinks into the sand, and I fight to put up the tent. The loose fabric flaps in the wind like a flock of silk saris, the kind Mrs. Bindas’s servants hang on the line by their beach. The saris catch the breeze and dry in under an hour. Not enough time to fade, she said once to Mother when they stood talking at the farm market. Mrs. Bindas held an armful of mangoes and Mother a clutch of watercolor pencils she’d brought to match the colors in the market.
“They smell so fresh, like the sea,” Mrs. Bindas said about the saris.
But the sea doesn’t always smell fresh—sometimes it reeks of marine life stranded ashore by low tide, and it tastes like tears.
The salt air burns my eyes.
“But if we open the doors—”
“No.” I wrap my hands around the cloth, squeeze. “Grab that end, will you?” Be useful, that’s what I want to say. Why I don’t, I’m not sure. Most of this past year I’ve said anything that popped into my head.
Kammi fights to hold on to a corner of the cloth, and I wrestle it into place. Now we have a four-foot square of shade between us to share.
While Kammi pulls out her art supplies, arranging the Caran d’Ache watercolor pencils, the kind Mother would buy, around the blanket like a color wheel, I stare at the sea. She opens the water bottle and pours some into a small cup. She settles herself, flips over a fresh sheet of drawing paper, and pauses. I sense her close her eyes, centering herself. Mother does that, too, like she would a yoga pose, a breathing exercise to push away distractions.
In the distance, a fishing boat, probably heading from Venezuela to the floating market at Otrobanda, chugs along. The wavelike shape of the prow reminds me again of the boat in the boathouse. Kammi’s too busy settling herself to see it, to notice it’s like the other one, the one I won’t let her draw.
“Since my dad’s been gone,” Kammi begins. She doesn’t mention the divorce. She says “gone,” almost as if it were a passive act. Something done to him, to her. She takes a deep breath. “Ever since then, it’s just been Mom and me. Mom says she won’t marry anyone else. She won’t even date. I sort of thought ... well, I sort of thought that meant he might come back, you know?” She looks at me from under the hat and tears start to well in her eyes.
I thought my dad would come back, too. Even after they found his body trapped in the netting. Even after the boat was hauled onto the sand and into the boathouse. I thought he’d just swim out of the sea and laugh at me for worrying. Water and sand would stream down his face and body, making unexpected sand castles at his feet.
I stare at the sea. It feels possible even now, though I know it can’t happen.
“Last fall, Dad came down to Atlanta for parents’ weekend,” Kammi says. “He said he’d come all the way from Maine for me.”
The sand shifts under my feet. “When?”
“October.”
Last Columbus Day weekend, Mother attended the opening of her retrospective in Atlanta. She hired a departmental graduate assistant—to house-sit, she said, but she really meant to babysit me. She called once and I listened in. Mother claimed the show was a bore and that no one really important was there and what should she expect from the South, after all. Laughter erupted in the background, as if she were at a reception or a restaurant. A man’s voice chuckled into the receiver. I imagined wineglasses being topped off, hors d’oeuvres being whisked by on trays.
Kammi grips her pencil hard and squints at the blank paper.
In October, Mother was in Atlanta.
So was Howard, Kammi’s father.
I close my eyes and listen to the sea. Only four months after Dad died. Maybe they’d even traveled together. The surf rolls onto shore, curling as it comes, echoing in ripples down the beach. Mother didn’t mention Howard until January. If she didn’t mention him in October, does that mean she was seeing him even before Dad died? Was she having an affair?
Kammi turns to a fresh piece of paper even though she hasn’t drawn anything on the first sheet, as if it was ruined before she started. “When Dad came, he brought me a gift from your mother. A tablet and some watercolor pencils. Caran d’Ache aquarelles. All because Dad told her I wanted to learn to paint. See?” She holds up her fresh pencils for me to see and I inhale the scent of new wood.
Aquarelles. Back in Maine, I have a tin of those, too, the tips still newly sharpened. Mother gave them to me as a gift in honor of her retrospective. She must have bought them at the same time she bought Kammi’s, though she said nothing. It was the first art-related gift she’d given me since I was small. I didn’t want the pencils. Still, I stashed the tin on a shelf in the back of the closet, because, despite everything, I couldn’t bear to throw them away.
Chapter Nine
AFTER WE trudge back with our empty water bottle and sandy towels, I go to my room and close the door. Here in the back room, the walls are pale green. Until this year, I didn’t know that this is the coolest room in the house. It keeps out the heat even on the hottest days. Martia said the owner wanted a room to remind him of Holland in the spring. Not the green-gray cold days that spit drizzle until June, but the green of tulip leaves emerging from the ground.
I open the glass box that I keep on my dresser and run my fingers through the small bits of sea glass I’ve gathered on the beach this summer—all but the largest piece, the one I’m saving for something special. That’s inside the toe of an old sock I found in the back of the dresser when I moved in. Someone’s lost sock. No one will look inside it,
tucked there in plain view among my underwear.
Someone taps on my door. The sound isn’t Mother’s crisp knock, so I open it.
Kammi’s changed out of her suit into a bandana dress. Squares of red fabric drape in a handkerchief hem. Her small red leather shoes remind me of Dorothy’s from The Wizard of Oz, only these don’t glitter.
“May I come in?” she asks as she peers over the lid of the glass box.
I back away from the door and she tiptoes inside. She slips onto the edge of my bed and looks everything over, not just the box I’m still holding, seeing it all for the first time. The green walls, the bookcase with a few dog-eared paperbacks, a few written in Dutch, left by previous guests. I’ve hidden The History of Language by covering it in a book jacket to hide the spine. The death certificate is in an envelope taped inside the back.
After Dad’s death, the police commissioner didn’t ask about what he might have been reading, and Mother didn’t mention the book. Neither did I, though I recalled having seen it the day before he disappeared. First on his nightstand, where he’d sent me to fetch his reading glasses; later in a stack of magazines in the living room. It had been sandwiched between Illumination, an art magazine that Mother had read on the plane ride down, and En Huis. Martia scours the Dutch magazine cover to cover, admiring the neatly tiled houses of Holland but not the Europeans who come to Curaçao to spend their money and make fun of the locals. After Dr. Bindas returned the book, I kept thinking it might contain clues about what happened to Dad. There was an inscription inside, dated two years ago now, in Rome: “The history of language is the history of love.” No signature. No initials, even. Maybe Dad had bought it used. As a professor, he often ordered secondhand books for research. This book seemed new, though, the spine barely creased, despite water damage to the cover.
“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.
Chapter Ten
THE 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.
The Other Side of Blue Page 5