After Dad died last summer, I found one of the ornaments, a blue bell, in a pin box in his sock drawer at home. Bits of it had crumbled off, but I knew what it was. It still smelled clean, like salt. I hid the box from Mother before she cleared out his things.
I don’t know why Dad kept that blue bell. Besides books, he saved little—his grandfather’s hammer, his mother’s wedding band after she died when I was eight, and an oil painting barely bigger than two inches square, with a scene of a gondola, a bridge, and clothes hanging on a line across a canal. He and Mother went to Venice on their honeymoon, so I assumed Mother had painted it herself. But when I held the small square frame to the Maine light, I saw the name Giuseppe along the edge. Someone else, not Mother, had painted it. So why did Dad keep it? What about Venice had stayed with him?
I want to ask him those questions. But now I will never know.
Chapter Ten
THE NEXT MORNING, Martia knocks on my door—I know it’s Martia because she taps in a special rhythm—two short raps, a pause, and two more raps. I pull my fingers through my tangled hair. Last night I changed into a fresh T-shirt from my suitcase. It still holds the scent of the dryer sheets we use in Maine.
When I open the door, Martia motions for me to follow her. Intrigued, I tiptoe after her. Her skirt and blouse smell as fresh as sunshine. Martia doesn’t believe that we should use electric dryers for our clothes, not when the sun is “for free.” But how can I explain Maine to her? How the damp gray air almost never dries out?
Martia knocks gently on Kammi’s door. Kammi opens it, grinning. Just like the first afternoon when we walked over to the Bindases’ house, she’s polished and ready to go, even down to her plastic slides. She’s hidden her hair under a bandana. This time, she looks the part of an artist. I can see her as a model for the front of an art-school brochure. All she’s missing is a smudge of blue paint on her nose for effect.
“I come in? Yes?” Martia asks. “Cyan, too?”
Kammi nods. Her eyebrows lower when she looks past Martia at me. She backs away to let us both in. Martia stands just inside the door, and I slip behind her into the room that every year before this one has been mine.
“I come to explain,” Martia says, and she folds her hands gently in front of her, as if she is about to take the wafer from the priest at Communion . “Mrs. “Walters, she can no paint in the air today.” Martia calls en plein air “in the air.” I imagine artists weightless, suspended in midair, painting on floating canvases.
“What do you mean?” Kammi’s face clouds. “Is she sick?”
Martia nods. “A headache. Mala cabeza. Mrs. Walters, she no go out today. I call Jinco already. He take you to Willemstad. Be tourists today, yes? Much better idea. Mrs. Walters has left some money for you to spend.”
Martia asks it as a question of Kammi, but it isn’t. Be good girls and go into town and leave Mrs. Walters to recover. Don’t make a scene. I tilt my head back, imagine Mother lying above us in her bed in her studio, her eyes squeezed shut against the light that almost won’t be kept out up there. She should be in my room, tucked against the back of the house in the cool green shadows. But down here is too close to her old room, the closed-off room she shared with my father when he came to the island.
I savor the taste of Kammi’s disappointment. She doesn’t cry or stamp her foot, but she looks at me sharply. Maybe she thinks it’s my fault, that I did something to make Mother come down with a headache.
I shrug as if she’s asked me a question out loud. Who knows? Maybe Mother doesn’t really have a headache. Maybe she doesn’t want to paint en plein air with a beginner, one who will look at her as if she’s a goddess. Maybe it makes her uncomfortable, though that’s hard to imagine, given the way Philippa used to hang around our house near the lake. She started out following ten paces behind Mother wherever she went, until she became more skilled herself. After a while, Philippa became an artist in her own right. Then she started to walk beside Mother, as if they were equals.
“Okay,” Kammi says, lowering her eyes. “If I can’t paint today, going to town will be okay.”
Other than the day we arrived at the airport, I haven’t been to Willemstad this year. It’s my chance to take the sea glass I’ve collected so far to the bead shop to sell.
“Another day, you paint with Mrs. Walters. It is no problem.” Martia smiles and straightens the small silver pin, shaped like a palette, on Kammi’s blouse. No doubt she is wearing a gift from her grandmother. Only a grandmother would give that pin to anyone who truly wanted to be an artist.