Portage

The canoe rode Ezra’s shoulders like a joke he refused to drop. He came up the granite in a half-stagger, singing the chorus of something about a train, and he got every other word wrong on purpose.

“Left,” Sam called from the front of the trail. “The cairn is left. You are walking into alder.”

“The alder likes me.”

“The alder will take the gunwale. Turn.”

Ezra turned, late, and the bow clipped a branch. He laughed into the song. Sam did not laugh. He stopped, map case against his chest, and waited until Ezra came even with him on the narrow rock.

“You sang that same wrong verse in ’16,” Sam said. “On the Mattawa. You have not improved.”

“You listened in ’16. That’s on you.”

Kit came up behind them with both food packs, one strap biting her collarbone. Sweat ran under the waist belt. She watched Ezra tip his head so he could see Sam around the canoe, and she watched Sam’s mouth go soft at the corners before he made it stern again. She had seen that look every summer for twelve years. She shifted the load and said nothing.

“Water in twenty minutes if you stop arguing with shrubs,” she said.

“I’m arguing with Sam.”

“Same thing some years,” Sam said, and started walking.

The portage ran a mile and a bit over shield rock, late August, the birch already going. Ezra kept the song going under his breath when the trail dipped. Sam corrected the route twice more, once when Ezra was right and didn’t know it. They bickered the way they always did when the day got long: close, fussy, a little pleased with each other. Kit stayed ten paces back and let the packs knock her ribs in time with her steps.

At the put-in, Ezra set the canoe down with a grunt that shook the whole hull. Sam knelt to check a scuff on the bow. Their hands met on the gunwale for a second, neither of them looking up. Kit unbuckled the packs and drank from her bottle until the moment passed.

“Cocoa when we camp,” she said. “If the sky holds.”

The sky did not hold.

They made the granite site at dusk, three pads of moss between jack pine, the lake gone the color of tin. Kit had her one-person tent up and staked when the first wind came across the water hard enough to lay the pines over. She had the rain fly half on. The gust took the other half and the pole with it. She heard the snap, then the wet slap of nylon against rock.

“Inside,” Ezra shouted from their tent. “Now.”

Rain hit in a sheet. Kit grabbed her sleeping bag and the drybag with her clothes and ran the six yards. The fly of their tent was already drumming. Sam held the zipper. She went in on her knees, soaked through the shoulders, and the zipper rasped shut behind her.

There was nowhere to sit that wasn’t someone. Ezra was against the left wall in a thermal shirt, Sam against the right in the wool layer he always packed. The floor between them was a strip the width of a paddle blade. Kit peeled the wet shirt off over her head and shoved it into the vestibule, then worked her arms into a dry one from the bag. The tent smelled of wet pine and cocoa powder from the pot Ezra had abandoned outside.

“Don’t,” she said, when Ezra started to shift to give her room he did not have. “You’ll put a foot through the wall.”

“Lie down,” Sam said. “It’s the only geometry that works.”

They did. Shoulder, shoulder, shoulder. Ezra’s arm had to go somewhere, so it went along the top of her bag. Sam’s knee found her shin and stayed there because moving it meant elbowing the stove kit. Rain hammered the fly until talk had to be loud to clear it.

Ezra laughed first, a short bark. “Your tent is in the lake.”

“A corner of it.”

“The important corner.”

Kit laughed because the alternative was noticing how warm his arm was. Sam’s shoulder rose and fell against hers with each breath. Lightning walked the far shore, white for a blink, then gone. She counted out of habit and got to four before the thunder.

“Why did you break up?” she said.

The rain filled the pause. Sam answered first. His voice stayed even, the way it did when he translated something he had already decided to say straight.

“I got scared,” he said. “We were good. That was the problem. I could see the next year and the one after, and I didn’t know how to want a thing that hard without wrecking it. So I ended it while it was still kind. I told him it was timing. It wasn’t timing.”

Ezra was quiet long enough that Kit felt the words land in his chest, under her shoulder.

“I knew,” Ezra said. “Not the speech. The scare. I let him go because fighting him on it would’ve made it ugly, and I didn’t want ugly with him. I still don’t. I made peace with the friend part. Most days the peace holds.”

“Most days,” Sam said.

“Most days.”

Kit stared at the dark above their heads. Twelve years of watching them pass the map, split the last of the cocoa, sleep in separate tents and still turn toward each other when one of them laughed. Twelve years of her own want sitting under that, unspoken, because saying it would have put a crack in the only summer that stayed the same.

“I’ve wondered,” she said. “The whole time I’ve known you. About the two of you, back when you were together, and after. And about me with both of you. Not instead. With.”

Nobody moved. The rain kept its hard beat on the nylon. Somewhere out on the lake a wave hit rock and fell back.

Sam spoke into the dark, close to her ear. “I’ve wondered too. More since the trips started stacking up. I didn’t have a right to say it. I was the one who left.”

Ezra put his hand on her wrist where it lay on the bag. “I’ve thought about it more than either of you,” he said. “The three of us. Out here, when the fire’s low and you both go quiet. I’d like to stop just thinking.”

Kit turned her head. She couldn’t see Sam’s face, only the line of his cheek when the next flash came far off. She put her hand on that cheek. The stubble there was a day past clean. He didn’t pull back. He turned into her palm, and she kissed him.

It was not careful. His mouth was warm and he kissed her back at once, a low sound in his throat, his hand coming up into her wet hair and staying. She felt the want in it, old and plain. When she drew back a fraction, Ezra was already there. He kissed her with his hand still on her wrist, thumb against the bone, his other hand at the side of her neck. She answered him the same way she had answered Sam, leaning in, taking it.

Lightning hit close. The tent went blue for a full second. In that light Sam and Ezra looked at each other over her, faces inches apart, the first time in nine years they had let themselves be that near with nothing friendly in the way of it. Sam reached across her. His hand found Ezra’s jaw. Ezra met him halfway.

The kiss was brief and not brief enough to pretend. Kit felt both of them shake with it, Sam’s wrist against her collarbone, Ezra’s fingers tight on her wrist. Then the blue was gone.

Thunder arrived late, a long roll that shook the stakes. None of them counted the seconds.