Searching for Sky

by Jillian Cantor

  Chapter 40

  Every morning, the sun comes up, and at night, it sets again out over the ocean, earlier and earlier now that it is fall. In some places, Mrs. Fairfield tells me, the air grows colder in fall, the leaves on the trees change color and fly to the ground. But not here, not in California. Not on Island, either. California has no seasons, Mrs. Fairfield says, but I don’t agree. Seasons, she tells me, means change, shifts in the air. But even the air feels different now that River is gone. Heavier.

  Every night, I look out my bedroom window, watching the moon. It still puffs and it grows, until it breaks the sky in a bright yellow ball, and then once again, it’s small, just a sliver of light, Venus hugging close below it.

  Each afternoon, Marta, the physical therapist, comes to exercise my leg, and it’s beginning to feel better now, stronger. The graze of the bullet is just a thin pink line. I think it’ll turn to a pale purple eventually, like the circle my mother always wore on her shoulder, though I wonder if mine will grow hot sometimes, too, even after years and years pass, if it will always ache and hurt, the way it does now.

  “It’ll fade,” my grandmother tells me. “In time it does, honey. It won’t always feel as bad as it does now.”

  I want to believe her, but I’m not sure whether I do, whether my pain really will lessen the way she seems to think hers has.

  Still, every day, I work hard with Marta to get my leg back to what it once was. My grandmother has kept me in the house, away from the beach, from the world. For now, she says. For my own safety, she says. Until I get better, she says.

  I have dreams about the shadow person still, the gun thundering in the air and the red petals of blood exploding on River’s chest. I am afraid still, in a way I never was on Island. But not of the beach, the ocean. I long for them. And I know once my leg is strong enough, I’ll be able to remove the screen and climb down the tree again and make it back to the ocean on my own. That’s all I want, just to hear the whisper of the ocean, to feel the water against my toes, dancing there, a memory of what once was. There is still so much I don’t know, I don’t understand. But what I do know is this: the ocean heals and it soothes. The water is home.

  One night, as I am planning my climb down to the beach while my grandmother sleeps, she comes into my bedroom just after dinner. I’m sitting on the bed, listening to music on the iPod that Ben has filled with songs. I see him less now that he’s back in school. But he still comes over for dinner a few nights a week, when his mother is working late. I think my grandmother has forgiven him from the gentle way she hugs him when he walks in the front door holding a brown paper package from Sandy’s Fish Market, but then, aside from talking about my leg healing, nobody talks about what happened over the summer. Not about the money. Not Camp Solanas. And especially not River or Island.

  She knocks softly on the door now, and I look up and see her perched there like a fine thin bird. In her hand she clutches a book. The book. The one she wanted me to read once. The one she promised me was filled with everything. Answers.

  “Can I come in?” she asks me, and I remove my headphones and nod. She sits on the edge of the bed and offers the book to me, the way River offered me the fish on my sixteenth birthday—a gift.

  I take it in my hands, and it’s heavy, overfull, the edges of newspapers hanging out the sides. “I know you probably have heard it all by now, one way or another,” she says. “But it’s all in here, too. Why don’t you look through it, and then you can ask me if you have any questions or need help reading anything. Okay, honey?”

  I don’t know if I want to. The book is filled with things I can’t understand and probably never will. In my lap now is a piece of the past, and how will it change me if I know more, if I understand more? My life on Island is gone. River is dead. The world pushes on. The tides pull back and forth. The sun rises and falls. The moon expands and then quivers to a thin yellow feather.

  I hand it back to her, but she pushes it back on my lap. “No,” she says. “You keep it. You’ll read it when you’re ready.” She smiles at me and moves toward the doorway.

  “He saved my life, you know,” I tell her now. “River.” And as soon as I say his name, I see her smile evaporate, like puddles of rainwater on the beach on a hot, hot day. It goes so fast you’re not even sure it was ever really there at all. “He stopped me from eating the mushrooms on Island. The ones my mother ate.” I pause. “He couldn’t kill. Not even the rabbits. I was the one who did it. I was the one who snapped their necks. I skinned them and took their pelts for us to use, too.” Tears well up in my eyes as I remember Helmut showing me how to do it, how to remove the pelt with a sharp stone. How River hid his head in my mother’s hip.

  “Oh, honey,” she says, walking back over to the bed and again sitting carefully on the edge.

  “Ben showed me the picture with the apples,” I tell her. “That’s probably in your book, too, isn’t it?” I hear the sound of my voice, angry. But I’m not angry. I just want her to know that her big, heavy book can’t mean something. It can’t mean more than what I know and what I remember. Whatever Helmut did when he was here, well, that was not my life on Island. That was not him. Or River.

  “That picture was everywhere,” she says, her voice cracking. “After you vanished, it was all you saw. In the newspaper, on the news …”

  “But you know that wasn’t really him, right?” I tell her. “You know River didn’t even know. He thought Eden was still here, that he’d be able to go back and be with his mother.” I need her to know this, to understand this. That River was everything good that I was, that I am. That I loved him, and that she was wrong about him. That he saved me, that he would’ve given anything to save me. Even himself.

  “Now I do,” she says, and her voice is thick and filled with something I don’t recognize, an emotion that didn’t exist on Island but seems to exist everywhere here, in all the adults around me.

  She reaches up and wipes a tear from my cheek, and then she leans back in and hugs me. “I’m sorry,” she whispers into my hair. “I know you loved him. I know that now.” She pulls back and holds my face between her hands. “And I’m sorry for everything that’s happened. I really am.”

  She lets go of my face, but I can still feel the impressions of her fingers on my cheeks. She has tears in her eyes, too, and there is something about the way she’s looking at me now that makes me think maybe she’s telling the truth.

  “I might have gone about it all wrong, but I really did just want to protect you.” She pauses and shakes her head. “Just the way your mother thought she was protecting you once by taking you away from here, I guess,” she says, and she sighs. “I never wanted him to get hurt … I never wanted anyone to get hurt.” Her voice breaks a little, and she takes a deep breath. “I was just thinking of you. What I thought was best for you … I thought I was helping him, too. With a little money, an apartment … It was stupid. Seeing how much help you needed here, I should’ve known. I just …” She pauses and stares out the window for a minute. She seems to be looking very hard for something, though I’m not sure what. “I’ve lived in California my entire life. Sixty-six long years,” she says. “You’d think I’d know everything there is to know by now. But sometimes I wonder if I know anything at all.”

  I think about what she just said. Is it true that you can live in this place, in California, for sixty-six long years, and still not understand anything about it? I lived on Island for fourteen years, and I knew everything there was to know. Almost. Except for what to do when the boat actually came.

  “I’ve been thinking about how you asked me about him when we were leaving the hospital,” she’s saying now. “And how hard this must be for you.” She pauses. “So I’ve been trying to call his aunt in Temecula. I’ve left her a few messages. She hasn’t called me back yet, but hopefully she will soon … I know how hard it is to lose someone you love so much. I do, honey. It was terrible the way I lost your mother and you. Not knowing. Then just
thinking you were dead, all that time, and not even having anywhere to visit you.” She pauses. “Maybe if we could go out there. See where he’s buried. Bring him flowers …”

  I think about what Dr. Banks called my brutal honesty, and I think I understand it now, the way the truth feels as if it has punched you hard in the gut, so hard that it hurts. See where he’s buried. River, in the ground. In some strange place called Temecula.

  I know how hard it is to lose someone you love so much …

  “Thank you,” I whisper, and she looks at me, her face turning in surprise. “For calling his aunt.”

  She nods and squeezes my hand and offers me a small smile. She stands, hesitates for a moment, and then leans in and kisses my forehead. I think about how when she did that at the hospital, I pulled so hard I smashed her nose. Now I stay still.

  “Now that your leg is stronger,” she says softly when she pulls back, “Ben offered to come over tonight after he finishes his homework to walk you down to the beach for a little while.” I glance at the window, and she says, “I had it bolted shut while you were in the hospital. You can’t be climbing down there. It’s just not safe.”

  “But I have to.” The words collapse against my throat, the thought of being trapped here forever, even after my leg is completely healed.

  She nods. “I know,” she says. “I know how much you miss the beach—I do. So any time you want to go, you can, okay? But you have to use the door. And just take Ben with you, for now. Until you get a little stronger.” She pauses. “From here on out, I’m going to do everything I can to make sure you’re happy here.” Her voice is so soft, so honest seeming, that for a minute it almost reminds me of my mother’s.

  Ben and I take the front walk to the ocean tonight, and I’m glad, because even the sight of the pines twirling in the wind from my window is too much to bear. It reminds me too much of River, of our last morning together, when he led me through the path in the pine forest he knew so well, when he beamed with our plan about finding a boat, going back together. If I squeeze my eyes shut tightly enough, the roar of the ocean calling to me in the near distance, I can almost hear him whispering my name: Skyblue.

  I want to remember it forever, the sound of his voice, the feel of his fingers through the tangle of my braid. But already, I can feel him slipping away, the way my mother started to after just a little time of being gone.

  Ben takes my hand and laces his fingers through mine. It’s a nice gesture, the way he is holding on to me, trying so hard to be my friend, to help me. I’m glad I have him here.

  I hold on to his hand as we walk and breathe deeply, taking in the cool, salty air as we walk past the last of the houses, toward the steps that will take us to the beach below. The sky is a pearly blue gray now, the sun a yellow-orange ball dropping so far on the horizon that it seems to be floating on waves in the distance.

  “Can I ask you something?” I say, just as we walk down the steps to the sand below. “What happened to the person who shot us?” I take my flip-flops off even though my leg hurts a little without them. I want to feel the sand between my toes, to remember that in one way, the world is still the same, just as it always was.

  “I don’t know.” Ben shrugs. “I know the police were looking for him, but they never found him. The money in the bag was just cash—bills,” he clarifies, “and they weren’t traceable or anything. So I guess he got away with it.”

  “Do you think they’ll ever find him?”

  Ben shrugs again. “Probably not. Unless he does it again and gets caught. It sucks, I know.” He sighs and holds on to my hand tightly as if he’s afraid to let me go too close to the water, as if he understands this inclination I have, I always have, to run in, to dive under the waves, to let them swallow me and carry me home. To Island. Except Island without River wouldn’t be Island at all.

  I roll up the bottoms of my jeans and let my toes touch the edge of the water. It’s still cold enough to sting, but I don’t care. The wind blows hard, whipping my short hair in my face, pushing the water up my legs in curls, seeping into my thin pink scar. The Santa Anas are here, just as Mrs. Fairfield promised me they would be as she tried to explain it to me, the regularity in this California world. Every October, Santa Ana winds. The normalcy.

  I try to imagine it again, across the giant space of the Pacific. Island. I don’t know what will happen to it, now that we’ve left it, now that it’s going on a map. Mrs. Fairfield guesses that tourists will want to see it, that cruise ships will stop there on their way to Fiji. She laughs when she says it, as if Island, my life, is something that amuses her. I don’t want to let it go, any of it, but maybe I have to.

  The past is now a giant, heavy book waiting in my bedroom.

  But it’s also the shimmering memories I have of a beautiful life on Island. Of my mother. Of River. Even of Helmut.

  Ahead of me, there is the same ocean. And yet everything about it is different: the color, the temperature, even the beating of the waves against the shore.

  The tide is coming in, and we have to move back so the water doesn’t take us. “Can we walk a little down the beach?” I ask Ben.

  “We probably shouldn’t, Sky,” he says. “It’s getting late.”

  Sky. I think of that girl I was. With River. I can’t be her anymore, I think. Island is gone. My hair is gone. My mother is gone. River is gone.

  But I can’t be Megan, either. Megan. This baby who once lived on a farm called Eden, who once rolled around in her mother’s belly during a shooting. No.

  I am the girl with the thin pink line on her calf, the girl who doesn’t know who she will be and what she will do without River. The girl who understands loss and love, survival and death, but who still doesn’t understand money, where it comes from, why everyone wants it so much. I am the girl who could stay here in California and maybe learn to love her grandmother. And also the girl who still dreams in Island, and wants to find a boat to make her way back to the place she still thinks of as home.

  I want the ocean to tell me, as it always has. I want the ocean to call to me, to heal me and save me, to protect me and feed me. I want it to offer me answers, the way it once offered fish and pretty pink shells.

  “Can you give me a minute alone?” I ask Ben now. He hesitates, and then I say, “I’ll be right here. I promise. I’ll meet you up on the steps in a minute.” He nods, and he walks back up toward the steps.

  The Santa Anas blow, and the sand swirls behind me in the wind as I watch him go. When I turn back, I see the sun has almost fallen below a wave, and the sky has turned a pale blue, surrendering to the whole moon, to Venus twinkling just below it.

  Starlight, star bright, first star I see tonight. I wish I may. I wish I might. I wish the wish I wish tonight.

  I wish for the ocean to tell me who I am and where I belong.

  I stare at the ocean, listening to it carefully. The waves crash and turn, and crash and turn again. The tide has pulled me closer in and also caused me to drift down the beach a bit. I take another step back. This time, without looking first, and my foot hits something hard, a shell or a stick, or a piney branch. I bend down to pick it up, and then my eye catches on something in the sand.

  It is hard to see at first, and the water comes in again and washes over it. I wait for the water to recede again, and I kneel in the wet, cold sand to have a closer look.

  The last moments of sun shine down across the sand, illuminating the top parts of two circles that were connected once, through the middle. The bottoms are missing, drowned already by the high tide, but the top parts remain, still connected, in just the smallest way. When they were whole, before the tide came in, they were exactly what I drew that night when River found me here. But that was so long ago. These drawings are new, fresh. Exactly what I traced in River’s limp palm in Military Hospital. Two circles, running through each other, together, around and around. Forever.

  You and me, River told me.

  See you soon.

&n
bsp; “River!” I shout his name into the ocean now, and then turn and shout it again into the pines. The Santa Anas blow, twisting the treetops. The ocean roars, higher and higher up the beach. The tide is almost at its height. “River,” I shout again.

  The ocean answers back, the waves falling, crashing against the sand. Rushing over these circles, erasing them a little piece at a time as the tide comes in.

  I feel a hand on my shoulder, and Ben is back, standing there behind me. “You all right?” he asks. “I heard you shouting.”

  “River is still here,” I whisper to him.

  “Yeah.” He squeezes my shoulder. “I know. The ocean reminds you of him, doesn’t it?”

  The trees rustle behind me, though for a moment, I do not feel the wind pushing against my cheek. I turn quickly, but the rustling stops, and then in another moment, the winds are back, cresting the tops of the pines like waves.

  Promise me you won’t leave me again, I said to him that night underneath the pier.

  I promise, he said.

  “Come on,” Ben says. “We have to get back.”

  “Not yet,” I whisper.

  But he tugs on my hand. “Come on,” he says again. “We can come back tomorrow.”

  As we walk up the beach together, I keep on looking behind me, back toward the ocean, toward the circles disappearing in the waves of the high tide. I’m pretty sure they’re completely gone, erased by the water, by the time we climb the steps.

  But now, from higher up, the Pacific begins to glow in the new light of the full moon, the waves bright and dancing, and suddenly, filled with hope.

  Acknowledgments

  Thank you to my agent, Jessica Regel, for her support and guidance and for encouraging me to take a chance on Sky and River. I’m so lucky to have her championing my work, which she did in this case even through a hurricane! Thank you also to everyone else at JVNLA, especially Tara Hart and Jennifer Weltz, for all their support and hard work on my behalf.