What I Carry

by Jennifer Longo

  “Maybe,” I said. They looked at each other and sprinted to the teacher.

  “Ms. McKinstry,” they screamed. “We want to go with the girl!”

  “I would, too,” Sean said, tossing his pack on the picnic table. “If you’d let me climb trees.”

  I wished so badly I didn’t like his voice, his…everything so much.

  Be. Cool. “I’d let you,” I said. “The ones you’re allowed.”

  All his T-shirts seemed worn and faded: this one blue with REI in block letters and, like the rest, humbly revealing his defined arms.

  “The kids always like you best. Got a lot of brothers and sisters?” he asked.

  “Hundreds,” I said, and right then small hands grabbed my arm.

  “Muir?”

  I looked down, disoriented, at a familiar face.

  “Zola.”

  “Muiriel!” Her arms wrapped so tight around my hips that my circulation slowed.

  “What…are you…?”

  “What are you?” she squealed into my side. She would not let go, she nearly knocked me off balance, and I reached to steady myself against the table. Sean was watching the scene unfold, and I tried to not see him seeing us. “Why are you with this school?” The bad-penny house was not in this district.

  “This is my school,” she said. “I’m home. With my mom.”

  I couldn’t pretend to not be relieved. “Oh, Zola,” I sighed, and untangled myself from her python arms to put one hand on her head to keep her still so I could see her face, her beautiful hair braided and beaded the way it was when I first met her, the way she liked it best. There is a pervasive lie born of the corporatization of adoption that insists birth parents are bad, adoptive parents are good, kids get “bad” traits genetically and learn “good” behaviors from adoptive parents. And worse, the disgusting additional lie that kids of color are better off removed from their families and stuck with white foster parents who can’t keep track of one goddamn swim lesson. It’s all bullshit. According to Zola, her mom occasionally worked nights while Zola slept; someone reported it. But Zola felt safe and loved at home; she believed she belonged with her mom. I believed Zola. I took her hands in mine.

  “That is…I’m so happy. Are you?”

  “Yes!” she said, and looked up and around the treetops. “Is this where you live now?”

  “I wish,” I said. “But I get to work here. I’m in a house here on the island.”

  “Is it good?”

  “So far.”

  “Good.” She noticed Sean. “Who’s this?” She didn’t wait for me to answer. “I’m Zola,” she announced, taking her hands from mine and extending one to firmly shake Sean’s.

  “Sean,” he said. “I’m a friend of Muiriel’s.”

  “Oh, okay.” Zola nodded. “So am I.”

  Sean smiled at me, his dark eyes looking right at me, and I slyly held the table to steady myself again.

  “Well, who do we have here?” Natan’s voice shattered the moment, and he strode toward us, bun high and tight, and carrying—oh God, no—a guitar.

  Please, Mother Earth, open a hole to swallow him and that guitar. Please. I beg of you.

  Zola watched Natan walking and backed near me as he knelt down before her. I stood behind her and instinctively put my arms around her. “Hello there,” he said in a tone most people save for really old people and puppies. “Are you going to hike with us today?”

  Zola nodded.

  “Fantastic!” he said. “You go, girl!” He held out his closed hand to her in a cringe-inducing attempt at a fist bump.

  Zola frowned at Natan’s fist, then leaned forward and spoke into it as if it held a microphone. “Is this thing on?”

  Natan’s smile was frozen and confused.

  Sean’s bloomed even more bright and beautiful. “Zola,” he said, “you might be my new favorite person in the world right now. Maybe ever.”

  Zola grinned and looked up at me. “Do I get to be with you? In your group?”

  “I’ll see what I can do.”

  She hugged me once more and ran back to her class. Natan got busy tuning his guitar and pretending he wasn’t just shut down by a tiny girl not about to tolerate his creepiness.

  Sean made room for me to sit beside him on the picnic table so we could be away from Natan, who put his feet up on a tree stump. Teva sandals with socks—which he removed. First the Velcro strap sandals came off. Then he peeled colorful wool socks off two long, hairy feet and began exercising his toes. Gross. I stood up, ready to bolt.

  “Muiriel,” Natan said. “That little girl a friend of yours?”

  “Sister,” I said, watching Zola race through the grass with the other kids. “Foster sister.” Sean turned to look at me.

  This is my usual: straight up from the start, unlike the cagey lie I told Kira.

  “Ah…,” Natan sighed in a dreamy way. “Foster care. Such a gift. Your parents are so generous to give shelter to the less fortunate.”

  Even more gross.

  “No,” I said. “I don’t have parents. Zola and I were in a foster placement together. Should you be barefoot right now? Aren’t we hiking in a minute?”

  Sean jumped up from the table, pulled on his pack, and handed me my water bottle. “Let’s go ask Jane if you can have Zola in your group,” he said.

  “Wait,” Natan said. “Hold up—you were a foster child?”

  “Muiriel, let’s go,” Sean urged.

  “Am,” I said. “I am in foster care.”

  His mouth opened. “Oh!” he said. “Well, then I misspoke—the gratitude is yours! How beautiful.”

  Oh. My. God.

  “Absolutely.” I nodded. “I am super grateful for every person who takes pity on me and gives me shelter.”

  “Jesus Christ, Natan,” Sean said, low. “It’s none of your business, and for fuck’s sake, gratitude? The entire fucking point of being born is that someone is supposed to take care of you.”

  Natan and I stared at him, his words ringing in the stillness.

  And what words they were. I was doomed.

  Is this what swooning feels like?

  Sexy cursing aside, why and how did Sean know to say exactly the right things? Those were some deep “nature of human familial structure” cuts. Were those conclusions he drew from losing his dad? He sounded like me. He sounded like Joellen.

  Natan shook his head and smiled, forever oily and patronizing, at Sean. “So young,” he said. “So hotheaded.”

  Sean’s face was somehow both blank and incredulous. “Dude. You’re like five years older than us.”

  Natan picked up his guitar. “Try twelve, friend. This reminds me of a song I wrote last summer. I call it ‘Tender Essence.’…”

  Sean placed his hand lightly on my elbow and steered me toward a water spigot near the lodge and away from Natan’s noxious cloud of patchouli and tentative G chord strumming.

  “Sorry,” he said when we were safely out of range, taking his hand from my arm. “Didn’t mean to manhandle you.”

  Manhandle away, sir. I came out of my haze. “Oh no,” I said. “We’re missing the musical genius that is ‘Tender Ess’— Oh Jesus, nope. I can’t say it out loud.”

  “Don’t worry,” Sean said. “We’ll just get it on Tidal.”

  Oh, we will, will we?

  He stooped to fill his water bottle at the spigot in the ground. “Have I mentioned yet today how glad I am you’re here to avoid him with me?”

  “You have now.” I liked happy Sean, but pissed Sean was his own kind of delightful. His eyes went to the name tag on my boring, stupid T-shirt.

  “Did you make that up?”

  “My name?”

  “The spelling.”

  “That’s what they called me.”

 
“Wow,” he said. “I’m kind of a Pinchot guy myself, but I mean—Muir. That’s cool.”

  Pinchot. Gifford Pinchot, John Muir’s nature nemesis. Sean was the son of a park ranger; where was the Pinchot nonsense coming from? I frowned.

  “And what would that entail?” I asked. “Being a ‘Pinchot guy’?”

  “Just that I…align with his ethics.”

  While John Muir was giving his life to fight for preservation of delicate, singular natural places, Pinchot was fighting for conservation—meaning the forests owned by the federal government should be managed and used for public recreation, logging, mining, scientific studies. So Muir’s national parks are often surrounded by Pinchot’s national forests. Park Service. Forest Service. Muir saw nature as a transcendental temple humans were obligated to cherish and protect, while Pinchot was in the Bible-minded “humans at the apex” camp and felt nature existed solely to be manipulated for human consumption. In short, Pinchot? Not a fan.

  Still. In all my life I had never met another person who knew enough about either, let alone both, of those names to have any kind of opinion about their ethics.

  “Yeah,” I said, sort of into my empty water bottle, and knelt to take my turn at the spigot. “Considering without Muir there would be no Yosemite, no Yellowstone, no Rainier, and also considering the fact that Pinchot is completely full of shit, I guess Muir is pretty cool, but I mean, you’re totally entitled to your own questionable opinion.”

  I looked up at him, standing there holding his open, forgotten water bottle.

  “Right,” he said. “That’s…you’re right.”

  “But that’s a fight for you to lose another day.”

  “Name the time and place.” He just stood there looking at me. With—was it admiration?

  Muir and Pinchot, and he’s seventeen and beautiful and here with me.

  Too much.

  I filled and capped my bottle. “Let’s get these kids worn out and lost.” From my day pack I pulled a brass compass and offered it to him. “Want to lead?”

  He held the compass, its shine worn from ten years of my anxious hands clutching it. “Heavy for hiking,” he said. “Also, I have an innate sense of direction.”

  “Lucky you.” I took it back and rubbed the brass. “This is my sense of direction.”

  “But you could lose it.”

  “You could lose yours.”

  “I…” He smiled. So much smiling. He was making it hard not to smile back, which kind of hurt; my smile muscles were severely underdeveloped.

  The kids lined up. Sean led our group (including the tree climbers and my Zola) into and safely out of the woods, on a path that did not need the help of a compass, except to show the kids what true north looks like; over boulders, across a creek, and I brought the last of the stragglers to where he stood beneath the shade of a giant cedar.

  We got the kids hydrated and back on the bus as the late-afternoon sun was still high and hot above the trees—hot for the Pacific Northwest. Seventy-five degrees and we lose our collective minds. Sean walked to the lodge, and I said goodbye to Zola.

  “Will you be here if we come again?”

  “I think so,” I said. “Probably.”

  “Can I write you emails now because I’m home?”

  I shook my head. “I’m not.”

  “When will you be?”

  I have no idea.

  The buses were ready to go, teachers lining up the kids, and I sent Zola to join them. I waved and walked behind as they pulled slowly away through the trees.

  I breathed in the forest air, sunbeams slanting through the evergreen boughs, owls and woodpeckers and black-capped chickadees rustling and singing, unseen. I closed my eyes and exhaled. No sign of Sean, so I collected my pack, said goodbye to Jane, and started down the road to the bus stop.

  The whir and click of a bicycle, and there he was beside me.

  I smiled into my backpack strap.

  “Walking?” he said.

  “To the bus stop.”

  “Join you?”

  “Sure.”

  Good, good, sounds normal, casual, except my breathing is all jacked up—calm the hell down; he’s just a person…an incredibly handsome person who loves the forest and understands foster care for some reason and seems to like you a lot, no big deal, so keep breathing—no, not like that, not so fast, just breathe like a normal person…God!

  He got off his bike and walked it. “Where do you live?”

  “It’s…I think at the end of the road the bus turns right—no, left, and then on this one path up a hill past a farm and two more lefts? Then a right down the drive. Toward the water. I think.”

  He smiled. “You’re right, that compass works great.”

  “I’ll know it when I see it,” I said.

  “Okay.”

  “I usually walk, but I’m helping with dinner tonight, so…bus.”

  “Too bad. Perfect day for a walk.”

  “ ‘I only went out for a walk,’ ” I said.

  He stopped walking. “ ‘And finally concluded to stay out till sundown, for going out, I found, was really going in. In every walk with nature, one receives far more than he seeks.’ ”

  Jesus. This guy. “That’s some good Muir for a Pinchot fan,” I managed, so charmed I could have passed out. We continued walking.

  “Well. Muir’s the better writer—I’ll give you that. Also, my dad was a ranger,” he said.

  “I heard.”

  “You’ve been asking about me?”

  “Kira told me,” I said. “Unsolicited.”

  He smiled. “Okay.”

  “It’s true.”

  “I’m glad you and Kira met. Kira is who you want to know. Toast connection for sure, and also her family is really nice.”

  “Hey,” I said. “Will you not say anything to her? About the foster care? Not a secret, I just haven’t—I lied to her. I don’t know why.”

  “Of course not. Not mine to tell.”

  He meant it. I believed him. We walked.

  “But just so you know, Kira wouldn’t be…Her aunt, we’re friends with her, too, she has foster kids sometimes. Little ones. How long have you…”

  “Whole life.”

  “Since you were born?”

  I nodded. “My whole life.”

  We reached the bus stop, a little wooden shelter beneath the trees. He stood and balanced his bike.

  “Well,” I said. “See you tomorrow?”

  “Sadly for me, no. I’m going on a trip. I’ll be gone till school starts.”

  “Oh.” An unfamiliar sinking feeling. “Where?”

  “Hiking. Wonderland Trail.”

  “The whole thing?”

  “Ninety-three miles.”

  Envy. All my life, walking nearly every street in Seattle, I’ve watched Mount Rainier rise and disappear behind clouds and above the water, and I’ve wished so badly to be there. Stratovolcano on a ten-year schedule that could erupt any day. John Muir loved Rainier: “Of all the fire-mountains…along the Pacific coast, Mount Rainier is the noblest.” The Wonderland winds through those fields around Rainier’s snowy peak.

  “Okay then,” I said. Jealous. And stung—gone for days? “See you when you get back.”

  “When I am back, would you want to maybe come over to my house and…debate the merits of conservation versus preservation? Little Pinchot/Muir rumble?”

  “No.”

  His face fell.

  “I’m not ‘debating’ the inherently superior merits of preservation. Conservation is half-stepping bullshit, and you know it.”

  “Half stepping how?” But his smile was bright. “We’re going into Rainier at the Longmire entrance—you know, the one right at the edge of Pinchot National Forest? ‘Con
servation means the wise use of the earth and its resources for the lasting good of men.’ ”

  “See, now you’re just proving my point. Pinchot is proving it! For the good of men? Like Earth’s sole purpose of existing is to be a usable resource for humans? You can do better than that.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Just— You seem like you could.”

  “I thought you weren’t going to debate this?”

  “I’m not.”

  “Aren’t you?”

  All that in me for so long, and here was someone who had it in him, too—like finding the only other person in the world who speaks the same dialect of a language I’ve made up—and now I had someone to talk to about what I love most and he loves it most, too. I was breathing fast and trying so hard to not smile.

  I failed.

  He looked relieved.

  “Do you want to go see a movie or something?” he said. “With me? Sometime?”

  Go out, not date. “Okay.”

  Huge smile. “What’s your number?”

  “I’ll ask, I don’t remember.”

  “No, yours, your phone.”

  Here we go. “I don’t have one.”

  “You don’t— How?”

  “I move every few months, and phones are expensive.”

  He leaned his bike against a tree and stepped nearer to me. “Here,” he said, and took my hand in his. He opened a Swiss Army knife, and for a second I thought, Oh, for crap’s sake, this madman is going to carve his number into my skin; have I lost all my human survival instincts because he is so beautiful and can quote Muir and Pinchot—what is wrong with me? But he pulled a tiny pen from between the knife blades and wrote his number on my palm.

  “Okay,” he said. “Well. ‘The mountains are calling…’ ”

  I frowned. “You going to finish that?”

  “ ‘…and I must go’?”

  I waited. “And?”

  “And…what?”

  The bus arrived. “Do not reduce my namesake’s words to hipster T-shirt, bumper sticker quotes you can’t finish. Pinchot lackey.”

  The bus doors opened, and, still smiling, he watched me climb in and fall into the front seat. Through the window I watched him get back on his bike, no helmet, and ride until we turned a wide corner, through the forested hills back to Francine’s house, and the whole way I thought about one thing. Who is he hiking with?