“Good. I have to go,” I say, and he lets go of my hand. I wonder if he knows the right way to use the toilet now, but I am too embarrassed to ask him, and I really have to go, so I just give him a small smile and run toward the bathrooms.
Inside the tiny bathroom, there is a small silver bad-smelling toilet, and I go quickly, feeling my stomach turn at the smells. When I’m finished, I flush and look around for a sink, but I don’t see one. I hear some noise from outside, yelling, so I forget about the sink and run back out to see what’s going on.
A woman stands in front of River, pointing her finger in his face. “You,” she’s yelling, “you’re pure evil, boy.”
Evil. I think about the way Helmut always stood at the edge of Ocean waiting for it to come to Island. Evil. I never understood what he was waiting for, and I still don’t. I think of the way Ben described it to me, that Helmut had decided some people in his cult were evil, my real father and River’s mother included, and that made him poison them. But then I think of the way Mrs. Fairfield called Helmut an evil man. How could they possibly mean the same thing?
River stands there now, seemingly still, like a rock, and I quickly run over and grab his hand. “Leave him alone!” I shout in the woman’s face, and then I tug on River’s arm so he will run up the steps with me.
When we’ve reached the top and we’re both breathing hard, River pulls me tight in a hug. “It’s okay,” he says to me. “I usually just let them yell.”
“Usually? This has happened before?” I think about Mrs. Fairfield and Ben and even my grandmother, how hard they were trying to teach me things. I have not been yelled at ever in California, and it makes me sad to think of River out here all alone.
“I told you,” he says softly. “That’s why I couldn’t stay at Apartment.” He pauses. “The people with the bright suns would shout things at me.”
“Oh, Riv,” I say, reaching for his hand. I think about my grandmother, about the way she called them vultures, the way she got out of her car and yelled at them. She was trying to protect me, I think. But who does River have to protect him in this strange world? Me.
He looks smaller in this California morning light, broken in his backward shirt. I understand now that I need to take care of him here, the way I often took care of him on Island. I am the practical one.
I pull him close to me, stand up on my tiptoes, and kiss him softly again. “You’re not evil,” I whisper. “None of this is your fault.”
He pulls back but still holds my hand. “I’m just so glad you’re here,” he whispers, his fingers tangling in my braid. Then he grins. “Come on,” he says, just like he might have said it on Island. “Let’s go catch some dinner.”
At the top of the hill and down the street, there are rows and rows of tables with a large sign that has words that look similar to fish market, but I understand they’re not exactly the same and I don’t really know what the first word means.
I follow River from table to table, where people have set out fruits and flowers of all kinds. “You know you have to pay money for all this, right?” I ask River.
He nods and pulls a messy pile of bills from his pocket. I remember what he said about my grandmother giving him money, and I swallow hard, thinking that this money in his hand is hers.
“But you see that man over there?” River points to a small man with dark brown skin. “He gives me strawberries every morning. He won’t let me pay him.”
“Why not?”
River shrugs. “He says he feels bad about everything that happened to me. That it wasn’t my fault. I was just a boy. He says he feels better knowing I’m eating fresh fruit every day.”
“Oh,” I say, thinking that maybe not everyone in California is broken. The man nods at River as we walk by, and he stares at me for a moment until I turn away and look ahead.
“The fish is up here,” River says, and there is just one small table, not nearly as big as the glass window at the fish market. River begins looking at the fish and asks for what he wants, but I stop paying attention as something catches my eye on the next table: the newspaper. And there on the front, again, is my picture.
I move closer and struggle to make out the words: ISLAND GIRL MISSING.
Island Girl, that’s me, the words Ben had written beneath his drawing. I think of Ben, of the way he said that and laughed as we listened to music in his bedroom.
“Hey,” the man from the fish table says. “I know you.” I look up, and I realize it’s the man from the fish market, not the one behind the window but the one from the back, the owner: Lucas, the sandy one.
I put my head down and grab River’s hand. “Come on,” I say. “We have to go. Run.”
“Hey,” Lucas, the sandy one, calls. “Wait a minute.”
But I hold on to River and run fast through the tables, down the hill, down the steps, past the rocks, onto the beach. I don’t even stop to breathe until we are back inside River’s shelter.
River cooks the fish over a small fire that he starts with matches. “See,” he tells me, and he grins. “Just like Island.”
Only it is nothing like Island. Fear wraps itself around my insides, like Helmut’s giant hand, clutching and pulling and stretching. ISLAND GIRL, the paper said, and Lucas, the sandy one, saw me. He knew who I was. It would only be a matter of time before they found me, and River, too, and I don’t want to think about what will happen then. I think about telling River, but I also think he won’t understand it, the enormity of the California world. The way these people move so quickly in their cars, on their I-5, always going somewhere, always looking for something. So instead I say, “We need a plan, Riv.”
“A plan?” he asks, turning the fish slowly to keep it from burning. I think of how this was my job on Island, how even on my birthday I cooked the meat, but I don’t offer to do it here, in what feels like River’s shelter—his place, his fish.
“We’ll need a boat,” I say. “But even then …” I hesitate, not wanting to tell River about the maps, Island’s nonexistence on them.
He nods. “We can get back to Samoa on a boat. Then we’ll just find Roger and Jeremy and get them to take us back to Island.”
I nod, but I am thinking that my grandmother will find out, that Roger and Jeremy probably can’t be trusted, or maybe even found. I’m not sure how big Samoa is, how far away it is from here, and how many different Rogers and Jeremys there are. But I swallow those feelings because I know River can’t stay here, and if he can’t, then neither can I. What other choice do we have but to find our way back there somehow? And anyway, that’s what I’ve wanted all along, isn’t it?
“How much money do you have?” I ask him, though I have no idea still how much you would need for a boat. Twenty dollars for fish, for dinner. A boat has to be more, but I don’t even know where we might go to buy one.
“A lot,” River says, and I nod, though that means nothing. “Here, fish is done,” he says. “And I didn’t even burn it.” He grins. “When we get back to Island, you might even let me cook the fish now.”
The fire still burns, low and small, but the red flames show me his face, every familiar space of it. He looks relaxed, not worried at all about a plan, about a boat. Still the dreamer.
I reach up and touch his cheek. His face looks sure and strong and steady. Like Helmut’s, only kinder. “Sure,” I say. “I’ll let you cook the fish when we get back.” It feels like a lie, but I don’t mean it to be.
Maybe we can go back. Maybe we really can. Maybe here, in California, I have become a dreamer, too. But I don’t care. I want to believe. I want to go back. I want the world to be small and familiar, the way it always was. River and Sky. Ocean and Beach, Shelter and Falls.
We pull at the cooked fish with our fingers, letting the warm meat slide down our throats and fill our bellies. I close my eyes, and Island feels so close. The waft of the salty Pacific, the taste of the warm fish. The feel of River’s body against me, our knees touching as we eat.
/> And when we are finished, we lie together, back to back, as we always did, as we always will, I think. Nothing is certain. Nothing is true. Nothing is real.
Except for this.
Chapter 33
I awake to the sound of voices, and when I open my eyes, it’s dark with just the smallest curve of moonlight coming in above us through the small wood spaces. I think I’m in Shelter for a moment, that last night when I awoke to the sounds of Roger calling for his mate, Jeremy. I wish I’d been stronger then. That I’d convinced River not to leave, to hide with me at Falls until the men left. I don’t believe the cut on my leg would’ve hurt me there on Island. I’d had cuts and scrapes before, and they’d always healed with the sap of the aloe that grew on the other side of the body of water that shares River’s name and the salt water of Ocean. If River and I had stayed, we would’ve been just fine. The world would’ve still been perfect.
“River,” I whisper now into the darkness, feeling for him with my hand. But when I don’t feel him, when he doesn’t answer right away, I get nervous, and I sit up. I see the arch of his back, a few paces in front of me: he’s perched by the edge of his shelter, staring out onto the beach. “River,” I say again, moving forward and putting my hand on his shoulder.
“Shhh,” he whispers as he puts his hand on top of mine. “It’s all right. Go back to sleep, Sky.”
“What’s out there?” I try to peer beyond him, but he holds me back with his arm.
“Just people on Beach,” he whispers.
But I hear the voices again, see the beams of the yellow flashlights rolling into the ocean. “Megan,” I hear someone calling. Someone who sounds a lot like Ben. “Megan,” he calls again.
“They’re looking for me,” I admit to River now.
He nods as if he already knew, as if he’s known it all along, and I wonder how, when he didn’t see the newspaper earlier. Something curls in my chest at the thought of Ben out in the darkness with his lonely flashlight, shouting my name. But I quickly push the thought away and wrap my arms around River, hugging him tightly.
“You could go to them,” River whispers.
“No,” I say fiercely, holding on tighter, wishing my arms were longer so they could span the width of him, so they could hold him here, keep him from moving. “I’m not leaving you,” I tell him. “Never again.” I pause. “And you better not leave me, either.” He doesn’t say anything, and against the rolling of the ocean, I hear my fake name, echoing in the waves. “Promise me,” I say, squeezing him tighter. “Promise me you won’t leave me again.”
He doesn’t say anything for a few moments, until the voices die down, the beams of the flashlight roll away, and then finally he says it: “I promise.”
In the morning River presents me with more strawberries, and I eat them quickly. I am hungry and thirsty, and the juice is delicious in my throat. I also need to use the bathroom, but I’m afraid to walk out from under the shelter, to go up there now, so for the time being I hold it in.
After I finish the green basket of berries, River pulls a small silver knife out of the brown bag. “If we’re going to do this,” he says, “you’re going to have to let me.”
“Let you what?” I ask.
He tangles his fingers in my braid, then puts his hand on my face. “Let me cut it,” he says.
I think of that morning, sitting in the car with my grandmother at the place she called the salon, where she tried to convince me to get my hair “shaped.” I couldn’t let go then; I wouldn’t. The braid is mine, my mother’s, everything I had left. But now I have River, and I know he’s right. My braid is me, and without it, I can be someone else. Not Megan. But not the Sky who came here, either, the one everyone will be searching for. Island Girl. “Okay,” I say softly.
I close my eyes and feel River’s hands moving gently against my back, then the cool whisper of the knife against my neck. I hear him pulling and pulling with the knife, as if my hair were a tree branch, thick and heavy and hard to cut. And then I hear a snap, and I open my eyes. River holds my braid in his hands, the way he always did, he always has. But now it’s no longer a part of me.
I reach up to feel for my hair, its absence like a shadow, something I can still imagine but can no longer touch. When I try to hold on to it, I grab only a fistful of air. “It’s really gone,” I gasp.
“I’m sorry,” River says.
But I shake my head, and then I wonder if you have to let go of everything you were just to be everything you are. Is that how my mother and Helmut felt when they first went to Island? The owl and the cat, dancing by the light of the new moon. Starting over again.
I run my fingers through what’s left of my hair, and it falls out loosely around my shoulders.
River reaches up to comb through it gently with his fingers. “Come on,” he says, putting my braid in the brown bag. “I know where the boats are.”
I stand up, and I follow him. We hold hands as we step out of his shelter and onto the beach.
I follow River up the winding steps through the rocks, and after a quick stop at the bathroom, we head into the pines. It’s too dangerous to walk on the beach now during the day. But still, I’d much prefer the feel of the cool sand between my toes than the sting of the pine needles. I think again about my silly flip-flops. I’d climbed down the window so quickly without them, and I feel a small pang of regret now. I wonder if I will forget about them, about everything I learned here, once we make it back to Island, but I don’t think I will, and I feel a little sad.
I hold on tightly to River’s hand as we weave through the pines. I feel lost in the tall green darkness of the trees, not like the paths I knew so well on Island, the trees I could navigate between, even on the darkest of nights.
But River seems to know these trees well, and I imagine that these were the pathways he took as he tracked me all those many weeks. I think of all the times I watched the tops of the pines slant in the breeze from Pink Bedroom in my grandmother’s house, and how I had no idea that River was here, so close. So alone.
“Tell me about your Ben,” River says now as we walk, holding hands.
“Ben?” I’m surprised that River is asking, and also I feel my stomach clench again as I think about the round beam of his flashlight, the way he called for me, sounding so desperate, last night. I think about his room, covered with drawings, the one of me diving into the ocean. The one he told me was unfinished. Will he finish it now, or will he just throw it out? “What do you want to know?” I ask.
“You like him,” River says, not a question but a truth, solid and undeniable.
I shrug. “I don’t know,” I say. “He was nice to me.”
“You’ll miss him when we leave,” River says, and I think there’s something wounded in his voice, like an animal in a trap that’s gotten its foot stuck and is crying in pain, knowing, knowing what is about to come.
“I don’t know,” I say again. “But it doesn’t matter now, anyway.”
“Yeah,” River says, his voice catching in his throat. “I guess not.”
He stops walking, and I think we’ve gone farther than my grandmother’s house, or maybe we’re right near it. I don’t know. And I hate this feeling of being lost, of not knowing my own way. It’s the way I felt those first few days at my grandmother’s house, when I understood nothing at all of this world.
“Wait here,” River says to me.
“What? No way, I’m coming with you.”
He shakes his head. “Someone might recognize you.”
“But my hair,” I protest.
“Just wait here,” he whispers, and he leans in and kisses me softly on the lips. “Let me go and talk to the man with the boats. And then I’ll come right back.”
“No.” I shake my head, though even as I say it, I understand he’s right. If someone recognizes me and calls my grandmother on her cell phone, she will get into her car and be here, wherever we are, in no time. And if River and I are separated again, I worry we
might never find our way back to each other, to Island. “Okay,” I say softly. “I’ll wait here.” He grins at me the way he always has and starts to walk away, but I catch his arm. “Just turn your shirt around,” I say. “It’s on backward.”
He looks at me, confused, and on his face I see the way I’ve felt so many times since coming to California. But he pulls the shirt off and then stares at it, unsure, as if it is a strange animal he has never encountered before and now he is seeing it for the very first time.
“The tag goes in the back,” I say, reaching my hand up and touching the tag to show him. But even as I say it, it sounds silly. Unimportant. And I wish I hadn’t said anything at all.
River turns the shirt around, pulls it back over his head, and offers me a small smile. But even with the shirt on the right way, I realize it doesn’t look right on him. It’s too big, swimming over his shoulders all wrong, making him look smaller than he is.
“Be careful,” I call after him as he walks away, but he doesn’t turn to answer.
It takes River a long time to come back, and I find myself walking back and forth in a small space of pines. What if something happened? I worry. And I wonder if I should go after him. But then I think I’ll wait just a little longer because I don’t want to ruin it all now by being recognized. I find myself wishing I had a watch, like Mrs. Fairfield and my grandmother wear on their wrists, so I could keep track of time, because in the thickness of the pines, it’s hard to track the path of the sun, to understand how much time has really passed.
But then at last I hear the crunch of pine needles, the snap of a twig, and River appears as if in a dream, in his too-big shirt. I reach out to touch his face, just to make sure he is warm and real and here. He is.
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