Searching for Sky (11 page)

I fill my belly, and for a little while, it is like filling myself with hope, that maybe everything here will be okay.

After I have eaten an entire fish and my belly is full, I tell the grandmother woman again that I want to see Ocean.

She sighs, walks away, and then walks back. “They’re still out there,” she says. “It’ll die down in a few days.”

“I could take her,” Ben says softly. “We’ll go out the back, climb the fence into my yard, and then take the back path there.”

“I don’t know.” The grandmother woman frowns.

“Yes,” I say, though I am not sure about Ben and whether I can trust him. But he is offering to take me to Ocean, and that is all that I care about now.

“I don’t know,” she says again, but her voice breaks, so I think that means yes. My mother used to do the same thing, when Helmut would ask her to do something she didn’t really want to, and it surprises me that they can seem so much the same, even though they are not the same at all.

“Come on,” Ben says. “Follow me.” Then he turns to the grandmother woman and says, “We’ll be back in twenty minutes, Alice. I promise.”

Chapter 17

The air outside the grandmother woman’s shelter is cool and damp, and I shiver a little as I follow Ben into the night. The sky is black and gray, with barely any yellow stars. I spot the half-moon hugging a gray streak of cloud, but I can’t find Venus where it should be, resting just below it.

I’m wearing flip-flops again, and I find it hard to walk quietly, as Ben said we must so that we don’t “tip off the press.”

“Come on,” Ben whispers, and he climbs over what he calls
Fence
, then reaches out his hand to help me. But I am good at climbing, having climbed trees on Island to get coconuts since I was very young, and I do it without his help now, though I take the flip-flops off first.

On the other side of Fence, there are trees, tall and thick and different looking from palms. But trees nonetheless. I inhale their sharp smell and reach my hand out to touch one. It’s sharp, and I pull back. “Pine trees,” Ben whispers. “Much nicer to look at than to touch.”

We walk for a few minutes in the darkness, through pine trees. Ben tries to hold on to my hand, he says so he won’t lose me. His hand is large and damp, and unfamiliar feeling. I think about River, as we went that last morning together, hand in hand, toward Fishing Cove, the boat. And I pull my hand away from Ben. “I don’t get lost,” I tell him, and he nods and watches me so carefully that it makes me feel nervous to be walking next to him.

But it’s not long before I can smell Ocean, hear it, and then I run past Ben toward Beach. I couldn’t get lost here, by Ocean. I pull the flip-flops off again and let my toes sink into the sand.

The sand is colder and harder here than it ever was on Island, but still the grains are familiar, sticking between my toes. The rush of Ocean sounds the same, too. And in the small glow of the half-moon, the water is black. I run toward it, and as the tide rushes against my toes I jump and howl a little bit. “It’s so cold,” I say to Ben.

He nods. “Welcome to California,” he says. He’s breathing hard, having run to catch up to me.

“But this is the Pacific?”

“Yep.”

I shake my head. I don’t understand it, how this could be the same great warm Ocean that I’ve known my entire life. And then I realize just how far away I am, just how different this California world is. Even Ocean isn’t
really
the same.

“Is this where you came to catch the fish?” I ask Ben now, trying to console myself with the thought that fish are here, too, as on Island. That despite all the distance, the cold water, the fish still swim here.

“No.” Ben laughs. “I didn’t catch the fish. I bought it. At the fish market.” I don’t know what that is, and he seems to understand that, so he explains. “There are people here who catch fish, and then they take it to this place where people like me go to buy it. That’s the fish market.”

“How do you buy it?” I ask.

“I gave them some money, and they gave me the fish.”

“Oh,” I say. “Okay.” Though I’m still confused.

I step back from the water’s edge and look at him. His face looks very small in the glow of the moon, and even though the grandmother woman said he was my age, there’s something about him that seems so much younger.

I sit down on the sand, and he sits next to me. I don’t sink as much as I’d expect—this sand is much harder than the sand I’m used to, especially this close to the water. “It must’ve been kind of cool to live on an island like that,” Ben says softly. “I mean, you probably didn’t have to deal with all the crap we have here. Like curfews and homework and school.”

I don’t know what any of that is, either, but I don’t ask. I just say, “Yeah. I guess not.”

“I’ve been thinking about it all day. Trying to see this place as you must see it now. Guess it kind of sucks here, doesn’t it?”

On Island we would suck the moist meat off the bones of fish, but I don’t understand what that has to do with being here, in this strange place, as Ben says it. But from his voice,
sucks here
sounds like something bad. I don’t answer him; I lace my fingers through the sand, digging until the grains grind under my nails and seep between my fingers. “Can I ask you something?” I say.

“Sure.”

“Do you know who Helmut is?”

“Of course.” He nods. “Everyone knows who he is.”

“But how?” I ask. “He was on Island for …” I try to remember what Dr. Cabot told me. “Fourteen years.” I pause. “If you’re my age, then you would’ve been, what, two, when he was here?”

“Yeah.” Ben nods. “I didn’t
know
him know him. But I know of him. Everyone does. Urban legend.”

“But how do you know Urban Legend?” I ask, not at all sure what he means. Though I wonder if this is the same way Roger and Jeremy knew Helmut, too.

“Google.” He pauses. “That probably doesn’t mean anything to you, does it?” I shake my head. “Well, before he left California he, um … well. Maybe I shouldn’t be the one to tell you this.” He stands, but I tug on his arm until he sits back down.

“Tell me. Please,” I say, though I’m not sure if I want to hear what he’s going to say or not.

“Okay, well, when he lived here, he had this group of people who lived with him, and he was kind of their leader. Some bad things happened. I mean, he did them, I guess. And then he got in a boat and took his people with him, and they, like, basically fell off the face of the earth.”

“I don’t know what that means,” I say, though I suddenly have this awful, sick feeling in my chest, and I’m worried all that delicious fish is about to come back up, into Cold Ocean.

“You should ask your grandmother. She’ll be able to explain it to you better. She actually knew him, I think.” I nod, though I have a feeling that even if I ask her, she won’t tell me. That she will just start talking about something else the way she did when
I asked her if she knew where River went. But also I don’t believe what Ben just told me, that Helmut did something really bad before he left. I don’t know if Ben is lying or maybe the person, Google, who told him about Helmut, might’ve been.

“Come on,” Ben says now, standing again. “We better get back before Alice gets worried.”

I stand up and follow him, inhaling the salty smell. Cold Ocean smells just as Ocean always did, and I calm myself with this thought. There is something here, something familiar.

And on the walk back, I watch carefully where Ben steps, memorizing the pathway back through the pine trees, so when I need to I can escape from the grandmother woman’s shelter and come back to Cold Ocean all on my own.

Chapter 18

I awake the next morning with the smell of Ocean still in my nose, and it takes me a little time to realize it was either a dream or a memory. That you cannot really smell Ocean from here, Pink Bedroom. I check, and Fake Ocean does not have a smell.

“Megan, honey.” The grandmother woman opens Door, and there she is, standing in Pink Bedroom, looking almost as strange and unfamiliar as she did yesterday as she handed me clothes in Military Hospital.

My stomach rumbles, and I wish I’d saved some of the fish from last night to eat now. But before I can even ask her, she says, “Come on downstairs and eat some breakfast, and then I have someone coming over to meet you.”

“Someone?” I ask, hopeful that it could be River, that he has changed his mind and he has found me this quickly.

“Her name is Missusfairfield,” she says. “We’ve been friends for a long time, and she is very good with teaching special-needs
children. She’s retired now, but she has agreed to meet you and possibly take you on as a private study.”

I sigh, not understanding any of what she said, hearing only that this person with the very strange long name is not River, and that she is re-tired. I feel re-tired myself, as if all this is just too much, as if it would be easier to sleep and sleep and sleep and make it all go away. But I am also hungry, and the grandmother woman promised breakfast. So I allow her to take my hand and pull me gently from Bed.

“How’s that leg feeling?” she asks as I put my feet on the soft ground.

I shrug and follow her down Steps, holding on to the railing as she reminds me to. Nothing hurts, not even my leg. But there is an emptiness in me now, here, without River, in this strange place. And I wonder if this is what it feels like to be dead, if this is what my mother was feeling that morning when her lips were blue.

The grandmother woman asks me if I need to use the toilet, and I realize I do and that this means I cannot be dead. So I nod, and she reminds me about flushing and washing my hands the way my mother used to remind me to clean my hands in Falls after I used Bathroom Tree when I was a very small child. But I am not a small child now, no matter what she might think, and it is annoying that she treats me that way.

After I am finished, she tells me to sit down where I sat to eat my fish last night. She puts a plate on the table, with a strange-looking, thick yellow leaf on it. She hands me a fork spear and points to the plate.

“What’s this?” I ask.

“An omelet,” she says. I stare at her. “Eggs, cheese …” I hesitate, then touch
an omelet
with the fork spear, and then push hard to spear it and pick it up. It hangs there, large and strange, shell shaped and stinky. I’m not quite sure what I’m supposed to do with it, because from the way it smells, I really don’t want to put it in my mouth.

“Oh,” she says. “You know what? Maybe I should get you some fruit instead.”

She grabs the plate and omelet away, walks over to all her strange boxes, and then comes back with a different plate with blue and red berries, like the ones I ate at Military Hospital with a spoon. Now I pick them up and eat them quickly with my fingers, and she doesn’t tell me not to.

As I’m eating, a high bird chirps, and then the grandmother woman murmurs something softly to herself and runs away. When she comes back, there is another woman with her—
Missusfairfield
, I guess. She is small, smaller than the grandmother woman, with bright orange-coral hair. Her skin is loose and wrinkled, but even more than the grandmother woman’s, and I wonder if that’s because she’s re-tired and hasn’t slept enough. But I don’t ask. She looks at the grandmother woman, leans in close to me, and then smiles so wide that I can see all her teeth, even the strange silvery ones in the back.

“Well, hello there, Megan,” she says. “Do you mind if I take a seat?” She points to
the chair
next to me, and I’m not sure where she wants to take it, but since the grandmother woman doesn’t argue, I guess it’s okay, and I nod.

But she seems to change her mind about taking it, because all she does is sit on it. “Now,” she says, still smiling. “I’d just like for
us to get acquainted today. Most children your age would have already been in school for ten or eleven years, so you’ll have a lot to catch up on, and Alice has asked me here to see if I might be able to help you with that. Today, I’d just like to assess where you’re at. How far behind in school you might be.”

I don’t know what school is, but I remember Ben mentioned it last night, when he talked about things that suck here, so I imagine it is a place where you go to eat, and she said something about catch, so maybe also learn to catch food? I will be good at this, I think, and I hope this can go quickly so I can make my way back to Cold Ocean in the daylight, where I hope it will suddenly be warmer.

“Now,” she says, “do you know what this is?”

She hands me a small, thin wooden spear, and I think this must be another eating tool. This would be perfect for eating the blue berries. There is one left on the plate, and I use the thin wooden spear to stab it, then pick it up, and suck it off. It tastes funny, and I make a face, wondering if this is why “suck” sounded like a bad thing when Ben said it.

“Oh, no, no!” She pulls the spear quickly from my hand. The grandmother woman makes a startled noise and puts her hand over her mouth, reminding me of the way the green birds sound at night. “This is a pen-cil,” Missusfairfield says. “We don’t put this in our mouths.” Her voice is very slow and high, the way I remember my mother’s sounding when River and I were very small, and I am embarrassed that I have done something wrong and that she is talking to me like I am a child. “We use this to write and draw,” she is saying now. “Do you know what that is?”