CHAPTER ONE
“Words are a pretext. It is the inner bond that draws one person to another, not words.”
-Rumi
Evie
Evelyn Perez’s summer began with a peace offering: cherry pie at midnight.
Solstice sunshine pinched a squint around her father’s eyes as he watched her dig a fork through the crumbling, flaky crust. She pushed it around, not eating it, painting a crimson ribbon with the filling across a bone china plate. Pie wasn’t the same as her abuela’s cherry pastelitos, the very epitome of summer. The wrongness of having a cherry confection here, of all places, trickled sadness through her bones.
“Lo siento, Evie,” her father said again. He’d promised to be back for a late dinner, but at ten she gave up and ate without him. Words like late and early were terms relative to nothing in this strange, foreign land. They may as well have been synonyms. Or tap-dancing chupacabras.
“It’s fine, Papá.”
It wasn’t fine, though. Not even a little bit. She was being robbed of a real summer. And sleep, courtesy of the midnight sun.
She rubbed her eyes with her thumb and forefinger and slumped in the rigid ladder-back seat, trying to avoid the sun’s inescapable glare. For a week, she’d been alone in the Icelandic countryside of Elska, behind four cottage walls, while her papá dug through the earth’s crust for the US Geological Survey, researching ways to harness geothermal power—or some kind of boring scientist crap like that.
“Un regalo. Besides the pie.” He grinned as he reached into the brown paper sack on the floor. A package bulged from the top, wrapped in shiny carmine paper. She trained her dark glare elsewhere. Don’t you dare look. He lifted it and placed it between their pie plates on the wobbly table.
She glanced at it, and then fixed her gaze on the uneaten pie. The shimmering foil taunted her peripheral vision. By its shape, it was likely a package of pre-stretched canvases. Probably Belgian linen.
He pulled out another wrapped package, also the color of a beating heart, and set it down. Winsor & Newton acrylics, if she had to guess. When they’d landed in Iceland, he’d given her a new set of Kolinsky sable brushes imported from Russia, stainless steel palette knives, and a leather messenger bag to carry it all in.
Dr. Alberto Perez wasn’t skimping on art supply quality, as if bribery atoned for forcing his sixteen-year-old daughter to forfeit her social life. Away from hard-earned friends in Florida, a lifeguarding job at the best Miami water park, and Ben Benson—the first cute guy at Saint Bart’s who’d ever shown interest in her. Not to mention Abuela, her favorite person on the planet.
“Go ahead,” Papá said, proud-of-himself grin twitching at the corners of his mustache. “Open it.”
Tensing her jaw, she dropped her fork on the plate. The clatter made a sharp statement she wasn’t bold enough to make herself. Presents wouldn’t make up for yanking her out of what could’ve been the best summer of her life. Her Catholic politeness kept her from saying so. For now.
She tore the paper from the smaller of the two. Twelve tubes of rich colors peeked at her through a stream of dusty sunlight. She risked a glance at her papá’s excited expression, and she manufactured a smile of her own—one as artificial as her mother’s had become before she left.
As she ripped the wrapping paper off the corner of the large square, a linen canvas poked out. Her papá traced the grooves in the table edge with a hairy-knuckled index finger, waiting expectantly for her gratitude. If he paid attention, he’d know she only painted in winter.
She wasn’t even sure she wanted to study art in college in the first place. That C she’d received on her self-portrait last semester still niggled at her confidence. Anyway, her senior year of high school loomed ahead. She didn’t have to decide right this minute.
“Gracias.” She dragged reluctant thumbs over the soft ripples of canvas. “Where’d you find these, anyway?”
He crossed his arms over a proud, puffed chest. “The general store up the road. Grimmurson’s. Same place I got the pie. Agnes helped me special order them.”
“Oh.” She squinted at him. “Agnes?”
“The owner.”
He must’ve spent a pretty penny on expedited shipping to the Arctic Circle. Still. She wasn’t going to jump for joy, no matter how much he wanted her to. “I could’ve painted at home, too, you know. Abuela loves painting with me, and—”
“Evie,” he interrupted, impending lecture bleeding through his tone. “We’ve been through this. Abuela can’t take care of you in an assisted living facility. It’s beautiful here. Don’t miss this opportunity to explore. You’re only here for the summer.”
Only. Oh, the terrific irony of that word. She whispered a sigh.
“You chose Iceland over New York because of the opportunities to paint,” he reminded her.
As it turned out, she gave exactly zero shits about painting in Iceland. She just said whatever she had to in a pinch, choosing here over New York because any city where her mother resided would always be too small for them both. Besides, Evie refused to leave her father alone like her mother had. She just wished he’d reciprocate a little. Loyalty was worth a lot more when it was a two-way transaction.
“Think of all those landscapes out there waiting for you.” He wadded the foil paper into a ball and pitched it across the box-cluttered room toward the recycling bin. It thunked into a half-empty cardboard box instead. Another miss.
The landscapes Evie painted were from her favorite songs, not depressing gray horizons. During Florida winters, she measured her breaths in notes and brushstrokes. Short days were spent baking with Abuela. Long, chilly nights were spent listening to music and painting—buttery paint smudging her fingers and dotting her nightclothes. She barely stayed awake in school the day after those art benders. But that was a brand of sleep deprivation she could tolerate.
A rendering of Three Little Birds hung in Abuela’s yellow breakfast nook back home, serving as a reminder that every little thing’s gonna be all right, because summer was always just around the corner in Miami. Summer—that glorious time of year when temperatures hovered near Hades, the sharp scent of chlorine clung to her impossibly thick hair, and her sun-kissed skin tingled under the air conditioning vent while she fell asleep.
Which was much easier to do in Florida, since it actually got dark there at night.
But summer would pass her by this year. And even the finest Siberian paintbrushes couldn’t paint pretty over that melancholy. She scooped a bite of pie and shoveled it in her mouth, mostly so she wouldn’t have to explain all of that to her clueless papá.
Her teeth sliced through crust and punctured plump cherry flesh. Juices sweet and tart spilled across sleeping taste buds. Her eyes fluttered closed and the room fell silent, as though all other senses had to shut down to make room for the taste. For a moment, she could almost pretend she was home, having cherry pastelitos on Abuela’s front porch as summertime fireworks exploded from the streets of Little Havana.
“Sorry there’s no ice cream.” His voice shattered her daydream. Night dream, whatever. It was so good it didn’t even need ice cream. But she’d never say as much and give him the thrill of thinking his bribery was working.