Love at Fifth Sight
Part 2-2
Later in the second week�
Rei squinted at the sun, wondering if it was time for dinner yet. She wished that Ami hadn’t wanted to stay out of the water today. Her cousin had been acting strange lately – she loved the ocean, but she was refusing to go in more and more often. She wasn’t eating her favorite foods, and she was much quieter than usual.
“Hey, Rei.”
She continued pulling her long hair into a ponytail and ignored the voice.
“What’s up?”
‘Why can’t he just go away?’ she wondered. Playing video games on a rainy day had been fine, but it didn’t mean they were best friends or anything now. And when it came down to it, the rough games the boys preferred didn’t overlap greatly with the activities she and Ami wanted to do. Most of all, she wanted to be alone to brood.
“Where’s the other dork?” she asked.
Jaden shrugged. “Grounded again for teasing Ami. He has to stay inside for the afternoon and clean his room.”
Looking at him more closely, Rei noticed that he was holding a foam board in his right hand. “Is that a surfboard?”
He shook his head, sitting down on the hot sand next to her. “Nope. Bodyboard.”
“You know how to?” She didn’t really know the difference, but she figured if it was anything close to surfing, you had to be old and buff to surf. And living in California. At least, that was the impression she had gotten from commercials.
“A little bit. I started taking lessons when I was eight. It’s easier than surfing for beginners and you don’t have to stand up,” Jaden recited, proud of himself for remembering how the instructor had described it to his mother.
“Oh.”
There was silence for awhile, and then Jaden, being an active eleven year old, needed to stand up again. “Want to swim?”
“No.”
“Want to watch me bodyboard?”
“Don’t be a showoff,” Rei said automatically, although her interest was piqued and her voice had less of a bite than usual.
He rolled his eyes. “Want me to teach you how?”
She looked at him quickly and then away. “Aunt Kira wouldn’t like it.”
Jaden huffed. “I won’t let you get hurt.”
Rei sprang to her feet, appalled at the implication. “I’m not afraid of getting hurt! I just…don’t want to make Aunt Kira upset.”
“Come on, my mom’s watching us. I’ll ask her, okay?”
Before she could say anything, he was off and running. A few minutes later, he ran back with a triumphant smile. “See, Mom said yes.” He didn’t repeat her admonitions for him to be nice, not to go too far out, and to make sure Rei didn’t get hurt. He felt like they would make her more grouchy than usual.
Rei had a wonderful time just riding in on the waves, although Jaden did reclaim his board periodically so he could take a few turns. ‘He isn’t such a bad teacher,’ she thought, surprised that he was laughing and encouraging her, and not laughing when she wiped out – well, not too much.
As if he had read her mind, Jaden said with a rueful grin, “I was really bad at my first lesson, and I got some bruises.” And he was getting a thrill from being the teacher instead of the student, he had been bored without Zach to play with, and Rei wasn’t telling him to shove off for once.
She smiled back, surprising him. “Let me go out by myself,” she cajoled.
“I don’t know…”
“Come on.”
“But–”
“Please?”
Large purple eyes looked at him pleadingly. He had no idea how many times she would use them on him in the future, but for the very first time, he felt himself weakening towards her because of them. “Well – okay. But come right back.”
“Yeah, yeah,” she laughed, heading off excitedly.
Midway in, a particularly strong wave threw her off balance, and she lost control of the board. “Hey! Rei!!”
She surfaced almost immediately and waded in, seawater streaming down her face like tears.
“Are you okay?” he asked. His mom would kill him if she cried. At least, he told himself, that was why he was worried. Nothing to do with those weird crushes some of the guys at school were getting. Nothing at all.
She didn’t stay anything, only stood there with her shoulders heaving.
“Rei?”
She looked up at him now with her eyes tearing up.
“Oh, no. Oh man. Don’t cry. Does it hurt?”
“No… I’m – I’m really sorry about – I lost the board, Jaden.”
He stared at her helplessly. “Uh – well, don’t cry…” He liked the board a lot, but he was also relieved that she wasn’t hurt and he hopefully wouldn’t be in huge trouble.
She sat down on the sand and began crying in earnest.
‘Shoot, was I not supposed to say that?’ he wondered. But he didn’t think that saying “Okay, go ahead and cry” would have helped much either. He sank down onto the sand beside her.
For once, Rei talked to him without prompting. It was hard to understand her through the sobs, but he made a good effort. “…I’m so… I didn’t mean to, and it was fun…”
He nodded bemusedly. “…that’s good…”
She gulped in a breath and then said very clearly, “It’s all my fault and I always bring people bad luck.”
‘Whoa.’ “Huh?” he asked inarticulately.
She looked at him despairingly. “I’m bad luck! I lost your board and my parents died, and Grandpa got sick so he couldn’t keep me. I thought things were okay when I came to live with Aunt Kira and Uncle Richard, but now they’re fighting all the time and Ami’s upset and we hate it, and it’s all my fault because I came here!”
Jaden was shocked into silence at her rambling explanation. He was only eleven, after all, and he didn’t really know what to say, so he tried his best. “Look, Rei… I’m sure it’s not your fault. Grown ups fight sometimes. Zach and I don’t like it when our parents fight, but they – you know, they say sorry and things are cool again.”
“This is different!” she cried. “They don’t make up, they just keep fighting. And they’re going to get divorced.”
“What?!”
She looked at him miserably. “I know they will.”
“But they didn’t say they were, did they?” The parents who lived next door had gotten divorced. Jaden and Zach were friends with their son, Kyle. But Kyle’s parents had told him about it and everyone knew.
“No. But I just… I know they will.”
She couldn’t tell what made her so sure, but it was just that gut feeling she had sometimes about bad things happening. Like right before she had fallen off her bike and needed stitches, and when she had known Ami was going to get a bad cold that turned out to be bronchitis after playing in the rain.
“I brought them bad luck.”
“They don’t fight because of you. You’re not bad luck, Rei.”
“How do you know?” she demanded tearfully.
Jaden searched frantically for the source of his conviction. Finally, a grin lit up his face. “Look,” he said, pointing towards the ocean. There was his board, washing back up on the shore.
He ran forward and rescued it. “See? You’re not bad luck. You must be good luck because it could have gotten swept out to sea forever, like my last one, but it came back this time.”
Rei sniffed one last time, swiping at her eyes. “Really? You think so?”
He smiled back. “Yeah.” Then his stomach growled noisily.
“I’m hungry. Let’s go see if it’s dinnertime yet.”
________________________________________
Zach was bored out of his mind. After he had spent yesterday cleaning his room with neither books nor computer to entertain him, he was determined not to get grounded again. He was also ready to enjoy his freedom, since it was their last full day on the beach. But here he was, all by himself, feeling grouchy because Jaden had decided to play volleyball with Rei and some other kids who were also vacationing on the beach.
They already had even teams, and he didn’t particularly like volleyball, so now he was stuck finding something else to do. It also stung that Jaden had actually had fun bodyboarding with Rei yesterday.
‘How could he possibly have fun with a girl?’ he thought, conveniently forgetting how he had enjoyed playing chess with Ami. Suddenly, a familiar figure caught his eye, and he perked up when he saw Ami. At the least, maybe needling her would make him feel better.
“Hey. Why aren’t you playing volleyball with Rei?”
She shook her head. “I didn’t feel like it,” she said softly.
“Well, it’s a stupid sport anyway,” he declared.
Ami looked at him curiously. “Well, it’s okay. But I’d rather swim.”
“Then why aren’t you swimming?”
She responded, “I’m waiting for my dad. He’s going to let me watch him paint.”
At that moment, Richard came out the back door of the house, loaded down with supplies. “Here, Ames, help me carry these,” he said, and she complied eagerly. He looked down at Zach rather bewilderedly. “You’re Eileen and Matthew’s kid, right? What’s your name – Zane?”
“Zach.”
“Ah.” He scanned the horizon, his gaze faraway.
Ever inquisitive, Zach observed Ami and her father, noticing physical similarities and differences. Ami’s head didn’t even reach Richard’s shoulder yet, and she looked a lot like her mother, with her dark hair and delicate build. Richard’s eyes were a darker shade of navy blue than his daughter’s. But her chin was like his, angular and slightly pointed, and the shape of her forehead also reflected his features.
“Let’s go there,” Richard announced, pointing in the general direction of some shallow but rocky cliffs on the far side of the beach, away from the crush of beachgoers milling around. “Are you coming too?”
It took Zach a minute to realize he was being addressed. “Uh – yeah – can I?”
“Sure. But be careful with these canvases.”
Finding his arms full of half-finished and blank canvases, he gulped and nodded. When they reached the cliffs, Richard relieved Ami and Zach of their burdens and set up his operation meticulously.
Ami watched him with wide eyes. His hair was a little too long, his pants were impossibly wrinkled, and his splattered shirtsleeves were rolled up to the elbows. She loved watching him paint, carefully observing how he choose colors and layered brushstrokes to translate reality onto the canvas. It didn’t matter that his paintings didn’t have the sharp-edged clarity of photographs. She loved the wistful, slightly dreamlike quality of many of his paintings and even the savage violence of the storms he painted.
Unusually subdued during these unusual proceedings, Zach settled on a rock beside Ami and watched quietly for the next few hours. Finally, when Richard took a break from filling in the greens, browns, and tans of the scrubby, resilient beach grasses to stretch out the kinks in his back, Zach summoned the courage to break the silence. “Do you ever paint people?”
Richard glanced back at him and smiled. “Getting tired of watching me paint just the water and the rocks?” As Zach shook his head vehemently, he laughed and continued, “I’m a landscape painter and not a portrait artist. I do paint people – rarely, and when the mood strikes me. But I only paint women who are very beautiful, or particularly striking.”
Hearing this, Ami felt a small wave of calm and reassurance wash over her. Her parents had had another quiet but heated argument that morning, when they had thought she and Rei were still asleep, and the tension over breakfast had been palpable. Her mother fought with icy silences and hurt tones, and her father countered with flashing eyes and shouts he had to silence to avoid waking the children.
But when he said this now, Ami remembered all the times he had said it before, referring to the large painting of Kira he had done ten years ago, before Ami had been born.
“Want to give it a try?”
“Huh?” Zach asked inelegantly.
Richard clipped a sheet of thick paper to the easel. “When I need a break from my work, sometimes I let Ami paint. It’s interesting to see things from a child’s perspective. I feel like it gives my work a more universalizing angle. Do you want the first turn?”
“Well – okay.” He accepted the fresh brush nervously, looking at the little cakes of paint set out to his right. “Do I just – anything I want?”
“Anything you want,” Richard said, moving over to help him.
Ami sat quietly, watching Richard’s rare grin flash and Zach’s surprised laugh. It was a strange feeling to watch her father and Zach together. It was true that her father sometimes let her paint with him, and she loved it. She had come to think of it as their special activity, one which even Rei didn’t take part in, mostly because she wasn’t interested in painting.
________________________________________
When Zach was done, he stepped back and she could finally see what was on the easel. His brushstrokes were thick and heavy, and she could tell where her father had guided the brush in a few places to help him, blurring the almost perfectly straight line where the water met sand. He had used as many as colors as possible, which she had also done when she was younger, excited at the prospect of getting to paint. Surprisingly, she liked his rendition of the sea, which was a rich dark plum highlighted with blues and greens.
Richard detached the paper and set it on the ground, weighting down the edges with stones. “We’ll just let it dry for now. Good job. Come on, Ames – your turn.”
It was Zach’s turn to settle down and watch. She gripped the brushes more confidently than he had and was much more skilled at blending colors. She also painted more slowly and delicately, mindful of the fact that with watercolors, she wouldn’t be able to paint over anything.
“Daddy, help me do the edge of the rock?” she asked.
Richard moved over to guide her wrist gently. “This is good,” he told her, evaluating her progress. “You’re focusing on capturing less at a time, and the perspective is improving. Maybe we should start you on art lessons.”
“I’d rather paint with you,” she admitted, “or watch you paint.”
He smiled but said, “I’m not a very good teacher, Ami. Your mother says I lack patience.”
Ami looked up at him, the corners of her mouth trembling, and he squeezed her shoulder reassuringly. “Don’t be sad,” he told her, and she went on painting in silence for awhile.
“I think we’re done for now,” Richard decided finally. “Why don’t you kids run along? Don’t get into any trouble, now. Stay right in front of me so I can keep an eye on you.”
As they were dismissed, Zach looked at Ami questioningly. “What do you want to do? Find Rei?”
She shook her head. “I want to go swimming,” she replied, her voice wavering slightly.
“Why are you sad?” he asked, baffled.
“I’m not. Are you coming or not?”
Zach shrugged. He didn’t have anything better to do, and water was meant for swimming, after all. “All right.”
He waited as she ran back to her father and left her glasses with him. “How are you going to swim without your glasses?”
She frowned at him, remembering his teasing from earlier that week. “I can see fine without them. I just see more clearly with them, especially when things are far away. I can swim like always.” Then she waded into the ocean and started swimming away without waiting for him.
“Hey, wait up!” he called.
Zach was surprised to find out how well she swam, sleek and fast under the crests of the waves. He was even more surprised when, while he was taking a break and treading water, a phantom grab at his ankle pulled him under.
Ami giggled as he resurfaced, spluttering and spitting out water.
“Hey!” he exclaimed, glaring balefully at her.
“What goes around comes around,” she said, reminding him of how many times he had scared her when they were younger.
When he dove at her, she merely laughed and swam out of reach. As the afternoon wore on, they grew cold and tired of being in the water and swam over to the pier. Zach heaved himself out first. Seeing that Ami was struggling to pull herself up, he reached over and hoisted her up as she squeaked, startled.
He wrung out his sopping hair, waiting for the sun to dry it as she sluiced water off her body onto the wet boards. The blazing sun made them shiver first, since they had just come out of the water, and then baked them into sleepiness. The lulling motion and sound of the waves crashing on the shore added to the soporific effect.
Yawning, Ami drew her knees up and wrapped her arms around them. “I like the ocean. And aquariums. We went on a field trip to one recently,” she explained rather randomly.
“I like the sharks. And the huge sea turtles,” he mumbled sleepily.
“I like seeing the tropical fish the most. They’re so colorful.” She reached down to scoop up a handful of seawater and peered at it intently. “Isn’t it strange how there’s so much stuff in here that we can’t see?”
Zach roused himself slightly. “You mean like plankton?”
“Mm hmm.”
He briefly pondered the idea. “It would be cool to be a scientist. Seeing all sorts of little things other people can’t.”
She shocked herself by telling him, “I want to be a doctor like my mom.”
“Yeah?” Zach hated the doctor’s office and he especially hated getting shots – the seeing the sharp, pointy needle part was more disconcerting to him than the pain – but he wasn’t about to admit his fear of medical paraphernalia to her. Or how he got faint at the sight of his own blood. “That’s cool.”
“Yeah,” she echoed softly, pleasantly surprised at his casual approbation. “What about you? A scientist?”
He lay down on the pier and propped his head up on his folded arms. “I dunno. Maybe. Or something interesting and different. A jet pilot, or a chess master, if I get good enough. Or I could design super-fast cars and drive them, too.”
As the young are apt to do, Ami replied with a non sequitur. “We’re going home tomorrow.”
“Us too.” He paused, then cracked open one green eye to look at her. “Are you coming back next summer?”
She shrugged. “I don’t know. Probably not. Mom’s always busy at the hospital, and Daddy could have a show.”
Zach nodded. Then a thought occurred to him. “Guess we won’t see each other again.”
“I guess not,” she agreed.
Love at Fifth Sight
Infinite Ice
