The Other Side of Blue(46)

“What?” Kammi peers around me, looking into the distance, but not down. From the angle she’s looking, she’ll never see Mayur.

“Mayur. There.” I point down the rock face. “He looks like a mountain goat from here.”

Kammi giggles. “I think I can see the horns on his head.” She looks at me, and her pink skin seems darker from the sun and the hike, even though she’s wearing a hat. But I still see she wants me to like her.

I laugh out loud again. Mayur, the goat boy.

I drink from my water bottle and motion to Kammi she should do the same.

“So where’s Saco?” I ask.

She blushes. “He was walking with me.”

“And?”

She shakes her head. “Nothing. He didn’t do anything. He’s nice. Mayur wanted to talk to him. So he told me to go ahead.”

“Really? Talk about what?”

“Mayur didn’t say.” Kammi fidgets with her pack, sliding it off one shoulder. “But I wondered if it had to do with you.”

“Hmmm. Maybe Mayur told Saco or Loco about what happened to my dad. I bet Saco would tell you,” I say as it comes to me. I grab Kammi’s arm. “Ask him. Will you?”

For the first time I want something from her.

“I’ll ask,” she says.

“Today,” I say.

“Today.”





I sit on a rock ledge in the sun while Kammi sets up her paints. She arranges the tubes of watercolors in a circle like a color wheel. She tears a sheet of paper from the pad and clips it to the board, fastening all four sides to keep the wind from lifting the page and making the paint run. Then she pours water into a plastic cup and plants it next to her on the ground. Holding four brushes of varying widths in her hand, she looks at me.

“I can’t remember how to start,” she says.

“Really?” Mother would have told her when they went out.

“Would you show me?”

“What makes you think I know how to paint?”

“I—I figured you’d know. You said—”

“You figured I’d know by osmosis or something? Or it’s in my blood?” So many artist friends of Mother’s have said the same thing when they’ve met me at a gallery show. They assume I have inherited artistic skills. Funny how Mother has never thought so.

Kammi shrugs. She looks very young. “You said you used to.”

I did say that. “Okay.”

She smiles.

Saco and Mayur crest the top of the trail.

“What are you painting?” Saco asks. He leans over Kammi’s shoulder.

“I don’t know yet exactly.”

Mayur says, “How about lizards? They sun themselves on rocks.”

He’s talking about me. I stretch out my legs on the rock ledge.

Kammi doesn’t take the bait. “I’m thinking more of a landscape. You know, like a photograph, to take home a good memory.”

A good memory. I look away, out over the divi-divi trees to the whitecaps far below. The sea stretching to the edge of the earth.

Mayur shrugs. “Trees? That’s boring. Hey, Saco, let’s get the Hackey Sack.”

“You brought that?” Kammi asks.

Saco shrugs and grins. “You brought art.”

Saco loosens his pack and retrieves a small crocheted beanbag. He uses his foot to toss it in Mayur’s direction, and Mayur kicks it up in the air, then steps back to let Saco move in and keep it moving.

“Don’t fall off a cliff,” I call after him. I don’t have my answer yet.

The boys pass the Hackey Sack back and forth as they jog around the flat, rocky area.

I get up and stand behind Kammi. “Hold still.” I put my hands on her shoulders, pulling them back and down. “Relax. You’re too tense. I thought all you skinny girls took yoga.”

“I’m not skinny.” Holding her watercolor board, Kammi snaps her head to look back at me.

“Yes, you are.” I nudge her head back toward the board in front of her. She looks at the blank paper clipped to it.

“First, don’t look at the paper.” I point toward the horizon. “Out there, that’s where you should keep your gaze.” Where the sea and the sky become one. Artists call it the vanishing point. For me, it’s the place to start to focus, to find the line between what is and what isn’t yet.

Dr. Bindas, who’s reached the top, nods and smiles as he passes by. He doesn’t say anything, though, as if artists deserve special reverence because they aren’t like other people. Maybe that’s why he still addresses my mother formally. Or maybe it’s because he knows something about what happened.

“Hey,” Kammi says, bringing me back. “If I don’t look at the paper, how do I know what to paint?” Her voice rises. She shakes the brush she’s holding.