All That We Carried Page 14

  Melanie shook her head and resumed walking. “That’s silly. No matter what I chose, there would be millions of other people who believed the same thing. I wouldn’t be alone in that belief, so why should I be worried about what other people think of my choice?”

  “No, that’s different. I didn’t say you were afraid of looking wrong. I said you were afraid of being wrong. If you pick the wrong one, well, there are consequences, right? There’s hell or being reincarnated as a lower life form, or even just missing out on having a fun life because you were part of some religion that was all about renouncing the pleasures of this world and taking vows of silence and eating just bread and water and wearing only scratchy clothes.”

  Melanie said nothing.

  “Anyway, that’s just my educated guess,” Olivia said, and Melanie could hear the smirk in her voice.

  A moment later, the trail led straight to the riverbank. Across the shallow water Melanie could see another blue blaze. The second crossing of the day. As she removed her hiking boots, she argued with Olivia in her head. She wasn’t afraid of being wrong. Why, she only barely believed in the concept of wrong. She didn’t like to tell people they were wrong about anything because everything was about perception and the lens you saw the world through. Who was she to say something was wrong? Unless it was, well, murder or cheating or stealing or stuff like that. Some things you did were right and wrong, but a person’s private beliefs? Melanie didn’t believe in imposing on that with a value judgment.

  She didn’t fear being wrong. Her fear went deeper than that. She had felt it when she saw the bear on the trail. She had felt it three years ago when she had such terrible food poisoning that she couldn’t get up off the bathroom floor to reach the phone and call Justin to come take her to the hospital. She had felt it as a small child when she’d jumped into a neighbor’s pool without a life jacket after seeing Olivia do just that, only Melanie couldn’t actually swim and had to be saved from drowning by her mother.

  Melanie wasn’t afraid of being wrong.

  She was afraid of dying.

  seventeen

  OLIVIA SHOULD HAVE KEPT her mouth shut. Even if she did believe it. And even if she wasn’t the one who’d started them down this uncomfortable conversational path to begin with. She leaned against a tree, pulled off her hiking boots and socks, and tried to think of something funny and self-deprecating to say that might break the tension that expanded within Melanie’s silence. But nothing came.

  Melanie pulled her pack back on, picked up her boots and her poles, and stepped into the steady stream of water.

  “Seems kind of strange that they would have us cross the river back there just to recross it downstream, doesn’t it?” Olivia said. “I mean, how hard would it have been to cut the trail along just the one side?” She was about to put her pack back on when she heard a scream, then a splash. “Mel!”

  Olivia ran into the water after her sister, who lay on her side, water piling up against her pack and flowing over her legs. Olivia grabbed her hand, but the pack was taking on water, making it impossible to right her from that angle. Olivia stepped over Mel’s legs so she was upstream and yanked up on her pack. Melanie struggled to get her bare feet back under her. Then she was standing in the river, water dripping from everywhere except for one dry shoulder and half of her hair. Her hiking poles hung from her wrists and tapped against Olivia’s side as she helped her to the far shore.

  “Are you okay? Did you twist an ankle?”

  What would they do if one of them couldn’t walk out? They were more than three miles from the nearest trailhead. Melanie’s cheeks were pink, her teeth were chattering, and her lips had an unsettling purplish cast. It was still only around forty degrees.

  “We have to get you out of these clothes.” Olivia snapped open the waist strap of Melanie’s pack and helped her out of it. “Take them off, right now,” she said as she unzipped the pack and began pawing through it. But the contents of Melanie’s pack were wet as well. Olivia wanted to scream at her for not packing everything in Ziploc bags as she’d instructed her.

  What’s done is done and can’t be undone.

  Without a word, Olivia left the pack there in the dirt and rushed as quickly as she dared back over the slippery river rocks to her own pack. She pulled it on, grabbed her boots and poles, and crossed the stream once more, then dumped everything onto the ground and found her hand towel.

  Melanie was still fully clothed. Olivia started stripping her down from top to bottom. She wrung out her hair, pulled off her coat and her shirts, and dried her as best she could with the small towel. She gave Melanie one of her own T-shirts and the jacket off her back. Then she got to work on the lower half. Her pants were too big around Melanie’s slim waist, but she pulled the drawstring tight. She dried Melanie’s boots as best she could and checked the size. Despite being a bit taller than Olivia, Melanie wore a size nine to Olivia’s nine and a half. Olivia thought but a moment before putting another pair of socks on Melanie’s feet, followed by her own completely dry boots. Melanie was still in such shock from the cold, she didn’t seem to notice.

  Olivia looked intently into her eyes. “Are you okay?”

  Melanie managed to nod.

  “Are you still cold?”

  She nodded again.

  “But nothing is broken or twisted?”

  Melanie took a few small steps.

  “Okay, here’s the deal. We need to get you moving. I’m going to pack this stuff up so we can keep going. In the meantime, I need you to just walk around in a little circle to get the blood flowing. I think we’re close to the lakeshore. Maybe someone will have a fire going where we can warm you up some more, okay?”

  Melanie nodded again but did not move.

  “So start walking,” Olivia said.

  There wasn’t a lot of room, but Melanie dutifully obeyed, making a tight oval around the spot where Olivia knelt in the fallen leaves squeezing as much water as possible out of everything in Melanie’s pack before refolding, rerolling, and repacking it.

  “Okay, we’re ready,” Olivia finally said. She handed her dry pack to Melanie, then pulled Melanie’s wet pack onto her own back.

  “Wh-what are you doing?” Melanie said through her shaking.

  “You said you wanted to carry the tent,” Olivia said.

  “B-but—”

  “No buts, let’s go.” She held her hand out for Melanie to go first, which she did without further argument.

  For a few minutes they walked between the Little Carp River to their left and a steep wooded hill to their right before the trail opened up and the land beneath their feet spread out to the northeast. It wasn’t more than twenty or thirty minutes before they could hear the sound of another waterfall. Traders Falls was about halfway between the river crossing and the shore of Lake Superior. The falls were small and picturesque, but neither Melanie nor Olivia slowed their determined pace to admire them.

  “Are you warming up?” Olivia called up to Melanie.

  “A bit, yeah,” Melanie said.

  Her voice was no longer shaking, and Olivia took that as a good sign. Now she turned her worrying over to the next problem. Everything in Melanie’s pack was wet. Her clothes, her underwear and socks, her towel, and quite possibly her sleeping bag, though Olivia hadn’t had time to check it out. They still had two nights and two days left on the trail before they got to their car, unless they could find someone who would give them a ride from the Lake of the Clouds to the Government Peak trailhead where they had started. If it stayed cool and cloudy, there was no way the stuff would dry out enough to use. Olivia had one more set of clothes left, which meant they’d both be wearing the same clothes for a couple of days. That in and of itself was not a big deal. They’d just be extra gross and grimy when they got out of the woods.

  What worried her was what they would do during the cold nights on the cold ground. One person could barely fit into a mummy bag, let alone two. If Melanie’s sleeping bag was we
t, of course Olivia would give Melanie her bag. But then what would she do? She wouldn’t even have much for extra clothing to put on.

  The farther they walked, the more she ran over this problem in her mind. And the more she ran over it, the more the hard truth came to the surface—they couldn’t spend another night out on the trail. In her obsessive poring over the map earlier, Olivia had located the spot where Josh had said he parked, the trailhead at Pinkerton Creek. That was their last chance to cut the trip short before they were locked into at least eleven more miles of hiking—and more than fifteen if they couldn’t find a ride at the Lake of the Clouds. Surely at this point Melanie would agree that it would be better to take their chances hitchhiking than walk into certain hypothermia for at least one of them.

  When they came to a small wooden bridge leading off to the left, they finally paused. A sign indicated that the North Country Trail continued over the bridge, as did the Pinkerton Trail, which would lead them to the parking lot and South Boundary Road. If they continued going straight, they would be on the shore of Lake Superior. Already the wind was picking up, reminding Olivia that of course the lakeshore would be even colder than the woods.

  Melanie pulled one of her water bottles from her pack on Olivia’s back. “We should have done it this way the whole time.”

  “Me with your pack?”

  “No, just carrying each other’s water bottles. Then they wouldn’t be changing hands so many times because we can’t reach our own when our packs are on.”

  Olivia pulled one of her bottles from the pack Melanie was carrying. “I hadn’t even thought of that.”

  They both took a few long swigs. This close to the lake, there was no reason to scrimp. They had three quadrillion gallons of fresh water at their disposal—enough to cover the entire land surface of both North and South America with a foot of water.

  “So where are we?” Melanie asked.

  “Well, that’s what I wanted to talk to you about. I’ve been doing some thinking, and considering the present state of things, I want to propose a change in plans.”

  Melanie got a little wrinkle between her eyebrows and waited for Olivia to continue.

  Olivia pointed down the trail. “That way is Lake Superior, where we might find someone with a fire where you can warm up some more and maybe, if we could find some way to hang things up near it without catching anything on fire, dry a few things out.” She pointed at the bridge. “That way is the road. And the lot where Josh said he was parked.”

  “Okay,” Melanie said slowly.

  “Here’s the thing. Everything in your pack is wet. Luckily I was carrying the tent, so that’s dry. But all your stuff is wet. And it’s going to be cold again tonight. And that’s dangerous. When people die out in the woods, it’s not usually because of a bear attack or starvation, it’s because of hypothermia. Well, the leading causes are falling, drowning, and heart attack, but in our case those aren’t really an issue, because we’re not rock climbing or canoeing down dangerous rapids and we’re youngish and at least passably fit. So if something gets us, it’s probably going to be hypothermia.”

  “Where did you get that list?”

  “Backpacker.com. I think the article was called ‘A Dozen Ways to Die.’”

  “Oh.”

  “Anyway”—Olivia patted her pockets—“I think we need to admit that this is the point at which we should throw in the towel and call this trip finished.” She twirled her finger at Melanie. “Turn around, would you?” She started digging through the pockets of her pack. “I know you’re going to want to keep pushing forward, but sometimes . . . huh . . .”

  “What?”

  “I can’t find the map.” She spun Melanie around again. “Did you see what I did with it?”

  Melanie twirled her finger now. “I think I had it last.”

  Olivia turned her back to Melanie. “I just emptied out your entire bag and repacked everything. It wasn’t in there.”

  “Did you look in every pocket?”

  “Yes.” Olivia spun back around to face her sister. “Oh no.”

  “What?”

  “You had it.”

  “That’s what I said.”

  “No, you had it. In your hand.”

  Melanie shook her head and mouthed no, but she didn’t look at all like she believed herself.

  “You dropped it,” Olivia said.

  Melanie nodded slowly.

  “In the river.”

  Melanie nodded again. “Olivia, I am so, so sorry. I had it under my arm because I couldn’t hold it and my poles at the same time.”

  It must have fallen when Melanie did and been washed downstream when Olivia was preoccupied with getting her sister out of her wet clothes. It was gone. The map was gone.

  “Well, that settles it,” Olivia said. “We have to stop. We have to cross this bridge and take that trail out to the road and hope that someone comes by before dark. What day is it?”

  “Now, hold on,” Melanie said. “Let’s just think a minute.”

  “That’s all I’ve been doing for the last half hour, Mel. Trying to think our way out of this mess. And this is it. This is the plan.”

  “Just hang on a second.”

  “No, it’s over. What is it, Saturday? Sunday? Is it still the weekend?”

  Melanie looked at her watch, but it had been in the water too long. No matter how she shook her wrist, it would not wake up.

  Olivia looked at hers, noting the low battery symbol in the corner. “Monday. Crap. No one’s going to be here on a Monday in October. Tourist season is over, and people coming up to see the fall colors would come on a weekend, not a Monday. Everyone’s back at work.”

  “Not Josh,” Melanie said.

  “Right, and he said he was parked at this trailhead. We should get down there as fast as we can so we don’t miss him.”

  “Wrong. I mean, yes, that’s where he said he parked, but he won’t be there. Last night he said he was going to the salmon run on the Big Carp River.”

  “He left so early in the morning though. He probably already finished fishing and headed back to the car.”

  Melanie was shaking her head again. “I don’t know. I got the feeling he’d be around for a little while. He didn’t seem like he was in any hurry. And he did say something about running into each other again on the trail, didn’t he?”

  “Melanie! We have no map! All of your stuff is soaking wet! This is ridiculous! We can’t go wandering around in the woods with no map and no idea where Josh is. Even if we found him, how is he going to help us? All the guy had was a hammock. He’s not going to suddenly have an extra dry sleeping bag.”

  “He gave us a compass.”

  “A compass can’t keep us warm!”

  “Stop!” Melanie held up her hands. “Just stop. You’re freaking out because this has all been really unexpected. This wasn’t in your plans. But I’m the one who fell in the river. I’m the one who’s cold. I’m the one who made a blunder. And I will be the one to figure out my situation. You think you have to fix this, but you don’t. You think you have to run everything because no one could run it as well as you can, but you don’t. I am an adult. I have been running my own life for ten years without your input. I think I can manage to make my own decision about how to handle this.”

  Olivia pressed her lips together and planted her hands on her hips. “Well?”

  “Just give me a second!”

  Olivia looked down at her feet, which were aching in Melanie’s damp, too-small hiking boots.

  “Okay, how far is it to Lake Superior?” Melanie finally said.

  “I could tell you—if I had a map.”

  “Oh, please. How do you not know that map by heart now? Ballpark?”

  Olivia sighed. “I don’t know. We’re probably less than ten minutes away.”

  “What time is it?”

  “It’s already past three.”

  “Here’s what I want to do. I want to keep going to the lake a
nd just see if there’s anyone there who might be able to help us or who might have an extra map or something. If there’s anyone there, we can ask if they’ve seen Josh, and then that might help us decide what to do. If it seems like we’re alone out there, then maybe we think about taking that other trail to the road.”

  Olivia raised her palms to the sky. “Don’t you see that the later it gets, the less likely it is that anyone will happen by in a car? That hitchhiking in daylight and hitchhiking at night are two very different activities? Every minute we spend out here makes it less likely that we’ll get picked up at all.”

  “Thirty minutes isn’t going to make much of a difference. We’ve already wasted ten minutes just standing here doing nothing.”

  Melanie had her there.

  “Fine. Thirty minutes and no more. If we haven’t found anyone who can help us in that amount of time, we bail.”

  “Fine.”

  “Here.” Olivia shrugged out of Melanie’s soggy pack. “You can take this back.” She bent to untie the boots. “And these torturous things.”

  “Why are you wearing my boots?” Melanie said, looking down at her own feet.

  “Because they were wet and mine were dry.” Olivia stepped out of the boots and stretched her toes.

  “You didn’t have to do that.”

  “But I did, didn’t I?” She motioned to Melanie to take off her boots. “But my feet can’t take much more, so give me mine back.”

  When they were both reequipped with their own stuff, Melanie grasped Olivia’s upper arms and looked into her eyes. “You’re a good sister.”

  Olivia pulled away. “Let’s get this over with.” She headed for the next marked tree down the path.

  eighteen

  MELANIE COULD FEEL the power of the lake even in the woods. The wind was high and cold, and the rhythmic waves crashing against the shoreline quickened her pulse and her pace. When they came out of the trees, she caught her breath. Superior was a deep gray-blue, flecked with the white of breaking waves all the way out to the horizon, where it merged seamlessly with the cloudy sky. The smooth tumbled stones that made up the beach were a darker gray, slick and wet and adorned with the occasional orange leaf that had lodged there. Large bodies of boulders hunched in the surf, and the skeletons of dead trees and driftwood lay like petrified lightning.