“Touch and go?”
“We just don’t know yet,” she says softly, retreating past the doorway.
A few minutes later, my grandmother and Ben turn the corner together. My grandmother looking happy, Ben looking pale and small, like he might throw up. I think about what he told me when I was sleeping, and I’m not sure if I dreamed it. From the look on his face, though, I don’t think I did, and I know I should hate him now if it is true. But every bit of hatred in my body curls into a giant, coconut-size ball in my stomach that I wish I could pick up and throw squarely at my grandmother’s head just between the eyes, knocking her out.
“Megan,” she says now, rushing to the bed, reaching for my hand. I pull out of her grasp and roll over. This is all her fault—everything. If she hadn’t forced River to leave me in the first place. If she hadn’t given him that money to begin with. If she hadn’t tried so hard to make me into someone who I’m not and I’ll never be … “Honey,” she says, her voice breaking on the word. I can hear the chair scraping against the floor as she sits down, though I refuse to turn and look at her. She puts her hand on the back of my head. “You cut your hair.”
“River did,” I whisper, biting back tears as I remember the way he held on gently, the way he tore across my braid with the knife.
“Did he hurt you?” she asks.
I roll back around hard, and my leg throbs. “I was shot,” I tell her.
“I know, honey,” she says. “But before that …?”
“None of this is River’s fault,” I yell at her. “It’s yours.”
She nods slowly. “I’m just glad you’re okay,” she says. She leans down to kiss my forehead, and as soon as I realize what she’s doing, as soon her lips make contact there, in space where my mother’s lips and River’s have touched, I yank my head back quickly, so my forehead bangs her nose, hard.
She puts her hand up to rub it, her mouth open wide as if she wants to say something, but she’s not sure what. Ben stares with wide brown eyes, eyes that remind me of the eyes of an owl perched so high in a palm tree it would never find its way into one of Helmut’s traps. We never ate an owl, anyway, because Helmut said that owls were not for eating. I always thought it was because of the story, the owl and the cat, because Helmut was the owl, but Helmut said it was because owls watched over us at night, their eyes so wide and alert like that.
“I need to go see River,” I say now, using all my strength to pull myself up in bed. I let my grandmother keep me away from River before, but only because I didn’t know better. Only because I thought River wanted me to be kept away. Now I know. Now I picture him hurting and alone, trapped inside the cold whiteness of Military Hospital. He needs me, and I’m going to go to him.
I pull myself out of bed, and I grimace as my feet hit the floor and my one leg throbs with pain.
“Megan, what do you think you’re doing?” My grandmother stops rubbing her nose to put her hands on my shoulders.
“I’m going to see River,” I say through gritted teeth. “Even if I have to walk there myself.” She tries to push my shoulders to get me back on the bed, but I push forward with every bit of strength I have left, and her small body slides across the room.
She looks at me for a moment, her lips in the shape of a circle, and then she yells, “Nurse!”
The woman in the white dress runs to the door. “Is everything okay in here?” she asks.
“Can’t you give her something to calm her down? She’s so agitated.”
I put my feet on the floor again and try to walk, but I fall, crashing into Ben, who holds me up with his arms. I think about Ben’s voice calling for me on the beach, his flashlight beam rolling in the waves. How River asked the next morning if I would miss him. If he meant anything to me. “Island Girl,” he whispers now. “Come on.”
I shake my head, refusing to look at him, and then I fight with everything I have, everything I am, thrashing my arms and legs wildly, clawing at the air, at Ben, at my grandmother, like a wild animal. But even an animal stops after a little while, after it realizes that there is no way out of the trap, that it’s the end. Even an animal gives up when it gets tired.
But I don’t stop fighting until the nurse jabs my arm, and the warmth takes over my blood, my body, until I’m falling into darkness again.
A wave pulls me under, holding me below the water until I think my breath will disappear, until I think the world will become black and murky and dead. The water is cold, and it saturates my body, making it impossible to feel. The water soaks through my skin until I am nothing. I am emptiness.
And then there are arms, River’s arms, pulling me up, pulling me to the top.
Skyblue, he says, the current’s too rough here. You could drown. Maybe you wanted to drown.
I didn’t. I promise.
His arms hold me up, pulling me to the surface, pulling the dead weight of my body to Beach. But just before he puts me down on the sand, he falls, flat, on his back. The bright red flower sprouts across his chest, growing bigger and bigger.
You promised me you wouldn’t leave me again. You promised.
The petals of the flower float and grow, and tear away, falling slowly down his stomach, onto the sand, turning the entire beach red.
“Island Girl,” a voice calls to me. My tongue is thick and I try to swallow, but I can’t. I move my mouth, trying to make a sound, but I can’t. “Sky. Wake up.” Ben pushes on my shoulder, hard.
I groan and open my eyes. The room is white and filled with sunlight, not electricity but real, honest sunlight streaming in through the window. It must be afternoon because the marine layer would have to be gone for the sun to seem this bright, though afternoon of what day, I have no idea. Nor do I know how long it’s been since they were all here and the nurse was jabbing my arm, poisoning me. Evil, I think.
“What do you want?” I finally say to Ben, my voice sticky in my throat now, so my words come out sharp, painful, like the pine needles that stuck in the soles of my feet.
“Come on,” he says, pulling my arm up, pulling it over his shoulder. “We’re going to get you out of here.”
“What?” I rub my eyes. “Where’s my grandmother?”
“She’s talking to the police,” he says, “so you have to hurry. We don’t have much time.”
His voice rolls in my head, and it’s so confusing, so hard to understand. But then I remember his confession to me, that my grandmother was paying him to be nice to me. That he was with her, not with me. “Get off me,” I say, shaking away his arm. “I don’t trust you.”
He sinks down in the chair by the bed and frowns. “I deserve that, all right? I know I do. But if you want me to drive you up to Camp Solanas, then you need to get your ass out of this bed and move quickly.”
“River?” I whisper. “You’re really going to take me to him?”
He tosses me a sweatshirt and a pair of jeans. Not River’s sweatshirt, but his, I’m guessing. “Come on,” he says, and he turns away so he isn’t looking at me. “Put those on.”
I do the best I can, throwing them quickly over my hospital dress. Everything is too big. But it’s better than wearing just the thin dress. I notice I still have the tube in my arm, the IV, but it doesn’t seem to be connected to anything now, so I cover it with the arm of the sweatshirt, and then I tap Ben on the shoulder.
He wraps his arm around me, and I lean into him this time. Maybe I shouldn’t trust him, but I’m not sure now I have another choice.
“Why are you doing this?” I ask Ben once we are inside his SUV and he’s pulling out of the parking lot. I notice his hands shaking against the wheel, and he glances behind us uneasily even as he drives. The car lurches and so does my stomach, and as soon as Ben makes it down onto the busy I-5 with cars swarming around us in all directions like crazy, angry bees, I have to close my eyes and breathe deep to keep from throwing up again.
“Why am I doing what?” he asks as he weaves his SUV between and around other, smaller cars.
&
nbsp; “You know,” I say. “Taking me to see River.”
“Oh,” he says, as if my question is a surprise. The car slows as all the cars in front of us do, too, and up ahead, there is an ocean of bright red lights glittering on the I-5 like wayward daytime stars. “Well,” he says after a little while, “did you hear me talking to you the other night, when you were sleeping?”
I nod. “I think so.”
“Did you hear me tell you that I’m your friend, for real?” I nod again. “Well, this is my way to prove it to you, I guess.”
“But you hate him,” I say. “You think he did horrible things.”
“I never said I hated him,” he says. “I said Alice did. And that she’s a good judge of character.” The weight of my grandmother’s name hangs in the car, like the weight of the ocean crushing, pulling you under when the current is rough. Neither one of us says anything for a while, and then the cars start moving again. Ben’s SUV dances between the other cars. My stomach lurches, and I close my eyes again.
“He talked to me the other night,” Ben says softly.
“What?” I open my eyes to look at him, and his face is pale and serious.
“I was looking for you by the pier, and Lucas … River, he came out to the beach, and he talked to me.”
“No, he didn’t,” I say, thinking about how I awoke and River sat there, staring at the ocean and the beam of the flashlight rolling across the waves. How he promised me he wouldn’t leave me again. He promised.
“He did,” Ben says. “I swear.” I think about that next morning, how River suddenly insisted I cut my braid, how he asked me about Ben as we walked through the pines. “He wanted to know why I was looking for you, what happened,” Ben is saying now. “He didn’t tell me you were with him. But I knew.”
“How did you know?” I ask, and I wonder if the Google told him this, too, if the Google is all-knowing and all-seeing.
He shrugs. “I didn’t know. But I guessed.” He pauses, and he gets off the I-5, turning onto a quieter, smaller street that hugs closer to the ocean. I watch the way the sunlight melts into the water in wide yellow swirls, making it seem warmer, brighter, than it actually is. “I mean I should’ve just gone under the stupid pier and taken you back home with me, and then none of this would’ve ever happened.”
“I wouldn’t have gone with you,” I tell him matter-of-factly.
“Yeah, I know,” he says. “And anyway, that’s not why I didn’t do it.”
“Why didn’t you?”
“I don’t know.” He shrugs again. Then he says, softer, “I thought that if you were there—with him … well, maybe that’s where you wanted to be. Where you were supposed to be.”
I feel a new warmth for Ben building in my chest, and I put my hand on his shoulder as he pulls into Camp Solanas. “Thank you,” I say, and for some reason I think of his unfinished drawing, me diving into the ocean, surrounded by the waves, being swallowed up by them, and I wonder if he’s finished it by now.
But I don’t ask him, because Ben is stopping the SUV, pulling down the window, and trying to explain to a green man why we’re here, what we’re doing.
The green man says something about not having clearance, and Ben looks to me, eyes wide again, like an owl’s. He planned my escape from the hospital. He drove me here, fighting so many cars on the I-5, and now he can’t get the SUV past the small, thin gate in front of us. I lean across him, even though it hurts my leg to put weight on it. “Get Dr. Cabot,” I say.
“I can’t—”
“Dr. Cabot,” I yell, and then the man’s face freezes funny, the way my mother’s sometimes would when she would bite into a sour piece of fruit, and I think that maybe, even without the braid, he knows me. He recognizes me.
A few minutes later, I see her walking past the gate, dressed in green, her blond hair pulled back tightly at the bottom of her neck. She puts her hand to her eyes, shielding the sun, and she peers into the windows of the SUV. She nods, says something to the man, and the gates open. Ben smiles at me, and then he drives right through.
Chapter 37
“I thought you got shot,” Dr. Cabot says to me as she helps me out of Ben’s SUV and through large glass doors into Military Hospital. They look different than I remember. But maybe it’s because last time I was looking out into this great wide, unfamiliar world, and now I’m looking in, back to the blank whiteness, to a place where I was so filled with fear, so lost, so … unaware, that I feel a tightening in my stomach at the thought of going back in there.
“It just grazed me,” I say, repeating what my grandmother told me. I don’t know how that’s different from being shot, exactly, but it sounds slightly better. Grazed. Like a rabbit chewing calmly on small pieces of grass.
She eyes my leg suspiciously and then walks away for a moment and comes back with a chair on wheels. “Sit,” she commands me, and I do. Not because I want to listen to her, but because my leg really does hurt. “And you are?” she says, glaring now at Ben.
“He’s my friend,” I say quickly, and Ben smiles at me and puts a hand on my shoulder.
“Okay, fine,” Dr. Cabot says, holding her hands up. “You push her, then.”
Ben grabs the handle on the back of the chair, and then I feel the ground moving beneath me, the white-walled hallways moving past me, spinning sideways, until I begin to feel dizzy.
Dr. Cabot walks beside me. “You cut your hair,” she says after a few minutes of walking. Her voice is softer now. And she nods approvingly.
“River did it,” I say.
“Oh,” she says. “I see.”
“That’s why I’m here,” I tell her. “I need to see him.”
She stops walking, and Ben stops pushing, and she kneels down so she is right in front of me, her bright red lips, her pearl green eyes. “I know,” she says. And there’s a kindness in her voice, in her eyes, that I haven’t detected until now, or maybe I was just so confused the first time I was here that I didn’t have the time or the depth to understand. In my head, she became one with the tall, gray, annoying Dr. Banks. “But I have to tell you,” she says, “it’s not good.”
“It’s not?” I whisper.
“He’s in a coma,” she says softly. “Do you know what that is?” I shake my head. “He’s unconscious.” I shake my head again. “It’s like a sleep, but a very, very deep sleep that we can’t wake him up from.”
“But he’ll wake up soon, right?” She doesn’t say anything, but she draws her red lips together in a small, tight line.
“I’m going to be honest with you, Megan, because I feel you deserve that after everything you’ve been through, okay?” I nod, and she stands and reaches out her hand for me to take it. I do. I struggle to stand, and Ben helps to lift me, holding me up under my arms. “I’ll take you in to see him now. But you should think of this as your time to say good-bye.”
“No,” I tell her. “I’m not going to say good-bye.”
I think about that morning when my mother and Helmut were dead, how it was River’s idea to take them to Ocean. Our whole lives on Island, the water had healed. We soaked sore feet and tired arms, and the salt numbed. The water made the pain better. Helmut pulled my mother in when the monthly bleed came so late that time and wouldn’t stop, and the water saved her then. But still, that morning, it felt wrong just to pull them in like that. Just to push their bodies under the waves and let go.
We’re not going to say good-bye, River said as he pushed Helmut under the water for the last time. Helmut’s face was purple and bloated, his lips pressed tightly together, unlike my mother’s. We let go, and Ocean swallowed them down, a wave washing them out far, farther than we would ever dare to swim.
Not good-bye, River whispered. See you again soon.
Like me, River dreamed the bodies would come back, wash up on Beach, healed.
See you soon, I whispered then, the waves swallowing my voice.
“Megan”—Dr. Cabot shakes my shoulder a little—“if you want
to see him, you need to prepare yourself.” She pauses and stares directly into my eyes, hers penetrating mine like spears. “You need to understand,” she says softly, “that this will be it.”
“It?” I whisper, though now it is not that I don’t understand, it’s that I don’t want to, that I can’t. After everything, every day River and I spent together on Island, every night we fell asleep back-to-back in Shelter, all this time we were apart in California, and then how we finally found our way back to each other, where we were supposed to be. Together. No. This, in Military Hospital, can’t be it.
“This will most likely be the last time you will ever see him,” Dr. Cabot is saying.
I shake my head. “But he promised,” I whisper.
“Come on,” she says. She pushes a door open, and inside the room is dark, the blinds closed. Something beeps softly, and in the center of the room there’s a bed with so many lines running and twisting out of it. I expect to go closer and see someone else there on the bed. That maybe Dr. Cabot and Ben are just lying to me. Cold and broken, my mother said. Skeletons.
But as I grow closer, it’s him. He’s the one who looks like a skeleton. River. A line runs into his mouth, and his face is blank, expressionless, nearly unfamiliar. I put my hand above his chest, letting it hover in the spot where the red flower crept and grew. In my dream, on the beach—I’m not sure. It’s gone now, or at least I can’t see it.
Dr. Cabot gets me a chair, and she pushes it close to the bed. Then she whispers that she and Ben will be right outside the door and that she’ll be back to get me in a few minutes.
After they leave, I almost expect River to sit up, to reach for me, to tangle his fingers through my now-short hair and whisper in my ear: Skyblue. You came. I knew you would. I’m fine. Everything’s going to be fine. We’ll find a way out of here. Together. The man with the boat is still waiting for us.
But I listen, and the only sound I hear is the beeping, the strange machines that surround him. They rush and whir, almost like the ocean, pulling him in, pulling him under.
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