Searching for Sky

by Jillian Cantor

  I’m still in River’s sweatshirt, and though she puckers her lips when she seems to notice this, she doesn’t ask me about it. I’ve seen Ben wearing a similar one, and she probably just thinks it’s his. I know she has known Ben for a long time and doesn’t know River at all, but still, it doesn’t make sense to me why she hates River so much. And why River seemed worried about me telling her I saw him last night.

  “Can I ask you something?” I say as I take a bite of her muffin. It feels strange in my mouth. Too soft and too sweet. I force myself to swallow some and wash it down with some of her coconut milk. Better than the oatmeal she gave me yesterday. Worse than the fruit salad she gave me the day before that.

  “What is it, honey?” She sips her coffee, and her voice sounds strained, as if she spent the night crying, the way my mother’s sounded once after she and Helmut got in a fight and Helmut didn’t come back to Shelter until the next morning.

  “Why do you hate River?”

  She puts the coffee down a little too hard, and some brown liquid jumps over the side and onto the table. She wipes at it with her thumb. “That man,” she says. And instinctively I know she means Helmut. “Nothing good can come from that man.”

  “River and Helmut are very different,” I say.

  “Well, you wouldn’t know that to look at him. He’s the spitting image.”

  “That’s really not fair,” I tell her.

  “You know what’s not fair?” she says. Her voice is low, and her jaw is clenched. “He took my daughter away. He took you away. Fifteen years,” she says. “Look what he did to you.”

  “What he did to me?” It sounds awful, as if I am some sort of sea monster, the kind my mother would tell me about as we walked through the skim of Ocean when I was little.

  The doorbell chirps in the distance, and my grandmother stands quickly, taking her coffee with her. “Finish your breakfast,” she says. “Mrs. Fairfield will be ready to get to work.”

  I watch her walk away, and then I stand up and throw the muffin in the trash can. It feels good. To do something I feel like doing in her house. Something I choose. However small.

  My grandmother doesn’t look like a skeleton in her bathrobe, with her uncombed hair and her coffee. But Mrs. Fairfield taught me about metaphors the other day, and now I think I understand what my mother had meant. My grandmother doesn’t care, really, that she lost me or my mother to Island. Or what happened to us there. Or that maybe we weren’t really lost. That we were happy. That we were alive, and Island was simple. That we all loved one another. She cares only about what was taken from her, what was done to her. Underneath her robe and her clothes and her flesh, I’m not sure I believe her heart is beating, as mine always has. As my mother’s did. As River’s does.

  “So tell me,” Mrs. Fairfield says, sitting across the table from me. Her coral hair is in a pile on top of her head today, which makes her cheekbones appear higher, her face more slanted and bright red. She smiles too wide, and I am already annoyed by her, though we haven’t even begun our lesson yet. “What do you know about religion?” she asks me, still smiling.

  “Religion?” I ask.

  “Your mother was raised Catholic. Do you know what that is?” I shake my head. “Okay, then. On the island, did you ever talk about things like a god or a church? Did you pray?”

  “I don’t know,” I say, all those words unfamiliar to me. “I don’t think so.”

  “Were there rituals you performed?”

  “Rituals?”

  “Things you repeated day after day or week after week for luck or good measure?”

  I nod. “Yeah, I guess so. We had things we did every day.”

  “Such as?”

  “Well, first thing in the morning, I would use Bathroom Tree. Then I made a notch in Tree of Days. I checked the traps—”

  She smiles again and puts her hand on my arm so I stop talking. “The things you did there, the way you survived every day, it’s amazing. It really is. But that’s not what I mean. Not the chores you did, not your routine.” She hesitates for a moment. “But what did you believe in?”

  “I don’t know,” I say. She nods and raises her eyebrows a little but doesn’t say anything. Which is what she does when she’s expecting me to think, or try, harder. So I put my head down, to make it look like I’m thinking. “We believed in Island, I guess,” I finally say, “and Ocean. That the land and the water would feed us and keep us safe.”

  “Well, okay,” she says. “But think, Megan. What did Helmut teach you to believe in?”

  He taught me a lot of things. To fish and to trap. To skin a rabbit and to start a fire, that Ocean saves and heals us, but I press my lips tightly together because I don’t think this is what she’s asking me. “Helmut had a lot of rules,” I say. “Is this what you mean?”

  “What kind of rules?” she asks, folding her hands in front of her on the kitchen table, as if she is ready and waiting to listen, should I find the right thing to say.

  “Well, things to keep us safe. We couldn’t swim out past Rocks, in Fishing Cove. We couldn’t build fires on Beach …” She shakes her head, and I don’t understand it, why she’s pushing me so hard on this subject we’ve never talked about before. “Aren’t we going to read today?” I ask her. I’m feeling anxious now to get through the lesson and suffer through what I plan on being a quiet half an hour with Dr. Banks so I can see Ben again and try to get him to tell me the truth. All of it. And to take me back to the fish market.

  “Do you know what a cult is?” Mrs. Fairfield asks now. I shake my head. “Well, most of us here have organized religion. Your mother and your grandmother are Catholic, like I said. A lot of people are. They all believe the same things, celebrate the same holidays, go to the same place to pray, and pray to the same God. It’s normal to be religious, to believe in one of the common religions.”

  Normal. There’s that stupid word again. In telling me how normal she wants me to be, she’s pointing out how normal I’m not. “Do you believe in Common Religions?” I ask her.

  She nods. “I’m Lutheran,” she says, “which is kind of like Catholic. But not exactly. Close. We celebrate the same holidays, pray to the same God, that sort of thing.”

  “Okay,” I say, though I only understand the smallest bit of what she said. And now I’m starting to get bored, so I pick at the loose piece of skin by the corner of my thumb.

  “A cult is an unusual form of religion—not normal. It’s smaller. More extreme. It’s run by a person with strange beliefs, and his followers go along with them, even if it’s bad for them.”

  “Why are you telling me all this?” I ask.

  “There was a man named Charles Manson back in the 1960s, right here in California. He started a cult he called the Manson Family. Anyway, he was the leader of this cult, and all the women in his ‘family’ were in love with him, or they thought they were, so they listened to him, they believed in him, even when he told them to do crazy things. Manson convinced them the end of the world was coming, and that they needed to start it by committing murders.”

  She says the word murders, and it thuds, hard, the way her dictionary does when she drops it on the kitchen table in front of me. I think of Dr. Banks as she told me that Helmut was a murderer, that he’d killed my father. So what is Mrs. Fairfield trying to tell me now? We were a cult on Island? A Manson Family? No way.

  “Heaven’s Gate was another one,” she’s saying now. “Also right here in California, just a little while after … you were born. Marshall Applewhite was their leader, and he persuaded about forty people to kill themselves. They took the religious book that the Catholics and the Lutherans use—the Bible—and they twisted it. They made themselves believe the world was ending. So they ended it first.”

  Ben’s song about the end of the world echoes in my head, and I wonder if R.E.M. is also a cult, and if Ben believes in them. But I don’t ask her. Instead, I say again, “Why are you telling me all this?”

 
“Because,” she says, “your grandmother asked me to teach you about Helmut Almstedt today.” I realize that Dr. Banks must’ve told my grandmother everything, and I don’t understand why my grandmother couldn’t just tell me about Helmut herself. “And I want you to understand exactly what that man was. Who that man was.” She pauses. “Charles Manson. Marshall Applewhite. Helmut Almstedt. They were the same,” she says. “Helmut Almstedt”—she repeats his name, and now it sounds like she bit into something sour—“was an evil man.”

  Chapter 27

  Helmut stood by the edge of Ocean, his face angled up, staring far ahead, watching the pale blue line that sat between the edge of the water and the edge of the sky, the edge of the world.

  “What are you looking for?” I asked him once. I was young, but not too young. Old enough to catch a fish, skin a rabbit. Old enough to doubt sea monsters and to understand that my mother loved Helmut even though he sometimes made her cry.

  “I’m looking for the end,” he said.

  “What does the end look like?” I asked him.

  He sat in the sand, at the edge of the water, the way he did every morning just after using Bathroom Tree. He let his feet touch the surf. I sat next to him and did the same. “I don’t know yet,” he said.

  “Well, then how will you know when you see it?”

  “I just will,” he told me. “You know everything on Island is perfect. We have everything we need. We have each other, without all the evil.”

  “What’s evil?” I asked him.

  He shook his head. “You don’t need to know that word here. You’re lucky, you know? Everyone isn’t so lucky as you and River. Growing up here.”

  “Everyone?” I asked, not sure who he meant; who else was there besides the four of us?

  “Me and your mother weren’t that lucky.”

  I sat there for a little while with him in silence, staring, staring. I saw only blue water meeting blue sky. “It’s not coming today, is it?” I asked him.

  “I don’t think so.” He stood and I did the same. “But one day it will,” he said. “Goodness doesn’t live forever.”

  “And what will happen then?” I asked him.

  “You don’t worry about that,” he told me. “I’ll take care of you. You and your mother and River. You never have to worry. I’ll always take care of you.”

  After Mrs. Fairfield leaves for the morning, my grandmother walks into the kitchen, slowly, quietly. She holds on to a book, which she puts on top of the table, and then she sits down across from me. “Do you understand?” she asks, her voice breaking a little on the word understand, as if it’s a hard question for her to ask me, as if maybe she doesn’t quite understand herself.

  “No,” I tell her. Everything Mrs. Fairfield said about Helmut having a strange cult religion and being an evil man still makes no sense to me. Mrs. Fairfield didn’t give details past that. She moved on to reading practice while my mind wandered to thoughts of Helmut there, on Beach. “Helmut loved me,” I say again now to my grandmother. “He loved my mother. I know everyone thinks they knew him. But they didn’t.” And still, I can hear the echo of River’s quiet yes, of his confession that Helmut killed his mother, too. But it has to be a mistake. River must be wrong. They all must be wrong.

  “Okay,” my grandmother says, pushing the book toward me across the table. “Then I’m going to give you this.”

  “What is it?”

  “Articles from newspapers and magazines that I cut out. Every written word that I could find about you and your mother back then. If you don’t or can’t understand or believe me or Mrs. Fairfield or Dr. Banks, well, then you can read what’s in here. See for yourself.”

  I can’t read well enough yet to be able to understand any of this, and even if I could, I don’t want to. Words on paper, they don’t mean anything to me. I’m not even sure where they come from, who put them there. And if you don’t know where words come from, how can you even know they’re real? I shake my head and push the book back across the table toward her. “I don’t need this,” I say. “I know what I know.”

  “But, honey …” Her voice falters. She pushes the book back to me. I push it back to her. She sighs, opens the book, and flips through the pages until she pulls something out and hands it across the table to me.

  “I don’t want it,” I say.

  “It’s just a picture,” she says. “Take it.” And without meaning to, my eyes fall on it and they catch on my mother, the strange, younger version of her that my grandmother showed me in the picture that day at Military Hospital. She’s holding a small baby human wrapped in pink. Me, I guess. And next to her, there’s a man I don’t recognize. He looks tall and slim, with curly brown hair and bright green eyes. His jaw is set, determined, the way River’s looked when he wanted to swim for fish past Rocks. But still, the man is smiling. His teeth are white and shaped like tiny, perfect fish eggs.

  My grandmother stares hard at my face and opens her mouth, as if trying to figure out what she wants to say next, what she thinks I might understand. “Do you know him?” she finally says, pointing to the man. I shake my head. “This man was Brad Baynes,” she says. “Your father.”

  “No,” I say. “You’re lying.” But my voice trembles because something inside me jolts, the feeling of an insect sting, so sharp and sudden and surprising and instantly painful. There’s something about this man that looks familiar. There’s a mirror in my bedroom here, and my reflection is more defined in it than it ever was standing at the edge of Falls, watching myself staring back at me from the water that shares River’s name. I think it’s the man’s eyes. They’re the same color as mine, the same slant and shape as mine when they look back at me from the mirror in my bedroom.

  “I’m not lying, honey,” she says softly. “I promise you, I’m not.”

  “But my father never knew me,” I protest, thinking if I say what I know out loud, then I’ll understand it again, the way I always have. “He died before I was born.” This is what my mother always told me, and Helmut always confirmed with a nod of his thick blond head. My father never knew me and I never knew him, and so, like a boat, like a planet named Venus, he was something too far removed to be real.

  “No.” She shakes her head. “Your father did know you. He loved you.” She pauses. “He died just after you turned one, just before you all left on the boat. Here”—she pushes the picture closer—“take it. Hold on to it. And when you’re ready to talk or read the rest of this, it’ll be here. I’ll be here.” Her voice trembles a little, and so, I notice now, does her hand as she picks up the picture, opens my palm, and lays it flat in there.

  I look at it again. I can’t help myself. The smiling man. His arm around my mother, and his other hand brushing the top of my head as if he’s about to lean down and kiss me there. It is so strange to see my mother—to see us—with someone other than Helmut.

  “I canceled Dr. Banks for today,” my grandmother says, and I look back up. “Maybe this has all been too much for you, too fast. I don’t know. I don’t know how to do this, honey. I’m sorry. I wish I did.” She shakes her head and bites her lip, getting purple lipstick on the cusp of her front tooth. “There’s no rulebook for this sort of thing. I’m just trying the best I can to help you.”

  Her tiny face is red, and her blue eyes water with tears. Her front tooth is stained with purple lipstick, and it makes her seem sad and small and old. She wants to love me, I think, and I suddenly feel bad for hating her so much. For the first time, I wonder how everything would be different now if this man, my supposed real father, had lived, and if my mother and Helmut hadn’t gotten on a boat and left California. If I’d known my grandmother, this strange woman named Alice, my whole life.

  The people in California are cold and broken, my mother said. There had to be more to it than this. She must’ve had a good reason for leaving this man behind, for getting on the boat with Helmut. She loved me; they both did. I still feel so certain of that. Even now.

/>   “I’m sorry,” my grandmother says again. “I can’t even imagine what this all must be like for you. I really can’t. I know you’re hurting here, and I want to take that away for you. I want to fix it for you.”

  “I’m not broken,” I say quickly.

  She nods. “I know,” she says. “I didn’t mean that you were.” She smiles and reaches for my hand across the table. She squeezes it. “So tell me, honey, what would you like to do today?”

  I want to find River again. I want to show him this picture of my supposed father. To ask him what else he knows about our life. What is true and what is not. I want to find him and hold on to him tightly and not let go. I open my mouth to tell her that, and then I remember the way River whispered so frantically last night not to tell her that I’d seen him. The way she’d spat at me this morning that nothing good could come from Helmut. So instead I say, “I want to go back to the fish market with Ben.”

  “Oh?” She smiles again, seeming happy that I have asked for something I guess she would consider so normal. “Well, absolutely. I’ll give him a call.”

  Chapter 28

  “Why don’t you ever have anything else to do?” I ask Ben as we sit in his blue SUV and he turns on the engine and speeds down the street toward the Pacific. I lurch forward and back, and his car seems to tumble down the hill to the ocean, too fast. He has the windows open, and the cool salt air flows in, thick enough that I can taste the ocean on my tongue.

  Ben laughs. “What do you mean?”

  “Well, I don’t really understand what people our age do here. It seems like you’re always at your house, just waiting for when my grandmother calls you and asks you to do something with me.” I picture him sitting in his room drawing pictures, listening to R.E.M. and Nina Simone and maybe even his lost father.

  “I’m not always at my house,” he says. “Alice calls me on my cell, so she can call me anywhere.” He points to the square, his cell. I nod. Mrs. Fairfield has told me about this and shown me hers. She has even tried to get me to tap the square numbers and then talk to my grandmother with it as my grandmother holds her cell upstairs in her bedroom, but it frightens me, the way her voice comes through it, broken and distant from her body.