Chapter 40
— Chapter 40 —
When I get home, it looks like the house has been ransacked. Soggy cardboard boxes are leaking into the living room carpet; a green tarp and a bright yellow sleeping bag hang from sawhorses dragged up from the basement.
Aubrey is crouched next to the fireplace, blowing on a lit scrap of newspaper underneath a fresh stack of logs. She doesn’t look up when I come in.
“Do it!” she says to the flame that is already burning out. “Come on! Fuck!”
“Here.” I take the lighter from her, twist up a new piece of newspaper, and use it to get the fire started. “Also…” I show her how to open the flue.
“Okay. Yeah. Fire needs air,” she says, rubbing at her forehead.
“Yes, and so do we.”
She keeps looking around the living room like she’s trying to figure out a puzzle. “It’s all going to get moldy,” she says, her eyes tearing. She’s not wearing any makeup or magnets, and she looks so young. “I should have checked it. I thought because the boxes were up high…”
“What is this stuff?”
“Step’s backpacking gear.”
“When did he start backpacking?” I ask.
Step had been a Boy Scout, and he talked about camping like it was heaven on earth, even though he hadn’t been since before he met my mother. He still had some of his camping gear, but it was already torn and mildewed back when he let me and Bee use it to play adventurer in the yard.
I look in one of the cardboard boxes and see an ultralight cookstove and enough foil sleeves of dehydrated stew to get a person through the apocalypse. In another there are hiking pants, UV shirts, a down jacket, wool socks.
“He was going to hike the Appalachian Trail,” Aubrey says.
“By himself?” A wave of overwhelm rises through my body. I can’t tell if I want to laugh or cry, but the emotion hurts to hold. “The whole thing?”
“I think so.”
Step planning any kind of trip on his own seems so far outside his character. This one would have taken him half a year and required a level of strategy and strength I never knew him to have.
“Did he talk about it?” I ask.
“No. I didn’t know until I found his stuff.”
“Do you think my mother knew?” I can’t decide if Step disappearing into the woods would have been a cruelty to her or a gift.
Aubrey shakes her head. “I don’t think anyone did. He had all these boxes in the closet under the basement stairs. I moved them to that weird shelf to get them off the ground.”
“The granite weeps up there,” I tell her. “It’s bedrock.”
“I thought I was keeping everything safe,” she says, her voice catching in her throat.
“It’s okay, Aubs. You couldn’t have known.”
I don’t understand why she’s so upset, but I don’t want to make it worse by asking the wrong questions.
Aubrey thumbs through a soggy notebook. It’s the black and white marbled one she was reading when I found her in the basement. “It’s still readable,” she says, pressing her hand to her heart. She turns the book around to show me. “Step had the whole trip planned. He broke the route into calories per day, based on how hard the hiking is. He was going to mail food to himself at different checkpoints. There are lists of what has to go in each box and where to send them.”
“So, he was close to leaving?” Nothing about this makes sense. Not only would I expect my father to fail at a trip of this magnitude, but the Step I knew would also expect that from himself and not even bother to try.
“He put a lot of work in,” Aubrey says. “A lot of money too.”
“Is the gear worth something?” I ask, thinking that probably explains her concern. “All this stuff is meant to get wet, right? We can probably still sell it.”
Aubrey rests the book on the mantel, sits on the ledge next to the fireplace. She looks at her hands, not me. “Before you came home,” she says, then pauses for what seems like eons, picks at her ragged thumbnail, “I was going to take a bus down to the trailhead in Georgia and start walking.”
“Holy shit.” I imagine her in a window seat on a Greyhound, staring at the white dashes on the road whizzing by, then in a blink, she’s trudging into the woods alone. It’s so clear in my mind that I feel like she’s about to disappear.
“It’s not that crazy. I have Step’s plan,” Aubrey says. “And most of the stuff I’d need. His pants even fit okay.”
“You’re not going to go now, are you?” I know my fear has leaked into my voice, my face. It’s too much to hold.
She shakes her head.
“You swear? You promise?”
“Yeah. Of course,” Aubrey says, as if I’m being ridiculous. “It’s already April. You have to start in March.”
The air smells like damp basement and cat pee and feels toxic in my lungs. I don’t trust myself to keep standing. I sit next to Aubrey on the fireplace ledge, fighting the urge to grab her arm, hold her in place. In February, I told her she couldn’t stay here. That could have been the last time I saw her.
“I still had to buy more food and mail the supply packages. And then you came home.” She swallows, looks up at the ceiling. Her voice gets higher as she talks. “I wanted to see you. Like, if you were going to be here, even just for a little while. I didn’t want to miss you.”
I lean over and hug her hard enough to feel her bones, to know for sure that she is here and not about to slip away into the dark forest.
We spend the next few hours washing Step’s hiking clothes and sleeping bag, wiping down his tent and backpack, taking the batteries out of his flashlight, and opening up his first aid kit so any moisture that leaked in can dry. Aubrey goes through the food packets to make sure none of them are broken or expired. I sort all his odds and ends—titanium utensils, refillable lighter, small shovel, multi-tool, switchblade, flat-rolled duct tape, orange plastic whistle, sewing kit, tent patches, extra parts for the cookstove. He had to do so much work to acquire these things and bring them into the house without my mother noticing.
“You weren’t scared of hiking two thousand miles alone?” I ask.
“Yeah,” Aubrey says, “but before you came back, I was scared here too. It’s so dark at night. Out there.” She points to the window.
“It’s pretty dark in the wilderness,” I say, pulling my best impression of Aubrey’s thinking face.
She gets what I’m doing and smiles. “Yeah, I know. But when I was here by myself, I had to keep pretending my life was normal, so everything felt worse. I think the trail is just abnormal, you know? And it’s like a goal I can have.” She checks the date on the last packet of stroganoff and chucks it on the keep pile. “I read about this thing people on the A.T. say—that you have to hike your own hike. Like, you’re supposed to do things your way. So, sometimes you walk with other people when your hikes match, but when they don’t, it’s okay to keep walking.” She looks at me and I can tell she’s trying not to cry. “I thought maybe if I knew what my hike was, they couldn’t hurt me anymore.”
I’m not sure if she’s talking about Kelly and Carter, or her parents, or everyone. I want to ask, but she shakes her head like she’s trying to erase her thoughts. She looks under the bottom flaps of the last soggy cardboard box, then turns it over to make sure there’s nothing in it.
“Did you find Step’s compass?” she asks.
“No.”
She runs down to the basement, comes back with a blue stuff sack, and dumps it out on the floor. There’s some rope and tent stakes and a tiny red velvet bag, sun-faded, worn down to the cloth in most places. “All of his gear looks brand new except for this.” She unties the pull-strings, shakes it over her palm, and holds out her cupped hand to show me a tin compass, smaller than a dime. The metal is worn and shiny, and the glass face is scuffed. It looks like something Step might have had as a toy when he was a child. “It works. That’s really north,” she says in a reverent tone, as if we’re in the presence of a precious artifact. It’s still hard to get my head around her affection for Step. I wonder if this was how my mother felt when she watched me cuddle up in Babbo’s lap to read Dr. Seuss.
Aubrey slides the compass back in the little red bag. She rests it on the mantel while she airs out the stuff sack. Maybe some of her reverence is for the gear itself, the comfort of an escape plan.
“What made you check on Step’s stuff?” I ask. She may have missed the March start date to thru-hike the Appalachian Trail, but there are other trails, different distances. “It’s not because you want to go somewhere else now, right?”
Aubrey shakes her head. “No. I just like to read his notebook. It calms me down.” She grabs the book from the mantel and holds it out to me. The paper is dry now, but the edges have ruffled. “It’s mostly supply lists and meal plans, but sometimes he drew little pictures of a flower he wanted to try to notice, or a bird that’s specific to a place. There are hot springs near a mountain named Max Patch and a hostel in Tennessee that has really good showers. Do you want to read it?”
“That’s okay.” I can’t decide if I’m proud of Step for working toward his goal or devastated that he found the courage to stand up for his dream when he never figured out how to stand up for me. If he were just some guy from the bar, I’d definitely be proud of him. It’s a shame he had to be my father.