Vacations From Hell (15 page)

“Evan is not my brother,” I say through my teeth. “And if you know all this, if everyone knows, then why don’t you do something about it?”

“She cannot die,” says Damaris. “Long ago they killed this woman and buried her in a grave with special markings to keep her from walking again. But even that will not hold her in the earth. Her magic is strong and deadly and she lives forever. Harm her and she will have her vengeance on you and your children after you. But you—you are a foreigner. You are leaving, going where she can’t hurt you. So I can tell you how to hurt her. She feeds on the souls she takes. Destroy those, and you will take her power long enough to get your stepbrother back.”

“But where does she keep them?”

“I do not know where they are,” Damaris says. “But you are a clever girl. Maybe you can figure it out.” She eyes me sideways. “I tell you one thing, though. Anne Palmer never give up a man once she have her claws in him. Not for nothing.”

“Then why are you telling me all this?” My voice rises almost to a scream. “If there’s nothing that can be done to save Evan, if it’s too late, then what’s the point?”

A red flower detaches itself from the tree overhead and drifts down to rest on Damaris’s shoulder like a splash of blood. “I say she never give up a man for nothing,” she says. “I never say she wouldn’t do it for something.”

That night Evan isn’t at dinner. Phillip frowns at his son’s empty place, a sharp line appearing between his eyebrows as if sliced there with a knife. “Violet,” he says—he always draws my name out when he speaks it, as if preparing to lecture me:
Vi-oh-let.
“Violet, where is Evan?”

I look at my plate. There is curry piled on it, and fish wrapped in banana leaves, and jewel-toned sliced fruit. The sight turns my stomach. “At the beach, I think.”

“Well, go get him.” He picks up his fork. “I’ve had enough of him missing family meals.”

I glance toward my mother, who nods imperceptibly,
as if afraid to be seen giving me permission. I throw my napkin down and stand up. “I’ll see if I can find him,” I say.
No promises.

The sun has gone down, leaving the sand cool and soft under my feet. There is a breeze off the ocean; it blows through my hair, cooling the damp sweat on the back of my neck, between my shoulder blades. I turn to look at Mrs. Palmer’s house. It is dark and lightless under the dimming sky, like a flower whose petals have closed for the night. I think of what Damaris said to me, and then I think of Mrs. Palmer’s terrifying face as she bent over Evan, and my heart twists inside me. I can’t go in there. I can’t help or save him. I don’t know why Damaris even told me anything. She’s seen my mother and Phillip together. It ought to be obvious that I’m not someone who can save anyone, even people I love.

I turn back toward the villa, and that’s when I see it: a scrap of blue caught on one of the rocks by the cave entrance Evan showed me the first day we were here. A blue the same color as Evan’s shirt. I move toward the cave, check to see if anyone’s watching me, then turn sideways to slip inside.

I push through the narrow part of the short tunnel, and then I’ve come out in the larger space where the colored moss glows against the cave walls like party lights. It takes me a moment before I see Evan, sitting on the
damp sand at the base of the cave wall, his legs drawn up, his face in his hands.

“Evan.” I kneel next to him. “Evan, what’s wrong?”

He looks up, and I’m shocked. Even in the short amount of time between yesterday and this evening, his face seems to have fallen in on itself: he is sunken and gray, his eyes outlined by stark shadows. His shoulders look thin beneath the worn blue material of his T-shirt. Before, he seemed mechanical, deadened, like someone on a numbing drug. Now the drug has worn off and he’s shaking and desperate. It’s much worse somehow.

“Vi,” he whispers. “Something happened—I made her angry. I don’t even know what I did, but she told me to go away.”

“Mrs. Palmer? Is that who you mean?” I reach to touch him, slide my hand over his shoulder, squeeze hard. He barely seems to notice. “Evan, you shouldn’t be around her. She’s not a good person. She’s not…good for you.”

“I
have
to be around her,” he said. “When I’m not around her, I feel like I can’t breathe. Like I’m dying.” He picks fretfully at the sand. “You wouldn’t understand.”

Oh.
That hurts. Like I’m just a little kid who can’t feel anything. I suck in my breath. “Do you love her?”

He gives a dry sort of cackle, not really a laugh at all. “Do you love water? Or food? Or do you just have to
have it?” He leans his head back against the cave wall. “I think I’m dying, Violet.”

“We’ll get you home,” I say. “We’ll go home, and you’ll forget all about her.”

“I don’t want to forget,” he whispers. “When I’m with her, I see…everything. I see
colors….
”

“Evan.” My cheeks are wet with tears; I reach to touch his chin, to turn his face toward me. “Let me help you.”

“Help me?” he says, but it sounds more like,
please help me,
and he opens his eyes. I lean toward him, and our lips meet somewhere in the middle of all this darkness, and I remember kissing him at the wedding reception, when we were both a little drunk and giggling under the canopy of fake white flowers in the garden. That kiss tasted like champagne and lipstick, but now Evan tastes like sea and salt. His skin feels dry under my hands as I slide them over him. Even as he rolls on top of me and I hold him in my arms, he feels as light as driftwood, and when he cries out a name, the name is not my own.

I practically have to push Evan back up the path to the villa. When we get there, I see that my mother and Phillip are done eating: the table is abandoned, flies gathering thickly around a plate of fried plantains. I push Evan down on a lounger, where he sits limply, his head in his hands.

“I’ll be right back,” I tell him, though he barely seems to hear me.

I head inside through the double doors. I’m not sure what I’m thinking now—that if I beg my mother and Phillip, they’ll take us home on the next plane, cutting our vacation short? That they’ll take Evan to the hospital, anything to get him away, even if Damaris says it won’t make any difference?

Their bedroom door is shut; I stop in front of it, my hand up, about to knock. There are voices audible from the other side: Phillip shouting, my mother saying something, trying to calm him down, but it isn’t working. His voice rises even as hers spirals down into soft gasps. She’s crying. My hand is frozen in midmotion like a statue’s. My mother’s sobs roll softly under the door like the sound of the tide being sucked back out to sea, cut off suddenly by the sound of a slap, sudden as a gunshot. I hear her gasp, and suddenly everything is quiet.

“Carol…” Phillip says. I can’t tell if he sounds sorry or just tired. I am not sure I care.
It will always be like this
, I think,
for the rest of my life, listening through a closed door as Phillip slowly destroys my mother, bleeding her soul dry as surely as Mrs. Palmer is bleeding Evan’s
.

I step away from the door and the silence on the other side of it. In the living room Phillip’s golf clubs gleam in the leather bag that hangs from one of the hooks beside
the front door. I grab a nine-iron and walk out onto the deck. Evan is lying on the lounger where I left him, his head on his crooked arm. He is so still I have to check the faint rise and fall of his chest to see that he’s still alive before I turn toward the path that leads down to the ocean.

The sea at night is black as ink. If I were a ghost flying over it, I wonder, could I see my face in its mirrored surface? It pounds onto the beach, sending up white froths of spray, as I slip through the gate of Mrs. Palmer’s house and into the garden.

Everywhere the shards of glass slice up out of the sand like shark fins slicing through water. The air here by the ocean is thick and hot to breathe. I raise the nine-iron in my hand; it feels heavy and solid. I bring it down hard against the nearest shard, half expecting the club to bounce off it. But the glass shatters, spiderwebbing out into a million cracks. A white puff of smoke rises from it, like an exhalation of cigarette smoke, and dissipates into the night air.

I stand there breathing hard, holding the club. And then I swing again, and again. The air is full of the lovely, silvery sound of shattering glass. A light goes on suddenly—the porch light of the house—stabbing into my eyes, but I keep swinging, bashing glass after glass after glass, until something seizes the other end of the
nine-iron and it’s wrenched viciously out of my hand.

Mrs. Palmer is standing in front of me. She no longer looks perfectly put-together; her hair is damp and tangled, her eyes wide and wild. She’s wearing a long black dress, cap-sleeved, old-fashioned. She really does look like a witch. “What do you think you’re doing?” she half screams. “This is private property,
my
property—”

“These don’t belong to you,” I tell her. My voice is steady, but I can’t help backing up a step or two; my flip-flops crunch on the ground. “They’re souls.”

She gapes at me. “Souls?”

“Whatever you want to call them. The lives you’ve stolen. You put them in the mirrors. That’s where you keep them.”

Her voice is a snarl. “You’re crazy.”

“I saw you do it,” I tell her. “I saw what you did to Evan. I was looking through the window.”

Her mouth opens, and then I see her eyes go to the key in my left hand. “
Damaris
,” she says. “That woman is a meddler. She never knows when to stay out of other people’s business.”

“I want you to leave my stepbrother alone,” I tell her. “I want you to let Evan go.”

Despite her anger her red lips curl into a smile. “Damaris must have told you it’s not that easy.”

“If you don’t let him go, I’ll come back—I’ll smash
the rest of these—I’ll tell everyone where you’re keeping the souls, and then everyone will know—”

“Your stepbrother,” she says. “He used to talk about you. He knew you had a crush on him. He said he found it amusing.” The anger is gone from her voice now; it has a lilt to it, the way she’d talked to Evan when she offered him the bottle of juice. “You were a joke to him, Violet. So why are you putting so much of your energy into saving him now?”

It hurts, what she says. I tell myself she’s lying, but it hurts anyway, a sharp sting, like getting lemon juice in a shallow cut. I take a breath. “I love him. Damaris said he could only be helped by someone who loves him—”

“But he doesn’t love you,” she says. “That is how men are. They take the love you give them and they twist it until it becomes a stick to beat you with.” She glances at the club in her hand; her look is vicious. “Tell me I have no right to even the score, Violet. Tell me you wouldn’t do the same in my place. Men are a curse on women’s lives and you know it.”

In my mind I see Phillip and my mother at his feet, picking fruit off the ground with bleeding fingers. “I don’t know what I think about men,” I say. “But Evan is only a boy. He isn’t good or evil or anything else yet. He shouldn’t be punished.”

“He will grow up to be like the rest of them,” says
Mrs. Palmer, who murdered her husband in his own bed. In a distant sort of voice, she continues, “They all do. That is why I will not give him up.”

I think of Anne Palmer’s husband, the man with the stick. “Damaris said you wouldn’t give Evan up for nothing,” I say. “But he’s young and weak. What if I could find you something even better?”

Against the darkness, like the sudden, startling gleam of a firefly’s light, I see Anne Palmer’s smile. “Tell me,” she says.

I wake in the morning to bright sunlight and the sound of birds. I lie in my netted bed for a long series of moments. It would be easy to think that last night never happened, any of it, but when I turn my head, I see the plastic bottle sitting on my bedside table next to the alarm clock. The pale liquid inside it shines with a rainbow slipperiness, like an oil slick.

I throw on a batik beach dress and slide my feet back into my flip-flops. There are cuts speckled across my ankles where flying glass sliced my skin, but I am fairly sure that no one will think the red dots are anything but mosquito bites. I pick up the bottle on my way out. It feels heavy, heavier than if it were full of water. When I tilt it, the liquid inside makes a thick, sloshing sound.

Damaris is in the kitchen, frying bacon in a pan. She
says nothing, but I can see her watching me out of the corner of her eye as I take a highball glass from the cupboard and fill it with ice. I unscrew the top of the plastic bottle Mrs. Palmer gave me last night and pour the liquid over the ice. It glops slowly out of the bottle neck, thick as lava. It smells vaguely medicinal, like herbs. As I stare at it, Damaris reaches around me and drops a slice of lemon into the glass. “There,” she says. “Tell him it is for his headache.”

I nod at her and take the glass out onto the deck. Evan is still lying in his lounger, but now his eyes are open and there is some color in his skin.

He won’t remember anything
? I said to Mrs. Palmer last night in her glass garden, souls like bits of shining jagged teeth glittering all around us.
You promise?

He won’t remember
, she had promised.
Only the vacation. The sun. The sand. And then the accident.

My mother is sitting in a chair next to Evan, fussing and trying to get him to hold a cold washcloth against his face; he pushes her hand away fretfully, but at least his voice is strong when he tells her no. She is wearing dark sunglasses again, but they don’t hide the discolored skin of her cheek. I take a long look at both of them before I cross the deck to the shaded alcove where Phillip sits with the newspaper open on his lap.

“Hi,” I say.

He looks up, his narrow, cold face expressionless in the sunlight. There is no guilt in the way he looks at me, no inner admission that last night he did something that, even if my mother forgives, I do not. But I doubt Phillip is interested in my feelings, either way. He has never thought of me as a person at all, with the power to bestow forgiveness or withhold it.