Searching for Sky (27 page)

“I’m not in Military Hospital?” I ask.

“No.” She shakes her head. “You’re at University Hospital.” She smiles at me in a way that tells me she’s done telling me anything. “Okay …” She stands and starts to leave. “Let me go call your grandmother. I know she’ll want to hurry back and see you.”

“Wait,” I call after her, and she turns in the doorway. “He’s going to be okay, right? If they moved him … that means he’s going to be okay.”

“It’s still very touch and go,” she says.

“Touch and go?”

“We just don’t know yet,” she says softly, retreating past the doorway.

A few minutes later, my grandmother and Ben turn the corner together. My grandmother looking happy, Ben looking pale and small, like he might throw up. I think about what he told me when I was sleeping, and I’m not sure if I dreamed it. From the look on his face, though, I don’t think I did, and I know I should hate him now if it is true. But every bit of hatred in my body curls into a giant, coconut-size ball in my stomach that I wish
I could pick up and throw squarely at my grandmother’s head just between the eyes, knocking her out.

“Megan,” she says now, rushing to the bed, reaching for my hand. I pull out of her grasp and roll over. This is all her fault—everything. If she hadn’t forced River to leave me in the first place. If she hadn’t given him that money to begin with. If she hadn’t tried so hard to make me into someone who I’m not and I’ll never be … “Honey,” she says, her voice breaking on the word. I can hear the chair scraping against the floor as she sits down, though I refuse to turn and look at her. She puts her hand on the back of my head. “You cut your hair.”

“River did,” I whisper, biting back tears as I remember the way he held on gently, the way he tore across my braid with the knife.

“Did he hurt you?” she asks.

I roll back around hard, and my leg throbs. “I was shot,” I tell her.

“I know, honey,” she says. “But before that …?”

“None of this is River’s fault,” I yell at her. “It’s yours.”

She nods slowly. “I’m just glad you’re okay,” she says. She leans down to kiss my forehead, and as soon as I realize what she’s doing, as soon her lips make contact there, in space where my mother’s lips and River’s have touched, I yank my head back quickly, so my forehead bangs her nose, hard.

She puts her hand up to rub it, her mouth open wide as if she wants to say something, but she’s not sure what. Ben stares with wide brown eyes, eyes that remind me of the eyes of an owl perched so high in a palm tree it would never find its way into one of Helmut’s traps. We never ate an owl, anyway, because
Helmut said that owls were not for eating. I always thought it was because of the story, the owl and the cat, because Helmut was the owl, but Helmut said it was because owls watched over us at night, their eyes so wide and alert like that.

“I need to go see River,” I say now, using all my strength to pull myself up in bed. I let my grandmother keep me away from River before, but only because I didn’t know better. Only because I thought River wanted me to be kept away. Now I know. Now I picture him hurting and alone, trapped inside the cold whiteness of Military Hospital. He needs me, and I’m going to go to him.

I pull myself out of bed, and I grimace as my feet hit the floor and my one leg throbs with pain.

“Megan, what do you think you’re doing?” My grandmother stops rubbing her nose to put her hands on my shoulders.

“I’m going to see River,” I say through gritted teeth. “Even if I have to walk there myself.” She tries to push my shoulders to get me back on the bed, but I push forward with every bit of strength I have left, and her small body slides across the room.

She looks at me for a moment, her lips in the shape of a circle, and then she yells, “Nurse!”

The woman in the white dress runs to the door. “Is everything okay in here?” she asks.

“Can’t you give her something to calm her down? She’s so agitated.”

I put my feet on the floor again and try to walk, but I fall, crashing into Ben, who holds me up with his arms. I think about Ben’s voice calling for me on the beach, his flashlight beam rolling in the waves. How River asked the next morning if I would
miss him. If he meant anything to me. “Island Girl,” he whispers now. “Come on.”

I shake my head, refusing to look at him, and then I fight with everything I have, everything I am, thrashing my arms and legs wildly, clawing at the air, at Ben, at my grandmother, like a wild animal. But even an animal stops after a little while, after it realizes that there is no way out of the trap, that it’s the end. Even an animal gives up when it gets tired.

But I don’t stop fighting until the nurse jabs my arm, and the warmth takes over my blood, my body, until I’m falling into darkness again.

A wave pulls me under, holding me below the water until I think my breath will disappear, until I think the world will become black and murky and dead. The water is cold, and it saturates my body, making it impossible to feel. The water soaks through my skin until I am nothing. I am emptiness.

And then there are arms, River’s arms, pulling me up, pulling me to the top.

Skyblue
, he says,
the current’s too rough here. You could drown. Maybe you wanted to drown
.

I didn’t. I promise
.

His arms hold me up, pulling me to the surface, pulling the dead weight of my body to Beach. But just before he puts me down on the sand, he falls, flat, on his back. The bright red flower sprouts across his chest, growing bigger and bigger.

You promised me you wouldn’t leave me again. You promised
.

The petals of the flower float and grow, and tear away,
falling slowly down his stomach, onto the sand, turning the entire beach red.

“Island Girl,” a voice calls to me. My tongue is thick and I try to swallow, but I can’t. I move my mouth, trying to make a sound, but I can’t. “Sky. Wake up.” Ben pushes on my shoulder, hard.

I groan and open my eyes. The room is white and filled with sunlight, not electricity but real, honest sunlight streaming in through the window. It must be afternoon because the marine layer would have to be gone for the sun to seem this bright, though afternoon of what day, I have no idea. Nor do I know how long it’s been since they were all here and the nurse was jabbing my arm, poisoning me.
Evil
, I think.

“What do you want?” I finally say to Ben, my voice sticky in my throat now, so my words come out sharp, painful, like the pine needles that stuck in the soles of my feet.

“Come on,” he says, pulling my arm up, pulling it over his shoulder. “We’re going to get you out of here.”

“What?” I rub my eyes. “Where’s my grandmother?”

“She’s talking to the police,” he says, “so you have to hurry. We don’t have much time.”

His voice rolls in my head, and it’s so confusing, so hard to understand. But then I remember his confession to me, that my grandmother was paying him to be nice to me. That he was with her, not with me. “Get off me,” I say, shaking away his arm. “I don’t trust you.”

He sinks down in the chair by the bed and frowns. “I deserve that, all right? I know I do. But if you want me to drive
you up to Camp Solanas, then you need to get your ass out of this bed and move quickly.”

“River?” I whisper. “You’re really going to take me to him?”

He tosses me a sweatshirt and a pair of jeans. Not River’s sweatshirt, but his, I’m guessing. “Come on,” he says, and he turns away so he isn’t looking at me. “Put those on.”

I do the best I can, throwing them quickly over my hospital dress. Everything is too big. But it’s better than wearing just the thin dress. I notice I still have the tube in my arm, the IV, but it doesn’t seem to be connected to anything now, so I cover it with the arm of the sweatshirt, and then I tap Ben on the shoulder.

He wraps his arm around me, and I lean into him this time. Maybe I shouldn’t trust him, but I’m not sure now I have another choice.

“Why are you doing this?” I ask Ben once we are inside his SUV and he’s pulling out of the parking lot. I notice his hands shaking against the wheel, and he glances behind us uneasily even as he drives. The car lurches and so does my stomach, and as soon as Ben makes it down onto the busy I-5 with cars swarming around us in all directions like crazy, angry bees, I have to close my eyes and breathe deep to keep from throwing up again.

“Why am I doing what?” he asks as he weaves his SUV between and around other, smaller cars.

“You know,” I say. “Taking me to see River.”

“Oh,” he says, as if my question is a surprise. The car slows as all the cars in front of us do, too, and up ahead, there is an ocean of bright red lights glittering on the I-5 like wayward
daytime stars. “Well,” he says after a little while, “did you hear me talking to you the other night, when you were sleeping?”

I nod. “I think so.”

“Did you hear me tell you that I’m your friend, for real?” I nod again. “Well, this is my way to prove it to you, I guess.”

“But you hate him,” I say. “You think he did horrible things.”

“I never said I hated him,” he says. “I said Alice did. And that she’s a good judge of character.” The weight of my grandmother’s name hangs in the car, like the weight of the ocean crushing, pulling you under when the current is rough. Neither one of us says anything for a while, and then the cars start moving again. Ben’s SUV dances between the other cars. My stomach lurches, and I close my eyes again.

“He talked to me the other night,” Ben says softly.

“What?” I open my eyes to look at him, and his face is pale and serious.

“I was looking for you by the pier, and Lucas … River, he came out to the beach, and he talked to me.”

“No, he didn’t,” I say, thinking about how I awoke and River sat there, staring at the ocean and the beam of the flashlight rolling across the waves. How he promised me he wouldn’t leave me again.
He promised
.

“He did,” Ben says. “I swear.” I think about that next morning, how River suddenly insisted I cut my braid, how he asked me about Ben as we walked through the pines. “He wanted to know why I was looking for you, what happened,” Ben is saying now. “He didn’t tell me you were with him. But I knew.”