Never Far Away

by Michael Koryta

  Leah went into motion, walking down the shoreline with a fast stride, but she was still outpaced by the canoe. “Guys! You’ve got moving water out there! Hailey! Bring it back!”

  Nick stopped paddling but Hailey didn’t. She leaned forward and said something that spurred him back into action. Leah stopped and stared. What in the hell was happening?

  They’re running away. That’s what is happening. You’ve made your plans and they’ve made theirs.

  Running where, though? Into the empty wilderness? That seemed unlikely even for her daughter.

  The memory of the map rose then. The way Hailey had traced the river’s path with her index finger, moving backward, oblivious to the difference between here and Kentucky, and now Leah understood perfectly: Hailey thought she was going to pick up the river and ride it south, all the way down to Moosehead Lake and the towns she knew were there.

  What would she do then?

  Call Mrs. Wilson, probably. Do the same thing that Leah planned to do.

  She was moving the wrong way for that. There were no phones where she was headed.

  Leah broke into a run, leaping from boulder to boulder until she was on the high ground, and then the pine boughs were raking at her as she ran and screamed, Come back! Come back, damn it!

  They paddled on, into the glistening brook where the current strengthened and pulled them ahead. The plane was gone and they had the only boat and Leah was on foot, hopelessly outpaced. She stopped running, caught her breath, cupped her hands around her mouth, and shouted, “It goes north, Hailey! Up here, the rivers go north!”

  They were too far away, though, and her voice was too faint. The thing she had not said when she’d had the chance couldn’t be heard now.

  36

  The flight from Martin Mountain to Greenville was a short one even in a small, single-engine plane, less than an hour, and when Ed Levenseller put the plane down on the calm waters of Moosehead Lake in front of his cabin, the area was still waking up, the water empty save for a few fishing boats and the pontoon ferry to Mount Kineo. It was amazing how things emptied out after Labor Day.

  There was someone waiting on his dock, though. He didn’t notice the man until he’d reduced power and begun to taxi because all his attention was on the plane during landing. Once he closed in, he finally saw him there, a lean black guy standing at the end of the dock, staring right at Ed’s plane as if he’d been waiting on it.

  Cop, Ed thought, but that was probably just paranoia. A cop didn’t sound all that bad to him, actually, no matter what Leah had said. Trust no one was a hard ideology for a man like Ed to accept.

  The stranger wasn’t dressed like a cop. He was wearing jeans and a white T-shirt and sunglasses. Average height, ropy, muscular build, shaved head. He wore sunglasses and stood with his hands in his pockets and did not move at all as Ed floated up to the dock. Even when Ed opened the door, climbed out, and tied the plane off, the stranger didn’t move. Just stared.

  “How’s it going?” Ed said.

  For a long moment he thought that the man wasn’t going to answer. Then he finally spoke, his voice soft but deep.

  “Ready to head back north?”

  Ed blinked at him, the paranoia returning. Suddenly, he wished there were someone else within view of the dock. His beloved isolation no longer felt comforting.

  “Excuse me?”

  “We’re going back north. You need to fuel up or anything first, or can we just go?”

  “I’m not flying anywhere,” Ed said slowly. “You want to explain what you’re talking about, or maybe just go on and let me do my…”

  His voice trailed off as the man stepped forward, knelt, and extended a phone to him.

  The phone’s screen was lit up, a FaceTime application running. In the center of the frame was a boy Ed had never seen before. He was a pale kid with dark hair and his hands were tied and someone just outside of the frame was holding a rifle to his head.

  “Please,” the kid said, his voice high and tinny on the phone speaker. “Please do what he tells you.”

  It was only then that Ed Levenseller realized the terrified child was sitting on Ed’s couch, in Ed’s living room. A photograph of a winter sunrise was just behind the rifle. Leah had taken the photograph. It had been a Christmas gift.

  Ed stared at the kid on the phone screen and didn’t speak. The kid stared back, waiting on him. Ed had an absurd thought that if he responded to the kid, he would make it real, but if he didn’t, it would never be real, there would be no child sitting on Ed’s couch with a rifle leveled at his skull. He wanted to believe that.

  Then the kid spoke again. “My name is Matt,” he said. “They are telling me that if you fly them, I can…” His voice wavered, and he swallowed and then tried again. “If you fly them, then I can stay alive.”

  Before Ed could respond, the phone was gone. The black man pocketed it but didn’t straighten up, remaining in the casual kneeling position with his arms resting on one knee, looking for all the world as if he were asking Ed a few questions about the plane the way any tourist might.

  “It is not about you,” he said. “Remember that. It’s not about you or that kid or Nina’s kids. Leah’s kids—whatever you call her. It is only about her.”

  “Let him go,” Ed whispered. “Whoever he is, just let him go.”

  “Thatta-boy. Thinking about the innocent ones. Just like you need to.” He looked from Ed to the plane. Spoke again in the same monotone, a voice devoid of humanity. “So,” he said, “do you need fuel, or are we good to go now?”

  37

  Moving water is alive with hope and threat. A river can sustain life or drown it, and a river hides its secrets. The one who sees what the river has hidden will be rewarded. The one who is satisfied with the river’s surface will be punished.

  Dax’s father had told him that once, and the lesson lingered. Dax both loved water and respected its threat. He was thinking of this while he piloted the pirated Zodiac south out of Lower Martin Pond and into a narrowing brook, moving against the current toward Upper Martin. He was focused on the water, watching for its secrets, when a yellow canoe blazed into sight against the dark pines, headed into the rapids below.

  There were two people in the canoe. The one in the stern knew what he was doing but the one in the bow did not, and that was trouble even before they made the fatal mistake and trusted the promise on the surface of the water, underestimating all that ran beneath. It was a simple eddy, a Z-shaped riffle on the surface, but the surface current surged forward into a deep pool that halted momentum, as if the river were in the midst of an argument with itself.

  The resulting argument created a whirlpool that nudged the canoe sideways, toward the rocks.

  The paddler in the stern saw it first, which was a problem. The bow seat offered the best scouting view, but the paddler in the bow was still trying to angle left even while the river told him to go right. In the stern, the second paddler saw all of this developing and shouted a command that went unheeded. Dax couldn’t hear the words, but he understood the instruction: the paddler in the stern wanted to run the rapids solo, without having to compensate for the flailing of the partner in the bow. This made absolute sense to Dax. It was better to be competent and alone than to be hindered by a hapless teammate.

  The canoe swung broadside, struck a rock, and upended as it shot between a trio of boulders at the base of the Z-shaped drop.

  The paddlers screamed when they went into the water. High-pitched shouts, not the calm reactions of pros. They had no business being alone on this river, and yet there they were.

  Dax listened to the shouts and smiled. You never knew what might come your way. “Precocious,” Dax said aloud, twisting the throttle on the tiller and angling upriver. “They are precocious kids.”

  It wasn’t Leah, just her children, and the idea that Leah’s children were downriver and alone suggested that Leah wasn’t in charge of this little adventure.

  They had no
idea just how fortunate they were to have overturned in a stretch of a river where a competent man with a competent boat happened to be. The yellow canoe righted itself and drifted by, as if determined to demonstrate that it was the paddling team that was to blame, not the craft. It hurried past like a dog ashamed of its master.

  “You know what you’re doing,” Dax told the empty canoe. “Easier to go it alone sometimes. Safe travels, Wenonah.”

  Wenonah rode the river on by and Dax focused on the children in the water beneath the boulders. They were both at the surface and swimming well enough to shout, which meant they swam well enough to make it to shore without drowning. Fortunate on all counts, because if they’d dumped in a recycling rapid with a strong current that could pull them back under and hold them in the deep or bash them against the rocks, the mistake they’d made might have been fatal. Even here, in this relatively calm stretch, they’d imperiled themselves. The Allagash was cold and lonely. It would be easy to die here, even beneath a bright sun.

  Good news, though—they were not alone.

  Dax brought the Zodiac in alongside the child who’d been in the bow and discovered that he’d made a regrettable error—he’d assumed the paddler in the stern, the one who knew what was going to go wrong before it did, was the boy. The boy, it turned out, was the one who’d been in the bow. Gender bias, no excuse for it, and certainly not a mistake that Dax should make, considering that the only broken bones he’d ever suffered had been caused by a woman.

  “Quit crying and grab my hand,” Dax told the crying child who was grasping a tree limb. “Hurry, now. I won’t turn around to give you a second chance.”

  The boy took his hand. Dax hauled, grateful that it was his right arm, and the boy belly-flopped into the bottom of the Zodiac like a boated bluegill.

  “You need to listen to your sister,” Dax told him. “She might’ve coached you through.”

  Dax returned to the tiller, twisted it for more throttle, and steered toward the girl. She was already sitting on one of the boulders, catching her breath.

  “You okay?” Dax called over the sound of the churning water, bringing the Zodiac in broadside to the boulder.

  She stared at him, hesitant, but nodded. She was soaked, her long tangled dark hair dripping.

  “That could’ve been bad,” he said. He could see that the girl was crying, and so despite himself, he added the gentle truth: “If your brother had listened to you, I think you’d have made it. He needed to just stop paddling and trust you, didn’t he?”

  She nodded again. She was soaked and shivering and too distracted by adrenaline and fear to appreciate the compliment.

  “Climb in,” Dax told her. “You kids are lucky. Most days, this stretch of the river is empty. But here I am.”

  38

  Cool your mind.

  So many times, Leah had counseled herself with that three-word phrase. So many times, she’d been able to follow her own advice.

  This was different, though. She’d grabbed her backpack and .30-30 Winchester with a Leupold scope, and as she jogged through the densely packed pines at a pace fast enough to cover ground but steady enough not to sap her reserves, she knew the difference as something that boiled up out of the blood.

  You didn’t tell a mother to cool her mind when her children were threatened. Or at least, you didn’t tell her twice.

  Leah wanted to lash out, wanted to be savage, wanted to paint the pines with the blood of her enemies. It was difficult to admit that the enemy ran alongside her, ran within her. The enemy was the truth that she had buried for so long. Buried with the best of intentions, but what did intentions matter when the innocent ones suffered?

  Beside her, behind her, and occasionally out in front, Tessa galloped with an enviable ease. The dog would run all day if given the opportunity, and usually she ran with an undisguised joyfulness, but now she had her ears pinned back and she looked at Leah often. She might not know the source of Leah’s tension, but she certainly knew it was there.

  Leah wanted to go faster, but there was no such thing as a simple step in the Allagash, where limbs lashed faces and grabbed arms, rocks and roots turned ankles and tortured knees, and the soil would shift from a splashdown pool to a spine-thudding stone in a single stride. Everywhere, the trees obscured the sun and mocked your sense of direction and of space, even your willpower. Maine’s terrain lacked the soaring elevation changes that made hipster hikers head west to Colorado where they could bag a fourteen-thousand-foot summit and be back to a craft brewery by evening, but every year Maine’s terrain ate up some of those same hikers and then a guide had to come haul their foolish asses to safety. A guide like Leah.

  She ran with fear but she ran with confidence, a contradiction that only those truly prepared for danger could understand. You knew that trouble would come, period, and in that acceptance came the confidence.

  She knew this place so much better than she knew her own role.

  Protector? Mother? Attacker? Aunt? Prey? Predator? Living? Dead?

  The possibilities came with each breath, inhaled and exhaled and lost to the lonely woods, and no answers arrived. Not yet. They would come eventually.

  She felt pain and she felt fear and she felt peace. For the first time in so many days, she felt peace. Her children needed rescue again, but this rescue she was prepared for. They were lost in the wilderness and this was a condition that Leah Trenton understood.

  Fix it, then. Fix this one thing and then endure whatever came on its heels.

  The map, Leah. See the map, be the map, run the map.

  The brook from Upper Martin Mountain Pond fed into Lower Martin in a stretch of short but tricky white water. Then, across Lower Martin Pond, the brook ran wide and smooth and deep and poured into the Allagash, where Roman Island Lake was the next stop. It was late in the year and the water was low, so the canoe wouldn’t carry them as far and as fast as it might have.

  She splashed through a bog that threatened to suck the boots from her feet and then clambered up across a rock scree and dodged a tangle of roots and ran on, slinging muddy water with each stride. She pictured the river and she thought she knew where she would find them. There was a Z-shaped chute above a deep pool, and the third point of the Z created a backing current that would throw a boat against the rocks.

  They would strike the rocks and either overturn or bang their way through, and regardless, she thought that Hailey would seek safety following the chute. There was a wide gravel bank on the northeastern shore that could be reached easily even if they were swimming, because they’d been wearing the life jackets, she’d seen to that much, so they’d be afloat and—

  Life jackets, yes; helmets, no. What if their heads meet the rocks? What then?

  They would pause on that bank to assess the situation. She would find them there, she would find them and she would cry out to them and tell them all that she had hidden and then they would…they would…they would…

  She ran on.

  The rifle banged against her back. She’d have run faster without it, but it was better to be prepared.

  Up ahead, obscured by the trees and hills but audible now, the rapids waited. Or was that her own ragged breathing? She tried to imagine it as the rapids, and the space between gasps as the stretch of bucolic gravel bank, and her children resting safely there.

  I’m coming. I am almost there.

  Mom is almost there.

  39

  The children had never been taught how to start a fire, Dax discovered, but he wasn’t dismayed by this because primal lessons were rarely regarded as practical in these modern times.

  Patient as always, he built the fire for them so they might dry out and warm themselves. They were appreciative of the warmth and the rescue, but they remained wary and he struggled to entice them into conversation.

  A shame.

  He’d put the Zodiac ashore on a gravel bank. Their yellow canoe glimmered on the far side of the pond, riding like a fishing bobber,
drifting across the still waters and toward the river. Perhaps it would wash up on Roman Island or perhaps it would continue all the way out. Dax liked to imagine it reaching the sea, but he’d always been a romantic.

  He sat on a sun-bleached limb that had washed onto the gravel bank and watched as Nick and Hailey huddled close to the fire, acting as if they’d left the river and entered a Jack London tale rather than a gorgeous fifty-degree day. The water had to be cold, though. He had no clothes or blankets to offer them, but the sun and the fire would do the work in time.

  “So, I’m not one to pry,” he said at length after their shivering subsided and they seemed to be steadying, “but it would be neglectful of me not to ask where you came from and where you’re headed.”

  The boy and girl looked at each other. The boy waited on the girl.

  “It’s private,” she muttered. “Sorry. Not trying to be rude, but…you’re a stranger.”

  “A stranger who saved your stupid butts.”

  She looked at him uneasily, and he smiled. “Just teasing,” he said. “You were going to be fine. You knew what you were doing. Just because you ended up in the drink doesn’t mean you were incompetent. Failure is a necessity of adventure. You never appreciate that in the moment, but when you look back on things, you’ll remember. Give it time.”

  “Okay,” she said. “Sure.”

  “Wherever you’re headed,” Dax said, “it would seem difficult to get there without my help. Your canoe is well out in front of you now. I haven’t done a lot of hiking around here, but it doesn’t look like easy country. So you’ll probably need a ride.”

  Silence. Dax smiled. Patient.

  “You were headed north. Where to?”

  Hailey shook her head. “South,” she said. “We were headed south. To Moosehead Lake.”

  “It’s an interesting way to get there, considering the river flows north.”