They Almost Always Come Home (27 page)

“Let me go on ahead, just to see if this spot’s worth pursu-

ing,” Frank says.

I look at Jen, wondering which of us will be the first to

object.

“Besides,” he adds, “nature calls.”

Again?

He vaults out of his canoe onto the lowest and closest pile of

rocks and ties his canoe to the branch of a low-hanging cedar. Before we can voice our objections, Frank disappears into the underbrush.

We sit with the paddle handles resting across our laps. The

blades dangle over the side of the vessel where they can drip without affecting our personal comfort. “Libby?”

“Yes?”

“Do you know the name of a good urologist for Frank? That

man has a genuine problem.”

“Agreed. I’ll talk to Pauline when we get home. Maybe she

can convince him to see somebody.”

In cahoots with Pauline for Frank’s health. Bonding over

urination issues. It’s a start, I guess.

I’m making plans for what happens when we get home.

The three of us. Once we get past the bodyless funeral. I’ll

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have more time to devote to Jen’s needs. I know the way to her oncologist’s office. I can pull out my recipes for mild foods she can tolerate during chemo, if necessary, and casseroles Brent and the girls like.

When Jen’s energy wanes, I’ll take her girls shopping and invite them over to make cookies and teach them Cat’s Cradle and any jump rope moves I remember and can pull off without wrenching something important to me.

The sun is too bright. Blinding. It reveals everything. The sunburn on the backs of my hands. The smudges from last night’s campfire on my pants. And the distance my heart is from home.

The gentle waves rock us like a kind hand on a cradle while we wait for Frank’s return from the men’s room. The breeze whispers a snatch of heaven’s lullaby—“It’ll be okay. It’s going to be okay.”

Lord, I can only believe that because You said so.

Jen must have heard the lullaby too and drifted with me. She and I startle in unison when we hear a branch do a drum riff in the woods.

It’s Frank, crashing out of the brush with a wild-eyed look on his unshaven face. He’s breathing unnaturally. Great gulps of air. “I . . . I found . . . my boy.”

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Y
ou found him?” Jen’s voice and mine hit the same decibel level.

He draws another stomachful of air. “I found . . . his . . .

canoe. I didn’t . . . I couldn’t . . . see him. Saw . . . footprints.”

“Oh, Lord Jesus!” I’m ashore before Jen by a nanosecond.

Frank waves his arms like an agitated gorilla. “Tie it down!

Tie it down!”

“Jen!”

“Got it.” She snags the nylon rope attached to the nose of

the canoe just before it floats away to a happy life in oblivion.

As soon as I reach him, I grab Frank’s sleeves. “You found

his canoe? Where?”

“In the woods.”

“What?”

“No more than about thirty yards in. Upright. And—”

“What? What is it?”

Jen’s arm around my shoulders helps lower my heart rate by

a beat or two per minute.

“The canoe . . .” Frank says. He swallows whatever chunky

thing had camped in his throat. “It’s been there a while.”

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Jen squints at him, as if that will help draw clarity from his words. “How can you tell?”

“Upright, Frank?” The words tumble out of me as realization dawns. Why would Greg abandon his canoe in the woods? And why upright? “Was anything in it? His equipment? Packs?” Jen adds, “There’s no trail here. How did he get the canoe into the woods in the first place?”

“You said it had been there a while. What did you mean by that?”

Frank takes a step back from us, turns toward the woods, then back again. “His . . . his stuff’s in there, some of it, any- way. And it’s been . . . messed with.”

“By whom? Or what?” I can’t let my imagination drum up an answer. I can’t.

“It was his food pack. Bear, I suspect.”

Jen tightens her grip on me and then says, “Shouldn’t we be moving faster?”

My legs try to perform their duty without the benefit of bones. Not the way God designed things. My lungs are frozen on inhale mode. How long before I pass out?

“I don’t think there’s any need to hurry,” he says with fune- real solemnity. “And . . .”

Frank’s hesitations may drive me the last few feet to insanity.

“And what?”

Jen pats my forearm with her free hand. Is she about to apologize to Frank for the edge in my voice? I pull away from her and ask him again, “And what?”

What happened to the tan Frank developed on the trip? It’s gone.

“I looked around the immediate area. Not much for foot- prints. No more clues.”

He would tell us if there was blood, right?

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“We have to look farther,” I tell him, annoyed he hadn’t

thought of it himself.

“Yes, of course,” he says. “But in light of what the contents

of his canoe look like, it might be best if I . . . if I went on alone.”

“No!”

“Libby, it’s not pretty.”

“No! You’re not going alone, for a hundred thousand

reasons.”

Jen straightens her shoulders and adds, “You’re looking at

two of them.”

Every hard edge on Frank’s face softens like glass at its

melting point. “Now look, I love you women.” He does?

“But you have no idea what we might find.”

We can imagine. I’m trying not to, but—

Jen presses her hands to her stomach. A pain? “Frank, we

can’t stay here and wait. Please understand. We have to go with you. We’ll go crazy either way.”

Frank eyes us as if calculating the logistics of hog-tying

us to a tree to put us out of
his
misery. Are those tears in his eyes?

“I wish I could spare you this.”

“Frank,” I say, “sometimes there is no other way but

through.” Now.
Now
I learn this.

“Okay, how are we going to handle the search?” Jen asks.

“What do you want us to do? Spread out so we can cover more territory?”

Please say we have to stay together.

Frank lifts his hat from his head and wipes his forehead

with the back of his wrist. “I think we should hang close to one another. Then none of us will be alone when—”

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I can finish his sentence for him. “—when we find Greg’s remains.”

Jen’s head snaps in my direction. But she doesn’t correct me.

As we head into the woods together, Frank warns us to look before we step. Every bent twig or indentation in the moss could mean something.

“Frank? The footprints you saw?” Jen asks. “Yeah?”

“Human or—?”

“Human. One way.”

“What?”

“I saw a few footprints going in one direction only. In deeper. Nothing coming out.”

What did I eat for breakfast? I’ll know in a minute. It’s on its way back up.

“See?” he says, pointing.

Why do we see so few footprints? One here. Two several yards farther on.

He anticipates my question. “The sporadic appearance tells us they were made a while ago. Only the ones that were in deep moss or mud are still visible. The rest, the ones that con- nect the dots, might have been washed away with the rain we had.”

“Just a couple of days ago?”

“Or earlier,” he says. “A week ago.”

Silence seems a reasonable response to that possibility. The underbrush is so thick, I can’t imagine Greg trying to carry his canoe through this. He didn’t get far with it. I wish I could ask him if he just intended to store it until he found out if Lacy Falls was a glance-and-a-wow spot or if it warranted an overnight stay for which he’d need to haul the rest of his equipment on a subsequent plow-your-own portage.

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“Greg, what kept you from coming back for the canoe?”

A few steps later, I know.

The claw marks that made strips out of Greg’s heavy canvas

food pack and scattered licked-clean debris scream “bear.” We have to check for human remains.

Don’t we?

“Frank?” I manage to say through a pool of lumpy bile. “Is

there any chance he could have survived this?” I make a mega- phone with my hands. “Greg? Greg!”

All three of us scan the scene. A flicker of hope. That’s all

I’m looking for.

Frank bends to pull away a piece of wreckage. Is he moving

in slow motion?

Jen and I watch as he moves things I can’t imagine touching.

I shiver as he digs deeper into the refuse that once belonged to my husband. Then he stands, wipes his hands on his pants, and takes a shuddering breath. “This is a good sign.”

A good sign? “Frank, how can you say that?”

“No blood.”

Which the rain would have washed away.

“Or bones.”

Oatmeal. That’s what I had for breakfast. It’s boxing with

my epiglottis.

Frank paws through the debris again. “Things are

missing.”

Jen steps closer and wraps an arm around me.

Frank gestures with his hand toward the destruction. “I

think Greg took a few things with him and, for whatever rea- son, didn’t come back for the rest. I don’t see any trace of his tent or any pack but his food pack, or what’s left of it. That’s all the bear was interested in anyway.”

Crazed bears sometimes masquerade as merely hungry

bears. Even I know that. And crazed bears do nontraditional

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things, like attack innocent humans. It makes the news. And documentaries.

“Are you ready?” Frank interjects into my distress. “For what?”

“Following the trail,” he says, already engaged in the pro- cess. Jen’s right behind him.

“Wait a minute. Wait!”

The two turn in unison to face me, the uncooperative one. “If Greg wasn’t anywhere near here when this happened,” I say, gesturing toward the crime scene, “wouldn’t he have come back? Wouldn’t he have returned, discovered that his food pack was shredded, but take the canoe and hightail it for home?”

Birdsong—light, delicate, comical—mocks the silence that falls between us.

One Mississippi. Two Mississippi. How many seconds will pass before someone breaks free with a viable thought? What must a lost eternity feel like? These brief moments of silence stretch interminably around us, like a cloak too heavy for our shoulders, a dark river of reality too deep and threatening to risk crossing. Hopelessness burns like a fire that grows fiercer with everything I try to use to extinguish it.

Frank turns, wordlessly, and walks away from our pool of despair.

“Where are you going?” If I breathe next time I speak, the words might have some power behind them.

“You women can do what you want. Me? I’m following foot- prints until there are no more.”

Jen looks at me. Then we step into Frank’s wake. I don’t know about Jen, but I’m overcome with concern that I won’t survive our finding that final footprint.

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G
reg smelled ozone, saw only pale gray light filtering through the tent walls, felt a washboard of tree roots under his back and clammy dampness on exposed skin, heard an uneven per- cussion pattern on the tent roof, and tasted swamp sludge. The sludge had nothing to do with the rain. It testified to the inadvisability of hot-and-spicy beef sticks as a snack.

Rain. Good for the thirsty land. Bad for taking pictures.

Good for dispelling fire bans. Bad for finding dry wood. Good for reading. Good for thinking. Bad for making it home in time. Ah, there’s the rub.

That guy in
Cast Away
had a volleyball to talk to, to help

him wade through his thoughts. His friend, psychiatrist, and sanity barometer—Wilson. Greg looked around the interior of his rain-pelted tent. His ripe hiking boots. No. His quickly ripening sleeping bag? No. His flashlight? Possibility.

“What do you think, Sparky?” he asked it. “Could you use

a friend?”

After unsuccessfully trying to dodge raindrops on his visit

to the “men’s room,” Greg grabbed some snacks he’d tucked into his daypack and slipped back into the tent. If the rain kept up, that’s where he’d spend the rest of his day. The pages

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GREG

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of the book Greg brought with him were limp from the humid- ity, as if made of flannel rather than wood fibers. He propped his backpack behind him to form a makeshift recliner for a storm-long reading marathon but soon found himself drifting off to the rumble of approaching thunder.

********

In a blinding flash, hot streaks of pain shot through Greg’s body and exited through his eyes. A guttural scream scraped his throat raw. Into what abyss had he fallen? And why? A tympani crash of thunder shook his world. He swallowed convulsively but his saliva was gone.

Like an animal in a cramped cage, Greg thrashed and clawed at his inky confinement. What was that smell? Burnt nylon? Burnt feathers? Burnt flesh?

As awareness replaced panic, Greg stopped thrashing and fought to gain his bearings. Unimaginably deep blackness told him night descended long ago. Moonless. Comfortless. Thunder shuddered, too loud and too close. Where was the lightning? Lightning should have given him sporadic strobes of illumination to help him figure out what happened to him. Where was it?

He reached for his flashlight. His hand patted the tent floor. Nothing. Nothing as in no tent floor. His palm touched bare dirt and tree roots. Where was he? He scooted sideways in his sitting position until he could feel the tent walls—walls, but a hole in the floor?

The bulk pressed up against his leg was his sleeping bag. It stunk like a singed chicken—a reminder of summers at his grandmother’s. As he searched the bag for his flashlight, his hands landed on a patch that felt crisp to the touch. Crisp?