All That We Carried Page 25

  “Yeah . . .”

  “And I’m sure you have friends and coworkers who could help you out a bit during your recovery.”

  “Okay . . .”

  “And if you don’t, you’ll hire help, right?” she said severely.

  “Mel, who’s bringing me home?”

  Melanie glanced at her. “Don’t be mad.”

  “What? Who?” Olivia said impatiently. Then it dawned on her. “No . . .”

  “You said you were planning on talking to him anyway, so I figured this would give you time to do it and it would give me time to rest and—”

  Olivia buried her face in her hands and groaned. “I wish you’d asked me first. That’s all. I just wish you’d asked me.” She took a deep breath. “I don’t know if I’m ready to do this yet.”

  “Well, you’ve got at least six hours to get ready.” She reached into the back seat and produced a small box, which she set on Olivia’s lap. “This might help.”

  It was the box Olivia had asked about at the beginning of their trip. She wiped her hands on a napkin and stuck it in her pocket, then removed the lid and stared into the past. Ticket stubs from movies. Notes folded into paper footballs. A dried corsage from homecoming. A cheap imitation silver locket. And a handful of photos.

  She and Justin on a trampoline. The two of them Rollerblading on the rail trail. Being dropped off at camp. Splashing each other in Crystal Lake. Eating ice cream on a bench and squinting into the sun. Her dad had taken these photos with his camera back before they all had smartphones. Olivia was intimately familiar with each one. Small holes attested to where pushpins had held them to the bulletin board in her bedroom. Her mind filled in the time on either side of the moment that had been captured. Moments that would never come again.

  When she came to a picture of her and Justin at age four or five standing in the backyard in just their underwear, his tanned bare arm slung over her tanned shoulders, Olivia stopped. Starting at age seventeen, Justin would cover his arms in tattoos. In this picture, they were peppered with bruises. It had taken years of friendship before Justin divulged the things that were going on in his house as his unhappy and often intoxicated parents took out their misery on each other and on him. Despite that, in every photo of the two of them together, Justin was smiling.

  At that moment, Olivia understood that her mother’s refrain of “What’s done is done and can’t be undone” had been wrong. Or at least, it was not universally applicable. What had been done to Justin, Olivia and her loving family had, in part, undone. For many years, they had shown him how a family could be, how it should be. They hadn’t removed his bruises, but they’d helped them heal.

  Then Olivia left him behind. And he drifted away. And she forgot about him. Until he came crashing back into her life.

  “I wondered what had become of this stuff,” she finally said.

  “You had to know I wouldn’t have gotten rid of it.”

  “You have always been rather sentimental.”

  “I hardly think it qualifies as terribly sentimental to keep hold of a few childhood memories.”

  “No, I suppose not.” Olivia returned the lid to the box, shrouding the past in darkness. “Music?”

  “Your pick,” Melanie said.

  “Nah. You choose.”

  “You sure?”

  “Sure.”

  Melanie retrieved a CD from her visor and popped it in. Olivia recognized it immediately as one of their mother’s favorites—the first disc of Paul Simon’s 1991 concert in Central Park. She had attended it with her sister Susan while pregnant with Melanie.

  Olivia sank a little lower in her seat, closed her eyes, and let her mind drift back to better days. She imagined her mother singing along to the songs she’d grown up with. Imagined her father teaching her and Justin how to throw a baseball. Imagined Melanie’s face when she finally got the kitten she’d been begging for. All of the photos that had been taken. All of the beautiful days that had passed by without photographic evidence to prove they’d happened. So many more happy memories than sad ones.

  It was a good life. And even if that part of it was over, life could still be good. It could be better than she had allowed it to be. She could be better than she had allowed herself to be.

  As she slipped into sleep, Olivia saw one more face in her memories. Josh’s. And she felt sure in that moment that she would see him again someday.

  thirty-two

  MELANIE DROVE EAST, back toward Marquette, back to the scene of the motorcycle accident nearly a week earlier. What had happened to that man? Had he been treated and sent home as Olivia had? Or had his funeral been held sometime when they were tromping through the woods?

  Life was so strange. The way it could go on for one person and end for another. If there was a life force out there, why was it always ebbing and flowing so capriciously? Who chose who got to live and who must die, and by what criteria? Why was Olivia’s life saved by falling off a cliff and their parents’ lost while driving down a familiar street?

  Attempting to fathom one being arranging all of this for billions of people all over the planet for all of time was like trying to untangle all of the neurons in all of the brains of all those people. To lay them all out in such a way that you could see all the connections simultaneously, so you could see exactly which cause created which effect.

  Impossible. She used to be comfortable with that—with the impossibility of knowing, the inscrutability of it all. When coaching clients asked her for specifics, she deliberately fuzzied things up and encouraged them to relax into the not knowing, into the nearly knowing. Specifics didn’t matter. What mattered was how you felt, and any combination of ideas that made you feel some happiness in the midst of a troubled life was what was right for you.

  Melanie thought about this as the names of tiny towns ticked by—Three Lakes, Imperial Heights, Beacon, Humboldt, Greenwood. Little outposts of civilization in the vast wilderness Longfellow had made famous in his “Song of Hiawatha,” a tediously long poem Melanie had been assigned to read in high school, and which she discovered her father still knew by heart from his own school days. How very western these towns all sounded, as though the people who established them were assuring themselves that they could tame the dangers they might face—the fevers from the marshes, the pestilential vapors, the poisonous exhalations of Longfellow’s poem—as they cut lumber and drained wetlands and platted out farmland.

  At the junction for M-28, she should have turned left to stay near the lakeshore. It would have taken her right past the site of the motorcycle accident and given her the chance to see if a roadside marker had been put up, indicating the man’s fate. Indicating whether or not her plea for positive vibes had been effective. But when it came down to it, she didn’t actually want to know.

  Instead, she followed M-41 south through nearly fifty miles of nothing but trees. The sky cleared as she got farther away from the big lake. Beech and birch trees shone bright yellow against the pines and firs, and shocks of red sumac rose like waves along the roadside. Summer’s wildflowers were brown and spent. Life was winding down like an old clock. In a few weeks, daylight saving time would end and it would be dark before Melanie sat down to dinner. On the nights Justin could come over to eat or to watch a movie, it wouldn’t be so bad. On the nights she was alone . . .

  But she didn’t have to be alone anymore. She did love Justin. And she knew he loved her. Not just the role she’d played in the wake of Olivia’s rejection. Her.

  It wasn’t until Melanie slowed the car to take a left on US-2 that Olivia stirred. “Where are we?” she asked.

  “A little over halfway to Indian River.”

  Olivia stretched and groaned. “Ugh. I forgot I was all messed up for a minute there.”

  “Do you need to take something for the pain?”

  “Maybe. And I need to get out of this car and move. I’m all stiff.”

  “We can stop in Manistique for lunch and bathrooms.”

>   “You mean Munising?”

  “No,” Melanie said. “I took a different route.”

  “Oh. How far to Manistique?”

  Melanie checked the GPS, which had started working again as they approached the southern shore of the peninsula. “This says thirty-eight minutes.”

  “I don’t think I can wait that long.”

  Melanie tapped the GPS. “Here. There’s a gas station just south of this little lake. We’ll stop there.”

  For the next twenty-five minutes, Olivia shifted and sighed in her seat. She fiddled with the radio, flipped through CDs, never landed on anything. When they finally arrived at the gas station, Melanie helped Olivia get out of the car—not an easy feat—and hobble to the bathroom. She stocked up on water and snacks in lieu of lunch, then helped Olivia back to her seat. She was walking around to the driver’s side when two women walked out of the gas station.

  “That was incredible,” one said.

  “It really was,” said the other. “I thought it would be a huge waste of time, but I think it’s my favorite part of the trip so far.”

  “Excuse me,” Melanie broke in. “What are you talking about?”

  “The big spring,” the first one said.

  “Kitch—Kitch-ipi—oh, I can’t say it. It starts with a K,” the second one said.

  “It’s just north of here.”

  “What is it though?” Melanie said.

  “It’s . . . well, it’s this spring.”

  “It’s a really still pool of blue, blue—”

  “Turquoise.”

  “Yes, turquoise water.”

  Melanie waited for more.

  “It’s hard to explain,” the women said simultaneously. Then they laughed uproariously.

  “You just have to see it,” the first one finally said. “It’s worth the drive.”

  “How far away is it?” Melanie asked.

  “Oh, what do you think it is?” she asked her friend. “Fifteen minutes up the road?”

  “If that.”

  “Which road?”

  They pointed.

  “This one here—149. It jogs, but there are signs.”

  “It starts with a K?” Melanie confirmed.

  “Yes. Kitch-something. They call it the Big Spring.”

  “Thanks,” Melanie said. The women went on their way and Melanie got in the car.

  “What was all that?” Olivia said.

  “Nothing. We just need to make one little detour before we go.”

  The walk from the parking lot to the viewing platform at Kitch-iti-kipi was slow and, if Olivia’s expression was any indication, painful. When the water first came into view through the trees, Melanie felt a twinge of disappointment. It just looked like a pond. A blue one, sure, but a pond nonetheless. They came to a large deck. Through a wooden gate set in the railing, one could step onto a large covered rectangular raft, which they did. A sign indicated that if she turned a large metal wheel, the raft would move along a cable strung across the length of the spring, bringing them out to the middle.

  “Oh!” Olivia said. “You can see clear to the bottom here.”

  In the center of the raft behind a wooden railing was a hole, a rectangle within the rectangle of the raft, and indeed you could see through the crystal-clear water to the bottom, which was crisscrossed with the remains of fallen pine trees. Melanie pulled the wheel and the raft moved a little. Pull by pull, first with her left hand, then her right, and as she tired, with both of them, Melanie slowly moved the raft to the middle of the pond, where there was nothing on the bottom but pale sand.

  “Look,” Olivia said, pointing into the hole in the raft.

  Swimming lazily through the water were large, dark bodies of fish. A sign by the rail said that they were mostly trout—lake, brown, or brook—much like the fish Josh had been grilling for them, the fish on Olivia’s knife. Another sign explained how meltwater and rainwater filled one permeable layer of rock that sat beneath another layer of rock, which was impermeable except for a few cracks. At these cracks, the pressurized water shot up into the spring at a rate of more than ten thousand gallons a minute. Where the water came up out of the ground, the sand looked as though it was boiling, though the water was only forty-five degrees Fahrenheit year-round. All quite practical and scientific and unmagical.

  Maybe that was how the world really was. One vast machine. Nothing more than a collection of predictable, measurable processes. It was bleak, but that didn’t necessarily mean it was not true. And if it was true, if this was the only life she’d ever have, Melanie didn’t want to spend the rest of it on her own.

  She looked out across the achingly blue water to the trees, which were reflected perfectly on its glassy surface. For every tree right side up, its twin was upside down. Each had a partner. Not one of them was alone.

  “I’m going to tell Justin yes,” Melanie said. She glanced at Olivia’s face for her reaction and was surprised to see a smile there. A small one, perhaps strained, but a smile nonetheless. Melanie gave a resolute nod and looked back out at the trees. “This is pretty.”

  Olivia joined her at the rail. “Yeah.” She pulled Melanie’s phone out of her back pocket. “One more picture?”

  Melanie took the phone from her. “Sure.” With their backs to the outer rail, Melanie framed their faces on the screen. “You can’t see much of the spring behind our fat heads.”

  “That’s okay,” Olivia said. “We know it’s there.”

  Melanie snapped the photo, then looked at it. “You look really happy in this one.”

  Olivia tipped the screen toward her. “You don’t.”

  “I’m just tired. It’s been a long day already.”

  “So what are you going to do with this trip on your blog?” Olivia said.

  “I don’t know yet. Maybe nothing.”

  “Nothing? That hardly sounds like you.”

  Melanie shrugged. “It’s a lot to process. And it’s a lot to keep up, you know? The blog, the videos, the social media. It’s been kind of nice to have a break from that this week. The thought of diving back into it all . . . well, it’s exhausting really.”

  “What about your following?”

  “I dunno. They’d get on without me. It’s kind of arrogant of me to assume I’m really necessary, right? Anyway, some of the stuff I’ve been saying to them all these years is ringing a little hollow to me the last couple days. Maybe I need to take some time to myself.” She motioned to the bubbling sand forty feet below. “I don’t have that sort of thing. I am feeding and feeding other people, but nothing’s really filling me back up. I just feel a little . . . empty.”

  Melanie could feel Olivia looking at her.

  “Do me a favor, Mel?”

  “What?”

  “Anytime you’re feeling that way, let Justin know, okay? Or send me a text. Or call. I’ll be more responsive than I have in the past. Just don’t keep it to yourself.”

  Melanie blinked hard and nodded.

  “Hey,” Olivia said, turning Melanie to face her. “I love you, Mel. And I’m going to be a better sister to you from here on out.”

  “Okay,” Melanie whispered.

  Olivia pulled her into a gentle hug, and the tears Melanie had been holding in slipped out through the cracks and cascaded down her cheeks like twin waterfalls.

  “Hey, hey,” Olivia said. “What’s wrong?”

  Melanie hiccupped a sob, then sucked in a deep, quavering breath. “I don’t know. I just feel so . . . so empty all of a sudden. Which is stupid. I’ve gotten what I wanted. I reconnected with you and I’m going to have you in my life, and I’ll have Justin too and I won’t have to choose.”

  Olivia rubbed her back. “Well, maybe that wasn’t the only thing you were hoping for. Maybe that was just the stuff you could see on the outside.”

  Melanie wiped her nose with the back of her hand. “I miss Mom and Dad so much.”

  Olivia pulled her in for another hug. “So do I.”


  They stood there on the platform in the middle of the turquoise water, ringed in on all sides by pines and cedars and silence. Melanie pulled away and searched Olivia’s eyes.

  “Do you really think we’ll never see them again? Do you really think there’s nothing left of them?”

  Olivia frowned. “I don’t know. I hope not.”

  Melanie slumped back against the outer railing. “I’m just so tired.”

  “It’s been a long week.”

  She threw up her hands. “No, I mean my whole life. I can’t do this anymore, covering my bases. There are too many things I have to do, and it’s all on me to do them, and what if I mess up? And you’re right. You’re right that they can’t all be true. That one thing has to be it, the real thing. And if that one thing is true, then the things that aren’t it can’t be. I don’t know, maybe there’s nothing. Nothing beyond this life. Maybe—”

  “No,” Olivia said. “Don’t say that.”

  “But you—”

  “I know what I said, but . . . I don’t know. Maybe I’ve been wrong. Frankly, I’m not even sure how much I truly believed what I was saying or if I was just saying it because it didn’t require anything of me. I did nothing, you did everything. I believed nothing, you believed everything. But maybe we’re both wrong. Maybe there’s just one thing. One real thing.”

  Melanie swallowed and wiped her eyes.

  “Okay?” Olivia said.

  “Okay. Yeah.”

  Olivia smiled. “Now we just have to figure out what it is.”

  Melanie laughed despite herself. “Easy, right?”

  “Yeah, easy.”

  The sun had dropped below the trees, but it hadn’t quite set. The purple-gray sky was stained with tangerine at the horizon. Almost twilight, but Olivia could still make out the ball as it swished through the bright white net. She palmed it briefly and sent it over to Justin.

  “One more and you’re out, P-I,” she said.

  “I know. I know how to spell.”

  She could hear the smile in his voice even if it was getting hard to see in the dark.

  Swish.

  She set up her next shot, took it, and missed.