Two hours later, after getting dressed, packing up, and leaving our room card at the front desk, Michael and I were trekking southbound down the beach, our backpacks on our shoulders and our hands joined between us. The sand was shifty and hard to walk in, but Michael said that as soon as we had passed the borders of the town, we would cut east into the woods and hike up the mountainside from there. He had already found all the necessary maps, and he assured me that he knew how to survive in many different climates--for him, this would be easy.
“Have you hiked around here before?” I inquired, smiling to myself at his confidence in himself, at the way he walked and talked and laughed.
“Oh, sure,” he said breezily. “Way back in Boy Scouts.”
I giggled. “You were not in Boy Scouts.”
“For a year or two I was--when we lived in upstate New York. But don’t worry, I went here with a friend a few years ago, he was a freelancing wildlife photographer and he wanted a picture of all the different animals that lived up here…he thought he would be able to get a good picture of a bear,” he snickered. “Luckily we didn’t run into one….”
I listened to the story of their hiking trip with fascination--I loved Michael’s stories. Not only were they more interesting than mine in a way that had nothing to do with magic and plot twists, but they were real, they had happened on this earth, not a single bit of them was fictional. I was entranced by the images that swirled through my mind and vowed to myself that if I ever went home again, which I sincerely doubted, then the first thing I would do would be to buy a lot of nonfiction books and see if they were as interesting as Michael made them seem.
He told me story after story as we hiked across the sand, and then through the woods--the ground becoming more rocky than sandy, and then suddenly earthy and green. I stared at the scenery around me--the tall, serene trees, bright and healthy in the summer sun, birds and squirrels and little rustling things hiding everywhere in the branches and the undergrowth. Michael followed the map in a near-straight line that he said was east-southest (I took his word for it) until he found a small, clear, babbling stream covered with rocks on the bottom and teeming with water plants and fish. We followed it uphill; it was beautiful, capturing the sunlight like shards of crystalline aquamarine, teeming with life and so pure and clean that I wouldn’t let Michael make me drop little tablets into it to purify it, instead drinking it right out of my hands.
“You’re going to get sick,” he muttered, but when I replied cheerfully and truthfully that I had never been sick in my life, he gave up, letting me do what I pleased.
The forest where we hiked was absolutely lovely, sloping very gently uphill--I could only really tell that we were on a mountain when we occasionally had to climb up rocks that seemed to grow out of the earth as naturally as the trees did, or when we reached a small outcropping or clearing and found that we could see all around us, several yards higher than we had been before. I wished that I could paint a picture of the ocean; Michael snapped a few photos with a little film camera, compact but clearly the tool of an artist, telling me that he would develop them later and put them somewhere special, maybe reproduce one or two with watercolor or charcoal. He let me play around with it a bit, telling me when I asked that he had taken a photography class in high school for a few months before he had had to move again.
“Where was the high school?” I asked curiously.
“Canada,” he replied, frowning as he concentrated. “Quebec, I think. Yeah, it was Quebec, Newfoundland was where we went next.”
Michael, it seemed had been everywhere; he showed me, when we took a break by the stream (which was now more of a river in my eyes, as deep as I was tall and twenty feet across) he pulled out a map of the world that he seemed to carry around with him at all times--for reference, he said vaguely--and pointed out all the places that he had been. The map was soon covered in little black Sharpie dots--he had been to every continent except Antarctica--because, as he said jokingly, if he wanted to freeze to death, he would prefer to do so in Alaska, Russia, or Greenland, where there were at least some people to freeze with--and had been as far south as Cape Horn (which he didn’t recommend) and as far north as Sevoromorsk in Russia (where the radiation had nearly killed him). The hottest place he had ever been to was in western Egypt, in the Sahara Desert, and it had nearly killed him at night because he had been so ill prepared for the vicious cold (because, as he explained, sand didn’t hold in heat, and became freezing when the heat from the sun bled out of it). Basically, he advised me, it was best not to go to one extreme or the other. Europe had been nice, and Brazil--and of course, it was always comforting to be in the United States, even if he wasn’t technically a citizen. He liked civilized places much better than other places--though western Alaska, where he had first seen the Northern Lights, was one of his favorite places, even though practically no one had been near him for miles and miles.
Our food was simple: rice, bread, and energy bars for breakfast, cold-cut sandwiches for lunch, and Michael promised something hot for dinner that turned out to be two fish roasted over the fire in a sheaf of tinfoil. Catching and skinning the fish had been a messy business--Michael had had to improvise a fishing line from a hook he had brought with him tied to a piece of tough twine and baited with a bit of hot dog, and had had to use his shirt for a net--but I had helped, and before too long we had had them all wrapped up in the heart of the coals, piling wood up all around it to keep the fire going while we washed up in the stream. It had been a long, hot day, and the water was pleasantly cool, so I decided to strip down to my underwear again and go for a twilight swim; Michael joined me but tried all the time not to stare, and turned away completely when I changed my clothes without giving him any warning--I had wanted to see what he would do, and felt absolutely no embarrassment or reservation about stripping naked in front of him, but he wouldn’t look at me. Even when I had dressed again in clean, dry underwear, which I fully intended to use as pajamas, he was still blushing, and handed me a long white t-shirt of his to wear to bed so I wouldn’t get cold. I put it on reluctantly, though secretly thrilled by the somewhat scandalous practice of wearing his clothes and stealing the scent of laundry soap and soft cologne and Michael that he left on them.
The fish were delicious, as were the bits of fruits and vegetables, as well as the rest of the hot dog, that he grilled on a small frying pan to go with it. The fire seemed like an irregular way to cook anything--Michael had advised me beforehand to spit out the burnt parts and the parts that seemed undercooked--but it was much, much more fun than cooking things at home--and a hundred times better, of course, than simply ordering food from a restaurant. Michael and I couldn’t keep our mouths shut, questioning each other continuously all through the meal, often with our mouths half-full. Afterward we roasted marshmallows, Michael humming under his breath, me curling up next to him, my hair loose and already mostly dry and warm.
“I brought chili,” he said around a mouthful of marshmallow after a long, peaceful sort of silence. “Tomorrow we can have hot dogs.”
“Okay,” I said placidly, hardly caring what we ate or even what we did, as long as Michael and I were alone together, far away from civilization.
He frowned, staring into the fire, squinting as he tried to focus with his bad eyes at his marshmallow. “How long were you planning to stay out here, sweetheart?” he asked me quietly, sounding slightly worried. “I mean, we have to plan ahead and conserve supplies, that’s all…I think I brought enough for maybe a week more, but then--”
“Your marshmallow is on fire,” I told him, and he hastily pulled it out of the flames and blew it out. We had figured out long ago that he could never tell when his marshmallow had become one with the fire until it was far too late to salvage it.
He frowned at the blackened but still gooey bit of fluff, then blew on it again before taking a cautious bite. “So,” he persisted, glancing down at me, “how long?”
I shrugged. “Honestly? I don’t ever want to go back.”
He took his time responding, frowning thoughtfully as he munched on his marshmallow, then stuck the roasting twig back into the fire, burning away the sticky residue. “We have to go back sometime,” he said gently, turning to kiss the top of my head. “If only for an hour or two. We can’t stay out here forever.”
I scowled into the flames. “Why not?”
“Well, for one thing,” he told me slowly, “I’m not sure that what we’re doing is legal. There’s a good chance that this isn’t a designated camping spot…it might even be a national preserve. If we stay here for too long, we’ll be found out, and we’ll get into trouble. And for another thing, I’m going to have to pay the loan on my house soon--if we’re leaving forever I’d like to pay that and leave for good, but I would need to put my things somewhere safe. Like in a vault somewhere. I forget where my American one is, I have it written down somewhere, but I have one in Switzerland where I put things before I go drifting around.”
He cleaned the marshmallow and smoke off his hands with a small wet towel, then threw it onto the rock where our other clothes were drying and began to slowly, soothingly pet my hair. “Baby,” he said very softly, “I’d love to start drifting again, I really would. And I’d love for you to come with me. But if we’re going to stay out here for longer than two weeks, then I need to take care of some things first. You understand that, don’t you?”
“No, no, of course I understand….” I must have looked more upset than I was. What did I care, as long as I never had to go home again? I would go missing, I didn’t give a damn, but Michael could do as he pleased. Still, what would we do? How long would we stay? I thought about it for a minute or two, and Michael, knowing the look that I gave him, let me have enough time to figure it out.
Finally, I said, “All right, then. What if we hiked up the mountain this week, then back down it next week…and we’ll make it back to your house by the end of two weeks, just like you said. Can we decide what to do when we get there?”
Michael nodded, smiling down at me. “Yes,” he told me, “we certainly can. That sounds very nice, actually.”
I smiled back. “I think so, too.” I leaned against him and closed my eyes, breathing in his smell and the scent of pine needles, smoke, and earth. A cool breeze lifted my hair, curving the column of smoke away from us, and I inhaled the scent of leaves and summer flowers as they closed for the night. It was wonderful out here, beautiful, serene, and exciting for me, who had never seen anything like this before.
“I think it’s time for us to go to bed,” Michael yawned after another hour of quiet, easy chatting between the two of us. I nodded and helped him set up the tent, which was much easier than I had feared; then I helped him pull out the two folded blankets and carry them and our two backpacks inside. “Do you want your own pallet?” Michael asked me. “Or should we share?”
“Let’s share,” I said eagerly, so we spread one blanket out on the slightly cushioned bottom of the tent, then buried the fire under a layer of earth before crawling inside the tent, burrowing together under the second blanket. I curled up in Michael’s arms, and he smiled as he carefully reached up and unzipped a flap on the ceiling above our heads, exposing a clear plastic section through which we could see the stars.
“It’s so beautiful here,” I whispered. “I never want to go home.”
“What was so bad there that you had to run away?” he asked me quietly, but I could not answer him easily. He gave me my time, not bothering with the you-don’t-have-to-tell-me business, waiting for me to speak.
“I just,” I finally told him, “wanted to get away from it all. I felt as though…I didn’t have a purpose in that world anymore. As though everything I knew were a lie.”
Michael gently rubbed my back beneath his shirt, looking straight into my eyes as he promised me, “You have a purpose here, with me. You are never useless.”
Even without my light?
But my light wasn’t Michael…my light couldn’t even come close to what I had now. I felt its absence, certainly, but if I had to choose, I would choose Michael--over and over and over again, every single time.
Smiling, I whispered a goodnight to him and closed my eyes, resting my cheek on his shoulder. I could almost feel the starlight shining down on us as he whispered, “Goodnight…I love you,” in a strange way, as if he weren’t used to saying it, but he meant it with his whole heart.
“I love you too,” I breathed, and then I was gone.
~
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