“What?” I feel an anger so thick it curls inside my body, in my blood, pouring and rushing into my head with the sound of the ocean so suddenly it’s hard to hear. The seaweed chokes my foot, and I kick at it, hard, until it flies. River is still talking, but I can’t make out what he’s saying.
Cold and broken. My grandmother is the worst of all of them. She showed River the pictures. She told him to stay away from me.
“No,” I finally say, grabbing onto River’s shoulder again. “She wasn’t right. She doesn’t know anything about me, about us. About Island.”
River stops talking, but his mouth is still open a little. I pull my face in close to him and listen for his breathing to even.
I notice the way River’s face and mine are almost touching, the way our breathing has evened in unison, as if we are one person. I notice that he still smells of salt water, and that being this close to him, my skin suddenly grows warm even in the cool night air. River is here, the same as he always was. But nothing is the same. I don’t feel the same. Maybe this is what my mother meant when she said things would change when we got older?
I want to tell River this, but I’m not sure how, so I stand up on my toes and lean in even closer, and do what I often saw my mother and Helmut do. I put my lips on his and I kiss him.
“Sky.” He pulls back. “What are you doing?”
I don’t know what I’m doing. Or why. But touching his lips with mine suddenly feels like an instinct for survival. Just like the ones we knew on Island. I need to show him how much I missed him, how empty I am without him. How he can never leave me again. How we fit together. River and Sky. Sky and River.
So instead of answering, I stand up on my tiptoes and kiss him again. I hold on to his lips with mine, and my entire body fills up with warmth from the inside out, as if we are back there again, in Ocean, the beautiful warm water holding us up, carrying us together.
“Skyblue,” he whispers, his mouth so close to mine that I think I can taste the sound of my name, my real name, in his voice. Warm and salty and just a little sweet like coconut milk on Island, and like everything I know to be true.
“It’s okay,” I whisper back. “We’re going to be okay.”
He hesitates for a moment, but then he smiles and wraps his arms around me tightly, pulling my body to him. He moves his mouth back to mine, and even through all our California clothes, I can still feel his warmth as I always knew it.
There are no words, good or bad, empty or filled with meaning, that could say any more than what we say to each other as our lips move tightly together. They fit, the way those circles I drew on the beach do, as if this is the way they were always supposed to be.
“Come on,” River whispers when he finally pulls back. “Come with me.”
He holds out his hand, and I take it.
Chapter 31
River and I hold hands as we walk down the beach, and by now the sun is almost up over the tall brown hills. I have the thought that my grandmother will notice the open window in my bedroom soon, that she and Ben will rush to the beach looking for me, and that I won’t be there, and she will be upset and worried. I feel bad for a moment, but then I think about what she did to River, and I push the feeling away. For the first time since I left Island, I know exactly who I am and where I’m supposed to be. Here. With River.
“Where are we going?” I ask River after we’ve walked for a little while. I wonder if he has a grandmother and a “team of professionals” to make him normal, but something tells me he doesn’t—that here in California, River is all on his own. For one thing, he is not wearing shoes, and for another, I notice now his shirt is on backward and his hair, though shorter, is messy, uncombed.
“My shelter,” he says. And immediately I think of the word house, because that’s what a shelter always seems to be in California, and now I think it’s strange that River doesn’t say this.
But I soon see why. River’s shelter lies underneath a long wood structure held up by tall sticks that spans from the high rocks above us, across the beach, out over into the water. We duck to walk underneath the wood, and inside it’s darker and smells a little like Bathroom Tree. When my eyes adjust, I see two men a little farther down, sleeping against each other in a pile of dirty-looking clothes.
River leads me to what I guess is his space, along the other end, where he has a blanket and a brown paper bag.
“This is where you’ve been?” I ask, and I feel a knot in my chest at the thought of him sleeping out here all alone, with no bed, nothing.
He nods, and he says, “It’s not that different from Island, really. And I can get everything I need here. If you climb up Rocks there are boxes of fruit and even fish some days.”
I think about the fish market, and I think that here in California, you have to pay money for these things, and I don’t know if River knows that. But I’m not going to mention it now. “You must be tired,” he says. I nod. I am. “Come on. We can sleep, and then we’ll figure everything else out later.”
He lies down on his blanket, and he pats the space next to him. I lie down, too, and he turns the way he always did on our rabbit pelt mats in Shelter, so our backs are touching, hugging each other. I hear the rush of the ocean close by, and then I close my eyes and fall asleep.
When I wake up, my back hurts, and it takes me a minute to remember where I am. I sit up and stretch, and River is already awake, sitting there, staring at me. “I got us some fruit,” he says, and he hands me a small green carton filled with strawberries. For some reason I think of that stupid picture Ben showed me in his laptop computer, River holding on to a basket of poisoned apples, grinning, but I push the thought away and take a strawberry. It’s sweet, and the juice melts in my throat, even as I think of what my grandmother told me, that it’s dangerous to eat fruit without washing it in the sink first.
“Thanks,” I say, and I smile at him. He smiles back, and I watch his lips for a minute, remembering how they felt against mine last night, in the darkness, on the beach. I want to feel them again, even though now the thought makes me feel embarrassed, and I think my cheeks might be turning as red as the strawberries.
“Hey.” He reaches out for my hand. “Are you sorry you came with me?”
“No way.” I shake my head, and I’m not sorry. From farther down, one of the dirty men groans and drinks something from a brown bag, and I quickly look away. “Don’t you have anyone here in California like my grandmother?” I ask him, and I think guiltily of the way her voice shook when she talked about my mother and her pretty pink bracelet. But then I think of what she did to River, and I hate her all over again.
He shakes his head. “Helmut has a sister who lives in Temecula. They let me call her from Military Hospital, but she didn’t want to have anything to do with me.” He shrugs. “I don’t blame her. She says this Temecula is pretty small and she has little kids, and, well, everyone would know me there. It’s bad enough that she’s already Helmut’s sister.”
“I’m sorry,” I say, reaching for his hand and squeezing it.
“It’s fine,” he says. “I don’t even remember her.” I nod. “Anyway, they said at Military Hospital that since I’m eighteen they would just let me go, on my own.”
“But you’re not eighteen yet,” I say, wondering if I’ve missed his birthday. Even though Mrs. Fairfield has shown me the calendar, and I’ve been making pencil notches behind my bed, it’s not the same as Tree of Days, and I have trouble keeping track, especially when some mornings my grandmother would shake me awake after I’d barely slept.
He shrugs. “I am. I have been for a few months, I guess.” He pauses. “That doctor at Military Hospital, she told me we weren’t counting right on Tree of Days.”
“Oh,” I say, but I don’t know that I believe that. It was easy to count. A notch for each day. And we always made one, every morning. Not like here, where I sometimes get distracted and have forgotten or haven’t been able to find my pencil.
�
��The doctor said that our birthday should count from the day you first come into the world as a baby human. She said the birthday we celebrated on Island—the day Helmut first put us in Ocean and gave us our names—that isn’t what a birthday really is.”
“Oh,” I say again, not sure I believe it. The day of your birth is the reminder of the day the water first cleanses you, gives you life, the day you are named and become one with Island. I was too young to remember being dipped in Ocean that first time, but Helmut always told the story. He told how immediately I swam, even though I was just two, how my head bobbed to the surface and I just knew the water. But how River was four years old and nearly drowned.
“Dr. Cabot said it was like we were reborn. New kids. River and Sky. Not Lucas and Megan. Lucas and Megan have different birthdays, I guess.” He shrugs, and I wonder what day my birthday is, at least according to Dr. Cabot, if I am already sixteen or not quite yet.
“Did you remember on Island that you had another name?” I ask him.
He shakes his head. “No. I remember the water part, that first birthday. I remember coughing water, and Petal pulling my head up and hugging me.” He pauses. “And I remember things from this other life … but not the name. No. Lucas.” He laughs grimly now. “He’s like this boy I never even knew.”
I nod in agreement, so glad I have River here, finally, to share with. And for some reason I think of what Mrs. Fairfield told me about religion. Maybe that thing about Helmut dipping us in Ocean was the kind of thing she was waiting for me to tell her, but I didn’t really think of it at the time. And I’m not sure if that dipping meant something else that I never understood. Not that it matters now anyway. I clear my throat. “So, you’ve been here on your own all this time?” I ask him. “I don’t understand how.”
“Your grandmother gave me money,” he says softly. “When she told me to stay away from you, she paid me what she said would be enough to live with for a while, and she found me a shelter that she called Apartment. But she said I had to promise to stay there, away from you.” He pauses. “I tried—I really did, Sky. But there were so many people there, and they weren’t nice. They yelled things at me. And there were all these bright suns flashing in my eyes.”
“Cameras,” I say, thinking of the vultures at the bottom of my grandmother’s driveway and about the fact that River had no one to shield him from them. Helmut was many things, some of which I’m still not completely understanding, but I don’t know that he was wrong when he called me the practical one and River the dreamer.
“So,” River is saying now, “I found this place. It was close enough to you so I could keep an eye on you.”
“Keep an eye on me?”
“Yeah.” He shrugs. “I’ve kind of been following you from a distance. Just watching to make sure you’re safe.”
“You’ve been tracking me?” He nods, and I think of the way Helmut used to hunt and track boar when we were younger. He would never let River go with him, because he always said River didn’t have it in him to track an animal. The thought makes me laugh a little now. River has been tracking me here in California. “So that’s how you found me in the ocean the other night?” I say.
He nods again. “You looked like you were going to drown.”
“I wasn’t,” I say quickly. “I’m a good swimmer.”
“I know,” he says. “But you looked like … I don’t know, like you weren’t trying to swim. Maybe you wanted to drown?”
“I didn’t,” I say. “I just wanted the water to heal me, to take me back.”
“It doesn’t, though, you know.” He looks down, and I think he’s remembering that morning, how hard it was to drag the bodies of our parents all the way from Shelter to Ocean. How I told River then what I hoped, what I wished, for, and then how Ocean didn’t answer me, how it just kept going on and on the way it always had. “The only way to go back,” he says now, “is with a boat.”
His voice is calm and serious, and I think he means it—that he wants to go back, too. And that somehow in his life here, without his team of professionals, River, the dreamer, has figured out a way. “Do you have a boat?” I ask him, my voice rising with excitement, though even as I say it, I am having to squash the feeling that it could not be that easy. That nothing is that easy here.
River shakes his head. “I just have this,” he says, pointing to the paper bag. “Money.”
“You need money for everything here,” I tell him, and he nods as if he already knows.
“Do you want to go back, Sky?”
“Yes,” I say quickly. “Of course.” I think about my grandmother and her house and her team of professionals, and then Ben and his nice mother and his drawings and his music. Going back would mean letting go of all of it, and something a little uneasy twists in my stomach at the thought of leaving it all behind, going back to Island, a place that was ours but also once was Helmut’s.
River smiles as big as he did that afternoon of my sixteenth birthday when he held out the fish, and I wonder if he still believes what he told me just before we left, that if we stay on Island, we, too, could die. Maybe I could talk to my grandmother; I could make her listen, convince her that River could come live in her house with us. But I think again of what she did, how mean she was to him at Military Hospital, how it was she who has kept him from me in California, and I know that I can’t. That I will either be with River or be with her, and I will choose River every time.
River leans in closer and wraps his arms around me tightly. I put my head on his chest, and his heart beats the way it always did. “I can’t let you go, Skyblue,” he whispers into my hair, tangling his finger in my now-messy braid.
“You don’t have to,” I whisper back, though even as I say it, I wonder how it’s really possible. How we can really find our way back to Island when Mrs. Fairfield couldn’t even locate it on her maps.
River and I spend the rest of the day and the night lying together on his blanket, speaking in whispers. I’ve missed this, having someone I can trust and tell and ask anything. Though after a little while, my back hurts, lying on the ground this much, and a part of me longs for my bed inside Pink Bedroom. I don’t share this thought with River.
“Did you remember?” I ask him instead, after the darkness has fallen and the yellow moon seeps in through the cracks above us in the wood. “About the apples? I mean, did you always know, the whole time on the Island?”
“No,” he whispers. “I remembered Eden. That was the farm where we lived. I remembered my mother being there.”
“That’s where you were when she was carrying you?”
He nods. “I think so.” He pauses. “She would sing to me, too, when I was falling asleep.”
“What would she sing?” I ask.
“I don’t know, but I liked it.” He closes his eyes, as if remembering the sound of her voice, her closeness to him. “It was nice there. We were happy.”
I close my eyes, too, and I try so hard to remember, even the smallest inkling of it. I think of the grassy hill from inside Ben’s laptop computer, and the room with the table where everyone sat, but none of it comes into mind as something real, as a memory. I remember nothing before Island, and I think again that it’s not fair that River is older, that he has something more to hold on to.
“I always knew that there was something else,” he says. “I just didn’t know how it ended … that we couldn’t come back here because of it. I thought Eden would still be there, waiting for us, you know?”
I don’t know. But I nod anyway, my head nudging against his strong shoulder. I think about Island, and I wonder if it’s possible, if you can ever really go back to a place you’ve left behind.
River strokes my hair with his hand. “You knew something, though, didn’t you? Deep down you must’ve suspected?” I say.
“Why do you say that?”
“You knew about the mushrooms. You saved me that night.” It’s the first time I’m admitting it, even to myself. That Helmut
might’ve known the mushrooms were poison and given my mother the mushrooms on purpose, that maybe he wanted her to die, and maybe she wanted to die, too. That he wanted me to die. All of us. I push down all the anger that comes with that thought and listen for River’s answer.
“I didn’t know,” he says. “Not really. But I just knew not to trust Helmut. Just this feeling in my gut that I was always pushing against him for survival … in spite of all his rules. And I knew he was lying about where he’d found the mushrooms.”
“You saved me,” I whisper, leaning into him.
He turns to face me, too, and our lips find each other again and again in the darkness.
Chapter 32
The next morning, river’s shelter begins to fill with thin smoke wafting over from the dirty men farther down. They don’t appear to be cooking anything, and their smoke smells different from cooking smoke, sweet and kind of sickening.
“Come on,” River says. “Let’s go up Rocks, and I’ll show you everything that’s up there.”
The way he says Rocks, I think of the ones at the edge of Fishing Cove, and it confuses me for a moment until I realize he means the steps that wind up from the beach over the tall high rocks up above us. But I say nothing as we hold hands and climb out from under the wooden shelter, walk up the beach, and then climb the winding stairs to the top.
I am without shoes, the way I always was on Island, the way River is, but now the sand scratches between my toes and the hard steps hurt the bottoms of my feet, and I feel strangely naked. River’s shirt is still on backward, and it looks funny, with the tag sticking out in the front. I think about telling him to change it, but I don’t want him to feel bad, so I don’t say anything.
“They have Falls here,” River says, his voice filled with excitement, and I look up. He’s pointing to what seems to be like the shower at my grandmother’s house, though outside in the open. I glance at it uneasily, at the thought of being naked here, outside, where the air is colder than it is inside my grandmother’s bathroom. “And there are Bathroom Trees there,” River is saying as he points to two wooden structures.
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