All That We Carried Page 5

  Over the course of the next few months, Melanie came to realize that she could not hate Justin Navarro the rest of her life as Olivia intended to. She had to let go in order to move on. She told him she forgave him, and she recorded the moment later that day on the final pages of that first journal. Then she called Olivia at school to tell her and to encourage her to do the same. After a stunned silence followed by some sharp words, Olivia hung up on her. That was when Melanie knew that Justin didn’t only take her parents from her, he took her sister as well.

  Until now, if Melanie had anything to do with it.

  The climb continued for maybe another thousand feet before it leveled out and they crossed a small wooden bridge.

  “That’s Cuyahoga Creek,” Olivia announced. “The next bridge will be over the Upper Carp River.”

  From behind her, Melanie could barely make out the words, but she didn’t really care all that much what the creek was called. It was sweet and talkative, and that was all that mattered. Jeweled trees leaned in toward the water, as though listening to the creek tell its particular story. She looked up to say as much to Olivia, but she was already several yards away, climbing up the next little hill.

  Melanie followed, though at a deliberately slower pace. Olivia may have a schedule, but she did not. She was determined to enjoy every moment of this walk in the woods in her own way, at her own speed. It was how she had determined to live her life as well, one of the reasons she had moved north to the artsy little town of Petoskey, where she celebrated every season’s unique offerings. The hot, windblown summers when the cries of seagulls mixed with the sounds of children on the beaches and the cracks of baseball bats in the park. The crisp, colorful autumns when the city emptied of tourists and the gales started out on Lake Michigan. The long, snowy winters of firelight and candlelight. And the fresh green springs when she would comb the beaches in search of the stones of fossilized coral that gave the city its name.

  Here in this moment, in the Porcupine Mountains, Melanie celebrated the transitions she saw all around her, from the trees preparing for winter to the berries and seeds that would fatten up the birds and bears and stock the squirrels’ larders. Everything was beautiful and magical. The only thing keeping it from being absolutely perfect was the fact that Olivia was walking too fast to notice it.

  They traversed relatively even terrain for about a half mile until they came to an open space and the second bridge, where Olivia finally stopped to let Melanie catch up. “Grab my water for me?” she said.

  Melanie pulled one of Olivia’s two 32-ounce water bottles from the side of her pack and handed it to her, then she turned to let Olivia return the favor. Olivia drank sparingly. Melanie gulped down a third of the bottle in a matter of seconds.

  “Whoa, slow down there,” Olivia said. “Conserve.”

  “You have a filter, right?”

  “Yes, but you can’t get water just anywhere.”

  “We’re literally standing above a river.”

  “Well, we’re not stopping to filter here. We’re not stopping until Trap Falls, where we’ll take a short snack break, then we’ll lunch on Government Peak, and you can’t get water there. I wasn’t planning on having to refill the bottles until we make camp tonight.”

  “If I need some when we stop at Trap Falls, we can just do it there.”

  Olivia sighed and held out her water bottle to Melanie to put it back in her pack.

  “What’s the big deal?” Melanie said, handing hers over. “If we’re stopping anyway.”

  “I just don’t want to spend a lot of time there, that’s all.”

  “Why wouldn’t you want to spend time at a waterfall?”

  “Because it’s only a quarter of the entire distance we have to travel today, and I don’t want us to get off track so early in the trip. We’re well rested, we’re fresh, our muscles don’t hurt yet. We need to make the most of that today because tomorrow we’re not going to be feeling quite as good.”

  “Fine, but if you’re not careful, you’re going to catch up with those other people, and you clearly don’t want to be anywhere near them.”

  Olivia said nothing, but her expression grudgingly acknowledged that Melanie was right. She started walking again, a little slower. Melanie retrieved her phone, took a few shots, and turned it off again. Then she soldiered on but still managed to focus on the positive. She was out in the beauty of nature with someone who sorely needed such beauty.

  Not long after the bridge, they began a steady climb. The trail soon converged with the river they had crossed, which ran rushing and gurgling along in a gorge to their left in the opposite direction of their hike. The sound of it filled the air so that Melanie could no longer hear any breeze in the trees. She listened closely for patterns and variations, trying to discern what it was the river wanted to say to her. It had no schedule, no agenda. It ran and jumped and danced its days away with joyous abandon, whether anyone was there to see it or not.

  Melanie felt a sudden and unexpected yearning to feel that free, to be utterly unaware and unconcerned with the results of her labors—to forget about views and likes and comments in order to make room for the sheer joy of being. It was the attitude she advocated for others but found difficult to cultivate in herself. With each step, each deepening breath that came with the effort of the constant uphill climb, Melanie felt more keenly the weight of the expectations she had placed on herself over the past ten years. The weight of being the perfect bereaved daughter, the manager of the estate, the dispenser of good advice, the bubbly online personality. She could feel her cheeks and ears getting hot, could feel her heartbeat in her temples, a trickle of sweat running down her neck. And still the top of the hill was out of sight and out of reach.

  Just when she thought she couldn’t take another step and would have to call out to her sister to stop so she could catch her breath, she ran into Olivia, who had already stopped ahead of her. Both of them were breathing hard, unable to speak. Wordlessly they retrieved the water bottles, and this time they both gulped, though Olivia still stopped herself before Melanie did.

  “You’re going to be all uneven,” Olivia said. “Give me your other bottle.” She reached into the matching pocket on the other side of Melanie’s pack, then poured from one of the bottles to the other until the water was evenly distributed. Then she put both back in Mel’s pack without asking if she was done drinking.

  “Here, give me yours,” Melanie said.

  “No, it’s fine. Just put this one back.”

  Melanie did as directed while Olivia consulted her map.

  “We’re about a third of a mile away from Trap Falls. We’ll take the packs off there and stop for a fifteen-minute break and have a snack.”

  “Good,” Melanie said.

  Olivia looked across the narrow river that was now at about the same elevation as they were. “This must be the way you go for the skiing and mountain biking trails.”

  “Which way?”

  Olivia pointed across the river. “This way. That’s Union Spring Trail across there.”

  “The bridge is out,” Melanie said.

  “No, there’s no bridge. You have to ford it.” Olivia turned to her. “You did bring water shoes like I told you to, right? They were on the list.”

  Melanie shook her head. “I didn’t see the need.”

  “They wouldn’t have been on the list if they weren’t needed.”

  “I just figured why buy special shoes when I would never use them again. I’ll just go barefoot.”

  Olivia squeezed her eyes shut. “I didn’t want anyone slipping on slimy rocks and going down in a river, that’s all. But, whatever. It can’t be helped now.” She hitched the pack up onto the top of her hips and tightened a strap. “Let’s go.”

  They walked alongside the water, in and out of trees, the occasional leaf drifting down from the canopy to land on their path. Then they veered away from the river back into the woods. In a little while, Melanie could hear the wa
terfall—a rushing, murmuring shhhh off to her left that promised rest and peace and beauty. Then it was up ahead, tumbling white and black down a cascade of moss-covered rocks and ending in a swirling pool of water, foam, and yellow leaves.

  Melanie quickened her pace, unbuckling her pack as she went, then dumping it next to a crude wooden bench. She stood at the edge of the pool, stretched her arms over her head, and breathed deeply, unfettered by the weight she’d been carrying. “This is gorgeous,” she proclaimed, turning to Olivia. “I wish we could camp right here.”

  Olivia carefully leaned her pack on the other side of the bench and sat down. “It’s supposed to be the best waterfall in the eastern half of the park. But we’ll see lots more in the next couple days. That’s how I chose our route. I wanted to see as many of them as we could. By the time we’re done we’ll have seen eight named falls. This will be the only one today.”

  She prattled on about the itinerary, but Melanie hardly heard her. She was taking off her shoes and socks and edging toward the water. Though it couldn’t be more than fifty degrees out, her feet were hot and sweaty. She dipped them into the frigid flow of the Upper Carp River and closed her eyes, breathing slowly in through her nose and out through her mouth three times. Mesmerizing.

  When she opened her eyes, she spotted movement up above the falls. A tawny back, a muscled leg, a long, ropelike tail. She stopped breathing. She looked again, harder. The shape was moving away. Melanie got to her feet, crouching, and put a finger to her lips to silence her sister.

  Olivia stopped talking for a moment. “What?”

  “Shhhh!” Melanie beckoned her with a finger, then held up a hand. A second later she straightened up. “Shoot. It’s gone.”

  “What?”

  “I think it was a cougar.”

  Olivia closed the distance between them. “It was probably a deer.”

  “No, it had a long tail.”

  “It was probably a deer,” Olivia said again. “A cougar would have taken off running the second it heard us walking up, and if not, then definitely when we started talking.”

  “And a deer wouldn’t?” Melanie challenged. “I know what a deer looks like and moves like, and this wasn’t a deer. It was definitely a cougar.”

  “A second ago you said you thought it was a cougar. Now it’s definitely a cougar?”

  “It was a cougar.”

  Olivia looked at her a moment, then shrugged and turned back to the packs. “I guess, maybe. Anyway, whatever it was, it’s gone now and we need to eat something.”

  Melanie looked back to where the creature had been. She had seen a tail, hadn’t she? Olivia had already ruined her theory about hawks and eagles always showing up when she was around. Her sister was not going to ruin the fact that in the first hour and a half of the first day of their hike, she had been visited by an elusive big cat that had been the stuff of legends until the Department of Natural Resources finally confirmed that they were indeed reestablishing themselves in Michigan. Melanie decided to take it as an omen that her idea for the hike and for reconnecting with her sister and helping her to heal was the right one. That cougar was Olivia—powerful and solitary and elusive. Yet she was courting Melanie, slinking around the margins, wanting to be seen. All Melanie had to do was not scare her off.

  She took some pictures of the falls, then put her socks and shoes back on and joined her sister on the bench. Olivia ate a little container of diced pears and a handful of trail mix while Melanie sampled from her bag of vegan granola. They sipped some water and watched the waterfall tumbling down the rocks.

  “This is nice,” Olivia said. She stood up and tucked her trash bag into her food bag and her food bag into her pack. “Let’s get going.”

  Melanie reluctantly followed suit. She wished Olivia had planned less walking and more looking. That’s how she would have planned the trip. But even though the hike had been her idea, Olivia had taken over the logistics. Just like when they were kids and Melanie had wanted to have a lemonade stand one summer. Olivia took over production and pricing and took all the fun out of it. Or when Melanie decided to go to the same college as her sister and Olivia took over registering her for classes and planning out what she should take each semester to get in all her requirements. Or when their parents died and Olivia took over the funeral planning, thus ensuring it would end up being embarrassingly short and strangely uncomforting. That was the one good thing about her abrupt return to college—it allowed Melanie to deal with the estate at a far healthier pace without her big sister’s interference.

  Soon Melanie’s thigh muscles were burning again with the steady climb. The river arched to the left as they veered to the right, deeper into the golden woods. Melanie kept thinking of that cougar and all of the reasons it hadn’t been a deer—the height, the heavily muscled back leg, the tail. It irritated her that Olivia didn’t believe her. Did she think she was stupid? That she didn’t know the difference between a cougar and a deer? Between predator and prey? Or that she was making it up entirely?

  Finally, the argument got so heated inside her head that it boiled over to her mouth. “It’s possible that the cougar didn’t run off because it couldn’t hear us over the sound of the waterfall.”

  Ahead of her, Olivia turned her head slightly but kept on walking. “I don’t know about that. They have excellent hearing. I mean, they have to be able to hear their prey over the sound of water and wind and stuff. It seems really unlikely that if one was at that spot it wouldn’t have heard us. And smelled us. And probably seen us with our completely non-camouflaged clothing.”

  “Okay, but a deer has even bigger ears,” Melanie said between labored breaths. When would this incline end? “And a deer wouldn’t have slunk away like this thing did. It would have bounded away, and I would have seen the white tail sticking up.”

  Ahead of her, Olivia tripped on a root but caught herself. “The deer might be used to seeing people.”

  Melanie pushed a branch out of the way. It snapped in the air behind her and hit the back of her pack. “In all these woods? I don’t know about that.”

  “The wildlife use the trails,” Olivia said. “Deer would likely come into contact with people, and certainly they would hear and smell them. And that loud little group had to have gone by not long before we did. I’m sure that would have scared off just about anything.”

  “It is completely plausible that I saw a cougar,” Melanie persisted.

  “Possible,” Olivia corrected. “I wouldn’t say plausible. More likely, if it wasn’t a deer it was a coyote.”

  Melanie caught her foot on a rock and pitched forward, catching herself with a hand on a tree trunk. “Cougars and coyotes are nothing alike. Coyotes are dogs. Cougars are cats. You couldn’t make up two more different creatures.”

  “Watch out,” Olivia said as she pushed a branch out of her way and it came swinging back toward Melanie’s face. “Man, it’s getting close out here. This trail must not be used much.”

  Melanie stopped a moment and looked around. “Yeah, this is much narrower than before.” She looked at her smartwatch. “We’ve gone over three miles since we started at the parking lot. Almost three and a half. How much further to this mountain peak?”

  “It’s 4.8 miles from the parking lot.”

  Melanie started walking again. “I’ll definitely be ready for a break.”

  The trail had leveled off while they were arguing, and now as Melanie decided to let the cougar thing drop, the trail did the same, heading steeply downhill. She groaned. If they were heading up to one of the highest peaks in the park, they would most certainly be going back up just as steeply at some point. She was about to say as much when she heard Olivia far ahead of her say, “What the heck?”

  Melanie quickened her pace and caught up to her sister, who was standing on the edge of a river, looking from the map to the river to the map again.

  “This shouldn’t be here,” she said. “There’s no river crossing before the peak.”<
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  Melanie took the map from her hands. “What do you mean?”

  Olivia took it back. “I mean, there’s no river crossing before the peak.”

  “Well, obviously there is,” Melanie said, spreading her arms in front of her to indicate what was clearly a river they must cross.

  Olivia poked at the map. “No, there is not. Look.”

  “That’s what I was trying to do before you snatched it out of my hands.” Melanie reached out for the map and Olivia handed it over. “Where did we park?”

  “Here,” she said, pointing. “And this dotted orange line is the trail we took to the falls. See how it leads to Government Peak? And see how it also doesn’t lead us over a river?”

  Melanie traced the line with a finger to where it met a dotted black line labeled Lost Lake Trail. A dotted black line that led to a river crossing a full mile south of the point at which the orange line of the Government Peak Trail turned sharply west.

  “Um, we never made a right turn,” Melanie said, indicating the spot where the trails converged.

  “What?” Olivia leaned in.

  “Right there. We should have turned right.”

  Olivia took the map back and stared at it, mouth open. “We’re a mile off course. And it’s not even lunchtime.” She rubbed a hand over her face from forehead to chin and back up over her mouth. She looked like their mother did whenever they’d done something without thinking, like when seven-year-old Melanie had decided to wash the car with Brillo pads.

  Melanie looked at her with a pained smile. “I think we need to turn around.”

  seven

  THE WALK BACK to the junction of Government Peak Trail and Lost Lake Trail was made in silence. Partly because the climb back up that last hill was arduous and putting a strain on Olivia’s sore hip, and partly because she didn’t trust herself to speak. She kept repeating to herself that it didn’t matter—what’s done is done and can’t be undone—but it did matter. She should have been paying closer attention to the sign that surely had to have been there. She shouldn’t have argued about what Melanie thought she saw because Melanie was always seeing things that weren’t there—spirits and ghosts and miracles and signs, of what, Olivia was sure Melanie decided completely arbitrarily.