Vacations From Hell

  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 hips 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.”

  Her lips curl up slightly at the corners, like burning paper. “No one has everything they need.”

  I reach to touch Evan on the shoulder. “We should get back to the house.”

  But he ignores me; he’s looking at Mrs. Palmer. She’s still smiling. “You know,” she says, “you look like a nice, strong boy. I could use your help. I’ve got an old car—a classic, as they say—and it usually runs like a dream, but lately I’ve been having trouble starting it. Would you take a look at it for me?”

  I wait for Evan to say that he doesn’t know anything about cars. I’ve certainly never heard him mention them as a special interest. Instead he says, “Sure, I could do that.”

  Mrs. Palmer tilts her head back, and the sun glints off her hair. “Wonderful,” she says. “I can’t offer you much of a reward, but I’ve got a cold drink for you if you like.” The bottle in her hand sparks rainbows.

  “Great.” Evan spares me only a single glance. “Tell the ’rents where I went, okay, Violet?”

  I nod, but he doesn’t even seem to notice; he’s already heading toward the pink house with Mrs. Palmer. Evan never looks back at me, but she does; pausing at the gate, she glances back over her shoulder, her eyes skating over me in a thoughtful way that—despite the heat—sends a cold shiver racing up my spine.

  Sunset comes and paints the sky over the ocean in broad stripes of coral and black. Damaris and the rest of the staff are setting the table on the porch. I sit at the edge of the pool, my feet in the water. I’ve been waiting for Evan to come up the steps for hours now, but he hasn’t appeared. Mom and Phillip are still sitting in their deck chairs, though Phillip has put down his book and they appear to be arguing in hushed, intense tones. I block them out, the way I always do when they fight, trying to concentrate on the sound of the sea instead. Everyone always says it sounds like the inside of a seashell, but I think it sounds like the beat of a heart, with its regular, pounding rhythm and the soft rush of water like the rush of blood through veins.

  Holding a folded set of napkins in one hand, Damaris leans over the porch and says, “Will there be four of you for dinner or only three?”

  “Four.”

  “I don’t see your stepbrother here,” Damaris says.

  “He’s down on the beach,” I tell her. “But he’ll come back.”

  Damaris says something under her breath. It sounds like, “They don’t come back.” Before I can ask her what she means, she turns back to setting the table.

  Dinner is eaten in silence. No goat this time, just stuffed peppers and a lemony sort of fish. Halfway through the meal Evan joins us, sliding silently into his seat as if hoping not to be noticed.

  Phillip freezes with his fork halfway to his mouth. “And where have you been?”

  Evan stares at his plate. He isn’t wearing his bathing suit anymore, I notice, but a fresh pair of shorts and a worn T-shirt. He looks very…clean. “I was helping the lady next door fix her car. She said if I could get it started, she’d let us take her boat out and use it if we wanted.”

  “That was very nice of you,” says Mom. She turns to Phillip. “Wasn’t it nice of him, darling?”

  Phillip grunts a reply around his mouthful of fish. “I don’t know why she thought you’d know anything about getting cars to work. You’re just a kid.”

  Evan flushes but says nothing, concentrating instead on forking up food from his plate.

  My mother turns back to Phillip. “So I was thinking, tomorrow maybe, we could take a trip to Black River.”

  “That town we drove through on our way here?” Phillip tears a chunk of bread in half. “It looked like a dump, Carol.”

  “Apparently there’s a market there every weekend, with people bringing items from all around. And you can take boat trips up the river, see crocodiles in the water….” My mother’s voice trails off under Phillip’s cold stare. “I thought it might be something for us to do as a family. Something fun.”

  “Fun?” Phillip echoes. “I didn’t come all the way here, Carol, to shop for cheap handicrafts and stare at a floating log some idiot tour guide claims is a crocodile.”

  “But Phillip—” My mom reaches out for his hand and accidentally knocks over the glass bowl of fruit salad beside his plate. Phillip jumps up, swearing, even though none of it has gotten on him.

  Mom looks dismayed. “I’m so sorry—”

  Phillip doesn’t answer her. He’s staring coldly at the remains of the fruit salad on the tiles at his feet. “Look at this mess.”

  “Phillip.” On the verge of tears my mom gets down on her knees, scrabbling with her fingers at the slippery bits of fruit and broken glass. I wonder where the staff is, but they seem to be hanging back, sensing the delicacy of the situation.

  “Mom, don’t,” I say, but she ignores me. She has cut herself on the glass, the blood dripping down on the mess of squashed fruit and juice splashed across the ground. I look over at Evan, wondering if he’ll say anything. He’s always liked my mother, or at least I thought he did. But he stares silently at his plate and avoids my eyes.

  That night I lie awake in my four-poster bed, staring at the ceiling. The mosquito netting, white as the veil of a bride, drifts in the faint breeze from the air conditioner. I can hear Phillip’s voice on the other side of the wall rising and falling like a wave as it grows angrier and angrier. My mother’s voice runs a faint point-counterpoint to his shouting: as his voice rises, hers gets more and more quiet. I watch a shining green beetle make its way across the stucco wall, its feelers reaching out delicately for something it can touch.

  We don’t go to Black River in the morning, of course. Phillip takes his book out to the pool and sits glowering in the shade. My mom stays inside, sunglasses over her eyes and a big hat casting dark shadows over her face, but despite the glasses I can still see that her eyes are swollen from crying.

  Evan doesn’t get up until noon, and when he does, he comes out of his room yawning, in board shorts and flip-flops. His hair looks lighter than before, as if the sun has already bleached out some of its color. I’m lying in the hammock on the deck, a maga
zine open on my lap; when I see him, I set it down and go over to him, lowering my voice as I get closer. “How did you sleep last night?” I ask, hoping he can read my eyes, wondering if he heard the same thing I did.

  “Fine.” He’s not reading my eyes; his own sky blue ones are darting around nervously. Maybe he’s wondering if they’re watching us, if they’re talking about how we stand too close to each other, talk too softly. But no. They don’t notice anything. They never have.

  I had met Phillip a bunch of times before my mother finally brought me over to his house, but that was the first time I’d ever realized how serious they were. Phillip was still trying to impress us both back then. He still thought there was some point in getting on my good side. He would come to our house dressed up in a suit, with a bunch of flowers for my mom and something for me—always something dumb and inappropriate, like a shiny barrette or a CD of bubblegum pop music. It was like he thought all teenage girls were the same and liked the same things, but he was trying, my mother said and besides he didn’t know anything about girls—he only had a son. And even though I knew that, even though I knew Phillip had a son my age, I never gave him the slightest thought until that night, when my mom hurried me up the lighted walk to Phillip’s front door and rang the bell, smiling nervously at me the whole time.

  And Evan opened the door. He smiled when he saw me. “Hi,” he said. “You must be Violet.”

  I stood there on the front steps without saying a word. I felt stunned, as if I’d fallen off a high tree branch and hit the ground hard, knocking all the wind out of me. There was just no way that this boy, who I watched every day at school, whose every mannerism I’d memorized—the way he flicked his hair out of his eyes or fiddled with his watch when he was bored—was the offspring of Phillip. Boring, tight-lipped, sallow-faced Phillip couldn’t possibly have a son who looked like that.

  I didn’t even care that Evan didn’t recognize me. Didn’t care that he didn’t seem to know we even went to the same school.

  “Are you going down to the beach?” he asks now. “I’ll come with you.”

  I shrug. There’s really no way to stop him. “Okay.”

  There are baskets of beach towels on the deck, brightly striped as candy canes. Evan drapes one around his shoulders as we head down the sandy path to the beach. It’s deserted again today, empty sand stretching away into the distance. It looks like an ad for some honeymoon destination, someplace where you can kiss on the beach with no one watching.

  We spread our towels out and lie down, me on my stomach, Evan staring up at the sun. He has a book spread out over his stomach: The Postman Always Rings Twice, I think it is, though I can’t read all of the spine. I was surprised when I found out Evan loves to read. I wouldn’t have thought any boy who looked like he did had interests outside maybe sports and girls, just like I never would have thought he’d have any time at all for a skinny, unpopular girl who wore unmatching socks and boys’ T-shirts because she didn’t know what she was supposed to be wearing anyway.

  But I found out I was wrong. Evan had time for me. The sort of time that meant we spent hours together in Phillip’s library, talking or playing Halo on the big-screen TV. The sort of time that meant he actually waved to me in the hallway sometimes, even when other people could see him. The kind of time that meant that on Tuesday nights, when we had dinner at Phillip’s, he’d wait for me outside school in his car, the parking brake on and the engine running, the passenger door propped slightly open. For me.

  I’d slide into the seat, smile over at him. “Thanks for waiting.”

  He’d reach across me to pull the door shut. “No problem.” The flush across the back of his neck as he bent to turn the key in the ignition let me know he noticed how close to him I was sitting.

  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.”
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  “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.