The Other Side of Blue (6 page)

Kammi tiptoes into the kitchen in her bare feet, her pink toenails like small shells, ever so quiet on the woven rug. She must not realize Mother is already awake and she's afraid to disturb her.

Martia turns and smiles at Kammi. “
Bon bini,
” she says. Good morning, as if yesterday afternoon were only a bad memory. She wipes her floury hands on her apron and reaches out to guide Kammi to a chair, then places a glass of pink guava juice in front of her.

“You missed the pancakes with coconut syrup,” I say, licking the last of the syrup off my fork. I feel overfull. Maybe the rich coconut will make me sick. But in an hour or two, I'll be hungry again. Martia will sneak food into my room later.

Mother hasn't looked in my room here on the island. Back home in Maine this past year, she searched my dresser drawers, trying to root out the candy wrappers and the chip bags as if they were weeds in a garden. Leaving ads for one-hundred-calorie snacks pinned to the corkboard on my bedroom door. That and notes on the kitchen counter.
Working late. Lean De-Lite entrée in freezer.
That's how we communicated most of the time.

Since we arrived here this year, she uses Martia to give me messages instead of leaving notes. She gets Martia to say “The colas are no good for you.” Yet Martia still ladles extra servings for me at meals and bakes coconut candies for dessert.

Kammi shrugs, not making a fuss about the pancakes. But I see in her eyes just a hint of disappointment.

“Oh,
chookie,
don't you worry. I make you something good,” Martia says. Martia called me
chookie,
too, when I was younger. In Papiamentu, it means “chick.” I feel as if I have always been Martia's chick, taking shelter under her arms when she clucks.

“So what are you going to do today?” Martia asks me while she's whipping up something light and fluffy. The thin batter spreads across the heated pan like foam from a wave. Finer than pancakes, crepes are Kammi's reward. “You show Miss Kammi around, yes?”

I shrug. No, that's what I want to say. I want to sit on the beach and stare at the sea and do nothing. Martia's so eager, though, that for once I can't say what I want.

Kammi answers for me. “I want to paint.” She smiles. I bet she's pleased with herself for speaking up, especially after yesterday. “I have to practice. Dad expects me to learn something while I'm here. I started a scene in my head last night. The boathouse.”

The sweet taste on my tongue goes sour.

Martia doesn't miss a beat. “I'm sure Mrs. Walters will be happy to show you some hints, but today is not so good. Mrs. Walters, she is very busy. She has a big commission to finish.”

Martia is capable of lying. For the first time, I know for certain she's told a lie. Mother has no commission. She isn't busy. As of yesterday, the canvases stood empty. Some pencil lines suggested Mother might be starting something, but it's hard to tell.

Kammi's face falls. She hasn't learned yet to hide the things that matter most.

“I have just the good idea, what you should do,” Martia said, serving Kammi her crepes. “I make you a picnic lunch, and you can take it to Boca Roja Beach. Miss Cyan, she knows the way.” Martia bustles around the kitchen. She lines a cooler with blue plastic ice packs, the ones Mother brought from home years ago, handling them as if they possess magic. She packs waxed-paper packets of food inside, along with a bottle of water and two lemon-lime sodas.

Kammi cuts into her crepes and looks at me. Maybe she's judging whether the beach with me is a good alternative to art lessons. Or maybe she's thinking about what happened and whether being with me will cost her another chance to talk to Mother.

I don't want to go, either, but I'd rather be away from the house. I don't want to listen to Mother's pacing in her studio, or catch the smell of paint thinner creeping downstairs like a poisonous gas.

 

“A hat, too.” Martia has found a straw hat somewhere. As we stand in the shade of the porch, she places the hat on Kammi's head, frames her face with it, and pushes the brim down. That way the sun can't find Kammi's fair skin so easily, but then she can't see very far ahead, either.

All I can see of her face is a nose dabbed with zinc oxide. She walks with the brim angled low, so she can see the
ground just in front of her. A pad of heavy paper sticks out of her beach bag. From the rattling sound, I know there's a tin of drawing pencils in there, too.

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.

W
HEN 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.

A
FTER 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.