Searching for Sky

by Jillian Cantor

  “What took you so long?” I ask him.

  “Sorry,” he says. “I was trying not to … bring attention to myself.” But by the way he frowns when he says it, I’m guessing that he did bring some attention. I think about the vultures yelling at him outside of some empty, soulless shelter—Apartment, he called it.

  “Okay,” I say, and stand up on my toes to give him a kiss. I’m so glad he’s here now, he’s okay, that any annoyance or worry I felt at waiting for him has already left me. “So … did you find a boat?”

  He nods, grinning, just the way he did on my birthday when he caught us a fish. “I found a man who said he’d take us to Samoa in his boat if I brought him all my money.”

  “Really?” I’m surprised. Just like that? River and I could go back, with a man. On a boat.

  “Really,” River says.

  But it feels too easy for this California world, where nothing is easy, and I wonder if River misunderstood or if this man was lying to him. I realize I should’ve gone to talk to him with River, even if it was risky. Because River doesn’t understand as much about this world as I do, and I’m not sure if I trust now that he has found us a real way home.

  “So we’re going now?” I ask. My heart thrums heavily in my chest, too fast, and for a moment, I can’t catch my breath.

  He shakes his head. “Soon. He said there’s a storm coming, and after it passes, he’ll take us.”

  “A storm,” I whisper, closing my eyes and thinking as I always do of that last night my mother was alive, the way the thunder rolled like breath, heavy enough to shake Shelter. The way the rain covered us the next morning on our horrible walk to Ocean.

  “Yeah.” River takes my hand. “He said it’s coming soon, so we should get going. He said to come back tomorrow morning with all my money. And then he will take us in his boat.”

  I nod and I think of how afraid I once was of a boat coming to Island, taking us away. And how now we need a boat so badly. The only thing that can save us. Take us back. We have to be sure that we can trust this man with the boat, that if we give him River’s money, he really will take us to Samoa. And now I have a nervous feeling in my stomach. Uncertainty.

  But River is smiling so big, so pleased with himself, that I swallow the feeling, and I hold on to his hand through the thick of the trees.

  Pine needles stab at the bottoms of my feet, piercing my skin. My soles are thick from years and years of walking through sand without shoes, but not thick enough for pine needles, and they sting and burn until I have to slow down.

  Back in River’s shelter, the dirty men are laughing. There are more of them now. Three or maybe four. Their smoke tufts in the air, making the space around us sweet smelling and hazy. It makes me feel sleepy. And the bottoms of my feet ache now. I wish for the aloe plants, but I tell River I’m going to walk to the edge of the ocean instead. The ocean heals and soothes, even if the water is colder here.

  “Do you want to come with me?” I ask him.

  He hesitates for a minute and glances uneasily at the dirty men, then his paper bag, and he shakes his head. “I’ll wait here,” he says. I glance beyond the side of his Shelter, and I can see the edge of the water. “You won’t go in too far?” he says softly, and I know he’s thinking of that other night when he pulled me out from beneath the waves.

  “And you’ll be here when I get back?” I ask, keeping my voice light, teasing him, but not really. I mean it.

  He nods, and his hand falls on my back, where my braid used to be. Its absence feels heavier now than its existence. But I think of what he said, how the man with the boat will take us back soon. To Samoa. And then from there we’ll find Island, or Island will find us. The world will be perfect again. It will. In time my hair will grow, and I can forget words like murder, cult, poison, grandmother, Ben. I want this all to be truth so badly that I tell myself that it has to be. There is nothing else.

  “When you get back from Ocean,” River is saying now, “we’ll go get more fish.”

  I don’t correct him, tell him that Ocean is the ocean here. That even though they are the same—the Pacific, really—they are not the same at all. Soon enough, River and I will be back at Ocean again. Together.

  I smile at him, and then I run down to the edge of the water, the roar of the ocean swallowing every other sound, everything else. I don’t hear the dirty men or smell their smoke. I put my feet in the cool rush of the water. It stings and it chills, and then it soothes. The waves are loud and strong and capped with white. I look up, and the sky, I notice now, is a silver gray.

  For a little while, I don’t hear anything except for the water. Except for Island calling to me, whispering to me across the loud, strong Pacific. It’s still there, waiting. For us. Calling us back. I hear nothing else.

  And then, suddenly, I do.

  Suddenly the dirty men rush across the beach, screaming.

  Chapter 34

  I know immediately that something’s wrong. I feel it in my chest, a deep sharp pain, like the way I felt when I realized my mother’s lips were slightly parted and blue, when I pushed her harder and harder and her body fell limply back at me, over and over again. I just knew. And I know now, too.

  I run out of the water, running up the beach as fast as I can. “River!” I shout. He doesn’t answer me. “River!” I shout again.

  My feet push hard against the hill, the sand, but I run and push back until I can barely breathe. I duck under the wood where the dirty men were, where their dirty things still are, and farther up, near River’s spot, I can see only shadows. Two of them. “River!” I shout again as I run closer, and his head turns. His entire face falls, and he shakes his head. I can see it in the depths of his green eyes that I know so well it’s almost as if they belong to me. No, he’s telling me. Stop. Run.

  But I don’t. Of course I don’t.

  The other shadow turns, too, and I am close enough now to see it’s a tall person dressed in all black, black clothing covering everything except the space of his eyes, a living, breathing shadow. The living part I can only tell from the steady rise and fall of his shoulders.

  River shakes his head again, slowly, carefully, but I push forward until I am close enough to touch him, until I grab his hand, feel his warm skin against mine. A relief.

  “Don’t move,” the shadow growls, and that’s when I understand what is happening, or I think I do. I see his arm is outstretched, and at the end of his black-gloved hand, there’s something else black: a gun. It looks just like the one in the picture Mrs. Fairfield showed me in the newspaper when she tried to explain the shooting to me. I didn’t exactly understand how guns worked, but now her words echo in my head, about guns being able to kill people quickly. Very dangerous, she told me.

  Then why do people have them here? I asked her.

  Well—she thought about it—to hunt, I guess.

  I tucked it in the back of my head, one more silly thing about California, that people here need something dangerous to hunt, rather than using traps like the ones Helmut built on Island.

  “Give me the bag,” the black shadow growls now, and he gestures with his gun to the brown bag behind River. He is hunting us, I think.

  “No,” River says, puffing out his chest, and I realize that he doesn’t understand. That he doesn’t know what a gun is. That he doesn’t know that this small black thing is so powerful it can kill him. Both of us. He’s still the dreamer. I’m still the practical one.

  “Just give him the bag, Riv,” I say, trying to keep my voice even, but I hear the words tremble and break.

  “No,” River says again. He looks at me. “It’s everything we have.” The money my grandmother gave him, the money River promised to the man with the boat. Mrs. Fairfield told me about a place called Banks that will keep your money safe for you, and I always imagined that’s where Dr. Banks went when she left my grandmother’s house each day, as if her tiny gray body could be the keeper of all money in California, which made no sense t
o me, that everyone would trust her so much. But of course, River doesn’t know any of this. River didn’t have a Mrs. Fairfield, or a Dr. Banks.

  The shadow person moves closer now and grabs my arm, twisting it tightly so that it hurts. I cry out in pain without meaning to.

  “Give me the bag,” he says to River, jabbing his gun against my shoulder. It is cold and hard, and the spot where he jabbed it stings a little, but it’s so small. It doesn’t seem like something that could actually hurt me, that could kill me. River eyes it suspiciously, and I know he’s not going to give the shadow person the bag now. River, who saved me from the mushrooms, from the scrape on my leg, from the dark, cool depths of the California ocean.

  He moves so quickly that for a second I’m not sure what’s happening. River’s reaching for me and for the gun all at once. He doesn’t know. He doesn’t understand what the gun can do. I want to open my mouth to scream it, to tell him, but everything is happening too quickly, and I can’t.

  Suddenly there’s noise. The loudest, hardest claps of thunder that I have ever heard or felt. Everything is hot and shaking and broken. I’m falling; River’s falling. A pearl of smoke whispers in the air.

  The shadow grabs the brown bag and hangs above us for a moment. And then it’s gone, blackness onto the sand.

  I can’t move. I am stilled, like a fish hanging on the end of my spear, eyes still open, air still moving through gills, but perfectly and completely still, as if moving is impossible this close to the end. I can’t move. The whisper of smoke climbs higher against the top of the wooden shelter.

  “River,” I shout, or maybe I whisper. I’m not sure, because all I can hear in my ears is the roar of the thunder, not my own words. He doesn’t answer. “River,” I try again.

  I want to stand up and run to find him, but I can’t get my legs to work, so I crawl across the sand instead, pulling as hard as I can with my fingernails, clawing my way to him. I reach my arm around and around and around for the feel of his warm body. Our money is gone, I think. I don’t know how we’ll get back to Island, but we’re still here. Together. River and Sky. It will be okay. It has to be.

  “River,” I say again, and then my hand hits his. His fingers squeeze mine softly, and I sigh, and finally, I can lean up a little bit.

  And then I see him. He’s lying on his back, a bright red flower seeping across his chest over his too-big shirt, growing and growing. His eyes are closed, and beads of sweat line his forehead.

  “River!” I scream.

  But I don’t think anyone can hear me. It’s like we’re there again. Back on Island, alone.

  Chapter 35

  Everything next becomes hazy, like the low fog that I now know hangs over the California ocean in the mornings. The marine layer. It hangs in my head and in my heart, covering, weighting, changing. I will never be the same.

  People rush under River’s shelter, wearing black and white, speaking loudly and quickly. Someone picks me up and carries me, and that’s when I realize that I really can’t walk, that my legs no longer know how to work, or that they just don’t want to.

  River is pulled away on a long, thin bed, like the one I was lying on in that newspaper picture I kept under my pillow. I shout for him over and over, or I want to, I try to. He promised me he wouldn’t leave me again, I think. He promised me. He made me a promise.

  Someone places a clear triangle over my nose and mouth. I struggle to push it away. “It’s just to help you breathe,” a voice says. “Don’t be afraid. You’ve been shot, but we’re taking you to the hospital.”

  “So sad,” another voice says. “These teenage runaways down here.”

  They don’t know me, I think. They don’t know I’m Island Girl. That River is River. I can still save him. I can still stop them from taking us away, pulling us apart.

  There’s a hand on my arm, a sharp, jabbing sting like that morning when Sergeant Sawyer held my arm, and then, again, I’m drowning in blackness.

  In the blackness, there are voices, and loud wailing noises like birds being feathered before they are fully dead. I roll and I shake, and then I climb under the water. It pulls me in and it heals me. It’s cold and gray, and then it changes, and it’s warm and blue.

  River is with me, just beyond Rocks, holding on tightly to me as we bob up and down in the gentle water, our fishing spears in our hands.

  “Look,” he tells me. “It’s not so bad beyond Rocks, after all. The water is calm and warm. And there are fish everywhere.” He’s grinning big, like that afternoon when I turned sixteen and he had caught me a present.

  Our bodies move in the water, skimming the surface of the gentle waves. The fish swim soundlessly through our calves, around our ankles. His strong arms hold tightly against my bare skin, and I hold him back. He’s weightless in the water. I can carry him. I move him. I lift him up. He’s laughing and falling back down, the water so clear and blue I can see his feet. I can see the bright red flower seeping across his chest.

  I wake up in a bed, the world white and small, unfamiliar. Hospital, I think. I’m in a bed in Military Hospital, just like I was when I first came to California.

  Above me, my grandmother’s pale face looms large, with deep, worried wrinkles hanging around her blue eyes. “Megan.” She breathes deeply. And I puff up with hatred for her, for that stupid name that means nothing to me. For what she did to River.

  “River,” I whisper.

  “Oh, honey.” She picks up my hand and squeezes it tightly. “You were shot. You could’ve been killed. But you were so lucky. The bullet just grazed your leg.”

  “River,” I whisper again, remembering my dream, Island, Ocean. River’s wooden shelter, the black shadow, the bright red flower seeping across River’s chest. I struggle to sit up, but my body is heavy and it’s hard to move.

  “Shhh,” she says. “Just rest. Everything’s going to be all right now.”

  I close my eyes, but even in my hazy faraway world, I understand that she’s wrong. That nothing will be all right now. That River and I will never make it back to Island; we might not even make it back to each other.

  I’m too tired to open my eyes. But still, I feel the tears falling past my lids, marking rivers, oceans, across my face.

  I think I sleep, until suddenly I’m aware that my hand is warm, being held. River is in my head and my heart, and I whisper his name again, or at least I think I do.

  “Island Girl … Sky,” a voice says, and I realize it’s not River. It’s Ben. Ben is the one holding my hand. “Are you awake? Can you hear me?”

  “Hmmm?” I murmur, or maybe I don’t. My throat hurts, and my tongue feels thick.

  Ben doesn’t say anything for a moment, and then I feel him squeeze my hand. “You asked me that night on the beach if I was your friend, remember?” I remember, but I can’t find the words to make any sound. “And I didn’t answer you then. But I should’ve. Because I am, your friend, I mean.” He’s quiet for a little bit, and I’m not sure if he’s still there until he starts talking again. “But I wasn’t completely honest with you. You were kind of like my summer job. Your grandmother has been paying me to spend time with you, to teach you things. She told me not to tell you, because she didn’t want you to feel bad. But after you … disappeared, I told her I don’t want any more money. I mean … I still want to spend time with you, but because I like spending time with you. Not because she’s paying me. I’ll get my job back at Vons.”

  His voice moves in and out of my head, and I think about the money my grandmother paid River to stay away from me, that the shadow took as he shot us. And the money she paid Ben to keep me close. How does she have so much of it, and why does it mean so much here in California? I don’t understand it. It’s just paper. It floats and falls in the breeze like dead palm leaves. How can it mean so much? Everything? Is that what Helmut was waiting for as he stood at the edge of Beach, waiting for evil to come to us on Island? Is that what he was looking for? Paper money, floating down across t
he horizon, sinking softly into the water?

  Chapter 36

  When I wake up for real, the room is empty and dark. I feel around for a light to turn on and wind up pressing a red button instead. A woman in a white dress comes in—a nurse, I think. I’m surprised she’s not in green.

  “Megan,” she says to me. “How are you feeling?” I don’t answer her, but I nod. “Your grandmother stepped out to get a bite to eat, but I can call her and let her know you’re awake.”

  “Wait,” I say, reaching out to hold on to her arm. She smiles at me and pats my arm back, and she has a seat in the chair next to the bed.

  “What happened to River?” I ask her.

  “River?”

  “Lucas.” Lucas. The name feels thick and hard against my tongue. It’s an ugly name, the name of a stranger, a boy who once lived in a place called Eden and handed out poisoned apples.

  “Oh,” she says. “Lucas … well, maybe I should let your grandmother—”

  “Please,” I say, squeezing her arm with all my strength, which isn’t much.

  She nods slowly. “He had surgery when they brought him in, and then they moved him to Camp Solanas. For … security reasons.” I don’t know what that means, but I remember the blank white walls of Camp Solanas, quite similar to these blank white walls around me, and I nod.

  “I’m not in Military Hospital?” I ask.

  “No.” She shakes her head. “You’re at University Hospital.” She smiles at me in a way that tells me she’s done telling me anything. “Okay …” She stands and starts to leave. “Let me go call your grandmother. I know she’ll want to hurry back and see you.”

  “Wait,” I call after her, and she turns in the doorway. “He’s going to be okay, right? If they moved him … that means he’s going to be okay.”

  “It’s still very touch and go,” she says.