All That We Carried Read online

“Thanks for saving me,” Melanie said.

  “Huh?”

  “Your arm. You flipped me on my way to the floor.”

  “Oh. Yeah. I didn’t even think about it. It just happened.”

  “Well, thanks.”

  Olivia let out a little laugh. “I guess it’s the least I could do. I did pull you off in the first place.”

  “Mom told you it was my turn, didn’t she?”

  Olivia sighed. “This bear smells terrible.”

  Melanie giggled and turned the other way, bringing Bruno with her.

  “Next year,” Olivia said from behind her. “Next year, it’s yours.”

  twenty

  MELANIE PLACED ANOTHER broken branch on the fire and shifted it around with the stick Josh had been using. The tip flickered and smoked, and she dug it into the dirt as he had. She eyed the dwindling pile of sticks and logs with some measure of anxiety. She didn’t want to use up all of the fuel, and she was afraid of leaving the fire untended to find some more. The thought of getting lost—again—kept her by the sputtering flames, giving them just enough of a nudge to keep going.

  She kept checking her watch and then remembering for the twentieth, the thirtieth time that it wasn’t working. How long had Olivia and Josh been gone? And when Josh finally returned, as she kept reassuring herself he would, would Olivia be with him? Or had she finally had it up to here with her little sister as she so often had when they were kids, when Melanie wasn’t playing by the rules and Olivia would stomp off and leave her in the basement with a board game or on the lawn with their Barbies and model horses?

  If she didn’t come back, would it be weird to be here alone with Josh, a strange man she’d only met the day before? If Olivia did come back, would that mean suffering through two more days of her bad attitude?

  Melanie tried to reconcile the woman who had rushed to help her at the river with the one who had so thoroughly belittled her in front of a third party. But if she thought about it, of course that’s how it had always been. Olivia the protective older sister had to take care of Melanie the flaky baby sister. Olivia the judgmental critic had to point out all the ways Melanie fell short of her expectations.

  Why had Melanie wanted to see her so badly? She had been doing just fine on her own for years. She felt good about herself, mostly. She had plenty of friends and followers to connect with. She had Justin. Why had she invited Olivia back in—no, insisted, dragged her kicking and screaming—when Olivia had so clearly wanted nothing to do with her? When she would have been better off without her?

  Right at that moment, Melanie decided that she hoped Josh would come back alone. She didn’t want to see Olivia again—not on this trip and maybe not ever. Possibly when they were old ladies. But maybe not even then. Olivia could walk right out of the woods and catch a ride with some lunatic out on the road. She could pick up the car and . . .

  Oh. It was her car though. Olivia wouldn’t drive Melanie’s car back home. She’d wait for her, probably at those little cabins they’d stayed in, and meet her at the trailhead a couple days later, all clean and smug and well rested, while Melanie would probably have to be practically carried out by Josh. And then Melanie would have to listen to her I-told-you-so’s all the way back to the carpool lot in Indian River. Melanie would be rid of her for two days and then be stuck with her for at least eight hours with stops—more if they stayed somewhere overnight to break up the trip.

  Melanie put another stick on the fire and poked at it. Why was having a sister so hard?

  She checked her dead watch again. Then, voices. She strained her eyes toward the sound. Movement. A laugh. Olivia’s. She saw them through the trees, Josh and Olivia, packs on, grinning and looking like an Eddie Bauer catalog. All they were missing was the wire hair fox terrier leaping after a stick. Melanie was simultaneously relieved and irritated. Relieved to see them—yes, even Olivia—but irritated that they seemed to be having such a good time together without her. That Olivia was having a good time at all.

  Josh caught sight of her and waved. Then Olivia quieted down, as though she was what they had been talking and laughing about and now they had better hush up.

  “Looks like you kept the fire going nicely,” Josh said as they drew near. He removed Melanie’s pack from his back and leaned it against a cedar tree. “Also looks like we’re going to run out of wood before long, so I better scare up some more.” He shared a look with Olivia, who nodded and took off her own pack, then he strode off into the trees.

  “What was all that about?” Melanie said.

  “What?” Olivia said.

  “That little knowing glance.”

  Olivia made a face. “There was no glance.”

  “Mmm.”

  Olivia held out her hands in a “what gives?” gesture. “You’re not happy to see me?”

  “I didn’t really think you’d bail.”

  “Well, anyway, it turns out the sleeping bag is fine. I kind of wish I’d taken the time to check it earlier. It would have saved a lot of stress. And walking.” She busied herself removing the tent from her pack and beginning the ritual of unrolling and setting it up. “Want to give me a hand?”

  Not especially, Melanie wanted to say, but she strove not to be a petty person. Pettiness was so often a factor in her clients’ unhappiness. Not being able to let go of little snubs or unintended insults. She routinely gave out a mantra for people struggling with this smallness of spirit: What I cannot free rules over me. She’d read it years ago on the inside of a Dove dark chocolate wrapper. She needed to let go of the tiny seed of bitterness she’d allowed to burrow into the soil of her heart and instead embrace her sister’s change of mind without suspicion or resentment.

  She leaned over to take two corners of the tent and shook it out with Olivia, like shaking out the blanket onto the hide-a-bed for their long-ago sisters’ sleepovers.

  “I’m glad you’re back,” Melanie said. She was fairly certain she meant it. Because the Olivia who returned was not quite the Olivia who had walked away a little while ago. “So, what were you and Josh talking about when you got back? You actually looked like you were enjoying yourself.”

  Olivia smiled. “You know, I was. It’s interesting. He must be our age or pretty near to it, and yet there’s something about him that seems older. I don’t know if it’s the way he talks or what he talks about, or if it’s just a result of him growing up out in the middle of nowhere up here—his father was a park ranger—but I don’t know. That can’t be it. He sounds too educated.”

  “That’s kind of judgy—implying that it’s surprising that someone raised up here wouldn’t be educated.”

  “That’s not what I mean, exactly. It’s just . . . well, you’d know if you talked to him much.”

  “I guess I’ll have plenty of time the next couple days.”

  Olivia pushed a tent peg into the ground. “Oh, I don’t think it’s really necessary to make him walk with us the rest of the way. He was just offering that as a favor if I didn’t come back. We shouldn’t hold him to that. He was just being a good guy.”

  “So let him be a good guy. I think it would be better with him. You looked like you were having a nice time when you walked up. What did you say you were talking about?”

  “We were . . . well, I guess we were arguing more than talking.”

  “It didn’t sound like an argument.”

  “It was. It was just . . . it was philosophical. It wasn’t personal. He didn’t flip out when I disagreed with him.”

  “Oh, I get it,” Melanie said. “He wasn’t sensitive.”

  “Exactly.”

  Melanie shoved a tent pole through a sleeve toward her sister.

  “Hey! Careful!”

  “Don’t take it personally.”

  Olivia rubbed her arm where the pole had hit her and bent down to guide it into place. “What is with you? I thought you’d be happy I came back and that I was getting along better with Josh, and here you’re jabbing me with sticks.
”

  “It was an accident.”

  “Sure it was.”

  Before Melanie could respond, Josh walked up with an armful of wood. They put up the rest of the tent in silence. When it was done, Olivia reached into her pack, retrieved the skein of nylon rope, and tossed it at Melanie. Harder, Melanie thought, than she really needed to.

  “What is this for?” she asked.

  “Clothesline.”

  Melanie stomped around the campsite for a moment looking for a suitable spot, then began tying one end to a tree branch.

  “Not there,” Olivia said. “Closer to the lake.”

  Melanie glared at her and walked to the side of the site that was closest to Lake Superior, then started to wrap the rope around the trunk of a sapling.

  “No, I mean way closer,” Olivia said. “Like as close as you can get to the edge of the woods. Where there’s lots of wind.”

  Melanie spun around. “Perhaps you would like to do it?”

  Olivia approached with her hand held out. “Sure.”

  Melanie shoved the rope into her hand.

  “And I’ll just take your pack too so I can hang up all your clothes for you,” Olivia said as she lifted the pack onto her back. “Maybe by the time I get back, you can have the beds made in the tent. Can you handle that?”

  Melanie’s face burned as she realized that off in the periphery, Josh had seen this whole childish exchange. “Fine,” she said.

  When Olivia was out of sight, she threw the pads and bags through the open tent door. Then she followed them in and zipped the door shut behind her. Sitting cross-legged on the cold, hard ground, Melanie whisper-screamed into her hands and then punched a sleeping bag. She felt just like she had when she was twelve and Olivia had embarrassed her in front of the neighbor boys when they were playing Truth or Dare. Olivia had dared her to French-kiss one of them, and Melanie thought that a French kiss was licking another person’s mouth because Olivia had told her it was kissing with your tongue. She couldn’t look Kyle Wilson in the eye for years.

  “Knock knock,” came Josh’s voice from outside the tent. “You okay?”

  “Yeah.”

  A pause. “You sure?”

  “Yeah, I’m fine, Josh.” She started unrolling the sleeping pads as if to prove that she was indeed okay. Would someone who was not okay be able to inflate two long blue rectangles? She took a deep breath and began to blow into one of the valve stems.

  “Listen,” Josh continued, “Olivia and I talked a bit about your parents’ accident on the way back.”

  What? She had talked to Josh, a complete stranger, rather than her sister?

  “I think maybe she’s ready to talk to you about it. She just doesn’t really want to argue about the afterlife stuff at this point.”

  Melanie stopped blowing. “Is that so? Is that what she was talking to you about? ‘The afterlife stuff’?”

  “A bit.”

  “And I suppose you don’t believe in anything either? Is that why you’re telling me this?”

  Josh unzipped the tent door partway. “No. I’m telling you this because she was ready to talk to you when we got back, but then you started picking at each other like children. I thought you said you wanted to reconnect. It’s just, this doesn’t seem like reconnecting, is all,” he said. Then he zipped the door shut.

  Melanie could hear his footsteps head off toward the lake. She finished blowing up the sleeping pads and unrolled the bags. He was right, and it annoyed her. Why was she suddenly shooting herself in the foot just when it seemed Olivia might be taking a few steps to meet her in the middle? She needed her journal so she could try to make sense of her jumbled thoughts.

  Her journal! Had it gotten wet when she fell in the river? And where was her phone? It had been in her pants pocket.

  She stumbled out of the tent to find that she was alone again. How long did it take to hang up some wet clothes? Was Olivia out there reading her journal? Going through her texts to Justin?

  As much as she didn’t want to leave the warmth of the fire, she could not stand idly by while Olivia pried into her personal life. Melanie would have to tell her what was going on eventually. But in her own way, at the right time.

  And this was not the right time.

  twenty-one

  OLIVIA SNAPPED A PAIR of Melanie’s leggings in the air and laid them over the makeshift clothesline she’d strung between a quaking aspen and a dying white birch tree. The wind off the lake blew them back toward the forest like a flag. It was the last of the clothes in the pack, but not the last of the casualties of Melanie’s fall. Olivia had found her phone in a pocket. She took the battery out and arranged the pieces of the phone on a wide, flat stone to dry. It might power on later, or it might not. But even if Melanie had to get a new phone, she’d likely still have all her pictures on the card or in the cloud somewhere.

  The thing that she knew Melanie’s heart would break over was the journal. If she’d used a pencil it would have been fine. The pages would have dried wrinkled, but they’d still be readable. But she’d used pen, and all along the outside margins her loopy cursive letters bled together into an illegible mass. It was like their relationship. Like someone had been writing their story, and some dumb accident, a momentary shift in balance, had wrecked it. No amount of wishing could undo it.

  “How’s it going out here?” Josh’s voice hit her ear like a soft breeze.

  Olivia lifted her head from where she crouched over the journal. “Okay, I guess.” She held up the journal. “This will never be the same.”

  Josh took the book from her as she stood. He riffled the damp pages and shook his head. “That’s a shame.”

  “She’s going to be really upset about it.”

  Josh handed the journal back to Olivia. She turned a few pages.

  “There are some in the middle that didn’t get it too bad. She might be able to read some of it and figure out what she was saying.” Opening to a page, Olivia caught sight of her own name. She shut the book before she could read any more—not because she wasn’t curious about what Melanie was saying about her but because she was. She deliberately placed the book on the rock next to the pieces of Melanie’s phone.

  She felt the corner of a T-shirt flapping on the clothesline. “Do you think this will be enough?”

  Josh felt the leggings. “Should be. It’s good she brought pants other than jeans. Denim takes forever to dry.”

  “Probably we should have gotten hiking-specific clothing that dries super fast. I could have done that. I don’t know why I wasn’t prepared for something like this.”

  “You can’t be prepared for everything.”

  “You can try,” Olivia said.

  Josh regarded her with a thoughtful twist to his mouth. “And that’s what you normally do, isn’t it? You want to be ready for anything.”

  “Doesn’t everyone? No one likes being caught off guard.”

  “Always being on guard against what might happen to you seems like kind of an exhausting way to live. When you block out the possibility of bad surprises, don’t you lose the possibility of good surprises too?”

  “You sound like Melanie.”

  Josh laughed. “She may be onto something there. Let me ask you this: when’s the last time you were pleasantly surprised by something or someone?”

  Olivia bit the inside of her lip a moment. “When we found you. Both times, I guess.”

  “Okay. And you wouldn’t have had those pleasant surprises if you hadn’t had a couple things go wrong, right?”

  “If we hadn’t had those accidents, we wouldn’t have needed your help at all. You would have been just another person on the trail. Actually, we wouldn’t have even crossed paths because we would have made our campsite that night while you were still out on the river fishing. You would have been inconsequential.”

  Josh sat on the rock next to Melanie’s journal. “But you did have those accidents. You did get lost and we did cross paths.”

&n
bsp; “So? If we hadn’t lost the trail, it would have made no difference if we never met at all.”

  “How do you know that? Can you see every contingency into the infinite future? How do you know you weren’t meant to meet me all along?”

  Olivia put her hands on her hips. “Because nothing is meant. Not in the sense you’re using the word. I thought we’d been over this already.”

  “All right. Let’s look at this from a different angle. Cause and effect. Do you think you and Melanie would have had all the same conversations you’ve had in the past couple days if you hadn’t gotten off the trail? Would you have even had the same thoughts in your own mind if everything had gone according to your plan?”

  “Of course not. I will allow that my thoughts and our conversations were affected by what happened.”

  “You might say they were effected by it. Caused, not just influenced.”

  Olivia tipped her head in concession. “Perhaps. But the fact that there is a cause and an effect doesn’t mean there is a mind behind the cause. Every part of the planet might be said to eventually affect every other part of it, but that doesn’t require a mind or a will. There are laws of nature that behave in predictable ways that are interacting with one another.” Josh opened his mouth, and Olivia rushed on. “And don’t give me that crap about an ultimate cause or an unmoved mover. I’ve heard that argument before.”

  He closed his mouth and smiled. “And you avoid talking about it because you’ve already decided it doesn’t fit into your worldview.”

  Olivia shook her head. “Don’t pretend like you know my inner thoughts. Don’t think that because I told you a little bit about my life, you somehow have any authority to say anything about it.”

  Josh didn’t respond. Just kept smiling that knowing smile. Who did he think he was? Pretending to know what she was thinking. She was trying to think of what else to say to get that look off his face, to jab him like she jabbed unreliable witnesses on the stand, when he stood and brushed off the back of his pants.

  “I’ve got wood to carry and fish to fry,” he said. “I’ll see you back at the campsite.”