Searching for Sky (22 page)

When I finish drawing, I stare out across the ocean for a long time. I think about all the many days of my life spent staring out
at Ocean, with my mother, Helmut, and River. I think of my mother’s story, about the owl and the pussycat, how they sailed out to sea in a beautiful boat. And then they danced and danced on Beach by the light of the moon. It was her story—I always thought it was, no matter what Helmut said about it. She and Helmut, me and River, sailing into beautiful deep blue Ocean in a boat. Island calling to us, a paradise found. But now I’m not sure. The way Ben told it to me, it was as if they were running away from something, something terrible, not running toward something beautiful. And I don’t understand how that can be true.

I look up, and I notice the sky is lightening a little now, that Venus now hangs low beneath the moon, just the way it always did on Island. It looks exactly the same here, a bright yellow star. Nothing more.

I think of the song my mother taught us when we were little:
Starlight, star bright, first star I see tonight. I wish I may. I wish I might. I wish the wish I wish tonight
.

What do you wish for?
I always asked her.

I wish for you to be safe and healthy and happy
.

I always wished for fish, that they would come quickly and easily to my spear the next morning and we would have enough for all of us to feast on the next day. But that night River and I carried my mom’s and Helmut’s limp bodies into Ocean, I wished for her to come back when I saw Venus. I wished for the water to carry her out and to heal her, and then for the tide to bring her back to me, full and whole again, the next morning.

It didn’t. It never did.

I stopped making wishes.

“It’s you and me,” a voice calls out into the ocean now, riding the crest of a wave in an echo, and I don’t know if I’m imagining it or if it’s really there. I turn quickly, and it’s real. He stands there, by my circles in the sand.

“River!” I yell, and I run to him. He wraps me in a hug, and I hold on to him so tightly.
Like two connected circles
, I think, our arms wrapped around each other, our bodies fitting together the way they always have and always will. “Where have you been?”

“Shhh.” He tangles his finger through my braid.

“I’ve been looking for you, and I couldn’t find you,” I say. “I thought you were at the fish market, but you weren’t. And then I didn’t know where else to go but here.” I bite my lip to keep the tears from coming, but I can’t stop them. They come quickly, and River wipes them away. “I know about everything now,” I tell him. “The cult, and Helmut, and … the apples.”

He nods slowly, and by the way his face turns down, I understand that it’s all true. Or at least he thinks it is. He knows, and he believes it.

“Aren’t you happy here, Skyblue?” he asks me. “With your grandmother and … your Ben, and …”

“No,” I say quickly. “Are you happy here, Riv?”

He shakes his head and lets go of me. He sits down in the sand, in the middle of one of my circles. I sit down next to him, and I put my head on his shoulder, entwining my arm through his, listening to the soft sound of his breath, his heart, his life. “I’m sorry,” he says. “We never should’ve left Island.” I think about that last morning, the way he begged me to go with him the twenty paces up Grassy Hill, the way he swam for me when
I dove back into the water, pulling me back to Roger and Jeremy’s boat. “This is all my fault,” he says.

“No,” I tell him. “You didn’t make the boat come, Riv.”

“Yeah, I did,” he whispers. “I built a fire on Beach that last day. When you were mad at me.”

“A fire on Beach,” I murmur. River broke Helmut’s rules, no swimming past Rocks, no fires on Beach.
These are the things I tell you to keep you safe
, he promised us, and we believed him. And maybe he was right. River broke his rules, and the boat came. And now … we’re here.

“So you can hate me now,” River says. “I did this.”

I shake my head. “I could never hate you.”

He turns to face me, and his face is so close to mine now that I can feel his breath against my cheek. “I remembered my mother,” he whispers. “I did.”

I nod because I believe him now. I think about how I yelled at him that time, years ago, when he swore his memory was truth. How I didn’t believe him then, and now I wish I had.

Memories
, my grandmother said.
No one can take those away from you
.

I wish I would’ve asked my mother more questions, made her answer me. I wish I could’ve known her version of this truth, so I would know how much to believe of what everyone else here is saying.

“My mother carried me somewhere once,” River is saying now. “I don’t know where. But she was holding on to me and running through grass, and the sun was warm and she was laughing, this really nice laugh that kind of sounded like the
rain on the rocks.” I think of that place Ben told me about, and I wonder if that was where they had been. “My head was on her shoulder, and she had her arms around me. And I just felt … safe. Loved.” He pauses. “I thought if I came back here, she’d still be here, waiting for me.” His voice cracks. “I just wanted to see her again. I didn’t know she was dead. All this time, I thought she was still here.”

I lean my face in closer so our noses touch. I feel River’s shoulders shake against my hands, and I think he’s crying. “It’s not your fault,” I tell him. “You didn’t know.”

“I fed them the apples,” he says. “I poisoned my own mother, and your father and a hundred other people.”

“You didn’t know,” I repeat. I finger the edges of the picture in my pocket.
My father
. He knew me and he loved me, my grandmother said. I think of the blurry image of his face, of River, standing there with the apples.
I poisoned my own mother
, River said.

I think of River seeing those pictures that Ben showed me earlier, and my stomach hurts as if I’ve been socked under hard by a wave and thrown into Rocks, gutted and mutilated like a fish.

River pulls away from me, and he stands. I’m afraid he’s going to run again, so I stand, too, ready to chase him. I’m fast, almost as fast as him. I can catch him. “I promised her I’d stay away from you,” he says.

“Who?” I put my hand back on his shoulder until he turns toward me.

“Your grandmother,” he says. He looks down, as if he’s ashamed to look at me when he says it.

I put my hand on his chin and tilt his face up gently so our eyes meet. “When did you talk to my grandmother?” I ask him.

“At Military Hospital,” he says. “She came to see me, and she told me everything then. About Helmut and what he did and what people think of him. And she showed me all those awful pictures with the apples.” He pauses and casts his eyes back down to the sand. My toes are tangled in a mess of seaweed now, but I barely notice. “She said I’d only be hurting you by being around you here, and she was right,” he says softly.

“What?” I feel an anger so thick it curls inside my body, in my blood, pouring and rushing into my head with the sound of the ocean so suddenly it’s hard to hear. The seaweed chokes my foot, and I kick at it, hard, until it flies. River is still talking, but I can’t make out what he’s saying.

Cold and broken
. My grandmother is the worst of all of them. She showed River the pictures. She told him to stay away from me.

“No,” I finally say, grabbing onto River’s shoulder again. “She wasn’t right. She doesn’t know anything about me, about us. About Island.”

River stops talking, but his mouth is still open a little. I pull my face in close to him and listen for his breathing to even.

I notice the way River’s face and mine are almost touching, the way our breathing has evened in unison, as if we are one person. I notice that he still smells of salt water, and that being this close to him, my skin suddenly grows warm even in the cool night air. River is here, the same as he always was. But nothing is the same. I don’t feel the same. Maybe this is what
my mother meant when she said things would change when we got older?

I want to tell River this, but I’m not sure how, so I stand up on my toes and lean in even closer, and do what I often saw my mother and Helmut do. I put my lips on his and I kiss him.

“Sky.” He pulls back. “What are you doing?”

I don’t know what I’m doing. Or why. But touching his lips with mine suddenly feels like an instinct for survival. Just like the ones we knew on Island. I need to show him how much I missed him, how empty I am without him. How he can never leave me again. How we fit together. River and Sky. Sky and River.

So instead of answering, I stand up on my tiptoes and kiss him again. I hold on to his lips with mine, and my entire body fills up with warmth from the inside out, as if we are back there again, in Ocean, the beautiful warm water holding us up, carrying us together.

“Skyblue,” he whispers, his mouth so close to mine that I think I can taste the sound of my name, my real name, in his voice. Warm and salty and just a little sweet like coconut milk on Island, and like everything I know to be true.

“It’s okay,” I whisper back. “We’re going to be okay.”

He hesitates for a moment, but then he smiles and wraps his arms around me tightly, pulling my body to him. He moves his mouth back to mine, and even through all our California clothes, I can still feel his warmth as I always knew it.

There are no words, good or bad, empty or filled with meaning, that could say any more than what we say to each other as our lips move tightly together. They fit, the way those circles I
drew on the beach do, as if this is the way they were always supposed to be.

“Come on,” River whispers when he finally pulls back. “Come with me.”

He holds out his hand, and I take it.

Chapter 31

River and I hold hands as we walk down the beach, and by now the sun is almost up over the tall brown hills. I have the thought that my grandmother will notice the open window in my bedroom soon, that she and Ben will rush to the beach looking for me, and that I won’t be there, and she will be upset and worried. I feel bad for a moment, but then I think about what she did to River, and I push the feeling away. For the first time since I left Island, I know exactly who I am and where I’m supposed to be. Here. With River.

“Where are we going?” I ask River after we’ve walked for a little while. I wonder if he has a grandmother and a “team of professionals” to make him
normal
, but something tells me he doesn’t—that here in California, River is all on his own. For one thing, he is not wearing shoes, and for another, I notice now his shirt is on backward and his hair, though shorter, is messy, uncombed.

“My shelter,” he says. And immediately I think of the word
house
, because that’s what a shelter always seems to be in California, and now I think it’s strange that River doesn’t say this.

But I soon see why. River’s shelter lies underneath a long wood structure held up by tall sticks that spans from the high rocks above us, across the beach, out over into the water. We duck to walk underneath the wood, and inside it’s darker and smells a little like Bathroom Tree. When my eyes adjust, I see two men a little farther down, sleeping against each other in a pile of dirty-looking clothes.

River leads me to what I guess is his space, along the other end, where he has a blanket and a brown paper bag.

“This is where you’ve been?” I ask, and I feel a knot in my chest at the thought of him sleeping out here all alone, with no bed, nothing.

He nods, and he says, “It’s not that different from Island, really. And I can get everything I need here. If you climb up Rocks there are boxes of fruit and even fish some days.”

I think about the fish market, and I think that here in California, you have to pay money for these things, and I don’t know if River knows that. But I’m not going to mention it now. “You must be tired,” he says. I nod. I am. “Come on. We can sleep, and then we’ll figure everything else out later.”

He lies down on his blanket, and he pats the space next to him. I lie down, too, and he turns the way he always did on our rabbit pelt mats in Shelter, so our backs are touching, hugging each other. I hear the rush of the ocean close by, and then I close my eyes and fall asleep.

When I wake up, my back hurts, and it takes me a minute to remember where I am. I sit up and stretch, and River is already awake, sitting there, staring at me. “I got us some fruit,” he says, and he hands me a small green carton filled with strawberries. For some reason I think of that stupid picture Ben showed me in his laptop computer, River holding on to a basket of poisoned apples, grinning, but I push the thought away and take a strawberry. It’s sweet, and the juice melts in my throat, even as I think of what my grandmother told me, that it’s dangerous to eat fruit without washing it in the sink first.

“Thanks,” I say, and I smile at him. He smiles back, and I watch his lips for a minute, remembering how they felt against mine last night, in the darkness, on the beach. I want to feel them again, even though now the thought makes me feel embarrassed, and I think my cheeks might be turning as red as the strawberries.