Chapter 36
“We’ll take him and his mother across first. Then I’ll come back for you and whatever supplies you absolutely need. The canoe won’t safely carry all of us at once,” Rachel said.
Sophie had moved back to the canoe. She sat on the bank with her knees drawn to her chest and kept her eyes on the rescue instead of Rachel.
Her face was closed off in a way Rachel recognized.
She’d seen it in children for fourteen years, usually right before they stopped trying to change what the adults had already decided.
The first crossing took fifteen minutes.
The boy sat in the center of the canoe with his injured leg stretched carefully across the thwart.
His mother sat behind him with both hands braced on his shoulders.
Rachel paddled from the stern, fighting the current’s pull toward the far bank where the settlement was supposed to be.
Her arms were already tired from the morning’s near-capsize.
Halfway across, they began to shake, but she kept paddling.
They reached the far shore at a gravel beach where the bank sloped gently to the water.
The boy’s mother helped him onto solid ground and turned back to Rachel, too relieved to speak.
Rachel didn’t wait. She pushed off at once and paddled back alone.
The canoe answered every stroke faster than before, even as her strength faded.
The second crossing brought the father and one backpack of essentials from their stranded supplies.
Each trip took longer than the last. Rachel’s strength drained away while the afternoon light thinned over the river.
By the time the family stood together on the far shore, the boy sat on a log, his parents beside him, and their belongings gathered at their feet.
Rachel’s arms had stopped shaking and settled into a deep ache that would last through the night.
The father tried to pay her with a pocketknife, a length of good cord, and a sealed packet of dried fruit he’d been saving, but she refused them.
“We’ll find her, and we’ll tell her you brought us,” the mother said.
Rachel pushed off for the final time. Sophie had stayed on the near bank through all of it, guarding their supplies because she understood how much they’d risked.
When Rachel returned, Sophie climbed into the bow seat without speaking.
They pushed into the current as the last daylight faded above the trees.
They made camp two miles downstream on a gravel bar wide enough to keep the canoe above the waterline.
Rachel built a small fire with deadfall from the bank.
They ate cold beans from a can, drank river water boiled over the flames, and split the last dried apples into portions that felt smaller than they had that morning.
Sophie hadn’t spoken since the first crossing.
She ate and kept her eyes on the fire, the water, or the darkness beyond their light.
The medical pack was half empty. The antiseptic wipes were gone.
Only a few compressed squares of gauze remained because Rachel had cut the larger pieces in half.
They’d lost most of a travel day. Brenton felt no closer than he had the day before, and the effort that should have carried them home had gone to strangers instead.
The fire had burned low, and the cold had settled into the surrounding stones. Fall was moving toward winter.
“What is it?” Rachel asked.
Sophie didn’t answer right away. She poked at the embers with a stick, and small flares of orange light crossed her dirt-streaked face. When she finally spoke, her voice was controlled and careful.
“I’m tired of hearing how badly you need to reach Hannah and Caleb while you keep giving away the things that would get you there. Time. Food. Medicine. Attention. Everything except the one thing you keep saying matters most,” Sophie said.
The accusation hit hard because Sophie had chosen her words carefully.
Rachel started to answer and found no defense that sounded honest. She wanted to talk about duty, children in need, and the difference between compassion and selfishness.
Those arguments belonged to the old world.
Back then, help could be summoned, and supplies existed somewhere beyond what people carried.
In the new world, losing an afternoon could mean losing the chance to reach home before the first snow.
“You left medical supplies we can’t replace with a boy we’ll never see again.
You spent hours ferrying his family across a river when we could’ve been ten miles closer to Brenton by now.
Tomorrow, you’ll do it again for someone else because there’s always someone else.
Hannah and Caleb are supposed to understand that they come after anyone with a problem you can see right in front of you,” Sophie said.
Rachel heard Hannah in the words at once.
It wasn’t Sophie’s voice that cut deepest. It was her daughter’s absence, and the resentment that had been growing long before the lights went out.
The charge was the same even if the words were different.
Rachel had always found room for other people’s children while her own waited at home.
She had treated being needed elsewhere as an explanation for being gone, and she’d expected Hannah and Caleb to accept that the work mattered.
“I couldn’t leave him there,” Rachel said.
“Sure. You couldn’t leave him, but you can leave them. You were leaving them before any of this started,” Sophie said.
Sophie set the stick down and pulled her knees tighter against her chest. Firelight showed the dirt on her cheeks, the scrape along her forearm, and the blistered heel beneath the torn edge of her sock.
She looked worn down and older than thirteen.
Her anger came from a place Rachel understood too well.
Sophie had learned early that adults’ good reasons didn’t erase the cost borne by the people who depended on them.
She kept paddling the next morning because stopping wasn’t an option.
The current carried them west, away from the stranded family, the lost supplies, and the hours that should have become miles.
Sophie sat in the bow with her back to Rachel.
Her paddle moved in steady strokes that matched Rachel’s rhythm from the stern.
The question stayed between them because she had no answer that wouldn’t sound like the excuse Sophie had already rejected.
Sacrifice could prove devotion, principle, and the willingness to put other people first. It proved those things most clearly to the person making the choice.
The people left with the consequences rarely got to decide whether the price was worth it.
Hannah hadn’t chosen. Caleb hadn’t chosen.
Sophie hadn’t chosen either, not while she sat in the bow of a stolen canoe with blisters on her feet and no clear place of safety ahead.
For the first time since leaving the highway, Rachel wondered whether a sacrifice could still be called selfless when someone else kept paying the cost.