Wicked River

by Jenny Milchman

  “Lucky for us, I didn’t,” Doug replied distractedly. He had unfolded the sheet to its full length and spread it out on the ground, making sure to keep the paper a safe distance from the water. Crouching, he traced his finger along a thick, red line drawn in marker. “This looks simple enough.”

  “We’re gonna party like it’s 1999,” Natalie muttered. She liked technology. GPS was so superior to this paper labyrinth that she was surprised anyone used to be able to find their way anywhere. Still, she dropped down beside her husband on the shore, water tickling her toes. “Do you really think you can get us the rest of the way with this?”

  “Sure I can,” he said. “This map is perfectly clear.”

  A breeze picked up, and with it, a flurry of last year’s leaves. Natalie and Doug both swung around. A bird squawked in protest over something in the woods.

  Doug frowned and got to his feet, starting to head toward the trees.

  Natalie reached for his arm. “Doug? Where are you going?”

  He removed her hand gently. “I’m sure it’s nothing.”

  Then he walked off.

  Natalie remained crouched on the riverbank. She watched the water sweeping by, experiencing the sensation of being carried along by something she could neither name nor identify. The force of her relationship with Doug. Where it had brought her, and why.

  “Honey?” she called out. She flipped the wet ends of her hair out of her shirt and began to wring them out. Silence from the woods. If Doug disappeared again, as he’d done during their first carry, Natalie didn’t know what she was going to do. Fifteen or twenty miles deeper into the wilderness. No GPS. Her heart began clanging in her chest.

  But her husband came back, breaking through a barrier of branches. “Nothing,” he repeated. “We should have some lunch and go.”

  Natalie fixed peanut butter sandwiches, while Doug studied the route with a seriousness that seemed worthy of such navigation. The sun shone down overhead, and Natalie knew they should take advantage of the light, the long summer’s day. Still, she took her time, methodically arraying foodstuffs on the ground, repacking the bag. She felt hesitant to leave this spot, to depart for points unknown.

  Doug came up and gave her a squeeze from behind. “Time to set out.”

  Natalie continued her painstaking preparations.

  “Nat?” Doug said.

  She twisted to face him. “That’s just a lot of open space out there.” What had Forrest said? Six million acres in the Adirondack Park.

  “I know what I’m doing, Nat,” Doug said, so sure, so certain, that it was easy to rise, like a puppet being drawn up by its strings.

  Chapter Eighteen

  Mia sat on her bed cross-legged, commenting on her aunt’s latest Instagram uploads, all from before Aunt Nat had left on her honeymoon, of course. Aunt Nat’s account had been totally quiet the whole time she’d been gone, two long days already. Her Instagram feed looked like the city after a zombie apocalypse.

  Another weird thing about Aunt Nat’s account: Mia’s were practically the only comments on it. Aunt Nat had uploaded a bunch of pics from the wedding, and aside from one lone, wish-I-could’ve-come type thing from somebody Aunt Nat seemed to work with, there were no replies. Not even any likes.

  Mia began to scroll back up through her aunt’s posts. She didn’t tag anybody, except for Uncle Doug and Mia herself. Mia had to go back more than a year to see the usual comments and likes, mostly from the same two friends, who had super-pretty profile pics.

  Mia checked her own account—also pretty quiet, now that school had ended—then dropped her phone on her bed. She and Aunt Nat were both friendless.

  The hot, hip camps where Mia’s friends were all going required at least a month’s enrollment, and because of the July timing of the wedding, Mia couldn’t find a session that worked for her schedule. Not that she could’ve afforded those camps, not this summer anyway, with her parents living apart. Supporting two households in New York City didn’t come cheap, as Mia’s mom (who paid all the bills) liked to remind her. And neither did trapeze training, filmmaking, and wakeboarding, activities the pricey camps boasted. They were located in what Mia would’ve once called the country, before she had been to the town where Aunt Nat got married. Now Mia knew. Her friends hadn’t traded urban for rural this summer. They had gone away for two months to play in a park.

  She felt older than all of them suddenly. It was as if the wedding had taken her off for much longer than a weekend, a voyage in the old-fashioned sense of the world. Sailing ships and uncharted destinations.

  Mia padded barefoot into the kitchen, seating herself on a stool by the counter.

  “Hey, you’re up,” her mom said, sending her a look of surprise.

  “Can I have some of that?” Mia asked, pointing.

  Her mother’s eyebrows flared. “Coffee, Mi?”

  Mia shrugged defensively. “It’s decaf,” she muttered.

  Her mom continued eyeing her, then reached into the cabinet for a mug. “No more than half a cup,” she instructed. “And put milk in it.”

  Mia hadn’t been expecting a yes. She filled the mug joyfully, although the mixture tasted like crap. This was the same stuff that went into a Frappuccino?

  “Mom?” she said, taking another quick swig. “I have a question.”

  Her mother sat down. “What a coincidence,” she said, blowing on her drink. “I have one too. But you can go first.”

  Mia looked at the counter. At the Chinese restaurant the day they’d gotten home, she had referenced the dumb secret Hot Guy had told her, when in truth, weren’t her parents the ones who really hid stuff? Mia didn’t even know why they were getting divorced. But she couldn’t ask that. “What happened before the wedding?”

  “Oh.” Her mother shifted on her stool. “I’m not really sure. Doug’s friends had an argument about something.” She refilled her mug from the carafe.

  Mia hesitated. “Did it have to do with the two shady characters who showed up?”

  The words didn’t sound like anything Mia would say—she was basically quoting Aunt Nat—and her mom caught it. She looked up, her face concerned.

  “Shady?” she repeated. “How do you know about those men, Mi?” Her brows drew together. “Which brings me to my own question. Is this what Mark talked with you about when he walked you back to the inn?”

  Mia’s cheeks fired at the memory of her late-night stroll, but she shook her head. Mark hadn’t mentioned any sketchy guys. The thing he’d told her had been about that gorgeous canoe. “I heard Aunt Nat asking Uncle Doug,” Mia explained.

  Her mom nodded, looking relieved. “Well, Aunt Nat married Uncle Doug, not his friends. Neither of us needs to concern ourselves with those men.” She carried their mugs over to the sink as if the matter were settled. “What did Mark say, though?” Her mother’s phone chimed then, and she reached for it. “Darn, Mi, I have to go into work. Shelley just called in sick, and they need someone to cover on peds.”

  Mia nodded. Her mom was a nurse in the NICU at Mount Sinai.

  “Stay home, and I’ll ask your father to get here as soon as possible.”

  Your father. Not Dad. Since when had that life edit gotten made? Mia bit her lip, turning away so her mother couldn’t see her face. As if it’d kill her to be here alone. All her friends had been allowed to stay on their own for, like, two years.

  “You and I will talk more later,” her mom added in an informing way.

  An idea struck Mia. “Hey, Mom?”

  Her mother was plucking a pair of ducky-flecked scrubs out of the stacked dryer, which stood behind the kitchen door. She nodded over her shoulder.

  “Do you know Mark’s last name?” Mia would have some time before her dad got here. And she needed something to do.

  “Um, no,” her mom replied. “With everything going on before the we
dding, I didn’t even have a second to look at the program. Harding maybe? Harmon?” She paused to pull her uniform top over her head. “Look, Mi,” she said, muffled through the fabric. “I know you’re a bit at odds and ends this summer, and I know that thirteen is a bit of an odds-and-ends age anyway. But I don’t want you focusing on some guy twice your age.”

  Mia blinked fiercely. Like her mom could control even her thoughts.

  Her mom placed a finger underneath Mia’s chin. “Promise me,” she said, and Mia stared up at the ceiling, willing tears away. “No matter how cute he is.”

  “Mom!” Mia shrieked.

  Her mother smiled at her innocently. “What? You think I don’t notice things like that anymore now that I’m an old lady?”

  Mia smiled back, and it wasn’t as fake as most of her smiles had been lately, if not quite all the way to happy. She’d be by herself for at least a little while, in charge of things for once, which made all the stuff that had come to annoy her about her mom recede. She recalled the time, ages ago, when they’d been best friends practically. It was like that’d been two other people entirely.

  She wondered if she could find Mark and Brett on Uncle Doug’s Instagram account. Uncle Doug’s groomsmen had stuff going on that nobody else knew about. Just the mention of them got Mia’s parents all worked up, and Aunt Nat had been curious about whatever happened before the wedding. If Mia could figure out the deal, then she’d finally be the person who knew something first.

  But when she got back to her room to look, she learned that Mark and Brett weren’t following Uncle Doug. He didn’t have many followers and wasn’t on Instagram all that much. Probably Mia should try Twitter, maybe even Facebook, since Uncle Doug and his friends were pretty old. She decided to start with plain old Google.

  The number of hits that came up when Mia typed in Mark Harding and Mark Harmon was overwhelming, like the worst school research project ever, and a lot of them appeared in multipage articles that would take forever to scan on the tiny screen of her phone. There was an actor by the second name, and his IMDB profile and a million other mentions jammed up Mia’s feed.

  She got up and wandered in the direction of her mother’s bedroom. She hated going in there now that her dad had moved out. The room was at once still his—a shared space—and so completely changed by her mother’s taking it over that Mia didn’t even recognize it. She scurried to the night table and snatched up the laptop—her mom didn’t want Mia having a computer of her own—before going back to her room and flopping down on her bed.

  Even on the computer, the task wasn’t easy. Mia’s eyes stung from reading so much text. There were hundreds of Mark Harmons in the world, and dozens of Mark Hardings. If either of those was even the right name. Mia got distracted by a Marcus Harding who appeared to be a designer and made the coolest shoes she had ever seen. Straps strung together with jewels, heels as thin as toothpicks. This guy’s profile pic didn’t look anything like Uncle Doug’s friend, though. Mia kept clicking on shoes, shocked when a price was displayed. Made Barneys look like Target.

  She hoped her mother wouldn’t discover this site and freak out about Mia shopping for totally inappropriate footwear. She knew her mom tracked her search history. Mia couldn’t even be alone in cyberspace.

  She went to try and find the page she’d started from, clicking the back arrow robotically, but had trouble because she’d navigated so far away. This must be what her teachers meant when they complained on her report cards that she lacked focus.

  There had to be some way to find out more about Uncle Doug’s friends. She decided she’d even be willing to try Facebook—what a loser site—but she had to friend Uncle Doug first to see what his friends were up to, and Uncle Doug was in no place to accept Mia’s request. Literally.

  Mia stared at the computer screen, at a total loss.

  Then it came to her. What if she didn’t just go online? Her dad was always saying how his students used their phones first, second, and last, without ever considering other sources of information.

  It was pretty good advice actually. She should tell her dad she was taking it.

  Kicking things old school. IRL and all that.

  Because wouldn’t Uncle Doug have info about his own best friends? An old phone that had them in the contacts maybe? Their business cards or something?

  Her mother had told Mia to stay home, but Aunt Nat and Uncle Doug’s apartment was practically like a second home to Mia. It barely counted as leaving.

  Mia climbed out of bed and got dressed. She was about to go and grab the extra set of keys from the hook on the fridge when her phone trembled, caught in the folds of her comforter. A text from her mom read Your father’s on his way.

  Chapter Nineteen

  The trip had a different feel to it now. This pristine setting had a new menace; there was something sharp in the strike of their paddles as they sliced through the water.

  They had more carries than Natalie had been expecting, although Doug didn’t seem taken by surprise. The river kept petering out in swampy masses of bracken, causing Natalie and Doug to shoulder their packs and hoist the canoe with grunting, soldierly resignation. Doug called out assurances—the river’s next leg lay just up ahead; they were about to come to a lake—and he was right every time, the symbolic rendering of their position on paper clearly no mystery to him. Whereas when Natalie forced herself to examine the same sheet, her vision went blank, and her pulse rate began to climb. She longed for the GPS as she might a missing pet.

  She had to rely on her husband now, trust him completely.

  But hadn’t she been doing that all along?

  Perhaps because Natalie had been on her own since she was so young—effectively parentless given her dad’s deficits and difficulty functioning, Claudia’s efforts to step in notwithstanding—it had been easy to let Doug set their course as a couple. He’d filled a gulf in Natalie’s life whose depths she hadn’t allowed herself to face when she was single. Now Doug was steering things quite literally, and having him in that role should’ve felt comfortable and easy and perfectly right.

  But it didn’t. Something was off, in the emotional realm as well as their physical reality. The woods had an eerie hollowness to them.

  They made camp that evening beneath the chin of Snowshoe Mountain, its bulk reassuring, despite the presence of clouds. Doug had gotten them where they were supposed to go, the spot he had pointed to in the distance the night before.

  The clouds scattered before any rain fell, and their evening passed unblemished, a whiskey-colored sunset bathing the landscape while they roasted strips of jerky in the fire—the meat sizzling and smoky—and chased them with marshmallows for dessert. Natalie and Doug fell asleep beneath a nearly unbroken canopy of stars.

  Rain clouds had amassed again the next morning, and when Natalie went to brush her teeth, she saw that their supply of fresh water had run out. It seemed a milestone of sorts, a reaching of some frontier. Natalie filled both bottles from the river, rereading the instructions from the UV kit. A waterborne infection out here would be no joke.

  Doug emerged from the tent, giving her a little wave as he stumbled down to the water’s edge and doused his face.

  Natalie waved back, pointing. “Coffee’s ready.”

  Doug polished off the pot before going to dismantle the tent. Muscles worked in his upper arms as he yanked out the tent stakes; life out here made you stronger than any prepackaged workout in the city.

  Her husband seemed antsy after all the caffeine, and Natalie hustled to load the canoe while he put out their fire. Once on the river, Doug took out the map, letting Natalie paddle solo as he studied the sheet of paper spread across his lap.

  The map remained a muddled morass of streaks and blotches when Natalie looked at it, and she wasn’t as strong a paddler as Doug. The canoe kept slowing down, and she bit back a grunt of frustration.


  Doug thrust his paddle into the water, and they picked up speed before coming to another carry Natalie hadn’t anticipated. The next body of water to appear was a lake.

  “Are we on track?” she asked, once they’d set out. She lifted and dipped her paddle in what she forced herself to think of as a soothing rhythm. “You’re looking at the map an awful lot.”

  Doug let out a laugh that didn’t sound terribly mirthful. “Well, I’d better be,” he said. “But yeah, we’re on course. This lake ends there”—he pointed to the outermost confines of the body of water visible in the distance—“and then the river should pick up again almost immediately. May be shallow at the mouth for a few hundred yards. We might have to wade and push the canoe.”

  The topography went exactly as depicted, and Doug’s air of relief seemed palpable. But Natalie found it hard to duplicate his feeling. The thought of making dinner from their stash of staid supplies, purifying water, then pitching their tent, only to repeat the same sequence for another four days, suddenly seemed about as appealing a prospect as housecleaning or going to work.

  But Natalie couldn’t say such a thing. Doug was holding up his end of their early marital bargain—navigating them safely through the wilderness—and she needed to offer support. Besides, what choice did they have? They were miles and miles from anywhere.

  Resupplies. She suddenly heard the word in her head. Their guide had mentioned two such spots, both marked on the map. Doug could get them to one of those as easily as their designated put-out, couldn’t he? They could emerge from the wilderness sooner than planned.