Wildfire

by Carrie Mac

  “Nice picture,” Pete says. “Now let’s go. I seem to be the only one carrying anything, so I’d like to get this show on the road.”

  * * *

  —

  By the time we start walking, it’s easily noon, judging by that crimson sun.

  Pete is walking so slowly that I don’t think we’ll even go five miles today, when we should be going at least twenty to make up for lost time. We were planning on fifteen miles a day to get to Fire Camp, with a day to spare. Now we’re so far behind that I can quietly start to hope that the people at Fire Camp and our dads will report us overdue, and then we can wait for a helicopter. So long as we can get to the PNT. Where we’re supposed to be.

  Watching Pete walk is like watching someone limping through a different kind of atmosphere, where everything is heavy and thick. Clearly, there is no way he can go any faster, so there is no point in being a cheerleader. That’s been over since yesterday.

  Truthfully, I’m not sure that he knows what day it is. Or how far we are into the middle of nowhere.

  “Let me take your pack, Pete.”

  “I’m fine.”

  “It’ll help.”

  “I’m fine.”

  I reach for him, but he pulls away, teeters on his good leg, and then tumbles backward, landing on his butt.

  “That moment in the movie when the main character…” I was going to say something about when the tough one is down but can’t stand being weak and always protests too much and then ends up on their ass, humbled. Forced to accept help. A movie trope we’ve seen a dozen times or more. But this is no joke, and I don’t make one.

  “You okay?” I squat beside him. “Pete?”

  He’s propping himself up with his backpack, leaning against it, eyes closed, sun shining on his puffy red face.

  He nods.

  “You need lip balm.” I am delighted to be able to do something, even this small thing. I pop the lid off and dab his swollen lips. He doesn’t look like himself today. Not as in, He’s not himself today. As in, he does not look like Pete at all. Put a picture of this person beside a picture of my Pete, and you would have a hard time believing that they were the same person.

  “We have to go, Pete.” I lean him forward, his shoulders hot to the touch. He’s breathing fast, like a rabbit. “Let me take this.”

  He doesn’t protest this time. I ease his arms free. He winces.

  “What hurts?”

  “Everything.” He reaches for his water bottle. “Everything aches.”

  I wish I could tell him that we don’t need to go any farther today. I wish we could just stay here.

  “But we can’t,” I say.

  “Huh?”

  “We can’t stay here.”

  “I know,” he says. He says it again, in a whisper. “I know we can’t.”

  “So let’s go.” There is a knot in my throat, which is how I know that I’m going to cry. I haven’t cried about any of this yet, but seeing Pete on the ground, struggling to get up, I’m going to cry now. I offer him a hand and help him up. “We have to keep walking. Ever northeast, right? We’ll find the PNT, we’ll get on it, we’ll get help, we’ll get through this, and we will find this all really, really funny a few weeks from now.”

  “We can’t go either,” he whispers.

  I pretend not to hear him.

  He steadies himself with the stick while I arrange his pack on my front.

  “Nice,” he says with a grin. “That’s a hot look.”

  “Right.”

  “You actually look really stupid, Annie,” he says. “I’m being totally serious.”

  “You actually are really an asshole, Pete.”

  He starts to make the L-for-“loser” sign on his forehead but changes it to a unicorn horn at the last minute.

  I do the same.

  “Walk, Pete.”

  He tries to take a step. He can’t even touch that one foot to the ground anymore.

  “I’m sorry, Annie.”

  That’s when the tears come. He’s hopping down the trail ahead of me, wincing as he goes. At first I worry about him turning around and seeing me, but I can tell that he’s so focused on moving forward, there is no way that he’s going to expend the energy to stop and look back.

  * * *

  —

  I don’t frighten easily.

  But I am terrified right now.

  If I’m being honest, I might say that I am the most frightened I’ve ever been.

  Before now, I was afraid of Gigi actually dying. Her being sick was almost easy compared with that. We had a routine. I did what I needed to do, and she did what she needed to do. We still had each other.

  Before that, I was terrified when Gigi was diagnosed.

  And before that, I was terrified of my mother. Not that she’d come back, because I always hoped that she would. I was terrified of her coming back to take me with her, which she did.

  * * *

  —

  Pete is slowing down. I count the seconds between one step and the next. Two seconds. Three. Four, for a long while. Now five. Five full seconds.

  Then he stops altogether and turns to look at me, his face dripping with sweat.

  “How far have we gone?” he says.

  “How about a rest, then some more?” I put my hands on his shoulders. “We could go at least another mile like this. It’s okay to go slow. It wins the race, right?”

  He shakes his head.

  “Just one step at a time?”

  “Nope.” He sways toward me, so I brace his shoulders to keep him up and steer him toward a rock just off the trail. I park him there, where he leans forward, his hands on his knees, his head down like someone deep in prayer. I kind of wish he were, because at this point, I’m ready to believe in God if it means Pete will get better and we’ll get out of here.

  “I don’t have anything left,” he whispers. “I feel like there’s a hole in me and all my blood drained out, like there should be a trail of it behind me.”

  “You do have a hole,” I say. “In your leg.”

  “Different kind of hole,” he says. “Like a bleed-out you see in one of Gigi’s crappy horror movies from the 1970s. Like when the man gets shot in Karate Girl and takes ten minutes to die.”

  “We’re not talking about dying.”

  “Which is maybe still better than being eaten by a Tyrannosaurus rex while you’re sitting on a toilet.”

  “In the dark.”

  “In the rain,” Pete says.

  “It wasn’t raining.”

  “Yes it was!” He lifts his head at last, and he’s smiling. I feel the first moment of relief in a long time. I hug him, but just quickly because I don’t want him to know what a big deal the smile is, and how it means so much more than just the shape of his face in the moment.

  “Wasn’t.”

  “Was.”

  “Walk some more?” There’s a lightness between us, and I think it can move him forward down the trail, even if it’s just another mile. “Let’s come up with a hundred cheesy movie deaths, and then we’ll stop for another rest.”

  * * *

  —

  We start at one hundred and go down. One person describes the death, the other has to name the movie. All those hours of watching the Movie Classics Channel with Gigi after school should make this a breeze.

  “Frozen in a hedge maze,” Pete says.

  “The Shining. Too easy.” I scroll through the hundreds of cheesy movie deaths I’ve seen. “Oh! Got one. Iocane powder.”

  “Princess Bride. Stupid easy. How about…wood chipper.”

  “Fargo. Come on, Pete. I am the natural-born granddaughter of the world’s most die-hard movie fan. Now one for you. Swallowing a pill that makes you blow up like a balloon
and—”

  “And then float up into the air and explode,” Pete says. “Live and Let Die. 1973. Roger Moore as James Bond.”

  I can hear how tired he is, like there actually might be a trail of blood behind him, and I am glancing at the dirt as if it could be there. I know that his wound isn’t bleeding. We need to keep walking. We have to go as fast as we can.

  “Give me one, Pete. Come on. A hard one.”

  He takes a long time to think of one, his steps slowing as he does. He comes to a complete stop and then turns. Sweat drips from his nose and chin, and he’s breathing like he’s just run five miles. But he’s smiling. He wags a finger at me.

  “Bee stings.”

  “Candyman.” That’s not the movie he means, but I’m not sure why he’s bringing up the movie that he does mean.

  We have an unwritten rule with this game. He doesn’t bring up movies with allergy deaths, or ones that will make me think of my mom, and I don’t ever bring up movies that might make him think of his mom, who died in a way that is hard to believe, even for a movie.

  I know exactly what movie he’s really talking about.

  “Sorry, Annie. It just slipped out. I don’t know why I even thought of it. I know it’s off the list.”

  “It’s okay, Pete.”

  I don’t want to talk about My Girl. A boy and girl, best friends. He dies after getting stung by bees. We watched her die not even a week after Pete had to use the EpiPen on me. Something occurs to me for the first time ever.

  “Gigi knew about the bee sting,” I say. “That’s why she put that movie on for us when she did.”

  “You’re probably right,” Pete says. “That was her style. Leave it to Hollywood to teach the biggest life lessons.”

  “You and me on either side of her, bawling our eyes out at the funeral scene.”

  “Open casket, no less.”

  “Let’s play a different game,” I say. “Let’s do foods, alphabetically.”

  “Can we just rest here a minute?” Pete says.

  Seven words. Said lightly, even. But I know Pete. I know the meaning behind his words. It’s not just about taking a drink of water or eating some peanuts and raisins. He means he’s done for now. Full stop.

  I bet we haven’t gone two miles.

  It’s just after dawn when I wake from the sleep that I thought I’d never fall into. I sit up and look out, across to where the creek is. I can’t see it, though. The smoke is playing tricks. Hiding the mountains and making it look like we’re sitting in a field, rather than a little valley between peaks. It looks like we’d just disappear into the smoke if we kept walking. If Pete could walk at all.

  I roll toward him, still in the warmth of my sleeping bag. I’m going to unzip his and get a look at his leg, and then I am going to make an executive decision. Forward. Backward. Try to summon help right here. Something. Some action. Sanctioned by Pete or not.

  He flinches when I get close. “No!”

  “You have to show me.”

  “Wait, Annie. Just wait. Okay? Not yet?” He squeezes his eyes shut as he tries to roll away from me. He groans in pain. “Let’s just pretend the day hasn’t started quite yet. Let’s pretend that we’re still asleep. Did you have a dream?”

  “No. Come on, Pete—”

  “A nightmare?”

  “Pete—”

  “I had a dream about my mom.”

  Now, that’s not fair, because of one of our mom rules. Don’t bring up the other one’s mom, but if one of us wants to talk about our own, then we drop everything else. I sigh.

  “I’m listening,” I say. “Even though I can smell your leg from here. But go ahead.”

  “It was the same one.”

  His favorite day with her. He’s lucky that is the recurring dream he gets. Mine is so boring that when I realize I’m dreaming it, I try to get it to change into something more exciting. Actually, Pete’s is kind of boring too, but in a very sweet and special way. Precious normal, not boring.

  “But it was a little different,” Pete says. “This time she took me with her.”

  “Down the hall?” I don’t like where this is going. Literally.

  “It was summer, twilight. Still hot. My dad was in the hammock, me and my mom were on a blanket, shelling a mountain of peas we’d picked. ‘Look up, Pete!’ She pointed to the sky, where a thousand starlings were swooping and soaring together, like a celestial giant was painting swaths of peppery black, only to have them shift into another shape, and another, not a bird out of place.” Pete’s eyes are still closed, but his face has softened. “ ‘Do you know what that’s called, Pete? A murmuration.’ ”

  I wait for him to tell me more, but when a very long time—just a minute or two, but it feels long—goes by, I decide that he’s not going to, and that’s okay.

  “It’s time to get up, Pete. We have to wash your wound. I’ll boil some water.”

  “She was wearing that yellow dress with the white dots,” he says.

  Even though the dream is pretty much the same every time, what she wears is different sometimes. This dress is often in the dream, and it’s the one she wore to his tenth birthday party, so I know it.

  “Then she got up, with the bowl of peas tucked in her arm like a baby, and gave me a hand up and kept holding my hand. She walked us up the porch and past my dad, who raised his beer in a little salute. We went into the kitchen and put the peas on the counter.”

  That’s the end of the dream.

  Usually.

  “Then what?” I say.

  “She put her hands on my shoulders and said, ‘You’ll help me, won’t you?’ I nodded. Then she took my hand again and led me down the hall to the bathroom.”

  In real life, Pete was at school when she went into the bathroom to clean the tub just a week after his tenth birthday. She mixed bleach and ammonia together and died from the fumes. Pete found her in the bathroom, halfway between the bathtub and the door. His dad was just behind him, but she’d been dead for hours, and there was nothing he could do except take Pete out to the front stoop and tell him to stay there while he phoned the police.

  Pete didn’t stay there. He ran the three blocks to my house, curled up on the couch beside Gigi, and put his head in her lap, while The Big Sleep played in the background—Gigi never, ever turned the TV off, even when she slept—and I asked question after question.

  “Did you get hurt, Pete? What happened? Where’s your dad? Where’s your mom? Are you okay?”

  * * *

  —

  Right now Pete is very not okay. Maybe the most not okay he’s ever been. But he is not going down the hall to the bathroom with his mom. He’s not that not okay. That’s completely ridiculous.

  “I can smell it from here, Pete.”

  “Pretend you can’t.” His voice is strained. Exhaustion. Pain. His body doing the heavy work of fighting off the infection.

  “I’m going for help.” I can hear the fear in my voice. “I’ll get search and rescue. They’ll fly you out.”

  “You’ll get lost.”

  “We are lost.”

  “We’re not. We’re heading northeast.”

  “Shut up about northeast! Northeast! Northeast! It’s not doing us any good! Let me go ahead at least. You stay on this bearing and follow. I won’t go off this bearing.”

  “Two of us out here? Separated?”

  “Then we keep going together,” I say. “I can lash a stretcher together with the backpacks and a couple of branches. With all our straps.”

  “I’m too heavy,” he says with a little smile. “That would work if you were the one whose leg smells like death.”

  My heart fills with liquid ice. One tap and the whole thing will crack apart.

  “It doesn’t smell like death!”

 
“Rotting flesh, then. Which is exactly what it is.”

  “You really can’t walk?” I whisper it, as if that might mean it’s not quite true. “Not at all?”

  He shakes his head, sure of himself.

  “Okay, then. Fine. I can work with that. I can. I really can. I’m not just saying so either. I can get us help. Where are we?” I dig the map out of his pack, and the compass.

  He sits up, wincing, and spreads the map on his lap. He moves his finger from the trailhead we were meant to hike in on, and all along a yellow line, to an intersection at a river.

  “That’s the PNT.”

  Then he moves his finger down and over, tapping a tiny blue dot.

  “There it is.” He laughs. “I bet that’s the fucking hot spring. It was on the map the whole time.”

  “It doesn’t matter now,” I say. “Where are we?”

  He moves his finger along the creek we’re following and then stops about two-thirds of the way from where we started to our endpoint.

  “We’re somewhere near here.”

  “And by ‘near,’ you mean?”

  “Give or take ten miles.”

  * * *

  —

  So we officially have no idea where we are.

  It’s hard to tell by the lines if the terrain between here and home is easier than the shorter distance between us and Fire Camp now. We are days away from anything in either direction, and the only people we’ve seen were Ty and Paola driving off on their quad, with their dog yapping and a wake of dust billowing out behind them.

  He can’t walk.

  He can’t walk.

  He can’t walk.

  And we are in the middle of nowhere together, which I normally love. I love it so much. Except for this one time. I hate the endless dark forest, the rushing rivers, the rocky path, and the stupid hot spring Pete should not have gone into. Neither of us has said that yet. But I know it’s true, and so he’s got to know it too. The hot spring was probably full of bacteria.