All That We Carried Read online

  She retrieved the bags from the ground. It had been Olivia’s that fell so hard. It was significantly heavier than her own bag, and she wondered for a moment if she hadn’t brought enough food along. Or maybe vegan food was lighter than Olivia’s jerky and cheese and whatever else she had in there.

  Olivia had the pads and bags rolled, stuffed, and strapped to the packs by the time she got back, and was already breaking down the tent. Melanie sat on a half-rotted log and pulled a vegan protein bar out of her food bag.

  “Just have something to eat first,” she said.

  “I’d rather be ready to go once we’ve eaten,” Olivia said.

  Melanie retrieved one of her water bottles. It was full. She checked the other one, also full. “You already filtered our water?”

  Olivia shook out the tent fly and laid it on the ground. “Yeah. I did it this morning while you were getting dressed.”

  “And you did the pads and the sleeping bags.”

  “I want to get started early. We’ll be going by some really nice features this afternoon, and I don’t want us to feel rushed when we get there.”

  Melanie stopped chewing and tried to swallow the lump of protein bar. She hated protein bars on a good day. As she saw now how childish she was being, this one was making her feel ill. She swished some water around in her mouth and swallowed the chunks like a mouthful of pills. “You could have woken me up earlier. I must have gotten way more sleep than you.”

  “I feel strangely okay,” Olivia said as she slowly and tightly rolled the fly, brushing off every speck of dirt with a dry washcloth as she went. “I’m actually kind of excited about tonight. We’ll be camping near a waterfall, and we’ll be the only ones there. And, I don’t know, there’s something about knowingly going to sleep next to a bear that’s just kind of invigorating.”

  Melanie frowned. She put the rest of the protein bar back in her bag and stood up. “What do you want me to do?”

  Olivia pointed. “Grab those ties for me?”

  Melanie retrieved two strips of nylon fabric and handed them to her sister.

  Olivia swiftly tied the rolled fly and set it aside. “Can you pack up the tent poles and pegs? The rubber bands are in the bag there.”

  As Melanie did as directed, Olivia straightened, folded, and rolled the tent in the exact same manner as the fly. Then she strapped tent, fly, and hardware bag to the top of her pack.

  “I’ll be right back,” she said, retrieving the toilet paper and shovel.

  When she disappeared behind a tree, Melanie picked up Olivia’s pack with her right hand and her own with her left hand.

  “Why is your pack so much heavier than mine?” Melanie asked when Olivia returned.

  “They’re about the same.”

  “No, they’re not. Yours is way heavier.”

  “Maybe a little.”

  “How much does the tent weigh?”

  Olivia shrugged. “I don’t know.”

  Of course she knew. Melanie could all but guarantee Olivia had added up the weight of every item on her calculator app as she walked around the sporting goods store. “Shouldn’t I carry at least part of it? Or if you carried it yesterday, I should carry it today?”

  “No, it’s good. I’m trying to lose some weight. This will help me.”

  Melanie didn’t argue further. It was never profitable to argue with Olivia when she had her mind made up—she pitied the defense lawyers who had to face her in the courtroom. She’d just have to find a way to even out the load later.

  Once they’d eaten, they headed out. The ground was level, but that was about the only good thing one could say about it. The rains had turned many low spots into bogs that sucked at Melanie’s hiking shoes, and even once she got moving at a good clip she just couldn’t get warm. The sleeping bag Olivia had gotten was great for the cold night, but her leggings, tee, and fleece jacket just weren’t cutting it in the crisp morning air.

  Every few hundred feet, Olivia veered off to the left or right of the trail to avoid mud or standing water. Melanie followed. They struggled through the brush, up little hills, around fallen trees, and then they were back on the trail, looking for the next reassuring blue blaze painted on a tree trunk. A bit farther and the whole process repeated itself.

  Melanie poked her hiking poles into the sludge and tried to step on rocks or rotting sticks or logs rather than in the muck, but every surface was slick with mud and she slipped off about half the time. Off trail, she tripped over everything in her path. She cursed and growled under her breath. Her brand-new vegan hiking shoes looked like the feet of a filthy extra in a documentary about the spread of the plague in medieval Europe.

  When they stopped to pull out each other’s water bottles, Melanie looked up at the blank gray sky that had been so blue the day before and released a bitter sigh. Even the colorful foliage on the trees seemed dry and dim, where yesterday it had felt like she was walking through a million suncatchers. By the time they reached the bridge over the river at Lily Pond, Melanie was in what she had always thought of as a brown mood—her signal to herself that she needed to change things up before she sank further down into black.

  “After lunch, why don’t we see who can spot the most varieties of mushroom,” she said.

  Olivia raised her eyes from her pack. “Wouldn’t the person in the lead have an unfair advantage?”

  “We’ll switch on and off every fifteen minutes, how’s that?”

  Olivia shrugged. “Okay.”

  They sat on a bench built into the wooden bridge and faced the pond. It could have been so beautiful in the sunshine. For about a minute neither spoke. They just stared ahead at the trees mirrored in the still water and framed with browning cattails. A young couple with a friendly shepherd mix approached from the right, the direction they would soon be heading.

  “Morning,” the man said.

  “Morning,” they said in unison.

  Melanie wished they would stop so she could pet the dog, whose paws were as muddy as her shoes—not a promising sign about what they were soon to face—but the couple didn’t even slow down. She retrieved her bag of carrot sticks. Olivia pulled out a can of SpaghettiOs.

  “What. The heck. Is that?” Melanie said.

  Olivia turned the can’s label toward her. “SpaghettiOs.”

  “Yes, I can see they’re SpaghettiOs. But why? Why on earth would you bring SpaghettiOs hiking?” Melanie gagged a little. “You’re not eating those cold, are you?”

  “Do you see a microwave out here?”

  “Blech! Gross!”

  “Settle down,” Olivia said as she peeled back the aluminum lid.

  “That is so disgusting.” Melanie turned away. “Ugh. I can’t even look at you.”

  Olivia started laughing. “You sure you don’t want some?”

  “Sick. No.”

  Olivia leaned closer and waved a spoonful of the cold canned pasta in Melanie’s face. “Hmmm?”

  Melanie swatted her away, sending SpaghettiOs flying over the bridge and into the water.

  “Hey!” Olivia said, still laughing. “Man, you are just as easy as ever to annoy.”

  “Well, you’re just as annoying as ever.”

  Olivia snickered. “So sensitive.”

  Melanie knew Olivia was just giving her a hard time, but the word sensitive got under her skin. Because she wasn’t being sensitive. She was just being herself. And she didn’t like being told that she was somehow more delicate than everybody else. It wasn’t her who was sensitive—it was everyone else who was callous. Especially Olivia, who’d never given Melanie the satisfaction of falling for a prank or doing anything but shrugging when criticism was leveled at her. If anything, Olivia could stand to be more sensitive.

  “That explains why your food bag is so heavy,” Melanie said. “How many cans are in there?”

  “Just two. I had a hankering for SpaghettiOs when I went shopping.”

  “Weirdo.”

  Olivia kept smiling
and shoveling SpaghettiOs into her mouth. Melanie foraged around in her bag for a few more morsels. She was already missing salads and roasted veggies and smoothies and almond milk protein shakes and pan-fried tofu with rice and lentils. She chewed on a granola bar and followed that up with a handful of almonds. Eventually she wasn’t hungry anymore, but she wasn’t satisfied either.

  It was the first time she went to dinner with Justin that she’d decided to become a vegan. Right there in a dark corner booth of a Mexican restaurant on East Paris Avenue in Grand Rapids. It was a terrible place in which to become a vegan. Even the bean dip wasn’t vegetarian. She and Justin had been emailing each other for weeks, talking about what had happened the night of the accident and what happens after you die—what might have happened to her parents, what might eventually happen to him. He was reading a New Testament someone had given him at a support group, even though he admitted to being a scoffer in the past. But now it felt like he really had something for which he needed to be forgiven. They’d covered a lot of ground in those emails, and Melanie had started thinking through the ramifications of reincarnation. Seeing the couple at the next table chowing down on tacos, ground beef spilling out the other side, she felt almost sick. That night she’d eaten a salad of just lettuce, tomatoes, and onions.

  “Ready?” Olivia said when they had both tucked their food bags back into their packs.

  “Sure.”

  “You want to lead first?”

  “Hmm?”

  “The mushroom thing. You want to be in front first?”

  “Oh, yeah. I guess so.”

  Olivia caught her eye. “Hey, what’s wrong?”

  Melanie shook her head. “Nothing. I’m just . . . it’s just kind of gray today, you know?”

  “Yeah. Not as nice as yesterday.”

  “And I can’t seem to get warm. All I can think about is getting back in that sleeping bag.” When she saw the concerned look on Olivia’s face, she added, “For the warmth.”

  Olivia nodded, but Melanie worried she had tipped her hand. When she’d been in the throes of depression after the accident, she’d spent most days in bed. Olivia wasn’t there, but Melanie knew that her aunt had tattled on her. It was good she did. If Melanie had been left to herself, she’d probably still be in that same bed. It was good to have people who cared about you. Though, if she was honest, it wasn’t either of them who’d gotten her out of it. It was Justin.

  “Why don’t you go first,” Melanie offered. “And you can’t just say ‘there’s one’ when you see it. You have to describe it. Like ‘the one that looks like white oyster shells’ or ‘the one that looks like earwax.’”

  “Lovely,” Olivia intoned. “All right. Let’s get a move on.”

  For the next fifteen minutes, Olivia led the trek and the mushroom count. It was a silly game, but it helped Melanie focus on something other than her brown mood. She did manage to spot some that Olivia had missed, including a rather phallic purple mushroom that looked nearly black against the leaf litter. When they got to the spot where the Little Carp River Trail met the Lily Pond Trail, they switched off, Melanie leading the way west toward the first place they would have to ford the river. As she searched out mushrooms, she saw not only the seemingly endless variety of fungi—tall and short, skinny and fat, ones that looked like open umbrellas and ones that looked like closed umbrellas, red, orange, yellow, white, solid and spotted and striped—she also saw so much she might have otherwise missed. Lichens and ferns of various types, and so many different and delightful varieties of mosses.

  Melanie was fully entranced. She’d never dreamed her manufactured distraction would be so good for her soul. Whatever creative force was behind this world, he/she/it never seemed to run out of ideas. There was no real reason for so much variety, was there, other than that it was meant to enchant those who looked upon it?

  Behind her, her sister snagged a mushroom she hadn’t seen as she was musing. What did Olivia see when she looked at the multitude of species in just this small parcel of land? No doubt there was a scientific explanation for it all. Something that didn’t want a divine designer. But Melanie just couldn’t understand how anyone could think there was nothing more to this life than survival of the species.

  “Why is it you don’t believe in God? Or some kind of higher power?” Melanie asked when they came to the Little Carp River crossing and started to change out of their hiking boots and socks.

  Olivia shoved her feet into her water shoes. “I guess I just don’t see any evidence for it. Or need for it.”

  Melanie rolled up her pant legs and slipped her hands through the loops on her hiking poles. “I see evidence everywhere I look.”

  “Believe me, I know,” Olivia said. “Don’t forget your boots.”

  Melanie silently chided herself for nearly leaving the most essential part of her hiking gear behind and decided to drop her line of questioning until she’d thought of a better response.

  “Ready?” Olivia said.

  Melanie nodded. “Want me to go first?”

  “I can. That way if there’s a problem you can avoid it.”

  “Why should you have to find the problem?”

  Olivia stopped at the water’s edge. “I don’t know. Maybe because I’m the one who remembered water shoes. Plus I’m the oldest. Just used to doing things first.”

  Melanie stepped up beside her. “I don’t think that’s necessary anymore.” Without waiting for Olivia’s response, she stepped into the water. She sucked in a breath at how cold it was but didn’t hesitate to take the next step. The water was fast moving but shallow, not even reaching to Melanie’s calves. The poles helped her brace and balance, but she immediately regretted not purchasing the water shoes. The submerged rocks were slimy beneath her bare feet. Even so, she was across in less than thirty seconds and turned back to give Olivia a triumphant look. But Olivia was right behind her, looking down at her own footing, totally missing Melanie’s conquest of the watery obstacle.

  Melanie dried her feet on the hand towel Olivia had instructed her to bring, put her socks and shoes back on, and shoved the towel back into her pack without much thought to where it should go.

  “My turn in front,” Olivia said. “How many do you have now? I have twenty-four.”

  “I don’t know. I wasn’t really counting.”

  “What? This was your game, Melanie.”

  Melanie took a sip of her water and looked around. “Is this a campsite?”

  Olivia took out her map. “Yes. Two of them.”

  “Too bad we can’t just camp here. My feet are freezing.”

  “Well, we can’t. We’ve barely gone three miles anyway. Hey, what is with you today?”

  Melanie felt herself fighting back sudden tears. She would not cry, not in front of Olivia. Especially when she had no idea what she would be crying about. It had been so long since she’d felt this way. Was it simply being with her sister that had yanked her back?

  “Do you need a break?” Olivia said, not unkindly.

  Melanie whipped her emotions into submission and put her water bottle away. “No, I’m fine. Moving will help me warm up.” She wrenched her pack—which was getting heavier by the moment—onto her back and shoved her arms through the straps.

  “Okay, if you’re sure.”

  “Totally. Let’s go. And I have thirty mushroom species. So I’m winning.”

  Olivia smiled. “How about we say you won. I don’t think at this point I could tell the difference between what I see and what I’ve already seen. So you win the mushroom game. We’ll have to think of something else for the next leg.”

  Melanie scowled. She knew she must look like a petulant child who’d been put off by a playmate who was tired of the game. But she couldn’t stop herself. “Don’t patronize me, Olivia. If you don’t want to play, that’s fine. I’m fine.” With that, she found the next blue blaze on a tree and started walking away.

  They walked in silence for ten minutes. Twenty.
The ground got wet again, and Melanie was now the one who had to look for the driest route around the muck. Small puddles alternated with what in some cases looked to be a hundred yards of sludge pockmarked with the soggy footprints of hikers who had gone before. It was slow going and frustrating. Kind of like recovery. Good days and bad days. Serenity and struggle. Wanting to quit but pressing forward because that was the only way out.

  After quite some time focused only on the ground directly in front of her, Melanie looked up and stopped. Where was the next blue blaze? And when had she last seen one?

  “What’s wrong?” Olivia said behind her.

  Every fiber of Melanie’s being wanted to lie, wanted to keep walking and miraculously stumble back upon the trail. Yet overriding her fear of looking stupid for leading them astray was the greater fear of being lost in the woods where no one would find them.

  She turned to her sister and said in a calm voice that belied the mounting anxiety within, “I think we’ve lost the trail.”

  Olivia gripped Melanie’s hand tighter. “Stop pulling.”

  Melanie pulled harder. “I see it!”

  Olivia yanked back on her arm. “It’s not going anywhere. It’s bolted to the ground. And Mom and Dad said we have to stick together.”

  The Ferris wheel loomed up ahead, lights flashing, music singing from tinny speakers. A sea of people lay between them and it, a sea in which Melanie seemed determined to be lost.

  Pulling her like the husky she kept asking for but never received, Melanie propelled Olivia forward, slamming her into strangers, who wheeled and yelled things like “Hey!” and “Watch it!” and a few things she knew she was not supposed to say—ever.

  They made it to the entrance, but the line stretched back twenty feet or more.

  “Do we have to do the Ferris wheel?” Olivia asked as they tacked themselves onto the end of the line.

  “Yes!” Melanie whined. “It’s my favorite part and Mom and Dad said I could and they said you had to take me, so there.”

  “Fine, but then you have to come with me to play some of the games.”