Chapter Forty Four
FORTY-FOUR
Your heart starts hammering.
“OVER HERE!” screams Diana.
She gets to her feet first, but neither of you can see anyone.
There’s still a thick pall of smoke in the air, and you can’t even find the glow of flames farther to the north.
The voice sounded male, but it was hard to tell whose it was.
You walk across the burnt forest, the ground still sizzling and popping beneath your feet.
The world around you looks so devoid of life and color, it feels like an unsettled planet, or maybe some kind of purgatory where you might linger for centuries awaiting your fate.
“TROY!” Diana yells. “WILL! FRAN!”
There’s no answer this time, and you wonder if you actually hallucinated the voice you heard.
The sound of Diana’s chattering teeth is all you can hear, along with the low whistle of some whirring bugs who seem attracted to the burnt wood.
A small fire burns what remains of the grass beneath your soggy boots.
The cold feels so deep in your body, you’re not sure how you’ll ever be warm again.
But you know the first step is getting out of your freezing, wet clothes.
As you walk, you start to peel them off, and Diana does the same.
The air is warmer from the fire, but not warm enough to save you on its own.
By the time you’re both in your underwear and boots, you know you’re going to have to do something more urgent or you won’t be able to go on.
“GUYS!” yells Diana into the smoke. “WHERE ARE YOU?!”
No response again.
“Diana,” you say through hiccuping breaths. “We need to get warm or we’re not going to make it.”
She kicks at the thin stump of a tree, and it shatters into uncountable pieces.
“I know,” she says through chattering teeth. “But there’s not much left to burn.”
She’s right; even though the fire moved through quickly, all the brush has been burned down to stubs and the trees are husks of what they used to be.
As you make your way around the lake, searching for something that hasn’t been completely swallowed, you eventually stumble upon a smoldering log, too big to burn in one go.
You put your hands over it and find it still warm.
“Here,” you say. “Help me with this. Maybe we can…”
You start kicking at it, and she joins in until the log rolls over. Then you begin to blow on the side that’s still red. You don’t have a lot of excess oxygen, but you use what you can spare until finally, a small flame comes to life in a single burst.
“I can’t believe we’re trying to create more fire,” says Diana.
You keep blowing, and eventually the log catches in earnest, and then you get as close to it as you possibly can without lighting yourself on fire.
Diana edges closer as well. The heat is not enough, but it’s something.
You huddle together around the small fire, trying to get some life back into your extremities.
Your feet and hands are numb, and you don’t know if you’ll ever be able to feel them again.
You lay out your clothes where they’ll dry, then you sit absolutely still, letting your body shiver until it finally starts to subside.
You don’t black out, but you’re not sure if it’s two minutes or two hours before the two of you can finally stand again.
Your legs are tingling and painful when you do, but you have more sensation in them.
Your compulsive shaking has faded too, but your body feels like it’s been pricked with a thousand needles.
“The voice sounded like it was coming from this way,” says Diana.
You put on your pants, which are now just a little damp, and follow her along the charred shore of the lake, swiping smoke out of your path with an outstretched arm. Once you’ve built up enough lung stamina, you scream again:
“HEYYYYYY!”
And this time, the response is a little closer.
“Over here!”
The words cut through the smoke and darkness, and you’re able to follow the sound, more or less.
Finally, you come to a crescent of sandy shore and you see two bodies standing absolutely still.
Whatever happiness you feel at the sight of them is undercut by your immediate realization that somebody is missing. Then you see that they’re looking down.
“He’s been burned,” says Will. “Really bad. And he’s not conscious.”
That’s when you see the third body, Troy’s, sprawled out on the ground. Fran is closest to you. She hugs Diana, and then puts a hand over her face.
“He tried to make it to shore too early,” she says.
When you get closer, you can see that Troy is breathing, but he also has a wound on his forehead and one on his arm that looks reddish brown and blistered.
His glasses are missing. He needs help, and he needs it fast. You pull one of the wet socks from your feet, and Will helps you rip it apart.
A bandage has to be better than nothing.
Anything else you had has been dumped in the lake.
You bend down and gently begin to wrap Troy’s arm.
He’s a skinny guy in the best of circumstances, but after days of little food, his limp arm in your hand seems like it’s barely there.
You wonder how much longer he can make it without wasting away.
He twitches slightly when you touch him.
You remember him bravely going over the falls, and you don’t allow yourself to think that this might be the end for him. But then, you also don’t know how you’re going to get him help.
“Fran, are we anywhere near the drop?” you ask with your last shred of optimism.
Fran is silent.
“What?” you say. “Did we miscalculate it?”
“No,” she says, and points down to the sand beneath you. “You’re actually standing on it.”
Off to the side of where she pointed is some melted plastic you assume was once bottled water.
There are a few scraps of cardboard too from other supplies.
Everything else is ash. First your food was eaten by a bear, and now by a fire.
You don’t even feel much at this realization, just a kind of grudging understanding that there are so many forces against you that it seems pointless to try to beat them.
You lean down and put a hand on Troy’s cheek. His body feels warm.
“We have to get him some care,” you say. “We can’t lose him. We just can’t.”
You look up at Diana. She avoids eye contact.
And everyone else you see looking back at you is barely there.
The fight they once had, even hours ago, to escape the flames and get to safety, is gone.
Now you are all exhausted and hungry and in various states of hypothermic shock.
It seems like there’s nothing left, and you have no idea what to do.
Diana sits down by Troy and holds his hand.
Fran sits next to her. And then finally, you sit on the other side of Troy’s body and Will sits next to you.
You get close enough to combine body heat, hoping some of it might transfer to Troy too.
It took a few days, but the wilderness has finally stripped you all down to nothing.
You have no supplies, no medication, no food.
You have boats and wet clothes; that’s it.
Everything else is gone. Even the world around you has been stolen by the fire.
“We were never going to make it, were we?” asks Fran.
The sound of the fire is so far in the distance, you can barely hear it anymore.
And with all the wildlife gone except a few insects, the quiet after she says this is all-consuming.
No one says anything for a while, and you’re starting to think that maybe no one else is going to when Will chimes in.
“It was kinda unlikely, I guess,” he says.
The amazing thing is that no one sounds sad, exactly. Just resigned.
“Do you think … normal people would have done better?” asks Diana.
You so badly want to say no. That your mental illness has nothing to do with it.
But it’s hard, sitting in this charred wasteland, without any gear or hope for rescue, to imagine anyone doing worse than you.
And once you admit that, the floodgates are suddenly open.
All the things you’ve told yourself for years about your deficiencies come back like summoned ghosts.
It’s a greatest-hits album that includes such favorites as: “Nothing You Do Will Ever Go Right,” “Self-Sabatage Is All You Know,” and “Your Own Brain Hates You.” Each song is more punishing than the last, and it ends with the epic power ballad: “You Were Probably Doomed from the Start.”
In the midst of this spiraling, there’s only one thought that gives you pause and keeps you from completely breaking down. As you imagine all the ways you screwed up on this trip, there is a difference between it and all your other anxiety-fueled tragedies: You were not alone.
It’s something, and it seems worth speaking aloud.
“If I was going to fail at survival,” you say, “I’m glad I got to do it with you guys.”
There isn’t a magic moment after this. No one stands up and claps or even says anything in return.
But there are nods and grunts, and no one contradicts you.
So maybe it’s actually an agreed-upon thing.
And for now, you are still together, and you huddle for warmth.
Night is finally falling, and one by one everybody starts to drift off to sleep.
It’s the first time everyone has slept in such close quarters since the inaugural night at the lodge.
But even though you’re borderline delirious with infection and hunger, you force yourself to stay awake.
To make sure Troy is breathing. To keep watch for predators.
And to keep yourself alive for just a little longer.
It could have been so much better.
That’s what you’re thinking in the dark.
Not this trip, which obviously couldn’t have gone much worse.
But your life with anxiety. If you had just found other people—people you could talk to about it, people who really cared about one another—maybe you wouldn’t have needed this “adventure” in the first place.
If you had just asked for a little more help from everyone around you, and, god, if Sean had done the same, maybe things would have turned out differently. Maybe you wouldn’t be here, at the end.
Diana is slumped against Troy, and all you want is just one last chance to be with her outside this place.
To go to Perkins again and sit there drinking bad coffee and laughing.
The longing you have to be back in that terrible restaurant actually makes your heart hurt.
But it also feels now like something that happened in another life.
In order to get back there, you’d have to use a time machine or a magic portal.
But you have neither. Just a blackened canoe.
You manage to stay awake for another hour or so, trying to ignore your hunger.
Mostly, you worry about Troy. Across from you, his chest moves up and down.
The rhythm of it gives you hope, but it also makes you drowsy.
And gradually, your blinks get longer and longer.
Even if Diana is right and falling asleep might take you under for good, you have little choice at this point.
And as you sit suspended in that place between dream life and waking life, you wonder if when you die—today or another time altogether—you will see Sean again.
You’re not a believer in much of anything beyond what’s in this world, but you let yourself dream.
Would it be possible to hug him again and say you’re sorry?
Would he still smell like himself? Chlorine and Old Spice deodorant.
Could you ask him all the questions you never got a chance to ask?
And what would happen from there? In this place, whatever it is, would you be able to stay together again?
Would you both have perfect brains? Would you even want such a thing?
You close your eyes.
And you only open them again when you hear the humming.