The Other Side of Blue(2)

From the studio windows, I notice the sea is the color of tumbled blue-green glass, roiled and unsettled. Last June after Dad died, his seat between Mother and me on the plane going home sat empty until just before takeoff, when a red-faced, sweating tourist weaved her way down the aisle and claimed it. She stuffed an oversized tote bag under the seat in front of her, leaving me to huddle against the window. As our plane rose into the sky, I couldn’t take my eyes off the sea. I thought the color of the water might change with the light, but it didn’t. It appeared deep blue, almost black, and dense as oil. No light penetrated the surface; we were left with the dark skin of the sea and no answers.

By now, the end of the first week of June at Blauwe Huis, Mother should be knee-deep in wet canvases, already ignoring me for the favorable slant of light under the eaves of the widow’s walk. This spring she said the hot, dry island has been her “artistic touchstone” ever since she started coming here as a girl, and she had to come back, even this year, even after what happened. She insisted I come, too. We would start over.

Her canvases remain stretched and ready but empty, and her mixing palette has dried out, the smudges of blue paint wavy and stiff under my touch like a bad van Gogh imitation.

The tubes and glass bottles of paint feel cool in my hand. Mother’s lined them up on the shelves like a display in a paint store, with the blues up front. She contemplates blue, collects it, honors it in every painting. Her marine blue appears steel gray, like a New England harbor in winter. Savannah blue acts sultry, with an undertone of indigo. Bahama blue seems paler than curaçao liqueur, more a bleached blue, the color of shallow water. It reminds me of the shade of Winslow Homer’s Caribbean water, but not quite—as if for Mother the sun has come on too strong, the glare blinding her to the undertones.

Mother chooses her blues carefully, with an eye toward the light, the swirl of colors on a glass palette tray. Fifteen years ago, she even named me for cyan, a fundamental blue.

On some mornings when she says she is working, I can stand down the beach, careful of the poisonous sap of the manchineel, and see her on the widow’s walk, hand raised, holding a glass. Martia keeps the shelf in the dining room stocked with blue curaçao, the national liqueur, made from the bittersweet peel of the apelsina. Mother drinks it with bitter lemon soda over ice—a Blue Bay. Sometimes the light catches her drink glass like a prism. Maybe she is toasting the sea. If she is, she never acts drunk, not like my best friend Zoe’s mother, who drinks when she thinks no one else is looking, but everyone knows.

Mother painted me blue, but as I look out over the sea, I think about Dad and wonder what color I really am.

What is the color for lost?





Chapter Two


JINCO’S HORN BLARES outside. I blink, realizing I don’t have any idea how long I’ve been standing here in Mother’s studio. I brush my hand across the paints as if I’m touching an enemy and escaping unharmed. Palming a half-empty tube of Prussian blue paint, I slip it in my skirt pocket and run downstairs. Has any of the blue smudged onto my fingers, my clothes? I’m almost hoping it has, like a dare to my mother to notice.

Martia meets me in the kitchen. Her face doesn’t give anything away. She knows where I’ve been, but she keeps it to herself. She opens the door and I step outside into the glare.

Looking like her photograph, Kammi exits the taxi’s back seat from the left, close to me, Mother from the right. Trim and brunette and neat, Kammi’s dressed out of Talbots down to the pink polo shirt and crisp capris. She’s wearing sunglasses, so I can’t see the color of her eyes, but I can tell there’s not a trace of blue in her. She is pink, shell pink, like the inside of a conch shell before the sun has bleached it. Tender-skinned, she’ll burn before the rest of us, turning the color of the cooked shrimp Martia peeled earlier.

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.