The Other Side of Blue(18)

“What’s in there?” Kammi asks, nodding at the box.

“Sea glass. Mermaids’ tears,” I blurt out without thinking.

“Mermaids’ tears?” Her eyes go big, as if perhaps she thinks I really believe in mermaids.

“It’s just trash. Glass that’s been tossed into the sea. I collect it.”

“To do what with?”

I snap the lid shut. I’m not ready to tell Kammi how I make jewelry with it. I’m not ready to trust her with anything.

“Okay,” she says, not asking me again. She looks around the room, maybe looking for clues about me. But there’s not much here to see.

Finally, Kammi says: “Your mother’s going to take me painting with her tomorrow.” She says it casually, but I hear an edge to her voice.

“She asked you?”

“Yes, well, not exactly,” Kammi says. She sits on her hands on my bed. “I was talking to her about the pencils, telling her I liked them. How I wanted to try watercolor. Dad thinks watercolor is the best.”

“She didn’t say draw first?” Draw first is Mother’s mantra. Even Mother’s star student, Philippa, had to prove her range of drawing skills before she graduated to paints.

“No. She’s taking me to paint en plein air.”

I know better. It’s an old trick. Kammi doesn’t realize that this trip with Mother isn’t really about her going. It’s about Mother getting someone to carry her supplies and trail at her feet like a servant. Maybe Mother wants a student, even if relationships with her students usually end after a couple of years, for different reasons.

Kammi will sit in the sun and burn if she forgets her sunscreen. The backs of her thighs will stick with sweat to the plastic webbed lawn chair that she’ll have to carry. She’ll sit there and Mother won’t want Kammi to look at what she’s doing because it’s a work in progress. Even if there’s nothing on the canvas. Mother might reach over once or twice and dab some paint on Kammi’s paper to make it look like she’s helping her.

I don’t warn Kammi. She wouldn’t believe me. She’d think I’m just feeling sour grapes, that I hate her because she’s here, because my mother sent her watercolor pencils before I knew she even existed. Because Howard’s coming to take Dad’s place. I don’t hate her for all those reasons. I hate her because of the same gift of Caran d’Ache watercolor pencils stuffed into the back of my closet at home.

“Why don’t you go with us?” Kammi asks me.

“Are you kidding?”

“You could.”

“Why would I want to?”

Her shoulders relax and she smiles, her even white teeth showing. She wants Mother all for herself, but she can’t help being polite enough to ask me to come along.

“Don’t you paint?” she asks. Now that it’s safe, now that I have told her I don’t want to compete with her for Mother’s attention, she asks the important question.

“No. I used to.” The same way that I no longer swim, I don’t paint or draw.

Kammi waits a minute. Maybe she thinks I’ll say more, but I stand silent, holding the glass box, with my back against the bookcase. She doesn’t ask why I don’t paint. Maybe she’s afraid my answer is like an illness that will infect her, too, and she won’t be able to learn to paint and please her dad.

Finally, when I continue to stand mute, she slips off the bed and tiptoes out again.

After she leaves, I return the box to its place on the dresser and lie on my bed, staring at the ceiling. Suddenly, I feel tired from the heat outside. In my pocket, I feel for the Prussian blue oil paint that I took from Mother’s studio. The cool metal edge curls where Mother has rolled up the end like a toothpaste tube, squeezing out the dark blue paint in small smudges against her palette. I should have hidden it by now, but I like the cool feel of it in my pocket. Prussian blue was developed in the sixteen hundreds. It became favored among artists because it didn’t fade like indigo, and it cost less than cobalt.

When I was little, I pretended to be an artist like my mother. On Christmas Eve when I was seven, my grandmother on my mother’s side gave me dough she made herself with salt and flour. I cut out bell shapes with cookie cutters and we baked them while Mother painted in her studio. Back then, she had a studio at the university, and we lived in an apartment on campus. The ornaments smelled like bread coming out of the oven. After they cooled, Grandmother Betts let me decorate them with thick paint in red, blue, and yellow—primary colors—with a set of paints she’d bought just for me. We hung the ornaments that evening. When Mother got home, she said they smelled up the house and that I was too young to handle paints. Grandmother’s voice got tinny and cold, but she didn’t get into an argument. After Epiphany, after Grandmother had returned to her winter retreat in Florida, Mother threw out the dough ornaments along with the tree. From the frosted window, I watched Dad haul it down to the curb on a Thursday when the garbage men were coming to truck away all the dead trees. When I cried and asked why, Mother said the ornaments wouldn’t keep; they’d mold. My grandmother had said art was for children. But dough ornaments weren’t even art, Mother said.