Searching for Sky (5 page)

“Are they agitated?” The American Official says.

“Aw, no, mate. They’re just a couple of scared kids,” Roger says. “The girl’s a little wild, but the boy—he might look like Helmut, but he’s not too bad.”

“Unbelievable …,” The American Official says. “I wasn’t sure what to expect when I got the call. But I came prepared.”

We hear the sound of footsteps coming down the rocks, coming toward us. River pulls me closer to him, and I can hear his heart, so loud it’s as if it’s beating in my ear.

Suddenly there is a bright sun above us, and it is so bright I can’t see anything for a moment. Then I see Roger. His no-hair is hidden again, and his face is red and shining with sweat.

“Hey there, kids,” he says, his voice softening. “This here is Mr. Sawyer.”

“Sergeant Sawyer,” the man says as he steps around Roger. He is not too tall, but his entire body is covered in a green that reminds me of the trees shrouding Shelter. The only thing I can see is his face, and his skin is dark, darker than mine and River’s, the color of the rocks in the deeper, cooler middle part of the body of water that shares River’s name.

“He’s come to take you kids home,” Roger says.

“Home?” I ask, thinking again of Island, of my rabbit pelt mat back at Shelter and my bracelet.
My bracelet
. How could I have left it there when I went to the boat with River? I was so stunned I wasn’t thinking clearly. My mother gave me that bracelet, and now it’s the only thing left of her, the pale pink shells to decorate my wrist.

“California,” Sergeant Sawyer is saying.

I let go of River’s hand, and I stand up. I shake my head.
No
. That’s not home. Island is home. My bracelet is there. I have to go back. I have to get it. “Take me back to Island.” I look at Roger, asking him directly, pleading with him, because I think he’s the one I trust the most. His eyes are blue, like my mother’s were.

“Sky.” River stands, too, and says my name softly. He tries to pull me close to him. But I shake him off.

“I need to go back,” I say.

Roger shakes his head. “But you’ve been rescued now, sweetheart.”

Sergeant Sawyer pushes Roger out of the way. “Let me handle this,” he says. Then he turns to stare at me and River. “So you both understand and speak English?”

River nods, though I don’t know whether we do or not.

I peer beyond Sergeant Sawyer, calculating the distance between here and the top of the boat, the water. There’s enough space between the two men for me to push my way through, like the distance between the two palm trees where my favorite and most trusted rabbit trap lies. And maybe if I can make it past them, I can jump into the water and the water will know me; it will hold me close, take me to the place I belong. Or maybe I can even convince Jeremy to take me if I stare into his silver fish eyes and beg him to do it.

“And you do believe yourselves to be American citizens?”

“I …,” River stumbles, and though we are not as close together now, I can still hear his heart beating, loud and wild.

I edge away from him, and I know I need to run, to get back to Island somehow. I rush toward the men, the rock hill, holding my arms out to push past them. “Sky,” River is shouting. “Stop. What are you doing?”

I make it up the rocks, and above me, the sky is close and Ocean seems far. Beach is in front of us but it is not like I have ever known it. It seems to be made of palm wood, like our traps, and there are people there. So many of them, and they are wearing strange things. Skeleton men and women everywhere. I can still hear River calling for me as my eyes search desperately for a way into Ocean that won’t make me walk on this strange wood with all these skeletons. I feel tears running down my cheeks, but I don’t stop to wipe them away.

Suddenly, Sergeant Sawyer catches my wrist with his hand. I struggle to pull away, but he holds on too tightly. Still, I fight him with everything I have, and I kick his legs until he stumbles
a little back down the rocks. He catches his balance, and I notice he’s holding a thin white stick between his teeth now, grabbing onto it with his other hand, and then he jabs it hard into my arm, through the flesh of the poncho.

I feel like I’ve been stung by the biggest and worst insect I have ever felt, but I am still trying to run. “Where the hell does she think she’s going?” I hear Sergeant Sawyer say.

And then the entire world goes still.

Chapter 7

I open my eyes and the world is white.

Not white like the sand that danced just beyond the edge of Beach in tiny pure dunes. Or even white like the full, puffy clouds hanging low in the cool blue sky, filled with rain. No. Now the white is all wrong. Everything around me is that color, and the world is a square, the whiteness of it so bright it hurts my eyes. I blink, and then I notice there’s the sound of something I don’t recognize. A strange kind of bird, close and regular, chirping in my ear.

I sit up, and I realize I am in a box. Bed. Like the one that was in Below Board on the boat.
The boat? River?

“River.” I call his name softly at first, then louder. “River. River.” He doesn’t answer, and my voice sounds strange in this white place, different.

I hear a knocking sound, and then I see part of the white move. A green person steps in, and I remember the man from the boat, Sergeant Sawyer. I move to rub my arm where he
stung me, and I realize my wrists are tied to Bed with heavy, thick leaves. I also see there is a long string coming out of my wrist. I lean in to tug on it with my teeth.

“Don’t,” the green man says, rushing toward me. I pull harder. His hand reaches across and gently pushes my head back. “Please,” he says. “Don’t do that. I’ll take it out for you. But if you do it that way, it’s going to hurt, all right?” He speaks slowly, his voice like the curl of a wave in Ocean. I let go of the string, and he squats next to Bed and sits on some strange sort of tree stump.

“Where’s River?” I ask.

“River?” he says.

“River,” I repeat.

“Oh … River, right. He’s just next door.” I don’t know what that means, but before I can ask more, the green man’s hand is on my arm, and he tugs gently, pulling on the string. “This is just an IV,” he says. “It’s hydrating you.”

He looks at me as if he’s waiting for me to say something in response, but I don’t understand any of what he said. Still, he stares so hard I nod, just so he will stop staring like that. “I want to see River,” I say.

He doesn’t answer as he pulls the string out the rest of the way and places some kind of sticky leaf on my wrist. I struggle to get out of the other, thicker leaves that are tying me to Bed. “I’m going to have someone bring in some food and water, and she’ll take those off,” he says. “As long as you eat and drink, I won’t need to put this back in, okay?” He stares at me again, and I nod again. “Good. First we’ll get you something to eat, and then we’ll talk about seeing people.”

“People?” I ask, and though it seems impossible, I wonder if
my mother and Helmut are here, too. If this is where Ocean brought them. But he doesn’t answer my question.

He stops by the opening he walked in. “Do you know where you are?” he asks.

“California?” I whisper.

He nods. Then he smiles at me. “Welcome home,” he says.

A few minutes later, the white moves again, and another green person enters in the coming-in place, this one carrying a long slab of wood. “I brought you some breakfast,” the person says, her voice sweet and high like my mother’s. Her hair is bright and blond like River’s, though much shorter and pulled back in a small, tight ball at the nape of her neck.

She puts the wood slab over my stomach, and then sits down where the last green person sat. “I’m going to unfasten these,” she says, tugging at the thick leaves wrapped around my wrists. “But we need you to behave. Do you understand what that means?”

Behave
. It was a word my mother used when she wanted me to listen to her and follow Helmut’s rules, to promise no swimming past Rocks, no fires on Beach, no lying, no running down Grassy Hill to Falls in the darkness.

I nod, and her fingers gently move against my wrists. She pulls at the leaves, and they make a loud sound as if very tiny rabbits are scattering across them, tearing the leaves away, and I jump. “Don’t be alarmed,” she says. “Just Velcro.” I don’t know that kind of animal, and I hope it isn’t poisonous. But as suddenly as Velcro began scattering, it stops. The thick leaves are gone. My
wrists are bare, my skin looking lighter than it did on Island but seemingly unharmed. I open and close my fingers a few times, stretching them. My arms, my wrists, my fingers are all sore.

“I’m sorry about that,” she says. “But it was for your own safety.” I don’t know what she means by that, so I don’t say anything. “Go ahead,” she says. “Eat. You must be hungry.”

On top of the slab of wood, on a big white circle, there are berries and something brown I don’t recognize. On the side there is coconut milk in a tall container. I am hungry, but even more, I’m thirsty. So I pick up the coconut milk and throw it down my throat. It’s so sour that I think I might throw it right back up, and I start to cough. I stare at the berries cautiously and pick at the blue ones, the most familiar. They are sweet, their juice melting against my tongue, and I pick them up by the handful and drop them down my throat.

“There’s a spoon,” the woman says, her eyes open wide, her fingers on a silver stick. She hands it to me, and I see the end is a circle. I turn it over, not sure what I’m supposed to do with it. “Here,” the woman says. She uses the circle to scoop a few berries and then gently places them in my mouth. I understand what she wants me to do now, but it seems silly when I could just use my fingers and my hand more efficiently. Still, I don’t want her to think I’m not behaving, to put the hard leaves and Velcro back on my wrists, so I do as she showed me and use a spoon.

“Good,” she says, and she smiles. “I knew you would learn fast. It’ll only be a matter of time before the island is just a distant memory.” I drop the spoon, and it echoes, like stones being
thrown into the body of water that shares River’s name. “I’m sorry,” she says. “I didn’t mean …” She shakes her head.

“I want to see River,” I say, trying to keep the tone of my voice even, the way Helmut’s always was, even if we knew he was angry. He always got what he wanted, Helmut did. No matter what.

“You will,” she says. “I promise you, you will.”

“Now,” I say, still even. “I want to see him now.”

She frowns, looks toward the coming-in place, and then looks back at me. “First,” she says, “there’s someone else who really wants to see you.”

My mother rarely talked about where she came from, who she was with before Island. It’s not that I didn’t ask, that I wasn’t sometimes curious, like River, if there was anything else beyond the blue lilt of Ocean. The small tidbits she’d whispered to me about California and skeletons—these were always just before sleep in Shelter, on the brink of dreaming. During the day she ignored my questions or told me there was nothing worth saying. “This,” she would say, holding out her arms to span the scope of Ocean, surrounding us, “is everything.”

My mother told me once I had a real father—not Helmut—who had died before I was born. But when I asked her to tell me more, who he was, what he was like, what had happened to him, her entire face grew still, as if just the mention of him, the memory, shut something down inside her.

And so I have no understanding now of what the green
woman said to me.
There’s someone else
. No. There is no one else, nothing else. Only me. Only River.