“I know this is strange,” she said, “but we’ll figure it out. I’m glad you came.”
Rakmen nodded again. “I’m . . . I mean . . . I’ll . . .” He tripped over the right thing to say. “I’ll try to be helpful, Mrs. Tatlas—I mean, Leah.”
Her name caught in his throat. She was the teacher. He was the student. That made sense, but ever since Promise House, those lines had blurred, and he didn’t know where he stood anymore.
CHAPTER 12
Leah handed each of them a sandwich on a paper towel and grabbed a water bottle. “Let’s go.”
“Aren’t we gonna eat here?” said Jacey, knocking on the water-stained table.
“I’m taking you to the point. It was always one of my favorite spots. Plus, you deserve proof that there’s a real lake.”
Rakmen followed them out of the cabin and along a tiny path, which hugged the shoreline. As Leah led the way, it seemed to Rakmen that her spine straightened and her head lifted. Maybe she really could leave Mrs. Tatlas behind.
“There’s some moose droppings,” she said, pointing to a pile of brown, marshmallow-sized ovals.
“Should we be worried about that?” Rakmen asked.
“No. It’s not very fresh, and anyway they’re really shy animals except during the fall.”
“Why then?”
“The males get feisty during the rut.”
Jacey made him stop and hold her sandwich so she could take a poop picture, and he could worry about moose survival strategies. Twenty feet ahead, the path nudged up against a ridge of grayish rock, which jutted into the lake like a huge, knobbly finger. Jacey clambered up and sat cross-legged on very end of the rocky point.
“It is a lake,” she said as they sat down beside her.
From this vantage, Rakmen realized that Vesper Lake was shaped like a giant tadpole. Uncle Leroy’s cabin was at the end of the long, swampy tail. The rest was open water ringed by forest. The sun setting behind them turned the surface bronze, and it was actually beautiful, as long as he didn’t think about what might be in the water or in the deeply shadowed trees. Other cabins dotted the edge of the lake, all far enough apart to seem lonely. The one directly opposite perched crookedly on stilts. Its front windows reflected the sunset like huge, blank eyes.
“Look at the dock,” said Jacey, pointing across the water to the cabin on stilts. A narrow lane of wood stuck out from the rocky shore in front of the building. “It looks like a tongue. The cabin is blowing a raspberry.” She stuck her tongue right back, blowing spit.
“That is disgusting,” he said.
The light was nearly gone. The surface of the lake turned from gold to blue-black. A light flickered on inside the tongue house. A shape moved behind the window and paused.
Rakmen shivered. Someone was watching them.
A warbling shriek rose across the lake. Jacey pressed against her mother. Rakmen scanned the area, cold rising in him. The call came again, closer this time, as if someone were trapped in a well.
“Is that a wolf?” asked Jacey in small voice.
“No, silly,” said Leah.
The prolonged howl rose, fell, and ended in a choked gurgle.
“What is it?” Rakmen asked. No good could come out of sound like that.
“It’s only a bird,” she said. “A loon. See—over there.”
Rakmen followed her finger. A black shape like a cross cut through the darkening sky. He could hear the whipping sound of its wings as it flew overhead.
“You should write that down in your notebook,” said Jacey.
“Why?” The howling bird gave him the creeps.
“’Cause I couldn’t take a picture fast enough,” said Jacey, like that was totally obvious.
“You know,” said Leah, “it might be fun to keep a bird list of all the species we see.”
Rakmen wasn’t convinced, but he pulled out his notebook, knowing Jacey wouldn’t stop bugging him until he did it.
“What do you want me to say?” he asked.
“Howling bird,” said Jacey.
“It’s a common loon,” said Leah. “That’s the species.”
Howling bird. Common loon. He tapped the pencil on the page before adding one more line. Moose, maybe wolves. I don’t know what is out here.
. . .
Later that night, after he’d called his parents and pretended everything was fine, Rakmen lay in the bottom bunk, listening. Little claws scritched and scratched inside the walls. The night outside was full of trills and squeaks and rustling. He couldn’t make sense of any of it. At home, he knew the difference between air brakes and an idling UPS truck. He could pick out fire trucks from police sirens. He could sleep through the occasional street fight.
But this. . .
A tiny, furry body raced across his pillow, grazing his cheek, and he flew out of bed so fast, he cracked his head against the top bunk. Giving up on sleep, he reached for his phone. Reception hovered around one bar of signal. His call home had been dropped three times, but he could probably get out a text. Only 11:30 here. Back home, Molly would still be up.
There is a rocking party going on here, he texted.
He sat on the edge of the bed in the dark, itchy and sweating. Damn mice probably had fleas. Rakmen wiped the sides of his face with a T-shirt. Everything about the cabin clung to him like a dirty film. He wished he could shed his skin and end up new.
His phone lit up as a reply came in, turning the underside of the bunk aquarium blue.
Uh? Good? That means you’re having fun, right?
It’s a midnight party of a million mice.
He hit send and heard the violent snap of a trap followed by a spine-chilling squeal from the front room.
Make that 999,999. There is not going to be water skiing.
Bummer. Swimming?
If you like leeches.
Maniacal hooting sounded across the lake. Another loon or maybe an owl.
At home, when he couldn’t sleep, Rakmen would leave the house, easing the door shut so his parents wouldn’t wake, and walk. Past the closed stores and deserted bars. Past the silent playground. Past the St. John’s Bridge, its towers lost in the fog. The city at night was empty but not empty. You knew everyone was there behind all those closed doors.
OMG, Rakmen. You’re torturing me. Tell me something good.
The hooting came again, closer now. This place was far from vacant. This darkness was full. But not with people. It was full of things he didn’t understand. He wished he could explain this to Molly. Instead he typed Jacey loves the camera.
She sent a smiley face back.
She’s taking pictures of everything. Even moose poop.
Hahahaha!
He smiled in the dark, psyched to have made her laugh.
Leah seems sort of better here. Like the place agrees with her.
You mean Mrs. Tatlas?
Yeah. She says we’re not at school so I’m supposed to call her Leah. It’s weird. How’s SAT prep?
Rakmen imagined Molly cross-legged on the couch using a study workbook in her lap to conceal her sketchbook. If she were here, she could’ve drawn the view from the point with all the shadowed hillsides in dark charcoal.
*groan*
She would have added the loon in a black slash.
You’ll rock it.
I’m trying. Hey, I’ve gotta run.
Rakmen squeezed the phone tighter, hating to break the connection. ’Kay. Miss you.
Don’t get lost.
He tucked the phone by the side of his pillow and lay back down, doubting he could get any more lost than he already was. He was both exhausted and wired, too antsy in the unfamiliar place to sleep. The mildew wafting out of his pillow made his throat scratchy. In the main room, mouse sounds erupted in fits and starts.
Over the rustling, he heard another noise. Leah was crying. The walls in this cabin were as thin as the ones at home, as thin as the door to the basement at Promise House. Leah cried like his mother,
low and rhythmic, each sob catching in her chest. They cried because they were ground zero, and it was impossible for anything to rise from such toxic rubble.
Rakmen pulled the moldering pillow over his head.
He did not want to keep overhearing.
CHAPTER 13
The next morning, Rakmen stayed in bed as long as he could, eyes squeezed shut, trying to ignore the musty smell and the fact that he needed to piss. There was nothing good to get up for. Not one thing.
But he really had to piss.
He dragged himself out of the bunk, rubbing his eyes and wishing the day away before it even got started. Jacey was reading a fifteen-year-old National Geographic in the torn recliner. Leah stood in the kitchen. A mouse trap dangled in each hand, the lifeless mice splayed out like clumps of dryer lint.
“All the traps were full,” she said. “Twelve mice.”
Rakmen had heard every single one of them die in the wee hours of the night, and from the look of Leah’s sunken eyes and hollow cheeks, so had she. “Uh, good? I guess.”
“I guess.” Leah turned in a futile circle, looking for some unknown thing, and then turned back to Rakmen with the traps still dangling.
“That’s why we set them, right?”
“Yeah, right.” She turned and headed out the front door. “I’ll just . . . deal . . . with these last two.”
He put two slices of bread in the toaster.
Nothing was different. He’d travelled three thousand miles from home and was still walking on eggshells and dodging blows. The only new thing was that he ate toast to the sound of scurrying feet.
Jacey abandoned her magazine and nabbed one of his slices.
“Hey,” he said.
She stood with her back to him, studying the wall of fishing lures. “Hey, yourself.”
Leah came back from the mouse graveyard and scrubbed her hands until Rakmen thought the skin might fall off. Jacey started at the top row of lures and touched each one in turn, all the way down. Leah poured cereal. Outside, that bird that sounded like it had swallowed a machine gun chattered its head off.
“Pileated woodpecker,” said Leah in a slumped monotone.
“Uh . . . excuse me?” Rakmen asked. The air in the cabin was stifling.
“That bird calling. It’s a woodpecker.”
“Write it down,” Jacey commanded, giving the last lure—a giant, red and white, spoonlike thing with jewel-eyes—a resounding flick with her thumb and third finger. It clanked against its neighbors. She wheeled around to face her mother.
“I want to go fishing.”
“No.” Leah’s words remained flat, and there was something dangerous around her eyes.
“Look at these lures.” Jacey flapped a hand toward the wall. “I bet they’ve caught a million fish. Come on. Take me fishing!”
“There’s a lot to do here. Rakmen will take you later.”
He very much doubted that.
Jacey let out a huffy whine.
The muscle in Leah’s cheek tightened. “Give me a break, Jacey, I can’t do everything.”
“You don’t do anything but lie around and cry.”
“I am doing my best.”
“You’d take Jordan.” Jacey lobbed the words like a grenade.
Rakmen had the sensation that Leah’s bones were giving way like buckled drywall and snapped girders. She set her cereal bowl on the counter with a thunk and walked into the bedroom.
Rakmen was on his feet before the door shut. “Come on,” he said, grabbing Jacey by the arm. Between the very loose hold Leah seemed to have on herself and the prickly sensation that the dead were watching, he couldn’t stay in the cabin another second.
“I want to go home,” said Jacey as she let him tug her out the door.
If only he could make that happen.
“Why’d you have to talk about the baby?” he asked, when they’d circled around to the front of the cabin.
Jacey bared her teeth at him. “He’s my brother! I can talk about him if I want.”
“Yeah, but it doesn’t do any good.”
“It’s called remembering,” she snapped, picking up a pinecone and hurling it into the lake.
“I’m not picking a fight with you,” said Rakmen, picking up more cones and handing them to her. “But dead is dead.”
“What if they’re up there in heaven or something, looking down and thinking we forgot about them?”
A sludgy wave of pain rose in Rakmen’s chest. As if forgetting were possible. He wished he hadn’t eaten breakfast. “I’m saying that it upsets your mom.”
Jacey threw the rest of the pinecones. When her ammunition was expended, she pointed to the shed attached to one side of the cabin. “Let’s go explore that shed.”
“It’s probably full of wood,” he said, but shrugged and followed her. Nothing else to do but count logs.
The morning sun sliced yellow fingers through the big trees around the cabin, and steam twisted up from the ground. The shed tilted ominously toward the water. Jacey pulled on the mildew-spotted tarp covering the doorway until the bungee cords holding it broke loose. She fell backward, ending up half-buried in the stinky plastic.
“This is so gross,” she complained, “Get me out of here.”
Rakmen ignored her and stared into the dim interior. Surrounded by piles of stacked firewood was a boat, upside-down on a pair of sawhorses. He whistled through his teeth; a long, low hiss of appreciation. Even a city kid who knew jack about boats knew this was something special. Under a buttery layer of lacquer, the honey-colored wood of the hull glowed. Leaving Jacey to extricate herself, he skirted the stacks of wood and ran his finger over the smooth surface of its hull. “This boat is probably worth more than the whole cabin.”
“It’s a canoe,” Jacey said, coming up beside him.
“Uh-huh . . . a canoe,” he repeated, mesmerized by its graceful shape and the way the wood almost seemed alive.
Jacey got on her hands and knees and crawled under the canoe. “It’s chained.”
Rakmen squatted in the sawdust. Thin boards braced the inside of the canoe like ribs, and a crosspiece spanned the center. He tried lifting it off the sawhorses. A chain, looped around the boat’s crosspiece and connected to an eye bolt screwed into the floor of the shed, rattled hoarsely.
Great-uncle Leroy was not as insane as he seemed. His cabin might be the biggest pile of crap Rakmen had ever seen, but he was safeguarding the best thing for miles around.
“Let’s find the key,” Rakmen suggested.
They tiptoed into the cabin. Leah was still in her room, and they were able to search without being seen. Behind the front door and near the pile of aged magazines, they found a hook on the wall. A key chain sporting a real scorpion encased in yellowed resin hung there. The single key was so old that the teeth were worn as smooth as beachside pebbles.
Jacey snatched it off the hook and tore her way back to the canoe, scrabbling under it with the scorpion in her teeth. The chain gave a deep rattle as she pulled it loose. She crawled out, spitting dust, and together they turned the canoe right side up.
“Let’s carry it down to the water,” Rakmen said, and bent to grasp the triangular, wooden piece set in his end of the canoe.
Jacey reached for her side, and then jumped back, squealing. A dime-sized spider clung to sheets of silk in the hollow at her end of the canoe.
“Come on,” he said, exasperated.
The spider scurried to the other side of its web.
“Get it out.”
“You get it out,” he said.
Jacey sucked on her hair.
“Fine.” Rakmen headed to her end of the canoe armed with a stick of kindling.
“Wait!” Jacey screeched, as he started to jab at the spider. She pulled the pink camera out of her pocket. “Take a picture first?”
“You want a picture of the spider?”
She nodded.
“Well, go ahead,” he said, leaning back against the post
of the shed. “I guess it’s not any weirder than taking pictures of moose poop.”
She shook her head violently.
“I thought you wanted a picture.”
“Can you do it?”
He sighed. “Give it here.”
Rakmen switched the camera to macro and leaned in close. Every hair on the spider’s body stood out like brush bristles. Eight eyes, various sizes, shone like black pearls. Shiny fangs hung low between its front legs. He took a handful of pictures and then handed Jacey the camera.
“Put this inside the cabin and grab those life jackets your mom brought, okay?”
She wobbled off, scanning through the pictures as she went.
Rakmen used the stick to relocate the spider. As he was brushing out its web, his fingers grazed a tiny strip of weathered bronze screwed into the inside edge of the canoe. He felt his skin catch on something engraved upon the metal. He squinted at the tarnished letters in old-fashioned cursive.
Au large.
Rakmen breathed in swamp muck and rotting wood and stared at the words on the metal plate. They made him nervous. Like the owl in the night, they meant something, but he didn’t know what.
Or whether that something was good or bad.
Au large.
Probably bad.
CHAPTER 14
Together they hauled the canoe to the edge of the water and slid it alongside a fallen log, gray with age, which bridged the muck and extended into deeper water. Balancing on the log, Rakmen guided the canoe out.
“Hold this while I get in.”
“What if we flip?” Jacey asked.
Rakmen squeezed the bridge of his nose between thumb and forefinger. The musty smell of the Promise House basement filled his nose, and headlines from his notebook flashed through his mind. Boy, seven, drowns in Clackamas River. Coast Guard calls off search for survivors of fishing boat. “Put on your life jacket.”
He tightened the blaze orange contraption around his own chest and lowered himself onto the front seat. Jacey balanced-beamed along the log. When she stepped in, the canoe wobbled wildly from side to side. Yelping, she plumped down on the rear seat. A bullfrog let loose a flatulent ribbit and slid under the surface, straight into the brown ooze, and they both white-knuckled the sides until the rocking ceased.
The Way Back from Broken Page 8
