All That We Carried Page 12

  “How long are you out here for?” Melanie asked.

  “This time, I think at least two more nights.”

  “Where are you going tomorrow? Or will you stay at this camp the entire time?”

  “Tomorrow I’m heading down the Cross Trail to Superior for one night, then I’ll be heading up the Big Carp River for the salmon run.”

  Melanie frowned. “So you’re not going the same way we are?”

  “No. The Cross Trail takes me directly to where I need to be. But you’re in for some nice hiking tomorrow. It’s one of the best hikes in the park. Besides being up on the escarpment.”

  “It’d be nicer if you were with us,” she said, then immediately regretted it. She didn’t want him to think she was flirting with him. She just really liked his company.

  Josh smiled at her across the fire. “I’m sure we’ll meet up again sometime.”

  “I hope so.” Then it felt like it was time to call it a night. Melanie always tried to follow those gut feelings. And to stay one moment longer would make it awkward. She stood up and waved. “I better get to bed before Olivia wonders what’s happened to me again. I’ll see you tomorrow.”

  Josh returned the wave. “Good night.”

  Melanie dispensed with the evening rituals and climbed into the tent and over Olivia, who was lying in the dark, still but obviously not sleeping. She changed into her pj’s as quietly as possible, trying not to kick her sister, then slipped into the sleeping bag Olivia had prepared for her without her asking or knowing or even really thinking about the fact that a sleeping bag needed to be prepared. Olivia, ever the older sister. Melanie lay there in the blackness and wondered if she could fall asleep with her eyes open since it was just like having them shut.

  Olivia’s voice rose out of the dark somewhere near Melanie’s feet. “Hey, Mel?”

  “Yeah?”

  “I’m sorry.” It was quiet for a beat. “I was kind of a jerk today.”

  Melanie waited for her to continue. But it was apparently all she had to say.

  “Miss Crabapple! The papers, if you please!”

  Olivia sat at one end of the dining room table, wearing her father’s old glasses and ringing a small gold bell. At the other end of the table, Melanie tore a sheet of paper from an electric typewriter found at a neighbor’s garage sale the day before and rushed it over to her sister.

  “Your speech, Mr. President!”

  “Madame President,” Olivia corrected out of the side of her mouth. Then loudly, “Miss Crabapple, how do you ever hope to be secretary of state when you can hardly manage being secretary of this office?”

  “Yes, Mr.—Madame President. Yes, of course.”

  Olivia strode to the window, gripped her nonexistent lapel, and stared into the middle distance, which was really just the lilac bush in the backyard. Then she ran her eyes over the speech she had just been handed. “Miss Crabapple, the fate of the country is at stake and you hand me this gibberish?”

  “You didn’t give me enough time,” Melanie said in her own voice.

  “Shh,” Olivia hissed. “Go get the hat and sit in the living room. You’re a reporter now.”

  Melanie took off the elbow-length gloves and shawl she had donned as Miss Crabapple and put on a fedora from the dress-up trunk.

  “Pad and pen,” Olivia directed.

  Melanie slid the legal pad and a black fountain pen from the table and sat in the wingback chair.

  “No, you’re on the couch,” Olivia said.

  Melanie sighed and changed places. “Come on, just give the speech.”

  Olivia walked to the center of the room and pretended to rest her arms upon an invisible lectern.

  “Friends, countrymen”—she nodded at Melanie—“reporters from all the most important papers in the world.”

  Melanie nodded back, her invisible mustache twitching.

  “I come to you today not just as your president but as your friend. We stand on the brink of war. The aliens that—” She looked at Melanie. “Does it have to be aliens?”

  “Yes. You said they could be from anywhere.”

  “Fine.” Olivia addressed the rest of the living room. “The aliens that have invaded Earth can only be stopped if we put aside our differences and join forces. The very human race is at stake! But we must also be aware that these aliens can take on human form, masquerade as one of us.”

  “Hey, I didn’t write that,” Melanie said.

  “I’m improvising.”

  “But—”

  “They may look like someone you’ve known for years. Like your own parents.” She pointed a finger at Melanie. “Like your own sister!”

  Melanie shot up from the couch. “I’m not an alien!”

  “That’s exactly what an alien would say!”

  Melanie threw down the legal pad and the pen. “I’m not playing anymore.”

  “Wait!” Olivia said, grabbing her arm to keep her from leaving the room. “Okay, you’re not an alien. You’re not an alien.”

  Melanie allowed Olivia to turn her toward the kitchen, where her parents were washing and drying the dinner dishes to the sounds of eighties pop music.

  “But maybe they are,” Olivia whispered.

  Melanie stifled a giggle. “Okay.”

  Olivia removed the glasses and Melanie took off the hat. They dug around in the trunk for the two thick sticks that served as swords, magic wands, and conductors’ batons, depending on the need. Now they were laser guns. They crept slowly, quietly, toward the kitchen’s swinging door. The song ended. They stood stock-still, like statues, until the next one on the CD began. They flanked the door. Olivia pushed it slightly open with her gun.

  There they were. Aliens. At the sink. Not washing dishes. No. They were developing a toxic chemical soup that they would unleash upon an unsuspecting planet within minutes. They must be stopped.

  Olivia charged into the room, Melanie at her heels, both screaming and waving their laser guns in the air.

  The alien that looked like their dad dropped a wet dish, and it shattered on the floor.

  The girls stopped shouting. Looked from the shards on the floor to the faces of their stunned parents.

  “Out!” their mother said.

  They scurried out of the room. Melanie began to cry. Olivia quickly disposed of the sticks and closed the trunk while Melanie stood in the dining room, tears streaming down her face.

  “Shhhh,” Olivia soothed. “Shhhh.”

  She could hear the pieces of the broken plate being collected. Then she thought she heard another sound.

  “Shhhh,” she said again, this time to quiet her blubbering sister.

  Melanie swallowed hard and wiped her nose on her sleeve.

  Was that . . . laughter?

  Olivia peeked through the swinging door again. Her parents were sitting on the kitchen floor, faces red, mouths stretched in mirth, practically crying as they tried to suppress the laughter. She opened the door the rest of the way, and her mother schooled her features, but her dad couldn’t stop.

  “Sorry,” Olivia offered. She felt Melanie come up behind her.

  Their mother motioned them into the room with one arm and elbowed their father with the other. “Would you stop?” she said to him. Then to the girls, “Come here.”

  They shuffled forward into the room, the door swinging closed behind them.

  “I don’t think I have to tell you that was not a good idea, right?”

  The girls shook their heads.

  “You shouldn’t sneak up on people, and you shouldn’t shoot at them, and you really shouldn’t do those things when they have wet dishes in their hands, right?”

  The girls nodded.

  Having recovered for the moment, their father added, “You’re lucky that wasn’t one of the good dishes.”

  They nodded again.

  “Okay, come here,” he said.

  Olivia and Melanie walked into their parents’ open arms. They sat there in a giggly pile on th
e wet kitchen floor. And all was forgiven.

  fifteen

  OLIVIA OPENED HER EYES. She could make out the tent around her in the gray light of almost dawn. How long had she slept? She felt the reassuring hardness of the gas station knife in her hand, ready to be flipped open and used to defend herself and her sister should the need arise. Her sister. She struggled to unzip the mummy bag from the inside and sat up. Melanie was there. On her side. Still asleep.

  Olivia lay back down. But then she needed to pee. This was the worst part of backpacking. Having to get up off the ground after a day of hiking and go out into the cold and drop your pants. Guys had it so easy.

  Every joint creaked and every muscle screamed in protest as she slid out of the tent and into her shoes. Blisters on her heels and the tops of her two littlest toes felt like lightning rubbing against the inside of each shoe. With some effort, she pulled herself into a standing position and zipped up the tent door, then stumbled out from under the extended roof of the fly and into the murky morning. Her breath came in clouds as she searched her pack for the toilet paper and shovel.

  She walked a few dozen feet into the woods and then looked around to make sure Josh couldn’t see her, but she couldn’t even see his hammock from where she was. She quickly dug her hole, did what she’d set out to do, and covered everything up. Back at her pack she used the hand sanitizer and ran her eyes over the surrounding trees. Where Josh’s hammock should have been, there was nothing. No pack hanging up, no foldable grill rack standing over the ashes in the fire ring. Had he already left? Had she imagined him?

  Olivia quickly took stock of their things and found nothing missing. She retrieved the food bags and filtered the water, and then she realized that she was incredibly cold. She climbed back into the tent and snuggled back down into her sleeping bag just as Melanie was waking up.

  “It’s freezing out there,” she said.

  Melanie groaned. “I told you we should have done this in the summer.”

  “I’d rather be cold than sweating and swarmed by mosquitos.”

  “I guess.”

  They lay in the gray light, Olivia trying to warm up, Melanie moving and flexing inside her sleeping bag.

  “My back is killing me,” Melanie said.

  “It’ll be fun putting those packs back on.”

  “Wrong.”

  “We should get going as soon as possible. Get a jump on things. We have a lot of ground to make up.”

  Melanie groaned again.

  “Hey, I gave us an out yesterday. We could have hitched back to the car and slept in the little cabins again last night. You wanted to keep hiking.”

  “And I still do,” Melanie said. “I just need to get moving and I’m sure I’ll be fine. Maybe Josh can make another fire this morning.”

  “He’s gone.”

  Melanie sat upright in her bag. “Gone?”

  “Gone. I find it a little strange that he didn’t say goodbye when he seemed so friendly yesterday. But then, there you go. He was a weirdo after all.”

  Melanie slumped over.

  “You look like you’re a larva about to pupate in that thing,” Olivia said.

  Melanie unzipped the bag and let it fall away. “Holy mackerel, it’s cold out there!”

  “I told you it was.”

  “Crap. I have to pee.”

  “You just gotta do it. Get up.”

  Melanie crawled over her. “I’m borrowing your shoes. Mine are too far away from the door.”

  “Whatever.”

  Olivia helped push Melanie out the door and into a semi-standing position, then zipped up the tent and started changing into her clothes. Two days in and she was feeling grimy and smelling ripe despite using deodorant and wet wipes. She ran a hand through her hair. “Ew,” she said out loud to no one. “I’m never going hiking again.”

  She pulled it into a ponytail, put on a ball cap she’d had since college, and started rolling the bags and deflating the pads. She’d gotten hers done and had started on Melanie’s by the time she came back.

  “Give me my shoes, would you?” Olivia said. “I need to stand up. I’ll finish the bags in a minute once I can stretch my legs.”

  “I can do my stuff,” Melanie said.

  “You have to do it really tight to fit it in the stuff sack.”

  “I know.”

  “Okay, be my guest.”

  She left Melanie in the tent and rummaged through her food bag for the second can of SpaghettiOs. She sat on the log and ate the nearly frozen pasta while staring out across the river, completely spaced out and mind blank, only coming to when the plastic spoon came back out of the can empty. She stood and rinsed the can in the river, then added it to her trash bag. She had some pears and drank some water. Then finally Melanie was unzipping the tent to come out. Olivia pushed her shoes toward her with her foot.

  “What the—there’s something in my shoe,” Melanie said.

  Olivia leaned over to see under the fly. “What?”

  Melanie held out a round black object. Olivia took it from her and opened it. “It’s a compass.”

  “There’s a note,” Melanie said. “‘So you can find your way in the wilderness. Josh.’” She looked up at Olivia. “What a sweetheart. I hope he doesn’t need that.”

  “He seemed like he knew where he was going,” Olivia said. “Did he leave his phone number or anything? I’d like to return it at some point or at least pay for it.”

  “No, and anyway, I think he meant it as a gift, free and clear.”

  “Are you about done in there? I want to pack up the tent, and you need to eat something.”

  Melanie held out her hands, and Olivia pulled her to her feet. “Pack away. I’m starving.”

  Twenty minutes later, they were ready to leave. Melanie rubbed her arms while Olivia consulted first her watch and then the map.

  “How many miles?” Melanie said.

  “Let’s just start walking and not think too much about it. It should be easy, anyway. All we have to do is stick to the river. It’s all downhill from here to Lake Superior.”

  “And we get to see some more waterfalls, right?”

  “Right.”

  They headed west out of the campsite, following the blue blazes of the North Country Trail, a 4,600-mile footpath stretching from the eastern border of New York to the middle of North Dakota. Altogether their trip would take them on just nine miles of the NCT, and most of it they’d hike that day. One hundred and seventy-five miles to the east lay the only other stretch of the NCT Olivia had ever hiked—the trail she’d been hiking when the ranger had found her to tell her of her parents’ accident. So even though this was one of the nicest hikes in the Porkies, according to both Josh and the always authoritative word of the internet, there was a part of Olivia that wanted to get it over with. She felt a strange buzzing in the soles of her feet with every step, as if the memory ran through the trail like electricity through a power line.

  They made good time despite the cold and their aching muscles, which did loosen up a bit as they walked. Other than a quick stop for water, they didn’t slow down—and didn’t speak—until they reached the first ford of the day, which would bring them to the spot where they had meant to camp the night before. They wordlessly removed their hiking boots. Olivia’s feet were hot and red and one of her blisters had burst, but she forced her water shoes on and waded across the shallow but quick-running river. On the other side, shoes and boots were exchanged once more, and Melanie wandered over to the campsite fire ring, presumably in search of residual warmth.

  “There’s not going to be any fire left,” Olivia said. “This was supposed to be our spot, so no one slept here last night.”

  “Oh yeah?” Melanie said. “Come see.”

  Olivia strode over, skeptical. But Melanie was right. It did feel warm. Olivia poked the ash with a stick, releasing the banked embers, which sent up a little flame.

  “Ooh! Get some sticks,” Melanie said.

&nbs
p; “We’re not making a fire. We’re leaving in a minute. You can’t make a fire and leave it. These people should have completely extinguished their fire before they left. And,” she added more indignantly, “they shouldn’t have even been here!”

  “Don’t you see though?” Melanie said. “Someone else needed this site. Maybe they got lost too. Or maybe someone turned an ankle and needed to stop for the night. But we got lost and ended up with Josh so that these people could use our open site. So it all worked out.”

  “Or,” Olivia said, “there were just some people hiking who didn’t make reservations ahead of time and thought they could do whatever they darn well pleased and take any site they wanted. I bet it was those three we saw at the trailhead where we parked the car.” She started looking around the campsite for evidence to support her theory.

  Melanie threw up a hand. “Why do you always think the worst of people?”

  “Because, in my experience, people are pretty much the worst. You don’t know because you live in a happy little echo chamber full of rainbows and unicorns, but I deal with the worst humanity has to offer on an almost daily basis. My whole job is about making people who break the law pay for their crimes. Sometimes it’s heinous, like rape and murder, and sometimes it’s just people being selfish jerks and not caring about anybody else because all they can think about is themselves and what they want. I have no respect for people who have no respect for the rules. The rules are for the good of everyone.”

  Olivia realized she was ranting and stopped, though she had much more to say on the topic. She bunched all the embers together with the stick and poured some of her water on them, sending up a plume of smoke, then she spread the whole mess out. “You want to eat lunch at a waterfall?”

  Melanie said nothing.

  “What?” Olivia prompted.

  “My life isn’t all rainbows and unicorns.”

  “Fine. But my point stands.” She shifted her weight off her sore hip. “Ready?”

  Melanie lifted her hands and her eyebrows in the universal sign for duh. Olivia bit back a sigh and started walking.

  Just a minute away from the campsite flowed Trappers Falls, which looked more like a waterslide than a waterfall. Olivia and Melanie silently dumped their packs and pulled out their food bags, which were lighter now after two days of hiking. Positioning herself on a stone ledge littered with yellow leaves, Olivia pounded some string cheese and jerky, then started shoving handfuls of nuts into her mouth. She was ravenous, and she wasn’t sure why.