Never Far Away

by Michael Koryta

  It was overlaid across the grinning figure, and it was hard to see against the black paint, but it was definitely there, a subtle teasing of dark on dark. How had she done that? The shadow looked almost like a man. In fact, there were two shadows. One shorter, one taller. Almost as if one shadow was Matt, and one shadow was…

  The man standing behind him said, “Do not make a sound.”

  Matt disobeyed, but it was unintentional; he dropped the phone. It fell to the bare concrete floor and cracked and sent diffuse rays of light across the pink insulation that hung from the ceiling. Before he could release the scream that was rising, a strong hand in a glove was clapped over his mouth and an arm encircled his chest and hugged him tight.

  From the darkness to his right, another voice spoke.

  “If he’s home alone, she and the sister can’t be far behind.” A second man, stepping out of the furnace room, speaking in a low voice.

  The hand across Matt’s mouth mashed his lips into his teeth. He could taste blood. On the chalkboard wall in front of him, the twin shadows had merged into one, Matt’s smaller form absorbed by the larger one, as if it had never existed.

  “No car pulled in,” the man holding him said. “Mom’s not letting him walk home alone in the dark while she drives the sister.”

  His voice gave Matt no sense of his identity. It simply rose from within the shadow, and the menacing chalk figure with the tipped hat and the wicked grin felt like an accomplice to it all, watching and smiling.

  Matt knew better than to fight against that strong arm squeezing his ribs and that hand crushing his lips into his teeth. Fighting would bring only pain. Maybe something worse than pain. Pay attention, then. Track the words. Remember the words because they would matter, they were hope, they were the only hope. Mom missing. Sister missing. No car. Those were the words, and none of them made sense, because Matt’s mom was next door, she was in the living room, and he had no sister, and why would his mom have driven him down here to…

  Realization rose behind the fear and the pain then: these two men waiting in the darkened basement thought he was Nick Chatfield.

  No, no, no, Matt thought. I’m not the one you want.

  But his bleeding lips couldn’t part to say a word.

  “Let me see him,” the second man said, and Matt was twisted to face him. The light from his cracked cell phone on the floor offered just enough illumination to show him that the man was white with a square jaw covered in stubble. He wore jeans and a black sweatshirt and a black knit cap. When he leaned closer, Matt saw that his eyes were different colors, one green and one brown. He studied Matt for a long moment and then said, “Oh, fuck.”

  “What?” the one holding Matt said, his voice low.

  “That’s not the right kid.”

  Matt tried to nod his head. It was hard, with the way he was being held, but the man with the different-colored eyes seemed to understand that he was trying to agree. He said, “Let him talk. He won’t scream. Will you?”

  Matt tried to shake his head. After a pause, as if he were reluctant to do it, the man who’d grabbed him removed his hand from Matt’s mouth. A line of Matt’s blood was on his glove.

  “Who are you?” the man with the odd eyes said.

  “I live next door.” The words left in a gasp. “I’m not one of the ones…I don’t live here.”

  The man studied him. “Not the ones?”

  “I don’t live here,” Matt repeated, and as his voice rose, the man holding him gave a twist of the arm that worked as an unspoken command. When Matt spoke again, it was in a quavering whisper. “I live next door. My parents are waiting for me. Please, just let me go home. I don’t—”

  “What are you doing here?”

  “Just…turning on lights.”

  “Turning on lights. No. You’re carrying this around, not turning on lights.” The man picked up the Arlo base unit and looked it over. “You putting cameras in their house? What’re you, some kinda pervert, looking to get your rocks off? Is that it?”

  “No.”

  “Then what?”

  Matt didn’t answer.

  The deep-voiced man behind Matt said, “We gotta make a choice here.”

  Make a choice. Matt didn’t like the sound of that. He was already sure that them letting him walk back home wasn’t one of the choices.

  “We will,” the man with the different-colored eyes said. “Once he tells me what he’s doing.”

  “Don’t matter what he’s doing, he’s the wrong damn kid.”

  Instinct took over then, a voice in Matt’s head screaming at him to make this choice harder on them.

  “They’re somewhere up north of Moosehead Lake,” he blurted out. “They left on a seaplane tonight.”

  Silence. The man with the mismatched eyes smiled at him. It was almost a kind smile. Almost.

  “North of Moosehead Lake,” he said. “And a seaplane. That’s no guess, kid.”

  Then the man holding him said, “You seem to know a little bit about our friends. How much you know?”

  Matt wasn’t sure how to answer that. His legs had started to shake. Only his legs, because his torso was being held too tightly. The legs shook and he felt tears in his eyes and the man said, “How much you know?” again.

  “That they’re scared,” Matt whispered. “I know that they’re scared.”

  31

  The only cabin that was remotely ready to host the guests that Leah and Ed had envisioned was cabin number one—or Caribou’s Courage, as he’d jokingly named it—but they passed over that and flew farther north as the sun sank to their left side.

  Ed was silent, focused on flying and, Leah knew, taking stock of what she’d told him on the phone that afternoon. It hadn’t been much. She’d told him only that she needed the pickup and that Nick and Hailey were in danger. The rest, she’d promised, she would tell him in person.

  He hadn’t hesitated. It was trust she didn’t deserve.

  In the seats behind them, Nick and Hailey were silent. Initially, Nick had kept up a stream of questions about the plane. As the towns and houses fell away and the endless forests replaced them, the trees looking black in the gathering darkness, even Nick had run out of talk. Tension thrummed through the plane like another engine.

  They were running out of daylight fast, and Leah knew that was weighing on Ed. It was legal to land a seaplane in the Maine North Woods in the dark but it was also foolish, the sort of thing you did only in emergency situations. His spotlights would illuminate water seconds before touching down on it, and something as simple as a floating limb could mean disaster.

  The sun was nothing but a thin red line lacing the western mountains. Everything to the east was already dark. The safest landing—and the most habitable cabin—was behind them. She’d told him she wanted to push as far north as possible. Push to someplace where not even a Jeep or a lifted pickup would make it through.

  When they’d passed over Moosehead, all she could think of was the wreckage of that B-52 on Elephant Mountain, and then she’d made the mistake of looking back at her children and giving them a reassuring smile and from that moment on she’d had to dig her fingernails into her thighs to keep her hands still. She wanted the stick, wanted control. Ed was an excellent pilot, but she was better.

  No. Nina was better. And Nina never had to land on the water in the dark up here.

  Still, she wanted control.

  The Allagash spread beneath them in all its glory. Even from overhead, it could look impenetrable, a half a million acres of forested wilderness fed from the veins of rivers, dozens of lakes, hundreds of ponds and brooks and creeks. It would be more active now than at other times of the year; it was moose season, after all. If you stayed off the logging roads, as Leah intended, it was unlikely that you’d even encounter a hunter. They were headed to Martin Mountain Pond, a small body of water that fed into a narrow, unnamed brook before it found a swirl of rapids that deposited the brook into Lower Martin Pond, and fro
m there it was a simple paddle to the Allagash River itself. Then the river ran north, into the St. John and on out to the sea. It was beautiful, it was cold, and it was isolated.

  It was, she believed, a place where she could buy some precious time.

  “We’re going to put her down now, guys,” Ed said. His voice was absolutely level, no trace of nerves, but she could see a muscle twitching in the corner of his jaw. He was grinding his teeth. “It’ll be nice and smooth. So smooth that I’ll have to tell you when we actually hit the water, because I don’t want you to miss the landing. But check those seat belts anyhow. We do things right in my plane, even when it’s going to be smooth.”

  Leah turned back to look at them. Nick tapped his seat belt and nodded at her. Hailey didn’t touch her seat belt and did not nod. She just stared at Leah as if something she’d long suspected was being proven.

  “It’ll be fine,” Leah told them.

  Neither responded. The plane angled down and there was a moment when that faint line of fading sunlight seemed to brighten. Then it was gone and they were descending into pure dark. The pond looked like ink spilled on asphalt. The spotlights caught the water but offered nothing more than a liquid shimmer, and each of the dancing shadows seemed a threat. A branch, a beaver dam, an overturned canoe—she could see them all, was so briefly certain of these imagined shapes that she nearly cried out to Ed, Pull up, pull up, please take us back up before it’s too—

  A thump and a shudder. Nick gasped. Then he said, “We’re down?” in an uncertain voice.

  “We’re down,” Ed said, his own voice soft and tight. He didn’t take his eyes off the water ahead as he cut the speed and taxied.

  They’d just landed more than two hundred miles northwest of Camden, flying toward the setting sun and away from any sign that Maine had ever been touched by human hands. There were exactly three ways to reach Martin Mountain Pond: by seaplane, by canoe along a route that required challenging portages, or on foot across the desolate miles.

  Leah let out a long breath and whispered, “Thank you.”

  Ed glanced at her for the first time. He nodded without speaking, his blue eyes studying her in the dim cockpit, unspoken questions dancing in them. Then he looked away.

  “I don’t see any cabins,” Hailey said, the only words she’d offered since they boarded the plane. “You said we were checking on a cabin.”

  “It’s right up ahead,” Leah said.

  And there it was: a low rectangle of ancient logs with a dark green metal roof. The roof was new. It was the only thing they’d done to this cabin so far. For decades it had belonged to a family from Presque Isle, a paddle-in retreat for two generations that had eventually reached a third generation whose members had no interest in paddling anywhere so remote. They’d sold it for ten thousand dollars cash and had seemed pleased to do that well. Leah and Ed had laughed ruefully about that afterward. Even their aggressively low bid had apparently exceeded expectations.

  It’s beautiful, the grandson of the original builder had told them. But it’s damn hard to get to, and it’s lonely.

  His words came back to her now like a promise, as soothing as a hymn. Damn hard to get to, and it’s lonely. That was everything she needed.

  Ed beached the plane just past the cabin. After the silent, seamless water landing, the crunch of the pontoons on gravel felt like a savage impact even though it wasn’t. The prop slowed and then stopped. A loon called, the mournful sound loud.

  “Okay,” Ed said. “Let’s get unpacked.”

  He was trying to keep his voice light, but it wavered. Leah thought she knew why. He was thinking about the rifles she’d asked him to bring.

  Leah got out first and helped the kids out one at a time. Tessa bolted out between them, splashing through the shallows, head high, tail erect. A million fresh smells to take in. When Nick and Hailey were standing on a large, flat rock on the shore, high and dry and safe, Leah went back to help Ed unload their gear. She was almost to the plane when Hailey spoke.

  “Is that a canoe?”

  For a moment, Leah thought she’d spotted someone on the water. Then she realized that Hailey was looking at the plane’s pontoon, where a sixteen-foot ultralight Wenonah canoe was lashed.

  “Yes,” she said. “It’s a canoe.” It would be their only means of transportation when Ed flew out in the morning, but as she looked at the craft’s bright yellow sides, she remembered that lazy August afternoon when Nick had told her about Hailey’s interest—and skill—in a canoe. “We’ll take it out tomorrow.”

  Hailey didn’t respond. Ed, wearing a headlamp, tight-roped his way down the length of the pontoon and handed Leah her own headlamp.

  “Getting dark fast,” he said, the first reference to what he’d surely been worried about the entire time.

  “It was a perfect landing,” Leah said, putting the headlamp on.

  “Let’s not ask me to do it again,” he said, and though he tried to inject levity into the statement, his tone undermined it.

  “Let’s not,” she agreed, and then they got to work unloading the plane. While the two of them carried the gear from the plane to shore, Hailey and Nick stood on the bank, watching. They were standing very close together, their breath fogging the night air. Only September, and already the evening temperature here was in the low forties. The nearest town—which wasn’t really a town in any traditional sense—was in Canada. Lac-Frontière, a French name that meant “Lake of the Frontier Border.” An appropriate name.

  She forced her mind away from that before the inevitable question rose behind it: Where next? Have Ed fly them into the Northwest Territories, raise her children among the musk ox? No. The running had to stop, and the running could not stop until Lowery was dead.

  This was the truth that she had to accept. If he knew she was alive—and he did—then he would have to die. There was no alternative now. No future where Doug raised them safely without her. No future where silence masqueraded as innocence.

  “I’m sorry it’s already dark,” she told the kids as she unshouldered the duffel bag at the cabin door and spun the combination lock that was closed over a stainless-steel hasp. “I wish you’d been able to arrive in the daylight and see how beautiful it is. But in the morning, you’ll see. We’ll take the canoe out and you’ll see what’s so special about this place.” She unfastened the lock and pushed open the door, and their headlamps illuminated the cabin’s interior.

  The rough-hewn log walls looked virtually the same on the inside as they did on the outside. The bunks on the far wall were just planks, no mattresses, no pillows. Hooks made out of antlers hung on the wall to their left. The woodstove and the single window were to their right. Otherwise, the space was barren. The wall art was a topographic map of the Allagash Wilderness Waterway and a calendar from three years earlier.

  “This is it?” Hailey said. “We’re supposed to stay here? All of us?”

  “The three of you,” Ed said from behind them. “I’ll be in a tent. But I’d always be in a tent, if I had my way.”

  He was trying to reassure, trying to soothe, but falling short.

  “Let me build us a fire,” Leah said. “By the time we get the sleeping bags out and a fire going, it’ll feel cozy.”

  She stopped talking then and busied herself with the fire. Nick sat on the edge of the bunk tentatively and didn’t move to take off his boots or his jacket or even his backpack. Hailey crossed the room, seeking privacy the way she did at the house. There was no basement here, though, no door to close. She settled for standing with her back to Leah, facing the topographic map on the wall. She touched it with a fingertip—she seemed to want to touch any type of art, as if the lines and colors spoke to her—and traced the river very carefully, from the place where they were now all the way down to Moosehead Lake, the place where she’d been before, her first stop in Maine. Leah saw that she was doing it backward again, the way she had at the cabin on the first day. Hailey trusted the rivers to flow south
, the way they did in Kentucky, slow floats to warmer climates. She had no idea that up here they actually led north, led through places that were only colder and more isolated before dumping you into a hostile frigid sea.

  Leah didn’t want to tell her that. Let her think that all the rivers of the world flowed south, meandering back down to the Ohio River, drifting right into Louisville. Let her believe that all rivers and all roads led home eventually.

  As she cracked kindling and stacked it in the narrow woodbox of the ancient iron stove, Leah knew once more the thing she’d chosen to deny for so long, the thing that had led her to Maine in the first place: She was no one’s mother. She’d brought lives into this world, yes, but that was all. A mother provided safety; Leah invited harm.

  This was the reason she had left all those years earlier. A mother who drew harm toward her children rather than guiding it away from them deserved nothing but exile. At best, she deserved exile.

  She removed a lighter and a cube of WetFire from her pack. She tore the wrapping off the WetFire and scraped the tiny white cube with her thumbnail, peeling flakes of it free. Then she sparked the lighter and lowered it, watched the flame catch the fire starter and spread to the kindling, felt the first traces of warmth on her face, and remembered the day Nina Morgan had died for her children. She felt that she’d done the right thing for them.

  A mistake.

  Dying for them hadn’t been enough. She knew now what she should have known then: A good mother didn’t die for her children.

  She killed for them.

  Part Four

  Follow the River

  32