Searching for Sky (13 page)

After I tiptoe down the hallway to listen for the grandmother woman’s snore, I put the picture back under the pillow and I remove the screen from the window. I slide down the tree and I run through the pines to the ocean because I know this is where I’ll find him again. The real him. Not the fake, fading picture.

I make sure I’m always back before morning, climbing up
the way I went out. I don’t think the grandmother woman knows I do this, but she hasn’t exactly said I can’t, either. She has not explained the rules to me, as Helmut always did. And so I go almost every night.

I call for River in the depths of the ocean, the waves often swallowing my voice. Sometimes I hear a rustle in the pines, and I wonder if he can hear me, but if he can, he doesn’t answer back.

Chapter 20

The sun rises and sets in the sky in California, just as it did on Island. June gloom, gray skies, and all. Every morning, the world grows lighter outside the window, and I make a black notch on the wall behind the bed with the pencil I took from Mrs. Fairfield. Every night the sky falls black. I track the pattern of the moon, half to three-quarters to full to the smallest silver feather in the sky, and by the time it is a half-moon again, the day sky grows bluer, the air a little warmer. One day, the sun rises, a flaming orange ball over the tall brown hills. There are twenty-two black notches on the wall behind the bed. My grandmother informs me that it is July, that in California there are months that change, just like the cycle of the moon.

By this time, the vultures have mostly disappeared, except for the occasional one that might block my grandmother’s car as she tries to back up, which will cause her to get out and yell and scream so loud that I worry she might shake the earth in one of those earthquakes Mrs. Fairfield has told me about.

Each morning now, not too long after I watch the sun come up through my window, I start with what my grandmother calls her “team of professionals”: Mrs. Fairfield; then a psychiatrist, Dr. Banks; and finally Ben. Mrs. Fairfield, who insists she is catching me up so I might go to school someday, though I know I never will. Dr. Banks to help me work through “issues.” And Ben to make me, as my grandmother says, a normal sixteen-year-old girl.

Mrs. Fairfield explains the word
normal
to me by telling me that it’s what’s usual, expected. She says being normal would mean I think and act and feel the same as all the other people in California, and I know I will never be that. And anyway, I don’t want to. What I want, in the small crevices of night, when I’m alone again, in silence and darkness, is to find my way back to Island, to a life that made sense to me, that did not require a “team of professionals.” To River.

The only thing that makes me feel even close to
normal
is the ocean, though I don’t tell that to my grandmother or Mrs. Fairfield because I know that this is not what they mean, that they wouldn’t even understand.

Dr. Banks, the psychiatrist on my grandmother’s “team of professionals,” is a very tall woman, her body like the trunk of a palm, thin and flat, her back arching into her large, wide head overcome by masses of gray hair.

She comes to the house at different times of the day, depending on what my grandmother calls her
schedule
. “But she’s the
best,” my grandmother says. “The very best.” I would not want to see the worst in California if that is true.

She sits on the couch while I sit across from her on the love seat, and on her first few visits all she does is stare at me and say, “Now, what would you like to talk about, Megan?”

“My name is not Megan,” I remind her, the way I’ve reminded everyone, again and again. She ignores me, the way they all do. I hate it when she calls me Megan, when anyone calls me Megan, but they all insist.
That’s your name
, my grandmother always says, her face turning an awful red.

After a few days, Dr. Banks starts asking me about Helmut, whether he ever hurt me and whether I felt afraid. I think about what Ben told me, about the word
captive
. But still, I really can’t understand what she’s asking me, what she wants me to say. If I did, I probably would just say it, just to get her to stop talking to me, and unlike my lessons with Mrs. Fairfield and Ben, I don’t see how anything Dr. Banks is doing or saying will help me really learn this world, help me get back to Island.

She asks again and again, though, about Helmut, and my answer is always the same.

“No,” I say. “And no. Helmut loved me. My mother loved me.”

Dr. Banks frowns and says things like, “This is a safe space, Megan. You don’t have to lie here.”

“I’m not lying.” I grit my teeth.

When she leaves, I tell my grandmother that I don’t think she’s helping, that I don’t think I need her, but my grandmother
just frowns and shakes her head. “Oh, honey,” she says. “Just give it time.”

The only one who doesn’t call me Megan is Ben, but only when my grandmother can’t hear him. Sometimes, I think he’s nervous around her in the same strange way that River sometimes seemed nervous around Helmut.

“Sky is a pretty name,” Ben tells me one afternoon as we walk along the edge of the ocean. It’s the time of day we usually go to the beach together. “It’s different. I see why you like it so much.”

“I thought you were supposed to make me normal,” I say. “Doesn’t different mean not normal?”

He laughs. We trail the edge of the ocean walking next to each other, our bare feet, tangled with ugly green seaweed, moving together, skimming the cool water. “Yeah, well, Alice probably didn’t pick the best person for that.”

“So you’re not normal?” I ask him.

He shakes his head, and I think I like him more. “But don’t tell,” he whispers, and he laughs again. I like that now it feels as if we’re keeping a secret together, something my grandmother doesn’t know, that I do. Ben is always nice to me, and I sometimes think about asking him to tell me more about Helmut, except then I worry that whatever he says might make me hate him, as I do all the others.

“Come on, Island Girl,” he says, stopping our walk and turning back. “It’s almost time for dinner.”

“Island Girl?” I ask him.

“That can be my nickname for you,” he says. “I’ve been thinking it over, and I like that one way better than my other choice, ‘Not-Megan.’” He pauses. “I mean, that’s practically already your name, you say it to everyone so much.”

I think he’s laughing at me now, and that makes me angry. Everyone wants to call me something that I’m not, even him. Why can’t I just be Sky? The person I am. The person I always have been? “How would you like it if suddenly your name wasn’t Ben anymore and everyone started calling you something you didn’t even know?”

He reaches down for my hand, and I pull away. But then he reaches again and squeezes my hand gently, so I think that maybe he wasn’t laughing at me. Maybe he was trying to be nice by calling me
Island Girl
? “I get it, Sky,” he says. “It totally sucks.”

And for the first time, I think I understand exactly what he means by that.

Chapter 21

The next afternoon, after the “team of professionals” has left for the day and Ben’s mom (who I haven’t met yet) is home from work and he’s spending time with her, my grandmother announces she’s taking me somewhere.

“Let’s do a girls’ day,” she says. “Live it up a little … We’ll go get our nails done and our makeup, and do some shopping and get our hair … shaped.” She tugs on the end of my braid, but not in a nice way, the way River would do when he was teasing me or comforting me. My grandmother’s hands on my braid annoy me, and I shrug her off.

I’ve already learned a lot here, but not everything—not even close—and I don’t understand where she wants me to go with her.

“Come on,” she says, as if I have a choice. “It’ll be fun.” She picks up her purse and pulls my elbow toward the door. “Everyone has been teaching you things, helping you, but me. You’ve
been here for weeks, and I feel like we’ve barely spent any time together.”

She’s right. I do eat dinner with her every night, and some nights with Ben, too. She cooks things and asks me to taste them, even when I think they look and smell strange. “You don’t have to eat all of it,” she says, staring at me, pushing me with her eyes. “Just a little taste and I’ll leave you alone.”

But each night, right after I’ve eaten some of her food, or pushed it around on my plate, I always say I’m tired and go upstairs to the pink bedroom. I wait for her to turn off the television box, close the door to her bedroom, and go to sleep before I take out the window screen and find my way down to the ocean again. Or if I’m really tired, I go straight to sleep and I find Island again in my dreams.

I think it disappoints her that I refuse to watch the television box with her after dinner. But the few times I’ve sat there with her, all I’ve seen are pretend faraway people talking to each other about things that have nothing to do with me. I don’t understand why she’s interested in them if they’re not even here, if they’re not even real.

She leads me into the garage now and opens the car door for me. “Your mother and I used to do this when she was your age, you know?” I don’t know, of course, so I don’t answer. When I think of my mother, I think of her singing softly in my ear, pulling her fingers through my braid, holding on to me on the rabbit pelt mat in Shelter. I can’t imagine her here, in this place. I think it’s too big, too loud, too much. It would swallow her whole.

My grandmother starts the car and backs down the driveway,
and I think about the fact that we haven’t talked much about my mother, neither one of us. There is so much she must know about my mother from before Island, and all she’s told me about are her books. It’s this thing that sits between us, as wide as the Pacific Ocean, and maybe that’s part of the reason why I’ve been avoiding her. Whenever my grandmother starts to talk about my mother, it’s like she’s telling me a story about this person she made up, this girl who never even existed, and I can’t listen without feeling sad and upset.

Suddenly, the car stops hard and I fly forward, then back. My grandmother gets out and storms down the driveway screaming: “You idiot … I nearly killed you … I’ll tell you where you can put your camera …”

She’s tough, I think. And I imagine she could skin a rabbit with a stone if she needed to. For some reason, this thought makes me uncomfortable now, that the two of us might have something in common, that if I were really trying to learn to fit in here—not just to find a way to get back to Island—then I might understand that she is the practical one, like me.

But that thought quickly falls away as she gets back into the car and says, “Sorry about that, Megan. Those vultures …”

I don’t hear the rest. I hear only the awful sound of my fake name in her voice.
I am not Megan. I am Sky
.

But I’m so tired of saying it. Of talking and talking and having her not listen, so I say nothing now. I just clench my hands at my sides.

She doesn’t say anything else, either, as she turns down the street, but I hear her breath in her chest, rattling a little. She turns
onto what I now know is the Coastal Highway, and her breathing evens. Outside my window, the Pacific spans wide and gray and white. A bird swoops down into the waves, and I put my hand to the glass, wishing I could get out and touch the ocean, feel the spray of the salt water against my skin. The ocean lulls me, teases me. So close, and so far.

After a few minutes, she drives away from the ocean and pulls into what I know now is a parking lot. Then she stops the car and turns to me and smiles. “Okay,” she says. “We’re here. Your mother used to love the salon when she was your age. She was such a girlie-girl, always worrying about her hair and makeup and nails. Oh, heaven forbid her polish wouldn’t look perfect or she would have a hair out of place.”

“I don’t know what that means,” I say. None of it. Makeup. Polish. Worrying about your nails? Nails are for digging and scratching, pulling scales from fish skin.

“Megan, honey.” She puts her hand on my knee. “I loved your mother very much. Everything that’s happened, well … I got through it by hanging on to the good times we had. And now that you’re here, I want to share some of that with you, okay?” She smiles. “Let’s go get ourselves all gussied up in there.”