Once we were so involved in conversation that even when we pulled up to Evan’s house, we didn’t get out of the car, just sat while it idled in the driveway, our voices mingling with the music from the car stereo. I reached to push a dangling bit of hair back behind my ear, but Evan’s fingers were already there—hesitant, gentle against my skin. “Violet,” he said when I went silent. “You know—”
The car’s window shook as Phillip banged on it. “Evan.”
Evan rolled the window down.
“Pull the car up into the garage” was all Phillip said, but one look at Evan’s white face told me that the moment was gone forever.
“Evan.”
I think for a moment that it’s my mother’s voice speaking and half sit up, looking around for her. But the beach is still deserted. Evan is sitting up as well, and I follow his gaze to see Mrs. Palmer, the lady from the pink house, standing in her half-open gateway. She’s too far away for me to have really heard her voice, and yet I could swear that I did, as if she were speaking in my ear. She is wearing a long pink dress today, almost the same color as her house, its halter neck leaving her brown shoulders bare. She has sunglasses on.
Evan is already standing, gathering up his towel. Sand glitters on his back and shoulders like a dusting of sugar. “See you later, Vi.”
I crane my neck to look up at him. “But where are you going?”
“Anne said that since I helped her with her car, we could take her boat out on the water today.” He seems to sense the way I’m looking at him, because he adds, “I’d bring you, but the boat holds only two people.”
I say nothing, and he turns away—relieved, I think, that I’m not making a fuss. I watch him walk toward the house, the sun beating down like a hammer, and when he passes through the gate and Anne shuts it behind him, the sun seems to burst off all the shards of glass that decorate the front of it like an explosion. I shut my eyes against the hot, refracting light.
With nothing else to do, I wander up and down the beach, taking photos with the pink digital camera Phillip gave me as a present, back when he was making an effort to get me to like him. I had never particularly wanted a camera, but I amuse myself with it now, taking photos of bits of glass buffed by the ocean, the hulls of deserted fishing boats, the distant black line of the horizon. Words someone has written in the wet sand by the ocean’s edge, already faded past readability. A sea horse washed up on the sand, its tiny mouth open and closing in drowning gasps. I throw it back out to sea.
On my way back to the villa, I stop and look out over the water. Anne’s boat is there, drifting on the waves, its sail white as a dandelion clock against the dark blue sky. Though I can make out only the outline of a pair of shapes I think must be people, one thing is clear: Evan was lying. You could certainly fit more than two people on that boat.
My mother is silent at dinner, pushing her food around with her fork. Phillip ignores us both, humming to himself as he slices jerked pork onto his plate. It takes him a while even to notice that Evan isn’t there, and when he asks where he is, I tell him that his son is in his room with a headache. I don’t know why I’m covering for Evan. Maybe I just don’t want to hear any more shouting.
Even hours after dinner the air still smells like jerk spices. I lie in the hammock, looking at the stars. The air is heavy, heat-stunned, despite the darkness. The insects buzz wearily, clicking and fluttering their wings in the shadows. Somewhere in the distance I can hear the sound of music: loud, pulsing reggae. I look out to sea, wondering if I’ll see a boat drifting on the sapphire water, but I see only a flat sheet of reflected moonlight.
“Some water, miss?” It is Damaris, her face a carved mask in the moonlight. She holds out a glass to me, iced with drops along the side.
I take it and hold it to the side of my head. “Thanks.”
“Where is your stepbrother tonight?” she asks.
“Down on the beach somewhere.”
“He is with that lady.” Her eyes gleam in the moonlight. “The Palmer woman.”
“I think so. Yeah.” I flick a mosquito away from my knee; it leaves a bead of blood behind, like a tiny ruby.
“You should not let him see her. She is dangerous.”
“Dangerous how?”
Damaris looks away. “She is not a good woman. She likes the strong ones and the pretty, young ones. She takes them and then they never come back. You should make him stay away from her, if you want to keep him.”
Keep him? “And how am I supposed to do that?”
Damaris says nothing.
“I don’t know why you’re asking me to do something about it anyway,” I tell her.
She glances toward the villa. My mom and Phillip have already gone to bed; the lights are dark, except for the party light along the deck. “Because,” she says, “no one else will.”
In the morning when I wake up, Evan is asleep on the couch in the living room. He is shirtless still, twisted into an uncomfortable sort of position, with his arm under his head. There are marks like bruises beneath his eyes. He stirs when I come in and sits up slowly, blinking as if he doesn’t recognize me. He hardly looks like someone who spent the day before relaxing out on the ocean.
“Evan?” I say. “Evan, are you all right?” I sit down next to him on the couch. I can feel heat radiating off him, off his bare skin, like a fever. “Did something happen yesterday?”
His eyes are like blue marbles. “I had a great time,” he says, his voice as mechanical as a talking doll’s. “It was a great day.”
I watch from the railing of the deck as Evan goes down the path to the beach, takes a sharp right, and heads toward the mirror house. The gate swings open when he touches it, and he disappears inside. I look around. Phillip is gone, probably headed to the golf course, and my mother is reading a book in a lounge chair by the pool. I slide my feet into my flip-flops and head down the path.
The sand is hot, hot enough to burn my feet through the thin soles of my shoes. I limp until I reach the gate of the mirror house, and then, suddenly, the heat is gone and the sand is icy. The gate is closed, and through the bars I see the wild, growing garden with its riot of flowers, most of them planted in big old-fashioned stone urns. There are other things there too, now that I am looking closely: bits of what look like more mirrors, big shards of them set here and there in the sand as if Mrs. Palmer were hoping to grow a mirror tree out of the inhospitable ground.
I reach for the handle of the gate, only to realize there isn’t one. There’s a keyhole but no knob, and the bars of the gate are lined with bits of glass. They reflect my own face back to me, pale and anxious, as I peer through the bars hoping to see what’s happening inside the house, but just as before all the curtains are drawn across the windows. I grab the bars and try to pull the gate open, but the jagged edges of the mirrors cut into my palms, and when I draw my hands back, they are bleeding.
The gate doesn’t budge.
Back at the villa I head into the kitchen to wash my hands. I watch the pink threads of my blood mix with the water and swirl down the drain. When I turn away from the sink, I see Damon standing in the doorway watching me. He hands me a package of Band-Aids without a word.
Evan shows up for dinner this time but barely eats anything. The circles under his eyes look like they’ve been painted there. My mother tells him to be careful about getting too much sun.
Every night when I go into my bedroom, the comforter has been turned down, the sheets folded over it, the pillows fluffed. The windows are firmly shut, not letting in any of the humid night air; instead the air conditioner hums, cooling the room to near-freezing.
Lying on the bed, I wonder if Evan is in his room now, sliding under his covers, looking at the ceiling, thinking about me as I’m thinking about him. Or maybe he’s wondering when the yelling will start up again. Or he could just be staring blankly into space like he was at dinner.
The tension started after the engagement. Phillip didn’t smile as much. He was distant. I could feel his anger as if it were heat coming from an open oven. My mom fluttered around him like a butterfly, trying to please him, to make him smile again. I hated to watch. I couldn’t tell if Evan did too. Not at first.
One night I was in the library with him playing Kingdom Hearts 2, mashing the buttons down hard like I was punching someone. Evan was beating me anyway. Then the noise came up suddenly—the shouting, my mom’s voice tearful and Phillip’s angry—rising over the electronic beeps and yelps from the Xbox.
Evan dropped his controller with a thump and went to slam the door shut. When he turned to face me, he was breathing hard. “I hate him,” he said. “I hate him.”
I didn’t say anything. I was thinking about how white he’d looked in the driveway that day Phillip had banged on the car window. How frightened. Except I wasn’t sure if it was his face I was now picturing—his look of fear or my mother’s.
“I didn’t think anyone would ever marry him,” said Evan. “I didn’t think your mother would ever say yes. If I had…”
I should have made him finish that sentence, I think now, rolling over in the bed. As I reach to pull the pillow under my head, my hand strikes something: a lump, hard and cool like a piece of metal. My hand closes around it; I draw it out and stare. It is a key, made of dark metal with a twisted brass handle. It gleams dully in the moonlight.
I wake up still holding the key in my hand. I wash in the outdoor shower, wearing my bathing suit, watching the ocean roll while I rinse shampoo through my hair. I can see my mother and Phillip out by the pool. They are both reading, on side-by-side loungers, my mother in a cap with a colored plastic visor that turns her face bright blue. She is facing Phillip, her voice loud and animated, but his face is buried in his book and he isn’t answering her. She might as well not be there at all.
The sand burns my feet through the flip-flops, but I have nothing else to wear. I endure the pain until the sand turns cold again outside Mrs. Palmer’s house. It’s almost noon, the sun directly overhead, and I feel it like a sharp nail piercing through layers of sky and into the skin at the back of my neck. Sweat trickles down into my bathing suit top as I work the key into the lock of the gate, twisting and jerking it until I hear the sound.