I tie the scarf over my hair. “Jealous? That shows how stupid your mother is. Or maybe that’s how she feels about it.”
Kammi blinks.
“Jealousy would mean I care what my mother does,” I say.
Kammi exhales hard. “You don’t...”
“No. She can marry the man in the moon and live happily ever after.” But there is no happily ever after. Not for her and Dad. Not even for her and Howard. Dad and I will always be between them.
Kammi stands there, staring at me as though I’m a strange lizard that slithered across the sand into the shade. I bet boarding school didn’t prepare her for this, for a stepsister-to-be who isn’t competition, someone who sidesteps all her thrusts.
“You didn’t say why you didn’t tell me.” Kammi rubs at the tears and ends up smudging zinc oxide off part of her nose and onto her wet cheek. If it were a Prussian blue smudge, she’d seem more like an artist.
“I thought it best not to say anything.”
Kammi holds the force field of drawing paper in front of her as she leaves.
I close my eyes, pull the scarf over my face. Through the layers of cloth, the light is even dimmer when I open my eyes again. Two lizards circle each other along the retaining wall.
I think about Mother’s easel collapsing into the sand, the gritty images forever marred. The Christmas after the episode with the salt-dough ornaments, my grandmother didn’t come—she was too feeble—but she sent me a long box with an easel inside. The gift was for me, though Mother checked the label three times to make sure it was my name on front. She thought Grandmother Betts had made a mistake because of her growing dementia; she kept mixing up people’s names and she did things like put her glasses instead of the juice bottle into the refrigerator.
Dad screwed together the easel parts, but one leg always seemed shorter than the others, and it tottered if I wasn’t careful. I positioned the easel in my room so the light came through my window over my left shoulder. Between Christmas and New Year’s, I splashed bold watercolor marks across the paper, just to see the colors tumble and blend. Mother didn’t “interfere,” as she called it, with the artistic process to tell me to work with form and shadow. She didn’t tell me about the Golden Mean, the balance of the longer side of the image to the shorter. Or explain negative space. I either had talent or I didn’t. She didn’t want to encourage another artist. After New Year’s, I folded the easel and put it away. Only a few spatters of blue paint like spilled sky still stained the carpet. Mother said, “It’s good you quit so soon. Nana shouldn’t have encouraged you. She never encouraged me.”
Martia clambers down the stairs from the deck above. She slips into the shadows with me. Maybe Kammi told her where I was, or maybe she just knew, like she knows about other things.
“Your mother, she is very upset.”
I shrug.
“Is no right, you and she.”
I still don’t say anything.
Martia mutters to herself in Papiamentu. Then she starts again in English. “Tomorrow is the party at the Bindases’.”
“Does Mother want to cancel?” She can’t. I have to confront Mayur, to see what he thinks he knows.
“No, no, is important to go. The Bindases are big people here. Some are with the government.”
Yes, Dr. Bindas is associated with the hospital in Willemstad, and his cousin is supposed to be in government. Mother never mentions the connection, though Mayur brags about it when he can. Mother will want people to think there is nothing wrong, so she won’t cancel, even if she doesn’t want to go.
Martia sighs and smiles. She holds her hand out as if I am a small child who’s threatened to run away and she wants to pack a lunch for me so that after I find a hiding place down the block, I’ll eat my lunch and go back home. Home, where they’re supposed to love you and want you back.
“Everybody today is in bad mood,” she says. “It’s time to kome, to eat. Come now.”
I’d say I’m not hungry, but Martia would know that I’m lying.
Chapter Fifteen
AT FIVE the next afternoon, Mother, Kammi, and I follow the shell road to the Bindases’ house. Before Mother can fix her everything-is-fine face, Mrs. Bindas waves us onto the beach from the edge of the green lawn. She smiles, her head tilted at an angle, as if she’s seen a family argument she’s not meant to witness.
Only we aren’t saying anything out loud.
We’re a silent trio. We’ve been that way for a whole day, since the plein air trip, since Kammi asked Mother about the blue boat. We are three corners of a triangle, sharp-angled and equidistant.