Chapter Thirty-One
“This wasn’t supposed to happen. Straight up. Straight back. That’s what you promised me.” To say I’m agitated is an understatement.
“We are the last two people qualified to be lost in the woods. We don’t know anything about survival. We have no skills. We
are those stupid people you read about months later after they’ve found their gnawed-on skeletons.” My breathing becomes ragged
as I imagine the scene.
“Big, calm down. Take a breath. What happened to you being the stoic one?”
“I can’t do it anymore, Lily. I can’t be the one who always gets you out of trouble.”
“Me? I took one wrong turn!”
“I’m not talking about a wrong turn. I mean, for God’s sake, look where we are. My gifts from Alaska all turned out to be
a snake in a can.”
“What on earth are you talking about?”
“You know, those cans of peanuts that you open and a snake springs out into your face and scares the bejeezus out of you?”
“Please don’t have a complete mental breakdown until after we get back to camp, okay?”
That request turns out to be too little too late. I shake my head and start to cry. I’m exhausted. Sweaty. Blistered. Sore. Defeated. It’s all been too much. Following my sister here, thinking I could protect her like I always have. “I can’t keep doing this.”
“Oh, come on. That’s a little dramatic. We’re barely lost.” Lily reaches into her jacket pocket and pulls out a handful of
crap: a lipstick, some crumpled tissues, the granola bars, and one of Marigold’s dog-poop bags. It all tumbles onto the ground.
She swoops it up, hands me a now-dirty tissue and shoves everything else back into her pocket. “Take this, blow your nose.”
“Ew, no thank you,” I say and wipe my tears and snot on my sleeve. Who cares? I’m going to die out here anyway.
Lily pulls on my arm. “Let’s go. We can backtrack along this trail and when we see something sloping down, we’ll take it.
At least we’ll be heading in the right direction back to camp, I guess. So much for my sunrise,” she adds glumly. I check
the time on my phone; there’s no way we’d make it now.
We walk back the way we came, in a wholly different mood than when we struck out. Lily is in front of me, her head bent to
the ground. We pass our own footprints in the mud going the other way. Birds, who couldn’t care less about our dilemma, tweet
and sing. A chipmunk darts across our path, startling us both. The trail curves and does indeed dip down, and I’m ever so
slightly heartened that Lily’s plan might work.
“I didn’t really mean that about the canned snake,” I say to her back. “Lil, I didn’t mean it’s been all bad.”
Lily doesn’t answer. She picks up speed, a bad idea since we need to watch for the next trail. Without turning around, she
finally says, “I’m leaving him.”
It’s a whiplash I wasn’t expecting. Even when she admitted we were lost, Lily was holding it together. She must have put a
lot of stake in being able to face the Denali sunrise and find the wisdom she was seeking, as the wizard in Talkeetna had
foretold. Now, without it, she has to rely on herself alone.
“I thought it all through,” she says.
I catch up to her and take her hand. “Okay, Lil.”
So, she hasn’t been Little Miss Carefree this whole time. She’s been masking it well, laughing, making friends, teasing me,
and running off with—well, never mind. But inside the cogs have been turning. Just because she couldn’t talk about it with
me, for whatever reason, it doesn’t mean she hasn’t been having her own conversation in her head. That makes me sadder than
I expected.
“I’m filing for divorce.”
“I can’t blame you.”
“If he thinks . . .” She starts to stammer, working herself up. “If he thinks I’m stupid enough to take him back . . . well,
I’m not!”
She starts moving a little faster, pulling her hand from mine, balling her fists.
“No one thinks you’re stupid, Lil, stop. No one thinks this is your fault.”
“Well, maybe it is.”
Now my ever-simmering anger toward my brother-in-law starts to bubble. That my sister is gaslighting herself into thinking
she had a part in this? How dare he?
“Lil, how can you say that? He cheated on you. He slept with someone else. He screwed it all up.”
“Thanks for stating the obvious, Big.” She strides ahead as if she’s caught a second wind.
“Lily, wait up.”
She stops and turns, crossing her arms, her face daring me to say something else dumb. So, of course, I do. “Just tell me
what he said. What was his excuse? I’ve been asking and asking and I can’t get a straight answer out of you.”
“I don’t want to talk about it.”
“So, he did say something.”
“Let it go.”
“Let it go? You’re kidding, right? What’s so bad that you can’t tell me?”
Her arms go tighter across her chest, but she doesn’t answer. Without actual information, my mind races. Willa is pregnant.
The business is bankrupt. He killed someone.
“You’re a real fucking pain in the ass sometimes.”
So much for thanks for doing this with me, Big. I feel better already. How is this suddenly my fault? Whatever he said, whatever she knows, it’s got to be bad. We started out giggling over our intrepid adventure, sneaking off, breaking the rules, a spiritual awakening waiting for us
at the top—and it’s turned into this. Back to square one. Lily has popped like a champagne cork—except there is nothing here
to celebrate. Everything building up since the CVS receipt has finally been released. I wanted her to share. I wanted her
to express herself, out here so far away from the scene of the crime. But this is not exactly how I’d pictured it, lost and
cursed at in a dark, damp forest.
I throw my hands in the air. “Fine.”
“Fine.”
“Let’s go back and erase this stupid outing from our minds.” I should have known what might be okay for Luna, wandering this
far out of my comfort zone, was going to lead to regret. We continue silently, both in our own heads.
A loud snapping and cracking of branches behind us wakes us from our collective stewing. We spin around, but before we see
anything, we hear deep, guttural, groaning roars coming from the brush we just passed. It’s enough to liquify organs and cause
hearts to leap from chests. Lily and I grab each other. My sister’s face is frozen in fear. And then I see why we are right
to be terrified. Two enormous bears stumble out of the trees onto the trail. But they are not coming for us, they are after
each other.
They are wrestling and tossing and thrashing with huge paws and long claws. One bear knocks the other to the ground with staggering strength. Then they are on their hind legs, taller than men, pushing and swiping at the other’s thick, coarse coat. Their bellowing carries through the trees.
The taller of the two bears targets its attack, snarling and snapping at its opponent’s mouth with long yellow teeth, and
that is when I see what it’s after. “Is that . . . your granola bar?” I recognize the gold and purple wrapper.
Lily frantically digs through her jacket pocket and pulls out the mess she’d shoved back in earlier. There is only one granola
bar in her hand. We brought two. “Shit, I must not have picked it up when everything fell out before. Oh my God, they are
fighting over it!”
“We have to do something before they realize there is more where that came from.” I grab Lily’s sleeve and pull her off the
trail until we are knee deep in ferns.
“We should run. It worked with the moose.”
“Absolutely not.”
“Now is not the time to get all big sister bossy on me. And don’t even think about googling it.”
“Running from a bear is the worst thing you can do.”
“Okay, Ranger Rick.”
“I’m not kidding. It said so at the trailhead the first day. The bear safety guide. Didn’t you read it? In giant red letters,
DO NOT RUN. Walk slowly backward, stand up as tall as you can with your arms up to challenge them, or play dead.”
“I don’t like any of those options.”
While we are debating our plan for not ending up mauled to death, the sound of fighting abruptly stops.
Down the trail, we see the bigger bear has won the granola bar.
The loser runs off into the trees, knowing that he is beat.
The victor chews and swallows the bar, wrapper and all.
Then he sits up on his haunches and sniffs the air, turns, and stares right at us.
He starts to lumber our way, his nose up and twitching. Lily grabs at my waist. The bear spray! She fumbles with the pin and
the canister goes off and a stream of burning liquid hits my leg. My eyes fill with tears, and I bite my cheek hard as the
chemicals that are supposed to deter an eight-hundred-pound charging bear soak through my pants and hit my skin.
“Oh shit, Big! I’m sorry, I’m so so—”
“Give it to him,” I say through gritted teeth.
“What?”
“Give. The. Granola. Bar. To. The. Bear. Throw it! As far as you can.” Lily pulls everything out of her pockets with shaking
hands. It all tumbles back onto the ground, and she grabs the granola bar and flings it in the direction of the bear. “The
lipstick too,” I say, wincing.
“But my new—”
“Damnit! Do it, Lily. It smells like flowers. He’s going to want that too.”
She does what she’s told. The bear swallows the bar in one bite then sniffs at the lipstick but ignores it. At least he’s
distracted long enough for us to make a move. Although, making a move might be a bad idea. Backing away slowly is an option.
So is playing dead. Just because I read a sign doesn’t mean I should be in charge of saving our lives. I wanted to go on a
cruise with seven meals a day and no apex predators.
We back up slowly, through the brush, crouching and bushwhacking our way toward anywhere that takes us away from here, occasionally glancing ahead—so we don’t trip on rocks or break branches or run into something else with teeth—but also keeping a close eye on the bear.
He’s still on the path, and the lipstick is gone.
I expect him to come after us, looking for a second course.
Instead, he shakes his head, snorts, and wanders back in the direction he came from.
Everything is quiet again, but my chest and ears and a very large vein in my neck are pounding and showing no sign of slowing
down, my leg is burning from the bear spray, and I’m pretty sure I finally peed in the woods.