Trouble

Henry Smith is 14 years old, the youngest child in a wealthy old-money family living in Blythbury-by-the-Sea, Massachusetts, in a centuries-old mansion on stone ledges above the Atlantic. Henry's father, a Boston accountant, has always told him that if you build your house far enough away from Trouble, Trouble will never find you. Henry's older brother Franklin, a senior and star rugby athlete at Henry Wadsworth Longfellow Preparatory High School, is the family's golden child: confident, dominant, and often dismissive of Henry as gutless. After Henry falls while climbing the black boulders in the cove below their house, Franklin promises to teach him to climb and take him up Maine's Mount Katahdin, including the treacherous ridge called the Knife Edge.

On the evening of Henry's 14th birthday, a police patrol car comes up the Smiths' drive, its red lights throwing blood-colored reflections onto his parents' faces. At the hospital, Franklin lies unconscious, both eyes bruised shut, a tube in one arm, his left arm missing below the shoulder. Henry sits on his brother's bed through the night. His father stops shaving and going to work. His mother grows brittle. His sister Louisa, a junior at Longfellow Prep, locks herself in her bedroom and refuses to come out.

The newspaper names the driver: Chay Chouan, a Cambodian American student at Longfellow Prep whose immigrant family runs Merton Masonry and Stonework in the nearby town of Merton. The article says Chay fell asleep at the wheel driving his pickup home alone. Days later, Henry takes his kayak past the cove and hears desperate yelping. He finds a dog drowning in the sea and swims them both to shore. The dog is female, emaciated, scarred, and missing pieces of both ears. Henry names her Black Dog. She forces her way into the house, and when Henry's grieving father sees the battered creature, he breaks down weeping. Black Dog earns a permanent home.

The Smiths' lawyer insists the family attend Chay's pretrial hearing. Testimony reveals a pattern of harassment against Chay at Longfellow Prep: students mocked him on his first day, his textbooks were spray-painted, and the school newspaper ran an anti-Cambodian cartoon. Most shockingly, the January "altercation" between Franklin and Chay was actually an attack: Franklin and four rugby players pinned Chay to lockers, and Franklin choked him unconscious. Henry, remembering Franklin demonstrating this exact technique on him, is shaken. The judge sets bail at $300,000 for aggravated assault. As the Chouans leave, Chay looks directly at Louisa, who stares back with her arms tight around herself.

A plea bargain follows: Chay pleads guilty to reckless injury in exchange for probation, loss of his license, and community service. Blythbury-by-the-Sea seethes with outrage. Someone commits arson against the Chouan family's masonry business. Then Franklin dies alone in the hospital while his family is away. At the funeral, Henry takes a shovel and fills his brother's grave himself, carrying load after load of earth until the gash becomes a low swelling of ground. Trouble keeps spreading: Bricks fly through the Chouan house windows, and the Longfellow Prep auditorium is vandalized. Late one night, Henry's father asks the question consuming him: "Do you think Franklin would have grown into a good man?" He confesses that Trouble was already inside the house, inside Franklin, and he knew it but refused to acknowledge it.

Henry tells his parents he plans to climb Katahdin, the mountain Franklin had promised to take him up. They refuse. He lies and says his best friend Sanborn Brigham will accompany him. Sanborn insists on coming, and they set out on July 2 with Black Dog, hitchhiking north. At dusk, a chromeless pickup pulls over. Henry climbs in and realizes the driver is Chay Chouan, heading north with no destination on a suspended license. Henry confronts him: "You killed my brother." When Henry demands to know how Chay could understand grief, Chay tells them about the Cambodian refugee camp where soldiers took his older brother by force and shot his sister in front of his mother.

In Portland, two fishermen harass Chay with racial slurs at a waterfront restaurant, and Henry drives the pickup in a frantic escape. They stop at a small diner called Mike's Eats, where they spend a day splitting firewood and the owner tells Chay he has a job there anytime. That evening, at a lakeside resort, Henry sees Chay swimming far out into the darkening water and paddles a canoe after him. On the dark lake, Chay reveals that his father discovered his relationship with an American girl and, in a rage, disclosed that Chay is not his biological son: His mother was raped by soldiers in the refugee camp, and Chay's birth was a lifelong shame. His father told him to leave and never return. Henry asks who the girl was, though he already knows.

During the drive toward Katahdin, Chay confesses that he burned down Merton Masonry himself after being disowned. On the Fourth of July in Millinocket, Henry ducks into a small museum run by Thaddeus Baxter, whose family donated Katahdin's parkland to Maine. Among the artifacts, Henry finds an engraving of a burning ship beside a house he recognizes as his own. Baxter explains that Captain Thomas Smith, Henry's ancestor, used the ship, the Seaflower, to transport 180 enslaved Native Americans after King Philip's War, a 17th-century conflict between colonists and Indigenous peoples. Smith shipped the captives to the Caribbean, then Africa, and abandoned them in Morocco. The cove's original name was not "Salvage" but "Savage." Henry pieces together the truth about the accident: Louisa, who was secretly seeing Chay, must have been driving the pickup that night. When Franklin appeared on the road, she swerved in panic and struck him. Chay sent her home, bandaged Franklin, and took the blame to protect her.

That night, camped at Katahdin's base, the two fishermen from Portland step into the firelight, armed with a shotgun and a broken bottle. Henry decides he cannot build his house far from Trouble; he has to live where Trouble is. He grabs a burning branch and hurls it at the men. Black Dog leaps in front of Chay. But the man with the shotgun fires, slamming 14 pellets along Henry's rib cage. The fishermen flee, and Chay runs with Black Dog to find help.

Henry wakes in a hospital to find his parents asleep together at the foot of his bed, holding hands and smiling for the first time in months. His father tells Henry none of the pellets entered his lungs. Chay disappeared from the emergency room after leading police to Henry. After Henry's parents leave the room, Louisa sits on his bed, and Henry whispers "Oz," the siblings' childhood code for safety, borrowed from their ritual of hiding together during frightening parts of The Wizard of Oz. Then Louisa goes to their parents and tells them the truth about the accident.

The next morning, Henry insists on climbing Katahdin. Chay had told him that if he were in trouble, he would go to the mountain and wait: Someone would come. Louisa drives them to the trailhead. Henry's stitched ribs scream with every step as they ascend through boulders, iron staples, and sudden cloud, finally reaching the peak. Henry cups his hands and calls "Katahdin" three times. A cry returns from below: "Henry." Louisa and Black Dog race down and find Chay sheltering among hemlocks.

They share food on the peak. Louisa and Chay lean against each other. Henry looks south toward the Knife Edge, smiles, and turns away. That evening, Henry strokes Black Dog's now-sleek fur and realizes how the dog ended up in the sea: Chay must have thrown her into the water near the Smith house, hoping she would be rescued. Henry arrives at his understanding: "The world is Trouble . . . and Grace. That is all there is." Below them, the Millinocket fireworks bloom across the dark sky, lighting the sides of Katahdin. Henry holds Black Dog close and watches the stars burst upward, back into the sky.