Searching for Sky (2 page)

“Thank you for the birthday fish,” I murmur, and I try not to think about my last birthday, when my mother was still here and she gave me the armband made of pink shells she’d dug from the sand.
It’s a bracelet
, she told me, and I had never seen anything like it before, something pretty whose sole purpose was for decorating your arm. Helmut didn’t approve. I could tell by the way he frowned as he watched her place it on my wrist.

“Sky,” River whispers in my hair now. I’m almost asleep, my mother and Helmut so close that I can almost touch them. River’s voice is hazy and raw, and I wonder if he’s almost asleep, too.

“Hmm?” I whisper back.

“I saw something today.”

“What?” I ask him. I am so warm and full and tired that I can barely move my lips to make a sound. I think about my mother’s bracelet, the way the pale pink shells feel cool and smooth against the bare flesh of my arm.

“A boat,” River says, just as I am on the cusp of dreaming. “I think I saw a boat.”

Chapter 2

There are very few things I know about my life before I came to Island, and even less that I know about my mother’s life before that. But this much I do know. She came here on a boat.
We
came here on a boat.

I was one or maybe two. And River was three or maybe four. My mother and Helmut and The Others Who We Never Met were all on this boat, and they didn’t mean to come here. I don’t know what they meant to do, but I am pretty sure Island was an accident because sometimes my mother would talk about The Others Who We Never Met and The Accident, and tears would well in her eyes, but whenever I’d ask her for more details, she’d press her lips together tightly.

“It doesn’t matter now,” Helmut would say. “We are all more happy here anyway. Just the four of us. Aren’t we, Petal?” He would look to my mother for approval, and she would give it with a nod, a smile, and the quick disappearance of her tears.

I don’t remember the boat we came on, or what happened to
it, or how we got here. In my mind, I have always been here. Island is my home. The blue, blue, blue stretch of the water into the sky. The warm grains of sand between my toes. Soft Grassy Hill by Falls. The cool water of Falls that cleanses me each day. Helmut, my mother, River. And now, only River.

I’m not sure I know what a boat looks like, or that it’s even a real thing. Or if it is, I imagine it like the stars, the one hanging just below the moon that my mother told me is Venus. The morning star and evening star, a distant, glowing planet, she said. It is so far away it’s not something I believe to be anything more than what I can see: the smallest dot of twinkling yellow against the pale blue light of dusk.

The next morning, when I wake up, River is gone, and I’m in Shelter all alone. I make a notch in Tree of Days, as I do every morning. Then I walk to Bathroom Tree and squat over Pee Hole to relieve myself.

River still isn’t at Shelter when I get back, so I walk down to Beach. Beach is in the opposite direction from Falls, and about three times the distance. Shelter is on the highest point of Island, so when the storms come and Ocean floods Beach, Shelter still stays dry and safe.

When I step onto Beach now, the sand is still damp from last night’s storm, and River stands there, at the edge of Ocean, ankle deep in blue, blue water. For a moment, I stare at the arch of his back, his wide, strong shoulders, before I walk down to the water’s edge to join him.

“Maybe you were wrong,” I say.

River turns to look at me. His face is blank like the sand. Any trace of yesterday’s smile is gone. “Good morning to you, too.”

“About the boat, I mean.”

“I know what you mean.” He turns back to Ocean, staring hard out across the horizon. Still, all that I see is blue water meets blue sky. The waves crest whiter today in the aftermath of the storm, and it comforts me to think that even if there was this boat that River thought he saw, the storm might have swept it away, taken it back out into Ocean, beyond our reach. “I wasn’t wrong,” he tells me, shaking his head.

River is older than me, less than two years, but still. Sometimes he uses this, as if it makes him so much wiser. As if he remembers so much more about some other life than I do. I remember nothing before Island. And I don’t think River really does, either.

“Come on, Riv,” I say now. “I’m going to check the traps. Are you coming?”

He shakes his head, and I leave him standing there by the edge of the water, watching for something I don’t even believe is real.

Our animal traps were first set by Helmut. They are strong and made of palm wood. He made them so long ago that I have no idea how he made them or how he knew to set them. But now they exist, something real, just like every other part of my life on Island.

As I walk from trap to trap, I think about River, standing there at the edge of Ocean, looking faraway and serious. River
is what Helmut always called a dreamer, which I took as a bad thing. My mother always said, “Oh, hush, Helmut. Leave the boy be.”

I know that Helmut was not my father, that my real father died before I was born. But Helmut was mostly kind to me, as if he were my real father. “You,” Helmut told me, “are the practical one. My son wouldn’t survive a day here on his own.” And so Helmut showed me how to set the traps, bait them with old fish for birds, leaves for rabbits, and then check them each morning. When I was younger, I used to go with him every morning to check them. Now that he’s gone, I’m still the trap keeper. The practical one.

But maybe Helmut wasn’t being fair, I think now as I walk from trap to trap through the thick, wide green palms that scratch against my bare legs. Helmut would’ve been proud of River’s fish yesterday, even if River did go beyond Rocks. It was a stupid thing to do, but even though he wouldn’t have admitted it, I think deep down Helmut would’ve thought it brave.

Then I imagine his thick face turning red with anger if he could see River now, standing at the edge of Ocean, thinking about this boat instead of checking traps with me.

All the traps are empty today, and I’m grateful River caught such a big fish yesterday so that we will still have more to eat than flowers.

Back outside Shelter, I find River just returned from Falls, his blond hair loose and hanging wet down his brown back, drops of water still beading his forehead. He sits down in front of me,
and I comb through his hair with my fingers, then braid it, tying the ends in a knot, the way my mother taught me.

“I’m going back beyond Rocks,” River announces when I’m finished.

“To look for this boat?” I say, hands on my hips, frowning at him the way I’m certain Helmut would’ve.

“The traps empty again?” he asks. I nod. “Then we need more fish.” He grabs his spear from Tool Tree and begins walking the path toward Beach. I imagine him there beyond Rocks, swept into the thick current, never to come back here to me. As practical as I might be, I don’t want to be alone. It’s almost too much that my mother has been gone now for nearly a year. I can’t lose River, too.

“Riv, wait,” I call after him. I grab my own spear from Tool Tree. “I’m coming with you.”

He grins, and he holds out his hand for me to take. I do, and we head down the path toward Ocean together, holding on to our spears and each other.

If you walk down Beach fifty paces, there’s a small cove encased by Rocks. This was what Helmut and my mother always called Fishing Cove, and it was where Helmut taught both River and me how to spear fish. Part of the trick in catching them is moving softly, lightly, and so it’s not really River’s fault that he’s not as good at it as I am. I’m smaller and lighter than he is. The air whispers more softly around the thinner space of my body. The fish don’t hear me coming as often as they hear him.
Also, I’m fast with the spear, maybe faster than River. A fish rarely gets by me alive.

I am determined today to catch fish in Fishing Cove so then River won’t have a reason to climb over Rocks and swim beyond them. But River runs through the cove, splashing water, warning the fish. “River!” I yell at him, but either he doesn’t hear me or he pretends not to, and soon I watch him climb over Rocks and start swimming beyond them.

I hesitate for a moment before removing my rabbit pelt, but then I watch River move farther beyond Rocks, and I take my pelt off, leave it on the sand, and quickly run in the water.

I climb over Rocks and begin swimming toward him. The water has grown suddenly deeper, and only River’s blond head bobs above the surface.

“River,” I call as I swim to catch him, “this is too deep to fish. You’re going to drown.”

His head is bobbing, his hands waving in the air, his fingertips reaching for the sky. I turn the corner, so Island is behind me now, wide-open Ocean in front of me. I have never been this far from Island before; I’ve never gone around the bend of it, never seen what’s beyond. It makes me nervous, and I want to get back to Beach as quickly as possible. So I swim faster to catch him, before Ocean takes him under, away from me.

“You idiot,” I say as I grab his shoulders and pull him toward me. “You can’t come out this far. You know it’s too dangerous.”

“Sky,” he shouts. “Look.” He points out to the horizon, or the place where the horizon should be, and there in the distance is something large and white, unfamiliar. “The boat. It’s closer
than it was yesterday.” His voice is thick with something. Fear. Excitement. I’m not sure which.

“How do you know that’s a boat?”

“I just know,” he says.

“That’s not a boat,” I say, though I’m unsure. Maybe it is.

His head is still bobbing, and I’m holding on tightly to his shoulders. He waves his arms in the air, higher, higher.

“What are you doing?” I ask.

“If we can see the boat, then maybe it can see us,” he says.

I let go and start swimming back toward Fishing Cove. It takes him a few minutes, but then he seems to notice I’ve left him, and I hear him calling after me. “Hey, Sky, wait. Where are you going?”

I hear him swimming behind me now, fierce, broad strokes, and he catches up to me. It’s not fair that his arms are stronger, his legs longer, that he can move through water faster than me.

He catches the length of my hair first, tugging on my braid. I don’t stop swimming, so then he catches me by the shoulders and pulls me toward him. We are in shallower water now, just by the edge of Rocks, and he pulls me close to him in a hug. I am suddenly aware of the absence of my rabbit pelt, the feel of his large hands against my back, and I try to pull away, but he doesn’t let me.