The Other Side of Blue (11 page)

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

I fling the Frisbee away, and the wind picks it up, arcs it toward the sun and down, straight for Mayur. Figures.

The boy closest to me, I think it's Loco, laughs. He thinks I meant to aim for Mayur. I shake my head.

The relay continues. Every two times around the circle of boys, one of them shoots the Frisbee straight for Kammi. She catches it and passes it to her right, in a straight line, from the hip. Straight to Saco, who doesn't seem to notice he's the favored one. He slams the Frisbee on to another boy, hard enough that it makes a whizzing sound.

The sun edges down the sky. Unlike Maine, where the light lingers past dusk, even in the winter, here the sun is out and then it's just gone, as if someone pulls down a shade at the end of the day.

When it's dark, the servants stoke the fires. Three bonfires line the beach like search flares, just like the night they found Dad. I stare into the flames and watch the embers catch the breeze and float heavenward.

The servants roast hot dogs and sausages on one of the bonfires. Mrs. Bindas waves us to the tent with the food.
“Such an American custom,” she says. “We thought you'd like it. Hot dogs and potato crisps, just like your Fourth of July, Independence Day, yes?” Mrs. Bindas asks as we all collect plates and napkins and move through the line. She says crisps instead of chips. Plates full, Kammi and I follow the boys to their fire, leaving the adults to gather around their own.

Kammi sits beside me on a driftwood log the boys dragged up from the beach. She acts unsure, as if she may not want to. She presses her knees together and sits tall.

The boys devour their hot dogs. They run crusts of buns along the rims of the plates, scooping up any mustard or hot dog juice. They go back for seconds. Kammi holds her bun in both hands, careful not to let the hot dog slip out or the mustard run down her fingers. One of the older boys, Klaus, throws a chip at Mayur, who ducks and tosses an empty soda bottle back. Mayur misses, but Klaus doesn't even flinch.

“Have you been to Mount Christoffel?” Kammi asks Saco.

Mayur is the one who answers. “Yes,” he says, and shrugs. “When the cousins come, we always hike there. Don't we?” The other boys all nod, looking at each other.

“Is it very high?”

“No, not so high.” He looks at Kammi, her feet planted close together in the sand. “If you're used to hiking.”

Ha. Mayur talks about hiking like he talks about swimming. Kammi one-upped him last time, about the swim team,
but this time she doesn't take him on. Maybe she thinks that since the boys outnumber her, Mayur won't be so easy to defeat. Or maybe she doesn't want to insult Saco.

 

Mrs. Bindas makes her way over, carrying a basket of marshmallows. She hands it to Mayur, along with a trash bag for our used plates, and gives him thin sticks to use for roasting. “Another American custom. We thought this might be fun.”

After his mother leaves, Mayur rips open the bag of marshmallows. He shows the other boys how to skewer them and toast the edges, pulling them out of the flames just before they catch fire. The gooey sweetness, just shy of burned, tastes delicious. He gives the first sample to Kammi, who giggles as she takes it. When she can't get the stickiness off her fingers, she licks them clean.

Loco finishes next, and he passes his stick to me. I frown. “Thanks.” I pull off the marshmallow, even though it's hot, and pop it into my mouth. I give the boy back his stick without looking at him, and he threads two more marshmallows on as if he's baiting a hook.

The other boys jostle for room to toast their own marshmallows. Mayur scoots close to Kammi and me.

Kammi jumps up. “I'm going for another soda,” she says. “Want one?”

“Sure. Okay. A Coco,” I say.

“Mayur?” she asks. Always polite.

“No.”

“I'll help you,” Saco says, propping his marshmallow stick against the log.

Mayur turns his head and watches Kammi and Saco walk away.

“I know,” he says.

“Know what?”

“About your father.”

“You said that before. What do you mean?” Mayur doesn't know what happened. The police don't know. No one knows. Maybe Dad didn't even realize what was happening to him.

“It was in the report.”

Now I know he's lying. Nothing was in the report. At least, not the report that Mother and I were given.

“There wasn't anything in the report.” Except that he died by drowning.

“Maybe you don't believe me.” Mayur yanks his marshmallow out of the fire, blows out the flames.

“Why should I?”

“My cousin, he works in investigations. He's very important.”

“No one knew Dr. Bindas at the commissioner's office.”

Mayur looks at me sharply. So he didn't think I'd actually try to find out on my own. “His name isn't Bindas. I just said he was a cousin.”

“So, tell me.” Mayur would say his cousin was important even if he were just the janitor in the police station. But
what if he does know something? And, if so, why wasn't it reported to Mother? Why wasn't it in the newspapers?

“If you want me to tell you, you better be nice to me.” Mayur holds out the marshmallow, roasted to perfection, tempting me to take it. And I do.

I
START TO
ask him why I should be nice, why he should tell me at all. I think he's lying. Mayur just likes to be important.

“Hey, what are you talking about?” Loco plops down on the sand in front of Mayur and me. He throws a bottle cap into the fire. He holds a new bottle of soda loosely by the neck. He runs his hand over the lip, as if to brush away sand or salt, then guzzles from it. He burps, long and loud.

Mayur laughs. No, he howls, the way boys do. Some of the cousins laugh, too, punching each other's shoulders, as if this is the funniest thing they've ever heard. Even the taller ones, the older ones, act like little boys. They're laughing so hard, they act as if they've forgotten what Mayur was talking about, why Loco even asked what was going on.

Kammi and Saco wander back into the circle of light around the bonfire. Kammi sits on the log next to me, but farther away than before. Saco sits near her.

I shuffle my bare feet in the sand, burying them in the coolness.

The moment when I could ask Mayur what he means has passed for now.

Mayur speaks into my ear as he pushes his pudgy body off the sand. “Remember, be nice, and I'll tell you,” he says, seeming to read my mind. “Later.”

“Do you swim at night?” Loco asks. He's looking at Kammi and me.

“Isn't that dangerous?” Kammi straightens her back as she sits forward on the log, no doubt thinking about how dark the sea is at night. What things could brush against a leg, or take it of?

Loco shrugs. “What is dangerous? Not
peligroso.
Not here, no sharks.”

“It's okay. It's shallow just here.” Saco sounds reassuring.

Sharks feed in shallow waters at dusk and dawn. That much I remember from the nature shows Dad encouraged me to watch all the time.

“Okay, who's in?” Mayur asks.

The boys speak all at once.

“For a minute. I'll go in for a minute,” Kammi says when Saco grins at her.

“What about you?” Loco asks me.

“I don't swim in the ocean.” I pull my scarf around my shoulders.

“This is just a sea, like a bathtub.” Saco grins, his eyes lit up by the glow from the fire. Kammi's watching him. She'll go in the water if he wants her to.

I shake my head.

Mayur narrows his eyes at me. “She's afraid.”

He thinks he can dare me to go in. His words don't scare me. I don't care if they all think I am a coward. At the end of the month, I'll go back to Maine. I won't have to see them again. Next summer, I'll find a way to stay with Zoe while Mother comes back here. Maybe she won't even bring Howard, since she told Philippa on the phone last year that bringing men here is bad luck. Kammi won't come, either; she'll spend time with her mother in Atlanta or have “quality” time with Howard. I can see it now. Like the points of a triangle, we'll stay in our separate corners.

“She doesn't have to come in,” Loco says. “She can watch from the beach, yell if she sees a shark.”

As if I could see a fin in the dark water, even with the waxing moon and the phosphorescence on the waves. But Loco is trying to be nice. For a boy.

The boys, including Saco, whoop and race each other to the water. Kammi unties her skirt, steps out of it, and folds it, revealing her pink bikini underneath. She looks toward Mother and Mrs. Bindas. To see if they're watching the boys run into the surf. To see if they raise a warning flag. They're
too busy laughing around their own fire. The men aren't looking our way, either.

“Saco said Mayur knows something about your father,” Kammi says, still not looking at me. She pulls her linen blouse over her head, folds it carefully, just like her skirt.

I close my eyes.

“Do you think he really knows?” she asks.

I shrug.

“Do you care?” Kammi's voice hardens.

I open my eyes. “I do. But why would
you?
”

Kammi steps backwards. She turns and races to the black water tinged with silver, as if she'll dive in and swoop it up into her arms. At least it will be welcoming, even if it's dangerous.

I follow them to the shore and watch, letting the surf glide over my bare feet. I seek sea glass with my toes, but everything feels like grains of sand or bits of shell. There's no point in dredging up sand and running it through my fingers in the darkness. After a storm, after the tides come in full and go out, and the sun rises, that's the best time to look for sea glass.

The boys yell and dive and show off. Two even do handstands. Only their legs stick up out of the water. I imagine their faces pressed against the sandy bottom, how they hold their breath and how their eyes bulge when their lungs crave air and they spring to the surface, gasping.

Shouts come from behind me. A couple of men, one of
them Dr. Bindas, dash into the waves, demanding that everybody get out of the water. “Out, come on out!”

Mother, breathless, appears at my side. She grabs my arm.

“Where's Kammi?”

“There.” I point. Kammi is closest to shore. She's waving her arms, sweeping water over her head. She turns at the shouts.

Mother drops her hand from my arm. “Why didn't you stop her?”

“Everyone went in.” Everyone but me. “Mayur says it's safe.”

“So if everyone jumps off a cliff, that's your excuse? Someone says it's safe?” Mother's voice rises. “Kammi's our guest. What if something happens to her?” Like it did to Dad, she means. But she doesn't say it out loud.

I do. “Like drowning?”

Mother sets her mouth in her tight, flat way. “Whose fault would that be?” She steps past me to meet Kammi, motioning her forward. “Kammi, come on. Aren't you cold?”

Kammi splashes out, the sea coursing down her skin. She's laughing, just like the boys. Not even Dr. Bindas's scolding makes them sheepish.

Mrs. Bindas bustles to the water's edge, a stack of towels under each arm. She makes each boy take one, though they try to scoot out of her reach. Mother takes one for Kammi, wraps her into it against the breeze. Kammi's teeth chatter, but she's grinning, I see as we get closer to the bonfire.

“We're going home. Right now,” Mother says. “Get Kammi's things.”

I grab Kammi's neat stack of dry clothes off the log.

“I'm okay, Mrs. Walters. That was fun. I've never been in the sea at night.” Kammi picks up her shoes, holds them in the hand not holding the towel around her. “Mrs. Bindas, thank you for the party.”

Kammi's beaming. Saco comes close. He sweeps his hair back from his face, water still streaming down his neck. He smiles.

“Good night,” he says.

Kammi says good night back.

Mother steps between them. “We'll send Martia back tomorrow with this towel,” she says to Mrs. Bindas. “Thank you.” She keeps watching Saco leave while telling Mrs. Bindas about how delightful everything was, how much like an American party it all turned out to be.

Mrs. Bindas clucks over Kammi's wet hair.

“She must go home, get dry. Children, always they are not thinking.” Mrs. Bindas is clucking at Mayur, too, but not in anger. She's more like a hen hovering over a chick that's been out in the rain. Like Martia would do.

Mother is already stalking toward the lawn, to wipe the sand from her feet. She'll put her shoes back on to protect her feet against broken shells on the walk back.

O
N SUNDAY MORNING
, Martia rises even earlier than usual so she can make breakfast before she walks down the road to catch the bus for her home near Santa Rosa. I can hear her in the kitchen. Once, when I was little, I ran after her as she left. I wanted to go with her. Martia might have let me, and Mother might have relented, but Dad said no, Martia needed her day off from
Blauwe Huis
—and all its inhabitants. Even me. Having Martia leave made her return all the better, even when she didn't bring me any sweets. Once, she brought me a picture of a stick house she said her little boy had drawn on the rough brown paper I'd sent home with her, the paper Mother said was good enough for me to use for drawing. In the yard, he'd drawn chickens with three-toed feet twice the size of their bodies.

I wait until I hear Martia turn the key in the front door before I slip into the kitchen. On the counter, she's left fresh-chopped fruit and fresh-squeezed orange juice, with a basket of mango-filled pastries under a yellow linen towel. I have some juice and make up a tray to take back to my room. On the way back, I remove the master bedroom key from the hook by the locked cabinet where Martia stores her herbs and spices, and probably healing potions she keeps for emergencies. When I was young, I was sure Martia stored powerful remedies that in the wrong hands could be poisonous. I slip the key into my pocket for later, when I'll look in the room.