The Distance from Me to You

by Marina Gessner

  She could hear Sam’s heart beating and then slowing under her ear. She’d never slept like this with anyone. In the morning, she’d finally know what it felt like to wake up in someone else’s arms.

  • • •

  Or so she thought. McKenna’s sleep was very deep, dreamless; so much so that she missed the moment when Sam slipped away. When she woke to a sun that was too high in the sky, the fire was out. Sam’s things were gone, and so was he, not the barest trace left behind except the one thing she’d given him, the songbird book, lying damp and deserted beside the remnants of last night’s campfire.

  “Sam?” she called, scrambling out of her sleeping bag. “Sam?” she called again, though she knew he had gone. He had left her. It was obvious.

  She kicked the ground where his sleeping bag had been. Incredible. All that had happened last night, and she had woken up alone. He hadn’t even said good-bye. With fast and furious movements, she collected her things. Sam must have packed up the garbage, the containers for the food and the whiskey bottle were gone. How considerate, she thought, giving the spot where he’d slept one last kick.

  With all her gear packed up, McKenna surveyed the campsite, trying to think where she’d gone wrong. But that led to the need to blink against tears. The sun had risen. She felt dazed, blindsided, heartbroken. But what could she do but set off down the trail? No matter what she felt, she had to do what she did every day: walk.

  • • •

  Her face, though, must have betrayed more than she realized. When she passed a group of day hikers—a mom and her teenaged daughters—the mom stopped and put her hand on McKenna’s elbow. “You okay, honey?” she asked.

  “Yes,” McKenna said, more defensive than she meant to be. “I’m fine.”

  “Sorry,” the mom said, her voice still kind. “You just looked . . . well, you looked upset. You aren’t lost, are you?”

  “No,” McKenna said, her voice very definite. “I’m not lost.”

  “Well, okay, then. Enjoy the day. Sure is a hot one.”

  “Sure is,” McKenna agreed, wiping sweat off her brow with her forearm. She’d forgotten to keep her bandanna where she could reach it.

  “Hey,” McKenna said, calling after them. The three women stopped, looking back at her. McKenna could tell by the mom’s face that she expected McKenna to admit she was in some kind of trouble.

  “What’s the date?” McKenna asked. “I’ve been out here for a while and I tend to lose track.”

  “It’s Sunday, August 22,” the mom said.

  McKenna nodded. To say she’d lost track of time was a bit of an understatement. She had turned eighteen four days ago, without even realizing it.

  Sam didn’t know what the hell his problem was. He’d woken up predawn, the birds going crazy, McKenna’s head resting on his chest, his arms wrapped around her.

  “Mack,” he’d whispered, his voice hoarse with emotion, then he’d kissed her hair. She smelled like campfire smoke and the outdoors. She felt completely relaxed, her shoulder blades sharp under his hands. She needed a shower. He never wanted to let her go.

  And then a kind of coldness gripped him. He couldn’t explain it. Three faces popped into his head: Starla, the last girl he’d slept with, his girlfriend before he took off. He didn’t wonder how she was doing now. Obviously she’d be fine, going to college like she’d always planned. They wouldn’t be together now, anyway, even if he was home. The next face was his mother’s, made miserable by years with his father, followed by Mike’s girlfriend’s, Marianne, the way she’d looked so tired at the kitchen table, and so trapped. He hated thinking about Mike and Marianne and the two girls. It was Marianne’s house. Kicking Mike out seemed like the obvious thing to do. A little surge of rage welled up in Sam that she hadn’t done it—that she might never do it. It almost made him madder at her than at Mike.

  He moved out from under McKenna carefully, laying her gently back on the hard ground. She barely stirred, her eyes still closed. It hadn’t occurred to Sam before she’d stopped him last night that it might be her first time. Now, watching her sleep, it seemed obvious. She looked like a little kid, totally innocent, with nice parents somewhere, in a nice house, worrying about her.

  Sam had meant to find something in McKenna’s food bag for breakfast, get out her cookstove, set things up for them, brew a pot of coffee. He pulled the bag down. She was probably the only person he’d met on the trail who actually did this, hung her food in trees because of the bears. Which seemed silly to Sam given that bears tended to be pretty good at climbing.

  He rooted through the bag for coffee. She was so much like a kid that she didn’t even have coffee. Starla drank coffee; she smoked, too. Sam remembered the silty taste of ash on her lips. She used to run her fingers along his scars from the cigarette burns. They didn’t shock her. She was a smart girl but she had her own set of problems; her dad was a meth addict who’d left when she was fourteen. She was gone now, he reminded himself, away at school. The thing was, a father like Sam’s—a history like Sam’s, scars and all—was pretty much in line with what Starla would expect out of life.

  Over by the fire pit, this other girl’s breathing sounded soft and trusting and very innocent. That’s all she was, right? Another girl. Plenty of them before her. Plenty more after. He thought of her last night, slugging back the whiskey. Taking off her clothes. She didn’t understand that wanting him was the surest way to wreck everything she had going for her.

  Sam closed McKenna’s dry bag and put the food back where she’d left it. Instead of making breakfast, he gathered his things and jammed them into his pack. He picked up the bottle of whiskey and hurled it into the woods. That’s the kind of guy he was, a hillbilly from Seedling, West Virginia, and this was how he rolled. He took out the bird book and left it by McKenna’s pack. She’d never given it to him, just loaned it. Now he wasn’t sure if he’d see her again, so it wasn’t fair to hang on to it.

  • • •

  It was the hottest day in a long time.

  Sam had already gone through half his water by noon. Truthfully it felt good, the punishment of that heat, combined with his pace, faster than usual. It reminded him of football practice when Coach Monahan had pushed them further than they thought they could go.

  It must have been a Saturday. Plenty of people on the trail, sauntering along in the most leisurely manner possible. A group of college girls were setting up a picnic in one of the campgrounds. They had a pink-and-white-checkered tablecloth and a basket like the one the Wicked Witch carried Toto off in. All Sam had to do was sit at the next bench, take a sip of water, smile at the one setting out the food. And then he had a paper plate piled with fried chicken and potato salad, a plastic cup of freshly brewed iced tea. He never could get used to the way they drank iced tea up north, sour and sugarless. But the caffeine would help give him the energy he needed to cover the miles.

  “Hey,” said the girl who’d given him the food. She had dark hair and a friendly, hopeful smile. “You camping here tonight?”

  “Nah,” Sam said. He scraped up the last bit of potato salad from the paper plate. “Thanks so much for the food. I have to get going. Lots of miles to cover today.”

  “How far are you going?” she asked as he headed back toward the trail, not quite deterred, not ready to give up on the chance of conversation with him.

  “Thanks again,” Sam called back over his shoulder, with one last wave.

  How far are you going? The sun beat down through the trees. Over the next couple weeks, a maddening swirl of color would rise and then fade, falling to the ground, and his footsteps would crunch over them. Today, those leaves were still green, only the tips hinting toward orange and yellow. Pretty, but more than that they served a purpose. Their cover saved him from getting sunburnt, or worse, sun poisoning.

  How far are you going? Sam put one foot in front of the other.
His legs were a lot longer than McKenna’s. His pack was a lot lighter. He was used to enduring pain. In no time at all, she would be miles behind him. Maybe he’d walk right off the trail and find a job in one of these little towns. Something you didn’t need a high school diploma for, like clerking at a convenience store or working construction, or maybe he’d be a janitor.

  The second he’d seen those girls setting out their picnic he knew they would give him food. When he saw McKenna the first time, back in Maine, she should have looked like an opportunity, planning to go all the way to Georgia, all that shiny equipment. He should have realized she’d be good for plenty of meals, plenty of warm nights. But he hadn’t thought that, not once, not really. He couldn’t say why. And maybe now he’d broken her heart.

  But he wouldn’t think about that. Anyway, it could be good for her. It might make her realize she wasn’t cut out for this kind of thing, this long walk, this life with a guy like him. It’d been dark last night, so she couldn’t see his scars. Maybe now she’d already gotten off the trail, walked into a town, called her mom and dad to come get her.

  How far are you going? As far as possible and not far at all. He was going all the way to Georgia, and then he would turn around and start walking back again. Spend his whole life on this trail, uphill and down, seasons changing, girls coming and going. Where else did he have to go?

  The sun beat down. Sam’s breathing was hard and labored. By the time the air got cooler late in the day, he felt light-headed. He wasn’t anywhere near a campground, but hell, he wasn’t hung up on rules, he wasn’t McKenna. There was a little clearing over there just right for setting up his tent. He’d had a big lunch, he didn’t need dinner.

  It wasn’t dark yet when Sam fell asleep staring up at the branch shadows crisscrossing his green canvas roof.

  • • •

  That night Sam dreamed that McKenna was in danger. He couldn’t put a name or reason to the danger, he could only hear her screaming and calling out his name. He tried to call back, but his voice was strangled in his throat, the barest squeak. He couldn’t reach her, he couldn’t even call out to her, all he could do was listen to her voice. She sounded so scared. He had never heard her sound scared. Not even when those guys were harassing her. It must be something serious. He tried to lift up his arms, to claw his way toward her, but he couldn’t move.

  In the pitch-dark, his eyes flew open. He was drenched in even more sweat than when he was walking uphill in the pounding heat. Every inch of his skin tingled, that confusing moment between a nightmare and the realization that you’re safe. But was McKenna safe? Sam shook his head, reminding himself that premonitions aren’t real. At the same time, that uncomfortable tingle wouldn’t leave his skin. He couldn’t shake it.

  Why had he just taken off and deserted her like that? What kind of jerk was he?

  He pulled down his tent and packed everything up in the dark, wishing for one of those headlamps like McKenna had. By the time he pulled on his pack, his eyes had adjusted to the dark enough that he could find the trail, and he headed north. There was no way she’d made it farther than he had yesterday. Any minute he’d come upon a nice legal campground and see her tent. Maybe he’d wake her up. Maybe he’d just unzip the flap quietly, peer in, and make sure she was okay. It was pretty much the only way he’d ever sleep again.

  • • •

  McKenna was actually south of where Sam had camped. Just a couple miles; she’d wanted to go farther but knew that would mean walking in the dark before reaching her next campground. Unlike Sam, she wasn’t willing to erode the trail by pitching her tent anywhere she felt like. She had hiked all day yesterday at a ferocious pace, planning to overtake him without a word. Which of course she had done, but in a way that wasn’t nearly as satisfying as she had planned—she had spent the day visualizing how she’d stride past him silently. Or maybe that would be too obvious, make it seem like she cared too much. Maybe instead she’d nonchalantly say, Hey, before sidestepping around him and leaving him in the dust.

  Of course he didn’t see her when she actually did pass him, walking by his sad little tent, which would offer zero protection if it rained. She wondered if he’d eaten anything today.

  She wondered the same thing the next morning as she made instant oatmeal on her cookstove. Stirring the pot longer than necessary, she refused to think that two guys had essentially managed to break up with her while she hadn’t even been in civilization. It took more effort than she would have liked, keeping both faces—Brendan’s and Sam’s—out of her mind. The first name hurt her ego. The second, well. This ache she felt at the pit of her stomach would go away eventually. It didn’t mean anything. She barely knew him.

  She just had to keep walking.

  There had been a few other people camped at the site, a middle-aged couple thru hiking to Maine who were gone before McKenna had emerged from her tent. The others were a father and ten-year-old son, heading back to the real world in time to get to work and school. They said good-bye to McKenna as she started to drag her sleeping bag and other gear out of her tent to pack. She wanted to hit the trail before Sam showed up. Ideally, she would have set out at the same time as the northbound thru hikers, but she had been exhausted from hiking so hard yesterday. As she knelt to gather her things, her muscles pinged and complained, straining against themselves. It had been a long time since that massage in Andover.

  “McKenna,” came a familiar voice, but in an unfamiliar tone. He’d called her what he never had, not once since she’d first set eyes on him.

  She stood up, her deflated tent at her feet. Sam walked toward her as if he hadn’t abandoned her of his own volition, but had been kidnapped by a band of pirates and spent the past twenty-four hours sword fighting his way back to her. He threw off his pack and hugged her so hard that her back cracked. He said something, muffled, into her shoulder.

  “What?” McKenna said.

  “Nothing. I’m just happy to see you. I’ve been looking for you all night. At first I went north because I thought you’d be behind me. But then I figured it out and turned around.”

  “Are you crazy?”

  “No. I mean, I had a dream that you were hurt.”

  “You had a dream?”

  “Yeah. You were calling out to me, and you were in trouble, but I couldn’t see you, and when I tried to call back my voice wouldn’t work. Do you ever have dreams like that?”

  McKenna stared at him, fighting the urge to place her hands on her hips, which she knew would make her look like a scolding schoolteacher.

  “Yeah,” she said, struggling to keep her voice even. She didn’t want to sound angry—or worse, elated and relieved that he’d come back. “I’ve had dreams kind of like that, where I try to speak, or scream, but can’t. But you know what I’ve never done?”

  Sam looked at her. His face was pale. There were brambles in his hair, the idiot had gone off trail again, his legs and arms were covered in scrapes and marks that would blossom into bruises before the day was through. He may have been shaking the tiniest bit. But McKenna pressed on.

  “I’ve never hooked up with someone—someone who thought we were friends—and then disappeared without a word or a trace or anything.”

  He looked at her, straight on, eyes astonishingly blue in the flat morning light. Somewhere not too far away, thunder rumbled. He shifted on his leg. McKenna’s eyes flitted down and she saw that his knee was bruised and a little swollen. She couldn’t help it. She knelt in front of him and examined the injury. Probably he’d slipped in those crazy sneakers.

  “I have an ice pack,” she said. “It might help.”

  “Thanks.”

  She dug into her first-aid kit for one of her instant ice packs, and cracked it. Sam sat on the ground. When the cold spread over the plastic, she pressed it to his knee.

  “I’m sorry,” he said, as if there’d been no break in th
eir conversation. “I don’t know why I left.”

  “You don’t know why.”

  “I woke up and you were still sleeping. I could smell your hair. My first thought was that I never wanted to let you go. And then my second thought was, I had to get out of there.”

  She stared at him, still squatting where she’d knelt to press the ice pack to his knee. In her whole life, nobody had ever said anything so romantic, or so confusing, to her.

  “Hold this,” she said. “Don’t let go. Otherwise you’ll just waste it.”

  As long as she had her first-aid kid right there, she might as well take care of his legs. She cleaned the scrapes with antiseptic pads, then put Neosporin on them, pasting Band-Aids on the two widest cuts. Sam just sat there through her ministrations. She could feel him looking at her. Another clap of thunder sounded, this one more distinct.

  “Are you hungry?” McKenna asked, not looking at him.

  “What I really am,” Sam said, his voice hoarse, “is tired. Extremely tired.”

  She stood and headed over to her tent, setting it back up, this time adding the rain guard, too. Sam stumbled into the tent’s opening. McKenna picked up his pack and put it in behind him. As he lay down on her sleeping bag, she laid his out right next to him. It was a nice bag, a Kelty, that would work until freezing or maybe even below. Sam sat up a little and pulled off his T-shirt, then lay back down. Thunder clapped again, closer now, and with it came a burst of rain, pelting against the top of the tent. It created moving shadows inside the small space that quickly filled with their combined breath. Sam didn’t look at McKenna but at the rain, and it took her a couple seconds to realize that his taking off his shirt was a kind of confession, too.

  The other night had been dark, and it had been McKenna who’d taken off her clothes—the whole thing had started with her nakedness, not his—so she hadn’t seen them, the scars below his collarbone, and on his chest and upper arms. Small and round and deep.

  She reached out and ran her finger from one to the other, until she rested it on his collarbone, the one scar that would be visible if he were wearing a shirt.