Searching for Sky (28 page)
Authors: Jillian Cantor
“How did you know?” I ask, and I wonder if the Google told him this, too, if the Google is all-knowing and all-seeing.
He shrugs. “I didn’t
know
. But I guessed.” He pauses, and he gets off the I-5, turning onto a quieter, smaller street that hugs closer to the ocean. I watch the way the sunlight melts into the water in wide yellow swirls, making it seem warmer, brighter, than it actually is. “I mean I should’ve just gone under the stupid pier and taken you back home with me, and then none of this would’ve ever happened.”
“I wouldn’t have gone with you,” I tell him matter-of-factly.
“Yeah, I know,” he says. “And anyway, that’s not why I didn’t do it.”
“Why didn’t you?”
“I don’t know.” He shrugs again. Then he says, softer, “I thought that if you were there—with him … well, maybe that’s where you wanted to be. Where you were supposed to be.”
I feel a new warmth for Ben building in my chest, and I put my hand on his shoulder as he pulls into Camp Solanas. “Thank you,” I say, and for some reason I think of his unfinished drawing, me diving into the ocean, surrounded by the waves, being swallowed up by them, and I wonder if he’s finished it by now.
But I don’t ask him, because Ben is stopping the SUV, pulling down the window, and trying to explain to a green man why we’re here, what we’re doing.
The green man says something about not having clearance, and Ben looks to me, eyes wide again, like an owl’s. He planned my escape from the hospital. He drove me here, fighting so many cars on the I-5, and now he can’t get the SUV past the small, thin gate in front of us. I lean across him, even though it hurts my leg to put weight on it. “Get Dr. Cabot,” I say.
“I can’t—”
“Dr. Cabot,” I yell, and then the man’s face freezes funny, the way my mother’s sometimes would when she would bite into a sour piece of fruit, and I think that maybe, even without the braid, he knows me. He recognizes me.
A few minutes later, I see her walking past the gate, dressed in green, her blond hair pulled back tightly at the bottom of her neck. She puts her hand to her eyes, shielding the sun, and she peers into the windows of the SUV. She nods, says something to the man, and the gates open. Ben smiles at me, and then he drives right through.
“I thought you got shot,” Dr. Cabot says to me as she helps me out of Ben’s SUV and through large glass doors into Military Hospital. They look different than I remember. But maybe it’s because last time I was looking out into this great wide, unfamiliar world, and now I’m looking in, back to the blank whiteness, to a place where I was so filled with fear, so lost, so … unaware, that I feel a tightening in my stomach at the thought of going back in there.
“It just grazed me,” I say, repeating what my grandmother told me. I don’t know how that’s different from being shot, exactly, but it sounds slightly better.
Grazed
. Like a rabbit chewing calmly on small pieces of grass.
She eyes my leg suspiciously and then walks away for a moment and comes back with a chair on wheels. “Sit,” she commands me, and I do. Not because I want to listen to her, but because my leg really does hurt. “And you are?” she says, glaring now at Ben.
“He’s my friend,” I say quickly, and Ben smiles at me and puts a hand on my shoulder.
“Okay, fine,” Dr. Cabot says, holding her hands up. “You push her, then.”
Ben grabs the handle on the back of the chair, and then I feel the ground moving beneath me, the white-walled hallways moving past me, spinning sideways, until I begin to feel dizzy.
Dr. Cabot walks beside me. “You cut your hair,” she says after a few minutes of walking. Her voice is softer now. And she nods approvingly.
“River did it,” I say.
“Oh,” she says. “I see.”
“That’s why I’m here,” I tell her. “I need to see him.”
She stops walking, and Ben stops pushing, and she kneels down so she is right in front of me, her bright red lips, her pearl green eyes. “I know,” she says. And there’s a kindness in her voice, in her eyes, that I haven’t detected until now, or maybe I was just so confused the first time I was here that I didn’t have the time or the depth to understand. In my head, she became one with the tall, gray, annoying Dr. Banks. “But I have to tell you,” she says, “it’s not good.”
“It’s not?” I whisper.
“He’s in a coma,” she says softly. “Do you know what that is?” I shake my head. “He’s unconscious.” I shake my head again. “It’s like a sleep, but a very, very deep sleep that we can’t wake him up from.”
“But he’ll wake up soon, right?” She doesn’t say anything, but she draws her red lips together in a small, tight line.
“I’m going to be honest with you, Megan, because I feel you
deserve that after everything you’ve been through, okay?” I nod, and she stands and reaches out her hand for me to take it. I do. I struggle to stand, and Ben helps to lift me, holding me up under my arms. “I’ll take you in to see him now. But you should think of this as your time to say good-bye.”
“No,” I tell her. “I’m not going to say good-bye.”
I think about that morning when my mother and Helmut were dead, how it was River’s idea to take them to Ocean. Our whole lives on Island, the water had healed. We soaked sore feet and tired arms, and the salt numbed. The water made the pain better. Helmut pulled my mother in when the monthly bleed came so late that time and wouldn’t stop, and the water saved her then. But still, that morning, it felt wrong just to pull them in like that. Just to push their bodies under the waves and let go.
We’re not going to say good-bye
, River said as he pushed Helmut under the water for the last time. Helmut’s face was purple and bloated, his lips pressed tightly together, unlike my mother’s. We let go, and Ocean swallowed them down, a wave washing them out far, farther than we would ever dare to swim.
Not good-bye
, River whispered.
See you again soon
.
Like me, River dreamed the bodies would come back, wash up on Beach, healed.
See you soon
, I whispered then, the waves swallowing my voice.
“Megan”—Dr. Cabot shakes my shoulder a little—“if you want to see him, you need to prepare yourself.” She pauses and stares directly into my eyes, hers penetrating mine like spears. “You need to understand,” she says softly, “that this will be it.”
“It?” I whisper, though now it is not that I don’t understand,
it’s that I don’t want to, that I can’t. After everything, every day River and I spent together on Island, every night we fell asleep back-to-back in Shelter, all this time we were apart in California, and then how we finally found our way back to each other, where we were supposed to be. Together.
No
. This, in Military Hospital, can’t be
it
.
“This will most likely be the last time you will ever see him,” Dr. Cabot is saying.
I shake my head. “But he promised,” I whisper.
“Come on,” she says. She pushes a door open, and inside the room is dark, the blinds closed. Something beeps softly, and in the center of the room there’s a bed with so many lines running and twisting out of it. I expect to go closer and see someone else there on the bed. That maybe Dr. Cabot and Ben are just lying to me.
Cold and broken
, my mother said.
Skeletons
.
But as I grow closer, it’s him. He’s the one who looks like a skeleton.
River
. A line runs into his mouth, and his face is blank, expressionless, nearly unfamiliar. I put my hand above his chest, letting it hover in the spot where the red flower crept and grew. In my dream, on the beach—I’m not sure. It’s gone now, or at least I can’t see it.
Dr. Cabot gets me a chair, and she pushes it close to the bed. Then she whispers that she and Ben will be right outside the door and that she’ll be back to get me in a few minutes.
After they leave, I almost expect River to sit up, to reach for me, to tangle his fingers through my now-short hair and whisper in my ear:
Skyblue. You came. I knew you would. I’m fine. Everything’s going to be fine. We’ll find a way out of here. Together. The man with the boat is still waiting for us
.
But I listen, and the only sound I hear is the beeping, the strange machines that surround him. They rush and whir, almost like the ocean, pulling him in, pulling him under.
“River,” I whisper, “River, it’s me. I’m here.” I reach for his hand, and I squeeze it. I will him to squeeze back. His hand is warm still but limp, and he doesn’t respond. “Listen to me,” I tell him. “I’m not going to say good-bye to you. You’re going to get better and wake up, and we’re going to go back to Island, okay?”
The machine beeps, slow and steady. River’s chest moves up and down. He’s still alive. He’s still breathing.
I turn his hand over, and I look at his large palm, and then with my finger I slowly trace the picture I left for him that night on the beach. The picture he drew for me on Island. Two overlapping circles. Me and him. Him and me. Going around, connecting, together.
“You promised,” I tell him.
Suddenly the beeping on his machines gets louder, higher, the beeps closer together.
Dr. Cabot runs in, and she is not alone now. Another doctor I don’t recognize runs to River’s other side and pushes on his chest. Then another one runs in behind him. “Megan,” Dr. Cabot says, “you need to leave.” She tugs on my shoulder.
I shake my head. “What’s happening?”
“You can’t be in here any longer.” She pulls hard on my arm so I’m forced to let go of River’s hand. It falls limply back to the bed, and now a few doctors surround him, pushing on his body.
“I can’t leave him,” I say, but she is strong, and my leg is weak, and she pulls hard so that I have no choice.
“River!” I yell. “River.” But only the machines answer me, beeping, beeping, beeping so loud that I don’t think there’s any way River could hear me over them.
“See you again soon,” I yell, tears streaming down my face as Dr. Cabot pulls me into the blank white hallway.
Ben and I don’t say a word on the ride back to University Hospital. We don’t talk about the way River looked lying in that bed, or what Dr. Cabot said, that it would be the last time I’ll see him. We don’t talk about what it meant when the machines started beeping louder, when the doctors rushed in and pushed on River’s chest. We don’t talk about how River is a part of me—that he always has been, and he always will be—and that I don’t know the world without him. And I understand now I don’t want to. That without him, my circle is broken, empty, alone.
I am glad that Ben isn’t making me talk, asking me questions, as if he understands that I can’t talk, that any words now may break me. Maybe he really is my friend. But what does that matter now, anyway? What does anything matter if River isn’t with me?
Ben drives his SUV through the car forest of the I-5, and I lean my head against the window, closing my eyes, opening them again. Wishing every time they open that all this is a bad dream. That when I look around, I’ll be lying on the rabbit pelts
in Shelter, River’s back hugging mine, the sounds of the green birds crying in the distance. But the only sounds I hear are car horns, and something on the radio that I don’t recognize, that I don’t have the strength to ask Ben about.
When he finally turns back into the parking lot at University Hospital, I see a lot of cars with bright red throbbing lights on the top. “Oh, shit,” Ben says.
Shit
, I remember, is one of the bad words that I’m not supposed to echo.
Ben stops the car, and a man dressed in black bangs on the glass of Ben’s window. “Step out of the car, son,” he’s saying. I think I hear my grandmother’s voice yelling from somewhere in the distance. Or maybe she’s crying. It’s hard to tell.
“Shit,” Ben whispers again. His face is very pale, his eyes so wide. An owl’s. A scared one.
He puts his hand on the door to get out.
“Thank you,” I say, but the words escape me like a shadow, so soft and shapeless, I’m not even sure Ben hears them.
I’m not sure what happens to Ben after we get out of his SUV, and I know I should care, and part of me does. But it is very hard to think of anything else but River, of the way he looked, lifeless in that bed as the doctors rushed toward him.
I allow my grandmother to pull me back to my room in University Hospital because I don’t really have another choice, and I’m tired, and my leg hurts. Back in the bed, I lie there limply, not even trying to fight as the nurse pushes her poison into my arm again. I want it to take me away now. To take me back. I want to dream in Island again, the water and the fish swimming easily through my legs, River’s arms holding me up. But I don’t. I dream nothing.