“My mother,” I say softly.
“Yeah.” He takes a deep breath. “Anyway, it was all good until one day Helmut decided that there were evil people who’d gotten into the Garden. Serpents, he called them. And so he poisoned their food.”
“Poisoned?” I ask, not liking the sound of that word at all.
He nods. “Yeah, he basically put something bad in it, something that would murder them when they ate the food.”
My heart pounds in my chest at the word murder. The noise rushes loudly through my ears, and it takes me a moment to realize that Ben is still talking.
“Almost everyone who lived on the farm died,” he’s saying now. “From what we know, there were only a few of you left, and he took you out on his boat and sailed away into the Pacific. The Coast Guard had him in their sights, and they were closing in, but then there was a storm, and, well … you know the rest.”
His words are so strange, so far away: poison, evil, murder. And for some reason I think about my grandmother’s question, when she asked me how my mother had died, the animal noise she made when I told her about the mushroom. Poison? But that’s not how my mother died. She only ate a mushroom. A bad mushroom. Helmut lied. River showed me that day on Island, as if he knew, as if he remembered that there was more, before us.
“Well …,” Ben says. “What are you thinking?” I stare silently into the ocean, into the round yellow sun of his light, dancing on the waves as they go slowly up and down, the way they always do, the way they always have. “Come on,” he says. “Say something, please.”
“I can’t,” I whisper. Because I don’t think there are words to say how I’m feeling, and if there are, I don’t know them. I think about my mother, the way her arm was limp around my body that morning, her fingertips cold, her lips slightly parted as if she wanted to whisper something more in my ear, but also they were an unnatural blue.
“I don’t think he’s coming,” Ben says now. “And we should probably get back.”
I don’t want to leave. I want to stay here, right next to the ocean, where there is something, one thing, the rush and pull of the water, the tides, that makes sense.
“Sky.” Ben stands and touches my shoulder. “Come on.”
I stand and force myself to turn away from the ocean. We climb up the beach, and I stare at the back path, the pine trees, for even the smallest glimmer of River, but all I see are the arches of the pines swaying gently in the night breeze.
“Ben,” I say as we climb the steps back up to the road. “There’s one thing I still don’t understand. Why does my grandmother hate River … Lucas?” I wonder where River is right now, and if he knows all the things Ben just told me, and if he believes them, and if he’s all alone. I want to hold on to him, to hear him whisper in my hair, feel the tangle of his fingers in my braid. I want to tell him that he’s not his father and his father isn’t him, and that anything that might have happened then has nothing to do with us. And that maybe the entire world is wrong. Maybe they don’t know what they think they know.
Ben doesn’t answer me, but as we cross the coastal highway and make it back onto their street, he stops first in front of his house. “Come in for a minute,” he says. “I’ll show you something that might answer your question.”
I follow him in through the front, and when we walk in, I’m surprised to hear the sounds of the television box.
“Mom,” Ben calls out. “I’m home.”
The sounds of the television box fade, and for the first time I see Ben’s mother. She is small and thin, and her face is round like Ben’s, her hair a little longer, but only at her chin, brown but streaked with gray.
She stares at me and then smiles. “Oh my goodness, Megan, is that really you? I’ve heard so much about you. Come sit down on the couch. Can I get you an iced tea?”
“Mom,” Ben says, “we’ll be upstairs.”
He pulls me toward the steps, and I hear her calling after us. “Well, let me know if you need anything. I’ll just be down here.”
“She seems nice,” I whisper.
Ben shrugs. “Yeah, she’s fine,” he says. “When she’s actually home.”
I think about what Ben’s saying and about how much time he said he spent with my grandmother growing up, and it makes me sad that he did not spend every moment of his life with his mother, the way I spent with mine. But also it makes me sad that she is still here, with him now, and my mother is gone. It doesn’t seem fair.
Ben turns on the light in his room, and my eyes go immediately to the wall with all the pictures. Then I notice that a new one sits on his table, not yet hung, and I pick it up. A girl, running into the ocean. The waves crashing over her. Me. “What’s this?” I ask.
“Nothing.” He snatches it from my hand and puts it facedown on the nightstand. “I’m not finished yet. Anyway, here …” He walks over to a table, opens the box I recognize as laptop computer. My grandmother has one, too, and Mrs. Fairfield says I will learn to use it eventually, that it is like the television box, only there is so much more you can do with it.
Ben moves his fingers across what I recognize as letters, and then turns the laptop computer so I can see it.
“What’s this?” I ask.
“Google.” I see only blank white with some letters I can’t read—Google looks like nothingness, like the whiteness that surrounded me at Military Hospital, and I have no idea how it could tell Ben anything. But Ben moves his fingers across the letters on the laptop computer again, and then something different comes before me. Small words that I don’t think I can read. And pictures. But unlike the television box, these pictures are still, the people in them unmoving, like the pictures my grandmother has handed to me, only these pictures are behind the laptop computer’s window.
There is one of Helmut where he is much younger, standing by a large grassy hill, smiling. He looks so much like River here it’s shocking. “How did you put this in here?” I ask as I put my finger up to trace the outline of his face, thinking it belongs to me. Then I think about what Ben said, about the poison, the murder, and I pull my finger back quickly.
“I didn’t put it in there,” Ben says. “It’s just the Internet. Google. Any picture you want, at your fingertips.”
I don’t understand how that is possible, and yet Helmut is here. Inside Ben’s laptop computer. The blank white Google is amazing. And frightening in its power.
“Here,” Ben says. “This one.” He presses one of the letter squares and the pictures shift, so I see a different one.
A small boy holding on to a basket with one hand and what looks like an apple in the other. He’s smiling, and behind him there are people sitting at a very long rectangle table. Their faces are blurry, hard to make out, but one catches my eye, and I think it’s possible it’s the same man from the picture my grandmother gave me.
“I don’t understand,” I say.
“This is Lucas Almstedt.” Ben points to the boy, and in the boy’s face I see a little of the River I know. A very small, short-haired version, but there is a look in his eyes that’s familiar, that same look, that same grin, as the one he had when he walked back to Shelter with my large birthday fish spanning his arms. “And this”—Ben points to the basket and the apple—“is how these people were murdered.” His finger spans the blurry heads at the table, one of whom might be the man my grandmother claims to be my father. “Poisoned apples.”
Ben pushes the letter button again, and there are more pictures. River—Lucas—handing people apples, and then one I have to look away from, rows and rows of the people lying on the ground, certainly dead.
“I don’t understand,” I say again. “How did all these pictures get in here? How do you know all this if everyone from the cult died or got on the boat?”
“Helmut left some of the pictures behind, I guess.” Ben shrugs. “And I think the authorities had him under surveillance for a while. It was like they knew he was going to do something crazy, but they didn’t figure
it out in time.”
Ben closes the laptop computer and pushes it away. But the image stays in my head, little River, feeding people poisoned apples. I don’t think for even a second that River knew what he was doing, but even still, I understand what Ben is trying to tell me. Everyone in the whole wide world who doesn’t know River the way I do—they believe the worst about him. They believe that he is just like his father: a murderer.
Chapter 30
I lie in bed in the darkness for a very long time, tracing the path of the moon across the gray sky, my eyes transfixed and open wide. Every time I close them I see the pictures, River, the poisoned apples. And now, for the first time, I have this horrible feeling in my stomach when I think of Helmut: I hate him. And not for the reason my grandmother or anybody else in the whole wide space of California does. I hate him for what he did to River, for the pictures he left behind, for all the Googles and laptop computers in the world that show River—my River—killing people. I hate Helmut.
When the numbers on my clock turn to all bright-red threes, I get out of bed and go over to the window. I can’t lie here anymore; I need to go back to the ocean, to look for River again, and if he’s not there, maybe I can leave him a message in the sand, draw him a picture the way we used to when we were kids.
I open my window and yank on the screen. And a few seconds later, my feet hit the grass, wet and cool with dew, and I suddenly realize I’m not wearing shoes. I’ve forgotten to take my flip-flops tonight. It startles me that this thought bothers me now—out of the house without shoes—and I hate how quickly I’ve become someone else. How quickly Sky has faded away and Megan has appeared. I’m not going to climb back up for them. I did not wear shoes my entire life on Island. I will be fine without them now.
I run through the dewy grass, and then I climb over the fence and run to the pine-filled path, my feet crunching on sharp pine needles. I can smell the ocean so strong in my nose, how close it is, and that’s enough to bring me comfort, even as my feet sting against the pine needles.
The beach is still and silent, and the tide has pulled in closer. My feet hit the sand, and I yell River’s name as loud as I can, but my voice is swallowed up by the ocean. I yell it again and again and again. But still, I’m alone.
I sit in the sand, and with my finger, I trace the outline of two circles, their round sides connecting midway through each other, and I think about how strange it feels to be drawing without a pencil now. But River and I drew this picture, when we were younger, in the sand. “It’s you and me,” he always told me.
“That’s not what people look like, silly,” I said once.
But now, I see it exactly the way he understood it then, River and me, our edges overlapping, connecting, entwined. That’s the way we’re supposed to be. Without him, I am lost, empty. Just a circle, a deep, empty hole.
When I finish drawing, I stare out across the ocean for a long time. I think about all the many days of my life spent staring out at Ocean, with my mother, Helmut, and River. I think of my mother’s story, about the owl and the pussycat, how they sailed out to sea in a beautiful boat. And then they danced and danced on Beach by the light of the moon. It was her story—I always thought it was, no matter what Helmut said about it. She and Helmut, me and River, sailing into beautiful deep blue Ocean in a boat. Island calling to us, a paradise found. But now I’m not sure. The way Ben told it to me, it was as if they were running away from something, something terrible, not running toward something beautiful. And I don’t understand how that can be true.
I look up, and I notice the sky is lightening a little now, that Venus now hangs low beneath the moon, just the way it always did on Island. It looks exactly the same here, a bright yellow star. Nothing more.
I think of the song my mother taught us when we were little: Starlight, star bright, first star I see tonight. I wish I may. I wish I might. I wish the wish I wish tonight.
What do you wish for? I always asked her.
I wish for you to be safe and healthy and happy.
I always wished for fish, that they would come quickly and easily to my spear the next morning and we would have enough for all of us to feast on the next day. But that night River and I carried my mom’s and Helmut’s limp bodies into Ocean, I wished for her to come back when I saw Venus. I wished for the water to carry her out and to heal her, and then for the tide to bring her back to me, full and whole again, the next morning.
It didn’t. It never did.
I stopped making wishes.
“It’s you and me,” a voice calls out into the ocean now, riding the crest of a wave in an echo, and I don’t know if I’m imagining it or if it’s really there. I turn quickly, and it’s real. He stands there, by my circles in the sand.
“River!” I yell, and I run to him. He wraps me in a hug, and I hold on to him so tightly. Like two connected circles, I think, our arms wrapped around each other, our bodies fitting together the way they always have and always will. “Where have you been?”
“Shhh.” He tangles his finger through my braid.
“I’ve been looking for you, and I couldn’t find you,” I say. “I thought you were at the fish market, but you weren’t. And then I didn’t know where else to go but here.” I bite my lip to keep the tears from coming, but I can’t stop them. They come quickly, and River wipes them away. “I know about everything now,” I tell him. “The cult, and Helmut, and … the apples.”
He nods slowly, and by the way his face turns down, I understand that it’s all true. Or at least he thinks it is. He knows, and he believes it.
“Aren’t you happy here, Skyblue?” he asks me. “With your grandmother and … your Ben, and …”
“No,” I say quickly. “Are you happy here, Riv?”
He shakes his head and lets go of me. He sits down in the sand, in the middle of one of my circles. I sit down next to him, and I put my head on his shoulder, entwining my arm through his, listening to the soft sound of his breath, his heart, his life. “I’m sorry,” he says. “We never should’ve left Island.” I think about that last morning, the way he begged me to go with him the twenty paces up Grassy Hill, the way he swam for me when I dove back into the water, pulling me back to Roger and Jeremy’s boat. “This is all my fault,” he says.
“No,” I tell him. “You didn’t make the boat come, Riv.”
“Yeah, I did,” he whispers. “I built a fire on Beach that last day. When you were mad at me.”
“A fire on Beach,” I murmur. River broke Helmut’s rules, no swimming past Rocks, no fires on Beach. These are the things I tell you to keep you safe, he promised us, and we believed him. And maybe he was right. River broke his rules, and the boat came. And now … we’re here.
“So you can hate me now,” River says. “I did this.”
I shake my head. “I could never hate you.”
He turns to face me, and his face is so close to mine now that I can feel his breath against my cheek. “I remembered my mother,” he whispers. “I did.”
I nod because I believe him now. I think about how I yelled at him that time, years ago, when he swore his memory was truth. How I didn’t believe him then, and now I wish I had.
Memories, my grandmother said. No one can take those away from you.
I wish I would’ve asked my mother more questions, made her answer me. I wish I could’ve known her version of this truth, so I would know how much to believe of what everyone else here is saying.
“My mother carried me somewhere once,” River is saying now. “I don’t know where. But she was holding on to me and running through grass, and the sun was warm and she was laughing, this really nice laugh that kind of sounded like the rain on the rocks.” I think of that place Ben told me about, and I wonder if that was where they had been. “My head was on her shoulder, and she had her arms around me. And I just felt … safe. Loved.” He pauses. “I thought if I came back here, she’d still be here, waiting for me.” His voice cracks. “I just wanted to see he
r again. I didn’t know she was dead. All this time, I thought she was still here.”
I lean my face in closer so our noses touch. I feel River’s shoulders shake against my hands, and I think he’s crying. “It’s not your fault,” I tell him. “You didn’t know.”
“I fed them the apples,” he says. “I poisoned my own mother, and your father and a hundred other people.”
“You didn’t know,” I repeat. I finger the edges of the picture in my pocket. My father. He knew me and he loved me, my grandmother said. I think of the blurry image of his face, of River, standing there with the apples. I poisoned my own mother, River said.
I think of River seeing those pictures that Ben showed me earlier, and my stomach hurts as if I’ve been socked under hard by a wave and thrown into Rocks, gutted and mutilated like a fish.
River pulls away from me, and he stands. I’m afraid he’s going to run again, so I stand, too, ready to chase him. I’m fast, almost as fast as him. I can catch him. “I promised her I’d stay away from you,” he says.
“Who?” I put my hand back on his shoulder until he turns toward me.
“Your grandmother,” he says. He looks down, as if he’s ashamed to look at me when he says it.
I put my hand on his chin and tilt his face up gently so our eyes meet. “When did you talk to my grandmother?” I ask him.
“At Military Hospital,” he says. “She came to see me, and she told me everything then. About Helmut and what he did and what people think of him. And she showed me all those awful pictures with the apples.” He pauses and casts his eyes back down to the sand. My toes are tangled in a mess of seaweed now, but I barely notice. “She said I’d only be hurting you by being around you here, and she was right,” he says softly.
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