OLIVIA OPENED HER EYES. She could make out the tent around her in the gray light of almost dawn. How long had she slept? She felt the reassuring hardness of the gas station knife in her hand, ready to be flipped open and used to defend herself and her sister should the need arise. Her sister. She struggled to unzip the mummy bag from the inside and sat up. Melanie was there. On her side. Still asleep.
Olivia lay back down. But then she needed to pee. This was the worst part of backpacking. Having to get up off the ground after a day of hiking and go out into the cold and drop your pants. Guys had it so easy.
Every joint creaked and every muscle screamed in protest as she slid out of the tent and into her shoes. Blisters on her heels and the tops of her two littlest toes felt like lightning rubbing against the inside of each shoe. With some effort, she pulled herself into a standing position and zipped up the tent door, then stumbled out from under the extended roof of the fly and into the murky morning. Her breath came in clouds as she searched her pack for the toilet paper and shovel.
She walked a few dozen feet into the woods and then looked around to make sure Josh couldn’t see her, but she couldn’t even see his hammock from where she was. She quickly dug her hole, did what she’d set out to do, and covered everything up. Back at her pack she used the hand sanitizer and ran her eyes over the surrounding trees. Where Josh’s hammock should have been, there was nothing. No pack hanging up, no foldable grill rack standing over the ashes in the fire ring. Had he already left? Had she imagined him?
Olivia quickly took stock of their things and found nothing missing. She retrieved the food bags and filtered the water, and then she realized that she was incredibly cold. She climbed back into the tent and snuggled back down into her sleeping bag just as Melanie was waking up.
“It’s freezing out there,” she said.
Melanie groaned. “I told you we should have done this in the summer.”
“I’d rather be cold than sweating and swarmed by mosquitos.”
“I guess.”
They lay in the gray light, Olivia trying to warm up, Melanie moving and flexing inside her sleeping bag.
“My back is killing me,” Melanie said.
“It’ll be fun putting those packs back on.”
“Wrong.”
“We should get going as soon as possible. Get a jump on things. We have a lot of ground to make up.”
Melanie groaned again.
“Hey, I gave us an out yesterday. We could have hitched back to the car and slept in the little cabins again last night. You wanted to keep hiking.”
“And I still do,” Melanie said. “I just need to get moving and I’m sure I’ll be fine. Maybe Josh can make another fire this morning.”
“He’s gone.”
Melanie sat upright in her bag. “Gone?”
“Gone. I find it a little strange that he didn’t say goodbye when he seemed so friendly yesterday. But then, there you go. He was a weirdo after all.”
Melanie slumped over.
“You look like you’re a larva about to pupate in that thing,” Olivia said.
Melanie unzipped the bag and let it fall away. “Holy mackerel, it’s cold out there!”
“I told you it was.”
“Crap. I have to pee.”
“You just gotta do it. Get up.”
Melanie crawled over her. “I’m borrowing your shoes. Mine are too far away from the door.”
“Whatever.”
Olivia helped push Melanie out the door and into a semi-standing position, then zipped up the tent and started changing into her clothes. Two days in and she was feeling grimy and smelling ripe despite using deodorant and wet wipes. She ran a hand through her hair. “Ew,” she said out loud to no one. “I’m never going hiking again.”
She pulled it into a ponytail, put on a ball cap she’d had since college, and started rolling the bags and deflating the pads. She’d gotten hers done and had started on Melanie’s by the time she came back.
“Give me my shoes, would you?” Olivia said. “I need to stand up. I’ll finish the bags in a minute once I can stretch my legs.”
“I can do my stuff,” Melanie said.
“You have to do it really tight to fit it in the stuff sack.”
“I know.”
“Okay, be my guest.”
She left Melanie in the tent and rummaged through her food bag for the second can of SpaghettiOs. She sat on the log and ate the nearly frozen pasta while staring out across the river, completely spaced out and mind blank, only coming to when the plastic spoon came back out of the can empty. She stood and rinsed the can in the river, then added it to her trash bag. She had some pears and drank some water. Then finally Melanie was unzipping the tent to come out. Olivia pushed her shoes toward her with her foot.
“What the—there’s something in my shoe,” Melanie said.
Olivia leaned over to see under the fly. “What?”
Melanie held out a round black object. Olivia took it from her and opened it. “It’s a compass.”
“There’s a note,” Melanie said. “‘So you can find your way in the wilderness. Josh.’” She looked up at Olivia. “What a sweetheart. I hope he doesn’t need that.”
“He seemed like he knew where he was going,” Olivia said. “Did he leave his phone number or anything? I’d like to return it at some point or at least pay for it.”
“No, and anyway, I think he meant it as a gift, free and clear.”
“Are you about done in there? I want to pack up the tent, and you need to eat something.”
Melanie held out her hands, and Olivia pulled her to her feet. “Pack away. I’m starving.”
Twenty minutes later, they were ready to leave. Melanie rubbed her arms while Olivia consulted first her watch and then the map.
“How many miles?” Melanie said.
“Let’s just start walking and not think too much about it. It should be easy, anyway. All we have to do is stick to the river. It’s all downhill from here to Lake Superior.”
“And we get to see some more waterfalls, right?”
“Right.”
They headed west out of the campsite, following the blue blazes of the North Country Trail, a 4,600-mile footpath stretching from the eastern border of New York to the middle of North Dakota. Altogether their trip would take them on just nine miles of the NCT, and most of it they’d hike that day. One hundred and seventy-five miles to the east lay the only other stretch of the NCT Olivia had ever hiked—the trail she’d been hiking when the ranger had found her to tell her of her parents’ accident. So even though this was one of the nicest hikes in the Porkies, according to both Josh and the always authoritative word of the internet, there was a part of Olivia that wanted to get it over with. She felt a strange buzzing in the soles of her feet with every step, as if the memory ran through the trail like electricity through a power line.
They made good time despite the cold and their aching muscles, which did loosen up a bit as they walked. Other than a quick stop for water, they didn’t slow down—and didn’t speak—until they reached the first ford of the day, which would bring them to the spot where they had meant to camp the night before. They wordlessly removed their hiking boots. Olivia’s feet were hot and red and one of her blisters had burst, but she forced her water shoes on and waded across the shallow but quick-running river. On the other side, shoes and boots were exchanged once more, and Melanie wandered over to the campsite fire ring, presumably in search of residual warmth.
“There’s not going to be any fire left,” Olivia said. “This was supposed to be our spot, so no one slept here last night.”
“Oh yeah?” Melanie said. “Come see.”
Olivia strode over, skeptical. But Melanie was right. It did feel warm. Olivia poked the ash with a stick, releasing the banked embers, which sent up a little flame.
“Ooh! Get some sticks,” Melanie said.
“We’re not making a fire. We’re leaving in a minute. You can’t make a fire and leave it. These people should have completely extinguished their fire before they left. And,” she added more indignantly, “they shouldn’t have even been here!”
“Don’t you see though?” Melanie said. “Someone else needed this site. Maybe they got lost too. Or maybe someone turned an ankle and needed to stop for the night. But we got lost and ended up with Josh so that these people could use our open site. So it all worked out.”
“Or,” Olivia said, “there were just some people hiking who didn’t make reservations ahead of time and thought they could do whatever they darn well pleased and take any site they wanted. I bet it was those three we saw at the trailhead where we parked the car.” She started looking around the campsite for evidence to support her theory.
Melanie threw up a hand. “Why do you always think the worst of people?”
“Because, in my experience, people are pretty much the worst. You don’t know because you live in a happy little echo chamber full of rainbows and unicorns, but I deal with the worst humanity has to offer on an almost daily basis. My whole job is about making people who break the law pay for their crimes. Sometimes it’s heinous, like rape and murder, and sometimes it’s just people being selfish jerks and not caring about anybody else because all they can think about is themselves and what they want. I have no respect for people who have no respect for the rules. The rules are for the good of everyone.”
Olivia realized she was ranting and stopped, though she had much more to say on the topic. She bunched all the embers together with the stick and poured some of her water on them, sending up a plume of smoke, then she spread the whole mess out. “You want to eat lunch at a waterfall?”
Melanie said nothing.
“What?” Olivia prompted.
“My life isn’t all rainbows and unicorns.”
“Fine. But my point stands.” She shifted her weight off her sore hip. “Ready?”
Melanie lifted her hands and her eyebrows in the universal sign for duh. Olivia bit back a sigh and started walking.
Just a minute away from the campsite flowed Trappers Falls, which looked more like a waterslide than a waterfall. Olivia and Melanie silently dumped their packs and pulled out their food bags, which were lighter now after two days of hiking. Positioning herself on a stone ledge littered with yellow leaves, Olivia pounded some string cheese and jerky, then started shoving handfuls of nuts into her mouth. She was ravenous, and she wasn’t sure why.
“I never really thought about the fact that your job was so negative,” Melanie finally said.
“It is what it is.”
“It must wear you down though. Day after day dealing with the worst people can do to one another.”
“It’s definitely a drag sometimes,” Olivia said. “But it is satisfying when you know you’ve gotten a dangerous person off the streets. You feel like you’re doing some good. Of course, it doesn’t always work that way. There are guilty people that go free. And there are people who get lighter sentences than you wish they would. You see some of the same people come through the court system again and again.” She stopped talking for a moment and stared at the water. “It’s frustrating, really. What do we have if we don’t have a society of people that can function? I mean, it’s hard to say if our prison system even works at all except to keep some dangerous people out of the general population. But there are so few who come out of it and seem to be able to make something of their lives. It’s not always their fault—society doesn’t make it easy for them to reintegrate. It’s like, once you’ve been branded this way, you can never escape it. There’s no forgiveness. You’re just . . . out.”
Melanie nodded. “It sounds like you’re under a lot of stress with your job.”
“Don’t tell me I should meditate or drink special teas or anything.”
Melanie laughed. “I wasn’t going to.”
“Okay, see that you don’t.” Olivia tied up her trash bag and shoved it back into her food bag. “I’ll say this—it’s not always fun, but it is necessary. And it seems to be something I’m good at, so there you go.”
“You are good at it. You’re good at everything. You always have been.”
Olivia shook her head. “No, I’m not.”
“Yes, you are. You played every sport, you got all A’s, you were always getting some leadership award or going on some special trip to somewhere or other because you were one of the smart kids.”
Olivia put a hand on Melanie’s knee. “You want to know the truth? I wasn’t good at everything. I just immediately quit the things I wasn’t good at. You don’t remember them because I didn’t do them long enough.”
Now Melanie was shaking her head. “No, I don’t believe that.”
“It’s true. You know I tried out for the fall play my freshman year of high school when you were still in junior high?”
“You did?”
“Yes, and when I didn’t get the lead role, I quit. I wasn’t going to play some background character with no lines.”
“That’s crazy. Why would they give you the lead as a freshman? That’s not how it works.”
“It’s how I thought it should work!” Olivia laughed. “And did you know I took piano lessons for a week, and then I quit because I thought playing ‘Mary Had a Little Lamb’ was infantile and the teacher wouldn’t let me jump ahead into better songs because she said I wasn’t ready for them?”
Olivia was enjoying the incredulous look Melanie was giving her, so she kept going.
“I quit doing anything artsy when nothing I painted looked like it did in my head. And I never sewed anything after I sewed a little pillow top I was embroidering onto the pants I was wearing. And I never helped Mom cook because I once burned a pan of snickerdoodle cookies and was so angry at myself I cried.” Olivia was really laughing now.
Melanie smiled. “I loved cooking with Mom.”
Olivia pulled up short. She hadn’t meant to mention her mother. And now the memory of that ill-fated attempt at baking became the memory of her mother handing her a freshly laundered softball uniform, which became the memory of her father’s ecstatic face the first time she hit a home run, which became the memory of the four of them at a Detroit Tigers game, where she caught a foul ball with her bare hands, chipping a bone in her finger. She didn’t know she was crying until Melanie wiped at her cheek.
“It’s okay to talk about it,” Melanie said. “And it’s okay to cry about it.”
Olivia looked at her sister, whose eyes were red and shining, whose smile was a little shaky at the corners. Then she stood up and wiped at her own eyes and nose. “We should get going again.”
She picked up her pack and her hiking poles and took a few steps up from the river and back onto the trail. In her peripheral vision, she saw Melanie put her face in her hands for a moment before standing up and brushing the dirt off her pants.
“We’re three miles from Lake Superior,” Olivia said.
Wordlessly, Melanie put her pack back on and walked up to her. Olivia silently implored her not to say anything. To just drop the whole thing, forever and always.
Melanie touched her arm. “I’ll lead for a while.” She held out her hand for the map. Then she headed into the yellow glow of the trees.