“Not even your name,” she says softly. I nod. “So what if I call you Sky? Would you like me more?”
“I don’t think so,” I say.
She laughs. “Your brutal honesty is refreshing.” She smiles more openly now, and maybe if I think about it, I would like her a little better if she called me Sky. I’m not sure why, though, but I can’t tell her that. “So back to your question,” she says. “Why Helmut never changed his name.” She leans over and rubs her forehead. “It’s a very good question, Megan—Sky,” she quickly corrects herself. I can’t help it—I smile a little. “I don’t know that I can give you the answer. From what we know of Helmut, he was a narcissist, which means he was very much in love with himself, his image. He held himself above others. People like him usually do.”
“People like him?” I say softly.
“It’s complicated,” she says, and that’s when I understand that Mrs. Fairfield has been hiding things from me, not reading me all of the newspaper, leaving the most important pieces out. I think about how my grandmother asked if he’d killed my mother, and I wonder why she would think that, what it is that everyone in this world thinks they know about that I don’t.
“It’s complicated,” I echo after her. “You mean, you don’t want to tell me?” Outside, I watch the bloated moon move behind a pale gray cloud. I listen hard, wishing I could hear the ocean from here. But I can’t. There’s so much noise in this house. Machinery. The television box. The dishwasher. The fan whirring above my head. The refrigerator buzzing in the next room. My head hurts.
“It’s not that I don’t want to … it’s just that … I want to wait until you’re strong enough here. Until you have the tools to process it all.”
That’s ridiculous. I am strong already. Stronger than her, than anyone I have met in this California world. “You think Helmut was a bad man,” I say. “Everyone thinks he was. But he wasn’t. He loved us. He loved me.” I hear my voice rising in my throat, my face turning red in frustration.
“It is just all very complicated,” she says again, pressing her pink lips together.
She is such a dick, I think, Ben’s word echoing in my head. I’m still not sure what the word means, but I’m pretty sure that she is one, whatever it is. “He was like my father.” I am yelling now. “And there was nothing complicated about it. Not there, anyway. Everything was simple. He loved me. He loved us. He took care of us.”
She nods slowly. “Why don’t you calm down and tell me what you know about your real father.”
“I don’t want to calm down!” I yell, and I am breathing heavily. I want to reach across and grab her palm tree neck and shake it until she tells me everything I want to know. I resist the urge and twist my fingers together.
“Do you know how he died?” she asks. I shake my head, and suddenly I’m uncomfortable again. My stomach hurts. My head aches. I should probably feel sadness, for this man, this real father who is dead. But I never knew him, so I don’t. “You want me to tell you the truth?”
“Yes!” I say, and I am yelling louder now. The noise from the television box in the other room quiets, and I know my grandmother has heard me yelling and is now listening in. But why is it so hard here for people just to tell the truth? Why does everything have to be so complicated?
“Your father didn’t just happen to die. He was murdered,” she says. Her voice is calm, quiet. “You know what that is, right?”
I nod, thinking of the article I’d read with Mrs. Fairfield about the shooting. Murdered. It wasn’t a word I ever needed on Island, and yet here in California, it suddenly feels so necessary, so important to understand. “My father was murdered?” I repeat back, in a whisper now, trying to make it mean something in my mind. But it doesn’t.
“Yes,” she says. “He was murdered. And I’m sorry that I have to tell you this, but you said you want the truth.” She pauses. “Helmut was the one who did it. Helmut murdered your father.”
No. I shake my head. I shake it and I shake it.
“You asked for the truth,” she’s saying, “and I did as you asked. Now you need to do as I ask and talk to me. How does this make you feel?”
I shake my head. Again.
I can’t listen to her anymore or talk to her anymore. She is cold and broken. A skeleton.
I stand up and run past Dr. Banks, past the worried red face of my grandmother peeking around the corner from the next room, as if she felt the disturbance in me the way I would once feel the coming of a rainstorm.
“Honey,” she calls after me. “What are you doing?” My hand reaches for the back door. “It’s dark out there. Where are you going?” She won’t follow me, because she told me her eyes are bad, that it’s hard for her to see at night. Even if she wanted to come after me, she couldn’t see to catch me in the darkness.
The door slams behind me, and I hear her yelling, “Wait, at least let’s call Ben to go with you.” But I run fast; I don’t stop. I climb the fence and make my way to the path, and then I run faster through the pine trees. The loose pine needles sting the bottoms of my feet, as I run too fast and my flip-flops slide, but I don’t care. I reach down and take them off. I’m done with this place. With California, filled with skeletons and liars. I’m done with my grandmother’s team of professionals, with all the things she and they think I need to learn. I’m done with Dr. Banks. With Megan. With all of it.
The cool sand hits my toes, and it’s a relief. The pads of my feet still sting from the pine needles, but I don’t stop until I reach the edge of the water, until I feel it roaring in my ears and in my heart. This is what I know. This is what I know is true. The great, wide mouth of the Pacific, calling to me.
I walk in the water, and it’s freezing, cold enough to burn my skin, but I don’t care. I want to swim in it, to fall in it, under the waves to let them carry me away, home. I want the tide to pull me out and far south until the water is warmer and bluer. Until the sky is familiar and the air clings to my skin.
In the sting of the water, I think of Helmut, of all the nights he brought me food and things to keep me warm in Shelter. Of the way he taught me things: to fish, to trap, to track, to cook. Of the way his giant palm would cap my head lightly when I made him proud. My mother explained things to me and River, things like family and love and counting seconds into minutes into hours into days, which became notches. River knew Helmut was his, and Petal was mine. But Petal loved him like a son and Helmut loved me like a daughter.
Now nothing can be true. None of it. And I hate Dr. Banks, and I hate my real father, who I never met, who I never knew. And I hate myself for hating him.
I am in the cold ocean up to my waist now, and my wet jeans feel awful sticking to my skin, but I keep walking. Hate is heavy, and it tugs me under, hard. I go in to my chest. I bob in a wave that breaks over my head, and then I’m sputtering, shivering. But I need to be in the ocean. It will heal me, make me whole again.
I think of the time when my mother’s monthly blood did not come, according to Tree of Days. We made notches and notches, and still it did not come. My mother’s face opened, like a flower, and so did Helmut’s with the width of a smile I never saw from him. And then notches and notches and notches later, the monthly blood did come. My mother’s face grew clammy, cold and pale, and there was so much blood that she couldn’t stop it with a palm leaf, like she normally did. Helmut picked her up and carried her, running her body down to Beach, running with her into Ocean, holding on to her there until the waves healed her, until the blood stopped coming. The water heals, and it washes away.
My head aches with so much new knowledge that I do not want, that I did not ask for. I let the waves tug me and pull me, take me and hold me under. Until suddenly I feel a hand on my shoulder, an arm around my chest, pulling me back, pulling me to the sand.
“Skyblue,” he whispers into my hair. “What are you doing?”
Chapter 25
I’m still shivering back on the sand. The California night air a
nd water are too cold to do what I just did, and my teeth chatter, and it’s hard to catch my breath. River puts his arms around me and rubs my skin, trying to warm me, and I’m crying, but I’m not sure if it’s because I’m happy or angry or confused. None of them. Or all of them.
“Where have you been?” I whisper to him, and the words are hard to get out. He doesn’t answer, but he pulls me close to his chest and holds me there until my crying stops and I begin to hiccup. His heart beats quickly in my ear, even through the fabric of his sweatshirt, such a familiar sound that it dulls the cold and the water, and for a moment I hold on to just the sound of him, living, next to me.
“What were you doing, Sky? Running in Ocean like that. The current is strong here. It’ll pull you under.”
“I was fine,” I tell him. “I’m a good swimmer.” I wasn’t swimming, exactly, but I don’t know what I was doing, so I don’t tell him.
“That’s not the point,” he says. “You shouldn’t take chances like that.”
“Right, like you weren’t the one who swam past Rocks to catch a fish?”
“That was different,” he says. “Everything is different now.”
“Yeah.” I pull away from him, and I shiver again, but I wrap my own arms around my knees, curling myself into a tight ball.
“Skyblue,” he whispers, kissing the top of my head, the way he always did before we went to sleep on Island. He takes off his sweatshirt and pulls it over my head. I close my eyes, breathe deeply. It smells faintly of fish and salt water. Home.
“River,” I whisper when he sits back, “did Helmut kill my real father?”
He doesn’t answer for a moment, and then he says simply: “Yes.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yes.” He sighs.
I think of what Dr. Banks called my brutal honesty, and I think River’s is worse. With one word, he makes me feel like I need to throw up, and I clutch my stomach tightly. “How come you never told me?”
“I didn’t know,” he says. “At least, I didn’t know for sure.” He pauses. “It wasn’t just your father, Sky.” His voice falters a little, and I reach across the sand for his hand. Our fingers lace together, interlocking perfectly. “It was my mother, too.”
That doesn’t make any sense. If River did not leave me at the hospital to be with his mother, then where did he go, and why? He can’t live at the fish market or on the market’s boat. People live in houses here.
“Megan,” a voice calls from the blackness, loudly. Then a little softer: “Island Girl, are you out here? Sky?”
“It’s Ben,” I whisper.
“Who?” River asks.
“He’s …” and I’m not sure how to explain it. I want to say that he’s my friend, but I remember that’s the way Ben described River, and it doesn’t seem right to use the same word to describe both of them.
“That boy that you’re always with,” he says softly, and I wonder how he knows.
“Sky,” Ben calls again. “Where are you? Alice is freaking out …”
“I have to go.” River pulls his hand away quickly, and then leans over and tangles his finger in my braid.
“Don’t go.” I reach up and hold on to his arm. “I’ve wanted to find you this whole time. We have to figure out a way to go back to Island, Riv. Together.”
But he tugs it away. “I have to go,” he says again, pulling farther away from me.
“Sky,” Ben calls, his voice floating closer.
“Ben’s nice—you’ll like him,” I say to River, grabbing for his arm, but he slips through my fingers. And even as I say it, I’m not sure. I think of what Ben said the other day, about my grandmother hating River and how he trusts her.
“Don’t do anything stupid,” River whispers behind him. “And whatever you do, don’t tell your grandmother you saw me.”
“River,” I plead. “Please. Don’t leave …”
The night wind whispers against my cheek, and in a second, his body has disappeared into the darkness, down the same pine path I ran here on. And Ben is there, putting his hand on my shoulder.
“There you are,” he says. “What the hell? Alice said you just ran away.”
“I …” I look around for any trace of River. But the only shapes I can make out in the darkness and the hazy glow of moonlight are the tall pines, arching in the wind. Don’t tell your grandmother you saw me, he said, and I’m not sure how much I can trust Ben now. I don’t think he’d keep secrets from my grandmother, his beloved Alice who has spent his entire life taking care of him almost as if he is her own. The way Helmut did for me. And I swallow hard, unable still to believe it. Helmut murdered my father, River’s mother. “I just wanted to go for a swim,” I finally say to Ben.
“Now?” he asks. “Dude, it’s, like, sixty degrees out and pitch black.”
I shrug. “I just wanted to be with Ocean … the ocean for a little bit. All right?”
He sits down next to me, in the spot where River just was. “Yeah, I get it,” he says, and his voice sounds so kind and understanding that I feel a little bad that I’m keeping something from him now. I’m not lying, exactly, I know. But I’m not being brutally honest, either. “You miss it a lot, don’t you?” he says after a few minutes. “Your island, I mean.” I know what he means, and I nod.
“Did you know that Helmut killed my father?” I ask him. Even as I say it, as I know River believes it, it still doesn’t sound right or true. Or possible. Why would Helmut do that? How could he do that?
“Yeah.”
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
He shrugs. “Alice said not to talk about all the bad stuff that happened in the past. That it might upset you, keep you from adjusting or something.”
“All the bad stuff?” I say. “There’s more?”
“I don’t know,” he says. “It was all a long time ago. I wasn’t there.”
“But there is more?”
“Yeah.” He sighs. “I guess so.”
“Then you need to tell me.”
“I don’t know …,” he says. “You should ask Alice. Or your weirdo therapist lady.”
“No. I want you to tell me. You’re my … friend, right?” Though I am still not sure whether he is or not.
He stands up, holding out his hand for me to take. “Come on, Alice is back at her house totally freaking out. And I ran out of my house so fast to come look for you that I left my phone there, so I can’t call her. Let me just walk you home now. Okay? And we can talk about this more another time.”
“Home?” I whisper. I look out ahead of me. The water rushes against the sand. River called it Ocean, but it’s not. It’s the ocean. Everything in California is more distant, more removed, not belonging to anyone at all.
And the water here didn’t heal me; it chilled me, and I can’t make myself feel warm now, even in River’s sweatshirt.
“I don’t even have Ocean anymore,” I tell Ben.
“Sure you do,” Ben says. “It’s right here. Right in front of us.”
I ignore his hand and stand up on my own. “But it’s not mine anymore.”
Later, in my bed, I lie there wrapped tightly in River’s sweatshirt. I pull the hood over my head and inhale deeply, and then I close my eyes and breathe in his new, California scent. It’s different than it was on Island. But there’s still something about it that reminds me distinctly of him.
The sweatshirt is warm, a little damp, and holds on to me tightly, like the feel of River’s back hugging mine as we lay there together on our rabbit pelt mats.
Chapter 26
That night, I dream of Helmut.
We walk along the edge of Ocean together, and Helmut holds his spear tightly in one hand, my hand tightly in his other. I am small again—five, maybe—and when I get tired of walking, Helmut picks me up and places me on his thick shoulders. I wrap my arms around his neck, getting tangled up in his blond hair and beard, the same yellow color as River’s. I’m laughing, until I look down and see the circl
e of blood around his neck, a sharp, fatal cut, like the one River made with the stone to take the head off my birthday fish.
He deserved it, River says to me from somewhere behind me on the beach. He killed them.
I wake up sweating, my arms tangled in River’s too-big sweatshirt. It was a memory, my dream, until it got to the awful part. Helmut would often carry me on his shoulders down on Beach when my feet got sore and tired, when it was too hot or too hard for me to walk. He would bounce me a little and teach me things, telling me about the tides and the moons, and the best way to catch and prepare a fish. I was six when he let me try it with his spear for the first time. I shot it into the water and pulled it back, squealing with delight to see a slippery silver fish on the point.
“Shhh.” Helmut put his large hand over my mouth. “You’ll scare the rest of them away.” Then he smiled at me. “Let’s go show Petal what you did. Only six and already catching dinner.”
Back on the sand, Helmut lifted me up and hung me on his shoulders. They shook when he laughed, great big booms of laughter. In his hand he held out the spear, my first dead fish, dangling and bloody, on the end.
If my grandmother overheard my conversation with Dr. Banks, or if Dr. Banks told her what happened last night, she doesn’t mention it when I walk downstairs this morning. When Ben walked me back in last night, she’d only clutched me tightly to her, so tightly it was almost hard to breathe, and whispered into my hair, “Don’t run off like that again, Megan. You scared me. I already lost you once, you know. I can’t lose you again.”
But instead of feeling her joy, I’d felt annoyed. What about what I’ve lost? No one seems to care.
At the table in her kitchen this morning, she sits there in her pink bathrobe, her blond hair uncombed, holding on tightly to a steaming cup of coffee. At my place she’s already put out a glass of coconut milk and something new today I don’t recognize.
“Blueberry muffin,” she says as I eye it skeptically. It looks nothing like a blue berry.
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