They Almost Always Come Home (17 page)

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CYNTHIA RUCHTI

I flip the canoe upright and move it out of the way so I

can dig in the pack. Buckles and zippers. Flaps and pockets. Where did I see that thing?

Jen has Frank’s pant leg torn open the rest of the way to the

knee by the time I reach them with the kit. The blood soaked into his sock ribbing seems significant to me. Jen blots at the wound with a piece of cloth. It looks like the T-shirt she wore under her outer layer a few minutes ago.

“Frank, sit down,” I urge. “Give Jen a better look at your

leg.”

“Can’t do that very well at the moment,” he says, massaging

his overgrown belly.

“What is that? What have you got in there?” I unbutton his

flannel shirt, chuckling at the oddity our trio makes at the moment. A pregnant old man. A young woman kneeling in front of his hairy, naked, bloody leg. And me . . . helpless, as usual.

He bats my hands away. “Careful, there,” he says. “Dry kin-

dling is worth its weight in government bonds on a day like today.”

Kindling? He stuffed his shirt with kindling?

Sure enough. At my promise to handle with care, he opens

his shirt and unloads his bundle of joy into my waiting arms. Crisp-dry pine needles, small cedar bows, and bits of bark.

“Where’d you find this in a rainstorm, Frank?”

“Hold still, Frank!” Jen’s and my comments hit him in an

unintentionally coordinated effort.

“I tripped over a stupid log that had no business being

there. Landed face first at the base of a big old cedar. I sup- pose I should thank the Lord the downed branches I landed in didn’t poke my eyes out.”

Thank the Lord, Frank? Bravo.

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His shirt now empty of its contents, Frank leans toward the ottoman-sized boulder to his left. Jen follows as he sits and elevates his leg to give her easier access to his wound. “The kindling, Frank?” I’m nothing if not persistent. “Under the young branches. Never would have discovered it if I hadn’t fallen.”

You’d think he’d found a new route to China.

“I bent myself over the branches and stuffed my shirt as full as I could.”

“Can you hold this, Libby?” Jen extends a roll of adhesive tape toward me. My arms bulge with the kindling. I hesitate to drop it on the damp ground, so I sidle closer to her and offer a pinkie finger. She slips the roll onto my finger, smiles, and returns to her paramedic tasks.

“I still don’t understand what took you so long, Frank.” Now that the fear is gone, my interrogation softens to the level of normal conversation.

“I guess, maybe, I might have lost consciousness for a min- ute or two.”

What?

“Frank!” Jen grabs the tape from me and slaps it over the gauze now cradling Frank’s leg wound. She turns her attention to his head.

“Frank, you have a goose egg the size of . . . of . . .” “Of a goose egg?” he offers.

“What did you do?”

“Oh, I almost forgot,” he adds without missing a beat. “Picked up some of these beauties too.” He digs into his shirt pocket and fishes out a handful of things that look like arthritic fingers. Dead ones. Long dead.

Can a concussion make someone fall in love with wood- land refuse?

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His eyes search ours for the appreciation he must expect to

find. “You know what these are, don’t you?” We city girls shake our heads no.

“Pieces of cedar root. Full of resin. Better than lighter fluid

for starting a fire.”

Okay, then. He still has a few marbles left. That’s a relief.

I survey the mess we’ve made. A listing tent. A wounded sol-

dier. A concern-weary makeshift paramedic with mud where her knees used to be. And me, my arms full of kindling I’m protecting as if it holds the potential to save our lives.

I think I know the answer, but ask anyway, “Are we staying

here for the night, Frank?”

“Probably best,” he says. His speech seems slurred. That

can’t be, can it?

“I’m feeling . . . a little . . . lightheaded,” he says and topples

off the boulder backwards into another nest of cedar boughs.

********

The cloth label sewn into the nylon of the tent flap says

it’s a four-person tent. If they sleep standing up, I suppose. Or crouch. None of us can stand up in here.

Jen and I somehow maneuvered Frank’s limp body into

the tent, where he now rests comfortably, if we can believe the words of a guy with a knot on both the front and back of his head. I retrieve the sleeping bags from our packs near the water’s edge. Sooner or later, Jen and I will need to haul it here to the campsite. Right now, Frank’s health is our main concern.

I stuff dry clothes into one of my sweatshirts and make

him a pillow for his neck. Jen swivels from checking for blood seepage through the dressing on his leg to watching his pupils and taking his pulse. How does she know this stuff?

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I ask her. She reminds me her mom was a nurse. Good enough for me.

Frank falls asleep, evidenced by his rumbling, deeply com- forting snores. Is it an old wives’ tale or are you not supposed to let a concussion victim fall asleep? As if we could stop him. Would it do me any good to look at the maps in his pocket? We can’t find our way out of here without Frank’s help. And even if we could, it would mean giving up our search for Greg. The thought slices through my heart with dagger-like effi- ciency, severing blood vessels and fleshy pockets of hope. We need a hero. I need my husband.

********

It’s taken most of the late afternoon to set up camp without Frank’s help. We’re grateful for the smallest favors—a flat rock on which to put the camp stove, a windless respite after the storm, air temperatures cool enough to make the bugs sluggish and less aggressive against the new flesh we offered them by invading their northwoods territory.

I’m grateful, too, that we had a couple of days under Frank’s leadership before we were thrust out on our own. Getting our food pack hoisted into a tall-enough tree will be a trick with- out Frank’s throwing arm to toss the rope over a tree branch. I wonder if Jen participated in women’s softball in college. We could use an ex-pitcher about now.

I dig in the food pack for our cooking utensils while Jen heads into the woods with a plastic bag of toilet paper. That reminds me of blueberries. What happened to them? It seems a shame to waste the very things that cost us precious time earlier in the day.

I look toward our canoe parking spots, trying to imagine where I might have tucked the bag of berries among the few

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remaining things we left at the water’s edge. The shore is less crowded than it should be. The pounding in my head matches that in the veins in my neck. Where’s the other canoe? “Jen?”

“Give me a minute,” she says from somewhere deep in the

trees.

“Jen, one of the canoes is missing.”

She must not have heard me. The fact that I choked on the

words might explain why.

What did I do? In my efforts to truck everything to the

campsite, did I dislodge it from its snug resting place? Was it not as snug as I assumed?

The thoughts accompany me to the water. I shield my eyes

against the sun that is too close to setting. Frantic to see that familiar green canoe, I search the water, close to shore at first, then in widening circles.

Oh, Lord! This is my fault. It’s all my fault! Everything! I’m

probably somehow to blame for Frank’s leg and his lumpy head
and—for all I know—global warming! Please bail me out again!
Please help me. I have to find that canoe. Oh, God Almighty! You
know where it is. Would you kindly . . . if You don’t mind . . . share
that information?

I’m running along the shore now, stumbling from my own

stupidity as much as the unevenness of the rocks.

How fast is the current here? Is there a current? Are we

still on a lake or is this a wide section of river? If it caught the current, it could be halfway home by now, like a dog bent on reaching its own yard before nightfall. The shoreline juts in and out of the water, as jagged as the torn edge of handmade paper.

And there it is. Our canoe. Bumping along the uneven edge,

the length of a football field away from me. What’s beyond that far arm of land that curves toward me? Open water?

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Hopelessness? If I follow the shore, the canoe could be long gone. We can’t survive one more disadvantage like this one. I fling off the hooded sweatshirt that’s kept me warm all afternoon and kick off my shoes. This is no Bahamian beach. My stocking-clad feet rebel against the cobbled lake floor as I wade in until the water’s deep enough for me to swim.

My water aerobics instructor from a decade ago would be embarrassed by my form. I know I’m flailing. Panic is never smooth. I try to remember to breathe, but I can’t lose sight of that green lifeboat.

How can water be this cold in the middle of summer? My lungs scream, “Unfair!” My legs grow numb after a few min- utes of wave-pounding. And the green slice of life retreats far- ther from me. How can that be? I’m moving, aren’t I?
God, help me!

That familiar cry.

Lord
,
You promised!
my mind shouts to the heavens above me.
You promised to help those who cry out to You!

My foot slams against something hard and unmoving, send- ing waves of pain up a leg I thought was numb. Is it shallow this far out into the little bay? I stumble to my feet, favoring the one that throbs. Knee-deep now. Not good. The water holds me back as I slog toward the canoe. Resistance is the last thing I need. Is this water or cold honey?

But I’m making progress at last. Slipping. Lunging. Grabbing an edge of kelly green.

“Libby, are you okay?” Jen’s shout is loud enough to alert the Toronto police half a province away. Why didn’t we think of that before?

I can’t answer or breathe. But I think I know what a stroke feels like. I grab the canoe by the scruff of its neck like I would a naughty puppy and proceed to walk it home.

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I know Jen will sympathize. She’ll make me something hot

to drink and listen to the story. But what I really want is Greg’s embrace. I want to snuggle into his chest and feel the beat of his heart reminding me of the pace at which mine should pulse.

And I don’t want to warm my blue lips on hot cocoa, but

on his. How long has it been since a thought like that crossed my mind?

What will I do if we don’t find him? What if we find him

but his lips are forever blue?

153

A
sleeping bag makes a pretty decent shawl when you need to warm up fast. The current cold front may be good for dis- couraging mosquitoes and black flies, but my teeth chatter so much I’m afraid I’ll crack a crown.

We’re Scrooge-frugal with our pirated kindling but manage to start a fire. Jen scrambles for more dry wood. It’s rare to find a log too large for a campfire up here. Most of the fallen limbs or downed trees are thin enough to catch fire quickly. The trick today is finding something that escaped the rain under an umbrella of other fallen logs or thick undergrowth.

I check on Frank. That’s one thing I can do while my blood thaws. He’s awake, complaining of a headache. Big surprise, the poor guy. I find a spare gallon-sized plastic zip bag in the food pack and lay it near his head. Seems to me concussions and vomiting go together, if I remember from the boys’ short- lived football experiences.

My boys. I may have let them go too soon. I may have forced open the bud of their independence. Why was it so important to me to make sure they didn’t need me? Did I fear letting them down if they depended on me, like I let down Lacey? People

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get paid to figure out things like that. I probably should have paid someone to tell me.

It’s not that I resent their aliveness. I don’t want my daugh-

ter back
in place of
my sons. A family can still be a family if it’s missing one of its key members, can’t it? The sparkling member. The one who helped balance all the male-dominated décor and activities and sports babble. The one who had me by the heart.

“Jen?”

“It’s me, Frank.”

“Oh, good.”

“Do you need something?”

“Pit stop.”

“Ah.”

I can’t imagine successfully helping him into the woods in

his current state of weakness. We just found another use for the “air sickness” bag.

********

“Do you think we should call Brent to send help?” Jen’s

voice holds a thread of uncertainty atypical for her.

“I haven’t earned a reputation for wisdom the last few years,

but I think we should see how the night goes. Frank’s tough. If you ask for the tour, he’ll show you scars from any number of wars. He may bounce back by morning.”

“Do you think so? Deep in your heart?”

I don’t dare dig that deeply right now. But I tell her, “What

can it hurt to wait until morning? Unless Frank takes a turn for the worse. I think he’s a little more with it already, don’t you? He was able to eat a little at supper. Great job with the dehydrated chili, by the way.”

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“The fresh air’s made you delirious. It tasted like cardboard soaked in tomato sauce.”

“With a hint of cilantro,” I add.

“When we get home,” she says, “I’m going to hug my spices and kiss my microwave.”

When we get home. How many of us will make the return trip? Just the three of us? Will I have something more than kitchen appliances to hug?