The Other Side of Blue(29)

Mother steps first onto the sand, shakes off her slides. Kammi follows, picking up her shoes and tapping the heels together gently just like Mother. I wonder if she knows she’s mirroring Mother or whether it’s just instinct. She already seems to have fallen into the rhythm of living here.

“Come, we have soft drinks. Coco Rico, Fria. Ice cold.” Mrs. Bindas leads us to a tent sheltering coolers of drinks. Beer in one cooler and bright orange and green bottles of sodas in another.

Down the beach, away from the bonfire and the tents, six boys throw Frisbees to each other in a relay. One of them, the short one, stops when he turns around and looks our way, heads toward us.

Mayur.

Mrs. Bindas beams. “Mayur, see your special guests, they have come. You should bring your cousins over, introduce them to the American girls.”

“They’re busy. Come on, I’ll take you to them,” Mayur says to us, and turns to walk back down the beach. He assumes we’ll follow. On command, Kammi does. I grab a glass bottle of Coco Rico, my favorite coconut-flavored soda, from the ice. A servant—not the boy from our first visit—opens it for me, tossing the metal cap into a basket behind him without looking. Ignoring me, except I see his gaze slide over my chest. He steps past to rearrange the ice around the bottles in the cooler.

Mrs. Bindas and Mother wander over to a cluster of beach chairs where other women sit drinking, their scarves and skirts fluttering like birds around them. The men gather around another fire, their laughter but not their words carrying between the crashes of the surf.

Yards behind, I trail Mayur and Kammi.

When I catch up, Mayur has gathered all the other boys around. His cousins from Trinidad. Some other boys, too; locals. Not so rich, I can see it in their eyes. Several don’t usually get a whole soda for themselves. They stand in a semicircle, looking at their bare feet, taking chugs from soda bottles they’ve planted in the sand. They won’t look directly at Kammi. Because she’s a girl, because she’s American, because she’s pretty. One boy looks up when I kick sand over his foot; then his gaze skims over Kammi before he looks away again. He’s thin and rangy, like the other boys, except for Mayur. Dark-skinned, too, with brown eyes that seem to miss little.

“This is Roberto, Tibor, and Saco. They’re my cousins. Some others are over there.” He points to the men around the far bonfire. “And the others here, Loco, Alonzo, and Klaus.”

“Cyan says you’re from Trinidad,” Kammi says to Roberto. “What’s that like?”

The boys shrug, then grin, still looking at their feet or out to sea. How to explain the difference? Another island in the same sea.

“Do you want to play?” Mayur asks. His mother probably bribed him to say that. I look over my shoulder, see Mrs. Bindas wave. Mother has her back to us, her hand holding a glass of wine in the air, perfectly balanced. Posed. Mayur doesn’t return his mother’s wave.

Despite herself, Kammi looks at me.

“No thanks,” I answer. “I’ll watch.” I hate running after the Frisbee when the wind grabs it from my reach. I hate missing it, chasing it as it rolls zigzagging down the slope toward the surf.

Mayur holds out the Frisbee to Kammi. “You go first.”

He’s playing host. This is his party, after all. He’s the big man. The other boys know it, too.

Kammi takes the Frisbee. “Thanks. I used to play this with my Dad’s black Labrador. Have you ever seen dogs that can jump and catch them midair?”

Some of the boys nod. Saco grins, his black hair flopping over his eyes. His is the kind of face most girls like. Soft and cute, his eyes are those of a black Lab.

“Claro, we’ve seen that,” Mayur says, shrugging, acting bored. “I had a dog once, he was a champion Frisbee catcher.” Sure he did.

I squat in the sand, spread my skirt around myself like a picnic blanket. Howard has a dog? Mother has never mentioned that. Neither has Howard, and he’s never brought one around in Maine. Mother doesn’t even like dogs. I wonder where it is now. Maybe in Atlanta with Kammi’s mother. I can hear Howard saying it. “Kammi needs a dog. With the breakup, this is just the thing. I’ll miss Old Pete or whatever his name is, but it’s for Kammi. Nothing’s too good for Kammi.” Howard doesn’t really talk that way—his voice is way too business-school to sound so breathless—but I can imagine him almost saying it like that. Getting rid of the dog and making it sound like he’s doing it for Kammi, when he’s really doing it for Mother. Has Kammi’s mother figured that out?

The disc thuds at my side, spewing sand onto my skirt. I squint into the sun. “Hey, watch it.”