Never Far Away Read online

  “Beaming back to earth,” she said and angled the nose down. Beneath them, two white sails glistened on the blanket of dark water—Hobie Cats racing across the lake.

  “Nice work. You really should get licensed to fly,” Ed said, and while he meant it supportively and with admiration, Leah’s smile slipped.

  “What?” Ed said. “You seem to love flying this thing. If we can double the pilots without doubling the pay…”

  “I know,” Leah said. “It just doesn’t feel like my thing.”

  He was watching her with a furrowed brow, puzzled, because Ed Levenseller was young but intuitive, and he knew joy when he saw it. Leah could pretend to have only a passing interest in the plane, but her eyes and her body sent another message. She was not merely joyful up here, she was home.

  “There’s a difference between doing it for pleasure and doing it for money,” she offered by way of explanation.

  “I guess,” Ed said. “But isn’t the idea to do what you love? If someone is willing to pay you to do what you love, well, you’re ahead of most of the world.”

  “Yes,” she said. “You are. But I love to guide and I don’t love to shoot. You know the difference there.”

  He didn’t push it. The silence that followed was comfortable, not the product of disagreement, just a pause in a long-running conversation. They were both lost in their own thoughts but joined in the moment by the soft shudder of the aluminum shell that swept them over a wilderness that was so beautiful, you had to struggle to believe it had the capacity to harm.

  Beautiful things always did, though. Somewhere just beneath them, north of Lily Bay, were the remains of a B-52 Stratofortress that in 1963 had left a Massachusetts air force base and crashed into Elephant Mountain. Several crew members had survived the crash only to perish in a blizzard. All this had happened while they were serving stateside during peacetime, flying with the lights of bucolic New England towns twinkling below them. Only hours later, they were freezing to death in subzero weather, still stateside but no doubt feeling very far from home and peace.

  You never knew what was coming your way. All the same, though, flying above this wilderness with the sun starting to gleam red behind Mount Washington? It was hard not to let the moment hold you.

  Leah banked north, Ed’s hand warm on hers, and they flew on alone, together.

  4

  A person can be in one place and span many. It is possible because the present is shaped by the past and the future, buffered by them like guardrails. Or the sides of a funnel.

  This is Leah Trenton, asleep in the slanting sunlight of late afternoon, her lover’s breath on her neck. This was Nina Morgan, in a hospital room in a Florida city, her second child in her arms, the baby’s breath impossibly warm against her skin, the preternatural heat of newborn life pushing forward like wind on a fire.

  While Leah slept in Maine, a dead woman’s life called for her. The past left the earth, chased blackness through space along an invisible thread, found a satellite, angled back down, and pierced the present with a scream.

  Leah jerked awake, the sheet falling from her breasts, Ed’s body going rigid beside her.

  “What is that?” he muttered, half asleep.

  “Don’t know,” she said, but she did. Inside an Osprey backpack hung on a hook beside the front door, an orange satellite messenger blared, an awful tone somewhere between a cheap alarm clock and a siren.

  Leah swung out of bed and fumbled for the clothes that had been discarded on the floor, clothes still damp with sweat and sawdust. A day of labor on cabin one had been followed by a welcome diversion that began in an ice-cold shower and moved to the ancient bunk that was now equipped with a new mattress and flannel sheets. Flannel in June. Summer in Maine. A day of hard work and loud laughs and clear eyes on the future.

  The messenger bleated again, and even as Leah tugged on her tank top and buttoned her jeans she was thinking, A cruel mistake, this is such a cruel mistake.

  Ed was rising, but she pushed him back. “It’s mine,” she said. “I’ve got it.”

  “Got what?”

  “Low-battery alarm,” she said, but she’d been monitoring and maintaining the batteries in the device for a decade, and she knew that it was not a low battery. The satellite messenger was outdated but functional. It could receive incoming texts from anyone who knew the number. There was only one person on earth who knew the number.

  A mistake, she insisted to herself as she tugged the pack down and fumbled the zipper open. The messenger blinked green lights at her. She pulled it free, staring at the screen, where an outdated, pixelated display showed a phone number. The number was the only message, like you’d see on a pager from the 1990s.

  A pause while she stared, and then it went off again.

  “Batteries,” she said as Ed propped himself up in bed, blinking at her in sleepy confusion. “Sorry. Go back to sleep.”

  She took her cell phone from the kitchen table and then opened the door and stepped outside, the satellite messenger in one hand and the cell phone in the other. Outside the cabin, Leah’s dog, Tessa, whined and rose from her own slumber in a patch of sunlight, loose grass sticking to her fawn-colored coat. Leah had found Tessa under an abandoned barn five years earlier. The dog was of unknown breed origins, with a boxer’s broad chest and stance, the muzzle and ears of a corgi, and legs that seemed to have been appropriated from an elk. Tessa, like Leah, had come to embrace a life of minimal electronic intrusions. The sound of the pager concerned her in the way no natural noise ever did.

  “It’s okay, girl,” Leah said, but her voice was so wooden that the dog took no reassurance from it and instead hurried to Leah’s side and pressed against her thigh, body rigid, tail stiff, whining through closed jaws.

  “Let’s check it out,” Leah said, trying to lighten her tone. “Come on. Let’s check it out.”

  She didn’t rush. If anything, she moved more methodically. Walked down the dirt and gravel driveway and toward the lake, aiming for a point between two towering pines that threw long, angular shadows across the rippled water. That spot, where the browned fallen needles formed a soft pocket between the rocks, was the only place on the property that had reliable cell phone coverage. She waited until she was standing at the water’s edge before looking at her phone.

  One bar.

  This was a luxury. Cabins two through six would have no bars. But here, she could make a call. All it took was the courage to dial the number.

  Impossible. Cruel joke. Don’t let yourself think of them. Don’t let yourself believe it is about them.

  Tessa whined again, high and insistent.

  “We’re fine,” Leah said. “Just fine.”

  But down in the center of her chest, there was a fluttering like a hummingbird’s wings.

  The number. You’re going to miss it, Leah, you’re going to lose it and never know whether it was real.

  The number was still on the display. Area code 502. Where was 502? She’d been through so many area codes over the years, and most weren’t as broadly helpful for location as her current one, 207, which covered the entire state of Maine.

  Her hand was shaking so badly that it took her two tries to enter the number.

  Cool your mind, Leah. Cool your mind.

  She took a breath, hit the dial button, put the phone to her ear, and waited.

  One ring. Two. Three. Four, and this was wonderful because she would get voice mail and maybe that would explain the mistake without Leah needing to talk to—

  “Hello?”

  The voice was young, female, hushed. Whispered, almost, as if the speaker didn’t want to be overheard.

  Leah said, “Hailey?” and then she was sitting on her ass in the pine needles without knowing how she got there, legs slack, hands trembling.

  “Aunt Leah?”

  Leah knew the rules, knew how her children had been taught to think of her, but still, Aunt Leah was a lance of pain. No, she wanted to say, I am not Aunt L
eah, I am your mother. I brought you into the world. I have missed you every day with every fiber of my being, and if you could just call me Mom one time, just once, it would change my life. It would be all that I’d ever need.

  Instead, she said, “Yes, it’s…yes, this is Aunt Leah.” A bloodletting, those words. “What’s wrong?”

  “Dad told me I had to call you. I don’t even know you, and Dad made such a big deal about it over and over, but I don’t know why I am supposed to call you!”

  Hailey wasn’t supposed to call Leah. Not ever. Not unless…“Hailey, calm down, it’s okay. What—”

  “No, it’s not,” the girl said, the whisper falling away, her voice rising. “It is not okay! My dad is dead and I don’t know who you are and none of that is okay!”

  Dead. The word landed on Leah with a numbing sensation, more sedating than shocking. “Who killed him?” Leah asked. “Hailey, do you know who—”

  “What? Nobody killed him! He was in a car accident. He was driving to get doughnuts and he…he…” She was starting to cry now, and Leah heard someone else in the background, a voice calling from the distance, calling Hailey’s name. “We’re alone,” Hailey whispered between sobbing breaths. “He’s dead, and we’re alone.”

  “You’re not alone. I’m here,” Leah said. “And I’m going to make sure you’re safe.”

  Again, the background voice called Hailey’s name. There was a rustling, a muted cry of One second, Mrs. Wilson! and then a soft crunching that Leah identified as footsteps. She tried to picture the scene, to imagine where her daughter walked, what surrounded her, who surrounded her. What she looked like. Once, she’d had Leah’s dark complexion and brown eyes and angular jawline and seemed destined to have her father’s height. So long ago, now.

  “Hailey?” she whispered. “You still there?”

  “Why did I have to call you? I don’t know you. Dad made me promise and practice and it was awful, because he always said, If anything ever happens to me, and I didn’t want to imagine that anything could, could…” She stopped and then disintegrated into tears.

  Doug really did keep his promise, Leah thought numbly. It would have been so much easier for him not to. “Your father was looking out for your safety,” she said. “That’s why he made you learn what to do. So you could take care of yourself and your brother if…”

  If anything ever happened to him sat unspoken between them now.

  Dead. Doug was dead.

  Leah squeezed her eyes shut, her pain for her daughter a physical thing as she imagined the moment, imagined the thirteen-year-old girl—child—hearing the news of her father’s death and still having the wherewithal to deliver on the instruction he’d given her.

  “Is Nick safe?” Leah asked, and she could almost feel her infant son’s warmth against her chest right then.

  For a moment, she thought Hailey had hung up. Then her daughter’s voice returned, softer and more controlled than before.

  “He’s safe. Daddy was alone.” Then, as if embarrassed by using the more childish term, she corrected it: “Dad was all alone. And now we are too. My mom died so long ago I don’t even remember her, and now my dad.”

  So long ago I don’t even remember her.

  Leah tried to speak and couldn’t. She wet her lips, gathered herself. Sensing the agitation, Tessa licked Leah’s ear, offering comfort.

  “I’m so sorry, honey,” Leah said. “I’m so, so sorry. But I promise I’ll be there for you. You’ll both be safe. I’m on my way.”

  “I don’t even know you!”

  “I understand that, and I’m sorry about it. I should have visited.” These words were hard to get out; how badly had she wished to visit or simply watch them from a distance? “I know that I should have. But I’m going to come for you now.”

  “I don’t need you to come for us!”

  “Yes, you do,” Leah said, keeping her voice as calm as possible even as her hummingbird heart intensified its wing speed. “Hailey, you really do. And you know that you do, because your dad made that clear, didn’t he? He taught you how important this is. If he hadn’t, then you wouldn’t have called.”

  Soft sobs came but no words. At least she hadn’t hung up, though, and no one had taken the phone from her—yet. Mrs. Wilson, whoever she was, didn’t sound like the type who’d let the call go on for long, though.

  “The number you called me from,” Leah said, “is it a cell phone or a landline? Is it your phone or does it belong to someone else?”

  “My cell phone.”

  “Okay. Perfect. That’s perfect. I have your number now, and I will call you back. I’m coming to help. If you need me, use the first number again. I will always call back. Always.”

  “He’s dead,” Hailey said, the sobs returning. “He’s dead, and we don’t have anyone.”

  “You’ll have me. I know that doesn’t mean much right now, but if you can cool your mind and remember you’ll have me—”

  “What did you just say?”

  “You need to remember—”

  “No. You told me to cool my mind.”

  “What I meant was—”

  “I know what you meant. Dad always said that. He told us it was my mom’s expression.”

  The distance between them seemed greater now.

  “It was your mom’s expression, yes,” she said. “It just stuck with me. When you’re in trouble, you need a cool mind. Keep one for me now, okay?”

  She managed to seal her lips before the rest of the words charged out, managed not to say: And you need to watch out for strangers. This is the most important job you will ever have. Three strangers in particular. One will be tall and tan and have white hair. He’ll probably be dressed very nicely, a suit and shined shoes. He wears glasses. Or he used to. He’ll look like a kindly grandfather. The second one you need to watch for is a pale man with different-colored eyes. His left eye is green and his right eye is brown. He’ll be younger than the old man, and he’ll be shorter but much stronger. And then there will be the one we all called Bleak even though his real name was Marvin Sanders; he was just Bleak, period. I don’t know how exactly to describe him other than that he will look like he deserves the name. If you see him, you run. You take your brother and run.

  But she couldn’t say that. Those men wouldn’t be coming for Hailey and Nick. Those men had no interest in the children of the deceased Doug Chatfield. They’d been interested only in a woman named Nina Morgan, also deceased, dead for almost a decade now.

  Leah said, “You’ve already done such a good job, honey. You did exactly what you were supposed to do. And I’ll be coming for you.”

  “It won’t help. I shouldn’t have called.”

  “Yes, you should have. You did exactly the right—”

  Leah was not surprised when the girl hung up. She thought that made plenty of sense, actually.

  My mom died so long ago I don’t even remember her.

  For a few moments, Leah sat in the pine needles with the phone in her hand, the wind freshening off the lake and shivering the boughs overhead. Tessa whined, and Leah lifted her hand and scratched Tessa’s ears absently, attempting to soothe her. Tessa knew something was wrong, though. You couldn’t fool a dog.

  “Who was that?”

  Leah turned to see Ed standing on the porch, shirtless, his lean torso scratched from a splintered shim that had sliced through his shirt that morning. That morning, back in the hours of laughter and Leah Trenton. An old life now.

  Another old life.

  “It was my—” She caught herself. “My niece.” The word like bitter bile on her tongue. “There’s been an accident, and my brother—my sister’s husband—is dead. My brother-in-law is dead.”

  She would learn to say the words right.

  She stood up and looked away from Ed, back to the satellite messenger, still astonished that it had been used. Doug had taught Hailey the plan. Had made her learn it, had driven its importance home so that even in the worst moments o
f her life, she had executed it.

  For ten years, Leah had kept the batteries in the satellite messenger charged, just in case. It had been more ritual than reality. Each charging and each software update a communion, wafer on the lips, wine on the tongue.

  Forgive me, Father.

  Ed stepped off the porch and walked across the lawn toward her, grass clinging to his bare feet. “Oh, Leah. I’m sorry. Who is with them?”

  “What?” she said stupidly, blinking at him.

  “Who’s with them now?”

  “With…”

  “Your niece and nephew.”

  She saw their faces so clearly, though all of the photographs had been hidden long ago. Her children. Her babies. She looked at Ed, processing his question in low gear, grinding through the crumbling soil of her thoughts, and said, “I have no idea. But I need to go to them now.”

  “Where?” he asked as he reached her.

  “Area code 502,” she said.

  He cocked his head, stared at her with confusion and uneasiness. “You need to sit down?”

  “No.”

  “Let’s sit down,” he said as he took her arm, talking to her as if she’d escaped an asylum and must now be returned to it. “You look…kind of in shock, okay? Just sit down.”

  “Do you know where that is?” she said, not sitting. The wind was blowing and the wind was cool and she was grateful for that. She needed it like ice on a fevered forehead.

  “Do I know where area code 502 is? No.” He shook his head, still holding her arm, still looking at her with that wariness. She closed her eyes and breathed the wind.

  Cool your mind.

  It was my mom’s expression.

  “I’ll need to find out,” she said, eyes still closed. “I’ve got to get back to town. Fast.”

  “You know where they are,” he said. “Leah? You need to take a minute here. Get your thoughts—”

  “I don’t know.”