The Way Back from Broken

by Amber J. Keyser

  He folded the map and placed it back in the waterproof bag.

  Leah pointed out a bird called a white-breasted nuthatch.

  “Write it down,” said Jacey, nudging him.

  “Yes, ma’am. That puts us at thirty-three species.”

  “Thirty-four,” said Leah, pointing at a bird skimming over the treetops. “Merlin.”

  “Like the wizard?” Jacey asked.

  “It’s a falcon.”

  Leah gave a mini-lecture on its birdy attributes.

  Rakmen added merlin to his notebook, scribbling underneath super fast, predator, eats songbirds. The sparrow he’d seen on the trail would be toast if that guy got his claws into it.

  They saw the merlin again as they paddled across Allard Lake, soaring and swooping like a fighter jet. Death from above—if you were a bird.

  They set up camp quickly, following the routine that had developed over the intervening days. Rakmen unloaded the packs while Leah collected wood. Jacey found the food pouches for the evening meal, and then he helped her set up the tents. It was clockwork now.

  In forty-five minutes, they were hiking to the old homestead. Without the canoe weighing him down, Rakmen was light on his feet. It made him want to try out for track next season.

  Jacey led the way along the shoreline, collecting fluffy, white seed pods from the tall grass.

  “Whatchya want those for?” he asked.

  “Duh! Pillows.”

  He smiled at her. For the past few days, she’d been making fairy houses out of bark and moss. Of course they needed pillows. He plucked another handful for her as he walked.

  A little farther on, Jacey stopped again. “What are those?” she asked.

  Under the water were two obviously man-made structures, mostly crumbled and rotting away, but their form still discernible.

  Intact, each one would have been about five feet across in both directions, an open box made of squared-off timbers and filled with bowling-ball sized rocks. One was about four feet from shore. The other farther out.

  “Those are the old cribs,” said Leah.

  Jacey squinted at her. “Like baby cribs?”

  The word baby sent alarm bells ringing in Rakmen’s head. His every instinct was to divert attention from that unstable ground. “It’s like MTV Cribs,” he said. “You know, houses.”

  “Houses for what?”

  “They weren’t houses,” said Leah as if she hadn’t noticed the word baby at all. “The old timers used cribs to hold up the decking of their docks.”

  She headed away from the water, and they wandered after her. Jacey found the crumbled remains of a stone chimney and what was left of an ancient wood stove with grass and wildflowers growing up through its many cracks. Other than that and a rectangular depression in the ground marking the floor plan of the one-room cabin, nothing was left.

  “I wonder what it was like to live here,” he said.

  “Pretty lonely, I expect,” said Leah, “so far from anyone else.”

  “I’m not lonely out here with you guys,” Jacey piped in.

  “Maybe not now,” Leah replied, “but you’d get sick of us eventually.”

  Rakmen paced out the impression of the four walls. It was a tiny space to spend the winter. He tried to imagine being cooped up with the wind whistling through cracks in the logs and snow, snow, snow in every direction.

  He retraced his steps from the old homestead to the ruins of the dock. Someone else had walked exactly where he placed his feet. Other eyes had stared out at this same lake, day in and day out, for years, maybe decades. Out there, in the rest of the world, in his old life, everything was different—cell phones and tablet computers, self-parking cars and internet glasses—but here...

  Rakmen turned quickly, half-expecting to see smoke curling above the sod roof of the little square building, and the trapper saying good-bye to his family as he went to check his traplines. What he actually saw was Jacey on a little hillock at the far side of the meadow, waving wildly.

  “Come here,” she hollered. “You’ve got to see this!”

  Leah shrugged at him. “More fairies?”

  His laughter came easily, rolling up from the bottom of his stomach. He strode toward Jacey, shaking his head. The girl was a goofball. Rakmen’s good humor lasted until he reached Jacey, where it trickled out like a last breath.

  She was standing beside a short iron fence that enclosed four graves all in a row. The stone markers were soft-edged from years of weather, and orange lichen clung to the surface, but the rough-etched names remained.

  Joseph Allard, mon ainé

  Marie Allard, ma troisième-née

  Jean Baptiste Allard, mon sixième-né

  Thérèse Allard, née Vallée, ma jolie femme,

  et notre dernière née, Adèle

  “What does it say?” Jacey asked, clasping and unclasping her hands.

  Leah swayed on her feet, the blood draining from her face. “The first three were children. The first born, the third, and the sixth. The mother was buried with a baby.” She stepped backward unsteadily and slumped to the ground. Jacey burrowed under her mom’s arm until she was practically in Leah’s lap.

  Rakmen could not tear his eyes from the graves. The air in his lungs seemed more like oil than oxygen. He tried to catch his breath, fighting the suffocating heat and the rising buzz of insects around them.

  “Why did so many of them die?” Jacey whispered.

  Leah pulled Jacey closer. “Oh honey, in the old days, kids died all the time.” Her voice fluttered like a tattered sheet. “No medicine. No hospitals. People got sick and . . . It happened all the time . . .”

  Rakmen imagined the trapper shoveling earth onto his wife’s vacant face. The remaining children—the second, the fourth, and the fifth—would be afraid of the way tears streamed into their father’s beard. Dazed by loss, they’d stumble into one another in the small cabin, wrapping bundles of food and rolling blankets, preparing to abandon this cursed place.

  Their ghosts thundered over him.

  “We need to go,” he said, urging Leah and Jacey to their feet. They were four days from anywhere and way too close to the dead.

  CHAPTER 25

  Rakmen dropped another armload of wood by the fire pit.

  “You can stop,” Leah said, feeding another stick to the flames.

  The light was fading. Soon it would be too dark to see the downed maple he was systematically dismembering into firewood. The trapper’s family had stayed with Rakmen all afternoon, their ghosts grasping at his heels. He couldn’t beat them away, but he could keep moving.

  His right arm was sore from sawing. His head pounded, and the world was distant. Once, the maniac cry of a woodpecker penetrated the shroud, but Rakmen bore down harder on the dry wood, sending shavings into the air and imagining the trapper skinning beaver in bloody strips. The man was gone. Rakmen did not know him. Yet what the man felt as he had buried his family, Rakmen felt now. He did not like the way it pierced him.

  Jacey had fallen asleep early, leaving him beside the fire with Leah. She’d been steadily feeding it wood but hadn’t made a dent in his supply. Rakmen had cut enough for an army to overwinter, and it still wasn’t enough.

  Up until they’d found the graves, Rakmen had been in the rhythm of au large. It was immediate, without memory most of the time. At the homestead, he’d stumbled into someone else’s life, and Dora had come back on the ragged coattails of the trapper’s children.

  No matter how much wood he cut, he could not dislodge the memories. They were tearing him limb from limb. The sky darkened, becoming an upside-down bowl of stars cupped over the pulsating bed of coals. When it was too dark to cut any more wood, he sat across the fire from Leah, too keyed up to sleep. Rakmen watched her through the distorted column of heated air that rose from the bed of coals.

  “Do you think they left?” he asked.

  She stirred the embers of the fire with a charred stick. “Who?”

&n
bsp; “The trapper and the kids who lived. Do you think they left this place? Is that why the trap got left behind?”

  Leah toe-nudged the rusty beaver trap at her feet, considering. “The trap could have been dragged somewhere he couldn’t find it.”

  “By a trapped beaver?”

  She shrugged and poked at the coals again.

  He didn’t want to think about an animal caught in those metal teeth, thrashing into deeper water, trailing blood. He did not want to think about that at all.

  “But you’re asking if I think he left after his wife died,” she said. “I doubt it. Those French Canadians were made of tougher stuff than I.”

  In the dim orange light, her lips quirked up in a small, sad smile. He studied her, seeing all the pieces of her, all at once. She was his teacher and his mother’s friend. Jacey’s mom and the dead baby’s too. She was a woman who broke plates and cried at Promise House. She had dragged them out here kicking and screaming. Yet on the trail, she seemed to be finding a way to put herself back together.

  “I think you’re tough,” he said.

  Her eyes flicked up from the coals. “You do?”

  “Yeah, but there’s one thing I don’t get.”

  Leah threw another log on the fire. “What’s that?”

  “Molly’s mom won’t let her do anything. No sleepovers with friends. No driving. No dates.”

  “Kate is scared she’ll lose her too,” said Leah.

  “I know,” said Rakmen, “but are you not? I mean, you brought us out here where anything could happen.” She stiffened. “I’m not criticizing,” he explained. “I was wondering. Aren’t you afraid?”

  On the water, a loon howled. The sound had grown so familiar that it no longer sent adrenaline coursing through Rakmen. Instead he listened for a reply, and soon enough it came, muted and distant, from some neighboring lake.

  Leah zipped her fleece jacket against the growing chill of the night. “I came because this place—these trees, the lakes, the trails—they don’t care if I’m happy or miserable. They take me the way I am.”

  Rakmen rubbed the calluses on his left palm with his thumb, nodding. He got that. He was a tiny dot on the map of the world. Under this sky and in these woods, it didn’t matter that he had failed as a brother. Somehow that made Dora easier to face.

  “Mrs. Tatlas,” he asked, suddenly unable to use her first name. “What happened to your baby?”

  She dropped the stick on the coals where it caught and flamed, deepening the shadows of her face.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “I shouldn’t have asked.”

  “No, it’s okay,” she said, taking a deep breath. “When your baby dies like he did, most people pretend he never existed. That’s worse than asking.” She picked up another stick from Rakmen’s wood pile and stirred the coals. A puff of sparks floated into the night, winking out above their heads. “He was stillborn.”

  “Jacey told me that,” said Rakmen. “I was wondering why.”

  Leah rocked back and forth on the log bench. “I remember thinking when I was pregnant that I wouldn’t have to start worrying about him until he was born. I didn’t know he could die like that. So fast.”

  Rakmen could feel the gentle weight of Dora in his arms, hear her snuffling, smell her milk-scented breath. He’d wanted to get her to sleep quickly so he could go out with Juan. She was holding him up, alternately crying and panting. He’d hummed distractedly, not really noticing the way her breathing changed, becoming wheezy and shallow.

  “Jordan was past his due date. The doctor kept wanting to induce labor. I kept saying no, everything’s fine.”

  Dora’s breath came in frantic gulps. Her eyes wheeled, terrified by the way her inner machinery was breaking down, but she was a baby and didn’t know what was happening. And he was slow, too stupid slow, to realize what was happening.

  “But the placenta started to tear off.”

  As a gray tinge snuck into Dora’s cheeks, Rakmen had screamed for help. He’d pressed two fingers to her sternum—again, again, again. He’d covered her tiny nose and soft lips with his own mouth, desperate to send his own life into her lungs—again, again, again.

  “By the time we were at the hospital, it was too late.”

  Dad wrenched Dora from his arms, but by then, her eyes had dimmed and gone.

  Across the dying fire, Leah’s shoulders trembled, and the wet tracks on her cheeks gleamed. Rakmen’s heart was flailing against the bone cage of his chest, thrashing its way to deeper water.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m so sorry.”

  She poured water over the coals. A hissing, choking cloud of steam rose in a gray column. “Let’s get some sleep. I want to move early tomorrow.”

  CHAPTER 26

  “You can’t take it.”

  “Mom!” The drawn-out whine of Jacey’s protest woke Rakmen from a nightmare. In the dream, they were back on Pen Lake where they’d seen the moose. He’d jumped off the high rocks like he had in real life, but he’d gone too deep to make it to the surface again. He thrashed out of his sleeping bag, panting.

  “I’ll carry it.”

  “It weighs too much.”

  “But—”

  “The trap stays.”

  Rakmen waited until the argument was over and the frantic pounding in his chest had calmed before pulling on his pants and climbing out of his tent. Jacey sulked over oatmeal while Leah finished rolling their sleeping pads.

  He glanced at his watch. It wasn’t even seven o’clock.

  Bleary-eyed, Rakmen headed to the lake to dip his head. Fog hung over the water, concealing the homestead across the bay, but the graves were there, the bones churned each year through freeze and thaw.

  Dora was buried in a cemetery high on the hills over Portland. For the funeral, their procession of cars had followed the hearse up a steep, twisting road. Queasy waves of nausea had swept over him, intensified by the cloying perfume his mother had worn. He’d gulped back bile, each swallow a struggle against the knotted tie and stiff collar.

  Rakmen dried his face on the bottom of his T-shirt. The cold, wet fabric against his stomach sent a shiver through him. He returned to the fire, where Jacey stared mournfully at the beaver trap.

  She flashed puppy eyes at him. “Can you take it?”

  “Sorry, girl. My pockets are full.”

  She returned to full sulk, gnawing on a piece of hair. Her brother’s bones were ash in a box in his crib. Rakmen squatted beside her. “You can take some pictures, you know.”

  “It’s not the same.”

  “I know, but it’s still cool. Nobody back home knows what a beaver trap looks like. Set it up on that rock for a fashion shoot.” That won a smile, and Jacey scurried to the task while he and Leah broke camp. For once, he was as eager to move on as she was.

  Thirty minutes later they were skimming through the rising mist toward the first portage of the day. It was a long one—five hundred and thirty meters—and the landing spot was a jumble of rocks. He’d have to be careful not to ding up his canoe.

  Uncle Leroy’s canoe.

  But Rakmen couldn’t help feeling possessive. He was the one who had carried it for the past nine days. He had propelled it mile after painful mile with his aching limbs. The blond wood reminded him of Molly and the way sailors always call their ships she.

  “You can stop paddling,” he told Leah and Jacey. “I’ll ease us in.”

  They rested their paddles across their knees while he slowed the canoe and deftly brought the bow into a narrow slot between two rocks. Once their gear was piled on the rocky shore, Leah helped him lift the canoe out of the water and rest it on a semi-flat spot, then the three of them stood together looking up the path. If you could call it a path. From the shoreline, the bank was more rock than soil and sloped up steeply. He’d have to pick his way like a mountain goat for at least fifty feet.

  “Are you going to be able to manage it?” Leah asked. “The balance will be tricky.”

/>   She was right. On flat ground, the canoe balanced perfectly on his shoulders, but here he’d have to tilt it to match the angle of the slope. The weight would try to pull him backward.

  “I think I’ll take my pack up the steep part first. Or I can take yours and you can take the smaller one up.”

  “I’ve got it,” she said.

  He nodded, shouldered his pack and took Jacey’s pack in his other hand. “Let’s go, girl. You first.” Jacey began to scramble up the rocks, pointing out good handholds along the way. He kept close behind her in case she slipped. At the top, they high-fived. “Wait here until I come back with the canoe.”

  “I wanna go,” she said, scuffing her boots in the dirt.

  He frowned at her, the uneasiness he’d felt earlier returning. “Take some pictures. I think we should stick together on this one.”

  On the way back down, he skidded on some loose pebbles and slid a few feet before catching himself. He frowned as he dabbed at the scrape on his palm.

  “Do you need a Band-Aid?” Leah asked when she saw fresh blood on his shirt.

  “Nah. Let’s get out of here.” This lake was bad news all around.

  He hefted Leah’s pack so she could slide into the straps. As she adjusted the tumpline on her forehead, Rakmen knelt and re-tied his boots, knotting them extra tight. Once the canoe was up, he couldn’t afford to catch a lace.

  Rakmen scanned the lake one last time. The fog had lifted, and the meadow where the trapper’s family had lived was a pale green smudge along the far shore. It was sunny, but a wind was rising, bringing with it a warning of trouble like a far-off siren. He turned back to the steep slope. For once, Jacey had listened. She waited at the top, taking pictures of tree bark or something. Leah was halfway up, bent almost double under the weight of her back and picking her way through the rocks. Twenty more feet and she’d be out of the tough part.

  Thin clouds streaked by. The upper air was moving fast. Rakmen bent toward the canoe, gripping the thwart inside the gunnels. A gust of wind flattened his T-shirt against his body and filled his mouth with a metallic tang. Waves splattered against the rocks around him. He was tensing for the swift movement needed to bring the craft overhead when he heard a quick, throaty gasp. The surprised intake of breath was barely audible over the wind and waves but somehow more piercing than any alarm.