Searching for Sky (9 page)

The ground is black like the night sky and hard beneath my feet, which already feel strange in these terrible flip-flops. They flap and make weird squawking noises as I walk, and my toes slip away. I don’t understand why I have them on, and I reach down to take them off.

“Don’t do that, honey.” The grandmother woman stops me with her hand. “The ground is dirty.” I wonder if that means there is nothing like Falls here, that there is no way to get clean
in California, and the thought makes my heart pound.
Everything is different. Everything is wrong. River is gone
.

I look up to catch the sky. I feel like it’s been forever since I’ve seen it, and I want it to comfort me now, to show me that something here is as it always was. But even that looks different. Less blue and more white gray. The air is cold against my skin, and I shiver.

“I should’ve brought you a sweatshirt,” she says, and she looks up to the sky, too. “It isn’t always like this. This is just June gloom, the marine layer hanging around a little longer than it should. Give it a month and the sky will blue up again in the afternoons. The air will warm up a little, too.”

I don’t answer her but I look around. In the distance there are pale brown hills, higher than anything I have ever seen. They are blank, like the sand, missing green trees. A few palms dot the far side of this blackness we are standing on, but they are different from the palms I know, thinner, flimsier. And between us and them, there are rows and rows of strange, oddly shaped … bushes? All different colors and sizes, but very shiny like sea glass, dotting the blackness.

The grandmother woman takes my arm and pulls me toward one of them, a red one, the color of what she was wearing when she first came to see me. She pulls something out of the rabbit pelt container over her shoulder and then reaches in front of me to pull the strange bush—(or maybe it’s a cave?)—apart. “Go ahead,” she says. “Get in.”

I shake my head. I have no idea what this is or what it will do to me. The inside looks like a small black cave, and I’m afraid I might become trapped.

“Oh, good lord,” she says. “I didn’t even think …” She puts her hand on my arm. “Honey, this is a car. This is how people get from place to place. I turn it on with my key.” She holds up the thing in her hand. “And then I power the engine on, and it takes us where we want to go.”

I think of the engine on the boat, the way it moved so far and so fast once Roger turned it on, Island becoming like a tiny shell behind us. “Like the boat?” I ask her now.

“Yes, sort of. Only it takes us places on land.”

“Why can’t we walk?”

“Oh.” She laughs. “Honey, think of it this way: this island where you’ve been all this time, it’s the size of this freckle.” She points to a tiny brown spot on her wrist. “And, California, well, it’s the size of this.” She gestures to show the length of her body. “It would take us two days to walk home from here. “We’re not all that close. Even in the car, it’ll take a good thirty minutes or more. Freeway traffic this time of day, well, it could take even longer.”

Nothing she says makes sense.
Freeway? Traffic? California is the size of her body? Island the size of a brown spot on her arm?
But I understand that I need to do what she’s asking or stand here in this strange blackness forever. So I get into Car Cave, and I let her tie a rope around me, which she promises will keep me safe. I don’t argue with her, because, really, what other choice do I have now?

And this, I begin to realize, might be the worst feeling of all. Even worse than being here without River. On Island, especially this past year, every decision I made was my own. But here, I’m
so lost. I know nothing.
I am nothing
. All I can do, for now, is listen to her and do as she says.

I watch as she moves her key, turning it funny as if she was going to roast it like a fish over Fire Pit.

Suddenly I hear a loud noise, like the rush of Ocean in my ears, only harder, louder, the way Ocean would sound if it pulled me under and I would have to struggle for a moment to find my way back to the surface to breathe.

But then I understand Car Cave is moving, pulling my body, not gently, along with it.

Black whirs around us. To my side, Military Hospital slowly grows smaller, just the way Island did as the boat moved across Ocean. And soon we have whirred so much I can no longer see Military Hospital at all.

I put my hand up to try to stop everything from moving so fast, to hold on and catch a fistful of the air, but my hand slams into something hard. I push and I push, grasping to feel the air against my skin.

“Oh, honey, don’t do that,” the grandmother woman says. “You’ll hurt yourself on the window.”

We are still for a moment, and I stop pushing. There is a small red sun in front of us, and I sigh, thinking this is over. But then the sun turns green, and we are flying, as if Car Cave is a bird and we’re riding its wings.

Suddenly there are these strange cars everywhere, all around us, so close, moving so fast. So many colors, a swirl of water and sand, sky and rocks, birds and trees, and one that is red, like blood, that moves so close to us, I think I could touch it, or that it
might touch me—and crush me—and I push my hand harder now to try to push myself out, to save myself.

I clutch my stomach with my hand that is not pushing to get out. I start gagging and I know it, that all the strange food I ate at Military Hospital is going to come back up.

As suddenly as it began, the motion stops, the grandmother woman escapes, runs to my side, and is pulling the rope off me to let me out of Car Cave and into the cool rush of noisy air.

Just in time for all the food to come back up, swirling in strange colors against the black ground.

“Oh, honey,” she says, rubbing my back. “I wasn’t thinking. I’m sorry. The freeway is a lot sometimes, even for me.”

She keeps rubbing my back, until the food stops coming, until I sigh and wish all the strange whirring cars away. I wish for Ocean, the starry sky, the sounds green birds make at night.

“I’ll get off at the next exit,” she says, “and we’ll take the side streets back. Fewer cars, a little slower going.” She pauses. “You tell me if you need to be sick again, and I’ll pull over.”

I nod, because I sense she is trying to help me now, even though I don’t understand most of what she just said. And besides, I don’t think there is anything left in me. My stomach is empty; I am empty.

She helps me back behind the rope in Car Cave, but before she walks back to her place and moves her key again, she says, “Why don’t you try to close your eyes. It might help a little bit.” She pauses. And then she says softly, “That’s what I used to tell your mother, when she was a little girl and she’d get carsick.”

My mother, in Car Cave? I shake my head because it doesn’t feel real. But I do as she says and close my eyes.

A woman begins singing softly in my ear, and I have no idea who she is or why she’s here. I hadn’t noticed anyone else in Car Cave, and her voice sounds different from the grandmother woman’s, higher, more pure. I like it. It reminds me of my mother, the way she’d sing me to sleep in Shelter when I was little, holding on to me tightly, singing about the sunshine.

I can’t go back there
, she pleaded with Helmut.

Skeletons
, she told me.
Everyone is broken there
.

I squeeze my eyes shut tightly, picturing the lull of Ocean, the great expanse of nothingness lying beyond it, River’s fingers tangling in my braid, my belly full with my birthday fish. Just a memory now. And if Helmut was right about memory, then that means nothing about my life on Island was real. As if my whole life up until now has been nothing but a dream.

Chapter 14

Eventually the motion of car Cave stops again, and there is quiet. “We’re here,” the grandmother woman says, and I open my eyes, at last.
Here?
“Home, sweet home.”

In front of me is something large, what I’m guessing is her shelter. It’s unlike anything I have ever seen or imagined up until now. A very tall, high multicolored square reaching for the sky.

She unties her rope, gets out, and opens up Car Cave for me. She tugs on my hand to pull me out, and I keep myself limp, holding on to her, following her, allowing her to pull me.

Suddenly I hear the flutter of a flock of noisy birds, then the flashing of a hundred suns. I turn, and there are people rushing up behind us. So many of them, all at once, that I can’t remember how to breathe.

“Mrs. Henderson, how does it feel to have your granddaughter back after all this time?”

“No comment,” the grandmother woman says, holding up her hands to block away the man’s sun.

“Megan,” another voice calls, a woman. “How did it feel to be Helmut Almstedt’s captive all these years?”

I turn, and she stands behind me, waving a stick in my face. Her sun, her electricity, is so bright, I can barely see in the wash of yellow.

“Come on.” The grandmother woman grabs my shoulders tightly and spins me toward her shelter. “Just ignore them.” She turns back. “Get off my property, or I’ll call the police,” she yells.

Then she pulls something from her rabbit pelt, presses a tiny square, and a large, wide coming-in place begins to open in front of us. “This is the garage,” she says. “Come on in. Don’t be nervous, honey. Don’t look behind you.” She pulls me into the large, dark square, hits the tiny square in her hand again, and the coming-in place closes behind us. We stand there in the darkness for a moment.

“What did she mean, Helmut’s captive?” I ask. I can still hear the flock of them squawking behind the closed coming-in place.
Captive
. It sounds like “capture,” which makes me think of the rabbits and birds in our traps.

“Oh, Megan, honey …” She sighs, but she doesn’t answer my question. She twirls the end of my braid with her fingers, almost like River always did, except it doesn’t feel the same from her, and I pull away, out of her reach. “We’ll need to get your hair taken care of, won’t we?” she says. “But first things first, I guess. Come on, let’s go inside.”

She pulls my hand, and I follow, wondering what she means about getting my hair taken care of and why she didn’t answer my question about Helmut. I think of River’s short hair, the way
he looks so different now.
River
. Helmut’s son, looking so much like him that Roger thought he was him. How does the grandmother woman know Helmut? How did Roger and Jeremy know him? How did that woman holding the stick in my face know him?

Then I think, none of them knew him. How could they? I am the only one. River and I, we’re the only two left who knew him.

My first memory of Helmut is watching as he snapped a rabbit’s neck, quickly, precisely, so its head fell limp, ready for us to skin it. This is truth; this happened. I know it did, no matter what Helmut always said about memory, and as I think about it now, I wonder if Helmut’s insistence about memory was only right for things that happened
away from
Island. Everything seems so different here; maybe memory is different, too?

That morning, with the rabbit, I felt my mother flinch as she wrapped her arm around me. She had one arm around me, one around River. She always held us to her like that, as if we were both her children, not just me. River hid his eyes in my mother’s hip then, but I watched, eyes wide open. Fascinated? Horrified? I don’t know.

“Come on, Sky,” Helmut said, looking at me, smiling. “You can be my helper.”

“Oh, Helmut.” My mother shook her head. “Really, she’s too young.”

“Are you? Too young?” he said, staring straight into my eyes. His eyes were the color of palm bark. When they held you, you
did not dare look away. I was four, maybe five. But I shook my head. He laughed. “She’s a tough one, Petal,” he said to my mother, whose arm pulled around me tighter. “Come on, Sky. Show my boy how it’s done, why don’t you?” River still had his eyes turned into my mother’s pelt, and I felt bad for him. But the dead animal seemed appealing to me in a way, too. I wanted to know. What to do with it, how to, as Helmut always put it, make it useful.

Helmut handed me the sharp stone. “We’ll bleed it, then cut away the fur for a pelt. Then we’ll clean it in Falls and roast the meat for dinner.” I nodded. “Right here,” he said, pointing to the rabbit’s neck. “You make the first cut.”

I took a deep breath and gripped tightly to the stone, and then I did as he asked. Helmut smiled over me to my mother. “What a good girl you have here, Petal.” He tousled my hair with his large, wide palm. “Now,” he said, “you’ll have the honor of cooking us dinner tonight.” He paused. “Why don’t you watch her, River? You might actually learn something.”

Chapter 15

I follow the grandmother woman into her shelter through a place she calls Laundry Room. There are tall, square boxes on one side that she tells me she uses to wash and dry clothes. I’m relieved that there is some way to get clean here, but it seems strange to put your clothes in a box to wash them rather than Falls, and to dry them in a box, too? Does the California air not dry things as the air on Island did?