Authors: Jillian Cantor
“Sky.” He whispers my name, so I can barely hear it over the crashing of the water against Rocks. “Don’t be mad.”
“What would Helmut say?”
He shakes his head. “He’s not here,” he says, and I can’t tell if he’s angry or sad. Or if I’ve hurt his feelings. “That’s the point, isn’t it?” he says. His arms hold tightly against my back as the
water bobs us up and down and up and down, and I notice the way his hands feel—warmth touching my bare, wet skin. The salty water beads across his broad forehead. “Don’t you ever wonder if there’s anything else out there?” he asks me.
“Skeletons,” I say. He raises his eyebrows, and I know he’s confused, but I don’t even try to explain. “Never mind.” I yank hard enough so I’m out of his grip. Then I climb over Rocks and wade to Beach, and I quickly pull my rabbit pelt back over my head, not wanting River to see me here, out of the water, without it.
I am so angry with River that I run from Fishing Cove and take a long, quiet cleanse in Falls to calm myself down. Then I take a long walk along the grassy banks of the stretch of inland water that shares River’s name. He is like that water, calm and beautiful and deep. I remember this now, and I soften. And I am no longer mad by the time I make my way back to Shelter at dusk, where I find yesterday’s fish, rotting.
We fell asleep in the storm last night, neither one of us taking the time to climb down to Falls to store the fish in Cooler, the giant hole Helmut and my mother once dug where the air inside is dark and cold. Inside Shelter, it’s too warm to store cooked fish, and everything has absorbed the rotting stench now, even our rabbit pelt mats.
I’m tempted to yell at River as he takes the remains of the fish down to Beach for Ocean to take back. I’m tempted to tell him that it’s his fault the fish has gone bad.
You are the practical one
, Helmut told me, and I realize it’s my fault as much as his, if
not more. I was too preoccupied with looking for him when I woke up this morning, and I should’ve noticed and taken the fish to Cooler then.
“Purple flowers tonight,” River says when every trace of the fish is gone, except the rancid smell. He sighs and reaches for the box fashioned out of wood where we keep our extra supplies. His voice is soft, no trace of anger or anything else, and no more mention of the boat, either. The boat, I reason with myself, if it even is a boat, is far out on the horizon. It’ll disappear, the way it did that other time just before Helmut and my mother died. That was nearly a year ago, and only Helmut saw it then. River and I have seen no sign of anything since. And then, today, even if it was there, there was no way it could’ve seen River’s flailing arms, his bobbing head. No way.
River hands me a flower, and I chew on it slowly. The petals melt in my mouth, but not in that good, satisfying way that the fish had the night before. They are too sweet, too thin. I chew them because I know I have to, not because I want to.
“You’re not still mad, are you?” River asks tentatively.
River is always so worried about what I’m thinking about him, and this is part of what makes me so happy that he’s here. He doesn’t ever ignore me, the way I would sometimes watch Helmut do with my mother when they were mad at each other. Sometimes I wished my mother would push Helmut, hard. Just shove him across his wide chest and see if he tumbled over. Just like that. She never did, of course. And River is not like his father, I remind myself for the hundredth time. None of us thought so, least of all Helmut.
“Well”—River pokes my leg with the stem of his flower—“are
you? Still mad, Skyblue?” His voice hangs easily on his nickname for me, what he’s called me in moments like this one since he was six years old.
I shake my head. “No,” I say. “You know I can’t stay mad at you.” I don’t ask him where he was all afternoon, what he was doing, because I don’t want him to talk about the boat again. And then I tell myself, even if it was a boat, this thing he saw.
Even if it was?
So what? That means nothing for me, for us.
I swallow back the too-sweet taste of the flowers, and also my fear, as I remember the look on River’s face when he said it:
Don’t you ever wonder if there’s anything else out there?
What’s there to wonder? There’s Ocean and Beach, Grassy Hill and Falls, Fishing Cove and Shelter. River and me. At night the yellow glow of a million tiny stars against the round black sky, River’s back against mine, warm and strong.
“Good,” River whispers now into my hair as we lie on our mats, our bellies empty and still with hunger. River kisses the back of my head and then turns his normal way. Our backs touch, the way Ocean hugs Beach. And before I know it, I’m asleep.
I’m startled awake by an unfamiliar noise. A sound I can’t place. I hear it, and I sit up, suddenly startled, sweating, breathing hard. The air is calm and black; it’s still night. I squint for my eyes to adjust to the darkness, and I realize River has heard the noise, too, maybe before I did, because he’s already up, sitting at the entrance to Shelter, his fishing spear resting uneasily in his hand.
“River,” I whisper, “what is it?”
“Shhh.” He puts his finger to his lips, and we listen in the blackness. We’re so used to the sounds of Island: giant green birds that cry, even at night, and sometimes owls hooting, too. Falls rushing twenty paces down Grassy Hill. In the distance, the roar of Ocean. Sometimes, the breath of thunder, the slap of rain. Rabbits rustling in the trees, or the snap of a wooden trap as we catch one. The whirring of insects in the hottest months. But this is something altogether different.
It sounds like Helmut talking, from somewhere far away, although something about it isn’t quite Helmut. I wonder if Ocean has finally brought him back, the way we always wished and thought it would. And if it brought him, then did it also bring my mother? I listen hard for the soft whisper of her voice. I don’t hear it, but I hear the not-quite-Helmut again, though I can’t tell what he’s saying. River reaches across the ground for my hand and holds on tight.
“Over here, mate,” the not-quite-Helmut’s voice yells, and the words are so different from any Helmut had ever spoken that I don’t think it’s actually him. Then, the sound of something else. Palm fronds moving, or being ripped away?
“River?” I whisper, and I start to panic.
“Shhh,” he says again, pulling me close, wrapping his arms around me. My head is against his chest. His skin is warm against my cheek. I hear his breath, his heart. It keeps on beating, faster, faster.
The roof of Shelter shakes hard, and I jump. River pulls me closer. Then a round close moon catches on my face, the yellow light making me unable to see anything at all.
“Jesus Christ,” the not-quite-Helmut’s voice says. “Jeremy,” he shouts. “Jeremy, mate, you have to see this.”
I turn my head into River’s chest and close my eyes, willing the moon to go away, the voice to go away. River’s heart beats faster and faster and faster.
“They’re kids,” the voice says, and it feels a little farther now. “Two of them.”
“River,” I whisper into his chest, my voice shaking. “We need to run.”
You are the practical one
, Helmut told me.
River’s body is still, and he doesn’t respond. “River,” I whisper again, “run.”
I tear out of Shelter into the night. My body knows the way even in the darkness, twenty paces down Grassy Hill, but in my rush now, my fear, I forget the rules. That there is no running in the darkness, and now I run too fast and I stumble, tripping down Grassy Hill, scraping my leg on a rock.
It hurts, but I keep running, around the corner, letting the rush of Falls be my guide. When I reach it, I sit on Bathing Rock, just next to Falls, hanging my leg under the cool water, cleansing it. It stings, and when my hand reaches to soothe it, it comes back sticky with what feels like blood. I can’t hear the voice now over the sound of the rushing water, but I don’t hear the sound of River coming, either.
I sit there for a little while, waiting. My leg aches, but I think it stops bleeding. In the morning, I know River will wade across the water here and bring back an aloe leaf for me, and then it will feel better. But as the darkness begins to fade into a blue-orange glow, I’m still sitting on Bathing Rock alone. Just below the moon, I see it there, the morning star, Venus, still bright, even when it’s almost day.
Where is River?
I close my eyes and try to think of a plan. What would Helmut do now? My mother? There was that boat once before, and I’d heard Helmut promise my mother it would go away on its own.
But I can’t go back there
, my mother had said.
I won’t
.
Petal, you don’t have to
. Helmut held her close to him.
This is our home
.
The boat never came that time. And anyway, a few days later, my mother and Helmut were gone.
“Sky.” River’s voice. Finally. Calling for me. “Skyblue,” he yells. “Where are you?”
“I’m over here,” I call, not wanting to peek around the edge of Falls, not wanting to yell too loudly. “River,” I call back. “I’m by Falls.”
He turns the corner, and then he’s here again. Close to me. I wrap my arms around him, holding my ear against his heart. It beats slower now. “What took you so long?” My voice trembles in a way that makes me sound angry, but I’m not angry, just afraid.
“Skyblue,” he whispers into the top of my hair. He kisses my forehead lightly and stands back. “You don’t have to be afraid. They’re not going to hurt us.”
I realize what he’s saying then. That he has talked to the not-quite-Helmut and maybe even the one called Jeremy. That he has not been running in the night, searching for me. He has been back there. With them.
“River?” I whisper.
“They’re here to save us,” he says.
“Save us?” My voice is trembling so much now I can barely speak, and tears burn, warm in my eyes. “We don’t need saving.” I try to blink back the tears because I don’t want River to see them. But it’s too late. He reaches his thumb up to brush a teardrop from my cheek.
“If we stay here, Sky, we’re going to die.” He says the words solidly, calmly, as if he is the practical one, not me.
I shake my head. “We’ve lived here forever,” I say. “This is our home.”
“Not forever,” he says. He looks past me now, into the distance, as if he remembers something before this. His eyes find the water that shares his name, River: beautiful and calm and deep. He looks back to me and puts his hands on my shoulders. “They know Helmut,” he says.
“They do? How?”
“I don’t know. But they said his name to me. It was the first thing they said:
Helmut
. I didn’t tell them that; they just knew.”
I hear what he’s saying, but I don’t quite understand it.
How?
Helmut was here, with us, forever, and there was no one else. Just the four of us.
“They want us to leave Island with them,” River is saying now. “Don’t you think that’s what Helmut would want? For us to leave with people who knew him?”
“No,” I tell him. There’s no way this is what Helmut would want. I think of how he held on to my mother, promising her that this was our home, that nothing would take them away. “Helmut loved Island. He’d want us to stay here forever.”
River shakes his head. “We’re running out of food. You know we are. The fish are harder and harder to catch. The traps are almost always empty.” He pauses. “Island killed them. If we stay, it’ll kill us, too,” he says softly.
“That’s ridiculous,” I say, though his words thrum underneath my skin, deep in my chest. “And besides,” I say, “Ocean still might bring them back.” I imagine it, the way I’ve imagined it before, walking down to Beach one morning to find my mother and Helmut just sitting there, holding hands, by the edge of the water, healed and new.
He shakes his head. “It’s been too long, Sky.”
I turn away from him so he doesn’t see the tears stinging my eyes, harder now than before. I know he’s right—I do. But I don’t want to admit it. When Tree of Days started marking weeks, then months, then nearly a year—I knew. But I never thought we’d leave Island. I always thought we’d be here. Just in case.
“We’re going,” River says now, putting his hand on my shoulder. “We have to.”
“No, we don’t,” I say.
“We do,” he says, softer. “Skyblue, come on. This is a good thing. These men who knew Helmut are here to take us on their boat. To take us back.” But I’m not sure if he really believes this or if he just wants to disobey Helmut, even this long after Helmut has been gone.
“Where?” I ask him, and I can’t believe I’m asking this. There is nowhere else, there is only here. I’m not leaving. He’s not leaving. This is ridiculous.
“Where we came from.”
California
. I hear my mother’s voice.
Where people are skeletons
.
He laces his fingers through mine and pulls me away from Falls, to the edge of Grassy Hill. But I pull my hand from his grip and shake my head. “We can’t,” I say again. His eyes are green, like the grass, and I watch as they fill with tears. He doesn’t move for a moment, but then he nods slowly, understanding. River can’t make me do something I don’t want to do. And he doesn’t say anything else as he begins to climb Grassy Hill. I watch his thick legs climb, his blond braid down his back, the arch of his strong shoulders.
If he goes without me, I will never see him again. I will be here all alone
.
“Riv, wait,” I call after him. He stops and turns to look at me. “Don’t leave me. Please.”
He doesn’t say anything, but he stares at me and holds out his hand, waiting, waiting, waiting for me to take it.
I do.
There are two men who came on the boat. The one whose voice we heard from Shelter, Roger, and the one he was calling for, Jeremy. Roger is tall, taller than River, and also bigger. He doesn’t seem to have any hair, or if he does, it’s covered with a funny round leaf he wears over his head. His cheeks are smooth, and I think that makes him look like a woman, although there is something about him that reminds me altogether more of Helmut than my mother. The other one, Jeremy, is smaller, my size. His beard is silver, and so is his hair, which is curly like mine but so short it reminds me of rabbit fur. His eyes are hidden by small black shells, and I don’t like that I can’t see them, that I don’t know what color they are.