I think of River, the way he looked that last morning, sitting on the edge of the bed, his hair short, his face so different. My hair, my braid, is just like my mother’s was. She taught me to comb it with my fingers, to knot it at the end. So many mornings she did it for me, just after I came out of Falls, and she’d sit on Drying Rock with me, her fingers twisting delicately through the strands down my back. My hair. It feels like all I have left now of my life on Island, of her. I’m not going to let the salon cut it. I will learn things, eat things, pretend to be Megan, if it means it will all make me know enough to figure out a way back to Island, but I will not cut my hair. I can’t.
“I don’t want it shaped.” I shake my head, my braid whipping hard against my lower back.
“When your mother was your age, she loved getting her hair done.” She reaches out and touches my braid and smiles, as if thinking of another time, another person, my mother. My mother. Her hair was long and thick, like mine. She’d almost always be humming after she went to Falls to get clean, and back at Shelter, I’d watch her twirl her long strands of hair through her fingers, quickly tying it into a neat braid. “Your mother loved the salon, Megan.” My grandmother’s thin fingers twirl through the end of my braid, and she frowns with distaste.
Skeletons, my mother said.
“No!” I shout, and I yank myself out of her grasp. Every bit of hatred I feel for this new world bursts right out of my skin—all the times she has called me Megan, her stupid team of professionals. It seeps over me, an anger I have never felt before, like seaweed clinging to my skin, suffocating me. “My mother hated it here!” I yell at her. My words echo in the car, and then they stop, and the air is very, very silent.
My grandmother sits there for a moment, her fingers shaking in the stillness of the air. Her mouth is open, arched, the wide shape of a seashell. “Maybe,” she eventually says. “Just before she left, she might have hated it here.” She pauses. “But she didn’t always.”
“She said the people were cold here,” I spit at her. “Skeletons.” I see my grandmother’s face turn, everything shifting down. She bites her purple bottom lip, and her eyes—my mother’s blue eyes—brim with tears. Then I feel a little bad. “She didn’t mean you,” I say. Though maybe she did. I don’t know.
My grandmother nods and then shakes her head a little, gripping tightly to the wheel, even though the car is stopped. She doesn’t say anything for another long moment. Then she speaks softly, her voice shaking just like her hands. “How did she die?” she asks me.
Her question seems so important, like something she may have wanted to ask me the whole time, and yet it takes me by surprise, that she is saying it here, now, out loud, just after she was talking about things like shaping hair and getting gussied.
“Did he kill her?” she whispers.
“Who?” I ask, though that horrible, sick feeling is back, and my stomach churns uneasily.
“Helmut,” she says as if she has bitten into something rotten. It is the first time I have heard her say his name, and it sounds so much different in her voice than it ever sounded in my mother’s.
“No.” I shake my head. “Of course not. He would never do that. He loved her.” I think of all the times her lips would touch his, and he would wrap her tiny body in his large arms, holding her tight to his chest. I think of the time she was bleeding and how he healed her, in Ocean.
“Okay,” she says now, but the word sounds funny, as if she’s choking on it, as if she doesn’t believe me.
“He did. He loved her,” I say again. “He loved us.” And then I hate my grandmother a little more for not understanding anything real about me, about my life until now.
“Okay,” she says again. “But just tell me something. Did she suffer?”
I close my eyes, thinking about that morning, her lips cold and blue. “I don’t think so. She ate some mushrooms, and then she went to sleep.” I pause. “And she never woke up.”
A funny cry starts in my grandmother’s throat, like the noise of a trapped animal that has recognized that this is it, the end—there is no way out. I’m not sure what she’s thinking or why she is reacting this way, but then she reaches up and quickly wipes away a tear that has escaped her eye and onto her cheek. Then another one. And I remember the way I felt that morning, when I saw my mother there, her lips cold and blue. The way I felt when I gave her back to Ocean and the water swallowed her up, took her away.
My grandmother’s tears keep coming, and then I understand something: my grandmother must have loved my mother once, even if my mother might not have felt the same.
“I’m sorry,” I whisper, suddenly wishing I hadn’t yelled.
“Oh, honey.” She reaches across for my hand, and her fingers are white now and grip onto me tightly. “You have nothing to be sorry for.”
She gives my hand a squeeze, and then she wipes her face dry. She clears her throat. “You know what, I changed my mind. I think your hair looks just right the way it is for now.” She pauses for a moment and looks down at the wheel. “I’m very tired,” she says. “Would you mind if we just went back to the house and did our girls’ day another time?”
Before I have a chance to answer her, she starts the car and turns us around, driving back toward her house.
Chapter 22
Mrs. Fairfield brings the newspaper with her every morning, and as the days go by, I begin to notice the way my picture moves from the first page to the second page, to the third page, and finally, one day, just a few days after the strange conversation with my grandmother in the parking lot of the salon, I am not in the newspaper at all. That day, too, even the last vulture seems to have disappeared from the street outside my grandmother’s house.
As Mrs. Fairfield and I start our morning routine at the kitchen table, my grandmother glances over our shoulders at the pictures and the words on the front page of the newspaper. Her cheeks turn a gray white, and she quickly turns away. “You’ll be fine down here today without me, won’t you, Elizabeth?” she says to Mrs. Fairfield, her voice shaking a little.
“Of course, Alice.” Mrs. Fairfield turns to me and smiles too wide, revealing her silvery back teeth. “We’ll do just fine, won’t we, Megan?” She pats my hand, and I sigh and nod, annoyed with the way she talks to me as if I am a small child. And the way she says Megan, like it is a sweet bite of coconut she is savoring in her silver teeth.
“I need to go back to bed,” my grandmother says. “Rest my eyes for a while.”
It was the same thing she said to me that afternoon when we got back from the salon, and I understand that this is what people say here when they are sad or when they need to be alone. I am not sure why she is feeling this way now, but I don’t ask.
“Now.” Mrs. Fairfield turns back to me after my grandmother walks up the steps. “I want to talk to you about our newspaper today.”
“That I’m not on it?” I ask. But what I’m really thinking is that River’s not. And that I would do anything to see a picture of him real enough to feel he was really here, with me.
“Yes,” she says. “But also about what is in it.”
She reads the front article out loud, asking me to follow along, and I do not understand so many of the words that are in it: gun, murder, shot, shooting. Though I do understand the word dead, and the number of people who seem to be: sixteen. Which I also understand is a lot. Many more people than I ever knew on Island.
“Do you understand?” she asks when she’s finished reading. “There was a shooting in Iowa. Sixteen people murdered.”
“Murdered?” I ask.
“Murder is when people die in a bad way,” she says. “When someone else takes their life on purpose.” She shows me the picture of a gun, which she says was used for murder in this case, but I cannot understand how it was used exactly. Or why.
I ask her, and I ask her again. But all she keeps saying is, “It’s such a senseless tragedy. Murder is a terrible thing.”
And nothing ab
out any of that makes me understand it.
“People forget,” Dr. Banks says a few hours later, when she asks me what I learned with Mrs. Fairfield that morning and I tell her how River and I were gone from the newspaper. “Everyone fixates on these things for a while, and then life just goes on. Gets back to normal. Something else happens.” There’s that word again: normal.
But this something else—shooting, murder—it does not seem normal to me at all.
“I don’t understand,” I tell Dr. Banks, thinking about how my grandmother called her the very best and thinking she should be able to explain this to me better than Mrs. Fairfield.
“What don’t you understand?” Dr. Banks says in that annoying way she has of always repeating my questions right back to me.
“Why would someone murder people with a gun?”
Dr. Banks nods. “In many ways your island life was filled with innocence.” I nod, but I don’t really know if it was or not. “But bad things happen in the real world, Megan. They just do. Nobody has all the answers.” She pauses. “Even on the island bad things happened, didn’t they?” She pokes at me with her words, the way my mother used to poke at me with her finger to sometimes hurry me along in Falls or back to Shelter if it looked like it was about to rain.
I think about the morning I found my mother, lips parted, blue, cold, and I nod, looking back at Dr. Banks. “My mother and Helmut died,” I say.
“And that’s all?” she asks me.
I think about the animal noise my grandmother made when I told her about how my mother died, her white fingers clutching tightly onto mine. I have this feeling that she and Dr. Banks think they know something about my life on Island that I do not. But I also know that that is impossible.
Dr. Banks raises her eyebrows, waiting for me to say something else. But I shrug. I really don’t understand what she’s waiting for.
That afternoon, Ben wants me to drive with him to the fish market to pick up dinner. We’ve walked together almost every afternoon along the beach, but so far, the only car I’ve been in is my grandmother’s. And only a few times. The last one, our failed trip to the salon, after which my grandmother spent the rest of the afternoon in her bedroom, just as she has done today. Resting her eyes.
She’s still up there when Ben walks through the front door without knocking, as he always does, and asks if I want to go with him. Ben has already told me that turning sixteen in California means that you are finally old enough to drive, and that he has had his license for six months now. I’d rather walk along the beach than drive anywhere because the car still frightens me a little. But I also know the fish market isn’t far and we don’t have to use the freeway to get there. And I am so tired of being trapped in my grandmother’s house.
“She’s in her bedroom,” I tell Ben. And he nods, as if he’s not surprised, and he climbs up the steps, two at time, calling her name.
A few minutes later, he is back downstairs again, smiling. “She’s cool with it,” he says. “As long as I promise to drive carefully.” He pauses. “Which I always do, by the way.” He laughs when he says it, which I think means maybe he actually doesn’t, but I don’t know the first thing about driving.
I’ve already learned that Ben spent a lot of time with my grandmother when he was younger. She said that his mom paid her to watch him. But really, she told me, he was watching me. She smiled when she said it, as if that all made perfect sense. I think that, in a way, Ben is what I would’ve been if I’d lived here my whole life. That she thinks of herself as his grandmother, and I guess that’s why she is okay with me going with him. She trusts him. And he seems to like her—a lot.
I am starting to trust him, too, I think now. Not the way I trust River, the way I trusted him as I stood by Falls that morning and he pleaded with me to leave Island. The way he offered me his hand, and I took it. It’ll be okay, he told me. And I wish I had convinced him then that it wouldn’t be. A part of me is angry with him now, for promising me, and then leaving me. Here. All alone. But even more, I am angry with myself. River is the dreamer; I am the practical one. I should’ve known better.
And I’m not alone here, I guess. I have my grandmother, and I have Ben. A team of professionals. Hundreds and hundreds of strangers in California, driving closely to one another on the I-5. When I open the window in my bedroom to climb out at night, I can hear the distant whir of all those cars, but strangely enough, I can’t hear the ocean from there.
It’s funny, though, how my insides feel so empty now. How I feel more alone surrounded by all these people than I ever did on Island.
Ben’s car is blue and much longer than my grandmother’s. It’s higher off the ground, too, and that’s because Ben says it’s an SUV, and it’s his mother’s car. “If I had my choice,” he says as he helps me in, “I’d drive something way cooler. A Jag or a Porsche.”
“Then why don’t you?” I ask.
He laughs. “Dude, maybe someday. When I’ve got tons of money.”
I don’t understand this money thing. Mrs. Fairfield has explained it to me, showing me dollar bills and coins, credit cards, and checks as I’ve repeatedly asked her where the money comes from. How people get it. Why they need it. I imagine this big, wide pool surrounded by rocks, like Fishing Cove, where money floats and people spear it with spears.
Mrs. Fairfield shakes her pointy coral head and laughs. That’s not the way the world works, Megan.
I do understand that money seems to be necessary to do anything here, and that I am going to have to figure out how to get some if I’m ever going to figure out how to get back to Island.
This is also why I like going places with Ben. The more I go, the more I leave my grandmother’s house, the more I learn about this world, for real.
On the ride to the fish market, Ben drives his SUV a little faster than my grandmother drives her red car, and the movement makes me feel sick again. The omelet my grandmother made for breakfast sloshes around in my stomach, threatening to come back up even though that was a long time ago. I hold on to the window, and I don’t breathe again until he stops and we are there.
We get out of the car, and the salt water curls deliciously in my nose, calming my stomach. I can’t see it from here, but I know we’re by the ocean, and that makes me happy.
“Wait,” Ben says as I start to walk without him. He runs around to my side and puts his arm around me. Then he turns and looks back quickly.
“Oh,” I say, realizing he is trying to shield me from the vultures. “They’re gone now. Didn’t you read about what happened in the newspaper?”
“The shooting, you mean?” I nod. “Well, at least they’re leaving you alone now, right?”
“I guess so,” I say. “But what do you think of it? The shooting. Everyone tried to explain it to me this morning. But I couldn’t really understand it.”
He shrugs. “It’s sad to say, but I guess I’m kind of used to it. That stuff happens all the time. I mean it happened to …” He looks at me hard for a moment and then shakes his head.
“To what?” I ask.
“Never mind.” He pauses. “It sucks. It really does. The world is a crazy, stupid place.”
The world, I’ve come to learn now that Mrs. Fairfield has taught me about maps, includes so much. The great wide Pacific Ocean. And the Atlantic, Indian, Arctic, and Southern Oceans, too. California. The United States. Samoa. And even Island, which, as hard as Mrs. Fairfield and I tried, we couldn’t locate on any maps she showed me. In the space where Mrs. Fairfield said Island should be, there is only blue, blue water. “Well,” Mrs. Fairfield had said. “I guess they’re going to have to redo this map now, aren’t they?” I didn’t tell her, but that upset me. I don’t think I want the rest of the great wide world to know about it. Island was mine and River’s, my mother’s and Helmut’s. And I would not consider it crazy, stupid, or sucks, like Ben considers his world. But deep down, I also worried about how hard it will be to find it again, if it isn’t even on Mrs.
Fairfield’s maps.
“Check this out,” Ben says now, opening the door to the tiny building in front of us. There are red letters on the door glass. I try to read them, but I don’t recognize the words. “Sandy’s Fish Market,” Ben says, helping me out.
“Thanks,” I say.
“Every fish you could imagine,” Ben says as we step inside. “Brought right off the boat.” The boat. I think of River and me lying there on the boat’s floor, our last night together, him holding on to me, promising me everything was going to be fine.
“They wheel them inside in these giant trash cans,” Ben is saying, and I realize he’s still talking about the fish. “These huge black bins piled up with fresh-caught fish. It’s kind of awesome to see.”
“Yeah, awesome,” I repeat back, doing as Mrs. Fairfield has asked me to—to echo Ben.
Awesome. It sounds like a silly, empty word. The words we used on Island had meaning. Fish. Water. Shelter. Falls. Spears. Fire. Everything meant something. Everything in our world was useful.
The door shuts behind us, chirping like a bird, and the smell of the ocean, dead fish, is strong in this small space. In front of me, there’s a large window filled with fish of all colors and sizes, already scaled, trimmed, cleaned, and filleted. Which is kind of disappointing. They don’t really even look like fish still.
“Come on,” Ben says, slipping a bill into my hand. “Twenty dollars. Pick whatever you want and pay yourself.”
“Did Mrs. Fairfield tell you to do this?” I ask.
He shrugs, and I laugh. Because it’s funny. Kind of. I take the twenty dollars and walk up to the window, trying to read the choices. The letters jumble and the words aren’t familiar, or maybe they are and I just don’t how to read them yet. Mrs. Fairfield talks a lot about letters and sounds, and sounding things out, but that seems like a lot of effort now, so I don’t even try it.
The man behind the window asks if he can help me. And instead of reading anything, I point to what looks the best to me, the fish that are most familiar to the ones I know. Silvery skin. Pink fleshy insides.
Searching for Sky Page 10