I hear a knocking sound, and then I see part of the white move. A green person steps in, and I remember the man from the boat, Sergeant Sawyer. I move to rub my arm where he stung me, and I realize my wrists are tied to Bed with heavy, thick leaves. I also see there is a long string coming out of my wrist. I lean in to tug on it with my teeth.
“Don’t,” the green man says, rushing toward me. I pull harder. His hand reaches across and gently pushes my head back. “Please,” he says. “Don’t do that. I’ll take it out for you. But if you do it that way, it’s going to hurt, all right?” He speaks slowly, his voice like the curl of a wave in Ocean. I let go of the string, and he squats next to Bed and sits on some strange sort of tree stump.
“Where’s River?” I ask.
“River?” he says.
“River,” I repeat.
“Oh … River, right. He’s just next door.” I don’t know what that means, but before I can ask more, the green man’s hand is on my arm, and he tugs gently, pulling on the string. “This is just an IV,” he says. “It’s hydrating you.”
He looks at me as if he’s waiting for me to say something in response, but I don’t understand any of what he said. Still, he stares so hard I nod, just so he will stop staring like that. “I want to see River,” I say.
He doesn’t answer as he pulls the string out the rest of the way and places some kind of sticky leaf on my wrist. I struggle to get out of the other, thicker leaves that are tying me to Bed. “I’m going to have someone bring in some food and water, and she’ll take those off,” he says. “As long as you eat and drink, I won’t need to put this back in, okay?” He stares at me again, and I nod again. “Good. First we’ll get you something to eat, and then we’ll talk about seeing people.”
“People?” I ask, and though it seems impossible, I wonder if my mother and Helmut are here, too. If this is where Ocean brought them. But he doesn’t answer my question.
He stops by the opening he walked in. “Do you know where you are?” he asks.
“California?” I whisper.
He nods. Then he smiles at me. “Welcome home,” he says.
A few minutes later, the white moves again, and another green person enters in the coming-in place, this one carrying a long slab of wood. “I brought you some breakfast,” the person says, her voice sweet and high like my mother’s. Her hair is bright and blond like River’s, though much shorter and pulled back in a small, tight ball at the nape of her neck.
She puts the wood slab over my stomach, and then sits down where the last green person sat. “I’m going to unfasten these,” she says, tugging at the thick leaves wrapped around my wrists. “But we need you to behave. Do you understand what that means?”
Behave. It was a word my mother used when she wanted me to listen to her and follow Helmut’s rules, to promise no swimming past Rocks, no fires on Beach, no lying, no running down Grassy Hill to Falls in the darkness.
I nod, and her fingers gently move against my wrists. She pulls at the leaves, and they make a loud sound as if very tiny rabbits are scattering across them, tearing the leaves away, and I jump. “Don’t be alarmed,” she says. “Just Velcro.” I don’t know that kind of animal, and I hope it isn’t poisonous. But as suddenly as Velcro began scattering, it stops. The thick leaves are gone. My wrists are bare, my skin looking lighter than it did on Island but seemingly unharmed. I open and close my fingers a few times, stretching them. My arms, my wrists, my fingers are all sore.
“I’m sorry about that,” she says. “But it was for your own safety.” I don’t know what she means by that, so I don’t say anything. “Go ahead,” she says. “Eat. You must be hungry.”
On top of the slab of wood, on a big white circle, there are berries and something brown I don’t recognize. On the side there is coconut milk in a tall container. I am hungry, but even more, I’m thirsty. So I pick up the coconut milk and throw it down my throat. It’s so sour that I think I might throw it right back up, and I start to cough. I stare at the berries cautiously and pick at the blue ones, the most familiar. They are sweet, their juice melting against my tongue, and I pick them up by the handful and drop them down my throat.
“There’s a spoon,” the woman says, her eyes open wide, her fingers on a silver stick. She hands it to me, and I see the end is a circle. I turn it over, not sure what I’m supposed to do with it. “Here,” the woman says. She uses the circle to scoop a few berries and then gently places them in my mouth. I understand what she wants me to do now, but it seems silly when I could just use my fingers and my hand more efficiently. Still, I don’t want her to think I’m not behaving, to put the hard leaves and Velcro back on my wrists, so I do as she showed me and use a spoon.
“Good,” she says, and she smiles. “I knew you would learn fast. It’ll only be a matter of time before the island is just a distant memory.” I drop the spoon, and it echoes, like stones being thrown into the body of water that shares River’s name. “I’m sorry,” she says. “I didn’t mean …” She shakes her head.
“I want to see River,” I say, trying to keep the tone of my voice even, the way Helmut’s always was, even if we knew he was angry. He always got what he wanted, Helmut did. No matter what.
“You will,” she says. “I promise you, you will.”
“Now,” I say, still even. “I want to see him now.”
She frowns, looks toward the coming-in place, and then looks back at me. “First,” she says, “there’s someone else who really wants to see you.”
My mother rarely talked about where she came from, who she was with before Island. It’s not that I didn’t ask, that I wasn’t sometimes curious, like River, if there was anything else beyond the blue lilt of Ocean. The small tidbits she’d whispered to me about California and skeletons—these were always just before sleep in Shelter, on the brink of dreaming. During the day she ignored my questions or told me there was nothing worth saying. “This,” she would say, holding out her arms to span the scope of Ocean, surrounding us, “is everything.”
My mother told me once I had a real father—not Helmut—who had died before I was born. But when I asked her to tell me more, who he was, what he was like, what had happened to him, her entire face grew still, as if just the mention of him, the memory, shut something down inside her.
And so I have no understanding now of what the green woman said to me. There’s someone else. No. There is no one else, nothing else. Only me. Only River.
It doesn’t take the green woman long to return to the coming-in place. She walks in, stands there for a moment, and stares at me, and then she turns to say something to someone else, behind her, someone I can’t quite see. “Go ahead,” I hear the green person say.
I am not at all prepared for what I see next. Stepping out from behind the green person is a woman: she is small with blond hair and sharp blue eyes, and she is wearing a strange-looking red pelt. She is familiar. Mine. It’s as if Ocean really has healed her finally and brought her back to me, new and well. And she’s here again, almost close enough for me to touch: my mother.
Chapter 8
The woman steps forward, closer to me, tentatively, the way I would approach a trap if I noticed the animal inside was still alive, afraid, staring at me, pleading with me to let it go. “Megan?” the woman says, and her voice is all wrong. It’s deeper than my mother’s, and emptier, as if her throat is filled with wind as she speaks. As she gets closer, I see now that her face is different, too. Her skin is paler, with more lines. This is a trick, I think, and maybe she, whoever she is, is one of those skeletons my mother told me about.
“Megan,” the woman says again, “do you remember me? Do you know who I am?”
Remember her? I shake my head and look past her to the green woman. “Where’s River?” I say again.
But she doesn’t answer me, and this fake woman’s face turns into a frown. She bites her lip and quickly turns into her pretend skeleton smile again. I notice her lips are a bright, unnatural purple
, so similar to the color of our flowers. “Megan,” she tries again.
“Sky,” I finally correct her. “My name is Sky.”
She reaches for my hand and squeezes it, but I quickly pull away. Her fingers are hard and sharp, as if I am touching directly to her bones. “Oh, honey, I’m just so glad you’re here. I can’t even tell you. After all this time …” She shakes her head. “It’s been so long I didn’t think I’d ever see you again.”
“I don’t know you,” I say with a startling vehemence, so the words come out as if I am spitting them at her.
“You probably don’t remember,” she says. She looks down at this strangely shaped—and what seems to be rabbit pelt—container she has hooked over her shoulder, sticks her hand in, and pulls something out. “Here,” she says. “This was taken on your first birthday.”
She hands the thing to me, and it has the texture of a thin leaf, only there are people drawn on top of it. River and I used to draw in the sand with sticks when we were younger, but never anything like this, with sharp colors and with perfect lines that make the people look entirely real, similar to the way our reflections sometimes stared back at us as we stood on the edge of River in the high sunlight.
“Here.” She points to a tiny person, what I guess to be a baby human, though I have never actually seen one before. “This is you.” The baby human she points to has brown curls, similar in color to mine but much, much shorter, and her face is covered with some kind of pink sand, as if she’d been stuffing it in her mouth. “This is me. And this is your mother.” She points to the other two people on the leaf, and I take it from her, twirling it up, closer to the sun. Then I bring it back down, closer to my eyes. Is it? My mother? She looks different here. Her skin is paler, her hair darker and shorter. I stroke her face with my thumb, and I want it to become warm and real, the way it was on Island, even as I lay beside her sleeping that last night. Her skin didn’t grow pale and cold until I awoke the next morning and caught her on her side, blue lips agape, as if in surprise.
“Who are you?” I whisper to the woman now.
She smiles at me. “I’m your grandmother, honey.” I shake my head because I don’t understand; I don’t even know what that is. “I’m your mother’s mother,” she says.
“Oh.” The word catches in my throat, like a sob. My mother had a mother. Has a mother. Of course she did; I knew that my mother had to come from somewhere. My mother explained it to River and me when we were younger, where people came from, how they came to be, how someday new people would come to Island through River and me. It was just that I always thought my mother’s mother must be dead, the way my father was, or she would’ve been on Island with us. I try to remember if my mother had even told me that her mother was dead, which would make me feel certain that this woman, here, is lying. But I can’t remember what my mother said about her mother.
“I don’t believe you,” I say now, though I’m not sure whether I believe her or not.
“Okay,” she says, and she takes the leaf back from me. She casts her eyes downward, as if I’ve wounded her.
The green woman has stepped closer, and she puts her hand on the other woman’s shoulder. “Maybe we should let her rest, Alice. This has all been very traumatic for her.”
The woman who says she’s my grandmother nods and stands. “I’ll be back, honey,” she says to me. She touches her bone-fingers to my cheek, and for a second, I don’t pull away. “You look just like her, you know. Just the way she looked when she was sixteen.” Tears well up in her eyes and then run down her cheeks, making brown streaks like tracks of raindrops through mud.
I pull away and turn over so I don’t have to look at her anymore as she leaves. And then I close my eyes and try to make her disappear, make this all disappear. But no matter how hard I try, I can’t forget the sound of her voice, the echo of it in my head now, new but strangely familiar: I’m your mother’s mother.
Chapter 9
My mother was a flower.
Her skin was smooth and shimmering like a petal, for which she was named. Her voice was soft, and her face looked kissed by the sun, a milky deep-coconut brown, not an angry red like Helmut’s. Her delicate hands fed me and pulled the strands of my unruly hair into a gentle braid. They held me at night in Shelter, stroking my cheek if I had my bad dream about the fish. They taught me things: how to draw circles in the sand, how to make and count the notches in Tree of Days, and how to turn a rabbit’s pelt into something that would cover our womanly parts. She taught me how to cook a fish, and how to hold my breath underwater without drowning.
She taught me that the land and the water, the trees and the animals, they were all necessary, all useful. And she showed me how. This world of ours is a paradise, a paradise found, she told me over and over again, whenever I would complain that I was hungry, tired, sore.
The only imperfection in my mother’s soft brown skin, in my mother at all, was a round and ugly pale purple circle on her left shoulder. When I asked her what it was, where it had come from, she would always shake her head and say it meant nothing. It had come from nothing. Some days, though, she would complain it was growing hot again, and then she would shrivel, the way flowers do when the rains don’t come and the sun burns them. She would stay in Shelter and refuse to come out, even if Helmut and I brought back a bounty from the traps. And then Helmut would tell River and me to go wait at Beach until he came for us.
Sometimes we would wait so long, the sun would lower across Ocean. The moon and Venus would come, and River and I would sit there hungry and scared in the darkness before Helmut came to get us.
But then the next morning, the world would be new again. My mother would be smiling, laughing, her purple imperfection cooled and forgotten. Her face bright and full of happiness again, and opening to the sunlight.
“Hello.” The sound of a voice startles me, and I sit up, feeling full and confused. I realize I must’ve fallen asleep after the grandmother woman left, and that I have been dreaming: first, of my mother, that she was here. That Ocean brought her back to me, and her purple circle was gone. And then also of River, that he was here, too, in this box with me, his back lying against mine, holding on to me as I slept. I feel around for him now, then turn to look for him, but he’s not here. Neither is my mother.
The air is darker now, and I squint to make out where the voice came from. There is a shadow by the coming-in place, and a hand that moves up. Then the sun alights above me, but a strangely shaped square one, bursting yellow light into my eyes.
“May I come in?” the voice asks. In the light of the sun, I see it is the green woman again, and I sigh. She doesn’t wait for me to answer before walking in and sitting down next to Bed. “Hello,” she says, smiling at me. Why do all these people smile so much when it seems they have nothing happy to say? “I should’ve introduced myself before. I’m sorry. I’m Dr. Cabot, and now that you’ve had a chance to rest, to … take some of this in, I’d like to explain everything to you. Would that be okay?”
“I need to see River,” I say again, tears of frustration building behind my eyes. It’s like I’m shouting his name into great, wide Ocean, and there’s no one around to hear me, least of all him.
“I know,” she says. “And you will. But I’d like to go over everything with you first.” She pauses. “Some of this is going to be confusing to you and probably hard to hear. But I think it’s important that you know the truth, that you know what’s going on.” I don’t say anything in response, so she clears her throat. “All right, then. You and, um … River, you were living on an island in the South Pacific. About a hundred and fifty nautical miles east of the American territory of Samoa.” She looks at me as if waiting for me to say something, but I don’t know what. I have no idea what Samoa is, but I recognize Pacific, which is where my mother always said we were. “We believe that you were on a boat, and that the boat crashed onto the island in a storm approximately fourteen years ago.” The Accident. The Others Who We Never
Met. “I’m sorry, is this all too much?”
I shake my head. “Okay,” she says. “Well, from what we can piece together, you and your mother, Helmut and his son—you were the only four survivors.” I nod. “But your mother and Helmut are deceased now?”
“Deceased?”
“No longer living.”
“Yes,” I whisper.
“But you and Helmut’s son lived on the island until now.” Her voice is cold like Falls in the early morning. But also precise, like River’s stone, slicing the head off a fish. River.
“I really need to see him,” I say, with all the bravery I can muster, though something about this woman, her talking, the preciseness of it, is making it very hard for me to breathe.
She simply nods. “We didn’t know about the island until about a year ago. There are so many little islands in that part of the Pacific. We’re always discovering new ones. Plates shift, tectonics and all that. Oh … I’m losing you. Well, never mind. That’s not the important part.” She pauses and licks her lips, which are strangely red, as if they are stained with berry juice, but I am thinking about what she said … so many little Islands? She must be wrong; there is only Island, in Ocean, only us. “About a year ago, some Australian explorers found what they thought to be some wreckage from your boat and that led them close to your island. But from their observations, we thought it to be uninhabited. It was assumed that you had all been killed in the boat crash. But we were all wrong, weren’t we?” She pauses again and stares at me funny for a moment, until I nod again. “I’m sorry about all that back in Samoa. Sergeant Sawyer, he can be a little … well, you were frightened, and I can understand that. But you’ve been rescued now. There’s no need to be frightened anymore.”
But I am frightened. I try to judge whether Dr. Cabot can be trusted, but her face is as blank and pure as untouched sand, giving away nothing about what she’s thinking or feeling. So I don’t tell her that we didn’t need to be rescued from Island. That River and I, we were just fine. That Sergeant Sawyer and the insect he put in my arm, Velcro running under the leaves on my wrists, this strange white room, the strange grandmother woman, the idea that there are many Islands in Ocean, not just ours … these feel like things I need rescuing from now.
Searching for Sky Page 4