Searching for Sky (8 page)

“Riv.” I reach for him, but now he’s the one who pulls back.

“Listen,” he says. “Everything is different now. And we need to figure things out here on our own, okay?”

“Our own?”

“You’ll be with your grandmother. You’ll love it.”

“And you?” He shrugs. “River,” I say, “I’m not going anywhere without you. I’ve been with you forever, and I’m not going to let these green people keep me from seeing you.”

He shakes his head. “They didn’t,” he says softly.

“Yes, they did. I’ve been asking for you since I woke up.”

“I know,” he says, and then he looks down and lowers his voice. “I told them I thought it was better if we didn’t see each other. I told them I didn’t want to see you.”

His words are so sharp, like that stone cutting through the belly of the fish, and now he’s cutting through me, ripping out my guts, throwing them away carelessly. Red entrails twisting in the wind, staining all this awful whiteness.

“I don’t understand,” I whisper.

He reaches out and twirls the end of my braid one last time. “You take care of yourself.” His voice trembles, and I think maybe he wants to cry, except his face is solidly emotionless, his skin smooth the way I remember it as a child. He’s running next to me on Beach, sitting in the sand, drawing with me.

“River,” I say one last time.

“No,” he says. “Not River.” He pauses. “Lucas.”

Back in my own space, I find myself crying. On Island the only time I remember feeling this way was after I dragged my mother’s
limp body into Ocean. But now there are tears I don’t even know I had, and they come and they come, until my chest rattles like a trap that has snapped its kill, and suddenly the entire world is dead, silent.

“I’ve got good news,” Dr. Cabot says, stepping in through the coming-in place. She stares at me for a moment, raising her thick blond eyebrows, as if she thinks about asking me what’s wrong, but then she seems to change her mind. “DNA is back, and you are who we thought you are. We’re clearing you with customs as we speak, and then we’ll be able to release you into your grandmother’s custody.” She pauses. “Of course, I will be happy to assist you with whatever you need after that, but your grandmother insisted she’s bringing in her own private psychiatrist to work with you in her home.”

“And what if I don’t want to go?” I whisper.

“You’re a minor in the state of California,” she says. “And so by law we have to …”

I don’t understand what she’s saying, and though she is still talking, I stop listening because I do understand I’m going to have to go … somewhere, that I can’t stay here, in Military Hospital, the whiteness, forever. I wouldn’t even want to. I can’t go back to Island, and even if I could, I would be alone, and I wouldn’t want to be there alone. River—no,
Lucas
—doesn’t want to be with me here, now that he has a choice. On Island, I never questioned my place in the world, where I belonged, where I’m supposed to be. Now I am a girl without a place. It’s worse than hunger—it’s the saddest, most lonely thing I’ve ever felt.

Dr. Cabot sits down next to Bed, and she picks up my hand. Her fingers are fleshier than the woman who called herself
my grandmother, thick and full, and if they were covered in blond hair, they might remind me of Helmut’s. “Now, I know all this must be very scary for you.” I shake my head. How can she know anything? “And this is all going to take some getting used to after everything you’ve been through. But I promise you”—she squeezes my hand—“you’re going to love it here once you adjust.” I pull my hand away from her and turn on my side, facing away. “Why don’t you relax for a bit,” she says. “Your grandmother should be allowed to take you home within the hour.”

Chapter 12

I do not understand beginnings, that things happened to me once, before I could remember them. There are beginnings on Island I can’t remember, either. Getting there, for one. The origins of Shelter or the wooden traps. The beginning of Tree of Days and Cooler. I know the stories, the things my mother told me about The Others Who We Never Met, The Accident, that Helmut was so good at surviving, that we were so lucky to have him. I know that every 365 days, counting from the thirty-second notch on Tree of Days, I turned another year older, and that every 365 days from the fifty-sixth notch on Tree of Days, River did.

But now my memory is like Ocean. It moves in and out, back and forth. Sometimes it brings me gifts and sometimes it takes them away just as quickly.

Helmut always told us that memories are things that never happened, stories we make up in our mind to make
ourselves feel better. River tried to argue with him about this once.

“That’s not true,” River said, shaking his head hard. He was younger then, stupid enough to think he actually had a chance at winning an argument with Helmut. “I remember my mother,” River told him once, “and she loved me.”

“That’s ridiculous.” Helmut laughed. “You didn’t even know your mother. She died before you were born. Petal is the only mother you’ve ever known.”

My mother nodded and murmured in agreement, though she was frowning, her forehead dewy and shining with sweat the way it always got when the sun was too high in the sky, too bright, too hot.

“I knew her,” River insisted to me later as we sat in Cove By Falls together, leaving my mother and Helmut to have their alone time in Shelter, which they asked us for at least once every seven notches, sometimes more.

River dangled his feet in the water. He was smaller than me then. Shorter and thinner. Sometimes I thought I might be strong enough to pick him up and hang him over my shoulders. Helmut said I could, before he laughed, like he was joking.

“I knew my mother,” River told me. “Helmut is wrong.”

“You’re an idiot,” I told him, skimming the water with my feet so it splashed up at him. “Memories are just stories you tell yourself.”

Helmut did not believe in stories. Not memories. Not anything. My mother told River and me the story once of two animals in a boat, going out to sea. The owl and the pussycat.

They sailed away for a year and a day, and they danced by the light of the moon
.

She smiled as she said it, as if maybe this was her memory. Her story. I tried to imagine her and Helmut out in Ocean, dancing together.

“Who am I in this stupid scenario?” Helmut growled. “The owl or the cat?”

“What’s a cat?” River asked.

“It’s kind of like a rabbit,” my mother answered.

The owl. Helmut was the owl. Of course.

I think about all this now as I sit at the edge of Bed, waiting for the grandmother woman to come back for me. I think about River’s memories, his stories, his insistence once that his mother was real, that he could honestly remember her, as something he could touch, a real person. Not just a story.

Maybe he’s already forgotten everything else. All the nights in Shelter where we slept back to back. The fish he caught me as a present. The pictures he drew me in the sand, the wet flowers he handed me on the night of the mushrooms.

The way he just pushed me away in his space, as if he didn’t care about me, as if he never even cared at all, makes it feel like all the things we did together on Island, they are memories, too. Untrue stories I am telling myself. Things that never even happened. Things that meant nothing.

And then I wonder if River is leaving this place with this woman he thinks he remembers: his
mother
. If suddenly she means more to him than I ever did. If River loves her more than he loves me.

And then it feels like I know nothing now. I am nothing.

Chapter 13

The grandmother woman arrives too soon. Without a view of the sun overhead, I don’t know how much time has actually passed since Dr. Cabot left, but I do know I’m not ready to see the grandmother woman again, to go somewhere with her.

She walks in, and today she is wearing night, black. Her hair is down, and short, I notice now, just at her shoulders. Her strange purple lips twitch and then form a smile as she hands me a pile of things.

“What’s this?” I ask her.

“Blue jeans, T-shirt, panties, bra, and flip-flops.”

I stare at her, unsure what she expects me to do with this stuff or if she expects me to thank her. I sniff it and it smells sweet, like flowers. “I don’t understand,” I finally say.

She smiles in that strange way that makes her seem more nervous than happy. The same look my mother got when Helmut was gone too long or his voice got too loud. “Clothes, what we wear here,” she says. “Let me help you get this stuff on.”

She tugs at my thin white pelt until I stand there before her, cold and naked, and embarrassed that this woman I don’t know is seeing me like this.

But then she averts her eyes, as if she is embarrassed, too, and she holds the pieces out to me one by one:

Panties. “Pull them over your legs.”

Bra. “Here, let me,” and she hooks it around my ribs.

Blue jeans. “Over the legs again”—which I don’t understand, since panties already cover my womanly parts.

T-shirt. “Over the head; pull your arms through.”

And then last—flip-flops on my feet.

I feel strange in all this … stuff. Everything is too tight, and it’s hard to breathe. But the grandmother woman doesn’t seem to notice. As soon as all her clothes are on my body, she takes my arms and pulls me out the coming-in place.

“You’re going to love the house,” she says. And we walk back into the long pathway where I walked earlier and found River. “We’re walking distance to the Pacific Ocean, so you’ll feel right at home.”

She holds tightly to my arm, pulling me, and I feel light like a bird. I glide along next to her, skimming the water, as if I can walk on it. She talks, and her words feel very far away and empty. I’m dressed just like River now, I think, in these strange, uncomfortable things that tug at my stomach and my chest.
River
. His coming-in place is open, and as we walk by his space, I see that it is already empty. River is gone, without me. I’m not sure if I will ever see him again, and I bite my lip to keep from crying.

“Do you know where he went?” I ask the grandmother woman now.

“Who?” she says.

“River.”

“Who?”

“Lucas,” I say, the word feeling funny on my tongue.

“Oh.” She stops walking for a moment and looks at me. “Don’t worry about him,” she says. “He’ll be fine. Okay? I promise you. And besides, we have so much else to talk about.” Her voice goes on and on, like the bright green birds that would chatter all night just before the rains. Helmut got so mad at their squawking that he swore if he ever saw one, he’d climb the tree and wring its neck. They were smart birds; they never showed themselves when they were that loud. “Now, I know you have a lot to learn,” she is saying now, “so anything you don’t know, you can ask me. Don’t be afraid. And I have a team of professionals coming to the house. You’ll be so much more comfortable there than in some sort of … establishment.”

I nod, though I don’t really understand what she’s saying. Except it seems she is right about one thing. I have a lot to learn. When we reach the end of the pathway, then turn, then walk down another, and then finally go out a coming-in place and into real sunlight, everything is unfamiliar.