All That We Carried Read online

  “Ready.”

  “Ask me a question.”

  “What is it?”

  Olivia rolled her eyes. “No, a yes-or-no question. Like, can you wear it, or something.”

  “Can you wear it?”

  “No.”

  Melanie frowned in thought. “Is it a toy?”

  “Yes.”

  She bounced up and down on her flannel-clad butt. “What is it?”

  “No, that’s not a yes-or-no question,” Olivia said, exasperated. “Ask if it has batteries.”

  “Does it have batteries?”

  “No. That’s three. My turn.”

  Melanie collapsed onto her side and bounced back up again. “No fair!”

  “It is so. We said three questions. That was three questions.”

  “But—”

  “My turn.”

  Melanie scowled. “Fine.”

  Olivia held up the gift in question. “Is it electronic?”

  “Yes,” Melanie mumbled.

  “Is it Japanese?”

  “What?”

  “Is it Japanese?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “What do you mean you don’t know? You said you knew what it was.”

  “I don’t know that.”

  Olivia huffed. “Fine, that question doesn’t count.”

  “Do you want to know where it came from?”

  “Yes!”

  “Oh, it came from Meijer.”

  “Not the store!”

  “Yes, I was there when Mom bought it at Meijer.”

  Olivia put her face in her hands. “Never mind. Forget that one.”

  “Okay, you get one more.”

  “Two more.”

  “No, I told you it’s electronic and it came from Meijer.” Melanie ticked off the short list on two fingers.

  “Fine.” Olivia thought hard. She needed to ask a question that her little sister would actually know the answer to. “Can it die?”

  Melanie laughed. “No! It can’t die. It’s electronic, silly.”

  “What’s going on in here?” Olivia and Melanie’s father shuffled into the room, followed by their mother. They were both in robes and slippers, hair mussed, eyes half closed.

  “I’ll make some coffee,” their mother said.

  Their father flopped onto the couch. “Do you girls know what time it is?”

  “It’s Christmastime!” they shouted in unison.

  Melanie leaped on top of him. He shot an arm out and wrapped it around Olivia, dragging her into the pile. Both girls squealed and giggled and tried to get away. He let them go and called out to his wife in the kitchen. “Excedrin?”

  “On it,” she replied.

  A few minutes later, Mom and Dad were snuggled up on the couch, steaming mugs in hand, while Olivia and Melanie scrambled around on the floor, finding and distributing presents, setting aside the ones that would be brought to their grandparents’ house later that day. When the piles were all made, the girls looked expectantly at their parents.

  “Okay,” their dad said. “One at a time. Starting with . . .” He moved his finger slowly across the room. “Mom.”

  The girls deflated for just a moment. Then Olivia grabbed a present off her mom’s pile. “Do this one first.”

  Melanie jumped up. “Yes, we made that one for you!”

  Their mother plucked the bow from the box and tore the paper away. Inside the small, square box sat a pinecone stuffed with cotton and adorned with an orange triangle and two black and yellow circles of construction paper.

  “It’s an owl!” Melanie said.

  “I see that. It’s lovely!” Their mother held it aloft by the string attached to the top, and it turned slowly in the air.

  “It’s for the tree,” Olivia explained.

  “I found the pinecone,” Melanie said.

  “And I cut out the eyes and the beak,” Olivia said. “And I tied the string.”

  Their mother handed it to Melanie. “Hang it on the tree for me.”

  Melanie bounded across the room and hung the owl directly in front of another ornament.

  “Come here,” their mom said, and she gathered them into her arms. “That was so thoughtful of you two. Thank you. I love it.”

  For just a moment, all four of them were on the couch in a tight, warm ball.

  “Okay,” their dad said. “Who’s next?”

  four

  MELANIE SAT IN THE BATHROOM stall and finished uploading her video. Whatever Olivia thought of her motives, she knew they were pure. If Olivia had devoted her life to justice, Melanie had devoted hers to encouragement. And for every criminal Olivia had sent to prison, Melanie could count hundreds of people she’d helped through hard times. For all she knew, one of those people her sister had prosecuted now watched Meditations with Melanie to cope with their new situation in life.

  Upload complete, she returned to the table where Olivia was perusing the menu.

  “Might be a good idea to eat big tonight,” Olivia said. “Last chance for real food for a while.”

  Melanie searched the menu in vain for the V for vegan symbol and then started back with the salads. She was used to building her own vegan meals at restaurants. Even though most chain restaurants were quite accommodating nowadays, local joints Up North were still hit or miss unless they were run by Millennials. After Olivia ordered a steak, medium rare, with buttered mashed potatoes and green beans, Melanie started in on her order: garden salad, no croutons, olive oil and vinegar on the side, with a couple lemon wedges and a plain baked potato. Yes, plain, thank you. No, no butter, no cheese, no sour cream. Yes, just plain.

  “I can bring you butter on the side,” the waitress said. She had a concerned look on her face, as though she was responsible somehow for Melanie’s well-being and the only thing that would ensure that well-being was some sort of dairy product.

  “No, thank you.”

  The waitress left, shaking her head, and Melanie was sure that she would bring butter anyway.

  When Mel looked back across the table at Olivia, her sister was already looking at her.

  “Hey,” Olivia said, “I’m sorry I freaked out a bit back there.”

  Melanie nodded. “It’s fine. I know we don’t see eye to eye on stuff like that.”

  “Yeah, but I shouldn’t have made that big of a deal about it. You’ve never come into a courtroom during a trial and given me your two cents about how to do my job, and I shouldn’t have put my nose in where it didn’t belong in your job. That is your job, right?”

  “Partly,” Melanie said. “I do make money off the YouTube channel from ads, but mostly it helps me market my detox packages and my life coaching services.”

  Olivia nodded, but Melanie had had enough experience with this to tell when she was being judged. Her sister thought she was a flake or a hippie or maybe even just garden-variety dumb. But Melanie had seen how her words changed people’s lives. She made people happy, and that was all that mattered.

  “So is being vegan a part of the detox or something?” Olivia asked.

  “It’s what I advocate in my program. Some people just do it for a span of thirty or sixty days. Some make a permanent lifestyle change because they lose weight and they just feel so much better and more energetic.”

  “That can’t be why you do it though. You’ve never needed to lose weight.”

  “No.” Melanie fiddled with her utensils.

  “Okay, so is it a moral thing? Like an animal cruelty thing?”

  “Not exactly.” Melanie smoothed her napkin on her lap. “I started thinking about reincarnation, and I got . . . anxious. About Mom and Dad.”

  Olivia’s eyebrows practically met above her narrowed eyes. “What do you mean?”

  Melanie looked her plain in the face. “I didn’t want to accidentally do anything to Mom or Dad.”

  “You mean . . . eat them?”

  Olivia was looking at her like she was the dumbest person she knew. She should have listened t
o the voice inside her that had been telling her to just lie to her sister. But lies brought negative energy and bred more lies, like how one fruit fly somehow led to dozens. It was better to tell the truth, even if it made you look foolish.

  “Okay, let me get this straight,” Olivia said, and she began counting off on her fingers. “You believe in reincarnation, and that good vibes and positive energy can help people you don’t know miles away from you, and also in prayer, and you do Tarot readings, and you try to do something Catholic every couple months. Am I missing anything? I’m not trying to be mean here, I’m just trying to understand. What’s the basis of your belief system?”

  Melanie leaned back as the waitress put their food on the table. She picked up the little dish of butter next to her potato and handed it to Olivia. “The basis of it?” she said, buying time.

  “Yes, what is it based on? Like, Christians base their beliefs on the Bible, Jews base their beliefs on the Torah, Muslims base their beliefs on the Quran, Native Americans base their beliefs on an oral tradition. So what are your beliefs based on? I’m seriously not trying to be mean. I just don’t get it.”

  “No, I know you’re not. Believe me, I can tell when you’re trying to be mean.”

  They shared a hesitant laugh, and Olivia cut into her steak.

  “I don’t know,” Melanie said, poking at her salad with her fork. “They’re based on a lot of things. Things I’ve read and teachers I’ve heard and poems and documentaries and stuff like that.”

  “So, there’s no one set of teachings or documents or traditions. You’re just picking the stuff you like from everything that’s out there. Like, cafeteria style.”

  Melanie took a big bite of her salad to give herself a moment to think. No one had ever asked her what she based her beliefs on before. It hadn’t seemed to matter to any of her clients or people who attended her workshops or her online audience, her Mellies. Why did it matter to Olivia? Olivia who believed in nothing at all.

  Melanie swallowed and took a sip of water. “I guess you could say that.”

  Olivia put down a forkful of potatoes. “But that’s completely illogical. You can see that, right?”

  “Why should it be?”

  “Because of the law of noncontradiction. If one of those groups is correct, then everyone not part of that group is wrong. If Christians are right about having to believe in Jesus, then any other system of belief with other gods and other ways to heaven can’t be right. Or if Buddhists are right about reaching nirvana, then the Christians can’t be right. You see what I mean?” Olivia finally put the potatoes into her mouth, but she kept talking right around them. “You can’t believe just a little bit of everything. And anyway, why bother? Why not just choose one?”

  Melanie let that last question settle into her brain. “Frankly, I’ve never really seen the need to choose just one.”

  “But you can see how that doesn’t work, right?” Olivia insisted.

  Melanie shifted in her seat and changed tacks. “What do you think happened to Mom and Dad? Like, where do you think they are now?”

  Olivia frowned. “At some point immediately following the accident, their hearts stopped, they stopped breathing, and their bodies shut down. The potential energy left in their cells after they died was used up as, well . . . as natural processes progressed.”

  “So in your opinion there’s nothing left of them.”

  “Nothing.” Olivia offered her a sad smile. “It’s not that I wouldn’t love to see them again. I just don’t think I see any evidence of an afterlife.”

  Melanie leaned forward. “Okay, but what if you’re wrong? Then you’d miss your chance to see them again. That’s why I try to follow all of these different belief systems. Because wherever they are, I want to be there someday.”

  Olivia’s expression softened. “So, you’re just covering your bases.”

  Melanie gave a little nod. “I guess so.”

  Her sister said nothing and focused on dismembering her steak.

  Melanie finished her salad, the sound of her own chewing deafening in the general silence. One look at the dry baked potato made her feel ill. There was no way she could stomach all of that now. Not with her guts tied up like they were. She had always thought of herself as someone who lived life from a place of generosity and love. It had never occurred to her that something else might lie at the root of her magnanimous attitude toward the spiritual realm. Something that looked suspiciously like fear.

  five

  IT WAS PAST 7:30 when the waitress finally came around with the bill. Even though Olivia had her credit card ready, she still had to all but shove the little plastic tray back into the waitress’s hand to get her to run it immediately. At the rate they were going they wouldn’t make it to Ontonagon until after ten o’clock. Had they been going to a big hotel in a major city, it wouldn’t have mattered. But only a few cities in the Upper Peninsula even had big chain hotels, and Ontonagon wasn’t one of them.

  What awaited them was not room service and down pillows and streaming TV but a tiny one-room cabin with beds that had probably been there for forty years. Or rather, bed. They would be sharing, like they used to do on the hide-a-bed in the family room when Mom and Dad let them have a “sisters’ sleepover” and fall asleep watching a movie.

  Olivia explained their weather delay to the owner over the phone, and he graciously said that he’d be up until at least ten but that his wife went to bed at nine. If he was too tired to stay up, he would just leave the cabin unlocked with the key inside. Olivia also called the park headquarters to ask about the trail conditions after the rain, but she had to leave a message.

  The deluge had let up some while they were eating, and the dash to the car parked on the street outside was easier than the dash inside had been. Melanie’s hair was curlier than ever in the wet air. As Olivia checked the rearview mirror for traffic, she saw that hers was flat and lifeless. She’d meant for both of them to take showers tonight so they’d be fresh for the morning and get out of the cabin as early as possible, but the long day of driving had taken a toll on her energy reserves, and she was sure she’d fall asleep as soon as her head hit the pillow.

  As they left Marquette, the sky ahead was dark with clouds obscuring an early sunset.

  The next two hours on the road were quiet. The rain was light yet persistent, and Olivia found it impossible to relax. She sat upright away from the seat back, gripping the steering wheel in both hands and scanning the edges of her headlights for eyeshine that would indicate a deer that might leap out in front of the car. She was used to city driving, which was never very dark and where the largest animal you might hit was a raccoon. Here in the sparsely populated western UP, even her brights couldn’t illuminate enough for her tastes, and any time an oncoming car appeared, she had to turn them off.

  She tried and failed to avoid thinking of her parents. It had been dark and rainy then too—for them at least. When it all happened, she and Melanie were far away, sleeping in tents along with four other friends, out of reach and out of touch on the backcountry trails of Pictured Rocks National Lakeshore. It had been warm and dry on the trail, and they were on their second of three planned overnights on the long Labor Day weekend. That day they had explored caves in the sandstone cliffs that had been carved out of the rock by the wave action on Lake Superior. They had splashed in the frigid water, baked in the warm sun, and marveled at the clear blue of the sky and turquoise of the lake. Everything was perfect.

  It was sometime after they had roasted marshmallows over the campfire, Olivia figured later, that the accident occurred. That was when the six friends had coupled up—which had been Olivia’s plan all along—and edged away from the firelight for a little privacy. She’d carefully chosen the group to include three potential couples with similar interests. She and Eric were both heading into their senior year of college and were into all the same bands. Melanie and Keith were both going to be sophomores and were artistic. And her friends Bryce and
Lisa were both junior-year fitness nuts.

  She’d never played matchmaker before, but like almost everything else she tried, she found she had a knack for it. It was all about taking what she knew about each person and projecting it into the future. What was cute and quirky now but would get nails-on-the-chalkboard annoying later? Which strengths could balance out which weaknesses? Could at least one person in every couple be reasonably expected to make a decent living? She’d thought of everything.

  Before she could see her plan come to full fruition, she was found by a ranger and taken aside along with her little sister. She was startled at first to hear a perfect stranger ask her if she was Olivia Greene, but then she remembered that all of their names were on the campsite registrations for particular nights. All a ranger had to do was look for her on the right part of the trail, which could be easily deduced by where they had slept the night before and where they planned to sleep that night.

  She couldn’t recall later exactly what the ranger said. The details were erased by the numb shock. All she knew in that moment was that her parents had been in an accident, that they had been taken to a hospital, and that she and Melanie needed to get home. The six of them silently followed the ranger down a two-mile access trail to his truck. They piled the packs in the back and squeezed seven people into seating for five, then he drove them back to Eric’s Explorer.

  The logistics of getting Olivia and Melanie home to Rockford and getting everyone else back to campus in Ann Arbor were ironed out with a few phone calls. The hikers would meet Olivia and Melanie’s Uncle Craig in Lansing, and he would take them the rest of the way home. The others would continue on back to the University of Michigan. What no one told them until Uncle Craig had delivered them back to their house, where Aunt Susan and Grandma Ann were waiting, was that both of their parents had died from their injuries before they reached the hospital.

  They were just . . . gone.

  In the week that followed, the gray haze of grief colored everything. It obscured the faces of friends and family, dulled the sounds of conversations and eulogy and hymns. It settled into Olivia’s spirit until her dreams, which were inevitably nightmares, felt more real than her waking hours. She felt as though she was slipping silently into a still pond and if she went all the way under she might never resurface.