All That We Carried Page 22

  “So how much further?” Melanie repeated.

  “A little more than a mile and a half and we’ll be at the parking lot.” She looked at her sister. “We can do this.”

  Melanie gave a resolute nod. Olivia rolled the map up until it resembled a relay baton, then pressed forward up the hill. One more big push and they’d be on the escarpment. From that point, it was a straight shot on level ground and they could move fast.

  Just a few minutes later, they reached the top. Unobscured by trees, the valley opened up below them and the sky opened up above. But they didn’t stop to admire the view. They pushed on past three empty campsites. Smoke was rising in the west to join the clouds, and the air smelled like a campfire. Were there rangers out on the trails right now, looking for backcountry hikers? Would she be met on the path by a stern-faced man bearing bad news as she had so many years ago? Were all her hiking trips doomed?

  Olivia checked her watch again. 4:50. She attempted to open the map without slowing down and tripped on a tree root. She went down hard, her right knee striking a rock, sending a lightning bolt of pain up her femur, like the feeling she used to get up her arms if the bat hit the softball just wrong. She struggled to stand.

  Melanie was on her in a breath, helping her to her feet. “You okay?”

  “Yeah,” Olivia said through clenched teeth. She was not okay. She took a faltering step and let out an involuntary yell.

  “Olivia!”

  “I’m fine. You take the lead. I’m fine.”

  Melanie hesitated.

  “Go!” Olivia shouted. “I’m right behind you.”

  Melanie started walking, looking back at Olivia every third step.

  “Stop looking at me,” she said. “You’re going to trip too.”

  Olivia struggled on, chiding herself for such an avoidable mistake. She was slowing them down. Melanie kept looking back, but now it was only every sixth step. The trail curved slightly right along the top of a ridge that had so little tree cover that for the first time they could see in the other direction, all the way to Lake Superior. Olivia stopped and stared.

  Smoke rose from an ever-widening swath of forest, starting at the lakeshore and reaching inland. The fire was big and the wind was strong, but Olivia was comforted by the fact that it wasn’t actually upon them. Yet.

  Next to her, Melanie was holding back tears.

  “We should keep moving,” Olivia said. “It’s got to be less than a mile. Less than a mile and we can get out of here.”

  She took the lead, breathing through the pain radiating up and down her leg. Every step was a fight with herself to keep moving forward. She could do anything as long as she knew there was an end point she was working toward. If her great-uncle could walk off bone cancer, she could walk off a fractured kneecap or a bone bruise or whatever this was. She could walk off the pain in her hip. She would walk out of these woods on her own two feet, blisters and all.

  Fifteen minutes later, they came to another overlook where they could see the Big Carp River. Unlike earlier when it was far off in the distance, here it flowed practically to the foot of the cliff they were standing on. The water churned and boiled with salmon jockeying for the best spots in which to spawn, and there, down among them, stood a man in olive-green waders flicking a fly rod.

  “Josh!” Melanie shouted. She cupped her hands around her mouth. “Josh!”

  “He can’t hear us from up here,” Olivia said.

  “We have to tell him about the fire. Josh!” She walked closer to the edge. “Josh!”

  Olivia grabbed her arm. “Melanie! What do you want to do, fall off a cliff to get his attention? Back up!”

  Olivia placed herself between her sister and the drop-off she’d been walking toward. Melanie took a step back. Olivia turned around to see how close her little sister had gotten to the edge. But when she pivoted on her left foot to avoid putting too much weight on her right knee, something in her hip snapped, her leg buckled, and the weight of her pack threw her off balance. She heard her sister scream.

  And then she was falling.

  twenty-eight

  IN THE SPACE of one strangled breath, Melanie heard her own scream echo off the hills on the far side of the valley. Then branches breaking and her sister’s body connecting with the side of the steep embankment.

  “Olivia!” Melanie dumped her pack to the ground in a second and scrambled up to the edge on all fours. “Olivia!”

  About twenty-five feet below, she could see the maize M on her sister’s navy-blue hat, the straight line of one of her hiking poles, the boot on one of her feet. She wasn’t moving.

  “Olivia!” she screamed through tears. “Olivia!”

  Rope. She needed the rope. She scrambled back to her pack and began emptying pockets. Where was it? Where was it? Where was it? The answer came in a sickening flash. On the beach, still strung between two trees where they had dried her wet clothes in the wind. The same wind that was now sending a forest fire ever closer.

  Okay. Okay. No rope. Help. She’d have to go for help. The parking lot was close. Less than a mile. Maybe less than half a mile. With no pack she could cover it fast. But how could she leave Olivia? What if the fire jumped the ridgeline and started burning the dry autumn vegetation where her sister lay?

  She crawled back up to the edge and tried to gauge the distance. She would have to climb down there herself and bring her up. Olivia’s pack still had rope. She could tie it to the pack on her sister’s back and drag her up the cliff.

  Melanie searched the edge of the escarpment for a gentler way down, but there was none. She moved about five feet to the left of where Olivia had gone over so she wouldn’t land on her if she fell, then slowly rolled over on her stomach, pushing herself back until her legs hung over the edge. Her feet searched for a spot to rest. Nothing. She pushed a little farther. A little farther. Then slipped too fast, scraping her stomach and rib cage over the rock. She fell for only a foot or two before her feet hit the ground. She grabbed wildly at a prickly bush anchored in the rock and caught it, keeping herself from sliding any farther but puncturing the meat of her hand.

  Melanie got her bearings and looked for another handhold, another foothold. Inch by painstaking inch—and sometimes foot by startling foot—she made her way down to where Olivia lay against the dirt-packed root structure of a fallen tree, her face and arms scraped and bleeding. Terrified of the answer she might receive, she put her cheek against her sister’s open mouth and pressed two fingers against her neck. Breath. A pulse. Thank God.

  Melanie unzipped one of the side pockets of Olivia’s pack and found the rope. She unwound a portion of it and tied it around the metal frame of Olivia’s pack. She knew nothing about knots, so she just kept making more and more of them. They couldn’t all fail. Then she looked back up the cliffside. They were much farther down than she’d thought. But it didn’t matter. She would get her sister up there and get her to the parking lot and get her to a doctor. She had to.

  Next to her, Olivia groaned. Melanie was on her in a second.

  “Olivia! You’re okay. I’m going to get you out of here, and you’re going to be okay.”

  Olivia groaned again and tried to move.

  “Just stay there,” Melanie said. “I’m going to pull you up. Just stay there.”

  Hugging the steep slope, Melanie made her way back up the escarpment, unwinding the rope as she went and praying it would be long enough to reach the top. Three times she slipped, losing precious time and distance before her hand found a grip or her feet found a rock or root. Just as she was fearing that her strength, already sorely tested by their near sprint through the woods, would fail, Melanie finally reached the top. Gripping the rope, she lay for a moment on the rocky outcropping, catching her breath. She shouted over the side, “I’m going to pull you up!”

  Now came the hard part. Olivia had always weighed more than Melanie, and the most Melanie lifted in everyday life was a bag of groceries. How would she do this?r />
  Incline, lever, pulley. Weren’t those the simple machines she’d learned about at the children’s science museum during their fifth-grade field trip? She looked around for a tree. A tree could act like a pulley. But there wasn’t enough soil up on the escarpment to support big trees. There was nothing up here but bushes and shrubs.

  Instead, Melanie positioned herself behind a low boulder, bracing her feet against the rock. She started to pull. The rope went taut. She pulled harder. But the blood from the wound on her hand made the rope slippery. She wound some around her hand and pulled as hard as she could. Her fingers started to turn purple.

  Then the rope finally budged. She’d moved her. Maybe only a few inches, but she’d moved her. Melanie pulled with renewed strength, drawing in another few inches of rope and wrapping it around her forearm. Pull, wrap. Pull, wrap. Pull, wrap. She had heard of people under duress performing great feats of strength in order to save another human being. She used to think that must be due to some otherworldly power infusing a human body with extra strength. But surely it was just the power of adrenaline, a completely explainable biological process. Melanie didn’t care at this point. All that mattered was that it was working.

  Pull, wrap, breathe.

  Pull, wrap, breathe.

  Pull, wrap, breathe.

  Finally, she could see the top of Olivia’s pack over the edge of the escarpment.

  Almost. There.

  Almost. There.

  Almost. There.

  There was Olivia’s hat. Then her tortured face, twisted in pain. Then . . . Josh’s face?

  In her shock, Melanie almost dropped the rope. But she managed to keep hold. In a few seconds, Josh, with Olivia on his back, was over the edge and laying her down on the ground. Melanie hurried to disentangle herself from the rope and get much-needed blood to her fingers.

  “Olivia!” she said, rushing over. Olivia coughed and moaned and held her side.

  “She probably has some broken ribs,” Josh said. “Maybe a concussion.”

  “Where did you come from?”

  “From the river. I heard screaming and saw her fall. I climbed up from below.”

  She stood and fixed him with a glare. “You shouldn’t have left us. If you’d been here, this would never have happened.” She knelt by her sister. “Is she going to be okay?”

  “We need to get her to a hospital.” He began unbuckling the straps of Olivia’s pack. “Help me get her out of this thing. Careful.”

  Though every movement clearly sent spasms of pain coursing through Olivia’s body, Melanie and Josh managed to get the pack off. A minute later Josh was half bent over with Olivia on his back, her right arm coiled around his neck, her left pressed against her side, where a troubling blotch of red was growing.

  “What about her pack?” Melanie said.

  “We’ll send someone back for it.”

  “But there’s a fire—”

  “Leave it, Melanie. We can’t take it with us.”

  He started down the trail, quickly but smoothly. Spent, Melanie struggled to keep up. Down an incline, around a wide curve, past another overlook, down another incline, around another curve, up another hill. Josh never slowed. Melanie seemed to stumble with every other step. Occasionally she heard a sharp intake of breath from her sister, but otherwise Olivia was silent. Finally, they hit a boardwalk and Melanie got her first glimpse of the Lake of the Clouds. But only a glimpse. Immediately they veered off to the parking lot, where rangers were directing traffic back down the road and out of the park.

  After a quick conversation with one of the harried rangers, Olivia was carefully placed on blankets in the back of a Suburban and checked over. The ranger pulled her hand away from her side. The bleeding was clearly worse. A first aid kit appeared, and the ranger quickly bathed the wound with isopropyl alcohol and pressed a wad of clean cotton gauze against it.

  “You,” she said to Melanie, “get in here and maintain pressure on this.”

  Melanie climbed into the back of the truck beside Olivia and pressed her hand where the ranger indicated. Josh reached up to close the liftgate.

  “Wait—you’re coming, aren’t you?” Melanie said.

  “No, I need to stay here. There are a few hikers unaccounted for on the Lake Superior Trail. I just volunteered to lead a search party.”

  “But—”

  “She’ll be okay, Melanie. And I’m needed here. I’ll grab the backpack and have someone take it to the hospital for you.”

  Then he closed the back of the truck. Melanie watched through the tinted glass as he jogged off in the direction they had just come. A second later someone got into the driver’s seat.

  “Ready back there?” the ranger’s voice called.

  “Yes,” Melanie managed to croak out.

  “It’s thirty minutes to the hospital. I’ll try to get you there in twenty. Try to keep her from moving, especially her head. It’s a curvy road.”

  Keeping one hand and then the other pressed against Olivia’s side, Melanie removed her pack and leaned over her sister. She rolled up some of her dirty clothes and tucked them on either side of Olivia’s head to keep it from moving back and forth with the motion of the truck.

  “Olivia, it’s going to be okay,” Melanie said. But Olivia’s eyes were squeezed shut, and Melanie wasn’t sure if she was getting through to her.

  “I’m Serena,” the ranger shouted back. “What are your names?”

  “Melanie. And this is my sister, Olivia.”

  “She’s going to be okay.”

  How did she know that? How did Josh know? What if she wasn’t? What if Melanie had badgered her sister into taking a fatal trip with her? What if she lost her too?

  “How long have you two been on the trail?” Serena said.

  “I don’t know. Three days, maybe? Four?” She looked to Olivia for confirmation but got nothing. Olivia’s face was scrunched in pain, her breathing slow and deliberate, as though if her concentration lapsed she would forget to breathe.

  “Beautiful time of year for it. I mean, normally. This fire . . . I just can’t believe it.”

  Melanie didn’t respond. She didn’t have the energy for a conversation. But that didn’t stop Serena, who probably thought she was helping her keep her mind off her troubles.

  “I’ve been working here for nine years. Love it here. Especially in the fall and winter. Beautiful country. Before this I was down cutting trails in Columbia. But I missed the seasons. Where are you from?”

  Melanie wished she would stop talking. “I live in Petoskey.”

  “Love that town. Kind of artsy, isn’t it? I’m from Chicago originally.”

  She needed to concentrate, to focus her mind on her sister, to channel her energy. She couldn’t lose her.

  “You both live in Petoskey?”

  Argh. Shut up. “Olivia’s a lawyer in East Lansing.”

  “And you? What do you do?”

  Melanie sighed. She normally loved that question. Loved sharing what she did with people, even when they didn’t quite get it. But she didn’t want to explain her job to Serena. She didn’t want to explain it to anyone anymore. It should be simpler to say what it was she did. If it was a real thing, it would be one word that wouldn’t require a long explanation. Lawyer. Plumber. Writer. Nurse.

  “I’m a counselor,” she said.

  Vague enough to be both true and false at the same time. Kind of like her beliefs, she thought wryly. According to Olivia, at least. Did it matter that she couldn’t explain what she believed in one word either? Did she have to have a label for it to be real?

  “That’s good. You probably have some great coping strategies for what you two have been through out there.”

  They all had a label. Jewish. Christian. Muslim. Buddhist. Atheist. And as Olivia said, they couldn’t all be right. A thing couldn’t be both true and false. And one true thing couldn’t contradict another true thing.

  “About ten more minutes,” Serena said after
a short silence. “How are you doing back there? Not too bumpy?”

  “Not too bad,” Melanie said. Still maintaining pressure on the wound on Olivia’s side, she leaned toward the front seat and lowered her voice. “Can I ask you something?”

  “Of course,” Serena said, matching her volume.

  “Do you believe in God?”

  Serena stifled a laugh. “Oh, man. That’s a big one. I thought it was going to be something about the park or the fire or something. Um, yeah. I believe in God. Why?”

  Melanie collected her thoughts. “Do you think the fire was part of his plan?”

  “Part of God’s plan? Gee, I don’t know. That’s above my pay grade. There are lots of ordinary reasons a fire starts. Unattended campfire, fireworks, cigarette butts.”

  “People,” Melanie said.

  “A lot of the time, yes. But one of the main sources is lightning—that’s what started the Duck Lake Fire back in 2012. My first year up here. I suppose someone could make an argument for God being involved somehow, but I don’t know. Some things just happen. Lightning is a natural occurrence.”

  “I remember hearing about that fire. That went on awhile, didn’t it?”

  “Weeks. It took the DNR twenty-three days to contain it. Burned more than twenty thousand acres. That’d be like losing one third of the Porkies.” She was quiet a moment. “I hope they can contain this quickly. They’re predicting rain tonight. That would really help. It’s a godsend we had that rain a few days ago or it might be spreading even faster. It was such a dry season.”

  Melanie glanced back at her sister. Olivia had been so angry when they came upon that fire ring that had been left with live embers. When she’d put the fire out, was she just delaying the inevitable? If God was all-powerful, wouldn’t he just find another way to get a fire started?

  “So you think this one was just an accident?” Melanie said. “Just dumb luck?”

  “I think it was negligence,” Serena said. “And if they can determine who is to blame, they could press charges.”

  Those three loud hikers at the Government Peak trailhead. Olivia clearly blamed them. But was that fair? It might have been anyone. “How would they figure that out?”