The Way Back from Broken

by Amber J. Keyser

  His empty stomach roared. Even his body was against him.

  Rakmen cursed under his breath as he pulled on his pants. Everything hurt, but Jacey’s oddly comforting pocketful of treasures bumped his thigh, and he checked to make sure the pocket flap was safely buttoned before crawling out of the tent.

  Mist, golden from the sun, rose from the flat surface of the lake. The cool morning air brought gooseflesh to his bare chest, but Rakmen could tell the day would be a hot one. Tiny snores came from the orange tent, and he thought he was the first one up until he caught sight of Leah sitting on the rocky point and looking at the lake.

  He tensed, trying to read the curved line of her back and the way her arms wrapped around her knees. He approached her like a bomb tech and went into defusing mode. Red wire? Blue wire?

  He scuffed his feet to make enough noise not to startle her, and when she looked up, his tension eased a notch. There was a softness to the lines around her eyes that he hadn’t seen before. She raised a hand in greeting before turning back to the lake. Rakmen splashed his face in the water, running his fingers through his dark hair.

  Jacey woke up and wandered blearily out of the tent, clutching her toothbrush. “Where’s the sink?”

  Leah actually kind of smiled as she handed Jacey a water bottle. “Spit in the bushes, sweetie.”

  Rakmen joined Jacey at the bush-sink.

  Jacey crossed her eyes at him and let a glop of white bubbles ooze down her chin, zombie-style. They practiced lurching around and foaming at the mouth until Leah told them to pack up their tents.

  “Aren’t we staying here?” Rakmen asked.

  “I want to keep moving.”

  “Why? This seems okay. No bears.”

  Her eyes narrowed to slits, making the dark circles under her eyes seem even darker. “I can’t stay in one place.”

  Jacey wiped her mouth on her sleeve and ducked back into her tent. Rakmen could hear her stuffing the sleeping bag into its sack. His own heaviness returned, numbing his limbs like he was an actual zombie.

  He deconstructed his tent while Leah made oatmeal. After cleaning up the dishes, they loaded the packs in silence. A loon skimmed to a landing in front of their camp, screaming like a prisoner. When they left that lake behind, Rakmen never wanted to see it again.

  . . .

  After that portage came another lake and another and another. It was almost noon, and even on the water, it was hot. The stifling air buzzed with insects. A particularly irritating deer fly had been harassing Rakmen for ten minutes until it succeeded in a nipping out a chunk of flesh on his ankle. “Damn it!”

  “You’re naughty,” Jacey teased from her spot in the middle of the canoe.

  He grimaced.

  “There’s the next portage,” Leah said, pointing ahead to where a wide creek burbled into the lake. “Let’s eat before we go.”

  “Lunch is good,” Rakmen said, stomach growling.

  While Leah divvied out their rations in neat piles on cloth bandanas, Rakmen and Jacey poked around. The rocky stream bed was fifteen feet wide and less than a foot deep in most places. There were a few deeper holes at the downstream side of the largest boulders. In those spots, the water churned to a white froth.

  “Guys,” said Leah, calling them back.

  Rakmen knew without counting that he had ten crackers stacked neatly beside a pile of nuts, dried apricots, a chunk of cheese, and a one-ounce square of semi-sweet chocolate. The woman couldn’t be trusted with plates, but she was precise about crackers.

  As they ate, Leah spread out the map between them. “We’re here at Wrangel Lake. This portage follows the stream until it gets a little deeper, then there’s a short section to paddle and another portage around some rapids.”

  “How long?” Rakmen asked.

  “Two hundred and ten meters followed by a four-fifty.”

  Rakmen popped the entire piece of chocolate in his mouth and tried not to think about six hundred and sixty meters of fun. If anything, today was worse than yesterday. His blisters had merged into fluid-filled blimps, and his shoulders had been both scraped by his pack straps and bruised by the canoe. He focused on the melty goodness in his mouth and was thankful his tongue didn’t hurt.

  Leah finished her lunch and walked to the edge of the stream. “The water level seems pretty high this year.”

  “So?” Rakmen didn’t see what that had to do with them.

  “We could try to bypass the portage.”

  Now she had his attention. Anything to avoid carrying that pack and canoe. They changed into sandals, left the packs stowed, and prepared to walk the canoe upstream in the shallow water. It was slow, sloshy going with Leah on one side near the bow, and Rakmen on the other closer to the stern, but it was way easier than portaging. Jacey waded in the water, turning over rocks to look for salamanders.

  Branches from maple trees on either side stretched overhead, making a shaded archway. It was cool out of the direct sunlight, and birds flitted everywhere like scraps of chittering confetti. Rakmen saw a little brown and cream-colored one bobbing its tail and poking in the water at the edge of the stream.

  “Pssst,” he hissed at Jacey to get her attention. “Look.”

  She stopped flipping rocks to look at the tiny bird wading in inch-deep water like it was in a baby pool. “It’s so cute,” she said. At the sound of her voice, the bird startled and flew upstream.

  “Smooth move,” he said, and Jacey hucked a pinecone at him.

  “That was a northern waterthrush,” said Leah. “Well-spotted.”

  “You should put it on the list,” said Jacey.

  “Nuh-uh,” said Rakmen. He hadn’t agreed to this bird-watching thing.

  “Shouldn’t all be bad stuff in there.” Jacey tipped her head at the pocket that held his notebook. “There’s good stuff to write down too.”

  He glared at her, and Jacey went back to collecting treasures along the bank, taking pictures of the things she couldn’t gather. By the time the creek flattened out and was both deep and slow enough for them to paddle upstream, she’d tucked a twisted piece of wood, a gray stone flecked with gold, and a prematurely red maple leaf into the cargo pocket of his pants.

  They paddled along the creek for a few hundred feet as it twisted through a grassy meadow. Soon, the terrain turned rocky and sloped upward, and once again the current got fast. They unloaded at the bottom of a narrow chute of white water.

  “On the way back, we can run that,” said Leah, gesturing to the long run of rapids in an offhand way.

  Jacey got excited. “You mean shoot the rapids? That would be epic.”

  Rakmen immediately started a mental slide show of all the ways that could go wrong. The canoe was made of pieces of wood, which would probably explode into matchsticks on impact with one of those boulders. Fast water would tug at their limbs, and sodden clothes would weigh them down. There was more than one drowned child in that album in the Promise House basement.

  Rakmen gulped for air, feeling the pressure to breathe. Dora had suffocated too, not by water in her lungs but by her malformed little heart, which simply could not—no matter how hard it tried—pump enough oxygen to save her.

  Instinctively, Rakmen fumbled for his notebook, desperate to pin down the million little things that can lead to death. Rapids, whitewater, sinking, capsizing. He saw water, frothing white and churned by hydraulics. He felt the weight of rushing water pinning him to the stream bottom.

  “The bird,” Jacey said, gripping his sleeve and jerking hard. His pencil skittered across the page, leaving a gray scrawl. “Write down the waterthrush,” she insisted. “Say that it wades even though it’s smaller than my hand, and to that bird, this stream is like the Grand Canyon or something. Write that.”

  Blinking away the damp scent of drowning, he wrote waterthrush, wades and is not swept away.

  “Good,” said Jacey. “Thanks.” She pulled on her pack and followed her mother up the trail by the stream. Rakmen waited unti
l his breathing slowed. Then he shrugged on his pack, tossed the canoe to his shoulders, and began the steep climb to Pen Lake.

  CHAPTER 22

  Jacey met Rakmen near the end of the portage. From the claustrophobic innards of the canoe, he heard her feet on the trail as she doubled back to find him.

  “Hey,” she said.

  He was too focused on the way his load was pounding him into the trail to do anything more than grunt.

  “There’s a moose,” Jacey said, in a breathy, exaggerated whisper, barely able to contain her excitement.

  He stopped mid-stride. “Where? Is it close?”

  Jacey laughed. “Not here, silly. Out on the lake. Hurry up so you don’t miss it.”

  Hurrying was impossible. Every step hurt from the bruised heel on one foot to the blister on the other, but he plodded after her. There was too much pain radiating through Rakmen’s body for him to share her enthusiasm about some overgrown deer.

  At the end of the portage, Rakmen unburdened himself as quickly as he could. Filling his lungs and grateful to be able to see again, he scanned the shore of Pen Lake.

  Trees, water, and more trees.

  “Good one, Jacey. You got me. I totally fell for it.”

  Jacey held a finger up to her lips and shushed him.

  Bewildered, he looked to Leah.

  She shrugged and smiled weakly. “Jacey’s getting worked up a little prematurely. See that brownish mound down there?” Leah stood next to him and pointed to a grassy bay partway down the lake.

  “It looks like a stump.”

  “Watch.”

  Moose or no, Rakmen was grateful to stand still. No paddling. No carrying. As long as he didn’t move, nothing hurt. Even his mind was quiet in this small, still moment.

  Then the stump moved, and Jacey bounced on her tiptoes, tugging on his arm. “Didyousee? Didyousee?”

  “Ouch,” he said, extracting his arm from her grasp.

  The stump was definitely looking at them.

  “Let’s see if we can sneak up on it and get a closer look,” said Leah.

  He eyed her while they loaded the canoe, trying to read the set of her shoulders and the lines on her face. He needed to know if she was leading them someplace they shouldn’t go.

  “Is this safe?” he asked as they pushed off into the lake.

  “Yeah,” she said, “and anyway we won’t get too close.”

  Rakmen nodded, and they paddled silently along the shore.

  The moose was the biggest animal Rakmen had ever seen outside of a zoo. And the weirdest. Humped back. Gangly legs. Head shaped like a giant peanut. It even had kind of a wattle hanging down from its chin, making it like an insane cross between a turkey, a horse, and a Volkswagen Bug.

  Formidable.

  That was the word for it. The moose was all bulk and antler and power. Except that it was wading in shallow water and grazing on lily pads, which seemed like a very docile thing to do.

  Jacey’s paddle slipped and banged the gunnel. She sucked in a startled puff of air as the moose swung its head in their direction, dangling a mouthful of stems and leaves. Rakmen and Leah froze mid-paddle-stroke, but the moose didn’t care and went back to grazing.

  Even without paddling, a slight breeze at their backs kept them moving slowly toward the moose. As they drifted closer, Rakmen could see clouds of flies buzzing around the animal. The moose flicked its ears and spindly tail, swung its head around to brush the biting swarm off its back. The itching of Rakmen’s own bug bites redoubled. He scratched one on the back of his neck, and the moose lifted its head, staring right at him.

  Its eyes were deep brown and soft, warm in the center but also utterly unfamiliar. The moose had been born here. It knew how to survive. These were its woods, its lakes, its fragrant lilies.

  You can be here, it seemed to say.

  You can walk and you can carry.

  For a while.

  Rakmen absorbed every detail of the moose. The ridge of hair on its back. Its velvety muzzle. The jagged edge of a broken bit of antler. He had never been this close to a wild animal.

  The moose dipped its head into the water, rooting on the bottom for lilies, and Rakmen realized he’d been holding his breath. He hadn’t noticed Jacey pulling out her camera, but the sound of her snapping a picture cut through the air. The moose’s head shot up out of the lilies. Jacey took another picture. Something about the tilt of the animal’s ears became threatening. A warning.

  I hear you, Rakmen thought, reversing his paddle stroke and edging them away. The moose turned and lumbered toward shore, crashing up the bank and disappearing into the forest.

  “Wow,” Leah breathed.

  The three of them grinned at each other, awed and exhilarated.

  How brilliant it would be to tell Molly about the moose. Rakmen wanted her to draw it, to capture both the softness and the strength of the creature. He would tell her how it felt to look into its eyes and be invited in.

  “Hey, guys,” said Leah. “How about camping there?”

  They were crossing the mouth of a small bay with a crescent-shaped slice of beach at its end. Up ahead, a high, rocky point stuck out into the lake, and the campsite was on top of it in a grove of pines. They landed at the end of the beach and carried their packs up to the pine-needled grove.

  Rakmen walked to the end of the point. To the left, he could see all the way down the lake to the portage they had just crossed. To his right the lake, rippling and dappled with sunlight, opened up. Directly below him, the water was super deep. The bottom was down there somewhere. Probably. Unless it was the portal to Edna’s Inuit underworld.

  “Think there are piranhas?” said Jacey, coming up behind him and plopping down on the lichen-covered rocks. “Barracuda? Oooh, I know. Sharks!”

  “No, stupid. It’s a lake. In Canada. Nothing dangerous.” But he couldn’t shake the uneasy feeling. It bugged him. He was tired of feeling hunted.

  “I’m gonna jump,” he told Jacey.

  Jacey cranked her head up to stare at him. “You’re gonna do what?”

  “Jump.”

  Before he could change his mind, Rakmen tore off his T-shirt and unlaced his boots. He was already wearing shorts. He flexed his fingers back, first the left hand, then the right. His knuckles jiffy-popped. Swimming made him think of movies and summer and Grant Pool, where you could see straight to the shark-free bottom.

  This was not like swimming.

  “So how ’bout it?” he said, “You coming?”

  “No way. It’s creepy when you can’t see what’s down there.”

  Rakmen stood on the edge, staring into the black depths. “Come on,” he urged, “there’s nothing down there but mud and some sticks.”

  “I don’t swim so good.”

  “You don’t swim?”

  She shrugged. “Well, I kinda can.”

  “Kinda? Like doggy-paddle?” She nodded. No wonder Leah insisted that she wear her life jacket all the time. Rakmen turned back to the drop-off. Somehow knowing Jacey couldn’t swim made the distance look farther than it had before.

  Buck up and do it, he told himself. He’d survived a night in the wilderness and been up close and personal with a moose. He could jump off a rock. He gripped the rough granite with his toes, flexed his knees, and leapt.

  He had time to whoop once, baggy shorts whipping against his thighs, before plunging into the cold, silent water. Engulfed in green, he sank in a cloud of bubbles and stopped motionless in the quiet before swimming for the chrome surface. Nearly out of breath, he burst through, sucking air and wiping the water from his eyes.

  “Yes!” he shouted up at Jacey, whose small, worried face poked over the edge of the cliff. “Yes!” he screamed again, pumping one fist before diving back under the water.

  CHAPTER 23

  By the eighth day on the trail, their odd crew had found a rhythm for their travels. At each portage, Rakmen helped Leah with her pack, which was getting noticeably lighter as they d
evoured their meals, then he hefted the canoe and headed out with Jacey. She liked being first. As the least encumbered of them, she darted this way and that, catching toads and pointing out birds. Thanks to her, the bird list in his notebook was up to thirty-two species, including a bright blue badass called a kingfisher.

  Now that he knew what he was doing, Rakmen set a faster pace than Leah on portages. She plodded along, rarely resting and rarely taking her eyes off the trail. He stuck with Jacey, distracted by her constant commentary, which mostly amused and only sometimes annoyed him.

  The day was beautiful. A breeze at their backs cut the heat and sped them along. The first two portages had been easy.

  “Alright, people,” said Leah, as Rakmen gave a final paddle stroke and maneuvered them into shore, “this is the longest portage of the whole trip.”

  “How long?” Jacey asked, hefting herself and her pack out of the canoe with practiced skill.

  Rakmen rubbed his shoulders. The muscles were tired from the long paddle across Cedar Lake, but it was a well-used, familiar soreness, not salt-in-a-cut excruciating like on the first few days. “Don’t ask,” he told Jacey, adding to Leah, “Don’t tell. That’s classified info on a need-to-know basis. I just carry stuff.”

  Leah grinned at him and gestured Jacey to her side, whispering the distance in her ear. Trail time was working on Leah too. Her tanned face slipped more easily into sweater-soft comfortable, and her silences were easier, as if she carried grief instead of being devoured by it.

  “Thanks,” she said as Rakmen helped her into her pack. “There should be a couple of canoe rests along the way, but they’ll be hard to see while you’re carrying. Hey, Jacey,” she called, adjusting the tumpline over her forehead, “stay with Rakmen and look for canoe rests, okay?”

  Jacey nodded. Rakmen hid his grin. He’d seen the guilty flash on her face as she collected yet another rock. He could hardly believe Leah hadn’t noticed his pants pockets bulging like mutant chipmunk cheeks.

  “Let’s go, girl,” he said, throwing up the canoe in one smooth motion.