The Other Side of Blue (2 page)

The girl pulls a slim garment bag and a tote out of the cab. She has come with so little; I can't believe she's staying almost three weeks. Does she travel light because they teach that at her boarding school? Or is she simply like that, spare and contained? Though her bag is small, I imagine she's packed it tightly, properly, as if she's arranging small fish head to tail on top of each other. I shade my eyes with my hand, just to get a better view of her face around her sunglasses. Will she think Mother and I are allied against her for the rest of June at
Blauwe Huis?
She needn't worry. A gulf as wide as the Caribbean has come between my mother and me.

Kammi carries her own bags. She doesn't wait for Mother to help her, or even Jinco, who stirs himself only to carry Mother's luggage on the day we arrive and the day we leave.

The first time I remember coming to Curaçao—Mother, Dad, and me—I didn't understand where we were going or about beach living. I trailed beach sand into the rented house without thinking about it, Martia sweeping up behind me. I wanted to show Mother and Dad my sand castle, not realizing that it had slipped through my pudgy fingers with every step I took away from the water's edge.

Dad stopped coming a few years later, spending his summers in Europe on language tours, teaching American university students on their semesters abroad. He tried to explain, “Curaçao is your mother's place. There's no room for me there.” I wanted to say there wasn't a place for me, either, but I didn't. Last year he finally came back, cutting short a tour through Italy to fly from Rome to Amsterdam to Curaçao. I traced the route on the map in the airline magazine I'd taken from our flight. Jinco deposited him at
Blauwe Huis
just before dusk and didn't carry his bags. Jinco's lack of interest in anyone's bags but Mother's bothered Dad, who was bleary-eyed from the flight. Mother told him to let it be. Jinco was reliable, she said, and had been so for years, and that was good enough for her. Dad grabbed his garment bag and left Mother to pay the fare.

Except for the luggage, Dad tried to make Mother happy those few weeks.

Kammi slips the garment bag over her bony left shoulder and walks toward me. As she does, a lizard skitters across the sand, trailing a shadow in front of her path. She doesn't miss a step. Maybe she didn't even see it. She extends her hand, almost as if she's auditioning to be queen.

“I'm so sorry...” she says as her cool hand touches mine in not quite a handshake, not an embrace. What is she sorry for? About my father? For the fact we'll be stepsisters?

I don't say anything. I turn away and lead her inside while Mother pays Jinco. Indoors, Kammi stops behind me for a moment, as if she's adjusting to the darker interior. I
watch her as she takes off her sunglasses. Hazel, that's what color her eyes are.

“The shades were my mother's idea,” she says, laughing in a timid way, her vowels soft and southern.

“This is yours.” I point to the small room off the living area. “It was my mother's idea.” I can't resist saying it that way. It really
was
Mother's idea to give Kammi my room, the nicer of the two small bedrooms. “Because,” Mother said, “for now Kammi is a guest, not family. We want to make a good impression.”

I put my things into the musty and unused second bedroom the day we arrived. The bedroom window faces the dry hills, not the water. I didn't even look at my old room. Martia, unaware of Mother's plan at first, had aired it out and tucked new hibiscus-colored sheets onto the bed. She told me she had found a pink paper fan shaped like a hibiscus blossom at a gift shop in Willemstad and she'd placed it on the pillowcase for me.

Perhaps it is destiny after all. The pink is perfect for Kammi. Dropping her bags on the bed, she smiles when she sees the fan and the sheets and the blue ocean beyond.
The sea, it is the sea.
Martia's voice in my head corrects me when I even think “ocean.” To me, a sea sounds calm. An ocean doesn't.

Kammi pushes the curtains aside and stares at the water.

“That's the Caribbean,” I tell her. “Curaçao's about forty miles from Venezuela.” I sound like I've memorized the tourist brochures. By now I have.

“I thought people here would speak Spanish. I studied Spanish in school, but I don't like to speak it.”

“Curaçao's a Dutch island. But some people speak Spanish. Papiamentu, the local language, is part Spanish and Portuguese, but other languages, too.” Now I really sound like one of those tour guides who stand by the pier at St. Anna Bay and herd cruise-ship tourists on shopping trips that pretend to be cultural tours. Mother calls the tourists cattle. Another reason she says she won't display her artwork at the galleries in Willemstad.

“Do you speak it?” Kammi asks, turning to look at me.

“Papiamentu? No. I studied Arabic last year.”

Her eyes go wide. I don't tell her I took the class to make Mother angry—she wanted me to study French. We were a class of five in an elective taught by a refugee. I got a C. I wouldn't turn in my homework.

I sense Mother listening from the hallway. Waiting to see how things go between us.

“Come on. I'll show you around.” To my own ears, I sound polite. I hear myself as if I am standing outside my body, listening. “We're not on the Internet here. Except for the phone, we're in the Dark Ages.” It doesn't bother me much, but I watch Kammi's face to see if she reacts. She simply nods. Her father must have warned her.

Mother's footsteps echo on the metal staircase as she goes up to her studio.

Kammi unfolds her bag onto the rattan luggage rack at
the foot of the bed. She unzips it, shakes out a few sundresses, all but unwrinkled, and hangs them in the closet. I was right: she packs like Mother, and her clothes are so tiny. I'd never fit in them. She leaves the rest and then follows me.

In the kitchen, Martia is smiling like she always does when she sees children.

“This is Martia,” I say.

“
Bon bini,
” Martia says. “Welcome.” Martia wipes her hands on her apron and takes Kammi's small hands in hers, giving them a big squeeze. Not for the first time, I wonder what Martia's family is really like, what her children do while she's here with us. Martia only goes home on Sundays. Does she wonder, too, whether they think of her here in the fancy house?

“Thank you,” Kammi says, smiling, a bigger smile than when she saw the pink-flowered bedroom.

“Such a pretty little girl come to Curaçao,” Martia says. “You will be liking it here. You come see Martia you need anything. I make your favorite foods. So you no homesick.” She shows Kammi the glass bowl. “Tonight we have shrimp and mango and a big salad. You like it?”

“Yes,” Kammi says. I wonder if she is telling the truth or just being polite. The way she smiles, I bet she thinks Martia is unbiased, an ally.

She's wrong. Martia is mine.

“C
OME ON
, there's more to see,” I say, motioning Kammi away from Martia, who is still smiling as she turns to continue preparing dinner.

Kammi follows me into the living room. Nature books and shells are arranged on the side tables. Big cushions with palm-tree prints line the white rattan furniture. Island décor just like something out of a magazine. Martia keeps everything looking that way. She sweeps the sand, fluffs the pillows, and repositions the shells.

“What's up there?” Kammi points to the metal staircase.

“You're not allowed up there.” Like Bluebeard's castle.

Kammi's face goes sour.

“I'm not allowed up there, either,” I say. “No one is. Except Mother. It's her studio.” I picture the bottles and tubes of blue. Will Mother notice the Prussian blue is missing?
Maybe she'll assume the paint dried out in the bottom of the tube and she threw it away. Or maybe she'll think that she forgot she threw it away, because she drank too much. Yesterday, before she was even fully unpacked, I stole a nearly empty tube of Scarlet Lake from her art bin and dropped it in the garbage. If she missed it, she didn't say. It wasn't one of the blues, after all. The Prussian blue is still in my pocket. Evidence of a crime committed right under Mother's nose, but I can't bear to destroy it.

“Oh, I hope I get to see her work,” Kammi says, and smiles. Her face lights up. “Before I came, she said I might. I want to paint, too.”

The breath goes out of me.
Before she came.
All spring in Maine, Mother encouraged me to send Kammi a “get-acquainted e-mail.” Kammi sent one to me, along with a photograph of herself under a beach umbrella. I couldn't make myself reply. I didn't have anything to say.

“Mother's very busy.” That's a lie, but I say it anyway. “Come on. I'll show you the beach. There are places where you have to watch the riptide.” I want out of the house.

I want
her
out of the house.

Before I open the French doors to the patio, the phone rings. Martia answers it in the kitchen. Her words turn stiff.

I hate it when the phone rings now. How the voice on the other end can change Martia with a simple hello. It's been that way since last year when the phone finally rang
after Dad disappeared. Mother had been standing at the window facing the sea, as if she could will the boat to appear on the horizon. She didn't even turn when Martia answered the phone on the fourth ring, but I saw her face.

Martia walks into the living room. “It is Mayur Bindas. For you,” she says, frowning. “I tell him you are busy. You have a guest.” Martia is my ally, but Mayur and his parents are rich. They know the Dutch owner of this house. They might make things difficult for Martia if she were rude to Mayur.

“I'll take it.” Mayur. I've been wondering when he'd call. He's waited until three days after we arrived. Mayur would wait just to make me wonder.

Kammi stands by the French doors, looking toward the sea, as if she's trying to give me some privacy. If she's curious about Mayur, she doesn't show it.

“Hello,” I say into the phone.

“
Bon.
” Not “good afternoon” or “hello,” just “good.” Shorthand. I haven't heard Mayur's voice in a year. Not since the day before Mother and I left Curaçao. The day when we stopped at the Bindases' house to thank Dr. Bindas for his help with Dad on the beach. The day I pushed Mayur into the pool, still dressed in his best clothes from a family wedding he'd just attended, because of what he said to me.

“What do you want?” Last year, he said he had a secret I would want to know. He didn't get a chance to tell me and I didn't ask. So he has kept it for a whole year.

“Mamí said you were back. With a new girl.” Without your father. He doesn't say it. But he pauses, so my mind fills the silence.

I don't say anything. Silence is a tactic I learned from the counselor Mother sent me to after we got back to Maine. Counselors like empty spaces. They know if they wait, the other person will fill up the space with words. Now I wait.

“Mamí told me you and the new girl must come to visit. You must come tomorrow,” he says.

We haven't spoken in a year and he's already ordering me around. Or trying to.

“The new girl is Kammi.” At her name Kammi turns around and cocks her head at me. She was listening after all.

“Kammi,” he says. “Mamí says you and Kammi must come. Three in the afternoon. She says to bring your swimsuits.”

“Your mother is very nice.” Meaning he is not. “Tell her we'll come.”

Kammi raises her eyebrows at me, asking me a question without speaking.

I shrug. After yelling to his mother that we're coming, Mayur starts to brag about some new game gadget he bought. How much it cost. I listen without hearing.

Then his voice gets low. “You remember what I said? Last year?”

Air rushes in my eardrum, as if the phone has become a shell and I can hear the sea.

“I'm hanging up,” I say. I don't wait for Mayur to finish.

Mother's voice carries down the metal stairs. “Who was that?”

“Mayur.”

“Bindas?”

“Yes.” As if there were any other Mayur. “His mother invited Kammi and me over tomorrow at three.”

Mother doesn't say “That's nice” or “I'm surprised after what happened.” She just changes the subject. “Have you shown Kammi around?”

“We're going to the beach now.” I shoo Kammi out the French doors. I'm closing them as I hear Mother start, “Be—”

Careful,
she means to say.

I am past that point.

 

Outside, the sun is so bright it hurts my eyes. Kammi slips her sunglasses back on, but I just squint into the glare. I don't believe in sunglasses.

“Let's go,” I say as we walk down the wooden steps of the deck and onto the sand. It squishes between my bare toes, so soft it almost tickles. Magic sand, Dad called it.

“Wait.” Kammi pauses, tugging off her slides. Tiny, leather-soled, the shoes are a smaller version of Mother's. Like Mother, Kammi won't want them to get wet or covered in sand.

I feel Mother watching us, but I refuse to look up to the windows or the widow's walk beyond.

Instead, I dig my toes into the sand and wait. I brought
only two pairs of plastic flip-flops to wear, no nice shoes. For clothes, I packed two broomstick skirts, five T-shirts in pastel colors, enough underwear for a week, and a bathing suit with a ruffle at the bottom that Mother made me buy the week before we left. She said it would be flattering. She didn't say the ruffle would hide the roll of fat around my waist, the one I see her look away from whenever I lean over. Or that it would visually balance my growing breasts, which have expanded along with the rest of me this past year. She watched me slip the suit into my suitcase, on top. That's all I brought, though. Most of my summer clothes from last year don't fit anymore. Instead of telling Mother, I just stuffed towels in my suitcase to make it look full. I hate shopping, hate how nothing on the hangers looks right on me. As if the clothes belong to someone else and I'm just borrowing them.