The Distance from Me to You (5 page)

McKenna's whole body ached. The trail had done a great job of humiliating her, but the rain on the tin roof of the shelter sounded pretty, and at least she was dry. She'd known going into this that Maine and New Hampshire were the hardest legs of the trail, and Katahdin the toughest climb. She might have failed today, but she'd failed on the hardest route up the hardest section of the whole two thousand miles. Which meant everything from here would be easier than what she'd survived today. Tomorrow she'd head to the Chimney Pond Trail, which her guidebook promised was the easiest route.

From now on, she'd be smart enough to respect the trail.

Sam Tilghman stood
on the front lawn of his brother's house in Farmington, Maine. At least he thought it was his brother's house. He dug into the pocket of his jeans and checked the piece of paper against the crooked metal numbers nailed into the porch railing. He'd jotted it down from the computer at the public library, along with the phone number, though he hadn't called ahead. For one thing, when was the last time you saw a pay phone anywhere? For another, calling after two years seemed worse, more awkward, than just showing up. This way if Mike didn't want to see him, he'd have to tell him to his face.

It was kind of a nice house, which surprised Sam, and for some reason made him feel sad. He didn't know why. Maybe he was just tired. Not just tired from yesterday, tired from the last three months, since he'd left his father's house and started walking. Funny, his brother probably thought he'd moved as far away as possible from Seedling, West Virginia. But it turned out it was in walking distance, as long as you stuck to the Appalachian Trail and had a fair amount of time to kill. Nothing keeps you walking like demons at your heels.

There were no cars in the driveway, and no movement that Sam could see inside the house, apart from curtains fluttering upstairs through an open window. Something told Sam that if he climbed the porch steps and turned the knob, the front door would open. Sam could pour himself a glass of water from the tap (talk about luxury) and help himself to some leftovers. When Mike got home, Sam would be snoozing on the couch, or maybe watching TV. Wasn't that the kind of thing family was allowed to do? Walk right in and make yourself at home?

Sam took a couple steps back, surveying the place, trying to imagine his brother there. A trike sat overturned at the bottom of the porch stairs, and he could see a plastic playhouse in the backyard, dirty as hell but still managing to look cheerful. Sam didn't even know Mike had gotten married, let alone had kids. How did you end up with kids old enough to ride tricycles in two years? They must be the wife's—or girlfriend's—kids. What would Sam say to her if she came home first? For all Sam knew, Mike hadn't even told her he had a brother.

Sam walked around to the back of the house and shrugged off his pack. It felt good to get the weight off his shoulders, even though by now he was used to it. Someone had planted a garden, with rows of fat heads of lettuce nestled beside rising stalks of corn. There was a back deck, too, with a table that had an umbrella, and a tabby cat enjoying the shade. He and Mike had a cat once, when they were kids, until their father kicked it so hard that it ran away and never came back. Some version of that happened to all their pets. But you could tell this cat
had never been kicked. It watched Sam with passive disinterest, totally unafraid.

Beyond the messy tumble of the yard and garden lay a low thicket of vegetation with a worn path inviting Sam to investigate. West Virginia this time of year would be hot, heavy, muggy. “Like living inside someone's mouth,” Mike used to say. But here in Maine, headed toward late afternoon, the air was livable, a cool breeze ambling by every few minutes.

Sam grabbed an ear of corn off a stalk and walked onto the path, where it was even cooler in the shade of pine, oak, and maple. He peeled the husk back and bit into the sour/sweet kernels still a couple weeks away from being ripe. In a few minutes he could hear the burbling of a stream. Funny, the relief he'd felt at how civilized his brother's house looked; now he felt a different kind of relief, the familiarity of a dirt path, barely two feet wide, brush and woods on each side, slivers of light reaching through the increasingly taller trees. Sam had been on the trail for so long, it was like all those years growing up in a house, in the regular world, had never even happened. The woods felt more normal than his house ever had. Maybe even more safe, not that safe was exactly what Sam was after.

When he reached the stream, he saw it was bigger than he had expected, wide and fast. He took off his shirt and knelt down, splashing water on his face and under his arms, and wetting his hair. Not much of an improvement, but a little. Hopefully Mike would let him inside for a shower and a hot
meal. Maybe they'd even have a washer and dryer so he could wash his clothes. Mike had taken off when he was eighteen and Sam fifteen, and Sam had already been bigger, taller. But he'd lost a good bit of weight on the trail, so maybe he could fit into Mike's clothes now.

As he pulled his grimy T-shirt over his head, he noticed a green wine bottle stuck in a tangle of moss by the shore. He fished it out of the brush, pulled out the cork, and found a note inside. It started:

To the Finder of this Note: Greetings. You are part of an experiment in flood dynamics, and also the poetry of streams.

The note said that the bottle had been tossed in the stream in Avon, Maine. It asked whoever found it to mail back the answers to a bunch of questions, like where and when he'd found the bottle, in what circumstances, along with his name, address, and any other information he felt like giving.

For some reason, this made Sam happy. It seemed like a good sign. Avon was only about twenty miles north of where he was, but the note said to respond even if the bottle was found just a hundred yards downstream. It was a good mission, a friendly reentry into civilization. Maybe one of Mike's kids could help him. Didn't little kids like this kind of thing? If Sam proved himself to be a good uncle, Mike and his wife/girlfriend
might invite him to stay for a while. He could get his head together, get a job, make a little money. Maybe he'd even sign up for one of those GED courses.

He tucked the note into his back pocket and carried the bottle to the house, where he could toss it into Mike's recycling bin. Then he sat on the front stoop to wait for someone to come home. It was time to focus on the future instead of the past.

• • •

Sam's past had ended one morning in March, just two months before he was supposed to finish high school.

First there was a searing and shocking pain, along with a sizzle. Sam's dad had a longtime habit of using him as an ashtray when he'd had too much to drink, but his doing it while Sam slept—when his dad couldn't even pretend to have been provoked—made something snap inside Sam. He stood up and slammed his father against the wall.

His father stared at him, his eyes glassy. Sam's rage overwhelmed him, along with a sudden new sense of his own strength. He pulled his dad up and slammed him against the wall again. Rotten whiskey and bad breath wafted across his chin. How had Sam missed it? At some point, he'd gotten taller than his dad. In his grip, the man felt small and soft. Whereas Sam felt clearheaded. He felt strong.

I could kill you, Sam thought. I could kill you right now with my bare hands and no one would blame me.

Even though Sam hadn't said the words out loud, he could
tell his dad heard them and knew they were true. No one would blame Sam, he wouldn't even blame himself, thinking of all the years his dad had beaten up on him and Mike. Their mother. Still, he let go, and his dad stumbled out of his grip, lurching forward with a rancid burp and making his way out of the room. Sam heard a soft
thud
, probably his dad landing face-first on the couch.

He couldn't remember making up his mind. Sam grabbed his old frame pack from the back of his closet, along with a couple water bottles and his sleeping bag—a good one that his grandmother bought for him the year before she died—and Mike's old green canvas tent. On his way out the door, he stopped to look at his dad, passed out on the couch.

“I'm not leaving because I don't want to kill you,” Sam told him. “I'm leaving because I don't want to be a killer.”

Nothing, just a muffled snore. Good riddance, Sam thought. He walked out the front door and kept walking all night long until he hit the Appalachian Trail. Then he kept on walking north.

• • •

By the time someone came home, Sam had settled into a rocking chair on the front porch. A woman driving a ratty station wagon pulled into the driveway. Sam could see two bright redheads in the backseat. The look of the mom when she got out of the car surprised him. She was very thin with no makeup, hair pulled back in a braid. Pretty, but she looked tired. She looked very much like an adult, which wasn't how Sam thought
of Mike. The last time he saw him, he hadn't been much older than Sam was now.

The woman said something to the kids before trudging toward the house. For a second Sam thought maybe she knew who he was. Maybe his dad had woken up that morning in March, full of regret, and had become frantic when he found Sam gone. Maybe he'd done something a regular parent would do, like get on the phone and call everyone Sam might have reached out to. Sam had only shown his face in the small towns along the trail. For all he knew, his picture could be all over Facebook and Twitter. He might even be on one of those billboards. He was still seventeen, technically a missing child.

“Hi,” the woman said tentatively, stopping at the foot of her own porch as if she needed his permission to come any closer.

“Hi,” Sam said, afraid again that he'd got the wrong address. “I'm Sam. Mike's brother.”

She hesitated a minute, like she was trying to work out in her head if she'd ever heard of him before. “Oh,” she finally said. “Oh right. Sam. Hey. I'm Marianne.”

“Hey,” Sam said, and he stood up. She walked up onto the porch and held out her hand. He could tell that she'd thought about hugging him, but decided not to, and he couldn't blame her. The hand bath in her little stream was the closest he'd come to laundry or showering in over a week.

He shook her hand, then waited for her to say something like,
Thank God you're okay
, or,
Everyone's been so worried about you!

But she only said, “Well, this is a surprise.”

Sam usually felt pretty comfortable around women. They tended to like him right away. But instead of giving her a slow smile, or trying to charm her, he found himself blurting out, “So did Dad call? Have you guys been looking for me?”

She looked confused. Then she shrugged, her face rearranging itself into a kindness that Sam liked. She was smart. In one second, she understood that Sam wanted to know if anyone had been worried.

“No,” Marianne said. “No, he didn't. But I'm very glad to see you, just the same.”

• • •

The two redheaded kids weren't Mike's, and neither was the house. Marianne used to live here with her ex-husband. She didn't go into a lot of detail about what had happened to him, but was otherwise friendly and chatty. She gave Sam some clean sweats and a T-shirt of Mike's, and showed him the bathroom and the washing machine.

Marianne had refused his offer to help with dinner, so Sam sat at the kitchen table with the older girl, Susannah, filling out the questions from the bottle. Marianne told Sam how she worked at a day care, so she could bring Susannah and Millie with her every day. Mike worked at the Save-A-Lot, bagging groceries.

“He'll be a cashier soon,” she said.

By the time Mike got home, Sam's clothes were tumbling in the dryer. Sam could tell when he came in that Marianne had
already called to give him a heads-up. He looked on edge, like his long-lost little brother wasn't the most welcome sight in the world. He also looked kind of bloated and puffy, and older than . . . how old must Mike be by now? Twenty? Twenty-one?

“Hey,” Mike said. “Look what the cat dragged in.”

Sam stood up to shake Mike's hand, hunching his shoulders a little so he wouldn't tower over his brother. This wasn't deferential. It was strategic. Mike could be competitive, and right now, Sam needed to make sure he didn't feel threatened. He needed him to be a big brother.

Mike clapped his hand onto Sam's shoulder, squeezing a little. “What are they putting in the water back there in Seedling?” he said. “Growth hormones?”

Marianne laughed, sliding chopped onions into a wide frying pan. They sizzled as they hit the oil, and Sam breathed in the scent. Sometimes, lately, his body forgot to be hungry. But it had been a long time since he'd smelled a home-cooked meal.

Mike grabbed two beers out of the refrigerator. “Let's go out back,” he said to Sam. “You can fill me in.”

At the kitchen table, Susannah lifted up the pen they'd been using, giant blue eyes imploring.

“We'll finish when I come back,” Sam promised her.

• • •

Things started out okay, with Mike showing him around the yard and asking him questions about the past couple years.

“Typical,” he said when Sam told him about the cigarette.

Mike pulled up his shirt to show him a couple of his own scars, and reminded him about the time Dad had broken his wrist dragging him into the kitchen to clean up after dinner. When his wrist swelled up, their dad had made a deal with both of them, saying he'd only take Mike to the emergency room if they promised to say he'd fallen on his Rollerblades.