“So what are you doing when she calls you?” I say. “If you’re not at your house.”
He shrugs. “It’s summer, so I go to the beach or go hang out with my friends …”
I wonder what he does at the beach, and it’s strange to picture him there, without me, with other friends who are not me and who I don’t even know. I don’t know what hang out means, exactly, and I imagine Ben and his friends climbing the spiky pine trees and hanging from the low branches, but I don’t want to ask Ben now. Though Ben is supposed to be my teacher, like Mrs. Fairfield, I don’t want him to think I’m a silly, stupid child, the way Mrs. Fairfield seems to think of me.
“Maybe you could come with us sometime,” Ben is saying, but the way his voice sounds, kind of strange and far away, I don’t really think he means it.
“Yeah,” I say, knowing that I never will, that soon I’ll find River again, and this time I will not let him run from me, no matter what. “Maybe.”
Ben shrugs. “Anyway, in a few weeks school will start again. And then I’ll go to school during the day.” I know what school is, spending the entire day with people like Mrs. Fairfield who try to teach you things—and it sounds awful. I’m relieved that my grandmother and Mrs. Fairfield have decided that I won’t be ready for that yet, whatever that means.
“But you don’t have any jobs?” I ask Ben. There was always something to do on Island. We had an order to every day, for survival. Rituals, like Mrs. Fairfield said. Food to gather or catch or clean. “River and I always had jobs,” I tell him. “For as long as I can remember.”
Ben gives a funny laugh and then says, “Well, not exactly …” He pauses. “I used to bag groceries at Vons for six bucks an hour, but then … you came.”
I don’t know what one thing has to do with the other, but we’re approaching the fish market now and I feel excitement at the thought of seeing River again, at the possibility that he might be here today.
Ben pulls his SUV into the parking lot and turns it off. I hold the twenty dollars my grandmother gave me tightly in my hand. The picture rests in the large middle pocket of River’s sweatshirt. “I want to go in by myself today,” I tell Ben.
“Um … I don’t know if Alice would like that.”
“I’ll be right back,” I promise. “And we won’t even have to tell her.” Listen to me, a lying, lying liar. Ben frowns. “Come on, you’re supposed to help me get normal. Don’t normal people our age buy fish themselves?”
He hesitates for another moment, and then he nods. “If you’re not back in five minutes, I’m coming in for you.” He laughs when he says it, but I don’t think he’s kidding.
Inside, the fish market looks exactly as it did the other day, the big glass window filled with slabs, so gutted and cleaned that they don’t even look like fish at all anymore.
“Hey,” the man behind the window says as soon as he sees me, a flicker of recognition crossing his face, and I feel my body tensing up, remembering how he asked Ben if I was that girl, from Island. But he doesn’t mention that. Instead, he says, “We got your wahoo in this morning. How much do you want?”
“I don’t know,” I say, and show him my twenty dollars. “What this buys.” He nods, and I lean in closer, across the glass. “Is Lucas here?” I ask. This is the real reason I’m in here, of course, why I’m lying to Ben and my grandmother. I pull the sleeves of River’s sweatshirt down, clutching them tightly between my fingers, suddenly nervous.
“Lucas?” he yells toward the back. “Hey, Lucas, come out here, would ya?”
I hold my breath as the man packages my wahoo in brown paper, and the back door swings open gently. A short man with no hair and a thick white beard walks out. I look past him, wanting to catch just the slightest glimpse of River.
“Can I help you with something?” the white-bearded man asks me.
I shake my head. “I’m looking for Lucas,” I say.
“Yeah,” he tells me. “I’m Lucas. What do you need?”
“You’re not Lucas.”
He laughs, a great big roar in his belly that reminds me of Helmut’s laugh. “The hell I’m not,” he says. “I’m Lucas. Lucas Sandy, owner of this place. Now, what can I do you for?”
I don’t know what he’s asking, but I feel my cheeks turning red and my legs wanting to collapse beneath me. There is more than one Lucas? How can that be possible?
The other man hands over the fish, and I hand over the money, as I am supposed to. My hands are shaking, and in my mind I see River, the way he was last night on the beach.
I had thought for sure he was here. But if he isn’t, then where is he? And how am I ever going to find him again?
“Can I help you with something?” Lucas, the sandy one, asks again. I shake my head, clutch the wahoo, and run back out into the parking lot.
“Four minutes and thirty seconds?” Ben says as I get back in his SUV. “Thirty more seconds, and I was coming in.” He laughs again, but I think he sounds nervous, the way my mother would laugh when Helmut would tell her that he could smell a storm two days away. I throw the wahoo between our seats, and the brown paper rips a little. “Hey, what did the poor fish do to you?”
“Nothing,” I say.
“No, really,” he says. “What happened in there?”
“Nothing,” I say again. “I bought some fish, all right?”
“All right,” he says. Then he turns on the engine and speeds out of the parking lot, back up the hill toward my grandmother’s house.
I calm down a little in the few minutes it takes to get back. I take a deep breath and try hard to think. Think. River found me on the beach, at night, and all I’ll have to do is go back, and then he’ll find me again.
But I think of all the nights I climbed out my bedroom window and I went there. The beach was always empty then, no River, no nothing. Those nights, it was later than last night, though, the middle of the night, when my grandmother was sleeping, and maybe River doesn’t go to the ocean then. Maybe he sleeps, too, the way everyone else in California does, in a bed. Still, River must be drawn to the ocean the same way I am, though I’m not even sure how he found me to begin with last night. I understand that the Pacific Ocean in California is long and wide, stretching across the beach for miles and miles and miles. But now that he’s found me once, I think, he’ll find me again. All I have to do is go back to the beach at night, at the same time, and he’ll find me.
But I think about the way my grandmother, as Ben called it, was “freaking out” last night, and I’m not sure how I’ll be able to make my way back to the beach at night again, at that same time, alone, without her “freaking out” again.
I understand now that I’m going to need Ben’s help and that I’m going to have to trust him. I don’t have any other choice. “Ben,” I say now as he stops the SUV in his driveway and turns off the car. “I need to go back to the beach tonight. You don’t need to go with me. Actually, I want to go alone. But I need you to tell my grandmother you are so she doesn’t get upset.”
“Wait a minute.” He holds his hand up. “You want me to lie to Alice and then just let you wander onto the dark beach yourself.” He shakes his head, and I wonder what he’d think if he knew about me climbing out my bedroom window in the middle of the night to go there—not that I’d tell him. “Not going to happen.”
“I’ll be fine,” I say.
“You’re not on some deserted island anymore. Bad things can happen here. Bad things do happen here.” I think about the gun, the shooting in the newspaper. But Mrs. Fairfield told me that place called Iowa is very, very far away from California.
“Fine,” I say. “Then you can come with me if you want.” I say this because I think it’s the only way he’ll agree, not because I need him to keep bad things from happening to me. No matter what Ben thinks, I know that the ocean, even here, will protect me, keep me safe. It always has, and it always will. “But you’re going to have to keep a secret,” I tell him.
“I don
’t like this,” he says. “Why don’t you just tell Alice? She’s so cool. She’ll understand.”
“No, she won’t,” I say.
He frowns. “Why not?”
“Because she hates River … Lucas.”
“That’s why you wanted to go to the fish market? And why you wanted me to wait in the car?” His voice grows louder, and his cheeks turn red; he’s mad.
“I’m sorry,” I say, though I’m not. “But he wasn’t even there. It wasn’t him. It was Lucas, the sandy one.” I pause. “But I saw him on the beach last night. He was there, right before you came. And that’s why I need to go back, tonight. Because maybe he’ll come back, too.”
He shakes his head. “I don’t know. I don’t think it’s a good idea …”
“Look,” I say. “You can either come with me and help me, or I’ll run again, and then my grandmother will call you and freak out.” I pause. “And if that happens, maybe you won’t find me so easily in the dark on the beach.”
“What are you saying?”
“I know a lot more about the beach and the ocean than you do,” I tell him. “I could disappear, let you search for me all night or all week. Let my grandmother freak out.” I know it sounds mean, like the words Helmut would spew at my mother when they would fight. He always knew more. Did more. Had more. It was a power he held over her in that way. But we couldn’t deny him that. It was true. If it wasn’t for Helmut, I’m not sure we would’ve known how to live on Island. How to survive. We needed him.
Helmut murdered your father. Dr. Banks’s voice still hangs uneasily in my head, right there next to River’s words. My mother, too. And that’s exactly why I need to go back to the beach tonight, to find River again.
Chapter 29
My grandmother cooks the wahoo on her grill for dinner, and as soon as I bite into the dry and flaky fish she’s put on my plate, I realize that Mrs. Fairfield was wrong. That this is not the same fish River caught me for my birthday at all.
I don’t eat much, but I push the fish around on my plate with my fork, a trick I’ve learned to make it look like I’ve eaten more than I have.
“Do you like it?” My grandmother’s voice arches expectantly.
I am about to nod and murmur that I do, but then I remember the way she sounded this morning, like she really did want to help and understand me, and I think I should tell the truth, the way my mother always said I should. “It’s not the same as the fish on Island,” I say.
She surprises me by laughing and nodding. “Well, I suppose not, honey. I don’t think anything would be.” She takes a bite of her own fish and then clears her throat. “So you ate a lot of fish there, then?” She says it softly, as if her voice is dancing on the crests of waves, uncertain whether they are drowning or floating.
It’s the first time she has ever asked me about my life on Island, as if she really might want to know, as if there were things there that were normal, and that it was okay that I did them and that I loved them. I hesitate for a moment, but then words spill out of me. I tell her about the fish that River speared for me on my birthday, the one he held out to me as a present, spanning the length of his wide arms. I tell her how we roasted it over Fire Pit until it began to rain, and then we ate it, huddled together in Shelter. And then afterward, we tumbled into sleep holding on to each other, our bellies warm and full.
“It sounds very nice,” she says, but I can’t tell if she means it, because something about her eyes seems far away, as if she is looking at something I can’t quite see. “You know what I gave your mother for her sixteenth birthday?” she asks after a little while. I shake my head. “A bracelet. Perfect pink stones. Do you know what that is, honey?” A bracelet. Pink. Perfect. I nod. “Your mother loved that bracelet.”
I think of the bracelet my mother made me on Island before she died, a band of pink shells, its sole purpose for decorating my arm. Now I wonder if she’d been thinking of the one her mother gave her when she made it for me, and if she had been, why she didn’t tell me then. “What happened to it?” I ask my grandmother.
“Oh, I don’t know,” my grandmother says. “I wish I had it still, honey. I’d give it to you. But I don’t.” She reaches across the table for my hand and gives it a small squeeze.
“My mother made me a bracelet. Out of shells,” I whisper. “I forgot to take it with me, when the boat came …” I look down, suddenly biting back tears. When I go back there, it will still be there, I tell myself. But the thought rests uneasily in my head now. It suddenly all feels … I think of Dr. Banks’s word: complicated.
“You know what’s better than a bracelet,” she says softly. I look up, and she taps her forehead with her other hand. “Memories. What’s in here.” She pauses. “No one can take those away from you, you know.”
Memories. The stories that Helmut said never happened. But now I’m not so sure.
I remember so much of Island—all of it. The feel of my mother’s delicate fingers as she put the shell bracelet around my wrist for the first time, the smell of the salt water on River’s skin after he came out of Fishing Cove, the feel of his warm back against mine as we fell asleep. The sound of Helmut’s booming voice as he taught me how to check the traps.
Is my grandmother right? That memories are better than a bracelet, that they cannot be lost or taken from inside your head? But then I wonder, if Helmut did not tell us the truth about memories, what else did he not tell us the truth about?
The doorbell rings, and I know it’s Ben. Darkness has fallen now, the night sky a perfect black, the yellow moon a perfect circle, arching high above the shadows of the pines.
“Oh, Ben, honey,” I hear my grandmother say from the next room. “What a nice surprise. I owe you a check, don’t I?” A check? I remember the rectangle pieces of paper Mrs. Fairfield showed me and claimed were a type of money, and I don’t know why she would give Ben one of those.
“No worries, Alice,” I hear Ben say. He clears his throat. “I, uh … just came to see if Megan wants to take a walk.”
“Now? It’s dark outside.”
“I brought a flashlight,” he says.
I get up from the table and walk to the front door. “Ben,” I say too loudly, “what a great idea. I’d love to take a walk.” My heart pounds so hard, I think my grandmother will be able to hear it, pounding through the thickness of River’s sweatshirt. This lying, it’s a very strange thing. And I feel bad about it now, thinking about the pretty pink bracelet my grandmother said she gave my mother once. Maybe she did love my mother, and maybe she is trying, even, to love me. But I need to find River, and I think about what Ben said about her hating him. I know I can’t tell her the truth, even if a part of me might now want to.
She pulls her purple lips together, but all she says is, “Well, you two be careful, and don’t stay out too long.”
Since all the vultures are long gone now, we take the front path to the beach, out the front door, past the houses, down the hill, across the coastal highway, and then down the steps to the beach below. Ben’s flashlight hangs out in front of us, a low, round circle sun. I’ve never seen a flashlight before, but then again the stars were bright enough on Island, and something like that wasn’t necessary. The stars always guided us in the darkness, even the twenty paces down the hill toward Bathroom Tree if you had to use it in the middle of the night.
“Why is my grandmother giving you a check?” I ask Ben as we walk down the steps to the sand.
“What?” he says.
“A check. I heard her say she owes you one. That’s money, right?”
“Uh … yeah,” he says. “But it’s no big deal.”
“No big deal,” I echo back, trying to figure out if these are good words or bad ones. Big sounds good. Deal does not. But Ben doesn’t yell that they’re bad, so I think they must be okay.
Our feet hit the sand, and I take off my flip-flops. Ben leaves his on, and I run past him quickly toward the edge of the water.
“Sky!�
� he yells after me. “Wait.” But I don’t.
I hear the ocean, feel the salt against my skin, and I want to feel the water on my toes. Even if it is cold.
“You’re not going to run in again, are you?” Ben calls from behind me.
I shake my head, though I think about the way River came in after me last night, and I pull his sweatshirt tighter around me. I put my hands in the center pocket, feeling for the crisp, thin edge of the picture.
I see the circle of Ben’s flashlight hit the water, and then he sits down at the water’s edge. I take a few steps back and sit next to him.
“So what do we do now?” Ben asks. “Just wait for him?”
I shrug because I don’t know. “Can’t you go wait up by the steps?” I ask him. “And turn your flashlight off?”
“Why?”
“Because he might not come out if he sees you here.”
“So?” Ben says. “That might not be the worst thing.” He pauses and tilts his flashlight down, so it makes a low yellow circle across a wave, catching on a slag of seaweed.
“Ben,” I say, “I really need to talk to him.”
“What if I tell you everything I know?” he asks. “Then can we go back home and give this up?”
No. But I don’t tell him that, because I want to hear it, everything he knows. “What do you know?” I ask.
He takes a deep breath, and then he starts talking, his voice measured, even. Like Helmut’s. “Okay, back in the nineties, Helmut Almstedt had this cult. This … group.”
“I know what a cult is,” I say, thinking of the way Mrs. Fairfield’s voice went up as she tried to explain it all to me earlier.
“All right. So they called themselves the Gardeners, after, you know, the Garden of Eden.” I don’t know, but I nod, even though I don’t think he can see me in the darkness. “Anyway, at first it was kind of harmless, I guess. Helmut wanted to start this sort of utopian society, where everyone worked on the land and they all grew their own food. He and his wife and … Lucas, they lived on this big farm up north of here outside LA, and lots of people came to join them.”
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