Never Far Away

by Michael Koryta

  Do you miss the woods?

  She turned and leaned against the deck railing and looked through the windows into the living room. Nick was stretched out on the couch, and Hailey was curled up in the armchair. They were watching a movie together, and Leah could’ve sworn it was the new Marvel movie, one that was still in theaters. Was her son watching bootlegged films? Surely not. She thought about asking him, but who gave a damn if it was bootlegged; they were happy. They were laughing. She closed her eyes and listened to that sweet sound.

  No, she did not miss the woods.

  19

  School started the Tuesday after Labor Day. Hailey Chatfield took the bus.

  Matt Bouchard was planning on biking to school but he was struck by a desire to change this transportation choice on the first day of seventh grade after catching sight of Hailey standing at the top of the steep driveway with her backpack on, her hair pulled back and knotted in a sort of loose ponytail, sunglasses shielding her eyes. Matt walked his bike back to the garage and ran inside to tell his mother he’d opted for the bus.

  She looked at him as if he were insane. Riding his bike to school had been a point of contention all last year, a valiant battle finally won by forces of good and decency and Matt’s relentless text messages regarding the Camden crime rate, or rather the lack thereof. Being allowed to bike to school had been seen as a win for freedom and independence everywhere. Now he was trading it for the bus?

  “The new neighbor kid is out there, and her aunt asked me—and you asked me—to be nice to her or whatever.” He tried to seem put-out by the idea, as if grudgingly succumbing to his better nature. His mother’s surprise morphed into a smile, though, and he felt heat rise in his cheeks. “What?” he said. “Didn’t you ask me to be nice to her?”

  The smile remained as she nodded. “I certainly did. So you just saw her standing out there and felt so bad you decided to do this on the spur of the moment, eh? That’s considerate of you, Matthew.”

  “I thought so,” he agreed. “I probably won’t do it again, but new kids get nervous on the first day, you know? So just this once.”

  “Just this once,” his mother echoed. “Be polite,” she called after him. “She’s probably a nervous girl today.” Pause. “And a cute one.”

  “Mom.” He shut the garage door hard enough to be emphatic but not so hard that he would get into trouble for slamming it.

  Up the hill, Hailey Chatfield had her head down and her phone in her hand. She’d pushed her sunglasses up on the top of her head. This was a small thing, and yet it made her look impossibly mature to him, impossibly cool.

  Her focus on the phone was so intense that she didn’t hear him approach. His own fault; years spent perfecting his silent walking techniques in the woods were coming back to bite him now. Couldn’t be clumsy if I tried, he thought. “Hey,” he said. He’d tried to deepen his voice, but it came out sounding more like a guttural grunt than a friendly hello. She snapped her head up and took a startled step backward. When she moved, her sunglasses slipped from their perch on her head and fell to the ground.

  “Crap!” she said.

  Matt rushed forward and bent to pick them up, praying that the lenses weren’t cracked. In his hurry, he didn’t see that she was bending over too. Their skulls met with a bone-on-bone clack.

  “Ouch!” She stepped away, rubbing her head, face twisted with pain.

  Couldn’t be clumsy if I tried, Matt thought again, and he wanted to laugh and cry and run back to the house all at once. Take his bike to school after all. Skip school, maybe.

  “Sorry,” he said. “I’m really sorry.” He picked up the sunglasses, brushed the dirt off them, and offered them to her. “They’re not broken, at least.”

  She hesitated before taking them from his hand, as if afraid that he might follow the headbutt with a karate chop to the throat.

  A bad start. A very, very bad start.

  She inspected the sunglasses carefully. The lenses weren’t cracked, but when she put them on, they canted to the left.

  “They’re bent,” she said. “Damn it, they’re bent!”

  She was almost shouting at him, and when she tugged the gold-framed sunglasses off her face again, he saw with astonishment that there were tears in her eyes. She could get this upset about some stupid sunglasses? He felt less embarrassed now and more irritated. Who cared if she was new and pretty? She was also pretty shallow.

  “I said I was sorry. But it was an accident. I mean, I didn’t drop them.”

  She wiped her eyes furiously with the back of her hand and Matt saw that the anger wasn’t because of him, or at least not entirely. She was mad at herself for showing so much emotion, it seemed.

  She’s probably a nervous girl today, his mother had said. Maybe Matt had underestimated her anxiety. She looked so cool, so calm, so mature, that the idea of her being nervous about anything didn’t make sense. But then again, everything was new to her. Being tall and pretty and smart didn’t keep you from being an outsider on the first day of school.

  “It’s okay,” she said. “It’s just…my dad gave them to me, that’s all. It’s fine. It wasn’t your fault.” But the tears were coming again.

  “I can fix them,” he said.

  “Don’t worry about it.” Her voice was thick and she avoided eye contact, but there was a single tear leaking down her cheek. She wiped it away with a ferocious swipe of her hand, like she was swatting at a mosquito.

  “Here, let me see.”

  “It’s no big—”

  But he was taking them from her, and she didn’t resist. He held them gingerly in both hands, lifting them and studying the balance. They were Ray-Bans with dark lenses and thin gold frames. At the point where the left earpiece met the frame, the metal was bent and the tiny screw that joined the two pieces together was pushed up.

  “This will be easy to fix,” he said. “I promise. My dad’s got little screwdrivers for stuff just like this. It’ll take me two minutes.” He was already in motion, hurrying back to his house.

  “You don’t need to!” she called after him.

  “It’ll be easy!”

  “But you’re going to miss the bus!”

  He looked back and saw that the bus was indeed approaching, making the turn up the hill and onto their street. He couldn’t fix the glasses now and ride the bus with her too. He hesitated, then said, “I usually bike anyhow. It’s faster.” Both statements were lies.

  “You don’t need to—”

  “I’ll find you in school and give them back. Do you know your homeroom?”

  “Mrs. Houseman.”

  “Oh. Okay.” He hoped she didn’t see his deflation. Mrs. Houseman was an eighth-grade homeroom teacher. Hailey was a year ahead of him. Hopelessly far away from him, in other words.

  She was already hopelessly far away after you headbutted her and broke her sunglasses.

  “I’ll find you,” he said, and then: “My name is Matt.”

  “I’m Hailey.”

  “I’ll find you, Hailey.” He turned and ran back down the road and up his driveway. He watched his feet while he ran. It had been a long time since Matt Bouchard had tripped over his own feet while running, but today, with Hailey Chatfield watching, anything seemed possible.

  It took him five minutes to find the set of eyeglass screwdrivers on his dad’s workbench in the garage and then another fifteen to remove the earpiece, carefully bend the metal, and reset it with the tiny screw. He wasn’t happy with his first effort, so he did it a second time, and then he set the glasses on the workbench and studied them to see if there was any tilt. They looked even. He found a level and rested it gently across the top of the frames. The bubble floated to the center.

  Success.

  He held the glasses up and put them close to his own eyes, studying the lenses to see if there’d been any faint scratching that he could buff out. The lenses looked fine. Holding the sunglasses this close to his face, he felt as if he could smell the fainte
st trace of perfume or shampoo. He leaned closer, inhaled…

  “Matt! What are you doing?”

  His mother’s shout surprised him so much that he came terribly close to dropping the sunglasses again. He held on, though, and looked back to see her staring at him from the door to the house, her car keys in her hand and her bag slung over her shoulder.

  “I had to come back for a minute,” he said. “Hailey dropped her glasses, and she was all upset because her dad gave them to her, and I knew I could fix them, so—”

  “School started five minutes ago!”

  He glanced at his watch, his beloved Garmin that told the altitude, barometric pressure, and compass bearing as well as the time.

  She was right. The first day of school had officially started without him. But Hailey’s sunglasses were fixed. You had to count victories and losses.

  “Get in the car,” his mom said in a low, warning tone that brooked no discussion. “Now.”

  And so he arrived at his first day of seventh grade not on his bike or on the bus but in his mother’s Subaru, fifteen minutes late by the time he climbed out, holding the sunglasses as gently as if he were transporting a kitten.

  “We’ll talk this afternoon about your approach to punctuality,” Mom said.

  “It was one time.”

  “I sincerely hope so.”

  He walked into school thinking that he’d be surprised if being tardy on the first day was detention-worthy…but regardless, he was already tardy, so could one be tardier? Late was late. Better to look to the future and start fresh by being on time for English.

  Also, with no reason to rush, he could wait outside Mrs. Houseman’s room.

  The bell rang ten minutes after he arrived, and the hallway flooded with students. Almost all were familiar faces. Camden-Rockport was far from the smallest school around—Islesboro had just fourteen students in seventh grade this year—but it also wasn’t so big that there were many strange faces. You knew almost everyone by seventh grade. He exchanged a few nods and hellos with classmates, but he was on the hunt for the one face that would be unfamiliar to all of them. She was nearly the last one out of the room, walking with her head down, eyes on her schedule.

  “Hailey?”

  She looked up, surprised that anyone knew her name, then recognized him. “Oh. Hey.”

  “Hey.” He held the sunglasses out. “I fixed them. You can check, but I think they’re fine.”

  She took them out of his hand, slid them on…and smiled. “Wow. You did it.”

  The smile weakened his knees, but he nodded with what he hoped passed for calm confidence.

  “Sure. Like I said, it was easy. You just need the right tool, that’s all.”

  She took the sunglasses off, handling them carefully, pulled a case out of her backpack, and zipped them into it. Matt waited, and one of his friends, Danny Knowlton, passed by and gave Hailey a look and then Matt a look, one eyebrow raised. Matt just shrugged. He knew he’d hear about this soon enough. He’d get plenty of questions about the new girl by the end of the day.

  “Okay, since you’re such a big help, can you do me another favor?” Hailey asked.

  “No problem.” He was ready to agree to build her a car if she asked for one, but she just handed him her schedule.

  “Where’s my science class?”

  “I’ll show you.”

  “You won’t be late for yours?”

  “Nah.” He laughed. “I was already late for school, so I’m not too worried about it.”

  She fell into stride beside him, the two of them walking upstream against a swarm of students. He loved the feel of walking beside her, but he wished he were taller. She also had the extra year on him. But she was walking with him, and he’d fixed her sunglasses, and her mother had asked him to keep an eye on her. By that calculus, he was already the best friend she had. It might last for a week or two.

  “You were late?” she said. “You rode your bike?”

  “No. My mom took me, and I was still late.”

  “Is she pissed?”

  “Not too bad. I’ll find out when she gets home from work, I guess. If I’m lucky she’ll be really busy with casework crap and she won’t have the whole day to think about it.”

  “Casework?”

  He nodded. “She’s a private investigator.”

  Hailey stopped walking. “Seriously?”

  “Yeah. It’s not as cool as it sounds, though. She doesn’t do any of the interesting stuff. She pretty much sits at a desk all day using computer databases. It’s not like your aunt, who’s—”

  “There’s a private investigator in Camden, Maine?” She looked incredulous to the point of suspicion.

  “She actually works in Rockland,” Matt said, but it was evident that Hailey didn’t distinguish between the two.

  “As an investigator,” she repeated with what seemed to be growing fascination.

  “Yeah, but the boring kind. Trust me, she’s not doing anything cool.”

  “But she researches people, finds out who they really are, things like that?”

  Matt was used to dismissing his mother’s profession as boring and nothing like TV, but there was something to the intensity of Hailey’s interest that told him not to do this. Anything that interested her was something he wanted to encourage.

  “Yeah,” he said. “That sort of thing. Background checks and stuff like that. Tracking people down.”

  “Background checks,” Hailey said. Someone bumped into her but she didn’t react. She just stood there, one thumb hooked in the pocket of her jeans, her dark bangs swept across her forehead, staring at Matt as if truly seeing him for the first time. He liked the feeling. A lot.

  “Yeah.”

  “So if I gave her, like, a name and a birth date, she could tell me about that person? She could find stuff that doesn’t show up on Google?”

  Matt Bouchard hadn’t reached the age of thirteen without developing a few finely honed instincts. He had good emotional intelligence, a teacher had told his parents. As he looked back at Hailey right now, emotional intelligence met a healthy dose of hormones and produced genius.

  “I could do that myself,” he told her. “She’s shown me how to do basically everything that she does.”

  “Seriously?” Hailey looked both dubious and hopeful.

  “Sure,” Matt said. “She let me job-shadow her.”

  This was true. He’d job-shadowed his mother for exactly one day. He’d spent most of the time playing games on his phone but he knew better than to mention that. “If there’s anything you want to find out,” he said, “just let me know.”

  “Okay,” she said. “Cool. Let me…let me think about that.”

  “Sure. I mean, I’m right next door, so just come by the house, or find me here in the hall, or whatever.”

  The hall, as it happened, was rapidly emptying. They both seemed to realize that at the same time and Hailey said, “Where’s my science class?”

  “I’ll show you. Hey, why don’t I get your phone number and you can just, like, text me the name or whatever and I’ll find out everything you want to know.” Casual, as if having her number didn’t mean the world to him.

  “Okay,” she said, and just like that, he had her number. Just like that, the day went from good to great. He put it into his phone, sent her a text that said, Hey, it’s Matt, now you’ve got my number, then pocketed the phone as they reached her classroom door. She made it in as the bell rang, leaving Matt alone in the hall, late for the second time that day. But walking to his English class, he didn’t care about the tardiness one bit.

  It was less than an hour before she texted him: Douglas Louis Chatfield, DOB 08/12/1979.

  He’d responded to the text with nothing more than a thumbs-up emoji. Professional investigators didn’t ask more questions than they needed to. Certainly not of clients. You nodded knowingly, as if you understood everything already, and you went to work. In today’s society, the thumbs-up emoji was the
equivalent of the knowing nod.

  Matt Bouchard had a PI client, and she was gorgeous.

  Bring on the seventh grade.

  20

  For a few blissful hours that night, all news was good and Leah’s focus was on the future. The first day of school had gone well for both Nick and Hailey. Nick had a lot of news that excited him: There would be a field trip on a three-masted schooner, which was way cooler than any field trip he’d taken in Kentucky; there was another Nick in his class who looked so similar to him that other kids joked about them being clones; he’d won races in gym; the food was better here than in Kentucky; his teacher was funny. Small things that were huge in the world of an eleven-year-old boy, and the accumulation of positive experiences filled Leah with hope.

  Hailey spoke less and with a more reserved demeanor, but her reports weren’t discouraging. She thought she was ahead of the math class she’d been placed in but said that was okay because she didn’t want to have to stress over it this semester. The kids were okay. The teachers were okay. Everything was okay, fine, neutral. She wouldn’t condemn anything or praise it. She just wanted to close her bedroom door and FaceTime with her friends back home.

  There were no complaints, though, which was good.

  Then, after dinner, an e-mail arrived from the law office of Everett J. Spoonhour.

  As we deal with the sudden and tragic loss of Everett, we hope that you will understand the gravity of the situation and remain patient. Recommendations for new counsel are available upon request, and we will work to expedite as necessary. As the staff and family deal with this tragedy, please reach out with questions only if they are urgent. We greatly appreciate your patience and your sympathy.