We set off. Rory in the lead, followed by Pia, then Rachel, Sandra, and me. The order felt profound in a way I didn’t quite like, but I let it go because right away I had other worries. Just keeping my balance with a pack on my back—which Rory and Pia had winnowed down to “a very doable” thirty-five pounds or so—and walking in high, stiff hiking boots took up most of my brain. To keep from falling backward I leaned forward, using muscles I didn’t know I had. What were they, stomach muscles? Core? Back? I gritted my teeth as I watched my chubby white knees pump up and down, negotiating my shoes into crevices between rocks and tree roots. The straps of my pack dug wedges into my shoulders. Already I was thinking about food.
In minutes, I was coated with sweat and breathing hard, noting somewhere in my brain that the path hadn’t even started going uphill yet. My ankles turned in my boots if I misjudged a step. I realized I’d better concentrate on every footfall; my mind wandered anyway. A grueling argument I’d had with Richard just a year ago flooded back to me. I’d asked him if Marcus, then in his early thirties, could move in with us. Insisted on it, since he had nowhere to go after the death of our mother. The fight had been one of the most vicious we’d ever had, and, to my surprise, I ended up “winning.” Marcus moved in the following week. One Sunday soon after, Marcus and I returned from a day of shopping to find all of Richard’s belongings gone from the apartment. Apparently this change of scene had pushed Richard into the arms of his girlfriend, someone he’d insisted up until that day didn’t exist.
A root shot up out of nowhere, trapped my boot, and I went flying, whiplashed from my memories. I can still conjure the fright of being airborne, all that greenery shooting by and rocks and earth zooming up to meet me. I lay in a fetal pile waiting for the world to stop moving, panting and cursing and crying a little until I could bring myself to examine my bloody palms and test my fingers. They all seemed to work. “Don’t be such a fucking baby,” I said aloud. “You fell, now get up.”
Something called to its mate high above me, a mournful coo followed by a shrill peep-peep-peep. I felt watched by insensate green. Underbrush crowded the path, yearning to erase it. I remembered something a friend who once lived near a cornfield had said to me: after a spring rain you could hear the stalks growing; they made an eerie, creaking sound.
I closed my eyes. Opened them. I was still in the middle of nowhere, alone.
“Rachel! Sandra! Rory! Pia!” I hated the sound of my voice. It sounded weak, thin, useless.
Only forest noises answered. I reached in one of my countless zippered pockets for my cell phone. No coverage.
I began to wonder if I was on the right trail. Yes, blue flashes of paint still marked the occasional tree on the path, but was there for some sick reason more than one blue trail? Had I taken a wrong turn and not noticed? A wave of love for civilization and its myriad comforts washed over me as I turned in my cathedral of tree and stone. It all looked the same to me. Nature was a language I simply didn’t speak.
I tightened my pack, retied my shoes, and began to climb. To summarize: I never knew there was so much up. The first time I clambered up a cascade of rocks, huffing and drenched with sweat, it didn’t occur to me that this would be only one of many messy encounters with gravity. I’d make it up one steep rise of earth and stone, congratulate myself—even get a bit smug on a level stretch—only to face the next heartbreaking climb.
A dull ache had fired up in both feet, mainly my heels and both little toes. Figured I’d ignore it, let it hang out with the pain in my shoulders, thighs, calves, and hands. I had no concept of how far I’d walked. A mile? Three miles? Five? I knew how it felt to walk a mile in the city in sneakers on a nice day, how it felt to swim my tidy ten laps at the Y, but this was different. I only knew that a couple of hours had passed, and I’d seen no sign of anyone. Everything in my life became the dumb brute act of moving forward, as animals must—food, sex, and shelter leading them on.
I heard water before I saw it. A delicious hush off to my right. I couldn’t quench a desire to see it, to rest my eyes on something other than green trees and gray stone. Thorns and brambles caught at my clothes and bare flesh as I bushwhacked toward the sound. The land fell away sharply under my feet.
Something moved down below, a black blur. A thick branch snapped back, young leaves glistening. I stopped breathing.
Something pink dappled through the leaves. I squinted, sorting out the layers of green from the objects below. A white arm, a pair of hiking boots placed side by side on black slate, socks draped over them. In silence, I drew aside a branch and saw Sandra’s shining hair and curved back as she sat on a rock, arms wrapped around her knees.
She turned and waved when she heard me call her name. I fumbled my way down the steep bank. Following her lead, I unbuckled my pack and let it drop to the earth. Crazy to think mine was a “pared down” version. Nothing ever felt so good. I nearly skipped over the rocks to join her in the sunshine at the base of a waterfall just taller than a man.
Grimacing, I took off my shoes and peeled off my bloodstained socks; blisters on my heels and toes had already broken.
“Shit, Wini, what are you doing?” she said with concern as she looked at my feet. She unzipped a side pocket in her pack, dug around in it. “How can you even walk?” She laid out a sheet of moleskin, a little packet of disinfectant, a Swiss Army knife. Using the tiny pair of scissors on the knife, she snipped off a small patch of moleskin. “God, I hope I have enough of this stuff. You poor thing!”
I wanted to cry a little, I was so relieved to find her and that she knew what to do, but instead I let her ease my feet into the icy stream while I nearly fainted from the pain-pleasure of the rushing water.
“Let’s see what we’ve got here,” she said as I extracted one foot and rested it on the warm stone. She glanced up at me with red-rimmed eyes. “Here, hand me that little towel from my bag.”
“Oh, Loo, what’s the matter?”
She shook her head and wiped her eyes with the backs of her hands, bending back down to her task. “Oh, you know, same old thing.”
Which meant Jeff. None of us could stand him, this husband who had for fourteen years been treating her like a possession. Better be home by ten, who are you going with, better not be lying, I might just drive by and make sure you’re really there at your so-called girls’ night out . . . All sweetness and smiles in front of Pia and Rachel and me; roaring like an animal with Sandra in the privacy of their home and smashing his fist through the wall next to her head if she arrived back only a few minutes late. Just standing next to him gave me a whiff of violence.
I sat close to her and put my arm around her.
“He said don’t bother coming home.”
“Come on, Sandra—”
“I talked to him back at the lodge. He said he never gave me permission to go on this trip. He’s crazy, but you knew that,” she said with a sad little laugh.
“It’s been a long time, you know, with this man.”
She nodded, face deep in shadow, thick black hair sweeping forward.
“Every year you say you’re going to give him another year and then—”
Fresh tears flowed out of her. “I know, my God, I know! I just wanted to be with my friends, especially you. I mean, how often do we get to see each other?”
“Never enough.”
“But I couldn’t let him destroy this weekend. It’s too important to me.”
We hugged, and it struck me—as it always did—how small she felt. I thought about her words. Rachel and Pia had been best friends since grade school, but Sandra and I had each other’s back, an unshakable trust and understanding. She was the one who had carried me through the first days of horror after Marcus’s death—was still carrying me. She understood my heart, and all our hearts; she saw the truth behind Pia’s manic trekking, Rachel’s rigidity, my chronic inertia; forgave it all and loved us anyway.
Without looking up from her work, Sandra said softly, “He was my rebound relationship after Joe, you know. How stupid is it to actually marry your rebound guy?”
“Yes, but—”
She waved me away with a little laugh. “I guess that’s not news to anybody, but look, Win, I am done with Jeff. I made my decision back at the lodge. All this time I’ve been staying in this for Ethan and Hannah, but if I were being honest with myself, those kids are exactly the reason I have to get away from him! They’re getting older, they’re picking up on things. Ethan’s started having these nightmares . . . kids are just sponges, you know? But I’m telling you, something about being with all of you guys again, it inspired me. . . .” She wiped her eyes and looked at me. “Anyway, I wanted you to be the first to know.”
“Loo, that’s great to hear—” I touched her forearm, and she seemed to tear up again, so I withdrew my hand.
“That’s all I can say right now. I don’t want to talk about it. It’ll take me back there. I want to be here, on this trip, with my friends.” She looked up, blinking. “In this sunlight, by this stream. Okay?”
“I hear you.” I winced as she cleaned my other foot, dried it. “How much farther to the campsite, do you think?”
“A mile or so.”
“Don’t you think it’s a little weird that they’ve left us behind like this?”
“You know they’re going to do what they’re going to do.” She put the knife and moleskin back in her pack, sat back on her haunches. “Let’s just enjoy the ride, okay? I mean, look at this place.” She laughed and threw up her arms. “This is soooo not my marriage, not my bills, my PTO conferences, my job. It’s our adventure, Win.”
“But you won’t leave me behind, will you?”
She looked at me. “Of course not.”
“How did—”
“It looked like he was keeping it hidden.”
She shrugged and reached for her socks and boots. “We’re in Maine, Win. In the woods. It’s not a bad thing to have.”
• • •
Back on the trail, we fell into a rhythm of walking together, me several yards behind but always keeping Sandra in view. I think we were both too tired to talk. We tramped through a marshy area, then across a series of wooden boards laid down over stretches of mud. I spotted cloven footprints deep in the black ooze and showed them to Sandra. We agreed they were deer, or maybe moose, but neither of us had any real idea.
The swamp gave way to old-growth groves of hardwood and birch trees. Orange and yellow mushrooms popped up in the rich decay of fallen trees, while chipmunks crisscrossed the trail at every turn.
As we climbed higher, the hardwoods thinned out, and we wandered among shoulder-high fir and spruce. Soon, even the conifers fell away. Above the tree line now, we walked on bedrock, scree kicking back behind us. Fairy-green lichen jeweled stone outcroppings. The air freshened on the ridge. To all sides, undulant mountains in heartbreaking shades of blue rolled off into soft clouds. The view stunned me, and I gasped. I don’t know why I was surprised to find such beauty. We followed the cairns that marked the trail—Pia had told us this curious name for these little piles of rocks—pausing to put on our fleeces as a cold wind whipped across bare stone.
Sandra and I stood side by side and looked down. A few hundred feet below us, a river, swollen and churning and alive, rounded a bend and plunged into pine forest. Even from our elevation we could see whitecaps. My stomach tightened. Through a break in the canopy of green just below us, smoke drifted up into the late-afternoon sky. As much as my feet screamed from inside my shoes as we descended the ridge to the campfire, I relished a small, private flame of pride that I had made it this far into this strange new world.