She unwraps the garbage bag lining the main compartment and reaches into the bottom for her last clean pair of wool socks—the pair she was never planning on wearing. Inside is a Ziploc inside of another Ziploc. Double-bagging it, just in case.
After re-twisting the garbage bag and re-latching the top pouch, she leans the pack against the tree trunk and brings the little package into the light of her headlamp. A silver flask; a beautiful, engraved panel of stained teak wood on the front. An owl. A gift from her ex-boyfriend. It was custom, he’d said. One of a kind, he’d said. Just like her, he’d said.
She’d filled it to the top, but she doesn’t need all of it, really, just a little something to take the edge off. A little something to steer her mind away from this place and these people.
Along with the flask, the baggie holds a pack of gum and a tiny sample bottle of perfume: extra protection for afterwards. Better to smell like perfume than tequila, and if they notice the scent of lavender tomorrow, it’ll just reinforce what everyone thinks of her. Yep, just little ol’ Amelia from Houston, Texas. Bringing perfume into the wilderness.
Playing the role.
It’s not like she’s going to get hammered. Besides, given all the pressure she’s under, it barely even counts. She crosses the little creek, which seems not to be as little as it was during the day, and walks for a minute or two longer. Just to be safe.
That first sip. That bite always so surprising, the bitter warmth, that burn down the back of her throat. She closes her eyes as she swallows.
The rain around her seems to intensify, but it could just be the tingling from the tequila. She sees herself doing all of this, watching herself as she might have watched the others. Judging as she might have judged the others.
These last few days, she’d convinced herself that she wasn’t going to drink it. That the trip would be like a window cleaning, that it was going to wipe away the grime that had built up over the last few years.
But she didn’t even make it a week.
She laughs to herself a bit. I should be on the trip, she thinks, not leading it.
It’s been maybe twenty minutes since she left her tent, and now the rain starts to come sideways, and while her jacket is holding up well enough, soon she’s soaked from the waist down. It doesn’t matter; she’s been soaked the whole week. And her pants are quick-drying, so she can just tie them to the side of her pack tomorrow. If it’s not still raining, because then it wouldn’t matter anyway.
Besides, she’s not cold. Not now.
Reaching into her pocket, she opens the two baggies with one hand and maneuvers the flask back inside. It’s the strangest thing: every time she touches the engraving, she thinks, Tyler Stafford gave this to me. Even though she hasn’t seen him in months. His full name still on the tip of her tongue.
It’s hard to remember now. With how it ended, those last weeks. The fighting and yelling and—worse than anything—the late-night phone calls, silence for minutes at a time, neither of them able to say anything, neither of them able to hang up. It’s hard to remember what they were trying to save.
But she should try, shouldn’t she? She should try to remember how Tyler felt like home after a life spent moving from country to country, from city to city. Should try to remember the lightness of her breath when his hand reached around her back, that index finger tracing the skin just under her belt. She should remember, because otherwise, what was the point of it all?
Something’s wrong.
Another sound joins the patter of rain on her hood, that second sound growing louder. She’s never heard anything like it, but it’s wrong, so clearly wrong, even though she doesn’t know why.
The earth seems to rumble, but not from thunder. And now she can’t even hear the rain.
Camp. She has to get back there, has to get back in her tent and lie down and crawl into her sleeping bag and let the Cuervo ease her to sleep. Running now, but the ground is slippery and rocky and wet and there’s no oxygen up here. The headlamp is pulled tight over the hood of her raincoat, so she can’t see much from side to side, either. The beam hits rocks, trees, little tufts of grass.
The sound is growing louder. Constant now. The source of it getting closer with every unstable step she takes.
She trips, because of course she does, and the headlamp flies off her head and into the muck, and it’s gone. She screams into the ground because it’s the only thing she can think of doing.
She looks straight ahead, but with the clouds, the rain, the night, she can barely make out the terrain. Pushing herself up on her hands and knees, she uses the sleeve of her raincoat to wipe the mud from her face, from her mouth.
Her coat is soaked through.
Amelia staggers blindly ahead. She has to be close to camp. That deafening noise more like rumbling thunder now. But the thunder isn’t coming from above; it’s coming from straight ahead.
A river. She’s not that drunk, is she? After a couple of sips? She would have remembered a river.
A light appears uphill, across the creek which is no longer a creek, and she slips, climbs again, and now she’s standing on top of a boulder.
“Help me!” she screams, and the light starts bobbing toward her.
Guilt floods through her, nearly choking her. The others are out in the rain, searching for her. Celeste probably woke up and saw that Amelia wasn’t there and got worried when Amelia didn’t come back. The darkness, the rain, and Amelia’s out of the tent, not safe, and the others are looking for her, risking their lives for her, and because she was drinking to get out of her own head.
“Help me!” she screams again. She clambers down off the rock, toward the current, but there’s no way she can cross. It’s too strong, too fast. So loud.
The light bounces toward her, and it’s Santi, and he’s kind of hopping. “Are you hurt?” he yells. He’s only wearing one boot. As he adjusts his headlamp, the beam sweeps down across his face, only for a moment, and Amelia can see that he’s terrified.
She opens her mouth, but all of the sudden, the constant rumble grows louder, and there’s a tremendous gust of wind coming from uphill.
She doesn’t know what makes her climb back on the boulder. Instinct, maybe, but probably luck. She pulls herself onto the rock and looks up to see a wall of black coming toward her. When she jumps backward, the boulder jumps right after her, knocking into Amelia while her feet are off the ground. Like a bus. The impact spins her around and throws her ten, fifteen feet backward, and she’s flying.
She’s flying.
The sound is deafening, and Santi is gone, everything is gone, and she lands and feels her arm snap, and so much pain that she’s going to vomit, but before that happens, the darkness gets even darker and now there’s nothing.
***
It’s dawn when she opens her eyes again. Dawn when she tastes the earth in her mouth. Dawn when her left arm throbs. She gasps from the pain, pushes the grit from her mouth with her tongue, but she does not move. She doesn’t even know if she can move. But her eyes are open, and as long as she can see, she’s alive.
As long as there’s pain, she’s alive.
Her clothes are soaked through, even beneath her raincoat. She has no idea where she is. Shivering. Her entire body aches, but her arm hurts the most, more than anything she’s ever felt.
A push up with her right arm, settling back onto her haunches as a wave of queasiness overtakes her. Then one foot on the ground, another foot. Standing up through the nausea.
A thick brown expanse coats the mountainside, mud as far as she can see, with boulders, branches, and snapped tree trunks strewn among the ooze. It’s like an enormous melted scoop of Rocky Road ice cream. She starts climbing up through it.
The others.
They’re probably still out looking for her, hours later. She’ll need a story. Santi and Victor will have told Jerry about seeing her, and he’ll want to know why she was out of her tent.
She notices a wool sock lying on
the mud behind a snapped-off pine branch. Gray wool with a bright orange heel, which means it belongs to Jerry. Amelia decides to grab it for him; maybe he won’t be as mad if she comes back with his lost sock.
Except that as she gets closer, she sees that the sock still covers a foot. Heel facing the sky, toes pointing downhill. Body under the surface.
She drops to her knees and tries to dig him free with the arm that isn’t killing her, but the mud has hardened like cement, and after a minute of frantic scratching, she hasn’t even cleared away an inch.
The sock has a tiny hole in the heel, she notices. Of course it does. She tries not to picture his body underneath, but she can’t help it. Jerry is dead.
She should be dead too, she thinks, and the sensation spreading through her is not relief. It’s shame, regret. Guilt.
Tears overwhelm her until there are no more of them left. And when she’s done, she lies on the mud beside him.
34
The fire crackled through the silence. They sat in a circle, evenly spaced, the second night of the trip, their faces illuminated by the flickering embers, with Jerry leading Santi’s group sharing exercise and Amelia trying to learn. It was important that she learn.
“We moved to Albuquerque after that,” Santi said as his heel carved a rut in the dirt in front of him. “Living with my mom’s brother, Ray.”
Santi was still a mystery to her. Technically, he deserved to be here. He was, after all, the only one sent by an actual judge. But so much about him didn’t seem to fit. The way he walked, for one, all gangly, like bad computer animation. How does a guy who walks like a newborn giraffe end up in juvie for stealing a car? Or the way he occasionally stopped in the middle of the trail to look around, to take in the scenery while the others powered forward, heads down like they were on a busy city sidewalk.
“None of this matters,” Santi said. “You have to know that, don’t you?”
Jerry let the question linger in the embers of the fire. “None of what matters?”
“You can be as careful as you want. You can wear your helmet and put on your seat belt and look both ways before crossing the street. You can stay out of trouble and hang with the right crew and finish your homework and eat your vegetables and none of it matters.” Santi took a deep breath and kept his eyes focused on the fire. “This place, this trip. It’s fucking pointless.”
“It’s not pointless,” Jerry said.
“Life is life,” Santi said. “We can’t do nothing about it.”
Amelia shuddered, but not from the cold. Jerry glanced at her, concern flashing across his face, before turning his eyes back to Santi. She didn’t know how he could do this, how Jerry could maintain his serenity, his patience, his optimism week after week, trip after trip. Up against such anger and self-doubt every time.
Her mom’s voice popped into her head: Jerry will be a marvelous reference someday.
“I just wish everything could go back to the way it was,” Santi was saying now. “Me and my dad and my sister. No onion ring, no Tahoe, no broken family.”
Victor snorted. Everyone looked at him.
“Sorry,” Victor said. “It’s just . . . ‘broken family’?”
“Don’t be such a dick,” Santi said.
Before Victor could respond, Jerry gave both Victor and Santi the stop-sign hands and said, “Let’s try that again, Santi. Okay?”
“Wait, me?” Santi said. “Let’s try that again, Santi?”
Amelia noticed Victor smiling. She noticed Santi notice it too. Jerry waited. Victor waited. Finally, Santi forced himself to say, “Don’t be so inconsiderate.”
“Remember not to cross the net,” Jerry said. “Stay on your side. How can you rephrase that? Try an I feel statement.”
This was, Amelia had learned, one of the linchpins of the Bear Canyon method. Personal growth made possible through the effective give and take of feedback. The effective give and take of feedback made possible through I feel statements.
The fire popped. Santi took a deep breath and then said to Victor, “I feel that you’re being inconsiderate.”
Rico laughed. Jerry shot him a quick look and said, “Try again, Santi.”
“When you say those things,” Santi said, slowly, pausing to chew at the inside of his cheek, “I feel ignored and rejected.”
“Good!” Jerry said with a clap. Bless his heart, Amelia thought. “That’s good! Can you see that keeps Victor from being defensive? If you say, ‘Victor, you’re being inconsiderate,’ his immediate response is bound to be something like, ‘No, I’m not.’ Am I right, Victor?”
Victor shrugged.
I feel that the Bear Canyon method is total bullshit, Amelia thought. No, that wasn’t right. That was an I think statement disguised as an I feel. Try again. Okay, I feel anxious about the fact that the Bear Canyon method is total bullshit.
35
“Look at you,” Victor says, taking the flask from her. “All breaking the rules.”
Amelia shakes her head at his surprise. Being a good girl is like having a superpower, like being invisible from suspicion and blame. People want to see her that way. Everyone wants to see her that way. Her parents need to see her that way. She’s the easy one, after all.
It’s like a drug, that invisibility, and the more you take it, the harder the withdrawal will be when it’s gone. It’s one thing for everyone to assume you’re a screw-up. At least then, if you do screw up, it’s expected. And if by chance you do well, if you prove them wrong, it’s like you just cured cancer. But what happens when everyone thinks you’re perfect? What happens if you prove them wrong then?
Maybe that’s one reason she signed up. She was feeling less and less like the girl other people saw. If she did this—wilderness therapy, at-risk youth, choose your buzzword—maybe she could convince herself that she was, in fact, good. If she did this, she would look like an angel compared to the delinquents and head cases she’d be leading through the wilderness.
But everyone has secrets, don’t they?
“I should be dead,” she says.
It’s the truth, and it scares her. Every breath she has taken since the mudslide last night—the first breath, really, since she shouldn’t even have made it to the second—every breath has been stolen.
Does this mean she has to believe in God now?
No, she can’t believe in God, not after this. Definitely not after this. Because if there is a God—a God responsible for keeping her alive—there has to be a reason for it, and that’s too much pressure. She doesn’t want to go through life with that kind of pressure, always wondering if she’s honoring these stolen breaths.
Victor is hitting the tequila hard. He offers her the flask, but she waves it off. He offers it to Santi, who waves it off as well.
It’s strange, she thinks, as she watches Victor point at the map, talking almost incoherently about a cabin in the middle of the woods, a cabin that just happens to be within hiking distance from their trail, a cabin that just happens to have a satellite phone. It’s strange how unprepared she is for the moment she’s living in. The night, the fire, the alcohol, the pain in her arm. All of it.
Victor stares at her and grunts. He grabs the flask and staggers back to his side of the fire, bending over, patting the ground as if to reassure himself that it’s still there. He slumps on his side and pulls his knees to his chest.
“Supply and demand,” Victor says. She can barely hear him.
“Victor?”
Victor doesn’t react at all. A log in the fire pops like a gunshot, and Amelia flinches and yelps in pain from the flinch.
Santi walks around the fire and eases the flask from Victor’s grip, and still Victor doesn’t move.
“I think he’s gone.” Santi comes back around and settles down next to Amelia, offering another pull. “How’s the arm?”
She takes the flask with her good arm but doesn’t drink. “Better with this.”
“Do you know what that was all about? T
he gold? Mining?”
Amelia shrugs and instantly regrets it. “You think his stepdad really has a cabin up here?”
Santi laughs. “At this point, I’d be surprised if he didn’t.”
“Where do you think he went yesterday? When he said he was lost, where do you think he went?”
He shrugs. They watch the fire together for a long time, the flames burning down to coals. The wind is gone now, so the smoke billows straight up. Amelia follows it, leaning back to look up at the sky, so clear and full of stars tonight that it looks fake.
“I’m usually the smoke magnet,” Santi says with a sad kind of laugh. “Now we’re so lost, I can’t even get the smoke to find me.”
“We’re not lost,” she reminds him. And herself.
Santi pushes himself to his feet and walks over to one of the nearby trees, where the branches low to the ground are dead and dry. Two loud cracks, and Santi returns with two thick branches, laying them crosswise on top of the fire. Victor doesn’t move.
“We could leave him,” Santi says like he’s offering up an option for dinner. We could have pizza. We could have sushi.
Amelia shakes her head.
“We have the map,” he says. “We can leave some food behind. He’s wasted. Even if he wakes up, there’s no way he finds us.”
“We can’t leave him,” she says.
“He’d leave us.”
“Maybe.” Even as she says it, she knows Santi’s right. Victor has wanted to leave them ever since this morning. “But I can’t leave him. Besides, if he’s right about the phone, we can get help faster. It makes more sense.”
“You don’t owe him anything.”
It’s not him that she owes, she thinks, and for some reason, she remembers the moment she met Victor, when she noticed his eyes drop to her chest, when she made the decision to tell him that she had a boyfriend.
A lie like that is easy at first. The words just roll off the tongue, and it’s done. It’s the maintenance of the lie that’s the hard part. New details here and there to establish the lie in three realistic dimensions. So much effort.
On the Free Page 15