Searching for Sky (12 page)

“River and I would draw in the sand,” I say quietly.

“Okay, yes. Very good.” She claps her hands together. “But here we use a pen-cil to write on paper.” She holds up something else, very white, like Military Hospital, but very fine and fluttery like feathers, only square. She puts it down on the table and then presses it in with a pen-cil, moving a pen-cil to make a black shape, the way River and I would use our fingers in the sand. “Now,” she says, handing me back a pen-cil, “you try.”

I hold on to a pen-cil, just the way she did, and press against paper. A small black notch appears.

“Did you used to write in the sand, too?” she asks me. I nod. “Well, go ahead and show me, then; show me what you know. Can you write your name?”

The feel of a pen-cil in my hand is very strange, and I grip it hard and tight like a fishing spear. I move it slowly and watch a thin black line moving around, until I have made a circle. I want to draw another one, just like we used to draw in the sand. Two interconnected circles, me and River. River and me. But as I move a pen-cil, I hear a noise, like a trap snapping, and then it makes no more black.

Missusfairfield takes it from my hand. “You just pressed a little too hard and broke the point,” she says. “Don’t worry. You’ll get the hang of it.” She pauses and puts her finger on my circle. “Now, tell me what this is?”

“Me,” I say. Because isn’t that what she asked me for?

She nods slowly and then turns and looks at the grandmother woman.

“Honey, why don’t you go lie down in the living room for a
bit, rest your leg on the couch, while Missusfairfield and I have a little chat.”

She walks me into a new space that I haven’t seen yet,
Living Room
. I expect for animals to be in here, something living, and I cautiously tiptoe around, listening for their sounds. But I hear and see nothing but strange-shaped caves and boxes and rocks, kind of like Bed, but not exactly. The grandmother woman walks back out, and I don’t know what
the couch
is, but there is a very bright multicolored rabbit pelt on the ground, so I lie on that.

I close my eyes, squeeze them shut tightly, wishing, wishing I could find it again, that feeling of lying on the rabbit pelt with River in Shelter. But this rabbit pelt is too thin, and it scratches my cheek. And River is somewhere else. Maybe with his mother. I wonder if she lives in a strange shelter like the grandmother woman does, if he is near Beach, if he understands or even remembers things about this world that I do not and I’m not sure I ever will. If he misses me the way I am missing him, an ache, an emptiness, a hunger that I feel will never go away no matter how much food I eat. Or if his mother has filled this space for him, if with her, he has already forgotten about me.

I hear a piece of what the grandmother woman and Missusfairfield are saying, and I open my eyes. “Very special case,” Missusfairfield (I think) is saying.

“Like a two-year-old trapped in a sixteen-year-old’s body.” (The grandmother woman.)

“But she survived all those years on an island … I can’t even imagine …” Their voices drop, and I don’t hear anything for a
while, and then I hear the sound of footsteps and Missusfairfield again. “She doesn’t know anything …”

I feel my face turning hot, that they think I know nothing. On Island, I knew everything. I was the practical one. River, the dreamer.

And then again there are tears burning hot in my eyes, rolling down my cheeks. I am not only a girl without a place but also a girl without knowledge. I imagine Helmut would’ve said that is the worst thing that could ever happen to me, and I understand I can never live here, among these strange things, with these strange people. I will find River, and I will convince him that we have to go back. That what we had there together on Island, it has to mean more than this new woman,
this mother
, he has found here.

“So much to learn …,” I hear Missusfairfield say.

I think about Helmut, the way he talked about tracking animals, about capturing them, knowing them.

The way you have to do it is to outsmart them
, he said.
Blend into their surroundings. Make them think you’re one of them, and then they never even see you coming
.

Chapter 19

I guess that missusfairfield has agreed to teach me, because she comes back the next morning as I am eating breakfast and thinking about Ocean. I never got to go back there yesterday. Ben wasn’t here, and the grandmother woman said the vultures worried her too much. I am determined to get there today. But then the high bird chirps, and Missusfairfield is back.

“Now,” she says to me after the grandmother woman has led her in. She places a small hand gently on my shoulder. “First things first. We need to teach you how to navigate this world.”

I put one last blue berry in my mouth with my fingers and nod.
Navigate
. There was much to navigate on Island, and knowing it, all of it, was what kept us alive. But now I understand that once I can navigate this new, strange world of California, I will be able to figure out a way to navigate my way back to River, to
Island. And so, for now, I forget about Ocean, and I stand up and follow Missusfairfield’s lead.

We spend a long time practicing the names and uses for everything in the grandmother woman’s shelter,
the house
. I learn that it is normal to sit on
the couch
(not lie on
the rug
). That only
a spoon, a fork
, and
a knife
are used for eating. That Cooler here is
the fridge
, and that there is a box in the Living Room (where things are not actually
living
) called
a television
where you can watch pretend people doing real things. She also teaches me that
Mrs
. is a nice way to refer to a woman, and that
Fairfield
is her second name. Her first name, she says, is Elizabeth. But since we are practicing for school, she thinks it is better that I call her Mrs. Fairfield. I don’t really understand why she has two names, and why she is telling me I have to call her by one, but I just nod and agree to call her whatever she wants.

After a while I am tired, and it is hard to remember and understand so much. I also start to wonder if all this is silly because I can’t see how understanding
the couch
or her name will help me find my way back. But then Mrs. Fairfield shows me
the blinds, the window, the screen
, how they open, letting the outside in, and I realize she has given me something real, something I can use.

I wait until darkness, until the grandmother woman is quiet and sleeping, and then I open the blinds and the window in Pink Bedroom. I push on the screen until it moves, until the air is open and cool and entirely against my skin, and then I climb out and down the tree, just as I always did on Island when I
went for coconuts. I follow the path Ben and I took the other night, through the rough pines until finally, at last, I am there again.
Ocean
. No,
the ocean
, as Mrs. Fairfield called it.

I run to its edge, letting my feet soak in the cold, cold water.

“River,” I yell his name again and again, hoping he will hear me, that he has come to find the water, too, and that he is close by.

But the only thing I hear is the sound of the cold waves crashing upon the sand.

The next morning, Mrs. Fairfield announces that she wants to teach me to read. The grandmother woman nods and makes bird noises with her tongue. I am tired, having barely slept after making my way back from the ocean, and not really sure what they’re talking about or why I need to know it.

“Your mother loved books,” the grandmother woman tells me, shaking her tiny head. “She was an English major in college.”

That doesn’t mean anything to me, so I just shrug.

But then the grandmother woman leads me back up the steps and shows me
books
, what she calls my mother’s
collection
. There are piles and piles of them, looking similar to the pieces of wood we’d throw in Fire Pit. They sit inside
the closet
in Pink Bedroom. I can’t imagine them meaning anything to my mother, though from the way the grandmother woman talks, it sounds as if they were important to her once.

“I couldn’t bear to get rid of them, not even after all this time,” she says.

It seems like such a waste to just leave them here rather than
using them to fuel her Fire Pit, or
the grill
, as she called it. But I don’t say anything.

And Mrs. Fairfield just smiles, pats the grandmother woman on the shoulder, and then tells me she wants to start with something “simpler.”

Back at the table, Mrs. Fairfield introduces me to
the newspaper
, and I listen now because I notice right away that the newspaper has pictures. They are real-looking, like the one the grandmother woman showed me at Military Hospital. And even better, the pictures in the newspaper are of me. Us.

There are pictures of my mother and Helmut, looking much younger than I remember them. Then below them, me, being carried on a long white bed into Military Hospital, River beside me, looking worried and holding tightly to my hand. I don’t remember this happening, and it’s strange to see and understand that these pictures can hold memories that I do not.

Mrs. Fairfield shows me
the words
and tells me she is going to read them to me. She asks me to follow along, as she talks and points, but I don’t even listen. I’m just staring so hard at the picture of me and River.

“Can I keep this?” I ask her when she finally stops talking.

“Oh,” she says. “You want to practice?” I nod even though I don’t think that’s what I want to do. “Well, of course, then. It’s all yours.”

After she leaves that day, I put the newspaper under the pillow in Pink Bed.

I don’t read or learn the words. But every night, for many
nights after, I take it out and touch the sandy texture of River’s face. He looks so worried about me here, not at all like someone who would want to leave me behind the moment we got to California.

I go over and over it again in my mind, that last time I saw him, the things he said to me, the way his fingers held my braid and he whispered,
Skyblue
.

One day I finally ask the grandmother woman if she knows what happened to him, where he is now. “I need to see him,” I say.

“Oh, honey.” She shakes her head. “Everything is different now. That boy is no good. You can’t be with him. Besides …” Her voice trails off. “He could be anywhere by now.” I remember what she told me, that morning when I first got in her car. Island was a freckle; California, the length of her body. Even though I ask her and I ask her again, her answer is always the same. Empty. And it’s hard to like her, the way I feel she wants me to, when she won’t even help me find River.

So all I have of him now is the newspaper. Every night, I hold on to the thinning, brittle picture of him, wondering where he is, what his life with his mother is like. I touch his grainy face again and again, until the picture starts to fade, the lines of his face wear away.