The Distance from Me to You

by Marina Gessner

  It crashed out onto the trail, a scrawny, rangy hound. Sam guessed it was a Treeing Walker Coonhound. Plenty of strays like that around here, failed hunting dogs. People picked them up for a season and then purposefully lost them on the last day of shooting. This one kept his belly low to the ground as he approached McKenna, who turned carefully toward her pack. At the sound of the zipper, the dog started and backed away. McKenna rooted around, opening up her dry bag.

  “You’re not going to feed it,” Sam said.

  “Why not?” She held out a piece of jerky. The dog lunged forward, grabbed it out of her hand, and ran back into the woods.

  “Because now it’s going to follow you all the way to Georgia,” Sam said.

  McKenna shrugged and pulled her pack back on. She’d gotten so good at it by this point, hoisting it like the weight was nothing, a little shuffle sideways, and then righting herself like the huge, hulking thing was a part of her. She smiled at him, freckled nose crinkling, big blue eyes bright. Sam thought she looked like a photograph that might come with a frame. She looked like a girl was supposed to look, sweet and wholesome. She should have a yellow Lab or a golden retriever, not some mangy stray that nobody wanted.

  “Don’t say I didn’t warn you when he gives you fleas.”

  “Deal,” McKenna said, and they started walking. The path was just wide enough for them to walk side by side, holding hands.

  • • •

  It took Sam longer than he thought to shake the ghosts of his home state. Now that school had officially begun again, they had the trail to themselves during the week and often even on weekends. More than ever, time ran into itself, became impossible to measure, even though McKenna broke down and bought a watch in Bearwallow Gap, just for when they needed to use the iodine tablets and had to measure thirty minutes.

  They got to the Sarver Hollow Shelter in Virginia a good three hundred miles after they first saw the dog. It was nearly dusk, a misty night. Sam told McKenna how he’d camped here as a kid with his Boy Scout troop.

  “You were a Boy Scout?” she said.

  “Sure. You don’t think I developed all these mad camping skills on my own, do you? Come on, I’ll show you the graveyard.”

  They walked down a steep incline to where Sam remembered the chimney to the old Sarver place still stood.

  “My Scout leader told us the story,” Sam told her. “This guy Henry built a cabin here, lived off the land for seventy years or so, all the way from the Civil War through the Depression, and then one day just took off, for reasons nobody knows.”

  Sam steered McKenna through the woods to the wrecked little cemetery. Most of the stones had been scratched and worn by time, but McKenna knelt in front of Mary Sarver’s stone, still legible.

  “Look, 1900 to 1909,” McKenna said. “Sad. I wish I could do one of those gravestone rubbings. My friend Courtney and I used to do them in the old Revolutionary War graveyard in Norwich.”

  “There’s a ghost that haunts this place,” Sam told her. “You can hear footsteps in the night, and sometimes he shows up in pictures.”

  “I wish I had my camera,” McKenna said for what seemed like the thousandth time.

  “When we camped here, the ghost shook one of the kids awake in the middle of the night. He woke up screaming.”

  “Shut up,” McKenna said, laughing. She got to her feet and brushed off her shorts.

  “I’m serious,” Sam said. “It was the ghost. George.”

  “I thought you said the guy’s name was Henry.”

  “That’s the homesteader. The ghost is George.”

  “Hm. Maybe that’s why Henry left. George scared him off.”

  It was dark by the time they got back to the shelter. They didn’t bother cooking, but ate the last of the latest dry food supply—there was a place in Sinking Creek where they could stock up again tomorrow. At some point in the night, wrapped in each other’s arms on the platform in a dead, muscle-tired sleep, they both sat up at the same time. Outside, they heard the most piercing, mournful moan. The noise was so loud it filled the shelter. It went straight through Sam’s bones, rattling.

  “I don’t believe it,” McKenna said. “It’s George.”

  “I’ll go check,” Sam said.

  “And leave me here alone? Are you insane?”

  “If you recall,” Sam said, “that was your original plan. To be alone.”

  “Yeah, well, in that case I probably wouldn’t have camped in a haunted cemetery.”

  She put on her headlamp and they got up, peering into the night. The moon was so full it made a joke out of the thin cylinder of light from the lamp. In front of the shelter, under that wide moon, sat the hound they’d met back in West Virginia. It must have been shadowing them these past three hundred miles.

  “Dang it,” Sam said. “See? I told you.”

  McKenna burst out laughing. She knelt down, patting her knees. “Come here.”

  The dog stopped howling and shied away. Then he stood, stock-still except for a little tail wag, staring at McKenna. As if Sam didn’t exist.

  “That dog’s never going to let you pet it,” Sam said.

  “Want to bet?”

  “No. Not really.”

  He put his arm around her and together they headed back to the shelter. Against Sam’s protests, McKenna left a pile of jerky outside for the dog. Then they did their best to sleep through what was left of the night. They had a long way to go in the morning.

  A thousand miles north, in Abelard, Connecticut, McKenna’s mom, Quinn Burney, ripped open a credit card statement. Usually she just tossed them, unopened, into the antique box for her bills. But since McKenna had started hiking the Appalachian Trail, this was the most definite way to track her progress. The texts she got from Courtney were terse and vague. They didn’t sound like McKenna, and she often had to fight the urge to call and hear her voice. It was important to respect her wishes, give her space. So when these statements arrived—a little map of where McKenna had bought things, how much she’d spent—it read like a narrative of what her daughter was doing.

  The latest charges were in Tennessee. Tennessee! In her life as a parent, there were moments when her children sometimes did things so different, felt things so different from herself, that all she could think was, Where did you come from?

  It was impressive. McKenna had gone so much farther than Jerry had predicted. So much farther than Jerry himself had gone on his famous summer hike. Even if she stopped now, if she didn’t make it the whole way, it would be more impressive, physically and mentally, than anything Quinn had ever done herself, possibly including childbirth.

  She passed the little wall hook where Buddy’s leash still hung and felt a pang of sorrow. She was almost glad she couldn’t tell McKenna that he’d died. Lucy’s grief—and Jerry’s, and her own—was enough to deal with for now.

  A bit later, driving toward the university, she slowed to a stop by the Whitworth shopping center, the new gourmet sandwich shop catching her eye. It would make her late to office hours, but this early in the semester, students rarely came by anyway.

  The glass door opened with a jingle. She was the only customer except for two teenagers by the window, holding hands. The boy had shaggy dark hair that curled over the back of his collar. She did a double take. The girl looked an awful lot like Courtney. She slowed, reaching into her purse for her glasses.

  Until this moment, she was fairly certain McKenna had never lied to her. McKenna was a straight-A student. There had been no visits to the principal, her room had always been clean—there had been no reason to doubt her for a single minute.

  But it was Courtney, sitting here, in Abelard. She didn’t even have a tan. All these months she’d been picturing the girls side by side, identical charges on Courtney’s parents’ credit card statements. Why the hell had she never thought to call them?r />
  “Courtney?” she said tentatively as she reached the table.

  Courtney looked up, her big brown eyes questioning, and then fearful, as she registered who was standing in front of her.

  “Oh,” Courtney said. She extracted her hands from the boy’s. “Hi, Mrs. Burney.”

  “You can imagine my surprise, seeing you here,” she said, letting her voice shake for maximum effect.

  “Yeah,” Courtney said. “I know.”

  She could see the girl racking her brain, trying to come up with a story. She leaned onto the table, between the teenagers. “Courtney,” she said, in the voice she used with students who had one last chance to pass her class. “You need to tell me everything. Right now.”

  Courtney let out a breath that had the barest tinge of a whimper. And then she told her everything.

  Because it was the only thing she could think to do, McKenna’s mom drove straight to the police station. She called Jerry on the way.

  “What do you mean she’s alone?” he said.

  “I mean she’s hiking alone. By herself. She lied to us. I just ran into Courtney at the deli.”

  “I’ll meet you at the station,” he said.

  She waited outside for him and they walked in together. The officer they spoke to was young, barely older than McKenna. As he listened, sympathetic but clearly also a little amused, she wished they’d asked to speak with an older officer, someone with children—preferably someone with a daughter.

  “How old is McKenna?” he asked, pen hovering over a white pad on which he’d so far written only: Tennessee and Appalachian Trail.

  Jerry answered quickly. “Seventeen.”

  But Quinn had noted the date with a pang a few weeks ago and said, “No. She’s eighteen. She turned eighteen August 18.”

  Their fight was over before it had begun. The officer shrugged and apologized. He ripped off the top sheet, crumpled it up, threw it in the trash can. He understood they were upset, but McKenna wasn’t a missing person. They knew what she was doing and, more or less, where she was. And she was eighteen, legally an adult. If she wanted to walk to Georgia alone—hell, if she wanted to walk to the moon alone—there was nothing they could do to stop her.

  “We could cut off her credit card,” Jerry said as they stood outside the police station. “That would force her home.”

  She could tell, from the hard line of his jaw and how the color had drained from his face, he was furious. By now her fury had faded, and what she mostly felt was worried. A young girl, all alone in the wilderness. Who knew what could happen?

  “No,” she said. “I don’t want to do that.”

  “It would at least force her to call,” Jerry said. “The first time it got turned down she’d have to find a phone.”

  She imagined the look on McKenna’s face. To have come that far all on her own and then be forced home? She couldn’t do that to her. Besides, the McKenna who’d lied to them, who’d worked out this giant ruse with Courtney, that was a McKenna they didn’t know. She couldn’t be sure that McKenna would come home willingly. And then what?

  “At least if she has the credit card, we can know where she is. We know she’ll have resources.”

  Jerry pulled out his phone, furiously typing in a text.

  “What are you doing?” Quinn asked.

  “I’m texting her, telling her we know. In case the broken phone is a lie, too.”

  It felt like that part had to be true—otherwise why risk the fake texts from Courtney? But she didn’t say anything, just let Jerry get his aggression out in the long and pointed text. Watching him, his blue eyes so much like his daughter’s, she had to admit that in addition to her worry she felt admiration. At eighteen, she would never have been brave enough to walk two thousand miles with a friend, let alone by herself. She wouldn’t be brave enough to do it now, or ever.

  They had managed to raise a truly exceptional person, she thought with a mixed sense of fear and pride. Now all she could do was hope that the very thing that made McKenna exceptional would be the same thing that kept her safe.

  Sam watched McKenna feed a granola bar to the rangy hound dog. It wouldn’t go away. The last thing Sam wanted was a companion from West Virginia. Not that the dog would let Sam touch him; that was a privilege reserved for McKenna, who’d already won their bet. Sam liked to stand back and watch the ritual she went through, scrunching down and coaxing the dog toward her. He would slither over on his belly, grab the food, and gulp it down. Then he’d lower his head, cowering, as if he thought this might be the time McKenna would haul off and beat him with a nearby stick.

  The dog disappeared on a regular basis, and whenever he did, Sam hoped they’d seen the last of him. McKenna was always as happy to see him come back as Sam was to see him go. Today, Sam stayed put, letting the sad little lovefest take place. No doubt the dog had a good reason to distrust humans, probably he had been beaten with a stick and worse. And whoever had abused him in the past, you could bet it hadn’t been a woman.

  The dog lay down on the ground and showed his belly so McKenna could scratch it. God knows what kind of fleas and ticks the animal had, but she went ahead, rubbing its stomach like someone had just given him to her for Christmas. She’d named him Hank after Henry David Thoreau, who until recently Sam only knew about from half listening in eleventh-grade English. By now McKenna’d made him read Walden, and while it wasn’t the fastest-paced book in the world, Sam liked it, especially all the bits about not conforming to society.

  McKenna walked to her pack and pulled out one of the cans of premium dog food she’d started buying and lugging around for when Hank showed up. Sam tried not to let her see it, how he wanted to shake his head. The way a rich girl wastes money, not to mention energy!

  After she got her things together, they headed up the trail, the dog following at a barely detectable distance. McKenna was so set on covering miles, making good time. It was already October. They had less than four hundred miles to go the southern terminus in Georgia, and McKenna wanted to get through to Blood Mountain before it snowed. Whereas Sam: he was in no rush. What was he going to do once they got to the end of the AT?

  After half a mile or so, Hank disappeared into the woods. These were the moments Sam liked best, just him and McKenna hiking together, no need for conversation. It was companionable, and so comfortable, like they’d spent their whole lives together and talking was unnecessary. The trail was too narrow at this point to walk side by side, so McKenna took the lead. Sam watched her brown ponytail and her fancy pack, her good hiking boots. She sure didn’t look like a girl who’d collect West Virginia strays like Sam and Hank.

  • • •

  That night in the Smoky Mountains, Sam helped McKenna set up the tent. For a while now they had been the only ones on the trail, during the week at least, nobody else camping, nothing but empty shelters. Even so, they usually would set up McKenna’s tent, not wanting to risk a late arrival intruding on their privacy.

  “Hey,” McKenna said, pouring dried beans and rice into her pot and adding filtered water. It was still light, but they had climbed up to a high enough elevation that the temperature was starting to drop. She’d pulled her wool cap over her unwashed hair and wore her fleece jacket. Sam had scored a black-and-red-checked wool coat from the free box in Shady Valley, but he still could’ve used a hat. McKenna kept offering to buy him one, along with boots and gloves. Every time they stopped, Sam made sure he got to the free box first so he could collect whatever dried food had been left there. Hikers were always getting rid of the food they’d grown sick of, and now that McKenna was too anxious to stop—they needed to make up time!—and fishing and foraging were dropping off with the temperatures, Sam had to scramble for ways to contribute. The thing was, it was different traveling on the trail with McKenna. No girls inviting him to meals. He’d never minded mooching in the past, but these days it
felt wrong, not in tune with how he felt about this relationship, the way he wanted it to be.

  “Hey,” McKenna said again.

  “Yeah?” Sam said.

  “The weather’s so good. Let’s have a long day tomorrow. Maybe if we start early we can have our first twenty-five-mile day.”

  “Not possible,” Sam said. “We’ll be gaining elevation.”

  McKenna frowned into the steam, stirring what didn’t need to be stirred. He wondered if he could talk her into a fire tonight. Instead of asking, he stood up, started collecting wood.

  “We had a fire last night,” she said.

  Sam wondered if she would have ever made a fire if she hadn’t run into him. “Look,” he said, pointing to the fire pit, someone else’s scarred logs still in their tepee shape. “You don’t have to be as careful this time of year. Fewer people come through.”

  McKenna sat for a minute with a look on her face that Sam loved, like there were two different people having a conversation in her head, a very smart angel and a very smart devil. In this case the devil won. Lately, it usually did. By the time they were blowing on their first spoonfuls of crunchily undercooked rice and beans, the sky was dark and a fire licked up toward the gathering stars.

  “You know,” Sam said, “we’re making pretty good time. We don’t always have to follow the trail.”

  “What else is there to follow?”

  “Our hearts?”

  She laughed. “But seriously.”

  “There are lots of cool detours that aren’t in your guidebook. Especially in the Smokies. Cool graveyards. This is the most haunted stretch of the AT, but you have to be brave enough to venture out a little.”

  McKenna was looking at the fire. He saw the devil and angel again, but only in profile. He put his arm around her.

  “Have you heard the legend of Spearfinger?” he asked.

  “I have a feeling I’m about to,” she said.

  “Spearfinger is a witch who roams the trails through the Smokies. She looks like the most harmless little old lady you ever saw. She used to wear a kerchief and carry a picnic basket. These days she probably has a day pack and an outback hat.”