Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea (2 page)

He looked at me, and I looked back. 

“Are you Violet?” he asked, and didn’t wait for my answer.“Yeah,I think you are.I’m River.River West.”He swept his hand through the air in front of him. “And this must be Citizen Kane.” 

He was looking at my house, so I tilted my head and looked at my house too. In my memory, it was gleaming white stone columns and robin’s egg blue trim around the big square windows, and manicured shrubbery and tastefully nude statues in the center of the front fountain. But the fountain I saw now was mossy and dirty, with one nose,one breast,and three fingers broken and missing from its poor, undressed girls. The bright blue paint had turned gray and was chipping off the frames.The shrubbery was a feral, eight-foot-tall jungle. 

I wasn’t embarrassed by the Citizen,because it was still a damn amazing house, but now I wondered if I should have trimmed the bushes down, maybe. Or scrubbed up the naked fountain girls. Or re-painted the window frames. 

“It’s kind of a big place for one blond-haired, bookreading girl,” the boy in front of me said, after a long minute of house-looking from the both of us.“Are you alone? Or are your parents around here somewhere?” 

I shut my book and got to my feet. “My parents are in Europe.” I paused. “Where are
your
parents?” 

He smiled. “Touché.” 

Our town was small enough that I never developed a healthy fear of strangers. To me, they were exciting things, gift-wrapped and full of possibilities, the sweet smell of somewhere else wafting from them like perfume. And so River West, stranger, didn’t stir in me any sort of fear . . . only a rush of excitement, like how I felt right before a really big storm hit, when the air crackled with expectation. 

I smiled back. “I live here with my twin brother, Luke. He keeps to the third floor, mostly. When I’m lucky.” I glanced up, but the third-floor windows were blocked by the portico roof. I looked back at the boy. “So how did you know my name?” 

“I saw it on the posters in town, stupid,” River said, and smiled. “
Guesthouse for rent. See Violet at Citizen Kane.
I asked around and some locals directed me here.” 

He didn’t say “stupid” like how Luke said it, blinking at me with narrow eyes and a condescending smile. River said it like it was an . . . endearment. Which threw me, sort of. I slipped the sandal off my right foot and tapped my toes on the stone step, making my yellow skirt swing against my knees. “So . . . you want to rent the guesthouse?” 

“Yep.” River put an elbow out and leaned onto his shiny car. He wore black linen pants—the kind I thought only stubble-jawed Spanish men wore in European movies set by the sea—and a white button-down shirt.It might have looked strange on someone else. But it suited him all right. 

“Okay. I need the first month’s rent in cash.” 

He nodded and reached into his back pocket. He pulled out a leather wallet and opened it. There was a thick stack of green inside it. So thick that, after he counted out the money he needed, he could barely close the wallet again. River West walked up to me, grabbed my hand,and pressed five hundred dollars into my palm. 

“Don’t you even want to see the place first?”I asked,not taking my eyes off the green paper. I let my fingers close down on it, tight. 

“No.” 

I grinned. River grinned back at me, and I noticed that his nose was straight and his mouth was crooked. I liked it. I watched him swagger, yes swagger, with panther hips, over to the trunk of his car, where he pulled out a couple of old-fashioned suitcases, the kind with buckles and straps instead of zippers.I slipped my sandal back onto my right foot and started down the narrow, overgrown path through the bushes, past all the ivy-covered windows, past the plain wooden garage, to the back of Citizen Kane. 

I looked behind me, just once. He was following. 

I led him beyond the crumbling tennis court and the old greenhouse. They looked worse every time I saw them. Things had gone to hell since Freddie died, and it wasn’t just about our lack of cash. Freddie had kept things up without money somehow.She’d been tireless,fixing things all on her own, teaching herself rudimentary plumbing and carpentry, dusting, sweeping, cleaning, day in day out. But not us. We did nothing. Nothing but paint. Canvases, that is, not walls or fences or window frames. 

Dad said that kind of painting was for Tom Sawyer and other unwashed orphans.I hadn’t been sure if he was kidding. Probably not. 

The tennis court had bright green grass breaking through the cement floor, and the nets were crumpled on the ground and covered with leaves. Who had last played tennis there? I couldn’t remember.The greenhouse’s glass roof had caved in too—broken shards were still on the ground, and exotic plants in shades of blue and green and white grew up the building’s beams and stretched out into the sky. I used to go there to read sometimes. I had many secret reading spots around the Citizen.They’d been painting spots, back before I’d quit painting. 

We slowed as we neared the guesthouse. It was a twobedroom red brick building covered in ivy, like everything else. It had decent plumbing and twitchy electricity, and it stood at a right angle to the Citizen. If the ocean was a mouth, then the Citizen would be the wide white nose; the guesthouse, the right eye; the ratty old maze, the left eye; and the tennis courts and the greenhouse two moles high on the right cheekbone. 

We both went inside and looked around. It was dusty, but it was also cozy and sort of sweet.It had a wide-open kitchen, and chipped teacups in yellow cupboards, and church bazaar patchwork blankets on art deco furniture, and no phone. 

Luke and I had run out of money to pay the phone bill months ago,so we didn’t have a working phone at the Citizen,either.Which is why I hadn’t put a phone number on the poster. 

I couldn’t remember the last person who had stayed in the guesthouse. Some bohemian friends of my parents, long ago. There were dried-out tubes of oil paint lying on windowsills and paintbrushes still in the sink, where they’d been rinsed and then forgotten about.My parents had a studio on the other side of the maze, called the shed, and had always done their art things in there. It was full of half-finished canvases, and it smelled of turpentine—a smell I found both comforting and irritating. 

I grabbed the paintbrushes as I walked by, planning to throw them out, but the bristles that hit my palm were damp. So they didn’t belong to old friends of my parents. They’d been used recently. 

I noticed River watching me. He didn’t say anything. I set the brushes back down where I’d found them and walked into the main bedroom, moving back so River could throw his suitcases on the bed. I had always liked this room, with the red walls faded almost to pink, and the yellow-and-white-striped curtains. River glanced around and took everything in with his fast brown eyes. He went to the dresser, opened the top drawer, looked in it, and closed it again. He moved to the other side of the room, pushed back the curtains, and opened the two windows to the sea. 

A burst of bright, salty ocean air flooded in, and I breathed deep.So did River,his chest flaring out so I could see his ribs press against his shirt. 

The guesthouse was farther away from the ocean than the Citizen, but you could still see a thick line of blueblue-blue through the window. I noticed some big ship, far off on the horizon, and wondered where it was going to, or coming from. Usually, I wanted to be on those ships, sailing away to some place cold and exotic. But that itchy, gypsy feeling wasn’t in me right then. 

River went over to the bed, reached up, and took down the black wooden cross that hung above the pillows. He brought it to the dresser, opened the top drawer, set the cross inside, and bumped it closed with his hip. 

“My grandfather built Citizen Kane,” I said, “but my grandma Freddie built this cottage.She got religious later on in life.”My eyes were fixed on the dark red shape left on the wall, where the cross had shielded the paint from the fading effects of sunshine. “She probably hung that cross up there decades ago and it’s been there ever since. Are you an atheist? Is that why you took it down? I’m curious. Hence the question.” 

I flinched.
Hence?
My habit of reading more than I socialized made me use odd, awkward words without thinking. 

River didn’t seem to notice. And by that, I mean he seemed to be noticing everything about me, and everything about the room, so that I couldn’t tell if he noticed my use of
hence
more than anything else. 

“No,I’m not an atheist.I’m just somebody who doesn’t like to sleep with a cross over his head.” He looked at me again.“So, what are you . . . seventeen?” 

“Yeah,” I said. “Good guess. Because my brother says I still look about twelve.” 

“We’re the same age,then.”A pause.“My parents went down to South America a few weeks ago.They’re archeologists. They sent me here in the meantime. I have an uncle who lives in Echo.But I didn’t want to stay with him.So I found your poster and here I am. Sort of strange that both our parents took off and left us, don’t you think?” 

I nodded. I wanted to ask him who his uncle was. I wanted to ask him where he came from, and how long he was going to stay in my guesthouse. But he stood there and looked at me in such a way and I just couldn’t bring myself to do it. 

“So where’s this brother of yours?” River brought his fingers up to his hair and gave it a good shake. I stared at him, and his tousled hair, until he stared back at me. And then I stopped. 

“He’s in town. You’ll have to meet him later. And I wouldn’t get too excited.He’s not as nice as me.”Luke had walked into Echo after breakfast, intending to track down this girl he knew, and try to grope her in broad daylight at the café where she worked. 

I pointed out the window. “If you want to walk into town to get groceries, there’s a path that starts back by the apple trees,behind the maze.It hooks up with the old railroad trail and leads right onto the main street. I mean, you can drive if you want to, because you have a car, but the path is really nice if you like walking. It goes by this old train tunnel . . .” 

I started to back out of the bedroom. I was beginning to feel stupid, talking on and on like some dumb girl who opens her mouth and lets all her thoughts fall out of it. And feeling stupid made my cheeks blush. And I had no doubt that this observant boy next to me would observe my cheeks turning red, and probably guess why. 

“Oh,and there’s no lock on the front door,”I continued as I sunk into the welcoming semi-darkness of the hallway and put my hands to my face. “You can get one at the hardware store if you want, but no one will steal anything from here.” I paused. “At least, no one ever has.” 

I turned and left without waiting for his reply. I walked out of the guesthouse, past the collapsed greenhouse, past the tennis courts, around the Citizen, down the driveway, down the narrow gravel road to the only other house on my street: Sunshine’s. 

I had to tell someone that a panther-hipped boy had come to live in my backyard. 

S
unshine Black had soft brown hair to her waist, and dimples in her elbows and knees.
 

She was sitting outside,on her cabin’s porch swing,one 

leg bent and dangling over the edge, drinking a glass of iced tea and staring off into space.We were the same age, and while we weren’t really friends, we were each other’s only neighbors. And I guess that amounted to the same thing. 

She looked at me as I walked up the wooden, uneven steps (Sunshine’s dad had built the cabin himself), and then moved her legs so I could sit down beside her. 

“Hey,Violet.What’s up?” 

“Lots, actually.” 

A crow cawed in the trees above us, and I breathed in the sharp smell of the pine trees, which you could smell better at Sunshine’s.Her little house was farther back from the ocean, set right into the forest. Tomato vines grew up the side of the porch and gave off their own faint earthy scent too. I took another deep breath. 

“Oh, yeah? Where’s Luke? What’s he doing today?” “Luke is pestering Maddy. He knows how much I hate that he’s kissing her. She’s too stupid to say no to him. It’s manipulative. He’s being manipulative. I once said that she seemed sweet and innocent like a girl in a fairy tale, and so he had to go corrupt her.But enough about Luke.I’ve got news.” 

Sunshine raised one eyebrow, half interested. 

“I had a taker on the guesthouse,”I said. “He’s already moved in.” 

Sunshine’s eyes widened a little.She had sleepy brown eyes, which made her look seductive, and very Marilyn Monroe, and probably made boys imagine what she would look like after being kissed. My eyes were big, and, according to Luke, staring and know-it-all. Which I think means I have a penetrating gaze.Which might be the same thing, but sounds a hell of a lot better. 

“Is he old? Is he a pervert? Is he a serial killer? Is he going to rape you in the middle of night? I told you not to get a renter, you know. I can’t see why you don’t just get a job if you need money.” 

I weaseled the glass of iced tea from her hand and took a drink.“I can’t get a job.If you come from old money,you have to run through it all and then drink yourself to death in the gutter.Getting a job isn’t allowed.Anyway,the guy isn’t old. Or a serial killer. He’s young. Our age. His parents left him,like mine.And he’s come to live in Echo.He was supposed to stay with his uncle,but he didn’t want to. So now he’s in my backyard.” 

Sunshine wrapped her arm around one creamy knee. “Well, our summer just got more interesting. What’s he look like?” 

“He’s . . .he’s all right.He looks expensive.In a vintage way. He has a good smile. It’s kind of crooked.” 

Sunshine grinned.“What’s his name?” 

“River West.” 

“Really? That sounds made up.” 

“You should talk, Sunshine Black.” I tilted the glass to drink the last of her tea. “Maybe he did make it up. I never asked to see any identification.” 

Sunshine shook her head. “That was dumb. Violet, you’re so naïve.Look,we’ll need to get a hold of his driver’s license then and check. Leave that to me. Does Luke still have any of that chokecherry wine he made last fall?”