Searching for Sky (15 page)

I am starting to trust him, too, I think now. Not the way I trust River, the way I trusted him as I stood by Falls that morning and he pleaded with me to leave Island. The way he offered me his hand, and I took it.
It’ll be okay
, he told me. And I wish I had convinced him then that it wouldn’t be. A part of me is angry with him now, for promising me, and then leaving me. Here. All alone. But even more, I am angry with myself. River is the dreamer; I am the practical one. I should’ve known better.

And I’m not alone here, I guess. I have my grandmother, and I have Ben. A team of professionals. Hundreds and hundreds of strangers in California, driving closely to one another on the I-5. When I open the window in my bedroom to climb out at night, I can hear the distant whir of all those cars, but strangely enough, I can’t hear the ocean from there.

It’s funny, though, how my insides feel so empty now. How I feel more alone surrounded by all these people than I ever did on Island.

Ben’s car is blue and much longer than my grandmother’s. It’s higher off the ground, too, and that’s because Ben says it’s an SUV, and it’s his mother’s car. “If I had my choice,” he says as he helps me in, “I’d drive something way cooler. A Jag or a Porsche.”

“Then why don’t you?” I ask.

He laughs. “Dude, maybe someday. When I’ve got tons of money.”

I don’t understand this money thing. Mrs. Fairfield has explained it to me, showing me dollar bills and coins, credit cards, and checks as I’ve repeatedly asked her where the money comes from. How people get it. Why they need it. I imagine this big, wide pool surrounded by rocks, like Fishing Cove, where money floats and people spear it with spears.

Mrs. Fairfield shakes her pointy coral head and laughs.
That’s not the way the world works, Megan
.

I do understand that money seems to be necessary to do anything here, and that I am going to have to figure out how to get some if I’m ever going to figure out how to get back to Island.

This is also why I like going places with Ben. The more I go, the more I leave my grandmother’s house, the more I learn about this world, for real.

On the ride to the fish market, Ben drives his SUV a little faster than my grandmother drives her red car, and the movement makes me feel sick again. The omelet my grandmother made for breakfast sloshes around in my stomach, threatening to come back up even though that was a long time ago. I hold on to the window, and I don’t breathe again until he stops and we are there.

We get out of the car, and the salt water curls deliciously in my nose, calming my stomach. I can’t see it from here, but I know we’re by the ocean, and that makes me happy.

“Wait,” Ben says as I start to walk without him. He runs around to my side and puts his arm around me. Then he turns and looks back quickly.

“Oh,” I say, realizing he is trying to shield me from the vultures. “They’re gone now. Didn’t you read about what happened in the newspaper?”

“The shooting, you mean?” I nod. “Well, at least they’re leaving you alone now, right?”

“I guess so,” I say. “But what do you think of it? The shooting. Everyone tried to explain it to me this morning. But I couldn’t really understand it.”

He shrugs. “It’s sad to say, but I guess I’m kind of used to it. That stuff happens all the time. I mean it happened to …” He looks at me hard for a moment and then shakes his head.

“To what?” I ask.

“Never mind.” He pauses. “It sucks. It really does. The world is a crazy, stupid place.”

The world, I’ve come to learn now that Mrs. Fairfield has taught me about
maps
, includes so much. The great wide Pacific Ocean. And the Atlantic, Indian, Arctic, and Southern Oceans, too. California. The United States. Samoa. And even Island, which, as hard as Mrs. Fairfield and I tried, we couldn’t locate on any maps she showed me. In the space where Mrs. Fairfield said Island should be, there is only blue, blue water. “Well,” Mrs. Fairfield had said. “I guess they’re going to have to redo this map now, aren’t they?” I didn’t tell her, but that upset me. I don’t think I want the rest of the great wide world to know about it. Island was mine and River’s, my mother’s and Helmut’s. And I would not consider it crazy, stupid, or
sucks
, like Ben considers his world. But deep down, I also worried about how hard it will be to find it again, if it isn’t even on Mrs. Fairfield’s maps.

“Check this out,” Ben says now, opening the door to the tiny building in front of us. There are red letters on the door glass. I try to read them, but I don’t recognize the words. “Sandy’s Fish Market,” Ben says, helping me out.

“Thanks,” I say.

“Every fish you could imagine,” Ben says as we step inside. “Brought right off the boat.”
The boat
. I think of River and me lying there on the boat’s floor, our last night together, him holding on to me, promising me everything was going to be fine.

“They wheel them inside in these giant trash cans,” Ben is saying, and I realize he’s still talking about the fish. “These huge
black bins piled up with fresh-caught fish. It’s kind of awesome to see.”

“Yeah, awesome,” I repeat back, doing as Mrs. Fairfield has asked me to—to echo Ben.

Awesome
. It sounds like a silly, empty word. The words we used on Island had meaning.
Fish. Water. Shelter. Falls. Spears. Fire
. Everything meant something. Everything in our world was useful.

The door shuts behind us, chirping like a bird, and the smell of the ocean, dead fish, is strong in this small space. In front of me, there’s a large window filled with fish of all colors and sizes, already scaled, trimmed, cleaned, and filleted. Which is kind of disappointing. They don’t really even look like fish still.

“Come on,” Ben says, slipping a bill into my hand. “Twenty dollars. Pick whatever you want and pay yourself.”

“Did Mrs. Fairfield tell you to do this?” I ask.

He shrugs, and I laugh. Because it’s funny. Kind of. I take the twenty dollars and walk up to the window, trying to read the choices. The letters jumble and the words aren’t familiar, or maybe they are and I just don’t how to read them yet. Mrs. Fairfield talks a lot about letters and sounds, and sounding things out, but that seems like a lot of effort now, so I don’t even try it.

The man behind the window asks if he can help me. And instead of reading anything, I point to what looks the best to me, the fish that are most familiar to the ones I know. Silvery skin. Pink fleshy insides.

“Do you have any wahoo?” I ask, because according to Mrs. Fairfield, this is most likely the kind of fish we caught and ate
on Island. She showed me a picture of one, and I nodded, telling her that yes, she was right. Maybe she was, maybe she wasn’t. She also showed me pictures of rabbits and wallabies, and tried to convince me that I had them confused, that it was not rabbit we always ate and wore on Island, but wallaby. I don’t know.

“Wahoo?” the man repeats. I nod. “Let me check in the back.” He opens a wide door and yells, “Hey, Lucas, any wahoo come in today?”

Not River. Lucas
.

All this time, he’s been so close? Not at the ocean. At the fish market? Of course
.

Mrs. Fairfield showed me the words in the newspaper, too.
Lucas. Megan
. And my mother, who they and my grandmother referred to as
Angela
, not Petal. Only Helmut seemed to be Helmut both in California and on Island.

“Lucas,” the man yells again.

I feel a cry rising in my throat, and I think I hold it back, except I must not, because Ben reaches for my shoulder. “Sky,” he whispers. “You okay?”

I shake my head.

“Hey, Lucas,” the man calls one more time. I hold my ear tight for the answer, the sound of his voice. If I could just hear it.
Skyblue
.

“He’s still out on the boat,” another voice calls, a man. Not River.

“Any wahoo back there?”

I don’t hear what the man says. My entire body feels tight, soaking in the still fish air. I can’t move. I can’t breathe.

“If you try back in the morning, we might have some,” the man behind the window is saying now.

Ben steps forward and takes the twenty dollars from my hand. “We’ll just take what you have, then,” I hear him say. “The halibut, and maybe some of the mahi.”

“She all right?” the man asks.

“Yeah, sure,” Ben says. “She’s fine.”

I feel the fish man’s eyes on me, cold and still. I squirm a little, uncomfortable with him staring so closely. “She that girl from the paper?” he asks Ben.

“No,” Ben says quickly. He stands up a little straighter and shoves the twenty dollars across the window. “Can you just hurry up with the fish? Please.” His voice trembles.

Finally the man hands the brown package across the window, and Ben grabs it, then grabs me, wrapping his arm around my shoulders, pulling me tightly to him, as if he’s trying to hide me in his side.

We get into the SUV quickly, and then we sit there for a moment, not saying anything. Ben puts his hands on the wheel, and I notice they’re shaking.

Hey, Lucas
. He’s here. So close.

“Shit,” Ben says now.

“Shit,” I echo back.

“Oh no, don’t. Don’t say that one in front of Alice. It’s not a good word.”

“Okay,” I say. But how am I supposed to know the difference? How are there good words and bad ones, useful ones and empty ones? I’m supposed to echo. But I’m not. I’m Sky but I’m Megan. I’m neither one. Or I’m both.

River is here. Or Lucas is. I’ve found him. Even if he didn’t want to be found.

And now that I know where he is, all I have to do is come back and talk to him, and convince him to go back to Island with me.

Chapter 23

Instead of going right back to my grandmother’s house, Ben pulls into the garage at the next house over, his house, first. “You wanna come in for a little bit?” he asks as he turns off the car.

I nod because I’m not ready to go back to my grandmother’s house yet. But as I follow him inside, I am not really paying much attention to what he’s saying to me. I am still imagining him,
my River
, inside the fish market, on a boat, catching fish, almost as he always was. So close to here.

“My mom’s at work,” I realize Ben is saying now as I follow him into his kitchen. “That’s why it’s so quiet.” His mom is almost always at work, this place where Mrs. Fairfield tells me people get money. My grandmother doesn’t work, but somehow she still seems to have money. Ben’s mother works a lot, and yet he mentioned in the car how he’d drive a different one if he had more money. It really is confusing. But I get tired of asking questions. And besides, it is hard to concentrate on worrying about
this world now when my mind is flooding with my old one.
River
.

I haven’t been in Ben’s house before now, and as he puts the fish in his silver fridge to keep it good, I notice the inside of his house is nearly the same as my grandmother’s in the shapes and placement of the rooms, but everything else about the house seems different. In my grandmother’s house, every room has its color, mostly a very bright one, and most of the rooms have carpet. In Ben’s house, the walls are white, and the floors are tile, like my grandmother’s kitchen and bathrooms.

I follow Ben up the tiled stairs, which are smooth and cool against the bottoms of my feet, and I notice his bedroom is the same one as mine, second door past the stairs, only inside his room, his walls are white and covered with pictures. Not fake oceans, like in my room, but people—drawings, like the ones River and I used to make in the sand, only Ben’s are much better, more detailed, more real-looking, almost like the pictures in the newspaper but not quite.

“Did you make these?” I ask. He nods. “They’re really nice,” I say. “Especially this one.” I run my finger across one that looks a lot like me. And by that, I mean Sky-me, the girl in the rabbit pelt who lived on Island and smiled and knew everything there was to know, not Megan-me, the girl with the jeans and flip-flops who doesn’t know much. The girl in this drawing is smiling. I’m not sure if I’ve smiled since coming to California.