Never Far Away

by Michael Koryta

  “Very different situations.”

  “Indeed.”

  Silence. They studied the car.

  “We’ll have to call it in,” the long-haired man said.

  “Here’s a prediction,” his partner answered. “He won’t pay us.”

  “Because she’s in the river, and we weren’t supposed to put her there?”

  “Correct. He wanted to see her. So the bastard won’t pay us.”

  The long-haired man gave a thoughtful nod. “In that case, the only sure money is Nina’s.”

  “Unless we give her up.”

  “Unless.”

  “But even then…”

  “He might not be happy.”

  “Correct.”

  The long-haired man removed his gloves. Studied the car. “It’s an experiment,” he said. “Can we sell it?”

  “Why not try?”

  “Why not?” the long-haired man agreed, and he took out his cell phone and dialed.

  Part Two

  Guardians

  2

  The wasp flew into the back seat of the truck at night, unnoticed.

  Doug Chatfield had lowered the window earlier when he was driving home with his thirteen-year-old daughter, Hailey, in the passenger seat and his eleven-year-old son, Nick, sprawled in the back amid a tangle of baseball bats, gloves, cleats, and stink.

  The kids were arguing when Doug pulled into the winding entrance road of the subdivision. Hailey took issue with what she termed Nick’s “totally rank BO.” Nick responded by peeling off one sweaty sock, lunging forward, and dangling it under his sister’s nose. That led to Hailey grabbing her brother’s hand and bending it backward, mercy-style. That led to a shriek of pain.

  At this point, Doug Chatfield said, “C’mon, gang,” and cracked the back window even though it was just beginning to rain, fat drops sprinkling out of a nickel-colored sky behind clouds that promised more.

  “Release your brother and let his stink blow south,” Doug said in the formal tone of a royal proclamation. The voice amused Hailey. Nick’s hand was freed, the sock fell onto the center console, Hailey swept it away with disgust, and the cracked rear window let the humid summer air pass over the fragrant cargo in the back seat. Not much air, though; Doug had cracked the window only about an inch due to the rain. Cracked it so little, in fact, that he didn’t remember it was open at all by the time he pulled into the garage.

  The wasp was already in the garage. It had flown in when Doug exited the house to go to work at his accounting office that morning, and it was sealed off from its nest under the eaves when he put the door down. When the Chatfield trio climbed out of the truck, the wasp crawled onto a dusty blue plastic tub that held Christmas lights. By the time it finally took flight, the garage door was down once more, and escape wasn’t an option.

  Sometime around midnight, it found the cracked window.

  On Saturday morning there was neither work nor practice nor alarms in the Chatfield house. No demands on the family until two p.m., when Hailey had tennis, and four p.m., when Nick had another baseball game—both activities weather-dependent. The storms that had rocked the Louisville area overnight had saturated the ground but hadn’t broken the humidity, and there was a chance of more rain that afternoon. When Doug woke, the sky was dark, and on the back porch, where he stood with coffee in hand, the air was so thick it seemed to have texture, like passing through a curtain.

  They’ll be inside all day, he thought with confidence. It will be a day of closed windows and air-conditioning and TV and video games and at least one battle between them, maybe two.

  Get things off on the right foot, then. A treat, a surprise. Doug was usually a big proponent of healthy breakfasts, the one meal he felt he had total control over on days that could so quickly devolve into chaos and crammed schedules. He was a big proponent of most things health-related, actually, because at one time he’d been a physician’s assistant. Now he tried to pass himself off as a hypochondriac to explain away the medical knowledge that occasionally leaked out. “Degree from WebMD,” he’d joke, and people would smile and accept it, because everyone knew that Doug Chatfield was an accountant and a widower. Who could blame him for being paranoid about his family’s health? He was all alone in this.

  A balanced breakfast was mandatory on most days, but this was summer vacation, it was Saturday, and his kids were looking at a rainout. There was a Dunkin’ Donuts three minutes up the road. Hailey was a jelly-doughnut fan and Nick was a chocolate-anything kid. Doug could get to the Dunkin’ and back in ten minutes, have the box waiting on the kitchen island whenever the kids woke and wandered downstairs.

  What the hell. They called it vacation for a reason.

  He left a note on the island just in case one of them woke while he was gone, unlikely as that was. One word, with an exclamation mark: Doughnuts!

  He rarely left them alone, but they’d be fine, and it was good practice. This was, as he’d discussed with Hailey repeatedly in recent weeks, the summer he wanted her to take more of the responsibility she was constantly demanding. She was convinced that she was already an adult—Thirteen going on thirty was the tired joke in the bleachers at the tennis matches—and that Doug smothered her, was an overprotective, clueless dad.

  Maybe she was not entirely wrong. Any parent knew the wicked risks this world held for children, but Doug could conjure up more creative risks than most. He had to push back against those fears, those memories. You couldn’t bubble-wrap your kids against the world.

  But you could give them treats.

  Let it rain, and let them sleep late, and let them eat doughnuts.

  He grabbed his keys and went into the garage. Started the truck and put up the door. Backed out, put the door back down, and pulled away. Only then did he hear the high whistle of air through the cracked window behind him and remember the body-odor battle of the previous day.

  He shut the window without a glance in the back seat.

  His house was a mile deep in the winding roads and culs-de-sac of a subdivision composed of brick homes striving for visual separation without much success. The speed limit was fifteen miles per hour inside the subdivision, and Doug adhered to it. You had to, with all the kids in the neighborhood. Kids did crazy things—chased Frisbees into streets, chased dogs into streets; hell, chased cars. They didn’t understand risk. Not yet. So you drove slow, and you paid attention.

  He was at the stop sign near the low stone fence bearing the neighborhood’s name—Flanders’ Woods—when the wasp crawled from the door panel of the back seat to the driver’s-door panel in the front.

  Doug didn’t see it. His eyes were ahead, on the road. There was no stop sign for cross traffic, and people drove too damn fast on this stretch. The hill to the east was particularly problematic in the morning, when the rising sun glared down on the crest and made visibility difficult. He paused for several seconds, making sure that he was clear, and then turned left.

  Now he was on Oak Ridge Road, where the speed limit rose to forty-five, except for the S-curves, where it dropped to thirty. One mile down this road, one more stop sign, and then he’d be on Fourth Street, and the Dunkin’ Donuts would be visible.

  He pressed down on the gas pedal.

  An American wasp is adorned with bright yellow and black bands. The colors are frequently adopted by sports teams and even warships for a reason—it’s an aggressive visual pairing.

  It is supposed to be.

  The colors are intended to sound an alarm and provoke a primal response. Don’t touch me. Don’t even come close to me.

  For those who cannot see the warning, though, or those who see it and choose not to take it seriously, the female wasp is equipped with a second protective measure: a stinger. Unlike a bee’s barbed stinger, the wasp’s is smooth, capable of multiple stings. Only the female wasp has a stinger because she has the burden of protecting the nest, and she remains close to it.

  Unless the world intervenes.

 
; The wasp crawling along the armrest of Doug Chatfield’s Dodge Ram was a female, and she was no longer near her nest. She was trapped, and her threatening colors had been overlooked, ignored. When Doug shifted his left arm, the sleeve on his polo shirt rode up, and he brushed against her.

  She stung him once in the meat of his left triceps.

  Doug shouted. The pain that rocketed through his muscular, nearly two-hundred-pound frame in response to the quarter-inch-long stinger was a blistering shock. He looked to his left, hurt and scared, exactly what the sting was meant to accomplish, and finally saw the wasp. She was still crawling along the door panel, still not taking to the air.

  He shifted his left hand away from the steering wheel and swatted at her. Missed. The wasp flew between his fingers, stung him once more, piercing the webbing just below his ring finger, then clung to his hand.

  He made a high sound of surprise and tried to do two things at once: lower the driver’s window and shake the wasp off before she could sting again. She was capable of hurting him, yet she was still a trivial threat. Things would be fine if he could just fling her out of his world and into another.

  He had both hands off the steering wheel when the horn from the oncoming Chevy Tahoe blared. He looked up and grabbed the wheel, seeing, as the wasp stung him again, that he was well across the center line. He had time to jerk the wheel to the right as the Tahoe swerved away, and for a half a second everything was back in his control—the wasp was gone from his hand and the collision had been avoided.

  Then the truck flipped.

  It rolled twice across the pavement before colliding with a hundred-year-old oak tree that offered enough resistance to pin the wreck above the steep grade below. The airbags deployed, dust hung in the air with the smell of cordite, and bits of broken glass and plastic tinkled down into Doug’s hair and rode rivulets of blood along his neck.

  Before the screaming started up on the road, and long before the sirens, the wasp found the shattered window and flew free. She buzzed there, alone above the carnage, and searched for a nest she could no longer find.

  3

  Western wind, inbound, left to right. Approximately six hundred yards of open water ahead. Slight chop. Taxi check is complete.”

  “Good, good, and good. Next?”

  “CARS. C means ‘carburetor heat,’ which is off. A means ‘area ahead clear,’ which it is. R means ‘water rudders up,’ which they are. S means ‘stick back.’ Which it is.”

  “Try it?”

  “Why not?” Leah Trenton said, sitting in the cockpit of a Cessna seaplane, taxiing across North Woods waters. The prop spun with increased throttle. Dark water trembled ahead. The pines on either side of the window morphed from green to black as the speed rose. The stick felt light in Leah’s palm. “First rise,” she said.

  “Good.”

  Faster, the pontoons still in contact with the water but only at a surface glide now.

  “Second rise.”

  “Good. Tune for the step.”

  “Roger that.”

  Twenty yards, thirty yards, forty, and…water contact gone. Pontoons free. The catch in her throat wasn’t fear; it was utter joy. The earth no longer had a claim on Leah Trenton.

  She was alone with the wind.

  Well, almost alone. Beside her, the seaplane’s owner, Ed Levenseller, beamed.

  “Terrific! That was perfect. You’ve got such a natural feel for it.”

  Leah smiled as the plane climbed above the lake and pines and angled into the late-afternoon sun, Mount Kineo falling below. She appreciated Ed’s compliments, but the smile was one of amusement too, because what Ed was praising as a natural feel was far from natural. Leah had at least fifteen thousand more flight hours than Ed.

  Well, her brain and body did. Officially, those flight hours belonged to a woman with a different name, a woman who’d been dead for just shy of a decade now.

  She took the plane up to a thousand feet and circled Mount Kineo, an angry rock island that rose a sheer eight hundred feet from the surface of Moosehead Lake, jutting skyward as if furious at being surrounded by water. As she banked, she tried to seem just hesitant enough. After all, it was only the fourth time Leah Trenton had taken off at the controls of a plane.

  She glanced to her right and saw Ed smiling back at her, his broad, tanned face framed by the shadowed angle of his headset. He touched her arm gently. “Pretty special, right?”

  “Pretty special,” Leah agreed, and it was. Oh my goodness, how special it was to leave the earth and soar above it. The water takeoff added something. She was in tune with all the elements then, water and land and wind and her own brain and body and spirit joined into one.

  That much she was able to talk about truthfully with Ed. She always felt a pang of guilt pretending to be a novice pilot with this kind, earnest man who’d been first a friend, then a colleague, then a lover. If there was one thing that Ed valued above all else in a relationship, it was openness, and his loving Leah meant he was loving a lie.

  Most of the time, she could avoid discussing her backstory and be present. She talked of this—Be present, be here now—with Ed as if it was a mantra for living, and it was, but it was also a method of being honest. Ask me about today so I can tell you no lies.

  Here, she was happy. Content. Moosehead Lake spread beneath them in all of the awesome majesty that had captured Thoreau a hundred and fifty years earlier. Massive bays and hidden inlets and streams, dozens of islands, walls of granite rising with the randomness of indifferent glaciers. Tamed since Thoreau’s day? Sure. Conquered? Not hardly.

  Moosehead was tourist country, there was no question about that, but it was also hard country. Not as isolated as the Allagash Wilderness stretching to its northern side, which held Leah and Ed’s destination for the day, but certainly not suburban. The cabins and cottages were filled now, the lake speckled with brightly colored boats, the inns and restaurants booked solid. By late fall, though, it would be a silent place once more, and by winter, when the northern wind howled down and ice augers growled through frozen feet to find the water’s surface, it was a world unto itself.

  Leah’s world now. It was hard to believe she’d once been a Florida girl.

  “Busy summer coming,” Ed commented. A gusting wind rocked the plane as if offering a gentle but firm reminder of what forces were in control here. Ed kept a careful eye on Leah.

  “I think the word is chaotic, not busy.”

  The biggest difference between her forty years and his twenty-nine was the degree to which one was willing to be overwhelmed. What she’d embraced when she was Ed’s age she now viewed through the prism of risk assessment. How much money would it cost, how much time would it take, what if it all went wrong? Of the many things she liked about Ed Levenseller, his young gambler’s heart stood out. He wasn’t reckless but he had a far easier time talking himself into a choice than out of one. Among the summer’s choices: renovation of the six cabins they’d purchased in the deep, isolated Maine North Woods. Leah thought they’d make it through renovations on two of them. Ed was pushing for all six but was willing to settle for four.

  Their long-term goal was a chain of cabins accessible only by seaplane, kayak, or canoe. They’d guide for those who wanted guides, and they’d facilitate access for those who wanted to go it alone. Rustic experiences were nearing a renaissance, Ed insisted. In a hyperconnected world, there was an appetite for escape. A week of cold wind and no Wi-Fi held appeal now. Ed and Leah could provide that escape, that unique taste of a part of the world that few people ever saw.

  “No need to rush,” Leah said, and though she was speaking of the cabins, she felt as if the words carried too large a meaning. If she asked Ed for anything, it was patience. While he charged forward, she circled, wondering how much to allow herself in this new life.

  And how much to allow herself to ask of him. She wanted to tell him no lies and yet here she was, accepting his instructions on how to fly a plane she could have f
lown before he had his driver’s license.

  “Let’s keep it contained to thinking about the kitchen of cabin one,” she said. “I’m worried enough about that.”

  “You mean the kitchen of Trout Vista?” he said, and they both laughed. It had been an ongoing joke as they scouted properties and discussed possibilities that so many of the inns and cabins of the North Woods carried some odd animal-themed name. She’d laughed about it one night early in their relationship while they drank beers at a pub called the Stress Free Moose. “Who is coming up with these names?” she had wondered out loud, and ever since then Ed liked to tag their own cabins with absurd names.

  “It’s just doing some beadboard, some flooring, and adding some butcher’s block to the counter,” he said. “Be done by the end of the month. I assure you, the warm hearth of—”

  “Cabin number one.”

  “Caribou’s Courage will be done by the first fireworks on the Fourth of July. Then I’ll march triumphantly on, miter saw in hand, to conquer—”

  “Cabin number two.”

  “Egret’s Estate, yes. Even less work there.”

  “The roof is missing.”

  “The roof is sagging.”

  “Water goes right through it.”

  “That’s the beauty of the sag—it directs the water to the center of the living-room floor,” Ed said, making a funnel shape with his hands to demonstrate. “Without that sag, the place might be a wreck.”

  Leah smiled and shook her head.

  “Four cabins ready by fall,” Ed said confidently. “It’s a lot, but—”

  “It’s less when I’m guiding all of your summer clients.”

  “Come on. You’re guiding summer fishermen. Grandfathers and grandsons who’ll be happy with bluegill.” He gestured at the altimeter. “You’re letting it creep.”

  Actually, she was not “letting it”; she was taking it higher by intent, but her intent ignored his guidance and fell back on the physical experience that he didn’t know she had. Wasn’t that often the case with young men and older women? Ah, the things you could not tell the sweet boys with the fragile egos.