‘Was it hers?’
I tried to speak, but nothing came out. Pulling it over my head, I tucked the pendant under my clothes where it made a frozen circle on my chest. I pressed a hand to the spot. ‘Ready?’
‘Maya, I don’t know if you’ve healed enough for this.’
‘It’s this or prison.’ I gave him a paddle, life jacket, and an impossible choice. ‘Where do you want me to go?’
He stepped closer and even in the moonlight I could see him struggle. ‘I know what I’m asking of you, okay, but you’ve got to believe me. He’s not a bad man. Neither of us know what happened that night. We weren’t there. And I don’t think he was ever able to talk about it with me, but—’
‘That’s my job.’ I stepped into the canoe and braced myself. ‘I help people find their voices.’
The Boundary Waters. Somewhere in the middle of the lake we crossed the threshold that divided one world from another, where human saturation gave way to one of the last great wildernesses in the country. Everything was covered with a layer of white, snow weighing down the branches of the pines that stood sentinel, the only witnesses to our silent progress. Our oars dipped in time, me in the bow, Lucas in the stern, steering us toward the main portage off this lake, a northward path that fed into another winding body of water. Paddling turned out to be worse than hiking. The twist of muscle in my abdomen screamed every time I pulled the oar and I bit my lip with each stroke, riding the edge of the pain and wishing I’d broken down and taken another pill. While my insides burned, my skin froze wherever it was exposed and even my fingers began numbing through the gloves. It felt like an hour before we reached the portage, and as soon as the canoe nosed the bank, I splashed out, cracking through the ice and looking for a foothold to drag the bow up as far as I could. Lucas was right behind me, and before I could put distance between us his arms encircled me.
‘Rest,’ he whispered in my ear. ‘Warm up. I can tell you’re hurting.’
As much as I craved his warmth, it was impossible to let myself take it. Pulling away, I lifted my pack out of the boat and dug through it. ‘Here. Modern technology to the rescue.’
I gave him a set of hand warmers and slipped another pair into my own gloves, glancing at the yawning darkness between the trees. ‘Packs first and then back for the canoe?’
But Lucas was already putting his pack on backward – over his stomach – and flipping the boat up without any help, balancing the yoke on his shoulders. Grabbing my own pack, I ducked out of the way and turned the flashlight on.
‘Too bright.’ He muttered, and I could hear the hurt from my rebuff slinking into the woods with him. ‘You can see that a mile away.’
So I followed blindly into the black, walking behind his boat-balancing shadow, while he whispered warnings of rocks and roots. As my eyes adjusted I could see spots of ground through the snow, other tracks besides ours, which were too big and too evenly spaced to be anything but human. The Boundary Waters was open year-round and winter campers came for ice fishing and dogsledding, but I couldn’t imagine who would be here now, in the transition between seasons when paddling became a dangerous gamble. You could get trapped in the middle of nowhere if a sudden freeze made the lakes unpassable. You could tip your canoe and fall into water with a temperature barely above freezing, water so cold that it sucked you down like Superior, and maybe you would drown or maybe you’d crawl your way out into hypothermia. Either way there was no help waiting for you. There was no 911 here, no phones, no outposts, no emergency services. There were a thousand ways to die in the Boundary Waters, and all of them were alone.
When we reached the next lake and emerged from under the canopy, the moon felt like a spotlight, a hundred times brighter than it had been before. I looked for the tracks again, but they were gone.
We loaded up and pushed out into a smaller channel lined with collapsed drifts of marsh grass. The ice was thicker here in the shallows and I punched at it with the oar, breaking a path into the open water around snow-covered boulders. We veered wildly in some places and not wide enough in others. The canoe scraped the bottom several times and at one point we lodged on a rock shelf, but not hard enough to ground. I shoved us off the shelf with the paddle and we tried another path, then another, breaking our way through by trial and error. It seemed to take forever for the channel to widen again and I wondered if we’d be forced to portage until finally the banks receded, our oars stopped hitting bottom, and we came into a glossy moon mirror of a lake.
This one was smaller and it didn’t take us long to paddle to the center, powered by Lucas’s long, sure strokes. When we reached the middle, I rested my oar across the gunwales and slipped a hand under my coat, gingerly feeling the edges of the bandage. It took a minute to register that Lucas had stopped paddling, too.
‘Look up.’ Lucas breathed, and I did. Overhead the cloudless sky showcased thousands of glowing and pulsing stars. As our paddle ripples faded off the surface of the water, the pinpoints of light reflected back from below, and it felt like we were floating in the middle of an endless galaxy.
‘I missed this.’
I’d forgotten how quiet it was, the total silence of the Boundary Waters. It was nothing like living at the mouth of Superior, which consumed everything in its white noise of wind and waves, and I understood why I hadn’t been back here, why I’d never come looking for the necklace. It wasn’t fear of a dead man. The dead man found me in my dreams no matter where I was. I hadn’t returned for the same reason Dad couldn’t; we didn’t want to have this without her.
I drew a shaky breath as I gazed from horizon to horizon. ‘Did you know we’re made of stardust?’
‘Really?’
‘Cosmic explosions from before time was time.’
She’d told me. It was written in the note she’d left on my nightstand before she’d tucked me in my bed, brushed a salty kiss over my forehead, and locked herself in the bathroom to eat two bottles of aspirin.
We’re molecules of living, breathing stardust, Maya, and just like the rocks, we’re all different. Some people are strong and beautiful and they can withstand glaciers. Others are weak and brittle, and the best thing we can do is birth a gemstone.
She hadn’t signed it with a goodbye or any words of advice or regret. There wasn’t even a Love, Mom at the bottom. Just a note about stardust, before she tried to turn herself back into it.
‘Then why don’t we shine?’ Lucas asked, pulling me out of my head. I slid my hand up to touch the agate pendant, making sure it was still there before grabbing the oar and setting my jaw against the fire that was going to start raging in my side.
‘Maybe we’re not far enough away to see it.’
We paddled into a larger lake and then portaged in a direction I’d never gone. The trail was a narrow, steep incline and the snow made everything more slippery. I fell twice and hit my head on the back of the canoe once. Just when I was about to break down and ask if we could make camp, Lucas froze on the peak of the hill.
‘What is it?’
‘Shh.’ He hoisted the canoe down and propped it on a fallen log, then scanned the perimeter. I held my breath, trying not to make the slightest noise. Finally, he pointed to a spot ahead and to our left.
‘There.’