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“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.
