The Distance from Me to You (20 page)

She lay back on the tarp, staring into the blue-lake sky. “I wish we could get down to that lake,” she said.

“We should try.”

“No.” The word came out short and final. “It's too steep. We'd have to search too long for a way down, and it would take forever to climb back up.”

“Could be worth it. For a swim.”

McKenna closed her eyes. “This time of year, at this altitude? That water is probably forty degrees. Can't you quit while you're ahead?”

She heard a little rustling as he swept the remnants of their lunch back into his pack, and his face came to hover in the space above hers. “Yeah,” he said. “I think I can.”

Eyes still shut, she reached up and touched his chin, the beginning of a beard. “It's like we're the last people left on earth.”

“Would you like that?” he asked.

McKenna thought in an idle way—everything felt idle at this moment, like nothing but the sun and Sam's nearness mattered anymore—that his voice sounded vulnerable.

“Yeah,” she said. “Sometimes I think I would like it. And other times, the thought scares me.”

Her eyes opened, taking in Sam's face blocking everything else from her vision. He was too close for her to tell if there were tears in his eyes, or if things were just blurry because he was so close.

“Well,” he said, “it doesn't scare me at all.”

As if to prove his point, he pulled off his clothes, and then hers, and they made love with the clear blue reflections hovering above, below, and all around.

• • •

Afterward they dozed, neither of them was sure for how long. It could have been ten minutes or two hours. McKenna was in the midst of a very peaceful dream: she and Sam, down at the lake, standing naked on the sand as the cool mountain water lapped over her toes. In the second between believing it was true and realizing it wasn't, McKenna thought she'd never wanted anything as much as she wanted a swim in that pure, cold water.

It was the crash that woke her up, a rumbling sound that took its time so that she almost thought it could be the waterfall, appearing magically, either beside the lake or right there where they lay.

A second crash made McKenna sit up, grabbing for her clothes. The sky no longer reflected the lake, it was completely dark. In her heightened dream state McKenna thought of the
word
eclipse
, but it wasn't an eclipse, just a storm, swept in without warning.

“Sam,” McKenna said. Unbelievably, he still slept. She stood to pull on her pants and kicked him lightly but urgently. “Wake up. It's about to—”

More magic, the sky opened before she could say the word. No preambling drizzle, just a faucet turned on full blast. They were soaked in an instant.

“Damn it,” Sam said, jumping to his feet and gathering up the tarp and his pack in one motion. Fast as they could, they got their things together and then ran. McKenna let Sam choose the direction, assuming that he knew where he was going, that he'd lead them back to their tent.

“Wait,” she yelled as he started to duck between the trees. A crash of light, with no time to count from the clap of thunder that preceded it; it was like they happened simultaneously. McKenna might not have been a Boy Scout, but she knew what that meant.

“We can't stand under the trees,” she said. “The lightning!”

“Would you rather stay out here and be the only targets?” he yelled, then reached for her hand, pulling her along the ridge. They ran for a while, the pack slamming on Sam's back, before finally ducking into an outcropping of rocks beneath a low ledge, neither the lake nor their campsite anywhere in sight.

They huddled close together while the storm raged, holding
the tarp over them for extra protection, their breath coming fast and furiously. McKenna had to admit she hadn't really felt afraid, and didn't feel afraid now. So far it had been a day of existing inside her body, following her emotions, and living in the
now
. Kneeling with Sam, watching the storm, only heightened that sense, the two of them wet and shivering, the display of light and sound gorgeous and humbling. They were merely two creatures in the forest, waiting out Mother Nature. McKenna didn't worry about the wet clothes, all they had to do was make it back to their campground to change. The very fervor of the storm meant it would probably pass quickly.

As it began to die down, they even laughed a little.

“That was amazing,” Sam said. “I've been out here . . . hell, I've lost track of how long I've been out here, and I've never seen a storm like that.”

As the rain slowed, Sam held his hand out from under the tarp, catching the drops in his hand and then slurping them down. McKenna did the same.

“We should have put out a water bottle and caught some,” she said. “Water that we wouldn't have to purify.”

Sam rooted in his pack and pulled out his still-full water bottle—at lunch, they'd been drinking from McKenna's. “Where's mine?” she said.

“Can't find it. We must have left it when we ran.”

McKenna imagined it, rolling over the edge of the ridge when they pulled up the tarp, landing beside that lake. In the dim light following the storm, it almost seemed like that lake had
been a mirage, or a trick, so weird that they could run away so quickly from something so huge.

“Oh no,” McKenna said. “The filter's gone, too.”

She pawed through their things, hoping she was wrong. But they had few enough things that she knew she hadn't missed it. They had left the filter behind.

“Don't worry,” Sam said, ducking out from under the tarp. “We have your other bottle at the tent. And we have the iodine tablets.”

She stood up and shook out the tarp, then jammed it into the bungee cords Sam had strapped on his pack's exterior—no point getting the inside of his pack wet. Overhead, water still dripped from trees in loud and persistent drops, but the outpouring from the sky seemed to have ended. It was oddly quiet, the clouds still hung overhead, empty but not quite ready to float away.

Sam took a few steps, looked around. There was no discernible path, just thick trees to one side and the wall of rocks on the other. Where there should have been footprints signaling the route they'd taken, everything was mud, the rain having cleared off the top layer of silt, leaving a blank canvas.

“Maybe if we follow the rock wall, it will lead us back to the ridge with the lake view,” she said. It made sense that if they got back to that ridge, all they had to do was walk along it, and eventually they'd get to the spot where they'd picnicked.

“But there's probably nothing there to mark the spot,” Sam said. “I'm sure the water bottle would've rolled away, and we
took up everything else. It makes more sense, I think, to go through the woods.”

“Where everything looks exactly the same?”

He turned his head, blue eyes narrow and, McKenna thought, looking a little superior. Still, it made her feel better that they also looked calm and in control. He wasn't worried.

“Maybe it looks the same to you,” he said, and strode off into the trees. McKenna paused for a second. The sight of his back, lovely as it was, had the potential to become a sore subject. Still: her out-of-mind calm hadn't really left her yet, so she took a deep breath and pulled his pack on. It wasn't as liberating as walking without anything, but compared to her usual load, it felt almost like nothing.

Sam kept walking, turning his head this way and that, choosing routes between the trees that seemed increasingly arbitrary. As the clouds overhead finally blew away, revealing a sky that was darkening past late afternoon, enough sun crept through so that her clothes began to dry—thank God and REI for quick-drying technology. Sam wasn't faring quite as well; his cotton clothes still looked sodden. He stopped short at the base of an ash berry tree, looking up into the leaves, trying to figure out if it was the same one they'd snacked at before.

“This is just one tree,” McKenna said. “The one we found before was a whole stand. And we could see the view from there, remember?”

“I know,” Sam said. “I was just wondering if we should collect some.”

Truthfully, McKenna's stomach had not felt tip-top since eating those berries. Maybe they weren't poisonous as in drop-dead-the-second-you-eat-them, but she wasn't convinced they were
food
in the strictest sense, either.

“Thanks,” she said. “But I'm good. Right now I just really want to find our campsite.”

An image formed in her head of the place where they had left her tent and pack with almost everything she had been hauling all these months, the gear that had become like an extension of her body. Her tent, her sleeping bag, her cookstove, her billfold with just-in-case cash. She had not been this far away from her things since going out to dinner with Brendan back in Maine. As natural as the earlier part of the day had felt, as liberating as it had been to leave everything behind, now she couldn't believe she'd been talked into it. Not only was she far away from her things, she didn't know how to get back to them. The trees surrounding them, the stupid poisonous ash berry tree included, had no white blazes, nothing that would help them get back to everything they needed to survive.

“Don't panic,” Sam said, though she hadn't said a word.

“Who's panicking?”

“Nobody.” His voice sounded too firm, like he was issuing orders.

“Okay, then,” she said. It took a lot of effort to make the words come out calmly. “If we're not panicking, what are we doing?”

“Walking. Walking and looking.”

“Any particular direction?”

“This way,” Sam said.

The certainty in his voice rankled McKenna because she knew it was a lie. Still, she didn't say anything, just tugged habitually on the shoulder straps and walked after him.

• • •

An hour later? Maybe more. Enough time had passed while walking with no idea where they were that the heat of panic had begun to take hold. Even so, McKenna stopped and got her fleece jacket from Sam's pack.

“Do you want your coat?” she asked him.

“No thanks.” His face had taken on a gritty and lockjawed expression, like no matter what, he wouldn't admit they were lost.

“It's actually pretty dry,” McKenna said, feeling the itchy wool. The clothes Sam wore still looked damp. The air around them was getting colder. He must be freezing.

“No, I'm fine. Let's keep walking. I think we're close.”

Which was total bull. The woods surrounding them looked nothing like the place where they'd camped, they'd gotten so deep into the forest that there was no sign of an opening on either side. Even if they
were
close to their campsite, there was absolutely nothing to indicate it.

By now, she'd had it with Sam pretending he knew what he was doing. So she said, “Oh yeah? Why do you think that?”

Sam didn't say anything, just veered—randomly, McKenna
was sure—through some trees to the left. She remembered the view from the lake, layers and layers of peaks and forest. Now they were folded into those endless and indiscernible layers.

Finally, she couldn't help saying, “I knew it. I
knew
we shouldn't have gone off the trail.”

She'd expected him to stop then, to turn, to argue. For example, he could point out that she hadn't seemed to
know
that when she'd run after him spouting off about Walden, or in her lawless euphoria the night before. She hadn't noticed it on their picnic, or in talking about making their way down to the lake, or naked and without a care underneath him and the blue sky. But he didn't, he just kept walking.

As her panic spiraled, McKenna found that she couldn't stop talking.

“It's getting dark. We're going to freeze out here. We're just going in circles. We hardly have any food left. There are no blazes. Do you know what every disaster story I read about the AT had in common? They all went off the trail.”

That wasn't what she said exactly, not in that order, anyway. There were other sentences threading these thoughts together. She'd never been a nervous talker, but now that she'd started, she couldn't stop. She felt like if she let the words slow down, if she shut up (as the stiff, tense muscles on Sam's back told her he wanted her to), all those words would translate from theory into reality. She wouldn't be talking about their disaster. She'd be living it.

“It's getting dark,” McKenna said again. “In a little while it
will
be dark, and we're just out here, exposed, with hardly anything to eat and just one water bottle—”

“Shut
up
,” Sam finally said. He stopped short and turned. A vein in his forehead that she'd never seen stood out, blue and furious.

“No!” she shouted. “I won't shut up. I'm petrified. We could die out here, Sam!”

“Is that how fast you go from one point to the other? You're either safe and happy, or you're right on the verge of death?”

“It's like you don't get it. This is
dangerous
. This is the wilderness out here, with animals and elements and we have
nothing
, we walked away from everything that's—”

“Everything that's what? You know when I walked away from everything? Coming up on eight months ago. Coming up on my whole damn life. You're worried about being lost? You're worried about being cold? Hungry? What you'll do next? Welcome to my world, princess.”

McKenna swallowed, thinking of all those months Sam had been on the trail alone with no money, none of the advantages she'd had. Not to mention all those years in the house with his wild-card, alcoholic father. She reached out, trying to soothe him, but he was too far gone. He turned, snatching his arm away from her, and kept walking.

But not for long. If their argument was too far gone, then so was the day. Not much time had passed when Sam had to admit defeat, leaning against a tree and sliding to the ground, which
was still wet. McKenna took off his pack. There was enough space to lay down the tarp. She handed Sam his jacket, and pulled on her hat, grateful that she'd brought it. She wished he had one. Mad as they were at each other, they huddled together, clinging tight. It was the only chance they had of staying warm.