Kammi and Saco wander back into the circle of light around the bonfire. Kammi sits on the log next to me, but farther away than before. Saco sits near her.
I shuffle my bare feet in the sand, burying them in the coolness.
The moment when I could ask Mayur what he means has passed for now.
Mayur speaks into my ear as he pushes his pudgy body off the sand. “Remember, be nice, and I’ll tell you,” he says, seeming to read my mind. “Later.”
“Do you swim at night?” Loco asks. He’s looking at Kammi and me.
“Isn’t that dangerous?” Kammi straightens her back as she sits forward on the log, no doubt thinking about how dark the sea is at night. What things could brush against a leg, or take it of?
Loco shrugs. “What is dangerous? Not peligroso. Not here, no sharks.”
“It’s okay. It’s shallow just here.” Saco sounds reassuring.
Sharks feed in shallow waters at dusk and dawn. That much I remember from the nature shows Dad encouraged me to watch all the time.
“Okay, who’s in?” Mayur asks.
The boys speak all at once.
“For a minute. I’ll go in for a minute,” Kammi says when Saco grins at her.
“What about you?” Loco asks me.
“I don’t swim in the ocean.” I pull my scarf around my shoulders.
“This is just a sea, like a bathtub.” Saco grins, his eyes lit up by the glow from the fire. Kammi’s watching him. She’ll go in the water if he wants her to.
I shake my head.
Mayur narrows his eyes at me. “She’s afraid.”
He thinks he can dare me to go in. His words don’t scare me. I don’t care if they all think I am a coward. At the end of the month, I’ll go back to Maine. I won’t have to see them again. Next summer, I’ll find a way to stay with Zoe while Mother comes back here. Maybe she won’t even bring Howard, since she told Philippa on the phone last year that bringing men here is bad luck. Kammi won’t come, either; she’ll spend time with her mother in Atlanta or have “quality” time with Howard. I can see it now. Like the points of a triangle, we’ll stay in our separate corners.
“She doesn’t have to come in,” Loco says. “She can watch from the beach, yell if she sees a shark.”
As if I could see a fin in the dark water, even with the waxing moon and the phosphorescence on the waves. But Loco is trying to be nice. For a boy.
The boys, including Saco, whoop and race each other to the water. Kammi unties her skirt, steps out of it, and folds it, revealing her pink bikini underneath. She looks toward Mother and Mrs. Bindas. To see if they’re watching the boys run into the surf. To see if they raise a warning flag. They’re too busy laughing around their own fire. The men aren’t looking our way, either.
“Saco said Mayur knows something about your father,” Kammi says, still not looking at me. She pulls her linen blouse over her head, folds it carefully, just like her skirt.
I close my eyes.
“Do you think he really knows?” she asks.
I shrug.
“Do you care?” Kammi’s voice hardens.
I open my eyes. “I do. But why would you?”
Kammi steps backwards. She turns and races to the black water tinged with silver, as if she’ll dive in and swoop it up into her arms. At least it will be welcoming, even if it’s dangerous.
I follow them to the shore and watch, letting the surf glide over my bare feet. I seek sea glass with my toes, but everything feels like grains of sand or bits of shell. There’s no point in dredging up sand and running it through my fingers in the darkness. After a storm, after the tides come in full and go out, and the sun rises, that’s the best time to look for sea glass.
The boys yell and dive and show off. Two even do handstands. Only their legs stick up out of the water. I imagine their faces pressed against the sandy bottom, how they hold their breath and how their eyes bulge when their lungs crave air and they spring to the surface, gasping.
Shouts come from behind me. A couple of men, one of them Dr. Bindas, dash into the waves, demanding that everybody get out of the water. “Out, come on out!”
Mother, breathless, appears at my side. She grabs my arm.
“Where’s Kammi?”
“There.” I point. Kammi is closest to shore. She’s waving her arms, sweeping water over her head. She turns at the shouts.
Mother drops her hand from my arm. “Why didn’t you stop her?”
“Everyone went in.” Everyone but me. “Mayur says it’s safe.”
“So if everyone jumps off a cliff, that’s your excuse? Someone says it’s safe?” Mother’s voice rises. “Kammi’s our guest. What if something happens to her?” Like it did to Dad, she means. But she doesn’t say it out loud.
I do. “Like drowning?”
Mother sets her mouth in her tight, flat way. “Whose fault would that be?” She steps past me to meet Kammi, motioning her forward. “Kammi, come on. Aren’t you cold?”
Kammi splashes out, the sea coursing down her skin. She’s laughing, just like the boys. Not even Dr. Bindas’s scolding makes them sheepish.
Mrs. Bindas bustles to the water’s edge, a stack of towels under each arm. She makes each boy take one, though they try to scoot out of her reach. Mother takes one for Kammi, wraps her into it against the breeze. Kammi’s teeth chatter, but she’s grinning, I see as we get closer to the bonfire.
“We’re going home. Right now,” Mother says. “Get Kammi’s things.”
I grab Kammi’s neat stack of dry clothes off the log.
“I’m okay, Mrs. Walters. That was fun. I’ve never been in the sea at night.” Kammi picks up her shoes, holds them in the hand not holding the towel around her. “Mrs. Bindas, thank you for the party.”
Kammi’s beaming. Saco comes close. He sweeps his hair back from his face, water still streaming down his neck. He smiles.
“Good night,” he says.
Kammi says good night back.
Mother steps between them. “We’ll send Martia back tomorrow with this towel,” she says to Mrs. Bindas. “Thank you.” She keeps watching Saco leave while telling Mrs. Bindas about how delightful everything was, how much like an American party it all turned out to be.
Mrs. Bindas clucks over Kammi’s wet hair.
“She must go home, get dry. Children, always they are not thinking.” Mrs. Bindas is clucking at Mayur, too, but not in anger. She’s more like a hen hovering over a chick that’s been out in the rain. Like Martia would do.
Mother is already stalking toward the lawn, to wipe the sand from her feet. She’ll put her shoes back on to protect her feet against broken shells on the walk back.
Chapter Seventeen
ON SUNDAY MORNING, Martia rises even earlier than usual so she can make breakfast before she walks down the road to catch the bus for her home near Santa Rosa. I can hear her in the kitchen. Once, when I was little, I ran after her as she left. I wanted to go with her. Martia might have let me, and Mother might have relented, but Dad said no, Martia needed her day off from Blauwe Huis—and all its inhabitants. Even me. Having Martia leave made her return all the better, even when she didn’t bring me any sweets. Once, she brought me a picture of a stick house she said her little boy had drawn on the rough brown paper I’d sent home with her, the paper Mother said was good enough for me to use for drawing. In the yard, he’d drawn chickens with three-toed feet twice the size of their bodies.
I wait until I hear Martia turn the key in the front door before I slip into the kitchen. On the counter, she’s left fresh-chopped fruit and fresh-squeezed orange juice, with a basket of mango-filled pastries under a yellow linen towel. I have some juice and make up a tray to take back to my room. On the way back, I remove the master bedroom key from the hook by the locked cabinet where Martia stores her herbs and spices, and probably healing potions she keeps for emergencies. When I was young, I was sure Martia stored powerful remedies that in the wrong hands could be poisonous. I sli
p the key into my pocket for later, when I’ll look in the room.
When I get back to my room, the door is open, and Kammi perches on the edge of my unmade bed. She holds my hinged box of sea glass in her lap. The orange juice sours in my stomach. She jerks when I enter the room.
“You had more of this glass before,” she says, as if she’s going to ask a question about what I did with the rest of it. “You should do something with it.” She holds up a handful of glass pieces.
“Do something?” I slide the tray of fruit and pastries onto my dresser and take the box from her. I snap the lid shut on the sea glass. The box feels cool in my hands.
“Yes, you could turn it into jewelry. I’ve seen some girls do that with beads and glass. They wrap wire around it, make bracelets. You shouldn’t just leave it in a box.”
Kammi’s being nice, even now, and I don’t want her to be.
“Don’t tell me what to do.” I squeeze the closed lid as if it’s Pandora’s box.
Tears well in her eyes. She’s probably thinking this is the month from hell and when is it going to end? Instead of running away or crying, though, she nods and crosses her arms, holding her hands against her sides, protecting herself.
“What are we going to do today?” she asks.
We?
“This is Martia’s day off. She already plugged in Mother’s coffee and set the timer for eight. That’s when Mother will come down, not a minute before,” I say, restoring the box to the top of the dresser. It’s now two hours before Mother is likely to come downstairs.
Kammi nods, as if I’ve told her a big secret.
“After last night, you should stay out of her way,” I say, raising my eyebrows toward the studio above us.
“Why?” Kammi’s face turns up, too, as if there’s a clue written on the ceiling.
“You know, the water. Saco following you around like a puppy.”
Kammi blushes, the pink undertones blossoming on her cheeks. “He wasn’t following me.”
“Right, Kammi. You’re supposed to be the artist, the observant one. Mother said so. You should be able to tell what a boy is up to.”
“How about Loco?” she asks shyly, but with the corners of her mouth upturned. Because of Saco or because Mother said she was an artist, I can’t tell.
“A boy named Crazy. What do you think?”
“It’s just a name. He seemed very nice.”
“Compared to Mayur, who wouldn’t be?”
Kammi scoots over to let me sit on the bed with her. “What should we do?”
“We” again. “We could go back to the Bindases’ and ask to swim in the pool. Mrs. Bindas gave us a standing offer. I’m sure Saco is still there.” That might alarm Mother, which alone would make the trip worth it. More important, though, is what Mayur said. Maybe Saco would tell Kammi if he knows. For Kammi, he might even ask the right questions, get Mayur to give up his secret.
Even though she grins, Kammi shakes her head. “Something else.”
“Ostrich farm?” I say.
Kammi shivers. “Not again.”
“Hato Cave?”
“Are there bats?”
“The bats only fly at night.” At dusk, they swoop out of the cave to hunt. By day, they hang from the ceiling, their guano mounding up on the floor. The cave is cool, I remember, and damp. Mother stayed outside while Dad and I took the tour. The only thing I hated was when the guide took us into one chamber and turned off the lights. Dad held my hand.
“I don’t think so.” Kammi shakes her head. “Not today.”
I hold up the key.
“What’s that for?” Kammi’s nose wrinkles, the funny way it does when she thinks something is off.
“The master bedroom.”
“Why is it locked?”
“Why do you think?”
Kammi stares at the key as if it holds a secret. “It was your parents’ room. Last summer.”
“An A for you. Come on,” I say. “We have time now. Before Mother gets up. We can only go there on Martia’s day off. She misses nothing.” If she found us, she’d shoo us out to the beach. To get out in the sun—“Remember the sun screening,” she would say. Blue curaçao, blue heaven. We shouldn’t be locked away in the house when paradise waits outside.
The doorknob is shiny brass, almost freshly polished, with no fingerprints smudging the golden surface. My face reflected in the handle looks misshapen, as if I’m some circus freak.
I turn the key, and the latch clicks. I twist the handle and push, careful not to let the door bang against the back wall—it sometimes did last summer when Dad forgot that the hinges had been greased. The room seems the same, just musty, like any room unopened for a long time. When I close the door behind Kammi, I turn the handle carefully so that it doesn’t click, even though Martia’s not here. She can hear me from the kitchen crinkling a candy wrapper in my room in the hour before cena. “Basta, child,” she’ll say. “Enough. There will be good food for dinner, wait.” But she doesn’t really mean it, since she shakes her head and lets me finish what I’m eating anyway, hiding the wrapper inside a paper napkin before tossing it in the trash. In case Mother checks. We are allies.
Slivers of light filter through the closed window shades. Bright lines cut across the wooden floor. Palm-tree linens cover the bed. The puffy pillows—the kind Mother likes—are plumped, just waiting to cradle a head.
I nod at Kammi, who tiptoes over and creaks open drawers in the bedside table. I check the tall dresser. I peek into the dark spaces behind the drawers, looking for a corner of torn paper that’s gotten stuck. But there are no letters tucked away, no forgotten receipts. Everything’s clean.
As she stands over an open drawer, Kammi whispers, “What are you looking for?”
“Anything interesting.” I want to say “clues” but I’m not sure she’d understand. She doesn’t know everything. She doesn’t know that my mother might have known Howard when my Dad was still alive. That might be a clue.
The wind starts to slap the window and the branches outside, zigzagging the morning light across the floor. With sunrise, the island heats, and the breezes start to blow landward again.
“It’s time,” I say.
I turn the handle as carefully as when we entered the room. I peek to make sure the hallway is empty. Kammi goes first, tiptoeing back to her room. As soon as she’s safely inside, I tug the door closed behind me. In the stillness, the click sounds loud.
In my room I fall onto the bed and stretch out. A successful foray, even though nothing turned up. I finish breakfast, then bus my tray back to the kitchen, this time slapping my flip-flops along the floor, making as much noise as I can. Before I empty the dishes into the sink—Martia always says to leave them for her—I replace the key on its hook.
As I’m leaving the room, the coffeepot gurgles into action, and a bitter aroma seeps into the air.
Chapter Eighteen
KAMMI AND I escape the house before Mother comes downstairs for her coffee. After Kammi takes a quick dip in the sea, we find shady spots on the upper deck, just off the living room. Kammi scoots her art bin next to her lounge chair, as if she believes she might learn how to paint by instinct, just by being close to the tools of the trade. She runs her hands over the smooth wooden handles of the paintbrushes. I imagine the tickle of the coarse bristles over the tender inside of her arm.
I hold Kammi’s horse series paperback, the spine now hopelessly bent, in front of me. It’s so boring I can’t make myself read the second chapter. Instead, I squint over the top of the page. In the distance, the sea seems to bend along the horizon and the sky pivots to counterbalance. Near the shoreline, the water is pure turquoise. I wonder which colored pencils in the back of my closet at home I would have to blend to match the exact hue.
The French doors open. Mother holds a coffee cup in one hand and closes the door with the other, a newspaper tucked under her arm. It’s the local paper, I can tell from the banner. The articles are written in
Dutch or English, sometimes Spanish, and even Papiamentu, as if whoever writes the article decides which language best suits the particular story. I imagine an article about the trade deficit in formal Dutch, reviews about the best shops on the cruise-ship circuit in English, a crime report in Papiamentu.
“You’re both up early.” Mother says it as if she doesn’t trust us together in Martia’s absence. Maybe she thinks we sneaked out last night and went back to the Bindases’ beach party, swimming until dawn. Kammi’s hair is damp from her morning dip. Mother’s gaze takes in that fact.
I think Kammi misses the look. She’s already staring down at her lap, her face beginning to turn pink. Maybe she thinks Mother can read guilt in her face about the master bedroom—for no reason, as we found nothing. Or guilt about being friendly to me, who let her swim at night at the Bindases’ house in the first place, when she’s here to make Mother her ally and to learn how to paint to make Howard happy.
“Dad always said the early bird catches the worm,” I say.
Mother sits down under the umbrella chair. Her coffee sloshes over the brim of her cup.
Kammi jumps up and wipes the arm of Mother’s chair with her beach towel.
“Thank you, Kammi.” Mother picks up her saucer so Kammi can wipe underneath.
“You’re welcome.” Kammi shifts her weight from foot to foot, still holding the coffee-stained towel.
“Just go rinse that in cold water, save Martia having to bleach that stain.” Mother dismisses Kammi. Mother has never said anything before about how to reduce Martia’s workload.
Kammi scrambles into the house.
“About last night,” Mother says, slapping the folded newspaper onto the table.
I raise the book back to eye level and try to focus on reading each word, seeing each individual letter.
Kammi comes running. “Mrs. Bindas is at the door. I’ll go let her in.” She disappears again before Mother can say anything. Did Saco or Mayur come with Mrs. Bindas?
“Why is she here?” Mother mutters to herself.
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