Mom handed her a newspaper section. I paced around the room. It was dark. The motel's wallpaper was old and depressing; the bedspreads were violently ugly. I took my wet socks off and rubbed my toes. I had prune feet, hideous. I searched the room for one piece of clothing that was reasonably dry, and finally put on my long underwear top. I shook out and turned over all the other clothes I'd laid out.
Then I lay down in bed, but the pillows seemed about six inches too thick.
“Mom?” I said.
“Later.”
Vivi didn't talk. I noticed this about Vivi: she was often quiet for long periods of time. She was nice in a Grandma way, but what did we really know about her anyway? She could be an ax murderer.
Vivi said, “I'm going to call my son.”
“How old is he?” Mom asked.
“Thirty-six.”
I couldn't picture an ax murderer with a thirty-six-year-old son. I threw the pillow on the floor. I got out Springer's T-shirt and wadded it under my head. I covered my head with the atrocious bedspread to drown out Vivi's phone conversation, and went to sleep.
When I woke up, it was still dark. I wasn't sleepy anymore. Vivi was snoring in the other bed, but Mom was gone. I could smell coffee. I opened the motel door, and there was Mom sitting on the step outside. She was dressed. The rain had stopped and the sun was rising between layers of purple-gray clouds. Mom had a Styrofoam cup in her hand. “Good morning,” she said. “If Vivi's up, tell her there's fresh coffee in the lobby.”
I shook my head.
“I'm still thinking about one thing,” Mom said. “But here's something you do need to know. Your father and I did not get divorced because Springer died. It's been difficult for us for a long time. We probably would have separated years ago if it hadn't been for Springer. Neither one of us could have handled caring for him alone.”
A wave of hurt, red hot, rolled up inside me. I thought I might throw up. “So you stayed together for Springer,” I said, “but you wouldn't do it for me?”
We checked out of the motel and ate breakfast and hitched a ride back to the Trail. I kept waiting for Mom to say something to contradict me. I kept waiting for her to tell me something different—that they might have stayed together for me, or even just that they loved me, or something, but she never did. She didn't say anything at all until six-thirty that night, when she caught up with me near Deep Gap Shelter, panting hard, and said, “It's dark already, Dani, can we stop for the night?”
March 9
Muskrat Creek Shelter (North Carolina)
Miles hiked today: 7
Total miles hiked on the Appalachian Trail: 78
Weather: still cold, sunny
Sometimes I felt like I wanted to talk. I'd walk up a steep section, panting hard and sweating even in a cold wind, and it would be like I wasn't even on the Trail. I wouldn't see the mountains or the trees, or even the rocks unless I tripped. My mind would be running like the engine on a race car, fast and furious, saying all the things I thought. You never paid attention to me. You never came to my soccer games. You never let Springer come. You were always working, or taking care of him, or doing something for yourself. Never me. You stayed together for him. Not for me.
I loved Springer and I missed him, and every night I was sorry I couldn't say good night to him and tell him about my day the way I used to, but even so when I was walking, I thought only about all the angry things I wanted to say to my mother. I would sit on a rock and wait for her, and think about what I should tell her. Then she would walk up, sit beside me, slurp water from the bottle at her waist. She'd hand me a snack, and I would eat it. “Ready?” she'd say.
“Sure,” I'd say. And we'd start off walking again, me pushing ahead, my anger making me fast and strong.
Two mornings after Helen, I woke to find my water bottles frozen solid beside me and ice crackling along the inside of the tent. The air had a sharpness to it, a chill that took a few miles of walking to shake off. Along the Trail long fingers of frost looked like they'd pushed themselves straight out of the ground. They were beautiful and fragile. They broke when I touched them. “Look,” I said when Mom came up to me. It was midmorning. The frost was still there.
Mom smiled. “You're finally starting to open your eyes.”
I scowled. “What's that supposed to mean?”
She shook her head. “Sometimes I think you're not seeing anything that's more than two inches off the Trail. You may as well pay attention. You might never get to do this again.”
“What do you know about paying attention?” I said. “You never did.”
There. I'd finally said something.
Mom looked at me for a long moment. She took my hand in hers and led me down the Trail until she found a log we could sit on. She sat, pulling me down beside her. She un-clipped the sternum strap of her pack, then her hip belt, and let the whole thing slide from her shoulders. I kept my pack on.
“I know we don't talk often, so please listen,” she began. “You're twelve years old, and I know you feel that life has not been fair, and that I especially have not been fair. I remember feeling the same way, with much less reason, when I was twelve. My hope is that when you grow older, you will start to be able to understand.
“I missed a lot, Dani. I missed your preschool Christmas program and the science fair contest where you got third place, and—”
“My soccer games,” I cut in.
She sighed. “Your soccer games. Not all of them, but most of them. And I didn't take you hiking, you did that on your own. I didn't spend summers taking you to the pool, and you were in day care more than I wanted, and you've had to fend for yourself a lot. But the thing you need to understand is this: I did the best I could. Every day. I had a dying child, and he did die, and he took up a lot of attention that would have otherwise gone to you. I can't change that. Would you have wanted Springer not to have been born?”
I started to cry. “Of course not,” I said. “But you didn't have to work. You were always working. You always complained about your job, but you never quit it.”
“I couldn't,” Mom said.
“You could, too,” I said. “We didn't need that much money. We could have lived in a smaller house.”
Mom kissed my forehead and wiped the tears off my cheeks. “I was the one with the health insurance,” she said.
I sniffed. “So?”
“Honey, think about it,” Mom said. “I never really wanted to work full-time. I never had a career, a job I loved to do. We had Springer, and then we had you right away. I was home with both of you, and that was good. I was happy. But we wanted to save some money and buy a house, so I took the job with the bank. You were in preschool. The health insurance at my job was cheaper than at your dad's, so I put you and Springer and me on it. And then we found out that Springer had muscular dystrophy, and we were stuck.
“He couldn't go back onto your father's insurance because his MD would have been a preexisting condition, and nothing related to it would have been covered. And mine was such good insurance—it covered everything for him—we could go to whatever doctor he needed. We couldn't give that up. So I had to keep working.”
She shook my face a little with her hands. “I had to keep working. Dani, his medical bills were enormous. This last time alone, with the pneumonia, it was two hundred thousand dollars for just two weeks. That's more than your dad and I make in three years.”
“Couldn't Springer have had insurance if you quit?”
“For eighteen months,” Mom said. “That's the law—we could have paid his premiums for eighteen months ourselves. But only eighteen, and we could never say, ‘In eighteen months this child will surely be dead and won't need insurance anymore.' And we knew he would never get better. So we couldn't do it. I looked into it, believe me.”
“It's not fair,” I said.
“Which part?” asked Mom. “The part where you had a brother? The part where the insurance company paid out over a million dollars for t
he care of a child born with a fatal disease? The part where he died? Fair has nothing to do with any of it.”
“I thought he was going to live, that last time,” I said. I leaned against her a little bit.
“Me too,” she said. “Me too.”
We had spent the night near Plumorchard Gap Shelter, though the place was so crowded we slept in our tents. We had a pretty short hike ahead of us, only seven miles, and then we would spend our last night at Muskrat Creek Shelter. From there we were only four miles from the road that would take us to Hiawassee, and from there to home.
At lunch Mom said, “I've been thinking.”
I had been searching through my pack for one last candy bar, but something about her tone made me freeze. I sat back slowly.
“I didn't know about this until I talked to your dad at Helen,” she said. “I didn't know anything about it. But if we agree, it might give us a little more time.”
I didn't have any idea what she was talking about.
Mom swallowed. “There was a life insurance policy on Springer.”
“What?”
“Your grandpa—your dad's father—took it out when Springer was born. As a gift to us, or something. I guess he told your father about it. But your grandpa died right before you were born, and the policy got put in with some papers at the bank, and your dad never thought about it.”
“Before Springer was sick,” I said. Duchenne muscular dystrophy is a genetic disease, so Springer was born with it, but he was diagnosed late, when he was six years old.
“Right,” Mom said. “It's not a bunch of money. It won't make us rich. But it would pay our house payment for a month or two, and our other bills. It doesn't cost us much to stay on the Trail. Your dad says if we want to use the money for this, we can. He's worried about you. He says he didn't realize how upset you were until you jumped out of the speeding car.”
“It was a very slow-moving car,” I said. “What about your job?”
“I'll need to make some phone calls,” Mom said. “I maybe need to go home for a few days, set everything up, make sure we can do this. But the bank set out some new policies last year. One is that above a certain level, employees are allowed to take a sabbatical for a few months, for any reason. No pay, but you keep your job.” She shook her head. “When they first announced the policy, I thought, ‘I'll save mine until the end, until I need it to be with Springer.' ”
Springer's disease was the most common form of muscular dystrophy. All his muscles were weak, and they got weaker and weaker as he grew older. Exercise made him worse, not better.
Even when I was little, I understood what this meant. Our hearts are made of muscle. Muscles pull the air in and push it out of our lungs. When Springer got weak enough, he would die, but we thought that would be when he was around twenty, not thirteen.
“What about school?” I said.
Mom tried to laugh. “We could always say you're home-schooling. I don't know, Dani, you'll probably have to go to summer school. You don't want to fail a grade.”
“I don't care if I do.”
“It's a big step,” Mom said. “I've been thinking hard because I wasn't sure I wanted to do it, but I'm willing to if it's important to you.”
“Can we make it to Mount Katahdin?”
“No,” Mom said. “We can't. I don't remember the details of the sabbatical, but I don't think I can take off more than two months. We'll have to settle for doing what we can.”
“Okay.”
“Happy?” Mom asked.
“Maybe,” I said.
We were sitting in a big clearing high up in the mountains. The air was crisp and the sky was bright, bright blue. Mom looked around and then grabbed one of my guidebooks and searched through it. “Thought so,” she said, leaning back in satisfaction. “We're in Bly Gap. Welcome to North Carolina.”
We'd hiked one state through.
That night at Muskrat Creek Shelter I checked the Trail registry. There's one at nearly every shelter. Most of the time they're spiral-bound notebooks with pens attached. Hikers can write down anything they want in them, and when one gets full, a Trail volunteer takes it away and sets out a new one. I don't know what happens to the old ones.
I had signed the register on Springer Mountain, of course—everyone does. Since then I hadn't bothered. I wasn't much concerned with the other hikers. But today as I turned the pages, a message leaped out at me, maybe because it had my name surrounded by a box of little stars. Good night, Katahdin, wherever you are. Beagle.
Beagle was thinking about me. He was looking out for me. I felt so happy and so excited that I wanted to run back to the last shelter to see if he had left me a message there, too. I didn't, of course. But I'd sure read the registers from now on.
“What are you smiling about?” Mom asked.
“Nothing,” I said.
March 12
3326 Holston Drive, Bristol, Tennessee
Miles hiked today: 0
Total miles hiked on the Appalachian Trail: 83
Weather: sunny, breezy, perfect for hiking
Our house was less like a museum than I could have wished. For one thing, it smelled bad. Mom had taken off for Amicalola in such a hurry the day she found me missing that she'd left some frozen chicken breasts thawing out in the kitchen sink. They had changed color. There was chunky milk in the refrigerator, too, and nasty dishcloths hanging by the stove.
Mom opened the windows in the kitchen. She dumped the rotten chicken into a plastic bag and took it out to the trash. I started the fan running and sprayed some Lysol into the sink.
It was midnight. We were tired. We'd hiked to a road that morning, but it turned out to be more isolated than we'd thought. It took us a long time to get a hitch into Hiawassee, and a while to find a ride from there back to Amicalola. Then we drove the whole way home. “Quitting, eh?” said the man who took us back to Amicalola. “Can't say as I blame you. We see a lot of those so-called thru-hikers. Most of 'em quit.”
“We're not quitting,” Mom said a little testily.
“Okay, lady, whatever you say.”
Mom looked aggravated. I thought it was funny. I patted her shoulder, and she jerked it away and glared at me.
“What's wrong?” I whispered.
She shook her head. “I don't think any of this is going to work.”
We stopped for coffee and snacks three or four times on the way home, and by the time we got there she was jittery. “Get unpacked,” she said when she came back from tossing the chicken. “I want to get our laundry going. Go upstairs and get all the dirty clothes from there, too.”
“Can we do it in the morning?”
“No. Take a shower, too, before you get into that clean bed.”
I unpacked and showered and then I went to sleep. When I woke up, it was past midmorning. I'd slept like a piece of granite. I padded down the hallway. Mom was flat on her back in bed, snoring. I went downstairs. Most of the laundry was finished and folded. All the mail and newspapers were stacked on the kitchen table. I went outside and brought in the morning paper. I moved the last of the laundry from the washer to the dryer and started the dryer. I thought about getting dressed but didn't really feel like it.
I called Dad. “I'm home,” I said.
“Great!” he said. “Can I take you out to breakfast?”
I put on some jeans and a clean shirt. I thought about waking Mom, but she looked so worn out I just wrote a note and left it on her nightstand. It was Sunday, so she wouldn't be able to call the bank or get started on anything important. She might as well sleep.
I was waiting on the sidewalk when Dad pulled up. I went around to the front passenger seat, but it was full. Lisa was sitting there.
“Oh,” I said. “Hi.”
“Hop in back, sweetie,” Dad said.
“Good morning,” said Lisa.
I planned on hating her for a long time yet, but I thought she ought to be pretty sweet to me. She'd gotten Dad, after all, and
she'd gotten a new baby; I'd lost my brother and Dad both. But she had a look on her face like I'd swiped something important from her. I wished she had stayed home.
Dad drove right to our favorite pancake restaurant. We used to go there all the time when Springer was alive. I ordered banana pancakes with nuts and whipped cream, and sausage and orange juice and milk and a side of hash browns. Lisa stared. “You can't eat all that,” she said.
I stared back. “Sure I can. I'm hungry.”
She shook her head, then looked away.
“Hiking burns up a lot of calories,” said Dad.
Lisa didn't look back. Dad patted my hand under the table and said, “Order whatever you want, honey.”
Of course I was going to order whatever I wanted. I always ordered whatever I wanted. It was just pancakes, not filet mignon.
Lisa ordered one pancake, plain, nothing on it, especially no butter. She was thin enough, but she didn't seem like a diet freak, so I thought it was a pretty stupid order. I didn't say anything. Lisa didn't say anything. Dad tried to fill up the silence with questions about my hike, but he asked them so quickly I could tell he wasn't listening to the answers.
Our food came. Lisa took one look at my plate, clamped her fingers over her mouth, and ran from the table. Dad said uneasily, “She's had a difficult pregnancy. Smells make her nauseous.”
“She can't smell pancakes?”
“She's reacted unfavorably to a broad range of things.”
I stuffed a sausage into my mouth. “Like me?”
Dad took a deep breath. “She's eager to get to know you. She's just having a bad day.”
Right. I kept eating. Dad didn't eat. He looked nervously toward the bathroom. He checked his watch. “Would you mind going in there to check on her?” he asked at last.
“Yes,” I said.
Dad looked surprised. He fidgeted with his fork. “She doesn't want me to,” I continued. “She doesn't like me. I'm sure she doesn't want me watching her puke.”
“Well …, ” said Dad. After a pause he said, “I think she will like you. She doesn't know you yet. You don't know her.”