Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea (15 page)

“He almost choked to death on moonlight, at the hands of a ten-year-old dead girl.Yeah.He didn’t like it much.”I was starting to feel the tight, pinched feeling my face got when I was angry—searing,red-hot,fires-of-hell angry— and trying to hide it. 

River noticed. He put his hands on me and drew me close to him.“I’m sorry,”he said,and looked like he meant it, as much as you could trust him, which wasn’t much.“I couldn’t resist, after the Ouija board setup. It was just too perfect. Besides, I hate the way he talks to you sometimes. It felt good to send a little mischief his way.” 

I looked up at River. His skin was glowing in the morning sun, and it smelled clean and salty, like the sea, and his hair was still wet from his shower and looked almost black, and my anger . . . went away. 

“So that’s why you did it?” I asked. “To punish him? What about Sunshine then? Why did you do it to her?” 

“I don’t like the way she talks to you either.” 

“River, you didn’t even know her when you glowed her in the tunnel.” 

“That’s true,”he said,and laughed again.“Look,Vi.The thing is, I suffer from a deplorable need for justice. Yes, I like to feel the glow in me. Yes, I’m having a hard time stopping it. But I also can’t just stand around watching people be mean to those who don’t deserve it.It’s a powerful thing in me. More powerful than the glow, maybe.” He paused for a second, and the glint came back to his eyes. “But I’m also a fan of mischief. So between the two . . .” 

My expression was kind of hateful, but River was pretending not to notice. “Is that why you glowed Jack and that little girl Isobel? Because you’re a fan of mischief?” 

River stopped smiling.“That . . . that I’m not proud of. Honestly. It went too far. I know that.” 

I didn’t believe he regretted it. Not for a second. 

But I
wanted
to. 

“Just don’t do it again. Any of it. I mean it, River.” 

He nodded.“I don’t plan to,” he said. 

We stopped at the co-op and bought bananas and fresh pain au chocolats for breakfast. The woman at the counter smiled at us while River paid for the food. A nice smile. Genuine. River smiled back. And I thought about what Luke had said, in the attic. About no one in the town talking to us. And I wondered, for the first time, if maybe it was more our fault than theirs. 

Were we snobs? We lived in a big house and had interesting ancestors, but our money was gone and we were holding on to the Citizen by a thread. Still, we kept ourselves apart. My parents had artist friends come to stay from the city, but they didn’t mingle with the people in their own town. My father said once that the only thing that bored him was boring people, and that Echo had nothing but. 

Thinking back, I wonder if he was just ashamed that we couldn’t afford to pay the heating bill most of the time. 

I took a deep breath and gave the woman a smile. She smiled back. 

It felt good. 

River showed me where Jack lived.The house was on a dead-end street near the big brick box of hate that was my high school. I let myself shudder as I walked past. I wanted to be tutored at home, like my father had been when he was a kid, but we couldn’t afford it. I wasn’t sure how I would face going back to school in the fall, if my parents didn’t come back. Luke played sports and had sports friends, during the school year at least. All I had was Sunshine, and Sunshine . . . was Sunshine. 

Maybe I should have joined things in school,like . . .drama. And the beekeepers club. Maybe I shouldn’t have spent all my free time with books. Or following around a ninety-ishyear-old woman who liked to talk about the Devil. 

I felt old suddenly. Really old. Freddie old. I put my hands to my face. But my cheeks were still smooth, still soft, still young. 

River looked at me, and I put my hands back down. We’d arrived at Jack’s house. 

It was small, with a paint-peeling air of sadness about it, like a forgotten toy left out in the rain. We went up to the door and knocked. I had a smile ready, expecting the solemn face of Jack to greet me at the door. 

A man answered instead. He was tall, and bone-thin. He had thin gray hair and dark hollows under his eyes, like the ones you’d expect to see on a half-starved train tramp in the 1930s. But his straight, even features had a kind of smooth, urbane grace, which still showed through the hollows and the bones. He would have been handsome, once, long, long, long ago. He wore a dirty yellow button-down shirt and brown wool pants. The matching jacket had been kicked into a rumpled heap in the hallway behind him. 

The man was Daniel Leap, the drunk who bellowed his opinion about my family from every street corner in town, the man who had ruined my view that first day drinking coffee with River. 

And suddenly I understood.I understood why Jack was alone. I understood why he was so quiet. 

Daniel Leap held a glass of amber liquid in one longfingered hand.Bourbon,I supposed.In his other hand he held a needle, with a tail of long black thread. His eyes were big, like Jack’s, except that, instead of Jack’s piercing sort of melancholy, they looked dazed, and lost. 

“Is Jack around?” River asked. His expression echoed mine. Surprise. Confusion. Concern. 

“What do you want with him?” The man’s voice was soft, whispery. But there was an edge to it. 

Before River could answer, Jack appeared in the doorway. 

“Hey, River,” Jack said.“Hey,Violet.This is my pa.” 

Jack’s pa looked from his son, to River, to me.Then he leaned to the side and shoved Jack,just a bit.Just enough. “Be quiet, Jack.” 

There was a long pause. Daniel Leap drank from his glass and we watched him, not saying anything. 

“So, what do you want with my son?” Daniel Leap asked again, and smiled. “Want to buy him from me? You rich people like to do that, don’t you?” His eyes settled on me. “Yeah, I know what you’re like, Violet White. My family’s been in Echo nearly as long as yours.Only we don’t live in mansions by the sea.No,my people live and die in the gutter.” He laughed. It was soft and whispery, like his voice. “But look at you now. Coming into my gutter, trying to buy my son. You want to rent him as a playmate, like in that Charles Dickens book? Yeah, I’ve read it. I can read.” 

He took a long swig of his whiskey and looked at me, up and down, from toes to eyebrows, until I started to fidget.Was he joking? 

“No, I don’t want to buy your son.We just want to . . .” 

I looked down at Jack.He was half smiling,kind of cynically, which I didn’t expect. He was used to this, his dad making a fool of himself. I looked back at Daniel Leap. I wondered if he knew how smart his kid was. I wondered if he knew that his son wasn’t afraid of him. 

Daniel started fumbling with the needle. He was trying to sew a loose button back onto his shirt while he was still wearing it, and while he was holding a drink in his the other hand, and while both hands were shaking.“I’ve been trying to get this button on all morning,” he said. He seemed to have forgotten all about Dickens and rented playmates for the moment. 

“Can I hold your drink for you?”River asked,polite and quiet. 

The man shrugged. He handed his glass to River. River tilted it back and took a deep swallow. My eyebrows shot up.Why would River want Daniel Leap’s cheap bourbon? River didn’t even drink. 

Daniel, his right hand now free, stabbed the needle at the middle button on his yellow shirt. I flinched, sure he was going to draw blood.Jack watched for a second,then reached up and took the thread from his father’s fingers. He led his pa to a chair near the door and gently pushed him into it. 

River and I stood there,not saying anything,until Jack looked at River, hard. River turned the glass of whiskey over and dumped it onto the ground. 

≈≈≈
 

River and I went looking for Luke when we got back. I had this notion of making River apologize to him.Though that would mean explaining River’s glow, and I didn’t know how that conversation would go down, exactly. 

I noticed that the door of the shed was propped open. The shed was bigger than you’d think, considering it was called the shed. It was a little white building that had several square windows. Inside, there were cans of paint everywhere and little stools to sit on and easels and brushes and canvas cloths and still life props—pitchers and glasses and wine bottles, fake fruit and candles and a human skull. 

Luke was inside, painting. He had two canvases set up—one had a base coat of white, and the other black. 

“I’m doing a diptych,” he said, and didn’t look up from the box of paints he was fiddling with. “A touch of impressionism with a streak of Victorian whimsy.The black canvas”—he gestured without looking—“is going to be a girl with deep, tired eyes, on the beach, on a bright, moonlit night.She’ll be wearing an old-fashioned swimming suit, the kind with shorts and a belt, like the one you wear.”He glanced up at me.“I’ll throw in a few random objects,out of perspective,like some fish or a whale or something. And—this is
key
—she’ll be holding up her own shadow, like it’s sick and needs her support. I’m going to do the white canvas with the same girl at the beach during the day, same shadow. It’s a metaphor.You know, the girl feels like she’s a shadow, like she doesn’t exist.Existential crisis,etc.”He looked at me,real quick, and then turned back to the paintings. “You can help me with the white canvas, if you want.” 

I didn’t say anything. But I was pleased as punch that my brother was painting again, and River knew it because he winked at me behind Luke’s back. 

I looked around, at the sun streaming in the little windows, at my parents’ half-finished canvases, at the paintsplattered floor, at Luke, concentrating on the easel in front of him. I breathed in the faint, bitter smell of turpentine, the oily smell of the paint, the scent of fresh sea air. Maybe I’d been wrong to give up on painting. 

My eyes caught on a half-finished portrait of my mother. It wasn’t a self-portrait. It was my father’s hand that had painted that long nose, those dreamy eyes. I could always tell. His lines were more crisp, more solid, his colors darker than my mother’s. She was Chagall, Renoir. And my father was . . . well, he was himself. Of the two, he was the true painter, I supposed. 

River was walking around looking at the old paintings. He was lean, and beautiful, and smiling. But I felt my sense of peace drain away, watching him. Our conversation from the night before hung over me, and it blocked out the very real, very warm sunlight that filled the room. 

I pictured the Devil again, rising up behind River, with his red eyes. My scalp tingled and I shivered, like I was cold, though I wasn’t. River saw. I know he did. But he didn’t say anything.He just leaned over,grabbed himself a box of dried-out acrylics, put it under his arm, and then pointed at the largest canvas in the shed. “Is this guy available? My artistic talent is too big to be contained by anything but the largest of canvases.Canvii? I’m not sure on the lingo.” 

The huge canvas River wanted was supposed to be for a family portrait. My mother had talked about painting all four of us together since I was little. She brought that big canvas home years and years ago. And there it still sat. “Sure,” I said, not looking him in the eyes. “Take it.” 

River set down the box of acrylics and looked around until he found a can of house paint, which my parents sometimes used to prep a canvas. He popped the lid off, gave it a good stir, and then reached in a hand. It came up with a fistful of yellow. 

“Jackson Pollock,” he said, and smiled at me. “It’s the only way to paint.”He threw his fist at the canvas,opening it at the last second, and yellow paint went flying. 

I picked up a brush. 

R
iver used up three cans of paint in his Pollock tribute. Blue, yellow, and black splotches covered the canvas. I stared at it for a while. River came up behind me 

and put his hand, still wet with paint, on my lower back, adding to the colors on my mom’s overalls.“It’s a painting of you,Vi. Blue eyes, yellow hair, black thoughts.” 

“That’s why it’s so ugly.” Luke laughed. Loud. “Don’t take out your Pollock-hate on the new kid,” I said, moving to rinse out my brushes in the shed’s small sink. I looked at River over my shoulder. “Luke thinks abstract expressionism is, well, bullshit. Mom thinks the same thing. But it’s just the natural descendent of—” 

“Pizza.” Luke stood up and stretched. “I need some pizza in my belly before I listen to Vi go off on art.” 

“Me too.”This from Sunshine, who was standing in the doorway of the shed, a glass of iced tea in her hand. 

“Where have you been today?”I asked.“We have been creating great masterpieces in here.” I stood back and looked at Luke’s painting. And then mine. And scowled. Why did my brother paint like me, and I like him? We were so different, in every other way. But my lines went the way his went, turned thin, then thick, same as his. My brushstrokes were short and quick like his too.It . . .bothered me. It made me think that Luke and I were more alike than I’d thought, as if . . . as if we were both headed in the same direction and just taking very different roads there. 

“My parents made me drive the bookmobile around,” Sunshine answered me, slow and breathy because Luke was there. “A lot of dried-up, house-bound spinsters needed their trashy romance novels.” 

“Sunshine, you’re the kindest person I know. Have I ever told you that?” 

She grinned at me, and then went over to ooh and aah at Luke’s paintings. 

“So where do you find pizza in this town?” River asked me. 

“There’s a great place right off the town square,” I replied.“Want to come?” 

“Yep,” he said, a sparkle starting up in his eyes. “That will be perfect.” 

“Perfect for what?” 

“You’ll see,” he said, and smiled the crooked smile.

≈≈≈
 

Echo had a great pizza place called Lucca, which sat on the main square by the café. It was run by the same Italian family—Luciano and Graziella, and their three sons. From what I could tell, the men in the family did all the cooking, and Graziella mainly went around giving orders and saying
allora, allora,
over and over. I asked her what that meant once, and she told me it was Italian for
now I think
.And I guessed from this that it must take Graziella a lot of thinking to make the pizza.