“Where’s the bear?” Fish asked.
The men looked at each other again. Sergeant Blake tilted his head in question.
“The bear,” said Fish. “The big bear that was here all night. Where did the bear go?”
The two men hesitated.
“There’s no bear out here, bud,” said Blake, who then looked around at the island, at the enormity of the whitewater surrounding it. “Bears can’t get past the whitewater. You just had a dream.”
Fish shook his head. “There was a bear here. He kept my hands warm.”
Sergeant Blake opened his mouth to speak, but the medic shook his head, so Blake dropped the conversation.
“All right, big guy,” said the medic, shaking a crinkled metallic blanket out of his pack and wrapping it gently around Fish’s shoulders, “you rest right here and we’ll get you home real soon.” He rummaged deftly in his kit. “I have some crackers for you to eat, and water. You rest up and try to eat and drink and let us take care of things.”
“Where’s the bear!” demanded Fish.
The medic smiled. “We’ll take care of things. You eat.”
The soldiers smiled, the medic patted his knee, and they stood and began uncoiling ropes and repacking kits and looking up at the bluffs onshore.
The strangers’ kindness, the bruin bear, and the thought of home brought tears to Fish’s eyes. Home again. Grandpa’s farm. His mom’s kitchen. What would his mom say to him? What would his grandpa say to him? It all swirled in his mind, but there was only one comfort, one thing that Fish knew for certain in all that fog: he was done running. And he didn’t have to run. Fish looked down at the opened package of oyster crackers in his lap, and his stomach growled in ways he didn’t know it could. He took a sip of the clean water, bit the corner from a cracker. The salt dissolved in waves. He ate the whole bag, drank the whole bottle.
The soldier’s radio crackled to life, and a jovial and fuzzy sort of voice came over the airwaves.
“Okay there now, you soldiers down on them rocks. Soldiers down on them rocks, come in. This here is—say what? Oh.”
The soldier unclipped his radio and frowned at it, then looked up at the lip of the falls. Specialist Grady stopped packing up his kit.
The voice came again. “Lieutenant here says I gotta say Reach Two. Reach Two, come in down there. Calling Reach Two.”
Sergeant Blake grinned at Specialist Grady as he lifted the radio to his mouth.
“This is Reach, go ahead.”
“So, there he is. This is Constable Bobby. You say you got that young man down there on them rocks?”
“That’s affirmative,” Blake answered.
A chuckle came through the radio. “Well then, soldier, put that young man on the horn! We got his mama up here wants to talk to him. Here you go, missus.”
Fish’s throat caught. His eyes blurred.
“Lieutenant?” Blake queried into his radio.
There was a pause, then, “Reach, Lieutenant. It’s fine if the boy is able.”
There was a pause, and then a quavering female voice. “Fischer, are you there? Fischer?”
Blake offered the radio to Fish, and Fish nodded and swallowed, and then the soldier showed him the button to push to speak and went back to his work. Fish held the radio in his lap, his mom’s voice coming through it. Her voice was so beautiful to hear, even through the static of that tiny speaker. It was a voice that made the world okay, the voice that calmed him in the night. She said his name three or four more times before Fish was able to answer.
“Mom,” he said.
There was a long pause. “Talk again, Fischer. Tell me it’s you.”
“It’s me,” he said, tears completely stealing his vision.
“It’s you,” she said.
“It’s me,” he said.
“It’s you,” she said.
IN LESS THAN AN HOUR, FISH WAS IN HER ARMS. SHE WOULDN’T LET him go. She wouldn’t let anyone come near them. She scooped him up in that crinkly blanket and carried him into the trees on the island, pacing back and forth in the cedars, weeping on him and rocking him as if he were younger than he was. Fish didn’t resist. He just lay with his head on her shoulder, smelling her neck. From time to time Miranda would stop walking, and they’d pull their heads apart to look at each other, and then Fish would bury his face again and Miranda would rock and sway with her eyes closed tight, whispering praise and prayers.
Scattered around the base of the island remained a handful of guardsmen in uniform, and Cal and Tiffany, and Bread, and Teddy, and Constable Bobby. Cal stood by the shoreline and conversed with the deputy and one of the guardsmen. Tiffany sat on a rock. Bread leaned back against her and she wrapped him in her arms, a blanket around them both. She liked the way the boy’s dirty hair smelled, liked the warmth of his bony back against her stomach. Teddy lay on his back beneath a pine tree, his legs splayed flat, sleeping with his green cap pulled over his eyes.
Constable Bobby’s voice rose up from the small group of men. Tiffany watched as he hiked his belt up on his waist.
“Like I says, when Jack bust out and hitched his duckboat, I knew he was headed downriver, and I knew them women was headed downriver, and I knew downriver don’t go farther than here, so I figured I’d get us a spot of help.” Bobby finished the sentence with a proud grin and gave the lieutenant too hearty a clap on the shoulder. “Yes sir,” he said, “got me some Army on the horn and all is nice and calm again. So.”
Tiffany grinned and shook her head, and then watched Miranda and her boy in the trees. The mother and
