Vacations From Hell (14 page)

“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.

Click.

The gate swings open, and I step into the garden. I have to be careful, weaving my way through the shards of glass that stick out of the sand. A single one of them could slice off a toe if I stepped on it. I hardly look up at the house until I reach it; the rose pink is even brighter up close, the house made of a smooth, unremarkable stucco, a pattern of roses picked out along the side of it in bits of mosaic tile. There is a white rose painted on the front door, but I don’t go up to it. I slide around the side of the house instead, feeling like a thief, an interloper. I see Mrs. Palmer’s face again in my mind, her sunglasses like the eyes of a black fly, and I swallow against the
dryness in my throat.

There is a window at the far side of the house that is open, just barely, a bit of curtain fluttering out into the still air like a banner. I raise myself on my toes, grab the ledge to get higher, and peer around the curtain into the room beyond.

It’s a living room, with plain, hard, modern furniture, nothing like the luxurious tropical furnishings at the villa. A coffee table, a red couch, a bunch of flowers in a black vase, a TV whose screen is dusty as if it’s rarely used. A square picture frame hangs over the couch, but it is backward, as if someone has turned the picture to the wall.

On the couch lies Evan. He seems to be asleep, his arm hanging limp down the side of the sofa, fingers brushing the floor. His hair has fallen over his face and moves slightly when he breathes, like seaweed in a current.

There is a rustle, and Mrs. Palmer comes into the room carrying a drink in her hand. There is ice in it and some slices of lime. It looks like a gin and tonic, one of Phillip’s favorite drinks. She sets it on the table and turns to look at Evan. She’s wearing a filmy sort of white cover-up over a black bikini and her sunglasses. Who wears sunglasses inside? And high heels?
Her feet must hurt
, I think as she bends over Evan. My stomach
thuds dully as she brushes his hair back and leans in, her mouth over his, and I wait to see them kiss.

But she doesn’t kiss him. She stays where she is, hovering, like a bee over a flower. Her blond hair falls behind them in a sheet of pale gold, and I think how I wish I had hair like that, and then I see her purse her lips as if she’s about to start whistling. And Evan’s mouth opens too, though his eyes are still closed. His chest is rising and falling fast now, as if he’s running. I see his hand clench into a fist. Something pale white and faint as a wisp of smoke rises from his mouth; it looks like he’s exhaling a puff of dandelion fluff.

Mrs. Palmer straightens, and reaches to flip over the hanging picture frame on the wall. It is a mirror, its surface strangely dull. She returns her gaze to Evan; the white smoke rising from his mouth has become a plume, and as it rises, the surface of the mirror begins softly to shimmer. She bends over Evan once again—

My hands lose their grip on the sill of the window and I fall, my ankle bending awkwardly under me, almost tipping me into the sand. My breath comes out in a whimpering gasp.

“Who is it?” I hear Mrs. Palmer call, her voice oddly thick. “Is someone there?”

I run.

My heart is pounding when I reach the villa, the soles of my feet burning. I duck into the kitchen through the back door, around the side of the villa where dusty flowers bloom in the shade. Damaris is not there; the kitchen is empty, plates and dishes stacked on a colorful kitchen cloth next to the sink. I turn on the water and rinse my dusty hands, my heart still pounding.
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.

I go out onto the deck; my mother is lying there in a lounger, half in and half out of the shade. She has a book open on her lap, the same one she’s been reading all week. I don’t think she’s advanced more than a few pages into it. She looks up, sees me, and gestures for me to come over.

I sit down at the foot of the lounger, and my mom smiles at me faintly. “Are you having a good time, Violet?”

My mouth is dry; I want to tell my mother about what I’ve seen, about Evan, but she looks so distant, as if she’s drifting away on a high sea. I try to remember the last time I felt like my mom was really concentrating on anything, especially me. “Sure.”

“I feel like I’ve hardly seen you,” she frets. “Still, I suppose it’s better, you and Evan having fun together….”

I think of Evan lying limp and gray-faced on the couch. “I’m worried about Evan, Mom.”

“Worried?” Her gray eyes are vague behind her sunglasses. “You shouldn’t worry while you’re on vacation.”

“No, I mean, I think there might be something wrong with him…like, really wrong.”

She sighs. “Teenage boys can be sort of moody and cranky, Vi. Hormones coursing through them and all that. Just don’t pay attention to his sulks. He has to get adjusted to this new family situation, just like you do.”

“Mom,” I say slowly, gathering up my courage. “Mom, are you happy?”

She sits up, looking surprised. “Of course I am! I mean, look where we are.” She gestures widely, her arm taking in the sea, the sky, the beach. “Even with me working both jobs we could never have afforded this nice vacation before.”

But it’s not nice
. It’s on the tip of my tongue to say it, but the look on my mom’s face stops me. It’s like she’s standing in front of me in a brand-new dress begging me to tell her she looks great and I can’t bring myself to tell her the truth: that the dress is ugly, cheap-looking, stained, and tacky. Because I love her, I bite back the words.

She slips off her sunglasses and for a moment I think she’s really looking at me, really seeing me. “I know
Phillip seems short-tempered,” she tells me at last. “But he’s just tired. His job is so demanding. Really, he loves us. I can see the kindness in him. In his eyes. You know?” She goes on without waiting for my response. “It’s what’s in someone’s eyes that’s important. Like the saying goes, eyes are the mirrors of the soul.”

“Windows,” I say.

She blinks. “What?”

“Eyes are the windows to the soul. Not mirrors.”

She reaches forward and puts her hand over mine. It feels thin, her fingers hard and dry as twigs. “You’re so smart,” she says. “You know everything.”

The front garden of the villa borders on a dusty unpaved road that stretches from here to Black River. A fence of bamboo blocks the house off from the occasional traffic, hiding us from the world. The garden itself is full of flowers: purple jacaranda, pink orchids, red bougainvillea. Damon is there, in the shade, a white hat tipped back on his head. He is inspecting one of the sprinklers. It all seems so normal that I feel foolish when I walk up to him and say, “I need to talk to your sister.”

He looks at me, his dark eyes fathomless. “My sister?”

“Damaris,” I say. “Please.”

After a moment he flips open his cell phone, dials,
and speaks into it in such a hasty dialect that I can’t understand any of what he’s saying. After a moment he shuts the phone and turns to me with a curt nod. “She say wait for her under the flame tree.” He gestures toward the big twisted tree with its red-brown blossoms. “Over there.”

Standing under the tree, reddish blossoms shower down on me every time a breeze blows through the branches overhead. The faint brushes of petals against my neck and shoulders feel like the touch of insect wings on my skin. I have to fight the urge to gasp and flick them away. I am relieved when Damaris steps through the bamboo gate and walks over to me. She is wearing a cotton dress the colors of sunset, but her face is somber.

“You saw her,” she says without preamble, “didn’t you?”

It comes out in a rush: the gate, the key, the garden of broken glass, what I saw through the window. She watches me while I talk, her face immobile, until I am done, and I say, “Who is she, Damaris? What is she?”

“You really want to know?” she asks.

“I do,” I say. “Please tell me.”

“She is a witch,” says Damaris. “A very old one. Not all magic is bad, but her kind is. She owned a plantation once, or at least her husband did. They say he used to beat her. One day she rise up, kill him with her own
hands. Then she start to kill the slaves, one by one. Just the men, you understand. She make them love her, and then she suck the life from them and leave them to die as husks, like empty seed-pods. She like the young and the pretty ones, but if she cannot take those, she will take any man. She lure them with a magic drink, and once they have a taste, they are hers. She take their souls and feed on them so she can stay young and beautiful. For hundreds of years she has done this. Sometimes she kill them quick, sometimes she wait, play with them for a while. Like she playing with your brother.”