Never Far Away

by Michael Koryta

  “Good deal, baby face,” she said, passing him the license and reaching for the Maker’s Mark.

  He sipped the old-fashioned, opened his laptop, and logged on to the internet. He didn’t use the hotel Wi-Fi, because hotel Wi-Fi was about as secure as mirroring your computer screen on a Times Square billboard. He used a mobile hot spot with satellite-based coverage instead, and he would change the hot spot in the next state. He expected the next state would be Maine.

  Mixed feelings about that. An ache in his arm, a memory of ruby taillights and the glitter of broken glass. At least he had the memories, though. Full knowledge of a lived experience. That was better than it had been out at the Lowery ranch near Red Lodge, looking into the mountains where his family had perished and not being sure of how exactly it had all come to pass.

  Once he was connected to the hot spot, he set about finding Nina Morgan, aka Leah Trenton. He began with a phone-number lookup and discovered that both Nicholas and Hailey Chatfield had their own cell phones. Kids these days. What could you do?

  A bit more probing revealed that the phones were on the AT&T mobile network and were active. Unless Leah Trenton had thought to send the phones elsewhere as a ruse, the phones were traveling with the kids. Dax hoped Leah had had at least this level of foresight, but he remembered what Doc Lambkin had told him: she was not an operator. She was a civilian who’d been in the wrong job at the wrong time.

  He thought about it for a while and then selected the boy, Nicholas, as his first target. Eleven years old, armed with a smartphone, and traveling away from home? He could probably use some distractions. A little something to put a smile on his face. Dax sent the boy notifications with download codes for a free game app and a free streaming app that promised a series of still-in-theater releases. Bootlegs, yes, but they were usually high quality and could be enjoyed on a phone screen. He wasn’t sure that kids cared much about movies these days, so he put more faith in the gaming app. You never knew, though. Nicholas Chatfield could be a young Marty Scorsese.

  Once he’d both texted and e-mailed the bait advertisements for his unique apps, he went to see what he could find about the two men whom Doc Lambkin had mentioned, Randall Pollard and Marvin Sanders.

  He did not need to invest much time in the search. There were news alerts from national and regional media. It seemed Mr. Pollard and Mr. Sanders had been involved in a van accident while in transit from Coleman Prison in Florida to a prison in Terre Haute, Indiana. The driver had been injured but survived. Pollard and Sanders had escaped. They’d be wearing distinctive orange prison garb and handcuffs and should be considered dangerous, the news reports warned.

  Dax suspected that only one of those three things was currently true.

  The prison van’s driver seemed awfully fortunate. Surviving a crash like that with two prisoners and emerging largely unscathed? That was good luck indeed. He was an employee of a transport company called MG&L that had contracts with numerous prisons. A company spokeswoman touted the impressive safety statistics even while she apologized for the unfortunate accident. There was no detail about the company beyond its name, its apology, and its impressive run of safe transit before this regrettable incident. Curious about this fine institution that had suffered such a bad day, Dax ran MG&L through a corporate-profile search. MG&L, it turned out, was a subsidiary of a company previously known as the Lowery Group.

  “Fascinating,” Dax said.

  “What’s that?” the bartender asked. She was leaning against the bar with her back to him, checking Instagram on her phone. Dax was one of two patrons in the entire place.

  “I’m reading an article,” he told her. “Really interesting stuff.”

  “Yeah? Hit me with it.” She still didn’t turn or look up from the phone.

  “Did you know,” Dax said, “that the Yellowstone Caldera could blow this entire state right to hell? This article says that there’s an active volcano down there, been sitting dormant all this time, but ready to just…ka-boom.”

  She looked up at him then. Studied him for a moment. Then said, “Probably bullshit. Like how we’re always supposed to be just getting missed by meteors or asteroids or whatever and then it turns out they’re really, like, ten million miles away.”

  Dax smiled at her. “Yes,” he said. “It’s probably just like that.”

  14

  The afternoon following their fishing trip, Leah told Ed that she was taking the kids to Camden.

  He came by just after four, having worked a half-day fishing trip. Nick seemed pleased to see him, wandering out in the yard to ask him about the fishing, and Hailey seemed carefully indifferent. She waved but didn’t come down off the porch, where she’d spent most of the day seeking futilely for a cell phone signal and reading a book that she’d taken a greater liking to than the Annie Dillard she’d tried the first night. It was Cormac McCarthy’s All the Pretty Horses. The orphaned John Grady crossing the border into Mexico, homeless and in a strange land with only one trusted companion.

  Perfect. Leah wished she would return to Tinker Creek.

  They’d been at the cabin all day except for a trip into Greenville for lunch. The rest of the time had been spent packing. Leah was trying hard to seem nonchalant about going to Camden, to the unseen but already rented house. She was, she realized, acting very much like Hailey. I am not afraid. I will not show you fear. I will not break.

  She wished she could be like Nick—open and honest and not afraid of cracking right in half. But that was a child’s right, not a mother’s. There was no fear more contagious than a mother’s.

  You’re just Aunt Leah, though. Go on and embrace it. Crazy Aunt Leah can be scared of leaving the little house in the big woods if she wants!

  She’d worked through the day sorting and packing, and she did not put the handgun in the car until she was sure neither of them could see her. Then she’d put it in the glove box and locked it.

  The rifles and shotguns would have to stay behind. She would have no need of them in Camden, of course. Not the long guns and not even the pistol. Still, she left the pistol in the car.

  When Ed arrived, she stayed in the garage while he talked to Nick and tossed a Frisbee for Tessa. At length he extricated himself from boy and dog and crossed the yard and joined Leah in the garage. He studied the back of the Jeep, which was already crammed with bags and boxes.

  “Their stuff from home?”

  “Some of it. Most of that is still in storage.” The storage center had been located and the movers retained by Everett Spoonhour. Leah owed him a few e-mails and a phone call. He was following up constantly, reminding her of the court’s requirements. High on the list was a site visit of the home where the children would be raised. Leah thought she should get keys to that house before she shared the address.

  “Doesn’t look like you’re unpacking it,” he said.

  “No.” She closed the tailgate, leaned against the back of the Jeep, propped one foot on the bumper, and faced him. He was standing with one hand resting on the lip of the overhead garage door. The sun was behind him, so his silhouette loomed beside Leah’s, as if to make up for the gap he was carefully leaving between them.

  “They’ll need a different place,” she said. It wasn’t the first time they’d spoken of it, but it was the first time in person. Always before, it had been on a phone call, and it had been brief.

  “Seemed to enjoy the day yesterday all right.”

  “Absolutely. It was also a lake day in perfect summer weather.”

  Ed acknowledged that with a nod. “Be different in February.”

  “Be different, yes. Too different. They’re used to travel baseball teams and private art lessons. We must FaceTime with Luke, Hailey’s boyfriend, and play video games with Jerome, Nick’s best friend. This requires fast Wi-Fi and an omnipresent cell signal.”

  “Everything we were going to help people escape from when they wanted to,” he said, and smiled.

  “Right.”


  “Emphasis being when they wanted to,” he said. “Those two haven’t been given a say, let alone made the request.”

  He understood what she was saying without making her say it. Somehow, that made the whole situation worse. “That’s my concern,” she agreed. “They’re upside down now. Everything they knew is gone. I can’t fix that, but I can at least be someplace that resembles their home. Someplace where they’ve got at least a touchstone of the lives they knew.”

  His face was turned from her when he said, “Where is that place?”

  “I’m not sure, but I’m starting with Camden.”

  He nodded slowly and kept his body half turned. “It’s a good spot to try. It feels safe. Might not feel familiar to them, but I think it will feel safe.”

  “Yes.”

  He turned to look at her. “Everything we’d talked about…that’s not going to be a practical fit for you, is it?”

  “Not this summer. Not this fall, I guess. I just need to get them settled first.”

  “I know it. But what I’m saying is, I don’t see when that’ll become practical for you.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Stop it. You kidding me? Your brother-in-law died and suddenly you’re a mother. You think you need to apologize to me for anything?”

  She said, “I am their mother.” The words painful and sweet simultaneously. Four words that gave her an identity, made her whole.

  Ed said, “Exactly. That’s the way you’ve got to think of it now. You’re not their aunt any longer when it comes to decision-making. You’ve got to think like a mother.”

  She hadn’t expected him to misunderstand, although it was reasonable that he had, and for a moment she stammered without getting any words strung together. Finally, she said, “Right. Think like their mother.”

  “So, Mom goes to Camden.” His chest rose and fell and he said, “Don’t stress about the rest of it, okay? Not now. You have to at some point, but not now. The cabins aren’t going anywhere. I’m not going anywhere.”

  “I’m not asking you for patience,” she said. “I appreciate it but…no expectations. I won’t do that to you.”

  Ed leaned against the garage-door track, his baseball cap pulled low, shadowing his stubbled face. He looked away from her, down to the creek. You couldn’t see the water in the oncoming darkness but you could hear it. In the yard, Nick laughed and Tessa barked and Hailey made no sound.

  “Going to be quite a life change,” Ed said. “Just…boom, raising two kids.” He brought his hands together as if imitating a collision, having no idea just how accurate that was. Doug’s truck had collided with a tree and knocked the past right into the present, spinning Leah’s world until the future faced backward.

  “There’s really nobody else in the family to help out?” This was as close as he would come to asking prying questions, challenging questions. He was a private man with respect for a private woman, and it was that nature that had brought them together.

  “No,” she said.

  “You know where you’ll be staying in Camden?”

  “Yes. There’s a rental house that seems like a good fit. Just a mile outside of town, so you can walk to everything, and there are kids around.”

  He gave a small sideways smile. “Walk to Cuzzy’s?”

  They’d once gotten very drunk at a bar called Cuzzy’s. It had been a foul-weather day and the rain kept pouring and the bartender kept pouring and they’d gone back to the hotel across the street and made love in the middle of the afternoon like college kids.

  A stranger had died and Ed’s life had changed. It felt unfair and yet she knew he would never let himself feel this way. He wasn’t a big believer in ideas of fairness. He was interested in right and wrong and just and unjust but not in fair and unfair. She realized, not for the first time but certainly the most intense, how badly she would miss him.

  “I hope you’ll come over when you can,” she said.

  “Couldn’t keep me away. The land of lobster and lounge chairs? Book me in.”

  “Adirondack chairs.”

  “Sure, but there’s no alliteration in that.” He smiled at her and there was just enough sunlight on the side of his face for her to see his sadness. “It’s the same damn state,” he said. “You’re right down the road. Don’t act like it’s far.”

  “Feels far,” she said. “Doesn’t it?”

  “Nah.”

  “A long drive.”

  “You should find somebody with a plane, then.”

  She laughed. “You can commute.”

  “Exactly. Put her down on Lake Megunticook or whatever it is over there, taxi right up to your new place.”

  “Just that easy,” she said, and although there was still laughter in her voice, somehow the words brought the exchange to an end and put both of them back into silence.

  “You take care,” Ed said, “and holler if you need me, all right? I’ll be there right away.”

  “Thank you,” she said. “And I’m sorry that—”

  “I said stop it with that. Please.”

  He crossed the garage to her and leaned down and put his hand on the small of her back and kissed her slowly. She reached up and grasped the back of his head, and he put his free hand on the leg she had propped up on the bumper. They broke the kiss and he rested his forehead against hers and they stood there for a moment in shared silence. Then he kissed the top of her head lightly and stepped away.

  “I hope the house in Camden is what they need,” he said.

  “Me too.”

  Part Three

  Where the Mountains Meet the Sea

  15

  They settled into the house in Camden like hostages, not visitors.

  But they weren’t visitors either, Leah reminded herself. The stay wasn’t temporary. This was home.

  It sure didn’t feel that way, though.

  Leah had talked the town up enthusiastically during the drive. She’d told them about the schools, the ocean, the old-fashioned schooners that sailed past the Curtis Island lighthouse, told them about skiing at the Camden Snow Bowl and walking to the library and eating ice cream on a bench in the harbor. She sounded like a spokeswoman for the conventions and visitors bureau.

  They took Route 1 south from Belfast, chasing the coast down through Lincolnville, where the ferry waited for a run to Islesboro and lobster boats floated at moorings, then drove up into the wooded Camden Hills, then back downhill and straight into the town.

  Camden. Home.

  She’d been so busy talking about all that awaited them there that the arrival felt too abrupt and the town too small. Sure, there was the beautiful library overlooking the harbor, and there was the cascading waterfall where the Megunticook River emptied into the sea beside a bucolic park, but then they passed those things and the tourist shops that flanked Route 1 were gone and the GPS was instructing her to take a right turn onto Washington Street. Maine had plenty of blink-and-you-miss-it towns, but Camden had begun to feel outsize to her as she’d made her plans, and the swiftness with which the heart of the village came and went was jarring. She made the right, and then quickly the beauty of the harbor was behind her and they were driving past an old textile mill that had been renovated and turned into restaurants and apartments. She remembered this area only vaguely, from a skiing trip years ago.

  “That’s Forty Paper,” she said, still in tour-guide mode. “It’s a little Italian restaurant with a great happy hour.”

  A great happy hour? Gather ’round, kids, we’ve got to discuss the best cocktail prices in town. This was her attempt at mothering? Well, maybe it preserved her identity a little bit better. Aunt Leah the Lush.

  “There’s a river up here,” she said, trying to move on from the happy-hour observation and remembering the map she’d studied on sleepless nights in Louisville, “and then there’s a lake. The lake is supposed to be pretty special. It’s a—”

  “We’ve seen a lot of lakes already,” Nick said, and the fatigu
e in his voice silenced Leah. He wasn’t wrong. They had seen a lot of lakes.

  “I’m excited about the house,” she said.

  No one answered.

  The home was a two-story yellow Colonial over a walkout basement with an oversize deck facing Mount Battie. Leah pulled in and killed the engine.

  “What do you think, Hailey?” she asked.

  “I don’t like yellow,” Hailey said.

  Strike one. Leah nodded. “Good news, then—there’s no yellow paint inside.”

  They climbed out, and Tessa promptly ambled across the property line to the neighbor’s yard, squatted, and shat.

  Beautiful. I’ll get to meet the neighbors with a poop bag in hand. But first I’m going to have to unpack some poop bags.

  Tessa trotted back when Nick whistled, and the four of them gathered outside the door as if three of them were waiting for the dog to take the lead.

  “Do you have a key?” Hailey said. “Or is someone supposed to meet us here?”

  “It’s a code. Let’s hope it works.”

  She put the code into the electronic lock and opened the door. “Home sweet home,” Leah said, and her voice echoed. The house had hardwood floors and high ceilings—selling points that the agent had mentioned repeatedly—but all of that lent a cool hardness to the space rather than welcoming warmth. It felt undeniably like the rental it was. Clean and cute and furnished tastefully but cheaply. Ikea Presents: Maine Cottage in a Box!

  The kids walked through the house in near silence, with Nick gawking in all directions and inspecting knickknacks with curious fingers and Hailey walking behind, hands in her pockets, shoulders tight. Her eyes took in the new space but she didn’t engage with it in any way. It was as if she wanted to pass through the walls and fade away for good, ghostlike.

  Just like her mom did, Leah thought. The only difference is Hailey actually wants to disappear.

  “Let’s go see your bedrooms,” Leah said. “You each have your own.”