Page 64 of Big & Lily

“I don’t recognize any of this.” We keep going. I inspect every leaf and bush hoping to find familiarity in it. I don’t. I try tomemorize landmarks, a tree with a broken branch that resembles a wishbone, a group of downed pines all covered in thick moss, a rock the size of a moose. We round a curve, and up ahead I see a wishbone-shape branch again. “Lily, we’re walking in circles.”

“Shit, Big,” my sister says. “We’re fucking lost.”

Chapter Thirty-One

“This wasn’t supposed to happen. Straight up. Straight back. That’s what you promised me.” To say I’m agitated is an understatement. “We are the last two people qualified to be lost in the woods. We don’t know anything about survival. We have no skills. We are those stupid people you read about months later after they’ve found their gnawed-on skeletons.” My breathing becomes ragged as I imagine the scene.

“Big, calm down. Take a breath. What happened to you being the stoic one?”

“I can’t do it anymore, Lily. I can’t be the one who always gets you out of trouble.”

“Me? I took one wrong turn!”

“I’m not talking about a wrong turn. I mean, for God’s sake, look where we are. My gifts from Alaska all turned out to be a snake in a can.”

“What on earth are you talking about?”

“You know, those cans of peanuts that you open and a snake springs out into your face and scares the bejeezus out of you?”

“Please don’t have a complete mental breakdown until after we get back to camp, okay?”

That request turns out to be too little too late. I shake my head and start to cry. I’m exhausted. Sweaty. Blistered. Sore. Defeated.It’s all been too much. Following my sister here, thinking I could protect her like I always have. “I can’t keep doing this.”

“Oh, come on. That’s a little dramatic. We’re barely lost.” Lily reaches into her jacket pocket and pulls out a handful of crap: a lipstick, some crumpled tissues, the granola bars, and one of Marigold’s dog-poop bags. It all tumbles onto the ground. She swoops it up, hands me a now-dirty tissue and shoves everything else back into her pocket. “Take this, blow your nose.”

“Ew, no thank you,” I say and wipe my tears and snot on my sleeve. Who cares? I’m going to die out here anyway.

Lily pulls on my arm. “Let’s go. We can backtrack along this trail and when we see something sloping down, we’ll take it. At least we’ll be heading in the right direction back to camp, I guess. So much for my sunrise,” she adds glumly. I check the time on my phone; there’s no way we’d make it now.

We walk back the way we came, in a wholly different mood than when we struck out. Lily is in front of me, her head bent to the ground. We pass our own footprints in the mud going the other way. Birds, who couldn’t care less about our dilemma, tweet and sing. A chipmunk darts across our path, startling us both. The trail curves and does indeed dip down, and I’m ever so slightly heartened that Lily’s plan might work.

“I didn’t really mean that about the canned snake,” I say to her back. “Lil, I didn’t mean it’s been all bad.”

Lily doesn’t answer. She picks up speed, a bad idea since we need to watch for the next trail. Without turning around, she finally says, “I’m leaving him.”

It’s a whiplash I wasn’t expecting. Even when she admitted we were lost, Lily was holding it together. She must have put a lot of stake in being able to face the Denali sunrise and find the wisdom she was seeking, as the wizard in Talkeetna had foretold. Now, without it, she has to rely on herself alone.

“I thought it all through,” she says.

I catch up to her and take her hand. “Okay, Lil.”

So, she hasn’t been Little Miss Carefree this whole time. She’s been masking it well, laughing, making friends, teasing me, and running off with—well, never mind. But inside the cogs have been turning. Just because she couldn’t talk about it with me, for whatever reason, it doesn’t mean she hasn’t been having her own conversation in her head. That makes me sadder than I expected.

“I’m filing for divorce.”

“I can’t blame you.”

“If he thinks...” She starts to stammer, working herself up. “If he thinks I’m stupid enough to take him back... well, I’m not!”

She starts moving a little faster, pulling her hand from mine, balling her fists.

“No one thinks you’re stupid, Lil, stop. No one thinks this is your fault.”

“Well, maybe it is.”

Now my ever-simmering anger toward my brother-in-law starts to bubble. That my sister is gaslighting herself into thinking she had a part in this? How dare he?

“Lil, how can you say that?Hecheated on you.Heslept with someone else.Hescrewed it all up.”