The Other Side of Blue (16 page)

“You would not say that if it were your allowance you were rounding down,” Dr. Bindas chuckles.

“That's right.” Saco laughs and punches his cousin in the shoulder.

The road begins to wind through greener underbrush and vines. Cacti grow in clumps. Mango trees, their leaves a dark green, stand out, taller than the surrounding brush.

At the next trailhead, Dr. Bindas parks the SUV.

“Before we go,” he says, “two rules: Stay on the marked path. At the top, wait for everyone else. I have the lunch basket.” Then he grins, and the boys pour out. Kammi slides out on my side and shoulders her backpack. The edge of the watercolor board sticks out the top, the cord stretching over it.

Dr. Bindas hands us each a copy of the trail map. “In case you get separated. But that is not to happen. Right, boys?” Dr. Bindas looks only at the boys when he says this.

On the map, a star marks the peak of Mount Christoffel. The trail rises along the backside of the hill.

“From the top, you can see the ocean,” Dr. Bindas reminds us.

Roberto and Loco jog toward the trail, their packs flopping against their backs. Mayur stalks off after them. Scraping his boot in the dirt, Saco waits at the trailhead. For Kammi? Dr. Bindas leans against the SUV to retie his shoelaces in double knots, something Dad used to do before hikes.

“Come on,” I say to Kammi. I want to catch up to Mayur.

She nods and follows me. Saco falls in next to her. Dr. Bindas stays a few steps behind us. Then his cell phone rings, and he stops to answer it.

My sports sandals don't keep my feet from getting dusty, but they give me good traction on the dirt and stones. I start up the trail, leaning into the ascent. If I hurry, I can catch up to Mayur. But once I do, how can I get him to tell me what he knows, or what his cousin is supposed to know? I don't trust him. He'd say anything just to make me think he's important. His father may be a respected doctor here, and his cousins may have to be polite to him because of it, but I don't.

Roberto and Loco climb out of sight. Mayur's in sight, not that far ahead of me.

“Hey!” I call after him, but he doesn't turn around.

I walk faster and feel my face getting warmer. My shirt is damp where my backpack hugs my shoulders. At the next switchback, I look up the trail to see Mayur right above me. He's stopped to look back down. He's twirling a twig between his fingers. He's breathing hard, and his pudgy face is
red. He knows, though, that I was trying to catch up. I can see it in his eyes.

Part of me wants to tease him about how he's not first up the trail, about how Roberto and Loco are in better shape. I don't, though. I need him to tell me what he knows.

I take a swig of water from the bottle Martia packed for me.

“At the beach party, you said something. You said you know something.”

He digs in his pocket for a candy bar, rips the paper off, and stuffs the candy in his mouth. He nods, chewing.

“Wineglasses...” he mumbles, talking around the candy.

“That was in the police report. All that information. The champagne bottle, the broken glass.” I don't tell him I found a shard in the blue boat, something missed by the investigators.

He swallows.

“Was there a note?” I ask him.

“A suicide note?”

That's what I was thinking, but I say, “Any kind of note?”

He grins and starts hiking up the trail.

At that moment, I hate him. I want to push him off the side of the trail. He wouldn't die—it's not that steep—but he'd slide a long way, over clumps of ground cactus and stinging bushes. I'd watch him all the way down, and then I'd tie my scarf to the closest bush on the trail to mark the spot. I'd
hike back to meet Dr. Bindas and tell him there'd been an accident. He would be shocked. Mrs. Bindas, too, when she heard later. Then Mayur would tell them I'd pushed him, just like I pushed him into the pool last year. And after they'd been so kind.

I grab his backpack from behind. “Tell me.”

He wrestles out of my grasp and faces me. “What'll you do for me?”

“What do you want?” I hate that I even ask him that question.

“Oh, maybe it's not me who wants something,” he says. He pushes my chest, but not too hard. If he hadn't been afraid, he might have touched my breast. Maybe that's what he meant to do.

“Yeah, right,” I say.

Mayur's eyes narrow. I bet he thinks he's supposed to hold something over me, and sex is the only thing he thinks having power over a girl is all about.

I try another tack. “I don't think you really know anything. If you did, you'd tell me right now.”

He laughs.

“Does my mother know?” I ask.

He sobers, seeming to think a moment before shrugging.

I step back. It's an answer and not an answer. If my mother does know, she hasn't told me. Why not? And if she doesn't know, should I share the information with her?

“How do you know my mother knows? If she knows, she'd tell me.”

“Are you so sure?”

I jerk past him up the trail. I imagine I feel a hand touch my butt as I go by.

S
WEATING
feels good as I pound up the trail, leaving Mayur behind. I don't even look at the trees, the vines. I barely hear the sound of parrots or wonder what color they are. Now I know what Zoe means about running track. The sweating makes you start to feel good after a while. Not even my anger at Mayur takes that feeling away.

I don't catch up to Loco and Roberto. I see them, though, as the ascent becomes rockier and less vegetated. Roberto makes it to the top first, Loco close behind him. They raise their fists in the air like conquering heroes. Then they dart out of sight, probably to explore the surrounding views from the summit.

I'm next, breathing hard as I scuttle up the last rocky
section. On top of Mount Christoffel, I'm at the point farthest from the sea on the island. From here, the ocean looks the same color blue as the sky. The trade winds stir the air, cooling my skin. A pebble tumbles down the rocks below. Instead of Mayur, I see Kammi pulling herself toward me, hunching slightly under the weight of the art supplies in her backpack. She has this streak of stubbornness I'm beginning to like.

“You didn't wait for me,” she says.

This is the second time I've seen her angry with me. There's hope. She can get angry.

For the first time, I hold my hand out to Kammi, and it feels good when she takes it and scrambles up the last few feet to stand next to me. I see Mayur so far down the trail he looks like a speck—or a mountain goat. I laugh out loud. Saco is with him.

“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.

“If you look at the paper, you're looking at the wrong thing. You're not seeing, not translating at all. You're faking it. It won't be as good. It won't be real.”

Kammi turns to look at me. “Your mother looks at her canvas. She draws a faint line across it before she even starts.”

I nod. “She's setting the Golden Mean, dividing her canvas.” Anchoring herself. Mother doesn't trust that she will know where she is by instinct.

“Maybe you should start with drawing,” I say. Mother's mantra.

Kammi shakes her head, her small mouth set. “No.”

I smile, but she can't see me.

“Okay. Just remember, you wanted to paint landscape. Keep your eye on the horizon. Hold your brush against the dry paper.”

“But the sea's so far away.”

“Why do you think this is about painting the sea?” I ask.

Kammi looks at me and frowns.

I stretch my arms. “What's all that? In front of you?”

“The whole park?”

“Sky, stupid,” I say, and laugh, but not hard. Not laughing at her. “It's all sky. There, just at the very edge of the earth, the sea even becomes the sky. That's it.”

Under her bangs, her eyes stare straight through me, as if she thinks I've played a long practical joke on her. As if I've somehow tricked her into lugging her supplies all the way up here to paint the sea from a great distance.

Finally, when I don't laugh and say the joke is on her, she turns to look where I pointed, out toward the horizon. She leans closer to the paper. She reaches out and splats the brush on the paper, misjudging where it is in relation to her hand, extended by the length of the brush. She steadies herself and holds the brush lightly against the paper this time, barely making contact. Touching it like a blind person.

“Paint what you see,” I say.

“There's no paint on the brush.”

“I know. It doesn't matter yet. You're seeing it.”

Kammi drops her arms to her side, the brush limp in her fingers. “I can't do that.”

“Yes, you can.”

“It's silly.”

I throw up my hands. “It isn't. I won't laugh. Some of my best paintings have been done this way.”

“You
are
making fun of me. You said you don't paint.”

“I don't. Doesn't mean I haven't. Come on, this way there's no evidence.” I use that word again, “evidence.” I soak a small sponge in water, squeeze it almost dry. “Okay, before you start, we'll do wet on wet.”

“What?”

“It's a watercolor technique. Mother didn't tell you this already?”