The Distance Between Lost and Found (10 page)

After a second, Hallelujah asks, “Why?”

“It's harder to light, but wet wood smokes more when you burn it.”

Hallelujah nods, understanding. A better smoke signal.

“Also, we'll be less likely to start a forest fire,” Jonah adds, piling up more sticks.

“Um, guys? Y'all have to look at this. . . .” Rachel is staring in horror at her legs. She's wiped off the mud to reveal angry red welts. The surrounding skin looks extra pale in contrast. “Oh my God!” she wails. “It itches so bad!”

Jonah walks over and squats down. “Looks like poison ivy,” he says. “You must've sat in it.”

With dawning realization, Hallelujah stares at her itching hands. They're covered in a spotty red rash. She thinks of the soft green plant carpet beneath the tree roots, and she knows. “Under the tree,” she says.

“Yeah, probably.” Jonah starts examining his legs. He has a few red splotches on his calves, but nothing major. “You're lucky you're in jeans.”

Hallelujah thinks of her raw, chafed inner thighs. Luck is relative. But she holds up her hands, the palms red and puffy, and says, “I still touched it.”

“What am I going to do?” Rachel spits through clenched teeth. She's breathing heavily, like it's taking a lot of effort not to scratch.

“Did the mud help?” Jonah asks. “Did it itch less before you cleaned your legs?”

“Yes—no—I don't know!” Rachel throws her hands in the air.

Hallelujah scoops up a handful of damp earth and runs it through her hands like she's lathering soap. The itch lessens. Just a little. “Try it,” she says to Rachel.

Rachel slaps mud onto her thighs, grumbling something about just getting clean and not being able to handle this. Once her legs are covered, she says, loud, “Can we at least eat something?”

Hallelujah's stomach growls in reaction. Breakfast—so small—seems so long ago. She digs out an energy bar for each of them. Rachel tears into hers, wolflike. Jonah takes two bites and folds the package closed, sticks the remainder in his pocket, goes back to the fire preparations. Hallelujah eats hers slowly, trying to savor it, to make it bigger than it is. Also trying not to touch anything but the wrapper with her muddy hands. And trying not to think about the fact that they're down to five now. Five energy bars and a banana.

And that stupid Diet Coke. It doesn't even have any sugar in it. It's useless.

Like me
, Hallelujah thinks before she can help it. And just like that, she decides not to be useless anymore. It isn't only up to Jonah to get them out. Or up to the rescuers to find them. She can do more than just keep from falling behind.

She stands. Holds on to a tree until the light-headed feeling of standing too fast passes. Her stomach, having taken in three hundred calories, wants more, more, more, but she ignores it. She walks over to Jonah.

“What kind of wood do you need?” she asks.

He looks at her. Then says, “Try for damp, not soggy. And not rotting.”

She nods, looking down at the pile. She tries to memorize the appearance of those branches. Then she walks downhill.

Jonah lets her go. But at the last minute, he adds, “Stay close.”

S
HE
'
S CARRYING A HEAVY LOAD OF STICKS AND BRANCHES
, trying to ignore the burning where her palms touch the rough wood, where the mud has smeared, when she sees it. A patch of bright yellow dandelions. She stares. A scene pops into her head: her middle school graduation dinner, a fancy restaurant, the salad arriving with dandelions on top. Leaves and petals. Her dad refusing to eat them. “Weeds. I'm not eating weeds.” But she'd tried them. They tasted like lettuce, but with a sharp bite. She's been meaning to use them in a recipe of her own.

She looks around for a landmark. That crooked tree. The dandelions are by that crooked tree.

She stumbles over her feet getting back to the top of the mountain, to their small camp. She drops the wood in a pile next to Jonah's fire pit.

He glances up. “Thanks.” Then he really looks at her. “Everything okay?”

“I think I found something.” She's a little out of breath, not from the hiking but from the excitement. Her hands tingle. “Something we can
eat
.”

“Seriously?”

Hallelujah nods.

“Show me.”

Rachel looks up, interested. But she doesn't move from her mud-covered seat.

Jonah says, over his shoulder, “Watch the fire. We'll be right back.”

Hallelujah leads him back to the crooked tree. Her stomach flips at the sight of the dandelions. She didn't realize she was this hungry, still, but of course she is because she's had two energy bars and a few sips of orange juice today and nothing else, and they've walked and walked and walked.

“Here,” she says. “Do your Boy Scout thing.”

“Dandelions?” he asks. He raises an eyebrow, picks a flower, and examines it. Smelling. Studying. His tongue darts out to touch the stem, the petals, the leaves.

Hallelujah can barely stand it. “I had them once with my parents. In a salad.” She feels like an animal. She wants to tear the flowers from the ground and stuff them into her mouth until her stomach is full.

“I think it's okay,” Jonah says.

“You think?”

“Well, seeing as I don't have a field guide to edible plants on me . . .” He flashes her an annoyed look. “It's kind of a risk.”

“Yeah, but we—” Hallelujah lowers her voice. Not that Rachel is likely to hear her from this distance, but still. “Even if we cut meals in half, we run out of food tomorrow. What if they don't find us? What if—”

Jonah cuts her off. “Right. You're right. Anyway, I don't think these'll kill us. At most, we'll get the runs. Which isn't great, but we can get more water tomorrow.”

Hallelujah grimaces. For everything good, there's a possible side effect.

“Get as many as you can carry.” Jonah starts to pull the flowers out by the roots.

“Um. Maybe I shouldn't touch them.” She shows Jonah her muddy, poison ivy–covered palms. “We probably don't want to eat . . . all this. Right?”

“Good call. Can we use your jacket?”

Hallelujah nods. She slips out of her jacket and lets Jonah drop handful after handful onto the fabric. Then she carefully wraps up the bundle of dandelions and carries the jacket back to their camp, Jonah right behind her.

When Rachel sees their bounty, her eyes go wide. Her mouth actually forms a round
O
.

“Rachel, I've got a job for you,” Jonah says. He takes Hallelujah's jacket and plops it down in front of Rachel. “Can you get the dirt off these? And Hallie, can you find some more wood?”

They work. By the time the sun is hanging low in the late-afternoon sky, Jonah has a good-size fire going. Smoke rises in a column, blowing lazily in the breeze. They all move upwind of it.

Jonah looks satisfied. “If anyone's looking for us—which they are, for sure—they'll see the smoke coming from up here where there's no campsite, shouldn't be any people, and then it's just a matter of getting to us. Plus,” he adds, “from here we should see 'em coming.”

Hallelujah's arms ache from carrying wood. Her legs ache from climbing all day. Her back still feels bruised from her fall into the ravine. Her hands itch so, so much. The skin on her thighs burns from being chafed by wet denim. Her heel blister has popped, and she thinks her sock has stuck to it. But she's pleased with their work. Proud. The emotions from earlier, the hysterical laughter and tears, they're gone. Replaced by a sense of peace. They did what they could do today. Beat Mother Nature.

She deliberately pushes tomorrow out of her head.

They sit next to the fire as the air grows chill, as the sun drops even lower toward the horizon. They each have one-third of Jonah's banana, one-third of an energy bar, and handful after handful of bitter dandelions.

It rains on them again, just once. A sudden, short storm. They don't even bother to look for shelter. Just hold their water bottles to the sky and let it happen.

Jonah stares at his fire as it goes out. He takes off his jacket and throws it over the remaining wood, tucking the edges like he's tucking a child into bed. And then he waits. When it's been a good five minutes without rain, he starts a new fire on top of the smoldering, wet remains of his earlier work.

Hallelujah doesn't ask what she can do to help this time. She can sense that he needs to do this alone. Plus, it's not like she can find good wood now, at twilight, after a storm like that. They'll have to use what they've got. What Jonah saved.

She huddles next to Rachel. It's getting colder and colder, and she can feel Rachel shivering. She wraps her coat around them both, trying to share body heat without touching Rachel's hive-covered legs. She doesn't want to get any more poison ivy rash than she already has.

Jonah rebuilds. Hallelujah watches him. Rachel stares into the place where the fire was. No one says a word.

T
HE SUN SETS
. T
HE NIGHT SOUNDS START UP, ANIMALS CALLING
back and forth. On their little mountaintop, Hallelujah feels like she, Jonah, and Rachel are the only people in the world. Prehistoric. Or survivors on a deserted island. In the dark, the wind on leaves is like the ocean, a rushing and a whisper. The stars are very close.

It's cold. Even with the fire rebuilt, even wearing her tank top, swim T-shirt, and long-sleeved shirt under her jacket, Hallelujah has goosebumps. She sits as near to the flames as she dares—so near, a spark jumps over to her jeans and she has to hurriedly pat it out. The burn is sudden, over quickly, remains as only a small stinging on her thigh—a sign that she's still alive.

They're still alive. More than twenty-four hours in the mountains with no map, no camping supplies, definitely not enough food. It feels like longer. Like they've been out here for days. Weeks. Forever. In this darkness, with the tree-waves cresting and crashing on the mountains all around them, with
something
howling on one of the other peaks, home seems like a dream.

Hallelujah feels strange. She feels like she's watching a TV show with herself in it, wondering how it will all turn out.
Will they be rescued? Tune in next time
.

Rachel interrupts her thoughts. “I have to go to the bathroom.” She stands up. Her red-and-white legs glow in the firelight and moonlight.

Hallelujah stands too. “I'll come with you.”

“You don't have to.”

“I have to go too.” She does. Only a little.

They walk to the edge of the clearing. Look out into the shadows.

Rachel goes first. She picks her steps carefully. Hallelujah steps where Rachel stepped until the fire is just a flickering red through the trees behind them.

“I'm going . . . over there,” Rachel says, gesturing vaguely. “I'll call out. Let you know I'm not dead. And who knows—maybe someone else'll hear us yelling too.”

“Okay.” Hallelujah watches Rachel's back as she moves away. Then she can't see her at all.

The trees surround her, and so she looks up. Turns in a circle. The stars blink down at her through the branches. If the trees are too close, are suffocating her, the sky looks too big, impossibly big.

“I'm still alive!” Rachel calls from somewhere to Hallelujah's right.

“Me too!” she calls back, unzipping her jeans with her swollen, itchy fingers. The wind is ice against her bare skin. She moves fast. She's dressed again in seconds.

“Hal?” Rachel is coming closer.

“Here.” Hallelujah moves toward the voice, feeling with her feet to keep from having to put her raw palms against the bark of trunks and branches. She crosses her arms, tucking her hands into her armpits.

It's a mistake. Because when she trips over something she can't see, she's not ready. She stumbles forward, and her left foot catches on something, and her boot gets wedged, and her body lands but her foot stays put.

She feels the ankle pop.

She hits the ground hard.

For a second, she's just trying to breathe. Then she feels the sharp, hot stab of pain inside her ankle. It's like there's a knife in her hiking boot.

She whimpers.

Rachel appears. “Hal? You okay?”

Hallelujah doesn't move. She doesn't want to make it worse. The pain shoots up her leg. “My ankle,” she says softly. Talking louder would make it hurt more.

Rachel rushes to kneel next to Hallelujah. “Which foot?”

“Left.”

Rachel gently runs her hands down Hallelujah's leg, stopping when she reaches the wounded ankle. Hallelujah gasps at the pressure. “Okay,” Rachel says. “Um. Do you think you can walk on it?”

“I don't know. But it's stuck.” And throbbing. And throbbing.

“If I lift the root, can you pull your foot out?”

“I can try.” Hallelujah sits up carefully and inches closer to the root, letting her knee bend. She grasps her left thigh with both hands, ready to pull. “Go,” she says, gritting her teeth in anticipation.

“One, two . . . three!” Rachel groans as she pulls at the root. But it moves, loosens its grip on Hallelujah's boot, and she pulls her leg, and she feels her ankle pop again and her foot is free. Hallelujah falls back onto her elbows.

“I'll help you up.” Rachel scrambles to her feet.

Hallelujah blinks back tears. “I can't,” she says.

“Come on, Hal,” Rachel says. “I've got you.”

So Hallelujah extends her hand.

T
HE HIKE BACK UP THE HILL IS GRUELING
. H
ALLELUJAH
can barely breathe through the pain of each step. Rachel is panting from the effort of holding Hallelujah up. Still, when they get closer to the clearing, Rachel manages to call out: “Jonah! Help!”