Authors: Jillian Cantor
Since all the vultures are long gone now, we take the front path to the beach, out the front door, past the houses, down the hill, across the coastal highway, and then down the steps to the beach below. Ben’s flashlight hangs out in front of us, a low, round circle sun. I’ve never seen a flashlight before, but then again the stars were bright enough on Island, and something like that wasn’t necessary. The stars always guided us in the darkness, even the twenty paces down the hill toward Bathroom Tree if you had to use it in the middle of the night.
“Why is my grandmother giving you a check?” I ask Ben as we walk down the steps to the sand.
“What?” he says.
“A check. I heard her say she owes you one. That’s money, right?”
“Uh … yeah,” he says. “But it’s no big deal.”
“No big deal,” I echo back, trying to figure out if these are good words or bad ones.
Big
sounds good.
Deal
does not. But Ben doesn’t yell that they’re bad, so I think they must be okay.
Our feet hit the sand, and I take off my flip-flops. Ben leaves his on, and I run past him quickly toward the edge of the water.
“Sky!” he yells after me. “Wait.” But I don’t.
I hear the ocean, feel the salt against my skin, and I want to feel the water on my toes. Even if it is cold.
“You’re not going to run in again, are you?” Ben calls from behind me.
I shake my head, though I think about the way River came in after me last night, and I pull his sweatshirt tighter around me. I put my hands in the center pocket, feeling for the crisp, thin edge of the picture.
I see the circle of Ben’s flashlight hit the water, and then he sits down at the water’s edge. I take a few steps back and sit next to him.
“So what do we do now?” Ben asks. “Just wait for him?”
I shrug because I don’t know. “Can’t you go wait up by the steps?” I ask him. “And turn your flashlight off?”
“Why?”
“Because he might not come out if he sees you here.”
“So?” Ben says. “That might not be the worst thing.” He pauses and tilts his flashlight down, so it makes a low yellow circle across a wave, catching on a slag of seaweed.
“Ben,” I say, “I really need to talk to him.”
“What if I tell you everything I know?” he asks. “Then can we go back home and give this up?”
No
. But I don’t tell him that, because I want to hear it, everything he knows. “What do you know?” I ask.
He takes a deep breath, and then he starts talking, his voice measured, even. Like Helmut’s. “Okay, back in the nineties, Helmut Almstedt had this cult. This … group.”
“I know what a cult is,” I say, thinking of the way Mrs. Fairfield’s voice went up as she tried to explain it all to me earlier.
“All right. So they called themselves the Gardeners, after, you know, the Garden of Eden.” I don’t know, but I nod, even though I don’t think he can see me in the darkness. “Anyway, at first it was kind of harmless, I guess. Helmut wanted to start this sort of utopian society, where everyone worked on the land and they all grew their own food. He and his wife and … Lucas, they lived on this big farm up north of here outside LA, and lots of people came to join them.”
“My mother,” I say softly.
“Yeah.” He takes a deep breath. “Anyway, it was all good until one day Helmut decided that there were evil people who’d gotten into the Garden. Serpents, he called them. And so he poisoned their food.”
“Poisoned?” I ask, not liking the sound of that word at all.
He nods. “Yeah, he basically put something bad in it, something that would murder them when they ate the food.”
My heart pounds in my chest at the word
murder
. The noise rushes loudly through my ears, and it takes me a moment to realize that Ben is still talking.
“Almost everyone who lived on the farm died,” he’s saying now. “From what we know, there were only a few of you left, and he took you out on his boat and sailed away into the Pacific. The Coast Guard had him in their sights, and they were closing in, but then there was a storm, and, well … you know the rest.”
His words are so strange, so far away:
poison, evil, murder
. And for some reason I think about my grandmother’s question, when she asked me how my mother had died, the animal noise she made when I told her about the mushroom.
Poison?
But that’s not how my mother died. She only ate a mushroom. A bad mushroom.
Helmut lied
. River showed me that day on Island, as if he knew, as if he remembered that there was more, before us.
“Well …,” Ben says. “What are you thinking?” I stare silently into the ocean, into the round yellow sun of his light, dancing on the waves as they go slowly up and down, the way they always do, the way they always have. “Come on,” he says. “Say something, please.”
“I can’t,” I whisper. Because I don’t think there are words to say how I’m feeling, and if there are, I don’t know them. I think about my mother, the way her arm was limp around my body that morning, her fingertips cold, her lips slightly parted as if she wanted to whisper something more in my ear, but also they were an unnatural blue.
“I don’t think he’s coming,” Ben says now. “And we should probably get back.”
I don’t want to leave. I want to stay here, right next to the ocean, where there is something, one thing, the rush and pull of the water, the tides, that makes sense.
“Sky.” Ben stands and touches my shoulder. “Come on.”
I stand and force myself to turn away from the ocean. We climb up the beach, and I stare at the back path, the pine trees, for even the smallest glimmer of River, but all I see are the arches of the pines swaying gently in the night breeze.
“Ben,” I say as we climb the steps back up to the road. “There’s one thing I still don’t understand. Why does my grandmother hate River … Lucas?” I wonder where River is right now, and if he knows all the things Ben just told me, and if he believes them, and if he’s all alone. I want to hold on to him, to hear him whisper in my hair, feel the tangle of his fingers in my braid. I want to tell him that he’s not his father and his father isn’t him, and that anything that might have happened then has nothing to do with us. And that maybe the entire world is wrong. Maybe they don’t know what they think they know.
Ben doesn’t answer me, but as we cross the coastal highway and make it back onto their street, he stops first in front of his house. “Come in for a minute,” he says. “I’ll show you something that might answer your question.”
I follow him in through the front, and when we walk in, I’m surprised to hear the sounds of the television box.
“Mom,” Ben calls out. “I’m home.”
The sounds of the television box fade, and for the first time I see Ben’s mother. She is small and thin, and her face is round like Ben’s, her hair a little longer, but only at her chin, brown but streaked with gray.
She stares at me and then smiles. “Oh my goodness, Megan, is that really you? I’ve heard so much about you. Come sit down on the couch. Can I get you an iced tea?”
“Mom,” Ben says, “we’ll be upstairs.”
He pulls me toward the steps, and I hear her calling after us. “Well, let me know if you need anything. I’ll just be down here.”
“She seems nice,” I whisper.
Ben shrugs. “Yeah, she’s fine,” he says. “When she’s actually home.”
I think about what Ben’s saying and about how much time he said he spent with my grandmother growing up, and it makes me sad that he did not spend every moment of his life with his mother, the way I spent with mine. But also it makes me sad that she is still here, with him now, and my mother is gone. It doesn’t seem fair.
Ben turns on the light in his room, and my eyes go immediately to the wall with all the pictures. Then I notice that a new one sits on his table, not yet hung, and I pick it up. A girl, running into the ocean. The waves crashing over her.
Me
. “What’s this?” I ask.
“Nothing.” He snatches it from my hand and puts it facedown on the nightstand. “I’m not finished yet. Anyway, here …” He walks over to a table, opens the box I recognize as
laptop computer
. My grandmother has one, too, and Mrs. Fairfield says I will learn to use it eventually, that it is like the television box, only there is so much more you can do with it.
Ben moves his fingers across what I recognize as letters, and then turns the laptop computer so I can see it.
“What’s this?” I ask.
“Google.” I see only blank white with some letters I can’t read—Google looks like nothingness, like the whiteness that surrounded me at Military Hospital, and I have no idea how it
could tell Ben anything. But Ben moves his fingers across the letters on the laptop computer again, and then something different comes before me. Small words that I don’t think I can read. And pictures. But unlike the television box, these pictures are still, the people in them unmoving, like the pictures my grandmother has handed to me, only these pictures are behind the laptop computer’s window.
There is one of Helmut where he is much younger, standing by a large grassy hill, smiling. He looks so much like River here it’s shocking. “How did you put this in here?” I ask as I put my finger up to trace the outline of his face, thinking it belongs to me. Then I think about what Ben said, about the poison, the murder, and I pull my finger back quickly.
“I didn’t put it in there,” Ben says. “It’s just the Internet. Google. Any picture you want, at your fingertips.”
I don’t understand how that is possible, and yet Helmut is here. Inside Ben’s laptop computer. The blank white Google is amazing. And frightening in its power.
“Here,” Ben says. “This one.” He presses one of the letter squares and the pictures shift, so I see a different one.
A small boy holding on to a basket with one hand and what looks like an apple in the other. He’s smiling, and behind him there are people sitting at a very long rectangle table. Their faces are blurry, hard to make out, but one catches my eye, and I think it’s possible it’s the same man from the picture my grandmother gave me.
“I don’t understand,” I say.
“This is Lucas Almstedt.” Ben points to the boy, and in the boy’s face I see a little of the River I know. A very small,
short-haired version, but there is a look in his eyes that’s familiar, that same look, that same grin, as the one he had when he walked back to Shelter with my large birthday fish spanning his arms. “And this”—Ben points to the basket and the apple—“is how these people were murdered.” His finger spans the blurry heads at the table, one of whom might be the man my grandmother claims to be my father. “Poisoned apples.”
Ben pushes the letter button again, and there are more pictures. River—Lucas—handing people apples, and then one I have to look away from, rows and rows of the people lying on the ground, certainly dead.
“I don’t understand,” I say again. “How did all these pictures get in here? How do you know all this if everyone from the cult died or got on the boat?”
“Helmut left some of the pictures behind, I guess.” Ben shrugs. “And I think the authorities had him under surveillance for a while. It was like they knew he was going to do something crazy, but they didn’t figure it out in time.”
Ben closes the laptop computer and pushes it away. But the image stays in my head, little River, feeding people poisoned apples. I don’t think for even a second that River knew what he was doing, but even still, I understand what Ben is trying to tell me. Everyone in the whole wide world who doesn’t know River the way I do—they believe the worst about him. They believe that he is just like his father: a murderer.
I lie in bed in the darkness for a very long time, tracing the path of the moon across the gray sky, my eyes transfixed and open wide. Every time I close them I see the pictures, River, the poisoned apples. And now, for the first time, I have this horrible feeling in my stomach when I think of Helmut: I hate him. And not for the reason my grandmother or anybody else in the whole wide space of California does. I hate him for what he did to River, for the pictures he left behind, for all the Googles and laptop computers in the world that show River—my River—killing people. I hate Helmut.
When the numbers on my clock turn to all bright-red threes, I get out of bed and go over to the window. I can’t lie here anymore; I need to go back to the ocean, to look for River again, and if he’s not there, maybe I can leave him a message in the sand, draw him a picture the way we used to when we were kids.
I open my window and yank on the screen. And a few seconds later, my feet hit the grass, wet and cool with dew, and I
suddenly realize I’m not wearing shoes. I’ve forgotten to take my flip-flops tonight. It startles me that this thought bothers me now—out of the house without shoes—and I hate how quickly I’ve become someone else. How quickly Sky has faded away and Megan has appeared. I’m not going to climb back up for them. I did not wear shoes my entire life on Island. I will be fine without them now.
I run through the dewy grass, and then I climb over the fence and run to the pine-filled path, my feet crunching on sharp pine needles. I can smell the ocean so strong in my nose, how close it is, and that’s enough to bring me comfort, even as my feet sting against the pine needles.
The beach is still and silent, and the tide has pulled in closer. My feet hit the sand, and I yell River’s name as loud as I can, but my voice is swallowed up by the ocean. I yell it again and again and again. But still, I’m alone.
I sit in the sand, and with my finger, I trace the outline of two circles, their round sides connecting midway through each other, and I think about how strange it feels to be drawing without a pencil now. But River and I drew this picture, when we were younger, in the sand. “It’s you and me,” he always told me.
“That’s not what people look like, silly,” I said once.
But now, I see it exactly the way he understood it then, River and me, our edges overlapping, connecting, entwined. That’s the way we’re supposed to be. Without him, I am lost, empty. Just a circle, a deep, empty hole.