Page 61 of Mirror Image

Chapter Twenty-Two

Mary

Four and a half years ago

I kept waiting for the other shoe to drop—for Leo to call in the reserves, the rangers, the backwoods po-po or whoever it is you’re supposed to call when identical twins land a catfight in a raft on Class IV rapids. But he never did, even though he probably should have. It didn’t look good, him coming down hard on Richard for putting his hands on Sam, but not on Sam for putting her hands on me. Not that it would have been just Sam. If she went, we went. After everything that we’d been through, I wasn’t about to leave her on her own while I finished the course without her. Instead, we got off with a stern warning and having to travel in separate rafts for the remainder of the course—which came faster than I could have imagined.

Halfway through week ten, we were preparing for our final test, a thirty-six-hour solo expedition. Everyone would be on their own to implement all the skills we’d learned over the course of two and a half months. We had to plot a route to our assigned spots, navigate our way there, set up our own camp, cook our own meals, and spend the night before hiking on to a predetermined meeting spot, where we’d have one last night together before heading back to North American Wilderness Academy headquarters.

“I don’t want to go out alone,” Nan (a.k.a. Nantucket) whined as she stirred the big pot of vegetarian chili. She’d turned out to be considerably less pretentious than her name, but she was a serial fretter. “What if something happens?”

“What do you think’s gonna happen to you?” Sam asked from the table where she was preparing a box of brownie mix. “Are you afraid aliens will abduct you? Or that there’ll be some disfigured, hatchet-wielding murderer waiting to carve you up like a Thanksgiving turkey?”

“Not helping, Sam,” I muttered.

“No,” Nan said, “of course not . . . Well, okay, maybe the axe guy—a little. But what if there’s a bear? Or if I accidentally set my sleeping bag on fire? Or—”

“Oh my God, Naaaaaan!” Sam groaned, drawing out the other woman’s name in exasperation. “Stop already! You know where you’re going and how to get there. We’ll all be within a quarter mile—we’ll probably be able to see one another’s campfires! Hell, we’ll probably be able to hear you if you yell, and Leo even said he’s going to hike around and check on everyone. Besides, wasn’t this the whole point of the last ten weeks—to be able to do this on our own?”

“Yeah, but I get it,” Martin interjected as he brought over another armload of firewood. “It’s different out there alone. And if we don’t find our way back to base camp, we don’t pass our solo excursion. If we don’t pass our solo excursion, we won’t get our credentials—”

“Oh, for fu—” Sam threw up her hands in irritation, stopping herself before she could drop the f-bomb—another condition of our probation after the river brawl. “Will you all please just chill already?”

“You got this, Nan,” Martin agreed as he sidled up beside her and draped one of his arms across her shoulders.

Sam and I looked at each other.

“Uh, something you guys wanna tell us?” my sister asked.

Nan looked besotted. Martin looked sheepish.

“Yeah, we’ve been kind of together for a few weeks now. We didn’t want to say anything till we were at the end, though. It’s kind of frowned upon—having relationships while you’re out on the course.”

“Three weeks?” I echoed incredulously. “How on earth did the two of you keep it quiet for so long?”

“My question exactly,” Sam piped up, waggling her eyebrows suggestively. “How did you keep it quiet? I mean you’re never farther than ten feet away from someone out here.”

Nan’s face heated with the inference.

“Where there are woods, there’s a way,” Martin quipped with a wolfish grin.

Out here—on the final solo test of the program, miles from the rest of the group, with no instructor hovering nearby, the silence had a way of loosening memories I’d spent years packing down tight. Maybe it was the high Oregon air or the knowledge that, for the next two nights, every decision was mine alone. Maybe it was just the strangeness of being out here without anyone else’s fear or expectations pressing in.

But something about the sharp, resinous smell of the pine needles under my boots cracked open a door I hadn’t touched in ages.

I suddenly remembered the night my dad pitched a tiny tent in our backyard because I’d announced, with very serious fourth-grade conviction, that I was “old enough to camp.” The wilderness in question was forty feet from our sliding-glass door, but he treated it like the Cascades. Mom brought us hot chocolate in mugs with cartoon bears. Dad taught me how to check for “wild animal tracks,” which turned out to be the neighbor’s cat.

He never laughed at me.

Not once.

He took my big, brave idea seriously.

He made it real.

I hadn’t thought about that night in years. Maybe I hadn’t let myself.

But here—under real trees instead of the backyard maple—I could finally feel what it had meant: