The Other Side of Blue

by Valerie O. Patterson

  “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.

  Chapter Fourteen

  KAMMI 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.

  Chapter Fifteen

  AT 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 eac
h 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?

  The disc thuds at my side, spewing sand onto my skirt. I squint into the sun. “Hey, watch it.”

  I fling the Frisbee away, and the wind picks it up, arcs it toward the sun and down, straight for Mayur. Figures.

  The boy closest to me, I think it’s Loco, laughs. He thinks I meant to aim for Mayur. I shake my head.

  The relay continues. Every two times around the circle of boys, one of them shoots the Frisbee straight for Kammi. She catches it and passes it to her right, in a straight line, from the hip. Straight to Saco, who doesn’t seem to notice he’s the favored one. He slams the Frisbee on to another boy, hard enough that it makes a whizzing sound.

  The sun edges down the sky. Unlike Maine, where the light lingers past dusk, even in the winter, here the sun is out and then it’s just gone, as if someone pulls down a shade at the end of the day.

  When it’s dark, the servants stoke the fires. Three bonfires line the beach like search flares, just like the night they found Dad. I stare into the flames and watch the embers catch the breeze and float heavenward.

  The servants roast hot dogs and sausages on one of the bonfires. Mrs. Bindas waves us to the tent with the food. “Such an American custom,” she says. “We thought you’d like it. Hot dogs and potato crisps, just like your Fourth of July, Independence Day, yes?” Mrs. Bindas asks as we all collect plates and napkins and move through the line. She says crisps instead of chips. Plates full, Kammi and I follow the boys to their fire, leaving the adults to gather around their own.

  Kammi sits beside me on a driftwood log the boys dragged up from the beach. She acts unsure, as if she may not want to. She presses her knees together and sits tall.

  The boys devour their hot dogs. They run crusts of buns along the rims of the plates, scooping up any mustard or hot dog juice. They go back for seconds. Kammi holds her bun in both hands, careful not to let the hot dog slip out or the mustard run down her fingers. One of the older boys, Klaus, throws a chip at Mayur, who ducks and tosses an empty soda bottle back. Mayur misses, but Klaus doesn’t even flinch.

  “Have you been to Mount Christoffel?” Kammi asks Saco.

  Mayur is the one who answers. “Yes,” he says, and shrugs. “When the cousins come, we always hike there. Don’t we?” The other boys all nod, looking at each other.

  “Is it very high?”

  “No, not so high.” He looks at Kammi, her feet planted close together in the sand. “If you’re used to hiking.”

  Ha. Mayur talks about hiking like he talks about swimming. Kammi one-upped him last time, about the swim team, but this time she doesn’t take him on. Maybe she thinks that since the boys outnumber her, Mayur won’t be so easy to defeat. Or maybe she doesn’t want to insult Saco.

  Mrs. Bindas makes her way over, carrying a basket of marshmallows. She hands it to Mayur, along with a trash bag for our used plates, and gives him thin sticks to use for roasting. “Another American custom. We thought this might be fun.”

  After his mother leaves, Mayur rips open the bag of marshmallows. He shows the other boys how to skewer them and toast the edges, pulling them out of the flames just before they catch fire. The gooey sweetness, just shy of burned, tastes delicious. He gives the first sample to Kammi, who giggles as she takes it. When she can’t get the stickiness off her fingers, she licks them clean.

  Loco finishes next, and he passes his stick to me. I frown. “Thanks.” I pull off the marshmallow, even though it’s hot, and pop it into my mouth. I give the boy back his stick without looking at him, and he threads two more marshmallows on as if he’s baiting a hook.

  The other boys jostle for room to toast their own marshmallows. Mayur scoots close to Kammi and me.

  Kammi jumps up. “I’m going for another soda,” she says. “Want one?”

  “Sure. Okay. A Coco,” I say.

  “Mayur?” she asks. Always polite.

  “No.”

  “I’ll help you,” Saco says, propping his marshmallow stick against the log.

  Mayur turns his head and watches Kammi and Saco walk away.
>
  “I know,” he says.

  “Know what?”

  “About your father.”

  “You said that before. What do you mean?” Mayur doesn’t know what happened. The police don’t know. No one knows. Maybe Dad didn’t even realize what was happening to him.

  “It was in the report.”

  Now I know he’s lying. Nothing was in the report. At least, not the report that Mother and I were given.

  “There wasn’t anything in the report.” Except that he died by drowning.

  “Maybe you don’t believe me.” Mayur yanks his marshmallow out of the fire, blows out the flames.

  “Why should I?”

  “My cousin, he works in investigations. He’s very important.”

  “No one knew Dr. Bindas at the commissioner’s office.”

  Mayur looks at me sharply. So he didn’t think I’d actually try to find out on my own. “His name isn’t Bindas. I just said he was a cousin.”

  “So, tell me.” Mayur would say his cousin was important even if he were just the janitor in the police station. But what if he does know something? And, if so, why wasn’t it reported to Mother? Why wasn’t it in the newspapers?

  “If you want me to tell you, you better be nice to me.” Mayur holds out the marshmallow, roasted to perfection, tempting me to take it. And I do.

  Chapter Sixteen

  I START TO ask him why I should be nice, why he should tell me at all. I think he’s lying. Mayur just likes to be important.

  “Hey, what are you talking about?” Loco plops down on the sand in front of Mayur and me. He throws a bottle cap into the fire. He holds a new bottle of soda loosely by the neck. He runs his hand over the lip, as if to brush away sand or salt, then guzzles from it. He burps, long and loud.

  Mayur laughs. No, he howls, the way boys do. Some of the cousins laugh, too, punching each other’s shoulders, as if this is the funniest thing they’ve ever heard. Even the taller ones, the older ones, act like little boys. They’re laughing so hard, they act as if they’ve forgotten what Mayur was talking about, why Loco even asked what was going on.