Dinner is served out on the deck, with our family sitting at a long, low table and the villa’s staff bringing us bowls of food: heaping piles of potato salad, sharp vinegary slaw, fish cooked with garlic and Scotch bonnets, and a bowl of dark, fragrant curry full of lumps of simmering meat.
I try to turn as the bowls are passed to me to smile at the villa staff, but no one will meet my eyes. The staff is a blur of dark faces and hands, the gleam of a coral-and-gold bracelet as a hand retracts the salad bowl I’m done eating from. “Thanks,” I say, but there is no response.
Phillip is forking up curry like it’s going out of style. “What is this?” he says abruptly, spearing a chunk of meat on his fork and shoving it in his mouth.
The tallest of the cooks, a woman with a sharp-boned face and a white kerchief tied around her hair, says, “It is goat curry, sir.”
Phillip spits the meat back onto his plate and grabs for a napkin, staring at the cook with accusing eyes.
I look down at the table, trying not to laugh.
The next day the heat is stunning, like a drug. I lie out on a lounger by the pool, the straps of my blue suit pushed down over my arms to avoid tan lines. My mom won’t let me buy a bikini. Phillip is sitting over in the shade reading a book called Empire of Blue Water. Evan is sitting with his feet in the pool, staring into space.
I attempt to catch his eye, but he won’t look at me, so I go back to my book. I try to read, but the words dance on the page like the sunlight dances over the pool water. This kind of weather makes everything dance.
Finally I put the book down and wander into the kitchen to get a Coke. The woman from last night, the tall cook who told Phillip he was eating goat, is standing by the sink washing up our dishes from breakfast. Today her headscarf is bright red, the color of a tropical bird.
She turns when she sees me. “What can I help you with, miss?” Her accent is as soft as flower petals.
“I just wanted a Coke.” I get the feeling I shouldn’t be in here, that the kitchen is the domain of the staff, even if all I want is a can of soda. Sure enough, instead of directing me toward the fridge, she retrieves the bottle herself, pops it open, and pours it into a glass for me.
“Thanks.” I take it, the cool glass feeling good against my fingers. “What’s your name?”
“My name?” She raises her dark eyebrows. They’re perfect arches, like she plucks them every day. “I am Damaris.”
“Damaris and Damon,” I say, and then wish I hadn’t; I sound like a moron. Maybe she doesn’t even know Damon well.
“He is my brother,” she says, and glances out the window, a crease appearing between her brows. “Your brother has gone down to the beach, I see. You should tell him to stay away from the other houses along the road. Most of them are private, and not all of them are safe.”
Not safe? I think. As in guarded by vicious dogs or trigger-happy security guards? But Damaris’s lovely, blank face gives away nothing. I set the empty glass on the sideboard. “Evan is my stepbrother,” I say as if it’s important; somehow I want her to know. “Not my brother.”
She says nothing.
“I’ll tell him to be careful,” I say.
The path that leads down to the water is sandy, fringed by rocks and scrubby grass. The beach arcs away to the south, lined with small, brightly painted houses in tropical colors: hot pink, acid green, frog-belly yellow. Ours is the last house, backed up against stone cliffs pocked with dark holes like raisins in a pale custard. I think the holes must be caves.
Evan is nowhere on the beach. In fact, no one is on the beach. It’s a pale swatch of inviting sand that’s somehow totally empty. I’m surprised not to see anyone out sunbathing, but as I follow the curve of the sand along the water, I see that most of the other houses are shut and bolted up. Some have heavy padlocks on their gates. They seem dusty, disused. The only one that looks like it might be inhabited is a hot-pink house, the color of a rose blossom, one of the closest houses to the villa. Its huge yard stretches down to the sand, surrounded by a wall covered in mosaic tiles that depict waves and sea creatures. The top of the wall is lined with bits of glass—not small jagged bits of glass meant to discourage intruders but big chunks of square and rectangular glass reflecting back the sea and sky. I glance through the gate and see a riotous garden of brightly colored flowers, but the door to the house is shut, the window curtains pulled across.
I’m surprised by the lack of activity. We can’t be the only people staying in this area, can we? Travel brochures are always advertising “deserted beaches” as if it’s something really desirable, but in reality it’s kind of creepy. There are footsteps in the sand, so someone must have been walking here at some point, but there’s no one visible.
I reach the end of the beach, turn and walk back toward the villa. The sun beats down heavily on my neck and shoulders. It’s cool up by the pool, but down here the heat feels like a heavy, wet blanket. I can see figures moving around up at the villa; they are black silhouettes outlined by the sun. As I near the path that leads back up through the scrub grass, a figure emerges from one of the holes in the rock.
It’s Evan. He isn’t wearing a shirt, just board shorts and flip-flops. His skin is as pale as mine is, but his wheat blond hair looks bright gold in the hot light. He has a few pale freckles splashed across his cheeks and nose, and I try to remember but can’t if those are new or if he’s always had them.
He looks surprised to see me. “Hey.”
“Hey,” I said, feeling, as I have since the wedding, stupid now that I’m around him. “Damaris told me to let you know that it isn’t safe down here.”
He squints, blue eyes against the sun. “Damaris?”
“The cook.”
“Oh, right.” He glances up and down the beach. “It looks safe to me. Maybe she meant there’s a riptide or something.”
I shrug. “Maybe.” She didn’t mean a riptide, but I don’t feel like getting into it.
“Come on.” He gestures at me to follow him. “I want to show you something.”
He ducks back into the dark opening in the rock and I follow, swallowing down my claustrophobia. I have to hold my breath to squeeze through a narrow passage, and then we come out in a larger space. Dim rays from outside spill through the opening slit in the stone, but they’re not all that’s providing illumination here: patches of glowing brightness are dotted here and there on the damp cave walls, and they’re different colors too: ice blue and pale green and sheer rose. “Phosphorescent moss,” Evan says. He runs his hand along the wall then shows the palm of it to me; it shines like the bright fin of a fish. “See?”
His eyes are glowing too, in the darkness. I remember the first time I ever saw Evan loping across the quad at school with his bag slung over his shoulder, his bright hair shining in the sunlight. He moved like someone with purpose, like there was a shimmering, invisible road only he could see and his feet were on it and he knew where he was going. I’d never seen him before—it turned out later he was new that year, having moved to town with his dad from Portland—and he didn’t look like any boy I’d ever liked. I went for the hipster boys: worn jeans and glasses and serious hair. Evan was clean and sporty and he shone like gold in the sunlight, and from that moment I wanted him like I had never wanted anyone before.
Now I touch my fingers to his; they come away glowing, as if he’s transferring his light to me. He tenses when we touch, and then his fingers wrap around mine. My toes dig into the sand as I go on tiptoe, reaching my face up to his, and then he’s kissing me, and his mouth is damp and soft. His fingers dig tightly into my shoulders before he breaks away. “Vi,” he says, and it’s more of a groan than anything else. “We can’t.”
I know what he means. We went over all this before, the night in the garden, when we kissed and then fought for hours. We have to tell them we can’t tell them we can’t do this they don’t need to know of course they’ll find out they’ll kill us he’ll kill me no. No.
Evan moves past me toward the cave entrance and slithers out through it. I follow him, saying his name, squeezing through the narrow slit in the rock after him, and the strap of my bathing suit gets caught on a sharp piece of jutting rock, which is why it takes me a moment to untangle myself then join Evan on the beach. He’s standing there, staring down the beach with his mouth open. When I follow his gaze, I see why.
There’s a woman coming out of the pink house. She pushes open the blue-painted iron gate and walks out onto the sand. Except she doesn’t just walk. She moves like a wave. Her h*ps roll, and her hair, which is long and white blond, ripples like foam on the sea. She’s wearing a sort of printed sarong. It’s split down one side, and you can see the whole of her perfectly tanned leg when she walks. She’s got on a white bikini top, and the way she fills it out makes me want to cross my arms over my chest to hide how flat I am. She holds a bottle in one hand, the sort that my Coca-Cola came in earlier, though there’s no label on it.
She pushes her glasses on her head as she comes close to us, and any hope I had that her face wouldn’t match the rest of her vanishes. She’s beautiful. Evan is just staring.
“You’re the children from the villa,” she says. She has a faint, indefinable accent. “Aren’t you?”
Evan looks dismayed at being called a child. “I guess so.”
She tilts the bottle in her hand. It’s filled with a pale liquid that glows with an odd rainbow sheen in the sunlight. “It must be dull for you, being here in the off-season,” she says. “Hardly anyone around. Except me. I’m here all the time.” She smiles. “I’m Mrs. Palmer. Anne Palmer. Feel free to stop by my house if you need anything.”
Evan doesn’t look like he’s about to speak so I do. “Thanks,” I say stiffly, thinking that she doesn’t look like an Anne. Anne is a plain, friendly name. “But we have everything we need.”