Searching for Sky (19 page)

Helmut stood by the edge of Ocean, his face angled up, staring far ahead, watching the pale blue line that sat between the edge of the water and the edge of the sky, the edge of the world.

“What are you looking for?” I asked him once. I was young, but not too young. Old enough to catch a fish, skin a rabbit. Old enough to doubt sea monsters and to understand that my mother loved Helmut even though he sometimes made her cry.

“I’m looking for the end,” he said.

“What does the end look like?” I asked him.

He sat in the sand, at the edge of the water, the way he did every morning just after using Bathroom Tree. He let his feet touch the surf. I sat next to him and did the same. “I don’t know yet,” he said.

“Well, then how will you know when you see it?”

“I just will,” he told me. “You know everything on Island is
perfect. We have everything we need. We have each other, without all the evil.”

“What’s evil?” I asked him.

He shook his head. “You don’t need to know that word here. You’re lucky, you know? Everyone isn’t so lucky as you and River. Growing up here.”

“Everyone?” I asked, not sure who he meant; who else was there besides the four of us?

“Me and your mother weren’t that lucky.”

I sat there for a little while with him in silence, staring, staring. I saw only blue water meeting blue sky. “It’s not coming today, is it?” I asked him.

“I don’t think so.” He stood and I did the same. “But one day it will,” he said. “Goodness doesn’t live forever.”

“And what will happen then?” I asked him.

“You don’t worry about that,” he told me. “I’ll take care of you. You and your mother and River. You never have to worry. I’ll always take care of you.”

After Mrs. Fairfield leaves for the morning, my grandmother walks into the kitchen, slowly, quietly. She holds on to a book, which she puts on top of the table, and then she sits down across from me. “Do you understand?” she asks, her voice breaking a little on the word
understand
, as if it’s a hard question for her to ask me, as if maybe she doesn’t quite understand herself.

“No,” I tell her. Everything Mrs. Fairfield said about Helmut having a strange cult religion and being an evil man still makes
no sense to me. Mrs. Fairfield didn’t give details past that. She moved on to reading practice while my mind wandered to thoughts of Helmut there, on Beach. “Helmut loved me,” I say again now to my grandmother. “He loved my mother. I know everyone thinks they knew him. But they didn’t.” And still, I can hear the echo of River’s quiet
yes
, of his confession that Helmut killed his mother, too. But it has to be a mistake. River must be wrong. They all must be wrong.

“Okay,” my grandmother says, pushing the book toward me across the table. “Then I’m going to give you this.”

“What is it?”

“Articles from newspapers and magazines that I cut out. Every written word that I could find about you and your mother back then. If you don’t or can’t understand or believe me or Mrs. Fairfield or Dr. Banks, well, then you can read what’s in here. See for yourself.”

I can’t read well enough yet to be able to understand any of this, and even if I could, I don’t want to. Words on paper, they don’t mean anything to me. I’m not even sure where they come from, who put them there. And if you don’t know where words come from, how can you even know they’re real? I shake my head and push the book back across the table toward her. “I don’t need this,” I say. “I know what I know.”

“But, honey …” Her voice falters. She pushes the book back to me. I push it back to her. She sighs, opens the book, and flips through the pages until she pulls something out and hands it across the table to me.

“I don’t want it,” I say.

“It’s just a picture,” she says. “Take it.” And without
meaning to, my eyes fall on it and they catch on my mother, the strange, younger version of her that my grandmother showed me in the picture that day at Military Hospital. She’s holding a small baby human wrapped in pink. Me, I guess. And next to her, there’s a man I don’t recognize. He looks tall and slim, with curly brown hair and bright green eyes. His jaw is set, determined, the way River’s looked when he wanted to swim for fish past Rocks. But still, the man is smiling. His teeth are white and shaped like tiny, perfect fish eggs.

My grandmother stares hard at my face and opens her mouth, as if trying to figure out what she wants to say next, what she thinks I might understand. “Do you know him?” she finally says, pointing to the man. I shake my head. “This man was Brad Baynes,” she says. “Your father.”

“No,” I say. “You’re lying.” But my voice trembles because something inside me jolts, the feeling of an insect sting, so sharp and sudden and surprising and instantly painful. There’s something about this man that looks familiar. There’s a mirror in my bedroom here, and my reflection is more defined in it than it ever was standing at the edge of Falls, watching myself staring back at me from the water that shares River’s name. I think it’s the man’s eyes. They’re the same color as mine, the same slant and shape as mine when they look back at me from the mirror in my bedroom.

“I’m not lying, honey,” she says softly. “I promise you, I’m not.”

“But my father never knew me,” I protest, thinking if I say what I know out loud, then I’ll understand it again, the way I always have. “He died before I was born.” This is what my
mother always told me, and Helmut always confirmed with a nod of his thick blond head. My father never knew me and I never knew him, and so, like a boat, like a planet named Venus, he was something too far removed to be real.

“No.” She shakes her head. “Your father did know you. He loved you.” She pauses. “He died just after you turned one, just before you all left on the boat. Here”—she pushes the picture closer—“take it. Hold on to it. And when you’re ready to talk or read the rest of this, it’ll be here. I’ll be here.” Her voice trembles a little, and so, I notice now, does her hand as she picks up the picture, opens my palm, and lays it flat in there.

I look at it again. I can’t help myself. The smiling man. His arm around my mother, and his other hand brushing the top of my head as if he’s about to lean down and kiss me there. It is so strange to see my mother—to see us—with someone other than Helmut.

“I canceled Dr. Banks for today,” my grandmother says, and I look back up. “Maybe this has all been too much for you, too fast. I don’t know. I don’t know how to do this, honey. I’m sorry. I wish I did.” She shakes her head and bites her lip, getting purple lipstick on the cusp of her front tooth. “There’s no rulebook for this sort of thing. I’m just trying the best I can to help you.”

Her tiny face is red, and her blue eyes water with tears. Her front tooth is stained with purple lipstick, and it makes her seem sad and small and old. She wants to love me, I think, and I suddenly feel bad for hating her so much. For the first time, I wonder how everything would be different now if this man, my supposed real father, had lived, and if my mother and Helmut
hadn’t gotten on a boat and left California. If I’d known my grandmother, this strange woman named Alice, my whole life.

The people in California are cold and broken
, my mother said. There had to be more to it than this. She must’ve had a good reason for leaving this man behind, for getting on the boat with Helmut. She loved me; they both did. I still feel so certain of that. Even now.

“I’m sorry,” my grandmother says again. “I can’t even imagine what this all must be like for you. I really can’t. I know you’re hurting here, and I want to take that away for you. I want to fix it for you.”

“I’m not broken,” I say quickly.

She nods. “I know,” she says. “I didn’t mean that you were.” She smiles and reaches for my hand across the table. She squeezes it. “So tell me, honey, what would you like to do today?”

I want to find River again. I want to show him this picture of my supposed father. To ask him what else he knows about our life. What is true and what is not. I want to find him and hold on to him tightly and not let go. I open my mouth to tell her that, and then I remember the way River whispered so frantically last night not to tell her that I’d seen him. The way she’d spat at me this morning that nothing good could come from Helmut. So instead I say, “I want to go back to the fish market with Ben.”

“Oh?” She smiles again, seeming happy that I have asked for something I guess she would consider so
normal
. “Well, absolutely. I’ll give him a call.”

Chapter 28

“Why don’t you ever have anything else to do?” I ask Ben as we sit in his blue SUV and he turns on the engine and speeds down the street toward the Pacific. I lurch forward and back, and his car seems to tumble down the hill to the ocean, too fast. He has the windows open, and the cool salt air flows in, thick enough that I can taste the ocean on my tongue.

Ben laughs. “What do you mean?”

“Well, I don’t really understand what people our age
do
here. It seems like you’re always at your house, just waiting for when my grandmother calls you and asks you to do something with me.” I picture him sitting in his room drawing pictures, listening to R.E.M. and Nina Simone and maybe even his lost father.

“I’m not always at my house,” he says. “Alice calls me on my cell, so she can call me anywhere.” He points to the square, his
cell
. I nod. Mrs. Fairfield has told me about this and shown me hers. She has even tried to get me to tap the square numbers and then talk to my grandmother with it as my grandmother
holds her cell upstairs in her bedroom, but it frightens me, the way her voice comes through it, broken and distant from her body.

“So what are you doing when she calls you?” I say. “If you’re not at your house.”

He shrugs. “It’s summer, so I go to the beach or go hang out with my friends …”

I wonder what he does at the beach, and it’s strange to picture him there, without me, with other friends who are not me and who I don’t even know. I don’t know what
hang out
means, exactly, and I imagine Ben and his friends climbing the spiky pine trees and hanging from the low branches, but I don’t want to ask Ben now. Though Ben is supposed to be my teacher, like Mrs. Fairfield, I don’t want him to think I’m a silly, stupid child, the way Mrs. Fairfield seems to think of me.

“Maybe you could come with us sometime,” Ben is saying, but the way his voice sounds, kind of strange and far away, I don’t really think he means it.

“Yeah,” I say, knowing that I never will, that soon I’ll find River again, and this time I will not let him run from me, no matter what. “Maybe.”

Ben shrugs. “Anyway, in a few weeks school will start again. And then I’ll go to school during the day.” I know what school is, spending the entire day with people like Mrs. Fairfield who try to teach you things—and it sounds awful. I’m relieved that my grandmother and Mrs. Fairfield have decided that I won’t be ready for that yet, whatever that means.

“But you don’t have any jobs?” I ask Ben. There was always something to
do
on Island. We had an order to every day, for
survival.
Rituals
, like Mrs. Fairfield said. Food to gather or catch or clean. “River and I always had jobs,” I tell him. “For as long as I can remember.”

Ben gives a funny laugh and then says, “Well, not exactly …” He pauses. “I used to bag groceries at Vons for six bucks an hour, but then … you came.”

I don’t know what one thing has to do with the other, but we’re approaching the fish market now and I feel excitement at the thought of seeing River again, at the possibility that he might be here today.

Ben pulls his SUV into the parking lot and turns it off. I hold the twenty dollars my grandmother gave me tightly in my hand. The picture rests in the large middle pocket of River’s sweatshirt. “I want to go in by myself today,” I tell Ben.

“Um … I don’t know if Alice would like that.”

“I’ll be right back,” I promise. “And we won’t even have to tell her.” Listen to me, a lying, lying liar. Ben frowns. “Come on, you’re supposed to help me get normal. Don’t normal people our age buy fish themselves?”

He hesitates for another moment, and then he nods. “If you’re not back in five minutes, I’m coming in for you.” He laughs when he says it, but I don’t think he’s kidding.