There isn’t much to cook for dinner, since we’ve got almost no food left, but we arrange it all on a towel. Two bags of chips. A candy bar. One bag of noodles. One bag of oatmeal.
“So half a bag of noodles for dinner, with half a candy bar for dessert?”
“Sounds perfect.” Sophie slips off her boot. Her face is all scrunched up and I see her ankle is swollen with purple marks all over it. “Oh, man. That looks bad.”
“Yeah. I was thinking about soaking it in the creek.”
“I’ll help you.”
“I can get there.” She picks up the tree limb crutch I made her and limps down to the water.
I follow her.
She puts her foot in the rushing creek and moans a little. Last time I checked, there were six Advil. Thank God the bear didn’t take those. I fill our water bags while Sophie sits on a rock and soaks her foot.
“So…does my crutch invention buy me a question?”
“What do you want to know?”
“What’s your connection to Rain Man?”
Her face falls. She lifts her foot again to examine it, and I’m pretty sure she’s going to ignore my question until she says, “He knew my parents.”
Then she looks me square in the eyes. Her shoulders back, head high. This is a no-negotiation stance if I ever saw one. “Look, Dylan. I’m not ready to tell you my life story. Some things are just for me.”
“I know.”
She looks at the ground and picks at her sleeve the way I do.
“I want you to know you can write your notes again. I promise I won’t dig them up anymore,” I offer.
She laughs.
This totally annoys me and confuses me at the same time. “Why are you laughing?”
“Because you make us sound like dogs. All the burying and digging up things we cherish like dogs with their bones.”
“Is that what your notes are?”
“Ha, I guess. Today I wrote to Mom about the trail things I remember. Like how she always fried eggs for us whenever we’d find a resupply and how I’d love waking up to the sound of the eggs in the pan and the smell of the coffee brewing.”
“Does that make you sad? To remember that?”
Sophie picks at the bandage around her foot. “Not always. Sometimes I remember things like the birds Mom liked and that makes me feel like she’s still with me.”
I nod. I want to tell Sophie her Mom still is with her because people tell me that all the time about Dad. But I don’t know if it’s true. I want it to be though.
“What about your Dad?”
“I’d rather talk about my dog. I had a rottweiler once. His name was Max, and he was the best.”
“Max. Like in the story.”
“Exactly. He was the best.”
“Was? What happened to him?”
“He had cancer. At the end, he hid in our laundry room. The vet said a lot of dogs find a quiet place to die when they’re ready. To be alone.”
“You think Rain Man…”
“Yeah. I do.”
“Did you ever think maybe he’s in too much pain to live?”
“Maybe. But it’s hard to be left behind. How it’s going to feel for his kids and grandkids and their dogs and their dogs’ fleas…”
“Their fleas?”
I shrug. She smiles.
“It’s all so much, you know? After they’re gone, it feels so surreal. Like it can’t be true. Like you’re living some weird alternative universe.” My hands go to my head. “I don’t know.”
“I know. Sometimes I think Mom is still alive. Actually I think it a lot.”
I nod.
“Sometimes,” Sophie adjusts her leg, moving it with her hand so her foot stays deep in the cold water, “Sometimes I wear Mom’s things and stare in the mirror, and…Dad always said I looked just like her. My eyes especially…and I wonder…”
“What?”
Sophie stares at the water. “I’m just babbling. I just miss her.”
I don’t know if it’s okay to touch Sophie, because I hate when people touch me, but I feel her sadness and want to help, so I shift over to the rock she’s sitting on and sit next to her. I put my arm around her, and she rests her head on my shoulder and we sit like that for a while.
Then she says, “You should soak your hands also.”
She’s right, but I’m not looking forward to this. I unwrap my knuckles, thrust my hands in the water. It hurts like hell and I try to make my mind go elsewhere even as I hear myself scream.
I think of the time I fell out off of my bike on a dirt road and scraped my face and both of my knees pretty badly. Mom put me up on the counter in the kitchen. She wet some cotton balls and dabbed at the area. She held my leg still with one hand and picked the gravel out of the cut carefully with the other. As I tried to pull away, she looked me straight in the eye. “Dylan. I’ve got to clean this out so you’ve got to try to be somewhere else while I do it. Okay?”
I nodded but didn’t know what she meant.
“So,” she said, “first rule is you can’t look at what I’m doing. Okay?”
“Yeah.” I could do that.
“Second rule, keep talking. Name all the states and capitals. In alphabetical order. Go.”
I didn’t ask if she meant putting the states in alphabetical order or the capitals. I just went with the states, because that meant the most sense to my mind. By the time I’d reached Lincoln, Nebraska, she was done. And I barely felt it.
“That’s my little warrior,” she said. “Your mind is always going to be your best escape.” And she kissed me on the forehead. I still remember how light that kiss felt. Light but good.
My skin feels uncomfortable. The muscles in my calves are tight and want to spring and recoil and spring again. I bounce on the balls of my feet like I’m getting ready to swim a big race. “Let’s go back to the campsite.”
“Help a girl out?” She lifts her hands, and I go to her side and bend down so she can slide her arm around my neck.
She starts to limp toward our campsite and my heart starts to feel as knotted as my calves. So I crouch down.
“Piggyback?”
I carry her on my back to our campsite. Her body is so small. She feels like a little bird, hurt and discarded. But her weight is enough to make me feel grounded, like when I wore that weighted vest and that helps to make my muscles feel less nervous.
I set her down as gently as I can in front of her tent. “We should probably get some sleep,” I say.
“Yeah.”
I push my hands into my eyes. The massive headache that has been building all day is now in full force.
“You okay?” Sophie asks.
“Yeah. Fine. Just a headache.”
“Time to take your vitamin I.” She points to my pack.
“Yeah.” I pull the bottle from my pack, and I pretend to take the pills since there’s no way I need them as much as she does. “How far are we from Rain Man? I can’t keep it all straight.”
“Well, we’re at Deep Gap.” She draws a line in the dirt. “Which is twenty-two miles to Sassafras Gap. His wife blue-blazed from there, so I’m not sure how much farther he’ll be in the woods.”
“So, about three days at eight miles a day,” I say even though I know Sophie can’t do that.
Sophie nods.
“Let’s get some sleep. It always looks better in the morning,” I say.
Mom used to tell me that. She’d say no matter how mad or sad you were, you’d feel better in the morning. Only that wasn’t true after Dad died. That first day, it was like my body and mind forgot. For a second, I felt almost normal. But then what happened came back in a rush, and the pain felt ten times worse than when I first heard Dad died. It was screaming pain. Skin-on-fire pain. Heart-ripping-open pain. Mom said he died from a heart attack. Arrhythmia. Nobody could have known.
But I’d been listening to my dad’s heart for years. I knew, or I should have known.
“Dylan?”
“Sorry. What?”
“I said, good night.”
“Yeah. Good night, Sophie.”
Sophie climbs into her tent and zips it closed. Suddenly, all I can picture is the body bag zipping closed over Rain Man’s wife. Over Dad. Oh God. I start to sweat. Dizziness assaults me like a swarm of insects. I throw myself on top of my sleeping bag, wishing like mad that I had sprayed my bug spray, but Sophie’s listening. I’m about to close my eyes and focus on the sounds of invading insects might make (two points, times two, Emily. Double play, girl!), when I hear Sophie.
“Hey, Dylan? You wanna share?”
Hell to the yeah, I do. I’m up and out of my tent and in hers in seconds flat.
“No playing around though, okay?”
“Okay.”
“I just sleep better when you’re here.”
“Me too,” I say. “Me too.”