Chapter Twenty-Two
“Gone where?”
Xavier squints up at me, seeming exasperated. I’m clearly interrupting his precious screen time. “Over there,” he says, hiking
a thumb behind him before bending his head again.
He’s indicating the woods beyond the tall growth. I can see a faint trail of trodden-upon grass where my sister bushwhacked
her way toward the pines. What was she thinking? Over at the van, the men are still crowded around the open hood. In the other
direction, Luna and Mimi are small in the distance, a couple of hundred feet down on the shoulder of the road. Brick had said
don’t go far. Brick had said stick together. I am in no position to start trouble with Brick right now. But I need to find
Lily.
I follow her path until I arrive at the tree line. The air becomes colder as I step into the tightly packed woods. The ground
is soft and covered with large, feather-shape ferns. Before I lose the view of the van and my group completely, I glance back
again. They are busy, chatting, laughing, exploring, turning their faces to the sun. No one has noticed me leave. I’ll find
Lily—how far could she have gone?—and get back before anyone is the wiser.
This clump of forest looks like every other so far. Same evergreens over and over again. Same ground cover. Same sky barely
peeking through the treetops. I could easily get lost if I don’t catch up with my sister soon.
“Lily!” No response. “Come on, Lily. We need to go back. If you’re peeing, hurry up.
” Again, nothing. “Lily! I get you aren’t talking to me.
Though I can’t for the life of me figure out why,” I say into the open air.
“I didn’t lock myself out of the cabin. I didn’t do something I’m going to live to regret. ”
I start to realize this is not the way to encourage her out of hiding, but my frustration has risen and reached my mouth,
so it’s coming out whether it’s a smart idea or not. “Really, it’s hysterical, you being mad at me right now. I can’t believe I’m the bad guy in this scenario.”
“You’re not, Big.”
Lily steps out from behind a stand of pines, looking contrite when I was expecting defiance. My aggravation turns into clay
and reshapes itself. “Lil, what are you doing out here by yourself?” I ask quietly, rant over.
“I needed a minute alone.”
“You should have told me. I would have come with you.”
“What part of alone would that have been?”
“Well, you shouldn’t be out here by yourself. What if I lose you?”
“Would that be so bad?” Lily sinks onto the soft ground like a kindergartner in circle time. Legs crisscross applesauce. She
lets out a huge groan and cradles her head in her arms.
I sit next to her, my thigh pressed against hers, and wrap my arm around her. “Yes, hon. It would. For one, Mom would kill
me.”
She lifts her head and snort-laughs. But only for a second.
“Oh, Big. I fucked up. Really fucked up.” A bird squawks overhead, and we both crane our necks, but the branches above are
too tightly meshed for us to see anything. “I guess we’re even now, me and Eric.”
“Are you?” I ask. “Even?”
Lily snaps off a piece of fern. “Not even close.”
“What were you thinking?” I ask.
My sister tosses the fern and grabs for another one. “I wasn’t. Or maybe I was. Maybe I was thinking I was someone else. Not Lily Ackerman whose life crashed and burned in a day with one stupid CVS receipt. I was ‘Lily on an Adventure,’ free, daring, bon vivant.”
“So, is this going to be a thing now? Are you and Dane an . . . item?”
Lily screws up her face like I asked her to eat worms. “What? What kind of question is that? No! Dane?” Another handful of
ferns. She’s going to clear the forest at this rate. “I mean, he’s handsome, and entertaining, and not so bad in—well, never
mind that. But that was a one-off. Believe me.”
I think about Dane, trying to catch Lily’s eye so many times this morning. She wasn’t playing it cool. She was trying to ghost
him in plain sight. “How does he feel about that?”
She shrugs. She knows he doesn’t think it was a one-off.
“You should tell him.”
“He’ll figure it out.”
She’s doing that same thing that got us to Alaska in the first place. Walking away from the hard thing.
“I wouldn’t be so sure. I think he’s smitten.”
Lily shoots me another incredulous glare. “What? Don’t be ridiculous. It was a one-night stand. Stop asking stupid questions.”
Her head goes back into her arms and knees, and she says something that is muffled and windswept but unmissable. “Besides,
I love Eric.”
My eyes burn from all the sadness that comes with that statement. I tuck my chin on Lily’s shoulder.
“I also hate him. I hate him very fucking much,” she growls.
“You still haven’t told me what happened with Eric. Aside from the obvious. What did he say?” The time had finally come to
get this out in the open. “What was his rationale for doing something so stupid? Not that it will change anything.”
“Can we not, Big?”
“Can we not what? I don’t understand why you’re holding back right now.”
“I can’t.”
“You can’t what?” I’m starting to feel like this is a Who’s on First? situation. “You know my vivid imagination and my excellent ability to catastrophize. Not telling me is making me think the
very worst things.” Suddenly I wonder if this is one of those very worst things. My heart thumps in my chest. Did we come
out here to escape something more than facing a confrontation? That’s the problem with a vivid imagination. It runs away with
you.
“Christ, Big. You’re just going to have to drop it. I’m not in the mood for a therapy session with you about why my husband
cheated on me. And now I’ve fucked up with Dane. Just leave it at that.”
It’s uncharacteristic, to say the least. Lily has spent a lifetime vomiting the intimate details of her life all over me.
She’s read diary entries out loud, made me smell her breath and her armpits before dates, described her periods, reported
on bowel movements. The demise of her marriage is bigger than all that, but I’d think it, more than anything, warrants a hashing
through.
“Okay, then,” I say, giving up that line of questioning, for now. “What’s the plan?”
“Plan?”
“With Dane. There are seven of us on this trip. We are sharing some tight quarters—planes, trains, and automobiles and all
that. There’s no avoiding him, if that’s your game.”
“I’m going to use you as cover.”
“Oh, so now you want me to run interference?”
“Come on, we can just stick together. That’s what you want anyway.”
“I’m not so sure anymore . . .”
“Hey. I’m sorry. I’m really sorry I locked you out of the cabin. That was a shitty thing to do. You can get me back. Shove me off a cliff, sacrifice me to a polar bear. Then we can call it even.”
It was shitty, what Lily did. Inconsiderate. Selfish. Really, really dumb. But if she hadn’t locked me out, I wouldn’t have
had that evening with Brick, and that evening with Brick, once I got past the mortification of playing the drunken fool, has
got me thinking about some things differently.
“I’m not sacrificing you to a polar bear. My luck, I’ll be the one who’d end up being eaten. Here’s the deal. We only have
a few days left here. Let’s try to make the best of it. Let’s accept Alaska’s gifts.”
“Alaska’s what?”
“Never mind. What I’m saying is let’s have fun, like you’ve been saying, and take advantage of the time we have here. In a
few days we’ll be back in Jersey.”
“We could stay,” Lily says, smiling wryly. “We could stay here and open a Sweet Dreams Two.”
“Nice try, but you’ve got to go back. You have some things to sort out. And whatever it is”—I take a pause, giving her a moment
to change her mind about telling me, which she doesn’t do—“we’ll tackle it together.”
“Fine.” She stands up and brushes off her pants. “Let’s go start having fun Big’s way. I hope I don’t fall asleep from the
boredom.”
“Very funny. Now, pull me up.” I reach up my hand to Lily, but she ignores me.
“Um,” she says, pointing back in the direction we came from, her mouth hanging open. “I think we have a problem.”
I turn around slowly to see a moose and her calf standing in a patch of ferns. And they are close. Too close. I can see flies
buzzing around their twitching ears and smell an old-rug smell coming from their shaggy hides. The baby is oblivious to us,
but the mother is staring us down.
“Don’t move, Lily. Brick said they are aggressive when they think you are threatening their calves.”
Believe me, you do not want to be trampled by a pissed-off fourteen-hundred-pound animal. Their hooves are the size of a man’s
head.
“I heard the same speech. And I have no intention of threatening anyone,” she whispers to me. “Shit, we gotta get out of here
and they are blocking the way.”
“Can we wait it out?” I whisper, grabbing Lily’s sleeve, backing up slowly. “It could get bored and just . . . go?”
“This is Eric’s fault. One hundred percent.” Lily and I finally agree on something this week. “If I live through this, he’s
going to pay.”
“I like your thinking,” I say. “First, we need to avoid being stomped to death. Then revenge.” It’s a staring contest right
now, and I don’t know how long this can go on. “Wait, Xavier has service. Let me google moose encounters and find out what
we should do.”
“I’m not sure we have time for a whole research project right now.”
I ignore her and slowly pull my phone out of my pocket, not making any sudden moves. Before I can type in how to survive a moose attack, it rings and a photo of a curly-headed woman with cat-eye sunglasses and hot-pink lipstick comes up on the caller ID. “It’s
Mom.”
“Decline!” Lily hisses.
“What if something is wrong at home?”
“Something is wrong here, Big. You want to tell her we’re being held hostage in the woods by a killer moose?”
“I’ll tell her now is not a good time. Then she won’t keep calling back.”
“What the hell. No.”
“Yes, Mother?” I say in a dramatic whisper. “We’re kind of in the middle of something. I’ll call you later.”
“Hang up,” hisses Lily.
“Is that your sister?” demands my mother. “Is she why you haven’t called me? You’re in Alaska, not on the moon. I know they
have phones there. I know how the World Wide Web works. And, for all you know, I could be dead right now.”
“That makes three of us,” I mumble.
“What? What is your sister doing to you?”
“Mom, I’m glad you’re not dead. But now is just not a good time. I’ll call you later, I promise.” I hope I can keep that promise.
Before she can answer I hang up quickly. I can tell from her face Lily thinks I’m insane. Which I might be. She shakes her
head. “You have to stop running scared from that woman.”
“I’m not. I am responsible for her. And she’s probably driving Tim crazy.”
“Sure, fine, but right now there is literally two tons of moose blocking our way back to civilization. You can’t help Mom
if you’re flat as a pancake.”
She’s right. I got a little panicky when I saw the call. Or I was misplacing my anxiety. Focus, Bridget. “All right, let me google how to—”
Not waiting for me to finish scrolling, the moose snorts and shakes her head, and we freeze. Lily digs her nails into my arm.
“I think we should run.”
“No, that’s not right. Aren’t you supposed to play dead? Or is that just for bears? I think we should—”
“RUN!” Lily is off, sprinting away from the moose, her calf, and me. Not looking back, but yelling at the top of her lungs,
“BIG! RUUUUN!”
Now it’s just me and the moose. Her ears are twitching. She stomps a foot. I don’t speak moose, but I recognize a stressed mother when I see one. Without taking another breath, I follow Lily’s lead.
I bolt past tightly packed trees, my boots squishing into something soft underfoot. I can’t tell if we’re being followed,
but if I turn around, I’ll end up on the ground, the perfect target. Finally, I catch up to my sister. With my breath all
but gone, I can only tag her on the back to tell her I’m alive. We keep going, past branches that snag on our sleeves and
fallen logs that turn us into hurdlers, and finally, when I think it’s not the beast that will kill me but the coronary, we
break out of the woods into the tall grass.
Only then do we stop, our hands on our knees, gasping for breath. We wait for a rustle of the trees or a crashing through
the pines. Mercifully, the woods are quiet. Lily puts her hand on her heart and sucks in air and then bursts out laughing.
“Holy shit,” is all she can manage.
“You are insane,” I say. “We could have been killed.”
“Did you want to stick around to find out?”
“No,” I say, feeling the nervous giggles rising. “Most certainly not.”
We laugh at ourselves, at our close call, at our wildlife adventure, and then I get serious. “Nobody needs to find out about
this, got it? Especially not Brick. I think they’ve seen enough drama from us for one trip.”
“Well, well. Devious. I don’t know this sister, but I like her.” I shrug and smile. “Maybe I was wrong,” adds my sister. “Looks
like Big-style fun won’t be a snooze fest, after all.”