9
CHRIS
WAS HAVING A good time. I was glad Larissa hadn’t left when theI others bailed. I don’t think I would have stayed if I had to walk alone, especially because she would have taken the dog.
It had warmed up as the day went on and the sun was baking us. Her face was pink, and her shoulders were getting red. Sometimes the trail would cut through a wooded area, but for the most part we had no coverage from the sun. She’d taken her hoodie off an hour ago and shoved it into her backpack. She had on a white tank top and some shorts. Her hair was in a ponytail pulled through a black hat with the logo from Mike’s gym.
It looked a lot better on her than it did on Mike.
“We should put sunblock on,” I said.
“Do you have some?” she asked.
I unzipped my satchel and pulled out a tube.
“Thanks,” she said, taking it. “I put some on before I left the house, but I think I’m sweating it off. I didn’t think we’d be out here this long. How
many miles have we gone?”
I looked at my watch. “Four.”
“He said an hour and a half, so we’re probably almost done,” she said, squirting some lotion into her hand before giving the bottle back to me.
I was getting hungry. I wanted to ask if she wanted to go get something to eat after but immediately shot the idea down. It was one thing to be on this walk that we hadn’t intended to do without anyone else. It was something different to make plans with her afterward. Alone, just the two of us—no. If it were Becca, it wouldn’t have mattered. But with Larissa it just did. I couldn’t explain why.
I started putting on sunblock while she pulled out her water bottle and crouched to offer some to Woofarine, but he didn’t want it again.
“He hasn’t had anything to drink,” she said, standing. “Should we be concerned about it?”
“We’re almost done,” I said, slapping lotion on the back of my neck.
“He’s probably okay.”
She looked down at our dog, worried. He didn’t look worried. He looked ready to continue the charge. I don’t know where all the energy came from, he’d dragged us for the last four miles.
She watched him while she tipped her water into her mouth. Then she
gagged.
“What’s wrong?” I asked.
“So bad.” She spit it out. “Sooooo bad.”
“What do you mean it’s bad?”
“It tastes like blood.” She grimaced.
I put the sunblock away and pulled out my water and tried it. I had to spit it out too. “Rusty pipes,” I said, wiping my chin.
“Is it dangerous?”
I shook my head. “No, it just tastes like shit. No wonder he won’t drink
it.”
“Gross.” She blanched.
I dumped my water into the grass. “When I was in grade school, the water in the drinking fountain tasted like that. If you got thirsty enough to drink it, the kids would make fun of you and call you Vampire Boy for the rest of the day.”
She laughed, putting her water bottle back into her bag.
I nodded at it. “You’re not gonna dump it?”
“No, I’m gonna keep it in case I need to wash my hands. You never know what rotten thing Woofie might get ahold of.”
She wasn’t wrong about that.
We started walking again. Woofarine was still pulling on the leash.
“This would be a nice first date,” I said, looking at some wildflowers.
“No. You cannot take someone on a hike for a first date,” she said.
“Why not?”
She gave me a look. “Are you serious? Hi, I know I’ve never met you before but would you like to join me alone in the woods?”
“It’s pretty,” I said, gesturing at the flowers. “You wouldn’t like this kind of date?”
“I would, yeah. But not for the first one. What if you murder me?”
“Okay, assuming you know me well enough to know I’m not going to murder you, why not?”
“Let’s see. I’d want to be able to look at you, for one. That’s hard when you’re walking next to someone. If I want to leave, I can’t unless the guy walks me out, and that’s awkward. Also, what if it’s hot? Or cold? Nobody wants to sweat or shiver on a first date. And then there’s an incline and I’m gasping for breath, fighting for my life, trying not to let him see how out of
shape I am.”
“Ha. You’re not out of shape though.”
Then I realized how that sounded, like I’d been checking her out. “I… I just mean you seem fine on this walk.”
“I walk a lot at work. I’m used to it. Not sure how I’d do if there were hills though.”
A warm breeze blew and her perfume danced across my nose. I turned away from it and pretended to be looking at the tree line.
When I glanced at my watch again, we were almost at mile six.
“How long have we been out here?” she asked, noticing me check.
“Over two hours now.” I wrinkled my forehead. “Maybe we should look at a map. Do you think we took a wrong turn?”
“There haven’t been any turns.”
She was right. The path had been clear, no forks.
We moved under a tree for shade and I pulled out my phone.
“Okay, let’s see.” I tapped Google Maps.
The area we were in was solid green. Nothing but forest. I zoomed out.
More green. I zoomed out again. Still green. I shook my head. “Where the hell are we?”
“Let me see.” She leaned over to look at my phone. It only took her a second to register what I’d already realized. “We’re in the middle of nowhere!” She looked up at me. “Why would Mike send us out here?”
“I don’t know. I’m calling him.”
He didn’t answer until the sixth ring. “What?”
He was drunk. I knew it immediately.
“Uh, hey,” I said, trying not to let Larissa see it on my face. “We’re on this walk and we’ve been out here over two hours. The map says we’re in the middle of the park reserve. Are we on the right trail?”
“How should I know?”
I glanced at Larissa.
“You said it was an hour and a half,” I said.
“It is. I just did it the other day.”
I paused. “Were you running?”
“Yeah? Why?”
I squeezed my eyes shut. Then I moved the phone from my mouth. “It’s an hour and a half, running,” I told her.
I watched the realization move across her face.
Mike was an athlete. He could sprint ten miles on his lunch break without even breaking a sweat.
“Mike, you have us out here in the middle of nowhere.”
“Just walk out. It’s not hard. You just… walk.” He sounded like he was falling asleep.
I put my back to Larissa and lowered my voice. “Hey, are you okay?
You sound a little—”
“I’m fine. Hey, I gotta go,” he slurred. Then he hung up. I watched the
phone screen go black in my hand.
“Is he okay?” she asked from behind me.
I turned and nodded. “Yeah. Yeah, he’s fine. I just think he’s a little out of it. From the migraine,” I added.
I didn’t think he was out of it from the migraine. I didn’t think he had a migraine at all. This was twice now. Something was up with him.
I wanted to ask Larissa how Mike had been doing. He had a history of anxiety and back in high school he drank to deal with it, but I couldn’t be sure whether he’d told her, and it wasn’t my place to let that slip if he hadn’t.
I’d have to talk to him about what the heck was going on, but for now I had to get us out of the woods.
“Okay,” I said. “We need to figure out where we’re at and how much farther we have to go.”
She nodded. “All right. Let’s sit and get our bearings.”
We found a shady spot just off the trail and sat on a log.
“We’re in the middle,” I said, looking at the map. “We’re almost as far in as we are out. A little less if we backtrack.”
“I don’t want to backtrack,” she said.
“We’ll get out faster.”
“Yeah, but we’ve already seen that. I don’t want to see it again. I want to
see what I haven’t seen.”
“We have no water.”
“I have water. It’s gross, but it’s water. I have enough for both of us.
Woofarine can drink from the next stream we pass. We’re not gonna die.”
I looked over at her. “You really want to keep going?”
She shrugged. “Yeah. Why not. What if what’s coming is better than
what we’ve already done?”
I laughed a little.
The tenacity again.
The woman had a hundred jobs, she never took a day off. She quite literally didn’t slow down. She was like Woofarine, only without the urge to
massacre.
I liked it.
“Okay,” I said. “We’ll keep going.”
“Let’s take an inventory of what we have,” she said. “Take a little break,
have a snack.”
“You have snacks?”
“I always have snacks.”
She started rummaging through her backpack. She pulled out a chocolate-chip granola bar, an apple, and a couple of the individually wrapped breadsticks that Donna used as a side for the soups at work. She
handed me one.
“I love these,” I said, unwrapping it.
“Me too. Better than crackers because they don’t get smooshed. I only take the ones the customers don’t open. Donna tosses them. I’m not stealing breadsticks.”
“I would never suggest such a thing,” I said, taking a bite.
“So what’s in your satchel?” she said with a smirk, nodding at it.
“Anything useful?”
I unclipped it and handed it to her.
She set it in her lap and dug through it. “Benadryl, Band-Aids, hand sanitizer, cortisone—this looks exactly like a fanny pack packed by a pharmacist. Oh! This could be good.” She held up a packet of grape- flavored electrolyte powder. “Might make the water taste better. Can I use
it?”
“Go ahead.”
She put her water bottle between her knees and unscrewed the cap, tore the corner off with her teeth, and poured it in.
When she tasted it, she gagged.
“Still bad?” I asked, watching her make a face.
“Now it’s grape blood.”
“We probably should drink it no matter how terrible it is. We have a
couple more hours of walking,” I said.
“Be my guest.” She handed it to me.
It was the absolute worst thing I’d ever tasted in my entire life. It was all
I could do to swallow it.
Fucking Mike.
I took a few more swigs, then handed the bottle back to her. She took another swallow, shivered, and put the cap back on.
When she was putting the water into her bag, she nodded at my leg. “I think you have a tick on you.”
I jumped up and swatted it off, doing a little dance.
“Don’t like bugs?” she asked.
“I’m not a fan of Lyme disease,” I said, looking my calves over. “Or the deer these things come on.”
“Yes, let’s not forget those hideous monsters. You still think this would be a good date?” she asked, opening her granola bar and taking a bite. She smiled at me while she chewed.
“Well, there’s something to be said about trauma bonding.”
She cracked up.
She gave me the other half of the granola bar, then took a bite out of the apple and offered it to me. I took it from her and took a bite and handed it back.
She bit off a piece of apple and fed it to Woofarine and I gave him some of the training treats I carried. Larissa dug through her backpack one more time and found a beef stick. She held it up like she’d discovered the holy grail and honestly it felt that way, out here in the middle of nowhere.
“Everything just tastes better when you’re lost in the wilderness,” she said, watching me chew my half of it.
“I don’t even like these and this is the best thing I’ve ever eaten.”
“What did you rate the bread?” she asked, nodding at the breadstick
wrapper on the tree trunk between us.
“An eleven out of ten.”
“See? Sometimes happiness comes from the most unexpected places.”
“We’ll have to thank Mike,” I mumbled, giving Woofarine the last bite of the jerky.
We reapplied sunblock, cleaned up our mess, took one more painful swallow of our grape blood water, and got back on the trail.
The stop was a good one. I felt better. Ready to take on the next six miles—actually looking forward to the next six miles, I realized.
I didn’t enjoy being plunked in the woods on some epic adventure with no warning, but I did like the company.
It made me think The Amazing Race or Naked and Afraid, where the person you’re partnered with makes all the difference.
“You know what this makes me think of?” she said.
“What?”
“Naked and Afraid.”
I grinned. “I was thinking the same thing.”
“Would you ever go on a show like that?” she asked, glancing at me.
“God no. Would you?”
She shrugged. “I think it would be cool. I’d learn so much about myself.”
“You’d learn what malaria feels like,” I said.
“I’d learn to appreciate the comforts I have at home. I’d learn to savor the things I take for granted. I’d finally kick my caffeine habit.”
“You’d learn suffering in a world full of way more suffering than necessary. And you’d have to be naked in front of a stranger,” I said.
“And a camera crew,” she added.
“And then all the people watching at home.”
“Yeah, but they blur the important stuff. Nobody at home would see anything. And the camera guys are used to it.”
“So you’d do it?” I asked.
“I mean, I’d have to learn survival skills. I don’t actually know how to do any of that stuff. But yeah. I would.”
“Like you’d learn stick in the parking lot?” I said, referring to the comment she made that day at the hospital.
“Sometimes necessity forces us to be the most efficient version of ourselves,” she said. “So you wouldn’t do it, then?”
“I think I know too much,” I said. “All the stomach parasites and infectious diseases. I’d just be stressed the whole time. You know, some of that stuff causes lifelong chronic illness. It’s not worth it.”
“Christopher—what’s your last name?”
“Wright,” I said. “Christopher Wright.”
“So tell me, Christopher Wright, is that why you don’t like deer? Lyme
disease?”
I smiled at the trail. “No.”
I felt her looking at me. “Oh, this is a thing, isn’t it?”
I glanced at her, but I didn’t answer.
“Did a deer murder your family?” she asked.
“How’d you know?”
“Ha. Tell me. I won’t tease you. Much.”
“How do you know it’s something I get teased for. Did Mike tell you?”
“No! He knows?”
“He’s my best friend,” I said. “I’m surprised he didn’t regale you with the whole thing already. He loves to tell that story.”
“Well now you have to tell me because I’m going to find out anyway.”
I blew a breath through my nose. “I got attacked by a deer.”
She turned to blink at me. “You did? Was it protecting a baby or
something?”
“No, it was licking me.”
She burst into laughter.
I gave her a moment to crack up before I continued. “I was eight,” I said, a smile in my voice. “We were up at Mike’s cabin for a week, and I was outside playing with Mike and this deer came out of the tree line and started licking the sweat off me. It was chasing me all over the yard. Mike ran inside crying and told his mom a deer was eating me.”
Larissa was gasping. I had to pause in my story.
“This is a joke. You’re kidding me,” she said.
“I’m not. When Donna came out, she started laughing so hard she could
barely help me.”
“So you have a deer phobia now?”
“Yes, they’re terrifying. I have a recurring nightmare of three deer
stacked up on each other’s shoulders under a trench coat in a dark alley.”
She choked.
To be honest, I didn’t love telling this story. The guys used it to tease me all through high school. But I did like making her laugh.
“If we ever encounter a deer, I’ll protect you, okay?” she said, still giggling.
I let a laugh out through my nose. “Oh yeah? How many of those things do you think you could take out in a fight? Real numbers here.”
“How many?”
“Yeah. They travel in herds. Have you ever seen fewer than two deer together?” I said. “Bare minimum, you’re in hand-to-hand combat with at least two. Realistically, you’re looking at five or six. You think you can take out five to six deer?”
“Deer run,” she said, looking amused. “They’re flight animals.”
“Not the ones I’ve met. Not the ones we’re talking about. If the deer come for us, it’s over, we’re screwed. They’ve got the numbers, they reproduce faster than we do. You’ve got a full-grown deer in three years.
They weigh as much as a man, they run thirty miles per hour, they can jump eight feet, see in the dark, they have superior hearing and smell, they’ve got stabby sticks on their head—”
She gasped. “Oh no, not the stabby sticks.” She made a fake scared face.
I had to fight to keep my expression straight. “You’re laughing at me, but I’m being totally serious. We’re lucky they haven’t organized. You think we’d still be at the top of the food chain if deer finally got sick of our shit?”
“They don’t have opposable thumbs, Chris. They don’t speak, they can’t conspire, they have no language.”
“Yet. That we know of. Do you know how many people are killed by deer every year?” I asked. “I mean, sure, most of the deaths are from traffic accidents—or are they accidents?”
She was shaking her head. “You are too much. Deer are not scary. Be
scared of something actually scary.”
“Like what?”
She shrugged. “I don’t know. Canada geese? Woofarine?”
I laughed at the Woofarine comment.
“Geese are birds. Nobody’s getting killed by geese,” I said.
“So you think you could take a pissed off Canada goose?” she asked.
“They’re cobra chickens.”
“I’m not saying it’d be a good time, but yeah.”
“What if there was a whole flock of them?”
“There’s a better chance at surviving a massive goose attack than an organized deer ambush. Not to mention geese are a seasonal threat and deer are here daily, living amongst us, patrolling our lawns while we’re asleep.”
“Something tells me you’ve never met the business end of a Canada goose. You’re waaaay too cocky.”
I smiled. “I want you to know that I’d put myself between you and a deer, and you and a goose for that matter, because that’s just the kind of guy I am, but know that I’d be terrified.”
“Well, it’s not brave if you’re not scared.” She shook her head, still cracking up.
I smiled, looking at her a moment longer than I should. She had a little dimple. I remembered the first time I noticed it, the night we met. Barefoot, hanging off Lexi’s back. Fun. Easygoing.
Her blond hair had been wavy from the humidity of the crowd. Not frizzy. Like a day spent on the beach. And she’d been so vibrant, that beaming grin she always had, despite all the crappy things I know she deals with—a shitty dad, all that debt, and all the jobs she works to pay it off.
I don’t know that I’d be as good of a person if the world had treated me the way it treated her. Even out here, lost and hot and tired and sunburned, she was positive and making the best of it.
Last week, I’d gone to her place to pick up Woofarine. Larissa was out babysitting, so Nancy let me in and wrangled me into talking for a few minutes. I was sitting there drinking an off-brand soda, chatting with her mom, looking around, and I could feel Larissa in every inch of that apartment. Larissa was like a flower planted in a garbage heap. She made this run-down place somehow feel bright and homey. There was a rainbow afghan Nancy said Larissa had made, draped over the couch, vases she thrifted, secondhand furniture she’d upcycled in the living room. She was so talented—and I don’t think she ever sat still. I know it probably didn’t feel like it right now, but Larissa was going to succeed, regardless of what life threw at her. Despite it. I think she would defy what takes most people down in the end because she had the ability to shrug things off and keep going. Keep smiling.
Life buries us. We get heavier and heavier as time goes on and we labor under the layers we’ve collected. Sometimes the layers make us who we are and sometimes they make us someone else entirely.
I wondered if what had happened to Mom started like that. Small and thin and it piled on until she didn’t recognize herself.
And I didn’t even know she was gone until it was too late.
I must have been quiet.
“What’s wrong?” Larissa said from next to me.
I shook my head. “Nothing. I’m just thinking about my mom.”
She waited. I almost didn’t go on, but for some reason here in the middle of nowhere, I felt like I could. Like maybe I could leave it here in the woods and walk out without it.
“She died in a way that I’m having a hard time processing,” I said.
“What happen—”
Woofarine veered hard to the left after something in the grass. He caught it. And the moment went from calm to chaos in a split second.
It was a snake. A very big snake. Larissa started screaming.
I pulled the leash, but he took the snake with him.
“Woofarine! Oh my God!” Larissa yelled. “Let it go! Chris, get him!”
“I’m trying!”
He was moving so fast I had to pick him up by the harness, hoping he’d drop it. He didn’t. Woofarine dangled there, four feet off the ground, shaking the snake and snarling like a honey badger.
“Can you grab it?” she shouted while the dog whipped it violently back
and forth.
“I’m not touching a snake!”
Woofarine snarled and gave it one final sonic-speed shake, then flung the snake to the ground. It was disemboweled and writhing on the black asphalt.
I stood there, still holding my dog by the harness like a six-pack of beer.
He was rotating midair, covered in guts and looking proud of himself.
Larissa was staring at us, wide-eyed. She had blood splashed across her white shirt.
A guy on a bike chimed his bell, waved as he passed us, and ran over the half-dead reptile, putting it out of its misery.
It was a long moment before she said anything. “Woofarine Christopher
Wright,” she whispered.
I looked at our unhinged little dog. “We’re gonna need therapy after this,” I breathed.
“Couples therapy,” she said. “We’ll get half off.”
That did it. I started laughing and so did she.
None of this was humorous. The snake was dead, we were covered in gore. The whole thing had taken less than thirty seconds and we were both in shock, but it was so fucked up it was funny.
I was wiping tears from my eyes when I finally got it together.
“The poor thing,” Larissa said, shaking her head at the snake.
She looked for a stick and pushed the limp body to the side of the trail.
I set Woofarine down and he darted for it again, but I wrapped my hand
around the leash and held him back.
She looked down at herself. “Gross.”
“You have some… It’s on your cheek.”
She wiped her face with the back of her hand and recoiled at the smear.
I pulled a sanitizer wipe from my fanny pack and handed it to her.
“Woofarine Christopher Wright?” I said, watching her wipe her face.
“He’s your son.”
“You’re his mother.”
“Not today.”
I smiled.
“This isn’t doing it,” she said, dabbing uselessly at her shirt.
“Maybe we can find a stream,” I said.
We walked for another half mile before we heard the trickle of water. We had to hike down an embankment to get to the creek. We did the best we could to clean up. The water was freezing. I washed the dog. He looked like a wet rat when I was done. Then Larissa took off her shirt to rinse it while I stood with my back to her on the side of the trail.
“I’m sorry,” she said from behind me. “I can’t walk six more miles with snake brains on me. I have to get this off.” I could hear the shuffling of wet rocks as she hopscotched across the stream to the little clear pool I’d used to wash the dog. “I can’t believe this,” she mumbled.
“This would make a really good Two Truths and a Lie.”
“Ha. My dog killed a snake and covered me in innards when I was lost in the woods. I graduated high school. I met my boyfriend while I was
barefoot after a Jaxon Waters concert.”
I blinked out at the field. “You never graduated high school?”
“Nope.” More splashing. “Ugh, it’s gonna be see-through until it dries,” she said.
“Do you want my shirt?” I asked over my shoulder.
“You’d give me your shirt?”
“If you need it, yeah.”
She groaned. “I might have to take you up on it. My bra is lace. I don’t want to flash anyone—Oh! I have my sweatshirt. I’ll just wear that.”
“No.” I was already peeling off my tee. “It’s too hot. We don’t even have good water, you’ll get heat stroke. Here.” I handed it over without looking.
A moment later I felt her take it. I was glad my back was to her so she couldn’t see me blushing.
I was in decent shape, but my body was nothing compared to Mike’s.
Why did her seeing me shirtless make me self-conscious? Maybe I’d care if it were Becca or Xavier’s wife, Samantha, too?
But I knew even as I thought it, I wouldn’t. This feeling was something very specific to Larissa, and I didn’t know why. I cared if she didn’t like what she saw—and then I felt so shitty about that that I wanted her to see me with my shirt off and compare my pitiful physique to her personal trainer boyfriend’s as punishment for my brain even going there. I was simultaneously hoping she was disgusted when she looked at me and hoping that she wasn’t.
“At least it’s cold water,” she said. “Good for getting blood off.”
“It could be worse,” I said over my shoulder.
“And how is that?”
“It could have been a skunk.”
“Don’t jinx us, Christopher. This day isn’t over yet.”
I smiled out across the field of wildflowers in front of me. “You still glad we kept going instead of going back the way we came?”
“Yes,” she said from behind me. “You know what I think about a lot?”
she said.
“What?”
“There was this book I read once that talked about the psychology of people in survival situations. How humans have a hard time rewriting the script in their head. Did you know in an emergency people tend to escape
out the door they came in, even if it’s not the safest route, because that’s the door they know? They’ll run right into the danger they’re trying to get out of, just because it’s familiar. I think about that like once a day. Most people go their whole life like that, escaping out the door they know. It actually
changed the way I live my life.”
“How’s that?” I said.
“I ask myself if I’m doing something because it’s what I’m used to, or if I’m doing it because it’s objectively the best thing to do.”
“And going the way we haven’t already gone was the objectively best thing to do?”
“Well, it was at the time.” I heard her come up behind me again.
“Dressed.”
I turned to look at her. She was standing there in my T-shirt, holding
hers in her hand.
“Better?” I asked.
“I’m just glad the mess was on my shirt and not my pants.”
“Can’t have you running around the park Winnie-the-Pooh style,” I said.
She laughed and held up the wet shirt. “I wrung it out, but it’s cotton.
Hopefully it dries soon.”
“We should hang it off your backpack. That way it gets full sun.”
I attached it to her bag for her, making sure to spread it out.
When I was done, she turned back around. Her eyes flickered for a split second to my bare chest. She cleared her throat. “You should probably put sunblock on. I can do your back.”
“That’s okay,” I said quickly. “I’ll just do what I can reach.”
She shook her head. “You’re going to burn.”
“No, I won’t.”
She looked at me like I’d lost it, but there was no way I was letting her touch me.
Mike wouldn’t care, it wasn’t even about that. I just didn’t feel right about it. Again, I knew I should probably unpack that, but not right now.
“If we do my back, we’ll run out of sunblock and we don’t know how much longer we’ll be out here,” I lied. “Why don’t you let me wear the backpack. It’ll cover me.”
She nodded. “Okay.” She took it off and handed it over. “Are you sure?”
“Yeah, I’m good,” I said, shrugging on the pack. “So why didn’t you
graduate?” I asked, trying to change the subject.
“I had to drop out in the eleventh grade so I could work because of the stuff with my dad. Are you sure you don’t want some sunblock?”
“I’m sure. You never thought about going back?”
She shrugged. “It’s not like I can afford college anyway, so what’s the point.”
“You could get student aid, student loans.”
She glanced at me. “I have to work three jobs just to afford to live, Chris. It’s not that easy.”
No. I guess it wasn’t. Sometimes I forgot how privileged I was growing up.
I’d had to work when I was in college, but I didn’t have to work to afford my school. I’d never given any thought to what it would be like if I did. Maybe I wouldn’t be a pharmacist right now. Maybe I’d be the one working three jobs.
We walked in silence for a moment. “How old are you?” I asked.
“Twenty-seven. How old are you?”
“Twenty-nine. The stuff with your dad goes back that far?” I asked.
She puffed her cheeks. “It goes back to before I was even born. He always had a problem but it got worse as I got older. He left us in a foreclosed house without a dime when I was fourteen. The car, the electricity bill, the phone bill—you name it, he didn’t pay it. We found out we were homeless when the eviction notice from the bank was taped to the
front door.”
I stared at her. “Where is he now?”
“I do not know and I do not care.” She plucked a leaf off a bush and started rolling it in her fingers. “How was your dad? Was he nice?” she
asked, smiling at me.
I laughed dryly. “He was great. Sorry.”
“Yeah, that doesn’t really surprise me. You give me I-grew-up-in-a- normal-family vibes.” She handed me the leaf. She’d rolled it into a rose.
I took it and smiled.
“I didn’t have a normal family,” I said.
“Why is that?” she asked.
“My parents were in their late forties and fifties when they had me. I was not planned. Only child.”
“Your parents were in their sixties when you were in high school?” she
asked.
“Yup.”
“Wow. What was that like?”
“Lonely? All their friends’ kids were already in college by the time I was born. I don’t have any cousins. Honestly, the guys were my family growing up. I did everything with them. Especially Mike.”
“Huh. Ever think of marrying Janessa?” She gave me a playful look.
“Uh, no.”
“Why? Not your type?”
“She isn’t, actually.”
“What is your type, then?” she asked.
“I don’t know.”
She rolled her eyes. “You don’t know what you like? Come on.”
I knew what I liked.
I changed the subject. “Do you want to hear my two truths and a lie?” I asked.
“No. I want to hear what you were going to tell me about your mom before Woofarine did murder on the trail.”
I scoffed.
“So your dad’s gone,” she said. “And your mom died recently. And you’re having a hard time processing it. Did you get to say goodbye to her?”
I stared out ahead of us. “I got the call and I went out there. She was living in Florida. Spent a few weeks with her while she was in hospice. I
was with her when she passed.”
“Was it unexpected?”
“It was.”
“How did she die?”
I paused. “Liver failure.”
She nodded slowly. “It’s not a peaceful way to go I take it?”
“No. It isn’t.”
They were pulling liters of fluid from her abdomen. She was covered in bruises, jaundiced and in pain, and her whole body itched. I didn’t want to tell Larissa that. I didn’t want to tell anyone that. I wished I didn’t know it either.
“I’ve been dealing with nightmares,” I said. “Not really sleeping.”
“She couldn’t get a liver transplant?” she asked.
“She wasn’t a candidate.”
I dropped it after that. I guess I wasn’t ready to talk about it to the
degree that I thought I was.
Thunder rolled overhead.
I looked at the sky. “Was it supposed to rain today?”
“I only checked the morning. I didn’t think we’d still be out here past lunch,” she said.
“Let’s speed up. Maybe we can outwalk it.”
We couldn’t.
It poured. Torrential, thunderous downpour. One of those freak Minnesota rainfalls that come on quick and dump on you, complete with wind and dark skies.
Woofarine was completely unaffected. He barreled on, pulling at his leash, soaking wet and plowing through puddles.
We’d been in it for ten minutes with no sign of stopping when Larissa nodded to a break in the trees. “Look!”
It was an outhouse. I had never been so happy to see a creepy dilapidated restroom in the middle of nowhere.
We ran for it and stumbled inside just as another crack of lightning broke overhead. I wrestled the door closed and locked it. We stood there, peering around the tiny room while the door rattled in the wind.
It was just as disgusting as you’d imagine. Concrete floor with scraps of toilet paper on it, an empty roll on the dispenser, a used tampon applicator in the corner. Flies and spiderwebs and a snakeskin. Woofarine darted for the tampon applicator and I heaved him up by his harness seconds before contact and held him against my chest while he struggled to get free.
Larissa stood there, two short feet from me, water dripping off the ends of her hair. She slumped with her back against the wall and pulled her ponytail over her shoulder and wrung it out. “So,” she said, watching Woofarine snap at a fly. “You think we’ve officially trauma bonded by now or do we need to find a dead body or something?”
“There’s probably one in that toilet.”
She burst into laughter. I laughed too.
We were soaked and sunburned. We had at least two more hours of
walking, water that tasted like grape blood, no food, a homicidal dog wriggling in my arms for the chance to eat a discarded menstrual product.
The room literally smelled like shit. Even after everything that was this fucked-up, unbelievable day, all I could think was how I wouldn’t change a thing. Not what I’d told her about Mom. Not getting lost. Not even that
Mike didn’t come.
Especially that.