They Almost Always Come Home (15 page)

It reads like a plush carpet tucked among the tree roots. But when I bend close to it or lift a piece to my eyes, I can see that it’s composed of delicate filaments of green. Incredible.

The landscape’s artistry seems intentionally composed for

maximum eye appeal. I picture God’s hand reaching down to move a rock a little to the left or drag His finger through the dirt to create a rivulet that links two light-reflecting lakes.

My tailbone connects with something unforgiving under

the tent floor. I shift to lie on my side. Air mattresses would have been a good addition to the weight in our packs. Air mat- tresses? What am I saying? God bless the guy who invented memory foam.

The downy feather I found earlier today while sweeping

debris from the square of ground now underneath me wouldn’t go far in creating something soft to sleep on. Little except for moss is soft in this environment.

A soft place to land. That’s what the relationship experts

claim we humans need. Greg tried to cushion my landing after Lacey died. A caretaker of the paralyzed, he stroked my hair and put his arm around me whether I could feel it or not. I couldn’t.

The search for a position conducive to sleep reaches critical

mass. Should I blame the pebbles and roots underneath or the internal thorns?

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Before climbing into the tent for the night, I watched the sparks of our campfire climb heavenward against the black backdrop. An orange glow of life inhabited each one. Higher. Higher. Knocking on heaven’s door. And gone. Then my eyes traced the path of others fighting to stay alive. Some died sooner. Some later. All glowed while they could.

Lacey glowed while she could, with a light so bright I can still see its image behind my closed eyelids.

If Greg is in serious trouble, or if his spark is knocking on heaven’s door, he’ll see Lacey again before I do. That’s wrong on so many levels.

The cry of a distant wolf ripples my skin like the surface of the water responds to a sudden wind gust. The animal doesn’t want me. He’s crying for his mate.

So am I.

********

Something stands between the moon and our tent, casting its shadow on my already dark existence. It snorts. Do bears snort?

I can hear it scratching on something. Sounds like fabric. Fabric? Our tent? Frank’s? Bears have no business being close enough to fondle fabric.

I whisper into the darkness, “Jen! Jen!” She’s completely comatose. Great.

“You trying to wake the dead?” I hear through the tent wall.

“Frank?”

“Who else did you expect? It’s late. Go to sleep. Big day tomorrow.”

Frank made a trip to the undergrowth in the middle of the night? That man needs to see a urologist when we get back.

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I flip onto my right side, hoping that’s the magic position to

encourage sleep. My hip bones act as if they have no padding whatsoever. The seam on my blue jeans digs impressions into my cellulite. I feel the impressions now. I’ll see them when I make my own latrine trips. Getting used to sleeping fully clothed will not happen while we’re here. If I could get over that mental hurdle, I might be able to fall sleep. Or not.

Frank’s right. Every day of paddling and searching is a big

day. I need my rest.

Some people go to bed clutching a stuffed animal or silky

piece of fabric for comfort. My hand is tightened around the mini flashlight. I click it on now just to make sure Jen is breathing and we’re alone. We are. When I click off the light, the darkness rushes back in like spilled ink and smothers the oxygen.

The stranded FedEx employee in the movie
Cast Away
spent

his flashlight batteries the same way, clicking the light on and off for a split second of reassurance. Soon after the batteries died, he slipped dangerously close to insanity.

The faint, filtered light from the moon ought to be enough

of a nightlight. But it isn’t.

I bury my head under the sleeping bag “comforter,” pull

Greg’s journal out of my pocket, and click on the light. Reading offers a good excuse to leave the light on.

I finger the pages I’ve already read and slowly flip through

to new territory—uncharted pages. He writes about his friend Denny’s pyromaniac attitude toward campfires, flirting with setting his pant leg, their tent, and the surrounding forest on fire. Greg expounds for half a page on the merits of using a fly rod with a Dahlberg Diver—a lure or fly or something, I assume—for smallmouth bass.

Then this. This entry.

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Saw a commercial for paper towels the other day, one of those
dumb lumberjack commercials. The man in a red-and-black flannel
shirt, jeans, and suspenders leaned on a tree, looked into the cam-
era, and said, “A real man knows if you can navigate nature, you
can navigate a woman’s heart.”

I might have believed him a few years ago. I’ve never lost my way
up here. Not for long. But the maze of rivers that wind and twist
through Libby’s heart should be marked on the maps “unnavigable.”
Or is it just my pathetic lack of wisdom?

No, Greg! No.

Shouldn’t love count for something?

Yes. It does.

God, I don’t care if I go home without a trophy fish again. I don’t
even care if I go home without arms or legs! Just please give me a
clue! Send me home with a clue about how to reach her, how to
reconnect, how to help us heal.

And please forgive me. I’ve failed her when she needed me most.
Is that what Greg’s been laboring under all this time? I thought he was quiet and unresponsive because he didn’t feel our grief as deeply as he should.

Our grief.

Until now, I’ve always called it mine.

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F
rank and I are the first ones up again. I’m pushing bacon around a skillet with a fork to keep it from sticking. Frank is filtering water. The air’s thick with the smell of bacon, coffee, sun-warmed pine needles, and cedar. The Bath & Body Works research and development team should consider a new fragrance line. I can see the display in my mind’s eye. It looks a lot like our camp, only tidier.

For some reason, Frank thinks powdered Tang is a fitting

substitute for orange juice. I don’t argue when he stirs a batch, though. It camouflages the floating things in the water.

Pancakes again. The complete pancake mix makes up fast

and easy. I make the batter thinner than Frank’s version and succeed in producing enough skillet-sized cakes for the three of us. I turn off the camp stove and leave the pancakes stacked in the hot skillet. No sign of Jen yet. I’ll have to wake her. We have no microwave to warm the food later.

Not wanting to startle her, I choose not to holler through

the tent wall. Bending to the base of the tent door, I reach to pull the zipper slowly, politely.

Jen’s not asleep. She’s sitting cross-legged on her sleeping

bag, reading.

15

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They Almost Always Come Home

“Sorry to disturb you. Breakfast is ready. We’d better eat while it’s hot.”

“I’ll be there in a minute.”

“What are you reading?”

“My Bible.”

“Oh.”

God, forgive me. How can I expect Your help if I neglect the book
in which You store so much of it?

I wait while she finishes whatever passage she’s reading. Maybe I’ll gain something by osmosis. “Find anything worth sharing?”

She shoots me a look that says, “You’re kidding, right?” When she opens her mouth, honey flows out. “I needed a reminder that finding Greg isn’t up to us.” “We’re all he has at the moment,” I counter.

“You know that’s not true,” Jen says, her voice that of a lov- ing parent in comfort mode.

What I know is that I’m choosing a path that may lead to something I don’t want to hear. But I’m drawn to the hope of healing in God’s words like the bugs are drawn to our lantern at night.

“What did you read?”

“Joshua.” She crawls off her sleeping bag, smoothes it, and works at rolling it tighter than sushi. “God told Joshua, ‘Remember that I commanded you to be strong and brave. Don’t be afraid, because the L
^ORD
your God will be with you everywhere you go.’ ”

“Even here.” I’m in awe that I actually believe it. “Yes. Even here. Especially here.”

“I wonder—”

“What?”

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I stop rolling my own sleeping bag, not caring that when I

let up on the tension of rolling, the down in its baffles swells and plumps.

“I wonder if Greg hears that promise ringing in his ears.”

“I’d guess yes,” Jen says. “If he’s—”

“Yeah . . . if.”

As we have so many times since the day I realized Greg

wasn’t coming home, Jen and I shift gears, choosing not to dwell on the ugly side of truth, the unnerving side of imagi- nation. It’s not denial. When we close the pantry door on the mental pictures of pools of blood or wolf-ravaged leftovers, we know they’re still there as surely as we remember the peanut butter, rice noodles, and three cans of tomato soup in the pan- try at home.

This isn’t denial. It’s survival.

So we finish rolling our sleeping bags, eat breakfast as if we

care, and dismantle the camp with an energy we don’t feel.

Peanut butter, rice noodles, and tomato soup in the

pantry.

********

I watch Frank tuck Greg’s splintered paddle securely along-

side the packs in his canoe.

“What do you think it means, Frank?” Our canoes are still

close enough in the bay of the island for us to talk.

My stroke is much smoother than it was yesterday or the

day before. Our first several hours on the water, the pattern I traced with my paddle looked like that of a first grader trying to master calligraphy when she hasn’t yet learned cursive.

Frank draws his paddle through the water—once on the

right, twice on the left—before he answers.

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They Almost Always Come Home

“Greg’s paddle? Wish we’d found some other evidence near that spot.”

We’d fanned out and combed the area as if searching for lice nits in a kindergartner’s hair. Nothing. Not a footprint or fabric swatch or what we most feared—a broken canoe. I paddle forward but keep my eyes trained on Frank. “I wish we’d found—” I can’t choke out the end of that sentence. Frank fills the gap. “I think finding Greg’s paddle means there’s hope.”

I turn to catch Jen’s expression. She doesn’t speak, but her eyebrows disappear into the fringe of bangs that haven’t seen a curling wand in three days. Is that a sign of agreement or doubt?

“Hope?” I shove the word across the water with my paddle. “How do you figure that?”
Please, Lord. Please make his explana-
tion sound logical.

Frank’s sigh ends with the shudder of a loon song’s final notes. “At least now we know not to look in Mexico. Or France. Or the Ukraine. Narrows our search.”

From behind me comes laughter that echoes across the water. I wonder if Greg can detect its sound waves where he is. Will we joke about it later? Will we use this moment as one of the story points when telling our grandchildren about the trip, this rescue operation?

Frank is married to the laminated maps he carries. It’s a good thing. It’s not like a person could go by landmarks around here. “Turn left at the pine tree. Then look for a cluster of three small islands and hang a right.”

All the shorelines look alike. All the pines are siblings, apparently. A series of three small islands is sure to be fol- lowed by another clump just like it.

Now that we’re out of the cove and into more open water, Frank’s canoe takes a strong lead. It doesn’t matter that we don’t

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know where we’re going. He does. If Jen and I stay focused on keeping up with his seasoned strokes, we’ll be okay.

A few years ago, when I was more sensitive to these things,

I would have turned that observation into a lesson for the women in my Bible study.

“We don’t have to know where we’re going,” I would have

told them, “if the guy in the lead—the Lord—not only has the map, but
wrote
the map.”

And one of the women—maybe even Jen—would have said,

“Oh, that’s good! You always come up with the best illustra- tions. Thanks for helping me understand that concept better.”

It’s the kind of thing a person like me would want to tell

her daughter. Or her husband. But I can’t share it with either of them.

The cold front is back. Or its cousin. The sun is shining,

but it has the warming effect of a lightbulb in a refrigerator. What would we do if the wind were blowing? God must know we need calm waters today if we are to make any headway through this tangled labyrinth of lakes and rivers.

“Crystal clear water” is the expression I’ve heard Greg use.

It fits. No matter how deep I dip my paddle, I can see to the end of it. I’ve been focused on conquering the wilderness since we got here, but even I can’t deny the beauty. It soaks into a person. The majesty. Light and shadow. Textures as rough as, well, tree bark and as glassy as the pool-of-mercury water at night. A morning mist with the color and fire of opals. Seventy shades of green in the verdant trees and underbrush lining the shore.

“I’ve stood in some mighty-mouthed hollow,” I recite, “that’s

plumb-full of hush to the brim.”

“What’s that?” Jen asks.

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“A line from a poem Greg used to quote. Not exactly Shakespeare. Certainly not Robert Browning or Emily Dickinson.”