The Way Back from Broken

by Amber J. Keyser

  After the gasp came a pop like the release of a jar lid.

  A tight, artificial sound. The rupture of some sealed chamber, cracked wide open.

  And then Leah fell.

  She thudded down the rocky slope.

  Jacey screamed and was still screaming when Leah’s body slammed into the ground at his feet. She was face up, her shoulders wrenched back by the straps of the pack. Her pupils were black tubes connected straight to her animal brain. The wind knocked out of her came back in a wheeze that racked through her body.

  Rakmen dropped to his knees, loosening the buckles on the straps so Leah was no longer pinioned.

  “It’s bad,” she said, the words cracking against each other. “Broken.”

  “No,” he said, unwilling to agree.

  “Look.”

  Her foot bent inward at an unnatural angle like the head of a dead chicken. Fear screamed through him. Jacey clattered down beside them in an avalanche of pebbles as Rakmen slid his hands under Leah’s back, lifted her off the pack and laid her on the ground. Leah’s face contorted with pain then relaxed as she lost consciousness.

  “Don’t die,” Jacey shrieked, throwing herself toward Leah.

  Rakmen caught Jacey around the waist and pulled her into his arms. She pounded her fists against Rakmen’s chest. “Don’t let her die!”

  The ground listed beneath Rakmen as if the ever-increasing wind had brought swells to the earth. His thoughts trampled each other.

  They needed help.

  There was no one.

  Not 911.

  Not his father.

  Not Edna.

  “Do something!” Jacey screamed. “You can fix her.”

  Four days from anywhere.

  The only someone was him.

  Rakmen shook Jacey, forcing her to sit down next to the canoe. “Shut up! I need to think.” Jacey glued her mouth into a tight little line. Rakmen palmed his hand toward the ground—stay. She dipped her chin and stayed. He crawled to Leah. All he could see was glassy white between her slitted lids. Beneath the skin, her eyeballs twitched. Her breath came in shallow rasps. Rakmen raked his hands through his hair, pulling hard. If only his dad were here, he’d know what to do.

  He had to focus.

  He needed to know how bad the break was. Compound fractures were the worst, his dad always said. Infection was the enemy. He crawled to the lower half of Leah’s body, flexing his fingers. Right in front of him was Leah’s scuffed, dirt-covered boot. The weight of it pulled against the foot inside.

  Sweat dribbled down the side of his face, only to be sucked away by the wind. He shivered. “I’ve got to get the boot off,” he said, trying to sound like his dad, “and quickly, before she wakes up. It’ll hurt less that way.”

  “What if you make it worse?” Jacey asked.

  He wiped his forehead with the back of his forearm. “We’ve got to know how bad it is. Besides, her foot will swell in the boot. Come over here. I need you to hold her steady.”

  Jacey crouched beside him and cradled Leah’s leg in her hands. Shaking, Rakmen picked at the double-knotted laces until they were as loose as possible.

  He paused, unsure of what to do next.

  The boot was still tight around the bones of her ankle. He didn’t know where it was broken or how badly or what damage he could do removing the boot, but Leah moaned, and he knew he couldn’t wait. He wasn’t sure he could do this if she were awake and in pain.

  “Hold her calf as steady as you can,” he said. “I’m going to ease the boot off.”

  Jacey blinked back tears and shifted position. “Now?”

  Rakmen held the heel with one hand and the toe in the other. “Now,” he said and pulled.

  With a wet, gristly sound, the boot came off. Afraid to stop what he had started, Rakmen peeled off Leah’s sock as well. Purple bloomed under the skin, spreading as he watched. The dents left by her sock were already being erased by swelling. Lumps where he didn’t think there should be lumps protruded, but the skin hadn’t split.

  He supported the foot with Jacey’s fleece jacket and sent her to dampen a bandana from the lunch pack. Wiping the cool cloth over Leah’s face, he worked to rouse her, trying all the while not to see, superimposed on Leah’s immobile face, his sister’s and the way her lips had gone blue-black at the end.

  “Come on. Wake up,” he pleaded. When her eyes flickered open, he nearly wept. “You’re alright.”

  She blinked slowly. “I don’t think so, Rakmen.”

  “You’ll be okay,” he stammered. “We’ll get out of here.”

  She shook her head very slowly. “I can’t walk.”

  Buzzing filled Rakmen’s ears and head and limbs. This wasn’t right. Things had finally started coming together. A few good days. That’s what they’d had. Now everything was broken again. His arm lifted of its own volition, the fingers curling into a fist. Sick churning filled him. He wanted to break and pound and destroy. He pulled his fist back, his muscles tensed, fury obscuring his vision.

  He should’ve known better.

  He pounded his fist into the ground beside him.

  Over and over, he hit the ground. Blind to the way Leah feebly struggled to stop him. Deaf to Jacey’s hysterical sobs.

  Raging, guttural sounds burst from his throat.

  What was supposed to happen was this—

  The adult in the room knows what to do. Babies don’t die. Boys don’t bash their fists bloody against the ground.

  Finally, Jacey’s wails pierced the hot, enveloping rage.

  Leah’s eyelids fluttered, and her hand fell away from where it clutched the side of his shirt. Panic filled his lungs until it felt like the dream, like drowning.

  Out on the lake, a loon wailed. A warning.

  A command.

  Rakmen pressed his palms flat against the dirt.

  He ignored the churning in his stomach and breathed deeply, catching the scent of pine and wet earth. Rain was coming, they were four days from anywhere, and he was the only one capable of doing anything.

  CHAPTER 27

  Rakmen helped Jacey to her feet. She was trembling. Rakmen’s insides were jelly, but he smudged her tears away with his thumb. “It’s gonna rain.”

  She nodded.

  “We can’t camp here. It’s too rocky.”

  Jacey nodded again.

  “I need you to hold the canoe while I load it and help your mom in, okay?”

  Her eyes filled with tears again, but she bit her lip and dipped her chin one more time.

  “That’s my girl.”

  Rakmen slid the canoe into the water, and Jacey crouched beside the bow. He returned to Leah and felt her pulse like he’d seen his dad do when someone got injured. It tapped a steady rhythm against his fingertips. That was good. It reassured him.

  He nudged her shoulder gently, and Leah’s eyes opened. “Are you in a lot of pain?” he asked. Her eyes darted to where Jacey waited by the canoe. She nodded almost invisibly then said aloud, “I’m okay.”

  He nodded back. Message received loud and clear. His own pulse dropped to a low, steady thrum. There was no room for emotion. Only to do what needed to be done. “We’re going back to the campsite until you feel better. I’m going to load the packs and then help you into the canoe.”

  As he picked his way up the rockfall to retrieve the packs, Rakmen ran through everything he could remember from the first-aid and CPR classes his dad had insisted that he take. Leah could be wrong about her ankle. If they rested a few days and then taped it up, she might be able to walk. He could make her a crutch and double back to carry her load as well as his own.

  All those options evaporated as he finished loading the canoe and turned back to Leah. Her foot hung completely the wrong way, and the swelling had pushed the skin of her ankle outward until it looked like it might burst. It was an angry, reddish-purple, like an overripe plum. His stomach turned over as he sat beside Leah and pulled off his own boots.

  “I’
m going to help you into the canoe,” he said. “I’ll lift you and then wade in alongside it and set you in the middle.”

  He prayed he could do it without flipping them.

  Leah exhaled in a long, controlled breath. “I’m ready,” she said, looping her arms around his neck. She trembled like a child, and the slick smell of fear rose from her. Rakmen slid one arm around her back and the other under her knees, ignoring the discomfort of being so close.

  He stood as gently as he could. Even so, her head wobbled against his shoulder, and he thought she might pass out again. Each step toward the water squeezed a gasp out of her, and she clutched his neck more tightly. He felt his way with bare toes along the slick rocks at the lake’s edge until he stood beside the canoe. Water lapped at his thighs, cold and insistent.

  “Brace as hard as you can,” he told Jacey as he eased Leah onto the pack in the center of the canoe. The canoe tilted toward him, the gunnel dangerously close to the water, but he pressed one thigh against the underside of the canoe and steadied it. Leah kept a white-knuckle grip on the gunnels, panting hard. Rakmen scanned her face. If she passed out in the canoe, they would go over in a flash. Scenes of what could happen then in deep water, with her unconscious, flickered through Rakmen.

  Not that.

  Not in the water.

  “Can you stay awake?”

  She gritted her teeth and nodded.

  As quickly as he could, Rakmen helped Jacey into the bow and regained his place at the stern seat. The smell of wet was stronger now. It was already drizzling at the trapper’s meadow, and Rakmen could see a hazy, gray line of rain pushing toward them. “Okay, Power. Back to camp. Full speed. We gotta get that tarp up.”

  Jacey hunched into the wind and dug in with her paddle. Rakmen set a course back to the campsite they’d left an hour ago. He’d thought they would be well away from Allard Lake by now. Away from the ghosts that haunted it. Turns out the past was way too hard to shake.

  Gravel crunched under the bow of the canoe when they landed. The impact sent a tremor through Leah, but she didn’t cry out. She waited, breathing hard, while he and Jacey got out. Once more, she wrapped her arms around Rakmen’s neck and let him carry her up to the fire pit, where he set her down in front of the cold ashes.

  Rakmen waited for her to tell him what to do, but she only stared at the fire pit, hands limp in her lap. Jacey stood on the flattened grass where her tent had been the night before, shifting her weight from one foot to the other and chewing on her hair.

  He pulled his match case out of his pocket and tossed it to Jacey. “Start a fire.”

  She scraped a match on a rock and teased the flame into a pile of birch bark, dry pine needles, and twigs. A red glow illuminated her face. He carried the packs to the fire pit, pulled the canoe out of the water, and began setting up camp. Each task familiar after so many days on the trail, a reassurance that he would know what to do next.

  He pitched the tarp first, draping it over a centerline strung between two trees and then pulling the corners taut. The tarp’s leading edge was outside the fire pit. The bulk of it covered the log where Leah was sitting and then angled down to break the wind coming off the lake. As he tied the last knot, the rain reached them, pattering on the tarp.

  The fire was roaring now, fueled by the huge pile of wood he’d cut the previous day. Leah and Jacey sat beneath the tarp, their bodies inclined toward one another, Jacey’s head on her mother’s shoulder.

  Rakmen pulled one of their sleeping pads out of the pack and made a place for Leah to lie down. He slid Jacey’s small pack under Leah’s leg to elevate her ankle. He put a pot of water on the fire to boil. “Find the cocoa,” he told Jacey. “It’s in my pack.”

  One by one, Jacey unloaded the various containers of food, lining them up on the log. Rakmen unpacked their cook kit and spooned cocoa into cups. When the water was hot, he used a bandana to protect his hand and filled each one to the rim.

  Raindrops tapped out a steady rhythm on the tarp and sizzled when they hit the flames. The lake’s surface was dimpled gray. The trapper’s meadow was a hazy line of green in the distance.

  “What are we going to do?” he asked.

  It took Leah forever to meet his eyes. When she did, it was like the first night at Promise House when he saw her through the ancient, wavy glass in the door. She was vague around the edges, lost all over again. “I don’t know.”

  “We wait,” he suggested. “Someone might find us.”

  Leah stared at him like he’d flunked one of her biology tests. “We haven’t seen anyone on the trail for days.”

  “We’ll rest your ankle until the swelling goes down. If I take your pack, we can make it out.”

  All of them looked at the ankle. Leah’s toes were tiny protrusions on the bloated lump. It hardly resembled a foot at all. Rakmen tore his eyes from the injury.

  He took stock as if seeing for the first time what was right in front of him. Their pile of gear was small enough to fit in the trunk of a car. The canoe, thin-skinned and delicate, could be destroyed with one hard kick. He and Jacey and Leah were fragile bodies, dragonflies buzzing the surface of the world.

  Risk was everywhere.

  The truth of it slapped him across the face.

  Cell phones and ambulances and good intentions—even love—hadn’t been enough to save Dora or Jordan or any of the kids in the Promise House memory book. Locking Molly in her house all summer wouldn’t keep her safe. All the headlines he’d jotted down, which were supposed to remind him to expect one suck-ass thing after another, did not prepare him for anything. He couldn’t hunker down and avoid more tragedy.

  It would come.

  Or it wouldn’t.

  Every second of every day, he was au large, hurtling into the unknown.

  “I’m going for help.”

  Leah met his eyes, calculating his chances. “I can’t let you do that.”

  “It’s the only way.”

  Au large was carrying him forward like a tidal wave, and he knew he would try to ride it as surely as he knew it would knock him flat.

  Finally, Leah spoke. “You’re right. It is the only way.”

  Rakmen began dividing their equipment. Talking about it any more would immobilize him. He clung to the reassurance of their gear, each piece designed to keep them alive. He’d need the tent, slick under his fingertips, and a sleeping bag and pad because they were four days from anywhere. Ninety-six hours. Three nights alone. He couldn’t think about that. He took the small aluminum pot. One plate. One spoon. His knife. He found his clothes bag and pulled out dry pants and boxers.

  “You’ll need this,” said Jacey, handing him the folding saw. She gazed up at him, chewing on a piece of hair.

  He took the saw and flicked the lock of hair with his finger. “Don’t let Edna see you like that.”

  Jacey spit it out. “I don’t want you to go.”

  Rakmen knew that look. She was about to cry. “I know.”

  “We’re supposed to stick together like a team.”

  His throat tightened. If he cried, she would, and they’d be stuck. Really stuck. He had to turn the canoe. “We’re still a team. You’re still the power. Always telling me what to do.”

  Her chest heaved. The sobs were coming.

  Leah shifted up on one elbow. “Hey Jacey, it would be good if we had more birch bark for the fire. Can you go find some?”

  Jacey fumbled with her jacket pockets, staring at him with wet eyes.

  “Go on,” he urged. “Help your mom out. Team job. You’re it.” He pulled up her hood against the rain and sent her off.

  Once she was out of earshot, Leah called to him, low-toned and urgent. “You need to take her with you.”

  His hands froze on the edge of the pack. If Jacey came, he wouldn’t be alone. But that was just another failure. He was thinking of himself. Again. Rakmen bit the inside of his cheek. If Jacey were with him, Leah would be the one alone. And besides, a person like him co
uldn’t be trusted to keep Jacey safe. Not for four days in the wilderness.

  He sat beside Leah, head in hands. “You’ll need her to keep the fire going, to cook for you.”

  “You’ll go faster with a bow paddler.”

  “Not on the portages.”

  Leah grabbed his arm and squeezed with inhuman intensity. “Listen to me. You can and you will. What if I get worse? Go into shock? Get an infection?”

  “I can’t.” Rakmen was the trapped beaver, unable to swim with a half-severed paw. No one was safe with him. He tried to tug out of her grasp.

  Leah held on more tightly. “What if I die and she’s here alone with a . . . Oh, God,” she moaned. “Take her.”

  Rakmen stopped trying to pull away.

  In death, Dora’s tiny body had been heavy in his arms. The person he loved most in the world was gone. It broke his heart open to remember. He never wanted Jacey to look into empty eyes, to touch slack cheeks, to feel warmth dissipate. He swallowed back tears again. He couldn’t take her, but he couldn’t leave her either.

  “Please,” Leah pleaded.

  He dropped his chin to his chest and felt the damp drizzle slip down the back of his neck. He nodded and kept nodding, convincing himself that this was right.

  “Thank you.” Leah squeezed his arm. “Thank you.”

  This might be the most wrong thing he’d done yet. But—

  He looked once more at Leah’s mangled ankle. It was the only way.

  Rakmen added Jacey’s sleeping bag and pad. Another plate. Another spoon. Leah was going through Jacey’s clothes when she returned, raincoat dripping and hands full of white, papery birch bark.

  “What are you doing?” she asked.

  “I’m pulling out some clothes for you,” said Leah.