The first time I remember coming to Curaçao—Mother, Dad, and me—I didn’t understand where we were going or about beach living. I trailed beach sand into the rented house without thinking about it, Martia sweeping up behind me. I wanted to show Mother and Dad my sand castle, not realizing that it had slipped through my pudgy fingers with every step I took away from the water’s edge.
Dad stopped coming a few years later, spending his summers in Europe on language tours, teaching American university students on their semesters abroad. He tried to explain, “Curaçao is your mother’s place. There’s no room for me there.” I wanted to say there wasn’t a place for me, either, but I didn’t. Last year he finally came back, cutting short a tour through Italy to fly from Rome to Amsterdam to Curaçao. I traced the route on the map in the airline magazine I’d taken from our flight. Jinco deposited him at Blauwe Huis just before dusk and didn’t carry his bags. Jinco’s lack of interest in anyone’s bags but Mother’s bothered Dad, who was bleary-eyed from the flight. Mother told him to let it be. Jinco was reliable, she said, and had been so for years, and that was good enough for her. Dad grabbed his garment bag and left Mother to pay the fare.
Except for the luggage, Dad tried to make Mother happy those few weeks.
Kammi slips the garment bag over her bony left shoulder and walks toward me. As she does, a lizard skitters across the sand, trailing a shadow in front of her path. She doesn’t miss a step. Maybe she didn’t even see it. She extends her hand, almost as if she’s auditioning to be queen.
“I’m so sorry...” she says as her cool hand touches mine in not quite a handshake, not an embrace. What is she sorry for? About my father? For the fact we’ll be stepsisters?
I don’t say anything. I turn away and lead her inside while Mother pays Jinco. Indoors, Kammi stops behind me for a moment, as if she’s adjusting to the darker interior. I watch her as she takes off her sunglasses. Hazel, that’s what color her eyes are.
“The shades were my mother’s idea,” she says, laughing in a timid way, her vowels soft and southern.
“This is yours.” I point to the small room off the living area. “It was my mother’s idea.” I can’t resist saying it that way. It really was Mother’s idea to give Kammi my room, the nicer of the two small bedrooms. “Because,” Mother said, “for now Kammi is a guest, not family. We want to make a good impression.”
I put my things into the musty and unused second bedroom the day we arrived. The bedroom window faces the dry hills, not the water. I didn’t even look at my old room. Martia, unaware of Mother’s plan at first, had aired it out and tucked new hibiscus-colored sheets onto the bed. She told me she had found a pink paper fan shaped like a hibiscus blossom at a gift shop in Willemstad and she’d placed it on the pillowcase for me.
Perhaps it is destiny after all. The pink is perfect for Kammi. Dropping her bags on the bed, she smiles when she sees the fan and the sheets and the blue ocean beyond. The sea, it is the sea. Martia’s voice in my head corrects me when I even think “ocean.” To me, a sea sounds calm. An ocean doesn’t.
Kammi pushes the curtains aside and stares at the water.
“That’s the Caribbean,” I tell her. “Curaçao’s about forty miles from Venezuela.” I sound like I’ve memorized the tourist brochures. By now I have.
“I thought people here would speak Spanish. I studied Spanish in school, but I don’t like to speak it.”
“Curaçao’s a Dutch island. But some people speak Spanish. Papiamentu, the local language, is part Spanish and Portuguese, but other languages, too.” Now I really sound like one of those tour guides who stand by the pier at St. Anna Bay and herd cruise-ship tourists on shopping trips that pretend to be cultural tours. Mother calls the tourists cattle. Another reason she says she won’t display her artwork at the galleries in Willemstad.
“Do you speak it?” Kammi asks, turning to look at me.
“Papiamentu? No. I studied Arabic last year.”
Her eyes go wide. I don’t tell her I took the class to make Mother angry—she wanted me to study French. We were a class of five in an elective taught by a refugee. I got a C. I wouldn’t turn in my homework.
I sense Mother listening from the hallway. Waiting to see how things go between us.
“Come on. I’ll show you around.” To my own ears, I sound polite. I hear myself as if I am standing outside my body, listening. “We’re not on the Internet here. Except for the phone, we’re in the Dark Ages.” It doesn’t bother me much, but I watch Kammi’s face to see if she reacts. She simply nods. Her father must have warned her.