Never Far Away

by Michael Koryta

  The kids fell asleep early, which amazed Leah. The unfamiliar place, the rapid transitions, the absence of creature comforts, and still they slept.

  She couldn’t take much reassurance in that, though. They were exhausted and they were learning to adapt to days of disruption. Ever since Doug had died, their lives had been a collection of curveballs and changeups. Everything you did not want for your children.

  And still she was putting them through it.

  Now wasn’t the time to worry about mistakes already made, though. Now was the planning hour, a time for cool minds and steady hands.

  And loaded guns.

  She could see the outline of Ed’s tent, lit by the soft glow of a flashlight or headlamp. He’d set up camp along the shore and he hadn’t returned. She knew he was waiting on her. Waiting on the truth. She added wood to the stove once more even though it was warm in the cramped cabin now, then looked at her children, watching their breathing patterns. Slow and steady. Lost to sleep. Nick’s hand trembled and his leg twitched. Deep sleep, she hoped, and not nightmares.

  She opened the door and slipped out into the night. The brushstroke smears of the Milky Way had the clarity you saw only when you were removed from all sources of urban light. She’d learned to love it but once it had scared her and she held that memory close now, imagining this place as her children saw it. For a few seconds she stood outside the cabin with the door cracked and breathed the night air and listened. The kids did not stir, not even when the loon cried again, the haunting call echoing from within the blackness.

  Leah closed the door behind her and walked down to the shoreline to tell someone the truth of her identity for the first time.

  Ed’s headlamp moved within the orange and gray Kelty tent and then there came the soft rasp of the zipper and he pushed through the fly and crawled out of the tent. He turned off the headlamp before he looked at her. She didn’t know how to take that; was it a courtesy, not wanting to blind her with a harsh glare, or was it that he didn’t want to see her face?

  She sat on the grass beside the tent, the ground cool and damp beneath her, and pulled her knees up to her chest. He sat beside her in almost the same position. For a time, they simply sat and looked at the sky and did not speak.

  Finally, she said, “Thank you.”

  “Sure,” he said, as if the favor he’d done had been routine.

  “And I’m sorry,” she continued. Her throat was thick and she had to swallow and wait to speak again. He gave her the time, silent, his head leaned back so that he could see the stars. “I am sorry, Ed,” she repeated.

  “Don’t ever apologize for needing help.” He looked at her then. “But that’s not what you’re apologizing for.”

  “Not just that,” she admitted.

  He nodded and looked skyward again.

  “How bad is it?” he asked.

  “Bad. I’ll keep you out of it, though. I mean, from here on out.” She felt ridiculous, saying that. Keep him out of it? He was the only person on the planet who knew where to find her. “I’ve got to trust you with the truth. I should have earlier. I think. There is a part of me that’s still unsure about that, but it has nothing to do with you. There’s a part of me that has been unsure about everything that I’ve done since Hailey called.” She paused, considered, and said, “And many of the things from a long time before Hailey called.”

  Ed said, “They’re your kids, aren’t they?”

  He stated it so flatly that she found herself merely nodding in the darkness. “They are. How do you know?”

  “I’d wondered since the first time I saw them. Hailey, in particular. She looks so much like you. Carries herself like you. Everything tucked away, hidden.”

  This observation brought the shock that the previous one should have. “That’s how I seem to you? Hiding things?”

  “You’re…a bit more than private. Let’s just say that. I always thought I’d get through the walls and the defenses in time and that when I did, there’d be a story there. I expected something about another man. Insecurity, I guess. But then I met the kids, and…” He shrugged.

  “And you knew that I was lying to you,” she said, her shame a physical thing, a weight behind her breasts like a cold stone.

  “I didn’t know that. I wondered, that’s all. Until today, I wondered.”

  “Why’d you come, then? Why did you help?”

  “Because of you. Because of them.”

  She closed her eyes, sealing out the starlight. “I didn’t know what else to do. I could have driven, but I was afraid of the car. I could have flown commercial or taken a bus or a train, but…same problem. No trust, lots of fear.”

  “It’s that serious?”

  “Yes.” She opened her eyes.

  “What did you do?”

  “The right thing after the wrong thing,” she said. “That’s what it felt like at the time, at least. And then it was all the wrong things. For a lot of years.”

  He waited for her to make sense of it for him. She sat and breathed the breeze off the lake and tried to remember Florida and Doc Lambkin and Rae. Tried to remember her husband and her children and how they had been and how she had been.

  It was harder than it should have been to remember those things.

  “There is a man who wants to kill me,” she said. “A few of them now. They’ve wanted to kill me for a very long time.”

  Ed rocked a little but didn’t speak.

  “You don’t believe me?” she asked.

  “I believe it. You called and told me to fly you up here and to bring guns and not say a word to anyone about it. Yeah, I believe you, Leah.”

  “Nina.”

  “What?” He faced her in the dark.

  “My name is Nina,” she said, and then she shook her head. “No, it’s not. It was, but it isn’t anymore. I don’t even feel like it belongs to me now. I’m Leah, but I was Nina, and Nina is the problem. She was then, and she is now. She’s a threat to those kids.” She felt pressure behind her eyes and she hugged her knees to her chest. Talking of herself in the third person made it more real, somehow. More personal. The weight of bad decisions mounting. “I don’t know how to tell it,” she whispered.

  “The way it comes out,” Ed said. “Just get started and let it come.”

  She closed her eyes and told it.

  Talk of Corson Lowery led to talk of Bleak and Randall Pollard and then she was talking of her husband, dead now, gone so long to her but really dead now, and then she was explaining Doc Lambkin and then she was with Rae Johnson and her children on the last flight of their lives. Images rose and fell and she tried to explain each one and in the explanations she found more images and they all scattered out before her like the stars, some clear, others blurred, some joined in a pattern, others adrift.

  Ed let her talk. He sat with his arms wrapped around his knees and he rocked and watched the night sky and did not say a word until she fell silent, exhausted and overwhelmed.

  Then he said, “There is truly no one you trust to help? No agency, no department, no—”

  “There is no one,” she said. “I have called the only people I believe I can trust. You and Lambkin. He won’t answer now.”

  Silence.

  “I know it sounds impossible,” she said. “But if you knew the reach Lowery has, Ed…”

  “I understand,” he told her, but of course he did not. He couldn’t. That wasn’t his fault.

  “So I ran,” she said. “Again. With your help, I ran. The only difference is…this time I took them with me.”

  “When will you tell them?” he asked, as if it weren’t a question of whether she would tell them, only when.

  She pressed her palms together and bowed her head, supplicant to the night sky. “I don’t know. I want them to be safe first. I do not know if I can ever keep them safe.”

  “You’re sure these men are coming for you?” he asked. His tone not disbelieving but not convinced either.

  “They
’re coming,” she said. “It will take them a while, I think. But probably not as long as I hope. When they get here, I’ll need to be alone.”

  “That’s insane.”

  “No.” She shook her head. “I’ll need to be alone.”

  “To do what, Leah?”

  She raised her head. “To kill them,” she said. “Or to die. It will go one way or the other. I don’t know which. I just know that I won’t make it easy on them.”

  Even in the blackness, his shock was evident.

  “Hailey and Nick can’t be here,” she said. “They never should have been. I knew that then and I should have known it now, but when she called and told me that Doug was dead, when she told me they were alone…” Her voice broke. She breathed cold air in through her nose and out through her mouth. “I made a mistake then. I should have known better than to risk…infecting them.”

  “They were orphaned. They’d have gone to…I don’t even know. They had no one.”

  Orphaned. How that word could cut.

  She shifted, loosening the muscles of her lower back, which had tensed while she was telling the story. Orphaned. Yes, they had been.

  But could she send them away? It seemed unbearable. It would be worse now than it had been then, and that had been the worst thing of her life. Maybe she wouldn’t be able to bear it this time. She wasn’t sure, but she didn’t know that it mattered one way or the other.

  “I rushed,” she told him. “Hotheaded and afraid. I did not slow down and cool my mind when I needed to. I rushed and I made a mistake, but I can fix that. Up here, I can fix that.”

  She told him what she needed then. It would take two trips for him. Neither would take long: she needed a satellite phone, and then she needed him to fly her children away from here.

  Away from her. The place was not the problem.

  “The plane has a radio,” he said. “You don’t need a sat phone. We can make radio contact.”

  “I can’t use the plane for contact, because I need the plane to be gone,” she said. “I need to be alone. Just me and the satellite phone.” And the guns, she thought but did not say.

  “Who are you calling from the phone?”

  The tears rose again and her throat constricted but she willed the words to keep coming. “There is a woman they know and love in Louisville,” she said. “Her name is Mrs. Wilson. How perfect is that? So Midwestern, so trustworthy. So safe. I met her. I loved her too. She baked me cookies.” She tried to laugh but the laugh was a sob. “I will call her, and I will tell her where they will be, and she will come for them, I think.” She paused and shook her head. “No. I don’t think she will come for them; I know that she will. She wants them, and they want her. They all want that for each other. I was wrong to take it away. I can fix it, though. I can still fix it.”

  Ed said, “Leah—” but she lifted a hand and cut him off.

  “I will call her and tell her to come for them and she will do that. Then you’ll take them out of here, take them to her, and I will stay behind.” She felt a tremor in her jaw muscle, her body rebelling against the effort of remaining rigid. Remaining strong. “Then I’ll make my second call.”

  “Who?” he whispered. “Lambkin? Or someone else?”

  “Someone else,” she said, and she left it at that, because she knew he would object to the plan if he heard it, and she loved him too much to fight over what had to be done. She had asked too much of him already. He did not need to know that when she was sure the children were with the lovely Mrs. Wilson, Leah would call J. Corson Lowery directly and tell him where she was.

  Let him come then.

  Let them all come.

  A mother would fight, a mother would kill, a mother would die if she had to. All of those things could be done; all she knew was that she would not fight from desperation in front of the den, the last defense. If she died, she would die alone.

  “Will you help me again?” she whispered. “I have no right to ask, but…will you help me again?”

  He touched her leg, and in the touch was the answer. She put her hand over his and it was only then, when warm dampness from the back of his hand met her palm, that she learned he had wept at some point.

  The tears he’d wiped silently away in the darkness dried against her skin.

  They sat like that and finally she said, “I’ll have the morning with them. Don’t rush back, please. Take a little time coming back. Let me have the morning with them.”

  “What will you tell them?” he asked softly. “All of it?”

  “Not all of it,” she said. “Just…enough.”

  He didn’t ask her what enough was, and she was grateful for that, because of course she did not know.

  33

  The man with the deep voice who’d grabbed Matt drove while the other one rode shotgun. Matt was in the back seat, and to anyone who passed by, he’d look normal enough, because no one could tell that his ankles were tied and there was a thin cord binding his right hand to the door panel.

  There weren’t many passing cars, though. It was full night and they were somewhere north of Bangor.

  The car was a Tahoe with a deep tint to the windows. It was a comfortable car and it was late and the road rolled softly beneath them and the two men up front did not say much. He almost felt like he could sleep, which seemed impossible. They hadn’t given Matt many instructions once they’d gotten him in the car, which had been parked in the lot at Shirttail Point above the river, a straight shot from Hailey’s backyard. On the fast walk down to the car they’d given him plenty of instructions, telling him not to run or scream, telling him what would happen if he did.

  They didn’t need to say much once he saw the back of the tailgate, where shotguns and rifles waited. They were ready to fight an army.

  There is something wrong with my family, Hailey had said.

  Yes. It seemed like there was.

  He’d cried for a while between home and Bangor. He’d tried to do it quietly to avoid angering his captors, but even when they heard him they didn’t say anything. They didn’t seem to have any interest in him at all, which was almost more terrifying in its own way. He hadn’t thought that he could stop crying or shaking at that point, but then they drove on through the night and eventually the tears dried and the trembling stopped.

  He tried to notice things then. Tried to observe anything and everything that he would need to tell the police.

  You’ll never talk to the police. They’re going to kill you, and you’ll never talk to anyone again.

  But they hadn’t killed him yet.

  As even the little towns fell away and darkness overwhelmed the road, he began to actually wish that they would talk more. Listening gave him a distraction. In the silence he had nothing to do but imagine what lay ahead.

  He thought he knew the place, at least. They were headed up Maine, toward the Allagash. All he knew about Hailey’s destination was that it was north of Moosehead, but the men who’d kidnapped him seemed to understand more than that. They seemed to know exactly where they were going.

  Behind him, the big guns clinked beneath the folded blue tarp that hid them from sight.

  The man in the passenger seat, the white man with the two different eyes, had done most of the talking, but the driver seemed to be in charge. Matt wasn’t sure why he felt this so certainly, because that man did not say much at all. Maybe that was why. When he spoke, it mattered. The other man would sometimes fill the air with talk but the driver never said anything unless it was a point of action. I am going to turn off here. I don’t want to stay on the highway. Things like that, dispensed rarely and briefly.

  The white man had said a name at some point, but Matt had been crying then, and he’d missed it. It had reminded him of something silly, but he couldn’t put his finger on it. They’d been talking about making the call and at first he’d thought that meant a decision on whether to kill him or let him live, but then he realized it was an actual call, a phone call. By the time h
e understood that, the name had come and gone and he was left with only that vague sense of a silly association that he could no longer remember. The name had started with an L, he thought. He hoped that they would say it again.

  The roads were narrower here, flanked with trees. He’d made a few trips to the perimeter of the Allagash Wilderness with his parents, once for a rafting trip and once to have an experience, as his dad had said. The experience they’d had turned out to be two flat tires on a logging road and it had ended with a protracted silence between his mother and father. That was the farthest Matt had ever been into the Allagash.

  Thinking of his mother made him remember his rules for trouble. Notice things, that was rule one. Be observant. Pay attention to details.

  He tried, but there was not much about the car that seemed unique. He knew the make and model and that it was black. The seats were leather. It smelled strange. Not like a new car, but sterile. A rental, probably. There was nothing in the back seat and in the third row there was nothing but the guns and the blue tarp. They’d made a point of letting him see the guns. That had been the driver’s choice, actually. He’d been the one to pull back the blue plastic tarp and let Matt take a long look at all of those glistening rifle barrels and curved triggers, the scopes and the bolts and the magazines. He had watched Matt see all of this, and when he was sure that the message had been absorbed, he pulled the tarp over the guns and smoothed it with his hand. Everything he did was efficient, crisp. Silent.

  They’d taken Matt’s phone from him but not his watch. He didn’t want to illuminate it and draw their attention, but it was too dark to make out the hands. He tilted it to face the road and waited for an oncoming car.

  And waited some more. Just when he was about to give up on their ever passing another car, headlights finally rose. In the instant before they flashed by, he saw the watch face. It was 10:48. His parents would have gone looking for him at least two hours ago. By now, they would have called the police. If the police had been called by nine or even nine thirty, what would the neighborhood look like now? He imagined the scene with flashing colored lights and crime scene tape and roadblocks. It probably wasn’t like that at all, though. It was probably just the police chief, Adam Thomas, and a couple of his officers calling Matt’s friends and walking the streets, telling his parents to calm down, kids ran away sometimes.