All That We Carried Page 21

  “It is much warmer today than it was yesterday,” Melanie agreed. “I mean, I’m not soaking wet either, but still.”

  Olivia stood and sniffed the air. “Mel, this isn’t snow.” She caught a piece in her hand and smudged it across her palm with her thumb. “This is ash.”

  Melanie rose to her feet. “Someone with a campfire nearby?”

  Olivia took in the flecks of white drifting lazily through the forest around them. “I don’t think so.”

  They locked eyes.

  “Get your pack,” Olivia said, her heart beating frantically against her ribs. She hoisted her own pack up with strength she didn’t know she still had after days of practically nonstop physical exertion.

  Melanie was ready just as quickly. “How many more miles?”

  Olivia started walking, ignoring the pain in her hip. “Three? Maybe four? We didn’t pass the mine yet, right?”

  Melanie followed close behind. “I didn’t see a mine. But I don’t know that I’d know one if I saw it.”

  “Probably there’d be a sign. And it wouldn’t be right on the trail. Off a ways maybe. Keep your eyes open.”

  “We’re not going to stop to admire an abandoned mine,” Melanie said incredulously.

  Olivia turned to her sister. “No, but it might come in handy—if we need somewhere safe to hunker down.”

  Melanie’s eyes widened. “No. We’re not stopping anywhere. We’re getting out of the woods. Today. Let’s go.”

  twenty-six

  AS MELANIE MARCHED along the trail, synchronizing her steps with the swift swooshing of her blood in her ears, the fear of a possible forest fire was mollified somewhat by the fact that her sister had actually admitted she had been wrong about something. About a lot of somethings. It was the type of breakthrough Melanie had been hoping for. How much further could they have gotten had they not been so rudely interrupted by the prospect of a natural disaster bearing down on them? She knew Olivia would not have gone so far as to offer her blessing when it came to Justin’s proposal. But maybe, just maybe, she’d get there at some point if she was willing to at least talk to him.

  Ahead, Olivia stopped abruptly. “I’m sure we should have already passed the mine, and I’ve seen nothing. No sign, no evidence anywhere that humans were ever here, let alone blasting holes in the ground.”

  “Maybe it’s just nothing at this point,” Melanie suggested. “It doesn’t take long for nature to take over once people are out of the picture.”

  “You’re right. Even if it were still here, it’s better to be out of the woods altogether than stuck in a mine shaft in the middle of a forest fire. Whatever safety we might find from actual flames wouldn’t really matter if the fire sucked all of the oxygen out of our hiding spot.”

  “I hadn’t thought of that,” Melanie said. She looked at the canopy overhead. “Do you actually see any ash here? I mean, is it possible what we saw was just from one person’s fire?”

  “I think that’s pretty unlikely, don’t you?”

  “Yeah,” she admitted. “But—”

  “There are no campsites along this part of the trail. The last ones we passed at the river were empty. There are a few up ahead on the escarpment—we were supposed to stay at one of them last night. There are also a few spots along the lakeshore. You know where we went upriver with Josh this morning? If we’d kept going on the same trail we would have stayed on Lake Superior for miles and miles. If someone started a fire out there where it’s so windy—”

  “And then left it unattended—”

  “Exactly. Remember that one site where the people hadn’t put their fire all the way out?”

  Melanie felt her jaw drop. “Those same people—”

  “Yeah. And I bet I know who it is.”

  “But I don’t feel any wind today,” Melanie said, looking for a reason Olivia could be wrong.

  “That’s because we’re on the other side of a whole line of little mountains that block it. And we’re going up those mountains.”

  “Doesn’t it seem like maybe that’s the worst thing we could do? Maybe we should turn around and go back to the river. And what about Josh? He’s down in that valley fishing right now. Shouldn’t we find him and warn him?”

  “I’m not worried about Josh,” Olivia said. “I’m one hundred percent sure he can take care of himself. But the fastest way for us to get out of danger is to get out of the woods. And the fastest way to do that is to keep going the way we’re going. Besides, we need to get to somewhere we can report the fire.”

  She started walking again. Melanie followed behind as quickly as possible, all the time wishing that life had fewer complications. If someone was in charge of this whole enterprise, why didn’t they just make good stuff happen? Why were there forest fires and car accidents and broken relationships? If there was an all-powerful God, that meant he had the power to do good things all the time—but chose not to. Or perhaps he was completely good and wished good things to happen, but he wasn’t all-powerful. Olivia had said she couldn’t believe in a God who would cause their parents’ accident. But maybe God hadn’t done that. Maybe he was just as powerless to stop two cars from colliding as they were to stop a forest fire.

  Maybe Olivia was right. Maybe religion was just there to make people feel like there was more meaning to life than just chemical reactions. Maybe she’d been wasting her time with her constant dabbling in spiritual things. Maybe there were no spiritual things.

  After what felt like more than a mile of steady upward progress, the trail leveled out. Melanie scanned the forest for falling ash but didn’t see any. Could they have imagined it? Could Olivia have been mistaken? Or perhaps she had purposefully led Melanie to believe there was a reason to rush through this last leg of the trip just so she could get it over with. Had she regretted her contrite words on the log and so cut them short with an outright lie? Had Melanie really seen ash in her sister’s hand?

  They emerged from the dense trees onto an outcropping of resistant bedrock with unobstructed views of the Big Carp River valley below. An unending carpet of orange and yellow unfurled beneath them, bisected by the river snaking its way through the trees. There was no smoke rising from the valley. Melanie strained to see if Josh was down there in the water, but they were too far away to spot a single man.

  This high up, she could feel some breeze. But it certainly wasn’t what she’d call windy. She lived on Lake Michigan. She knew windy.

  Olivia motioned to a wooden bench set back from the cliff. “I think we should stop here for a few minutes and eat something. I’d like to keep pushing on, but my energy is really lagging. What do you think?”

  Melanie was surprised to be asked her opinion on the matter. “Sure. I’m really hungry. And tired.” She pulled out her last protein bar and unwrapped it. “You know, I haven’t seen any ash this whole time we’ve been walking. I think we’re worried about nothing.”

  Olivia opened a pouch of tuna salad. “It would be nice if that were true.”

  “It must have been something else. Some kind of fungus maybe?”

  “Hmm. I have heard of some kind of invasive pest that’s been a problem for hemlocks. Some kind of parasite. Woolly something-or-other.” She squeezed the tuna salad into her mouth. “Something that lays eggs in white sacs.”

  “There you go,” Melanie said. “I bet it was just some of those coming loose and falling to the ground.”

  Olivia didn’t look convinced. She took another bite of her tuna then a swig of water. “So, what are you going to tell Justin?”

  Melanie nearly choked on a bite of protein bar. She chased it down her throat with some water and coughed. “I don’t know.”

  Olivia raised her eyebrows. “Oh, come on.”

  “I actually always thought you two would get married,” Melanie deflected. “Then you just threw him away when you went to school.”

  “I didn’t throw him away. He was never my boyfriend or anything.”

  “I think may
be he thought of himself that way.”

  Olivia shrugged. “I can’t help that.”

  Melanie frowned at her.

  “I’m sorry, but I never thought of him that way. So if that’s what has you unsure—like I’d be angry you stole my first love or some such thing—that’s not my issue with it.”

  “That’s not it.”

  “Well, what is it then? Look, I’m not actually going to cut you out of my life. I shouldn’t have said that. I was just surprised and angry and . . . I mean, I’m still angry and I don’t forgive him, but I’m not going to make you choose between us. I’m not going to be celebrating holidays with the two of you or anything, but I’m willing to work on you and me.” She paused. “I mean, you love him, right? You uprooted your life in Rockford and followed him to Petoskey.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Okay, so . . .”

  Melanie sighed. “I’m not—I just—” She tried again. “I need to be sure I love him and not just the idea of . . . making up for you.”

  “What?”

  Melanie twisted a little on the bench, trying to find a more comfortable position. “Like, the reason I was so nice to him at first was because you were so mean. He wanted to talk to you, not me. But I was the next best option. I felt bad about how you treated him, so I was extra nice. I listened to him like I thought you should. I became his friend because you stopped being his friend. I did all the things I thought you should be doing. And we have become real friends. But . . . do I love him like that? Or is it just that I think someone should love him like that?”

  Olivia tucked the empty tuna pouch into her trash bag. “You know, Josh said something last night. I won’t say it as well as he did, but here’s the gist of it: you can’t live someone else’s life for them. I can’t live your life the way I think you should live it, you know? And you can’t live mine. Or Justin’s.”

  Melanie nodded and looked at her muddy hiking boots.

  “You’re carrying a lot of weight around,” Olivia continued. “You’re trying to make everything right for everyone else. Maybe you need to think about yourself once in a while.”

  Melanie felt tears building up behind her eyes. She was exhausted by all of it. Physically and emotionally depleted. Worrying about so many other people. Not just Olivia and Justin, but all of her followers and clients. Worrying that they were eating right and breathing right and living right. Worrying that if she didn’t constantly think about them and anticipate their needs, their lives would spiral out of control. That if she was gone too long from their screens, she’d lose them. And she’d have no one left to worry about. Except herself.

  “Thank you for saying that,” Melanie said, swallowing down the lump that had lodged in her throat. “I just want everyone to be happy and live good lives.”

  Olivia put her hand on Melanie’s shoulder. “You don’t have to answer to God for anyone else. If we mess up, it’s not on you. You just have to answer for yourself.”

  “God? Excuse me?”

  Olivia dropped her hand to her lap and looked rather sheepish, as though she’d let slip that she was taking Melanie to a surprise party. “Eh, I’m trying the idea out today. We’ll see.” She stood up. “Come on. We’re not going to figure this all out right now. And we still have a mountain to climb.”

  twenty-seven

  OLIVIA LED THE WAY forward along the trail, silently chastising herself for using that word. God. It would only get Melanie’s hopes up for her when the entire notion was still strange and alien and likely to wear off the minute they were safely out of these woods and on the way back to real life. People under pressure often made bad assumptions and faulty decisions.

  She remembered her father telling her about her great-uncle Gordon, who had been an altogether rotten man. Beat his wife and kids, shot the family dog after it urinated on a sofa, couldn’t hold a job down because of his temper and his drinking. Bedridden with bone cancer and given six weeks to live, he’d made a bargain with God. If God got him out of that bed and made him walk again, he’d be a changed man. He did get out of that bed. He did walk again. In fact, he lived six more years.

  Her father had told her that story as an argument for the existence of God, but she could read between the lines. Great-Uncle Gordon hadn’t actually changed, of that she was sure. If he didn’t abuse his family anymore, it was because he wasn’t fast enough or strong enough after the cancer had ravaged his body. And if he didn’t shoot another dog, it was because they’d sold his guns while he was in the hospital. And he used his weakened condition as a new excuse not to look for a job. The doctors were just wrong about the timeline, that’s all.

  So no, she reasoned, she didn’t really believe in God. She’d been momentarily taken in by a fisherman, like a catch on the end of his line. Now she was wriggling her way back into the water.

  She checked her watch. Nearly four o’clock. They’d lingered too long on the mossy logs beneath the hemlocks, too long at the overlook. Without her map she couldn’t be sure exactly where she was, but she did know that they could make no more stops if they hoped to make the parking lot before sunset. If they missed getting a ride, they were sunk.

  “How does your watch still have power?” Melanie said from behind her.

  “Solar charger. It was full when we started hiking, and it’s still not totally depleted.”

  “You think of everything.”

  Suddenly aware of how hot she felt, Olivia took off her ball cap as she walked and wiped her forehead with her arm. Sure, it was the hottest part of the day, but in the UP in October, that shouldn’t be more than fifty degrees or so. And for the past ten minutes, they had been walking on level ground. If she felt like this now, the big climb up to the escarpment was going to be brutal.

  She fanned her face with her hat and turned back to her sister. “Are you hot?”

  “Oh my gosh, yes! I thought it was just me.”

  Olivia stopped walking, looked ahead, looked behind. For what, she wasn’t quite sure, but she saw nothing out of the ordinary. For the past quarter mile on the right-hand side, the land rose up from the valley to meet them and continued far above their heads on the left. Up ahead, she could see that the land tapered down toward their level. They must be coming to some kind of gap in the mountain ridge. After that, they should begin their climb.

  She started walking again. Felt the breeze pick up. Then she saw it, dancing through the trees about twenty yards ahead. Ash. She picked up the pace, urged Melanie on with a silent wave. The trail curved to the left, and the ground spread out before them, level and radiating heat through the soles of Olivia’s shoes.

  Melanie gasped. “Look!”

  Three deer, then four, then three more bounded out of the trees and across their path, crashing through the underbrush down the hill toward the valley. Chipmunks scurried in their wake. Jays cried out and zipped through the trees.

  “We need to move,” Olivia said.

  “Wait!” Melanie whispered.

  Olivia wheeled on her to argue, but Melanie was pointing and smiling like a maniac. Olivia followed the invisible trajectory of her outstretched finger to the spot the deer had just been. A cougar stood there looking at them, body taut, eyes wide, one ear turning back toward the place it had just come from. It sniffed the air once, twice, then jogged off in the same direction the deer had gone.

  For a split second, Olivia considered following it. Animals knew where to go during a natural disaster, right? They had some special sense for things like this. But she would not change course now. She was getting out of this forest. And out was up, not down.

  “I told you,” Melanie squealed.

  “Not now,” Olivia warned.

  She pushed forward along the trail, speed-walking only because she couldn’t run with a pack on her back. Should they ditch them in the woods? The ash was getting thicker and the heat was intensifying. She felt like she was rushing into the fire rather than away from it, but the blue blazes on the trees dictated
her route.

  After a few minutes that felt like much longer, the trail made a sharp right and began to rise. Another switchback, and then they were climbing what felt like straight up.

  Olivia’s muscles burned. Her hip cried out in protest. Her blisters screamed against the insides of her boots. Behind her, Melanie was coughing.

  “Just a little further,” she lied. She had no idea how much further, how long it would take them to reach the top. Or what they would find when they got there.

  Despite herself, Olivia began a silent chant, much as she had when she was walking behind Josh to get the packs they’d left leaning on the birch tree. It was far less critical than her earlier chant of stu-pid or sel-fish. Those were directed at herself and at her sister. Now she directed her words skyward. Save us, save us, save us.

  The trail made another turn, and Olivia’s muscles were given a short reprieve.

  Melanie got her cough under control. “Can we just stop a second? I need some water.”

  Olivia didn’t want to stop, but her throat was parched too. “Okay, but quick.”

  They grabbed and gulped and shoved the bottles back into the packs.

  “How much further?” Melanie said.

  “How should I know?” Olivia said. “I have no map.”

  “Yes, you do.”

  “What?”

  Melanie spun around. “I forgot. Front zipper pocket.”

  Olivia unzipped the compartment. “How—?”

  “It washed up on shore near where we hung the clothes out.”

  This was too much. She snatched the map out of Melanie’s pack. The ink indicating her plans was gone, but she could still see the depressions her pen had made in the surface. It really was her map. Impossible.

  “There. We must be there, where the trail winds back and forth up the mountainside. And there,” she said, pointing, “is the open spot between the peaks where the heat got so intense and the animals were running through.” She looked toward the shoreline on the map. “The fire could have started at one of these campsites.”