The Distance from Me to You (16 page)

Who knew when McKenna would be in a place where she'd be able to check e-mail? But when she did, it would be there, this photograph of her and Sam, strong and golden, proving that this stretch of time—this idyll—had been more than just a dream.

• • •

For Sam, the four miles after that photo on the bridge were the longest miles of his life. West Virginia. Last time, going north, the reverse had been true—he'd hiked them in such fevered determination to get the hell out, and who cared where he ended up? McKenna wanted to stop in Harpers Ferry but Sam's reply was a curt “Let's wait till Virginia.”

It wasn't that he worried about running into his dad, who didn't exactly spend his weekends hiking. He really couldn't
put his finger on the problem. This stretch of time with McKenna, the two of them together, had felt kind of like a destination. Maybe crossing into West Virginia reminded him that after two thousand miles of walking, he'd ended up exactly where he'd begun.

“Look,” McKenna said. She reached out and touched his elbow. Sam followed her point reluctantly. They only had a mile to go before they reached the state line. The last thing he wanted to do was stop.

“What?” he asked after staring into the bramble without seeing anything remarkable.

“Don't you see it? I think it's a dog.” She shrugged off her pack and Sam rolled his eyes.

“Come on, Mack,” he said. “We've got one more mile in West Virginia, let's get through it.”

“We've got a lot more miles than that,” she countered, talking about their plans for the day. Sam hadn't said anything to her about his antsiness. It was amazing she didn't realize. He forgot, sometimes—the thing people always told him—he could be hard to read.

“Hey there,” McKenna said, kneeling and holding out her hand. “Come here.”

It crashed out onto the trail, a scrawny, rangy hound. Sam guessed it was a Treeing Walker Coonhound. Plenty of strays like that around here, failed hunting dogs. People picked them up for a season and then purposefully lost them on the last day of shooting. This one kept his belly low to the ground as he
approached McKenna, who turned carefully toward her pack. At the sound of the zipper, the dog started and backed away. McKenna rooted around, opening up her dry bag.

“You're not going to
feed
it,” Sam said.

“Why not?” She held out a piece of jerky. The dog lunged forward, grabbed it out of her hand, and ran back into the woods.

“Because now it's going to follow you all the way to Georgia,” Sam said.

McKenna shrugged and pulled her pack back on. She'd gotten so good at it by this point, hoisting it like the weight was nothing, a little shuffle sideways, and then righting herself like the huge, hulking thing was a part of her. She smiled at him, freckled nose crinkling, big blue eyes bright. Sam thought she looked like a photograph that might come with a frame. She looked like a girl was supposed to look, sweet and wholesome. She should have a yellow Lab or a golden retriever, not some mangy stray that nobody wanted.

“Don't say I didn't warn you when he gives you fleas.”

“Deal,” McKenna said, and they started walking. The path was just wide enough for them to walk side by side, holding hands.

• • •

It took Sam longer than he thought to shake the ghosts of his home state. Now that school had officially begun again, they had the trail to themselves during the week and often even on weekends. More than ever, time ran into itself, became
impossible to measure, even though McKenna broke down and bought a watch in Bearwallow Gap, just for when they needed to use the iodine tablets and had to measure thirty minutes.

They got to the Sarver Hollow Shelter in Virginia a good three hundred miles after they first saw the dog. It was nearly dusk, a misty night. Sam told McKenna how he'd camped here as a kid with his Boy Scout troop.

“You were a Boy Scout?” she said.

“Sure. You don't think I developed all these mad camping skills on my own, do you? Come on, I'll show you the graveyard.”

They walked down a steep incline to where Sam remembered the chimney to the old Sarver place still stood.

“My Scout leader told us the story,” Sam told her. “This guy Henry built a cabin here, lived off the land for seventy years or so, all the way from the Civil War through the Depression, and then one day just took off, for reasons nobody knows.”

Sam steered McKenna through the woods to the wrecked little cemetery. Most of the stones had been scratched and worn by time, but McKenna knelt in front of Mary Sarver's stone, still legible.

“Look, 1900 to 1909,” McKenna said. “Sad. I wish I could do one of those gravestone rubbings. My friend Courtney and I used to do them in the old Revolutionary War graveyard in Norwich.”

“There's a ghost that haunts this place,” Sam told her. “You can hear footsteps in the night, and sometimes he shows up in pictures.”

“I wish I had my camera,” McKenna said for what seemed like the thousandth time.

“When we camped here, the ghost shook one of the kids awake in the middle of the night. He woke up screaming.”

“Shut up,” McKenna said, laughing. She got to her feet and brushed off her shorts.

“I'm serious,” Sam said. “It was the ghost. George.”

“I thought you said the guy's name was Henry.”

“That's the homesteader. The ghost is George.”

“Hm. Maybe that's why Henry left. George scared him off.”

It was dark by the time they got back to the shelter. They didn't bother cooking, but ate the last of the latest dry food supply—there was a place in Sinking Creek where they could stock up again tomorrow. At some point in the night, wrapped in each other's arms on the platform in a dead, muscle-tired sleep, they both sat up at the same time. Outside, they heard the most piercing, mournful moan. The noise was so loud it filled the shelter. It went straight through Sam's bones, rattling.

“I don't believe it,” McKenna said. “It's George.”

“I'll go check,” Sam said.

“And leave me here alone? Are you insane?”

“If you recall,” Sam said, “that was your original plan. To be alone.”

“Yeah, well, in that case I probably wouldn't have camped in a haunted cemetery.”

She put on her headlamp and they got up, peering into the night. The moon was so full it made a joke out of the thin
cylinder of light from the lamp. In front of the shelter, under that wide moon, sat the hound they'd met back in West Virginia. It must have been shadowing them these past three hundred miles.

“Dang it,” Sam said. “See? I told you.”

McKenna burst out laughing. She knelt down, patting her knees. “Come here.”

The dog stopped howling and shied away. Then he stood, stock-still except for a little tail wag, staring at McKenna. As if Sam didn't exist.

“That dog's never going to let you pet it,” Sam said.

“Want to bet?”

“No. Not really.”

He put his arm around her and together they headed back to the shelter. Against Sam's protests, McKenna left a pile of jerky outside for the dog. Then they did their best to sleep through what was left of the night. They had a long way to go in the morning.

A thousand miles north
, in Abelard, Connecticut, McKenna's mom, Quinn Burney, ripped open a credit card statement. Usually she just tossed them, unopened, into the antique box for her bills. But since McKenna had started hiking the Appalachian Trail, this was the most definite way to track her progress. The texts she got from Courtney were terse and vague. They didn't sound like McKenna, and she often had to fight the urge to call and hear her voice. It was important to respect her wishes, give her space. So when these statements arrived—a little map of where McKenna had bought things, how much she'd spent—it read like a narrative of what her daughter was doing.

The latest charges were in Tennessee. Tennessee! In her life as a parent, there were moments when her children sometimes did things so different, felt things so different from herself, that all she could think was,
Where did you come from?

It was impressive. McKenna had gone so much farther than Jerry had predicted. So much farther than Jerry himself had gone on his famous summer hike. Even if she stopped now, if
she didn't make it the whole way, it would be more impressive, physically and mentally, than anything Quinn had ever done herself, possibly including childbirth.

She passed the little wall hook where Buddy's leash still hung and felt a pang of sorrow. She was almost glad she couldn't tell McKenna that he'd died. Lucy's grief—and Jerry's, and her own—was enough to deal with for now.

A bit later, driving toward the university, she slowed to a stop by the Whitworth shopping center, the new gourmet sandwich shop catching her eye. It would make her late to office hours, but this early in the semester, students rarely came by anyway.

The glass door opened with a jingle. She was the only customer except for two teenagers by the window, holding hands. The boy had shaggy dark hair that curled over the back of his collar. She did a double take. The girl looked an awful lot like Courtney. She slowed, reaching into her purse for her glasses.

Until this moment, she was fairly certain McKenna had never lied to her. McKenna was a straight-A student. There had been no visits to the principal, her room had always been clean—there had been no reason to doubt her for a single minute.

But it
was
Courtney, sitting here, in Abelard. She didn't even have a tan. All these months she'd been picturing the girls side by side, identical charges on Courtney's parents' credit card statements. Why the hell had she never thought to call them?

“Courtney?” she said tentatively as she reached the table.

Courtney looked up, her big brown eyes questioning, and then fearful, as she registered who was standing in front of her.

“Oh,” Courtney said. She extracted her hands from the boy's. “Hi, Mrs. Burney.”

“You can imagine my surprise, seeing you here,” she said, letting her voice shake for maximum effect.

“Yeah,” Courtney said. “I know.”

She could see the girl racking her brain, trying to come up with a story. She leaned onto the table, between the teenagers. “Courtney,” she said, in the voice she used with students who had one last chance to pass her class. “You need to tell me
everything
. Right now.”

Courtney let out a breath that had the barest tinge of a whimper. And then she told her everything.

Because it was the only thing she could think to do, McKenna's mom drove straight to the police station. She called Jerry on the way.

“What do you mean she's alone?” he said.

“I mean she's hiking
alone
. By herself. She lied to us. I just ran into Courtney at the deli.”

“I'll meet you at the station,” he said.

She waited outside for him and they walked in together. The officer they spoke to was young, barely older than McKenna. As he listened, sympathetic but clearly also a little amused, she wished they'd asked to speak with an older officer, someone with children—preferably someone with a daughter.

“How old is McKenna?” he asked, pen hovering over a white pad on which he'd so far written only:
Tennessee
and
Appalachian Trail
.

Jerry answered quickly. “Seventeen.”

But Quinn had noted the date with a pang a few weeks ago and said, “No. She's eighteen. She turned eighteen August 18.”

Their fight was over before it had begun. The officer shrugged and apologized. He ripped off the top sheet, crumpled it up, threw it in the trash can. He understood they were upset, but McKenna wasn't a missing person. They knew what she was doing and, more or less, where she was. And she was eighteen, legally an adult. If she wanted to walk to Georgia alone—hell, if she wanted to walk to the moon alone—there was nothing they could do to stop her.

“We could cut off her credit card,” Jerry said as they stood outside the police station. “That would force her home.”

She could tell, from the hard line of his jaw and how the color had drained from his face, he was furious. By now her fury had faded, and what she mostly felt was worried. A young girl, all alone in the wilderness. Who knew what could happen?

“No,” she said. “I don't want to do that.”

“It would at least force her to call,” Jerry said. “The first time it got turned down she'd have to find a phone.”

She imagined the look on McKenna's face. To have come that far all on her own and then be forced home? She couldn't do that to her. Besides, the McKenna who'd lied to them, who'd worked out this giant ruse with Courtney, that was a McKenna they didn't know. She couldn't be sure
that
McKenna would come home willingly. And then what?

“At least if she has the credit card, we can know where she is. We know she'll have resources.”

Jerry pulled out his phone, furiously typing in a text.

“What are you doing?” Quinn asked.

“I'm texting her, telling her we know. In case the broken phone is a lie, too.”

It felt like that part had to be true—otherwise why risk the fake texts from Courtney? But she didn't say anything, just let Jerry get his aggression out in the long and pointed text. Watching him, his blue eyes so much like his daughter's, she had to admit that in addition to her worry she felt admiration. At eighteen, she would never have been brave enough to walk two thousand miles with a friend, let alone by herself. She wouldn't be brave enough to do it now, or ever.

They had managed to raise a truly exceptional person, she thought with a mixed sense of fear and pride. Now all she could do was hope that the very thing that made McKenna exceptional would be the same thing that kept her safe.