Searching for Sky (18 page)

The sweatshirt is warm, a little damp, and holds on to me tightly, like the feel of River’s back hugging mine as we lay there together on our rabbit pelt mats.

Chapter 26

That night, I dream of Helmut.

We walk along the edge of Ocean together, and Helmut holds his spear tightly in one hand, my hand tightly in his other. I am small again—five, maybe—and when I get tired of walking, Helmut picks me up and places me on his thick shoulders. I wrap my arms around his neck, getting tangled up in his blond hair and beard, the same yellow color as River’s. I’m laughing, until I look down and see the circle of blood around his neck, a sharp, fatal cut, like the one River made with the stone to take the head off my birthday fish.

He deserved it
, River says to me from somewhere behind me on the beach.
He killed them
.

I wake up sweating, my arms tangled in River’s too-big sweatshirt. It was a memory, my dream, until it got to the awful part. Helmut would often carry me on his shoulders down on Beach
when my feet got sore and tired, when it was too hot or too hard for me to walk. He would bounce me a little and teach me things, telling me about the tides and the moons, and the best way to catch and prepare a fish. I was six when he let me try it with his spear for the first time. I shot it into the water and pulled it back, squealing with delight to see a slippery silver fish on the point.

“Shhh.” Helmut put his large hand over my mouth. “You’ll scare the rest of them away.” Then he smiled at me. “Let’s go show Petal what you did. Only six and already catching dinner.”

Back on the sand, Helmut lifted me up and hung me on his shoulders. They shook when he laughed, great big booms of laughter. In his hand he held out the spear, my first dead fish, dangling and bloody, on the end.

If my grandmother overheard my conversation with Dr. Banks, or if Dr. Banks told her what happened last night, she doesn’t mention it when I walk downstairs this morning. When Ben walked me back in last night, she’d only clutched me tightly to her, so tightly it was almost hard to breathe, and whispered into my hair, “Don’t run off like that again, Megan. You scared me. I already lost you once, you know. I can’t lose you again.”

But instead of feeling her joy, I’d felt annoyed. What about what I’ve lost? No one seems to care.

At the table in her kitchen this morning, she sits there in her pink bathrobe, her blond hair uncombed, holding on tightly to a steaming cup of coffee. At my place she’s already put out a glass of coconut milk and something new today I don’t recognize.

“Blueberry muffin,” she says as I eye it skeptically. It looks nothing like a blue berry.

I’m still in River’s sweatshirt, and though she puckers her lips when she seems to notice this, she doesn’t ask me about it. I’ve seen Ben wearing a similar one, and she probably just thinks it’s his. I know she has known Ben for a long time and doesn’t know River at all, but still, it doesn’t make sense to me why she hates River so much. And why River seemed worried about me telling her I saw him last night.

“Can I ask you something?” I say as I take a bite of her muffin. It feels strange in my mouth. Too soft and too sweet. I force myself to swallow some and wash it down with some of her coconut milk. Better than the oatmeal she gave me yesterday. Worse than the fruit salad she gave me the day before that.

“What is it, honey?” She sips her coffee, and her voice sounds strained, as if she spent the night crying, the way my mother’s sounded once after she and Helmut got in a fight and Helmut didn’t come back to Shelter until the next morning.

“Why do you hate River?”

She puts the coffee down a little too hard, and some brown liquid jumps over the side and onto the table. She wipes at it with her thumb. “That man,” she says. And instinctively I know she means Helmut. “Nothing good can come from that man.”

“River and Helmut are very different,” I say.

“Well, you wouldn’t know that to look at him. He’s the spitting image.”

“That’s really not fair,” I tell her.

“You know what’s not fair?” she says. Her voice is low, and
her jaw is clenched. “He took my daughter away. He took
you
away. Fifteen years,” she says. “Look what he did to you.”

“What he did to me?” It sounds awful, as if I am some sort of sea monster, the kind my mother would tell me about as we walked through the skim of Ocean when I was little.

The doorbell chirps in the distance, and my grandmother stands quickly, taking her coffee with her. “Finish your breakfast,” she says. “Mrs. Fairfield will be ready to get to work.”

I watch her walk away, and then I stand up and throw the muffin in the trash can. It feels good. To do something I feel like doing in her house. Something I choose. However small.

My grandmother doesn’t look like a skeleton in her bathrobe, with her uncombed hair and her coffee. But Mrs. Fairfield taught me about metaphors the other day, and now I think I understand what my mother had meant. My grandmother doesn’t care, really, that she lost me or my mother to Island. Or what happened to us there. Or that maybe we weren’t really lost. That we were happy. That we were alive, and Island was simple. That we all loved one another. She cares only about what was taken from her, what was done to her. Underneath her robe and her clothes and her flesh, I’m not sure I believe her heart is beating, as mine always has. As my mother’s did. As River’s does.

“So tell me,” Mrs. Fairfield says, sitting across the table from me. Her coral hair is in a pile on top of her head today, which makes her cheekbones appear higher, her face more slanted and bright red. She smiles too wide, and I am already annoyed by
her, though we haven’t even begun our lesson yet. “What do you know about religion?” she asks me, still smiling.

“Religion?” I ask.

“Your mother was raised Catholic. Do you know what that is?” I shake my head. “Okay, then. On the island, did you ever talk about things like a god or a church? Did you pray?”

“I don’t know,” I say, all those words unfamiliar to me. “I don’t think so.”

“Were there rituals you performed?”

“Rituals?”

“Things you repeated day after day or week after week for luck or good measure?”

I nod. “Yeah, I guess so. We had things we did every day.”

“Such as?”

“Well, first thing in the morning, I would use Bathroom Tree. Then I made a notch in Tree of Days. I checked the traps—”

She smiles again and puts her hand on my arm so I stop talking. “The things you did there, the way you survived every day, it’s amazing. It really is. But that’s not what I mean. Not the chores you did, not your routine.” She hesitates for a moment. “But what did you believe in?”

“I don’t know,” I say. She nods and raises her eyebrows a little but doesn’t say anything. Which is what she does when she’s expecting me to think, or try, harder. So I put my head down, to make it look like I’m thinking. “We believed in Island, I guess,” I finally say, “and Ocean. That the land and the water would feed us and keep us safe.”

“Well, okay,” she says. “But think, Megan. What did Helmut teach you to believe in?”

He taught me a lot of things. To fish and to trap. To skin a rabbit and to start a fire, that Ocean saves and heals us, but I press my lips tightly together because I don’t think this is what she’s asking me. “Helmut had a lot of rules,” I say. “Is this what you mean?”

“What kind of rules?” she asks, folding her hands in front of her on the kitchen table, as if she is ready and waiting to listen, should I find the right thing to say.

“Well, things to keep us safe. We couldn’t swim out past Rocks, in Fishing Cove. We couldn’t build fires on Beach …” She shakes her head, and I don’t understand it, why she’s pushing me so hard on this subject we’ve never talked about before. “Aren’t we going to read today?” I ask her. I’m feeling anxious now to get through the lesson and suffer through what I plan on being a quiet half an hour with Dr. Banks so I can see Ben again and try to get him to tell me the truth. All of it. And to take me back to the fish market.

“Do you know what a cult is?” Mrs. Fairfield asks now. I shake my head. “Well, most of us here have organized religion. Your mother and your grandmother are Catholic, like I said. A lot of people are. They all believe the same things, celebrate the same holidays, go to the same place to pray, and pray to the same God. It’s normal to be religious, to believe in one of the common religions.”

Normal
. There’s that stupid word again. In telling me how normal she wants me to be, she’s pointing out how normal I’m not. “Do you believe in Common Religions?” I ask her.

She nods. “I’m Lutheran,” she says, “which is kind of like Catholic. But not exactly. Close. We celebrate the same holidays, pray to the same God, that sort of thing.”

“Okay,” I say, though I only understand the smallest bit of what she said. And now I’m starting to get bored, so I pick at the loose piece of skin by the corner of my thumb.

“A cult is an unusual form of religion—not normal. It’s smaller. More extreme. It’s run by a person with strange beliefs, and his followers go along with them, even if it’s bad for them.”

“Why are you telling me all this?” I ask.

“There was a man named Charles Manson back in the 1960s, right here in California. He started a cult he called the Manson Family. Anyway, he was the leader of this cult, and all the women in his ‘family’ were in love with him, or they thought they were, so they listened to him, they believed in him, even when he told them to do crazy things. Manson convinced them the end of the world was coming, and that they needed to start it by committing murders.”

She says the word
murders
, and it thuds, hard, the way her dictionary does when she drops it on the kitchen table in front of me. I think of Dr. Banks as she told me that Helmut was a murderer, that he’d killed my father. So what is Mrs. Fairfield trying to tell me now? We were a cult on Island? A Manson Family? No way.

“Heaven’s Gate was another one,” she’s saying now. “Also right here in California, just a little while after … you were born. Marshall Applewhite was their leader, and he persuaded about forty people to kill themselves. They took the religious book that the Catholics and the Lutherans use—the Bible—and they twisted it. They made themselves believe the world was ending. So they ended it first.”

Ben’s song about the end of the world echoes in my head,
and I wonder if R.E.M. is also a cult, and if Ben believes in them. But I don’t ask her. Instead, I say again, “Why are you telling me all this?”

“Because,” she says, “your grandmother asked me to teach you about Helmut Almstedt today.” I realize that Dr. Banks must’ve told my grandmother everything, and I don’t understand why my grandmother couldn’t just tell me about Helmut herself. “And I want you to understand exactly what that man was. Who that man was.” She pauses. “Charles Manson. Marshall Applewhite. Helmut Almstedt. They were the same,” she says. “Helmut Almstedt”—she repeats his name, and now it sounds like she bit into something sour—“was an evil man.”

Chapter 27