Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea Read online

  “Movie?” River asked. He shifted his hips and leaned against the kitchen counter. “What movie is this?”

  “They play outdoor movies in the park during the summer,” I said, before Luke could answer. “Tonight they’re showing Casablanca at dusk. I usually make up a picnic. And we like to go early and get a good spot close to the screen.”

  “Don’t you need to attend to Sunshine or something?” Luke shifted his hips and leaned against the counter, in an exact imitation of River. “I was planning to steal some vodka from Maddy’s house and drink it at the movie. Which sounds a hell of a lot better than a stupid picnic. What do you think, River? Shouldn’t Violet stay home and let the men play tonight?”

  River ran his hands through his dark hair and smiled. “Violet, why don’t we join Luke on his walk back into town and try to actually make it to the grocery store this time. No stopping at tunnels and whatnot. Then we can buy some things for a picnic. And Luke, I’ve got a bottle of cognac in the back of my car, if you want it. I don’t drink. Or rarely, at least. I was saving it for a special occasion, but you can have it.”

  Luke shook his head. He was mad at River for refusing to mock me and my sweet little picnic idea. And for saying he didn’t drink. All real men drank, as far as Luke was concerned.

  “Nah,” he said. “That’s all right. You keep the bottle. I don’t drink that much, either. I just wanted to tonight, because they always show old black-and-white movies, and those things are so damn slow. If I don’t drink, I’ll fall asleep.”

  “Casablanca is one of my favorite films, actually.” River caught my eye, and the corner of his mouth flickered. “I’ve seen it a dozen times, dead sober, and never once fallen asleep.”

  Luke groaned, and I grinned. Hell, I shimmered. River was taking my side against Luke. Sunshine never did that.

  Having River around was already a lot better than talking and praying to Freddie. Because Freddie was dead. And River was alive and kicking and standing up to Luke and about to go grocery-shopping with me, and I felt like a million bucks all of a sudden.

  Ten minutes later, tote bags back in hand, River and I followed a silent Luke down the path to town. This time when we got to the tunnel, we didn’t stop. The boys walked on like the tunnel meant nothing to them, but I shuddered as we went by in the way that old phrase says you do when someone walks over your grave. And I kept my eyes focused on the path, afraid if I looked up, I’d see a dirty man grinning at me from the opening, brown, furry teeth snapping and gnashing like a wild dog’s.

  Our town had one café, and it was a good one. Right in the center, on the corner of two streets that outlined half the green-grassed, oak-treed town square. If you stood in the middle and spun around, you could see the library, the pizza joint, the café, the Dandelion Co-op, the flower store, Jimmy the Popcorn Man in his popcorn stand, the antique clock store, the hardware store, and the rare book shop run by the mysterious Nathan Keane—Nathan Keane was a century old, and he had long, unkempt hair, kept strange hours, and nursed a story of love gone wrong.

  Echo had all the quaint white angles you’d expect in any American town older than most. It looked clean and sweet and timeless, especially in the bright yellow sun. And while I spent a good deal of time dreaming about leaving, sometimes I kind of liked my town.

  The café was owned by the same Italian family who ran the pizza joint, so it was the genuine thing. On nice days, you could sit outside at one of the round black tables, and drink Italian joe, and stare at beautiful Gianni as he steamed milk, and feel like you were a little bit civilized.

  I’d been drinking coffee at the café since I was twelve. The summer Freddie died, I spent almost every day going back and forth between the library and the coffee shop, and could often be seen, I supposed, holding an espresso cup in one hand and a Brontë sister in the other. Adults would sometimes walk by and give me a look. But my parents wouldn’t have cared that I drank coffee so young, even if they’d noticed, which they hadn’t. Freddie wouldn’t have let me, but my parents . . . my parents didn’t like to intrude. It was one of the things about them. They didn’t believe in rules. Not if those rules interfered with what they considered to be my own private matter—like the private matter of me drinking a height-stunting caramel-brown beverage if I wanted to.

  Are they coming back? I asked, as I often did. Freddie, are they ever coming back?

  Yes, came the answer. Yes, yes, yes. You just hang on, Vi.

  We ordered lattes to go from Maddy, even though we just had coffee at the guesthouse. I smiled at her, but she was looking at Luke. She had round cheeks and long eyelashes and glossy black eyes, and I’m guessing she thought she was in love, or something close enough to it that she didn’t care.

  Luke pointed at her and smirked. “You staying out of trouble?”

  She laughed. “No.”

  “That’s my girl.” And then Maddy smiled at him like he was the sun coming out on a cloudy day.

  “You can do better,” I said, but not loud enough for her to hear. Freddie told me that a person has to pick and choose her battles. And this wasn’t mine, I guess.

  River and I took our joe back outside and I sipped at mine and mused about how nice it was to drink coffee with a person you like. And I liked River. I looked at him from the corner of my eye, standing in his linen pants on the sidewalk, graceful and long and looking like he owned the town. In a good way. I liked how he narrowed his eyes before he sipped his espresso, as if he didn’t know what to expect.

  So I drank my coffee and looked around Echo’s pretty town square, River at my side, until a gaunt man with thin gray hair appeared from around the corner and stumbled onto the green grass. He stood there, looking up, glaring at the sky as if the sun had insulted him. It was Daniel Leap, wearing the brown wool suit he always wore. He was drunk. He was always drunk. Usually I tried to feel sorry for him. But at that moment he was a dark splotch on the otherwise lovely view of my town, and so I hated him, suddenly, with the fast anger you get at a spill on a beautiful dress or a drowned fly in a perfect, cool glass of lemonade.

  “Daniel Leap has ruined our view,” I said.

  “Who?” River asked.

  “Daniel Leap. He’d be the town eccentric, except we already have Nathan Keane, the heartbroken man who runs the bookstore. So Daniel Leap is the town drunk.”

  “I like town eccentrics,” River replied.

  I smiled at that.

  Daniel caught sight of me then. “Violet White,” he shouted across the square. He didn’t come over; just stood on the grass, swaying and pointing, his words slurring until they ran together like paint colors dripping down a canvas.

  “Violet White,” he said again, “is a snob who thinks she’s better than the rest of the town, like all the Whites before her, and the Glenships too, until we drove them out of Echo. Snobs. Always was and always will be, living in that big mansion on the sea, knowing nothing, acting like they know everything, but I could tell them a thing or two . . .”

  Daniel Leap had done this for years, every time he saw me, or my brother, or our parents, and I was used to it. His monologue always touched on the same themes: us being snobs, and him being able to tell us a thing or two. I asked my dad about him once, wondering if there was some bad blood between him and my family. But my father had just picked up his paintbrush, shrugged, and said, “Violet, who knows what motivates the lesser people,” before going back to his painting.

  So the snob description wasn’t completely off.

  I turned away from Daniel Leap, deciding I would just move along to the Dandelion Co-op at the end of the block. But someone grabbed my arm, and I stopped. River. I looked at him, but he was looking at Daniel Leap.

  River was furious. His eyes were slits and his cheeks were red and his body was still. His grip tightened on my arm.

  “It’s all right,” I said. I waved my free hand l
ike I was shooing away a fly. “He always talks like this when he sees one of us. I’m used to it.”

  River shook his head once, fast. “You should never let yourself get used to someone talking about you like that.”

  Daniel Leap stopped pointing at me. He swayed and swayed, and then toppled over onto the ground.

  “Look,” I said to River. “He’s passed out now. Let’s just go to the grocery store.”

  River finally turned away from the drunk and looked at me. He smiled, and he seemed relaxed again, snap, just like that, all anger gone. “All right. Lead the way.”

  The Dandelion Co-op carried locally grown vegetables, and almond milk, and nuts and spices in bulk. Sunshine’s parents had hooked me on natural food. Cassie and Sam had a plump little garden back behind the cabin, in the only spot that got much sun. They made coconut milk ice cream, and cauliflower fried in olive oil, and pesto pizzas, and on and on. They invited Luke and me over for holidays, since my parents had left. They even gave us presents last Christmas. I got a long, striped hand-knitted scarf that I wore all winter, and Luke got a book on artists of the Italian Renaissance, which he’d actually read. And it had been fun, cramped into their tiny living room, playing board games until midnight, pine needles from the too-big Christmas tree poking at everyone. Luke and Sunshine even forgot to flirt with each other, for a while.

  My own parents rarely cooked. Or gave presents. I guess they wanted to spend their money and their creative urges on their art, not waste it buying gifts, or cooking a meal that would be eaten in twenty minutes by two semi-oblivious brats.

  Shopping at the Dandelion Co-op made me feel European. Very Audrey Hepburn as Sabrina in Paris (that movie played a few weeks ago in the park). River picked out goat cheese to spread on crispy-crusted French bread for the picnic, and olives, and a jar of roasted red peppers, and a bar of seventy percent dark chocolate, and a bottle of sparkling water. He bought some things for himself too: organic whole-fat milk, another crunchy baguette, glossy espresso beans (which were roasted by Gianni’s family and sold all over town), bananas, Parmigiano-Reggiano, fat brown eggs, extra-virgin olive oil, and some bulk spices.

  I watched River as he shopped. Closely. I watched him breathe in deep the gorgeous roasted smell of the espresso beans before he ground them. I watched him open the egg carton and stroke the brown shells before closing it again. I watched him slip his slim fingers into the barrel of bright purple-and-white cranberry beans, unable to resist the urge, just like me. I always had to put my hands in the pretty, speckled beans. Always.

  You wouldn’t think a person could learn so much about someone by watching them buy food. But you can. Luke shopped savagely, throwing things into a basket like he kind of hated them. And Sunshine shopped slow and thoughtless, sauntering from one aisle to the next. She would look at foreign cheese for twenty minutes, and then just decide to buy the first bag of pasta she could reach on the way to the counter. Neither of them had ever smelled the coffee, or stroked the eggs, or stuck their hand in the cranberry beans. Not once.

  “Where did you learn to shop for food?” I asked. “You’re good at it. Not too slow, not too fast.”

  “I went to culinary school,” he replied.

  “No, you didn’t. You’re still in high school.”

  “Am I?” River asked.

  He smiled, and it was crooked and sly and beautiful.

  “Yes, you are,” I said. And then I kind of scowled a bit. “Aren’t you?”

  River just shook his head and laughed.

  When we got back to the Citizen, River helped me put the groceries away. Our kitchen hadn’t been upgraded in decades, but all the appliances still ran well enough. It was a big, robust kind of room, with saffron walls, and high ceilings, and a long oak table in the middle. There were four windows on two sides, and an old yellow couch against the far wall that got all the afternoon sunlight. The windows had checkered curtains, and the floor was covered in dusky yellow tiles. Sometimes I slept in here, on the couch. Being in the kitchen at night made me remember things, like making Dutch Christmas cookies with Freddie—the hot cinnamon smell covering me like a blanket, and the sugary crumbs melting on my tongue like snow.

  River kneeled down and began looking through the cupboards. His shirt lifted up in the back, and I stared at the tan skin that peeked out above his linen pants.

  I wanted to kiss him there, suddenly, on his lower back. I’d never really wanted to kiss a boy before, to be honest. Not the boys Luke and Sunshine locked me in the closet with, not any of the thoughtless, graceless, un-Byronic boys in our town.

  But River was . . . River was . . .

  “Violet?”

  I blinked, and moved my eyes to meet River’s. He was looking over his shoulder, watching me watch him. “Yeah?”

  “Do you have a frying pan? Not Teflon, I hate that stuff. Cast iron? Or stainless steel?”

  I found River an old cast iron pan in the cabinet by the sink. I put in on the stove, and I imagined, for a second, Freddie, young, wearing a pearl necklace and a hat that slouched off to one side, standing over that very pan and making an omelet after a late night spent dancing those crazy, cool dances they did back in her day.

  “Brilliant,” River said. He lit the gas stove and threw some butter in the pan. Then he cut four pieces of the baguette, rubbed them with a clove of garlic, and tore a hole out in each. He set the bread in the butter and cracked an egg onto the bread so it filled up the hole. The yolks of the eggs were a bright orange, which, according to Sunshine’s dad, meant the chickens were as happy as a blue sky when they laid them.

  “Eggs in a frame.” River smiled at me.

  When the eggs were done, but still runny, he put them on two plates, diced a tomato into little juicy squares, and piled them on top of the bread. The tomato had been grown a few miles outside of Echo, in some peaceful person’s greenhouse, and it was red as sin and ripe as the noon sun. River sprinkled some sea salt over the tomatoes, and a little olive oil, and handed me a plate.

  I licked my lips. But not how Sunshine would do it. I did it like I meant it. I left the fork on the table, picked up the fried bread with my hand, chewed, swallowed, and laughed out loud.

  “It’s so good, River. So very, very good. Where the hell did you learn to cook?” Olive oil and tomato juice were running down my chin and I couldn’t have cared less.

  “Honestly? My mother was a chef.” River had the half smile on his crooked mouth, sly, sly, sly. “This is sort of a bruschetta, but with a fried egg. American, by way of Italy.”

  I took another bite. My mouth was singing. I swallowed, and was about to dig in again, when I remembered something. I looked at River, in a hard sort of way.

  “I thought you said your mother was an archeologist.”

  River’s lips were shiny with oil, and his eyes were laughing at me. “Did I?”

  “Yes.”

  He shrugged. “Then I must have lied. But the problem is, which time?”

  I smiled, and then laughed. River backed you into a corner and crooked-smiled at you, until you felt too stupid to keep asking him things. And then he acted like it all mattered less than nothing, and so you started to think so too.

  I realized suddenly, as I was biting into the fried egg bruschetta again, that I had only known River for a day. A day. That morning I had been River-ignorant, sitting on my front steps reading Hawthorne’s Mosses From an Old Manse and unaware of his existence. Now I was shopping for groceries with him and liking that he did it like me. And I was eating his food and licking my lips, and everything seemed smooth and happy and one-of-a-kind wonderful.

  But the truth was that I knew nothing, nothing about this boy at all. I wondered what Freddie would have said, about feeling so close to someone so soon . . .

  “Now let me ask you something,” River said, catching my eye and interrupting my thoughts. He sh
ook his hair in the sunlight, and I saw a blond streak pop out among the dark brown. It fell back down into the side part, but stayed messy, in a good way. “How long has your brother been like that?”

  I raised my eyebrows. “Like what?”

  “The sexism, the insecurity, the drinking. Is it because your dad is gone?”

  I set down the bruschetta on the white, chipped china. “Yes. And no. Luke has always been sort of . . . aggressive. There’s more to him than this, he just doesn’t show it much. He needs something to believe in. At least, that’s what my grandma Freddie always said.”

  “Freddie sounds pretty sharp.” River wasn’t looking at me when he said this, but was gazing off into the distance, with an odd expression on his face. And by odd, I mean it wasn’t laughing and wily, but almost earnest. And sort of . . . stern.

  “She was a lot of things.” I paused, thrown by River’s strange look. He didn’t say anything, so I kept talking. “Luke’s been worse since our parents left. They were always in and out when we were growing up, busy with artist things, but there was Freddie to watch us back then. Since she died, they’ve never been gone this long. It’s like they forgot we’re still kids, technically.”

  River didn’t answer. Instead, he handed me a glass of sparkling water with ice. I took a long drink, and it tasted delicious after the salty meal. River kicked off his canvas boat shoes. He wasn’t wearing any socks, and he had nice feet, especially for a boy—strong and tan and smooth and so beautiful, you almost couldn’t call them feet anymore. He yawned, plopped down on the yellow couch in the corner, and yawned again. Then he leaned forward and grabbed my hand.

  “Look, I was driving most of last night. I think I better have a nap before we check out this movie.”

  “We don’t have to go, you know. You can skip it if you want.” I was focused on River’s fingers, covering my own. It was the first time anyone had ever held my hand. Any boy, I mean.