The Other Side of Blue (9 page)

Mother looks pale. “I don't feel like playing a game, Cyan. Just give me the card.”

I hold it up for her to see the front. Kammi, too.

“Recognize it? It's Venice. Know anyone there?” I ask.

Mother stares at the picture.

“Give up?” I ask. “It's from Philippa.”

“Who's that?” Kammi asks.

“One of Mother's best art students. Her last one, actually,” I answer. “Isn't that right, Mother?”

“Yes,” Mother says, then presses her lips together in a thin line.

“Philippa says she has a commission to paint the most famous bridges in Venice. This is her first one, the Bridge of Sighs.”

“I've heard of that bridge,” Kammi says, smiling.

“Please put it away, Cyan. I'd like to eat in peace.” Mother unfolds her napkin. That's Martia's signal to serve.

Martia moves efficiently between the kitchen and the table. She places a salad next to Kammi and a pitcher of iced tea next to me. Then she uses both hands to carry in a steaming bowl of saffron rice and shellfish. She nestles it right in front of Mother, the steam rising into Mother's face.

“
Kome, kome,
” Martia pleads with us as she reties her apron. “Eat, eat.”

Kammi picks at her salad, not bothering to arrange the greenery, the way she did her first day. Today she is more abstract expressionist, like Jackson Pollock, jumbling the vegetables on her plate, not caring how they're placed. She's not trying to please the eye. All because I got her to say what Howard said about me? And I laughed at her? Or because Mother ignored her when she said she knew about the Bridge of Sighs?

I fish out some carrots and red cabbage from the salad bowl Kammi passes to me before sliding it across the table to Mother, who doesn't even seem to notice. She's too busy scooping rice in slow motion. I like the colors that clash on
my plate. When Mother passes the rice dish, I'll spoon yellow rice and pink shrimp onto my palette, too.

“Do you have a student now?” Kammi asks.

“No,” I answer for Mother.

“Cyan, I can answer for myself,” Mother says. “Kammi, having a student is a big investment. At the moment, I'm trying to concentrate on my own work.”

Kammi looks crestfallen.

I smirk into my napkin. Kammi's dreaming if she thinks Mother will take her on. Kammi, whose only painting experience is grade school art once a week. This week, bringing Kammi to Curaçao into Mother's sanctuary, this is just for show. Just to make a good impression for Howard's benefit.

Mother takes a long drink of iced tea, reviving herself. She asks, “Kammi, what'd you think of Willemstad?”

“I liked it. We walked along the floating market. We also went to a bead store. It had interesting beads, more than I've seen at home.”

I breathe in and out. Tingling with almost-fear that she'll mention the commissioner. Anticipating Mother's reaction.

“Do you string beads?” Mother sounds as though she's trying to make up to Kammi for the lost day. She plants her elbows on the table and holds her head in her left hand. With her free hand, she stirs the saffron rice around on her plate, placing the shellfish on top of the rice haystacks. Mother thinks stringing beads is like painting by numbers.
Or knitting from a pattern. It's just a craft. It isn't Art. I've heard her say it enough.

“Beading's something I can do with my friends.” Here, Kammi looks at me. She must be thinking of how things might have been different, how we could have shared beading together. I can tell just by the way she said “friends.”

“Antje has classes, all on cruise-ship days. I bet you could take one next week.” Smiling, I offer the classes up to her. She'll think I'm being kind. Mother might suspect I'm not, since I know how she feels about bead stringing. When I took a beading class last summer after we went home to Maine, Mother encouraged it only because it meant I wasn't eating and I wasn't moping around the house, disturbing her studio time. She never asked to see my work. She didn't even know that what I liked was wire-working in silver. The beads almost didn't matter, and stringing them on fine, nearly invisible thread bored me. But the silver I liked. I liked the feel of it in my hand, the way the warmth of my fingers softened the wire and allowed it to be shaped, capturing blownglass beads, making three-dimensional sculpture on a small scale. It made me think for the first time that I might someday feel better again. Because at least in those moments, I forgot that Dad had died. I forgot that I felt mostly nothing.

I gave most of it away. I saved only one piece, and it isn't finished. It's silver with blue sea glass. I don't have enough sea glass yet to finish it.

“I'm sure Kammi can take bead classes back in Atlanta.” Bead stores are the latest fad, she's thinking, I know.

Kammi's bottom lip sags.

“What else did you do?” Mother asks her. “Something unique to Curaçao, I hope.”

Kammi picks at her rice. She cuts her eyes at me. “The ostrich farm,” she says in a whisper, maybe uncertain what to say next, whether Mother approves.

Mother frowns at me. “Ostrich farm? You had time to go there?”

“Jinco said he'd take us,” I say.

Martia swishes around the table, clucking at the lack of food being consumed by everyone but me. That and she's probably disapproving of the detour to the ostrich farm. She'd know I would have had to bribe Jinco to take us, which made us late coming back. On purpose. And it cost more money.

“You liked it?” Mother sounds accusing when she asks Kammi, but she smiles at the end of the sentence, as if she's sorry she's said the words but they're out.

Kammi folds her hands in front of her plate. “A little.” A weaselly answer. She should have just said yes in a loud voice. Or even no because the ostrich scared her, or because I was mean, or because feathers make her sneeze.

“Tomorrow I'll take you painting, like I planned for today. Just the two of us.” Mother raises her head off her hand, sits straighter. She takes pity on Kammi. “That's more fun than any old petting zoo. I'm feeling much better.”

“It's not a petting zoo,” I say. On the refrigerated shelves at the farm store, tourists can buy ostrich meat. Hardly what they'd sell at a petting zoo in the United States. The signs say “Ostrich: leaner than beef, lower in cholesterol.” I'm surprised Mother doesn't buy it for me.

Mother doesn't respond to my comment.

I feel the postcard in my lap. For the moment, Mother has forgotten it. Eventually, she'll ask for it. She'll say she's glad for Philippa. She'll be lying. Something happened between Mother and her best student; what, I don't know. Mother doesn't want competition in her art, I know that.

I'd like to lie, too, and say everything between us will be okay. If I lie, then maybe we can pretend we remember the same things. Like the article that came out the day after Dad died. It said the boat was gray. But the boat was blue. The paper said his body was found washed ashore. But he was found trapped in fish netting, one end of the rope still tied to the boat.

G
OING TO PAINT
en plein air the next morning is a production. Mother is late because one of her precious tubes of oil paint is missing. (I wonder which one it could be.) When she finally arrives downstairs, Martia scurries around to pack a soft-sided cooler with drinks while Mother collapses her field easel. An art bin holding her oil paints teeters on the edge of the counter. She's armed to do battle with the elements that defy the artist. The wind that carries with it bits of sand, which stick to still-wet canvases.

I sit at the kitchen table, pretending to read one of Kammi's stupid horse books. Kammi stands half in and half out of the room. She looks as if she thinks she's supposed to be doing something to help but no one has told her what to do.

Dressed in a pale pink linen shorts set, she looks ready for a garden party, complete with gardenia scent.

She'll find out soon enough what she's supposed to do. Beast of burden.

Martia draws her in. “Sit, sit. All is no problem. All is well.” Kammi lets herself be coaxed into the kitchen to perch on the edge of a chair, ready to go at Mother's call.

Mother wears a flimsy metallic cover-up over her onepiece. “Don't you look nice,” she says to Kammi.

Then she slaps a wide-brimmed straw hat onto her artist case.

“You've been out?” Mother nods at the bottom of my skirt, damp and sandy.

“Walking. You said exercise is better than Ding Dongs and Ho Hos.”

Kammi blushes and stares at the floor. Maybe she's embarrassed on my behalf, because she's thin and I'm not.

Mother brushes air away as if she's walked into a spider web. “What are you going to do?” she asks.

“Besides read?” I lift the book.

Mother doesn't lose it. “While Kammi and I are painting.” Mother smiles at Kammi, sharing a secret with a fellow artist.

I think of all the things I might say. Write to Zoe, help Martia in the kitchen. Sand the blue boat, or touch up the scratches along the underside, the scratches that couldn't be seen until the boat was lifted out of the water.

I shrug. It doesn't matter.

“Do something productive. I don't want to find you just lying around when we get back.”

I bury myself in the sentences of the book until I hear them leave. Then I fold the corner of the page and crease it.

 

The house becomes silent, but then Martia starts making a racket in the kitchen, washing the dishes, banging pots, chopping vegetables for the next meal. She saves her fury for the kitchen. I wander outside onto the veranda, clutching Kammi's stupid novel. I'm not reading it, it's just a prop.

The stiff breeze shudders along the veranda, whipping my hair and the flag hanging from the widow's walk.

After a few minutes, I meander into the kitchen and filch a coconut cookie off a plate. Martia smiles, shaking her head at the same time. When I go out again, she's still working.

Mother's studio.

I leave Kammi's novel on the glass table in the living room. Open, spine up, as if I've walked out of the room for another cookie but am coming right back to pick up where I left of.

Barefoot, I don't make a sound even on the metal stairs. The scarf around my neck bounces down my back as I skip the third stair from the top because it creaks.

Mother's room smells of paint thinner, almost of pine. More Maine than Curaçao. The easel faces the back wall. I hold my breath and walk in front of it.

Paint clings to the canvas, a light wash of color. The pencil lines show through, giving guidelines for the next step.

The outline of a boat on the water. It's hard to tell if it is
the
boat. Whether she will actually dare to paint it.

But she is painting, or at least preparing to paint.

I flip open the tackle-box case that holds the paints she plans to use most for her current project. That's how she organizes her work. The ultramarine is on top. Ultramarine for the bold lines of the boat, to distinguish it from the water. To show the depth where the boat meets the waterline. It's the next color she'll apply.

From my pocket, I pull out the Prussian blue. I substitute it for the ultramarine in the tackle box and snap the lid shut. The ultramarine goes in my pocket, a new tube cold against my leg.

I go out through the doors and onto the widow's walk. From here, Mother must have seen Dad take the boat out. She must have stood here, watching the boat cut the swells until it merged with the sea and disappeared.

There was no storm that day, only calm seas. Clear skies. That first night, the stars shone until the light from the bonfires quenched them and they faded away.

At first, I thought he'd just left, taken the boat and returned to Willemstad by sea, to catch a ride to the airport. I told Mother to check the airport. Martia looked at me, as if she thought I understood something I wasn't supposed to. But Dad didn't lash the boat to the pier in Punda and take a flight out that night. When they checked the roster of outgoing flights the next day, his name wasn't on any of them. Mother told the commissioner, “It was a ridiculous idea.” She folded her arms tightly around her middle. “I told you.”

I'm sitting on the deck after lunch when I hear them returning. I stretch out the way Mother would if she wanted to look relaxed. It doesn't take long before the French doors snap open.

“Where is it?” Mother grips the doorframe as if to hold herself steady on a rolling ship.

Squinting, I turn toward her and pull my scarf in front of my face, making a gauzy film between Mother and me. “What?”

“Prussian blue. Winsor and Newton.”

I smile. The Prussian is one of her most prized blues. I should have buried it in a tin box under the deck, like a treasure. The paints are evidence, after all, though not the kind the commissioner wanted when Dad died. Or I might have pitched the paint into the sea—but I couldn't. The color makes me ache, too. I'm ashamed that I can feel the way she does about anything.

“What are you talking about?” I ask. “We're not even allowed in your studio.”

“There isn't a ‘we' here. Don't bring Kammi into this.” Mother shuts the French doors, keeping our argument away from her.

The sea gleams in the bright sun.

Whitecaps toss on the surface.

I pick up a pad of paper and a pencil from the wrought-iron deck table as if I'm an investigative reporter. “When's the last time you saw it?”

“You think this is funny?” Mother folds her arms in front of her, digging her nails into her skin. “Do you know how much Winsor and Newton costs? I can't get it here. I'll be stuck leaving that section undone until we get back to Maine.”

I know how much it costs. Over the summers, I've been dragged by Mother to all the art supply stores, good and bad, in Willemstad. Most of what can be had is second rate, the tubes dried out, the colors unreliable. She'd never trust her blues to one of the local merchants. “So, you're painting again?”