The Other Side of Blue(6)

“Color?” she asked, as if she thought she’d heard me wrong.

“Yes, color. Like the way my name means ‘blue,’” I said. “But what color do you think I am?”

She squinted at me, as if narrowing her vision until I appeared as just a color, no shape.

“Yellow,” she said.

“Like sunshine?”

“Yellow like kibrahacha. Flowers, you know.”

Actually, I didn’t. Later I looked up the word in the guidebook to the flora and fauna of the Dutch Antilles. After the spring rains come, the western hills blaze up with yellow kibrahacha. Persistent, rangy, and rugged, they’re all bloomed out by June when we arrive.

What did Martia mean? Am I really yellow?

At home in Maine, I have a book my father gave me about color. Goethe, a German philosopher, wrote it two hundred years ago. I keep it by my bed, moving the bookmark a page or two each night to keep Mother guessing about whether I’m reading it or not. Most of it bores me, and I skip pages, but I understand some of Goethe’s ideas. He said color isn’t just light hitting an object. Color is how we perceive light hitting an object. The color closest to light, he said, is yellow. The opposite, the color closest to the darkness—the absence of light—is blue.

I look past Kammi to the sea, but I don’t say anything to her about the water or about color.

“Race you to the point.” I burrow my feet into the sand, giving me traction and propelling me forward. I’m taller, longer-legged, and older than she is. I have the advantage.

I beat her, but she’s not breathing as hard as me when she catches up. She turns to look back the way we came. Maybe she’s trying to get her bearings, figuring out landmarks, making a map in her head.

“You can see the point for a long way down either beach. You won’t get lost,” I say.

“I just wanted to see what it looks like from here. The house.”

I look, trying to imagine what it must be like to see it for the first time. From the beach side, you can see all three stories and the widow’s walk on top. From the main entrance and driveway, which faces the hills, the house looks smaller—you can’t see the ground floor. From here it looks like a castle, especially with the copper roof on the cupola, how it reflects the glare like a torch. I wonder if Dad saw it from the sea before the sun went down the first day he went missing.

“The Bindases live this way, around the point and along another cove. It’s quicker to get there by going along the road.”

“Who are the Bindases?” Kammi asks, still looking toward Blauwe Huis.

I know she’s asking about Mayur. “Dr. Bindas is a doctor. Mrs. Bindas is very nice; pretty, too. You’ll like her. They have a pool down by the sea.”

“And Mayur?”

“You be the judge.” I start to walk around the curve of the point, where I’ll be out of sight of the house. “You’ll meet him tomorrow. He’s about fourteen.” Older than Kammi, younger than me. All brat. What’s he going to try to tell me?

“Who’s waving? Is that your mother?” Kammi asks.

I turn around. Before I answer, Kammi starts waving back.

“Yes, it’s her.” I look down at the line of shells at the high-tide mark. I refuse to let Mother see me stare back at the house. Even when she is supposed to be painting, she is watching. I won’t wave. It’s not me she’s waving to anyway. She’s trying to impress Kammi, to make it seem as if we’re a happy family. Or will be, once she marries Howard, Kammi’s father.

Before Dad died, Mother’s art students—her protégés, anyway—were the ones she tried to impress. Every year or two, she had a new favorite. They all had wonderful names, as if they’d been born to be artists: Catrione, Kiera, Samantha, Philippa.

Catrione was the one I liked best. She took time when Mother wasn’t looking to show me things—how to arrange still-life objects to best effect, how to understand perspective. Things Mother lost patience in trying to explain to me. When Mother told me to think of an orchid in a vase as a cylinder, all I could see was the delicate lip of the blossom, the tiniest ruffles along the edges of the fragile petal, and the thin lines disappearing down its throat. I imagined the color turning darker and darker deeper inside the stem, and I wondered how that secret place could be painted. The next week, Mother bought a crochet hook and granny-square kit for me. “Some people are artists, some are craftsmen,” she told me.

Catrione had more patience. Once, she even sneaked to my room while Mother was out talking to a gallery owner. She looked over my sketch of the orchid, which I kept under the cloth runner on my dresser. Hidden, but close to the surface.