The Other Side of Blue(17)

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.





Chapter Nine


AFTER 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.