Searching for Sky (25 page)

I run my fingers through what’s left of my hair, and it falls out loosely around my shoulders.

River reaches up to comb through it gently with his fingers. “Come on,” he says, putting my braid in the brown bag. “I know where the boats are.”

I stand up, and I follow him. We hold hands as we step out of his shelter and onto the beach.

I follow River up the winding steps through the rocks, and after a quick stop at the bathroom, we head into the pines. It’s too dangerous to walk on the beach now during the day. But still, I’d much prefer the feel of the cool sand between my toes than the sting of the pine needles. I think again about my silly flip-flops. I’d climbed down the window so quickly without them, and I feel a small pang of regret now. I wonder if I will forget about them, about everything I learned here, once we make it back to Island, but I don’t think I will, and I feel a little sad.

I hold on tightly to River’s hand as we weave through the pines. I feel lost in the tall green darkness of the trees, not like the paths I knew so well on Island, the trees I could navigate between, even on the darkest of nights.

But River seems to know these trees well, and I imagine that these were the pathways he took as he tracked me all those many weeks. I think of all the times I watched the tops of the pines slant in the breeze from Pink Bedroom in my grandmother’s house, and how I had no idea that River was here, so close. So alone.

“Tell me about your Ben,” River says now as we walk, holding hands.

“Ben?” I’m surprised that River is asking, and also I feel my stomach clench again as I think about the round beam of his flashlight, the way he called for me, sounding so desperate, last night. I think about his room, covered with drawings, the one of me diving into the ocean. The one he told me was unfinished. Will he finish it now, or will he just throw it out? “What do you want to know?” I ask.

“You like him,” River says, not a question but a truth, solid and undeniable.

I shrug. “I don’t know,” I say. “He was nice to me.”

“You’ll miss him when we leave,” River says, and I think there’s something wounded in his voice, like an animal in a trap that’s gotten its foot stuck and is crying in pain, knowing, knowing what is about to come.

“I don’t know,” I say again. “But it doesn’t matter now, anyway.”

“Yeah,” River says, his voice catching in his throat. “I guess not.”

He stops walking, and I think we’ve gone farther than my grandmother’s house, or maybe we’re right near it. I don’t know. And I hate this feeling of being lost, of not knowing my own way. It’s the way I felt those first few days at my grandmother’s house, when I understood nothing at all of this world.

“Wait here,” River says to me.

“What? No way, I’m coming with you.”

He shakes his head. “Someone might recognize you.”

“But my hair,” I protest.

“Just wait here,” he whispers, and he leans in and kisses me softly on the lips. “Let me go and talk to the man with the boats. And then I’ll come right back.”

“No.” I shake my head, though even as I say it, I understand he’s right. If someone recognizes me and calls my grandmother on her cell phone, she will get into her car and be here, wherever we are, in no time. And if River and I are separated again, I worry we might never find our way back to each other, to Island. “Okay,” I say softly. “I’ll wait here.” He grins at me the way he always has and starts to walk away, but I catch his arm. “Just turn your shirt around,” I say. “It’s on backward.”

He looks at me, confused, and on his face I see the way I’ve felt so many times since coming to California. But he pulls the shirt off and then stares at it, unsure, as if it is a strange animal he has never encountered before and now he is seeing it for the very first time.

“The tag goes in the back,” I say, reaching my hand up and touching the tag to show him. But even as I say it, it sounds silly. Unimportant. And I wish I hadn’t said anything at all.

River turns the shirt around, pulls it back over his head,
and offers me a small smile. But even with the shirt on the right way, I realize it doesn’t look right on him. It’s too big, swimming over his shoulders all wrong, making him look smaller than he is.

“Be careful,” I call after him as he walks away, but he doesn’t turn to answer.

It takes River a long time to come back, and I find myself walking back and forth in a small space of pines.
What if something happened?
I worry. And I wonder if I should go after him. But then I think I’ll wait just a little longer because I don’t want to ruin it all now by being recognized. I find myself wishing I had a watch, like Mrs. Fairfield and my grandmother wear on their wrists, so I could keep track of time, because in the thickness of the pines, it’s hard to track the path of the sun, to understand how much time has really passed.

But then at last I hear the crunch of pine needles, the snap of a twig, and River appears as if in a dream, in his too-big shirt. I reach out to touch his face, just to make sure he is warm and real and here. He is.

“What took you so long?” I ask him.

“Sorry,” he says. “I was trying not to … bring attention to myself.” But by the way he frowns when he says it, I’m guessing that he did bring some attention. I think about the vultures yelling at him outside of some empty, soulless shelter—
Apartment
, he called it.

“Okay,” I say, and stand up on my toes to give him a kiss. I’m so glad he’s here now, he’s okay, that any annoyance or
worry I felt at waiting for him has already left me. “So … did you find a boat?”

He nods, grinning, just the way he did on my birthday when he caught us a fish. “I found a man who said he’d take us to Samoa in his boat if I brought him all my money.”

“Really?” I’m surprised. Just like that? River and I could go back, with a man. On a boat.

“Really,” River says.

But it feels too easy for this California world, where
nothing
is easy, and I wonder if River misunderstood or if this man was lying to him. I realize I should’ve gone to talk to him with River, even if it was risky. Because River doesn’t understand as much about this world as I do, and I’m not sure if I trust now that he has found us a real way home.

“So we’re going now?” I ask. My heart thrums heavily in my chest, too fast, and for a moment, I can’t catch my breath.

He shakes his head. “Soon. He said there’s a storm coming, and after it passes, he’ll take us.”

“A storm,” I whisper, closing my eyes and thinking as I always do of that last night my mother was alive, the way the thunder rolled like breath, heavy enough to shake Shelter. The way the rain covered us the next morning on our horrible walk to Ocean.

“Yeah.” River takes my hand. “He said it’s coming soon, so we should get going. He said to come back tomorrow morning with all my money. And then he will take us in his boat.”

I nod and I think of how afraid I once was of a boat coming to Island, taking us away. And how now we need a boat so badly. The only thing that can save us. Take us back. We have to
be sure that we can trust this man with the boat, that if we give him River’s money, he really will take us to Samoa. And now I have a nervous feeling in my stomach. Uncertainty.

But River is smiling so big, so pleased with himself, that I swallow the feeling, and I hold on to his hand through the thick of the trees.

Pine needles stab at the bottoms of my feet, piercing my skin. My soles are thick from years and years of walking through sand without shoes, but not thick enough for pine needles, and they sting and burn until I have to slow down.

Back in River’s shelter, the dirty men are laughing. There are more of them now. Three or maybe four. Their smoke tufts in the air, making the space around us sweet smelling and hazy. It makes me feel sleepy. And the bottoms of my feet ache now. I wish for the aloe plants, but I tell River I’m going to walk to the edge of the ocean instead. The ocean heals and soothes, even if the water is colder here.

“Do you want to come with me?” I ask him.

He hesitates for a minute and glances uneasily at the dirty men, then his paper bag, and he shakes his head. “I’ll wait here,” he says. I glance beyond the side of his Shelter, and I can see the edge of the water. “You won’t go in too far?” he says softly, and I know he’s thinking of that other night when he pulled me out from beneath the waves.

“And you’ll be here when I get back?” I ask, keeping my voice light, teasing him, but not really. I mean it.

He nods, and his hand falls on my back, where my braid
used to be. Its absence feels heavier now than its existence. But I think of what he said, how the man with the boat will take us back soon. To Samoa. And then from there we’ll find Island, or Island will find us. The world will be perfect again. It will. In time my hair will grow, and I can forget words like
murder, cult, poison, grandmother, Ben
. I want this all to be truth so badly that I tell myself that it has to be. There is nothing else.

“When you get back from Ocean,” River is saying now, “we’ll go get more fish.”

I don’t correct him, tell him that Ocean is
the ocean
here. That even though they are the same—
the Pacific
, really—they are not the same at all. Soon enough, River and I will be back at Ocean again. Together.

I smile at him, and then I run down to the edge of the water, the roar of the ocean swallowing every other sound, everything else. I don’t hear the dirty men or smell their smoke. I put my feet in the cool rush of the water. It stings and it chills, and then it soothes. The waves are loud and strong and capped with white. I look up, and the sky, I notice now, is a silver gray.

For a little while, I don’t hear anything except for the water. Except for Island calling to me, whispering to me across the loud, strong Pacific. It’s still there, waiting. For us. Calling us back. I hear nothing else.

And then, suddenly, I do.

Suddenly the dirty men rush across the beach, screaming.

Chapter 34

I know immediately that something’s wrong. I feel it in my chest, a deep sharp pain, like the way I felt when I realized my mother’s lips were slightly parted and blue, when I pushed her harder and harder and her body fell limply back at me, over and over again. I just knew. And I know now, too.

I run out of the water, running up the beach as fast as I can. “River!” I shout. He doesn’t answer me. “River!” I shout again.

My feet push hard against the hill, the sand, but I run and push back until I can barely breathe. I duck under the wood where the dirty men were, where their dirty things still are, and farther up, near River’s spot, I can see only shadows. Two of them. “River!” I shout again as I run closer, and his head turns. His entire face falls, and he shakes his head. I can see it in the depths of his green eyes that I know so well it’s almost as if they belong to me.
No
, he’s telling me.
Stop. Run
.

But I don’t. Of course I don’t.

The other shadow turns, too, and I am close enough now to
see it’s a tall person dressed in all black, black clothing covering everything except the space of his eyes, a living, breathing shadow. The living part I can only tell from the steady rise and fall of his shoulders.