The Middle of Somewhere - Softcover

Written by today’s freshest new talents and selected by New American Library, NAL Accent novels touch on subjects close to a woman’s heart, from friendship to family to finding our place in the world. The Conversation Guides included in each book are intended to enrich the individual reading experience, as well as encourage us to explore these topics together—because books, and life, are meant for sharing.

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CHAPTER ONE

Liz hopped from foot to foot and hugged herself against the cold. She glanced at the porch of the Yosemite Valley Wilderness Office, where Dante stood with his back to her, chatting with some other hikers. His shoulders shrugged and dropped, and his hands danced this way and that. He was telling a story—a funny one, judging by the faces of his audience—but not a backpacking story because he didn’t have any. His idea of a wilderness adventure was staring out the window during spin class at the gym. Not that it mattered. He could have been describing the self-contradictory worldview of the guy who changes his oil, or the merits of homemade tamales, or even acting out the latest viral cat video. Liz had known him for over two years and still couldn’t decipher how he captured strangers’ attention without apparent effort. Dante was black velvet and other people were lint.

Their backpacks sat nearby on a wooden bench like stiff-backed strangers waiting for a bus. The impulse to grab hers and take off without him shot through her. She quelled it with the reminder that his pack contained essential gear for completing the three-week hike. The John Muir Trail. Her hike. At least that had been the plan.

She propped her left hiking boot on the bench, retied it, folded down the top of her sock and paced a few steps along the sidewalk to see if she’d gotten them even. It wasn’t yet nine a.m., and Yosemite Village already had a tentative, waking buzz. Two teenage girls in pajama pants and oversize sweatshirts walked past, dragging their Uggs on the concrete. Bleary-eyed dads pushed strollers, and Patagonia types with day packs marched purposefully among the buildings: restaurants, a grocery store, a medical clinic, a visitor’s center, gift shops, a fire station, even a four-star hotel. What a shame the trail had to begin in the middle of this circus. Liz couldn’t wait to get the hell out of there.

She fished Dante’s iPhone out of the zippered compartment on top of his pack and called Valerie. They’d been best friends for eleven years, since freshman year in college, when life had come with happiness the way a phone plan came with minutes.

Valerie answered. “Dante?”

“No. It’s me.”

“Where’s your phone?”

“Asleep in the car. No service most of the way. Even here I’ve only got one bar.”

“Dante’s going to go nuts if he can’t use his phone.”

“You think? How’s Muesli?” Valerie was cat-sitting for her.

“Does he ever look at you like he thinks you’re an idiot?”

“All the time.”

“Then he’s fine.”

“How’s the slipper commute?” Valerie worked as a Web designer, mostly from home, and had twenty sets of pajamas hanging in her closet as if they were business suits.

“Just firing up the machine. You get your permits?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Try to sound more psyched.”

How could she be psyched when this wasn’t the trip she’d planned? She was supposed to hike the John Muir Trail—the JMT—alone. With a few thousand square miles of open territory surrounding her, she hoped to find a way to a truer life. She sure didn’t know the way now. Each turn she’d taken, each decision she’d made—including moving in with Dante six months ago—had seemed right at the time, yet none were right, based as they were on a series of unchallenged assumptions and quiet lies, one weak moral link attached to the next, with the truth at the tail end, whipping away from her again and again.

Maybe, she’d whispered to herself, she could have a relationship with Dante and share a home if she pretended there was no reason she couldn’t. She loved him enough to almost believe it could work. But she’d hardly finished unpacking before her doubts had mushroomed. She became desperate for time away—from the constant stream of friends in Dante’s wake, from the sense of sliding down inside a funnel that led to marriage, from becoming an indeterminate portion of something called “us”—and could not tell Dante why. Not then or since. That was the crux of it. Instead, she told Dante that years ago she’d abandoned a plan to hike the JMT and now wanted to strike it off her list before she turned thirty in November. She had no list, but he accepted her explanation, and her true motivation wriggled free.

The Park Service issued only a few permits for each trailhead. She’d faxed in her application as soon as she decided to go. When she received e-mail confirmation, a crosscurrent of relief and dread flooded her. In two months’ time, she would have her solitude, her bitter medicine.

Then two weeks before her start date, Dante announced he was joining her.

“You’ve never been backpacking, and now you want to go two hundred and twenty miles?”

“I would miss you.” He opened his hands as if that were the simple truth.

There had to be more to it than that. Why else would he suggest embarking on a journey they both knew would make him miserable? She tried to talk him out of it. He didn’t like nature, the cold or energy bars. It made no sense. But he was adamant, and brushed her concerns aside. She’d had no choice but to capitulate.

Now she told Valerie, “I am psyched. In fact, I want to hit the trail right now, but Dante’s holding court in the Wilderness Office.”

“I can’t believe you’ll be out of touch for three weeks. What am I going to do without you? Who am I going to talk to?”

“Yourself, I guess. Put an earbud in and walk around holding your phone like a Geiger counter. You could be an incognito schizophrenic.”

“I’ll be reduced to that.” She dropped her voice a notch. “Listen. I have to ask you again. You sure you feel up to this?”

Liz reflexively placed her hand on her lower abdomen. “I’m fine. I swear. It’s just a hike.”

“When I have to park a block from Trader Joe’s, that’s a hike. Two hundred miles is something else. And your miscarriage was less than three weeks ago.”

As if Dante could have overheard, she turned and walked a few more steps down the sidewalk. “I feel great.”

“And you’re going to tell Dante soon and not wait for the absolute perfect moment.”

Despite the cold, Liz’s palms were slick with sweat. Her boyfriend knew nothing of her pregnancy, but her friend didn’t have the whole story either. Valerie had made her daily call to Liz and learned she was home sick, but she’d been vague about the reason. Knowing Dante was out of town, Valerie had stopped by and found Liz lying on the couch, a heating pad on her belly.

“Cramps?”

“No,” Liz had said, staring at the rug. “Worse.”

Valerie had assumed she’d had a miscarriage, not an abortion, and Liz hadn’t corrected her. Next to her deceit of Dante, it seemed minor. Valerie had made her promise she would tell him, but when Liz ran the conversation through her mind, she panicked. If she revealed this bit of information, the whole monstrous truth might tumble out, and she would lose him for certain.

“I will tell him. And I’ll make sure I’ve got room to run when I do.”

“He’ll understand. It’s not like it was your fault.”

Liz’s chest tightened. “Val, listen—”

“Crap! I just noticed the time. I’ve got a call in two minutes, so this is good-bye.”

“’Bye.”

“Don’t get lost.”

“Impossible.”

“Don’t fall off a cliff.”

“I’ll try not to.”

“Watch out for bears.”

“I love bears! And they love me.”

“Of course they do. So do I.”

“And me you. ’Bye.”

“’Bye.”

Liz put the phone away. She checked the zippers and tightened the straps on both backpacks. On a trip this long, they couldn’t afford to lose anything. Besides, a pack with loose straps tended to creak, and she didn’t like creaking.

Dante was still chatting. He glanced over his shoulder and flashed her a boyish smile. She pointed at her watch. He twitched in mock alarm, shook hands with his new friends and hurried to her.

“Leez!” He placed his hands on her cheeks and tucked her short brown hair behind her ears with his fingers. “You’re waiting. I’m sorry.”

She was no more immune to his charm than the rest of the world. The way he pronounced her name amused her, and she suspected he laid it on thick deliberately. He had studied English in the best schools in Mexico City and spent seven years in the States, so he had little reason for sounding like the Taco Bell Chihuahua.

“It’s okay.” She rose onto her toes and kissed his cheek. “We should get going though. Did you get the forecast?”

“I did.” He threw his arms wide. “It’s going to be beautiful!”

“That’s a quote from the ranger?”

“Más o menos. Look for yourself.” He swept his hand to indicate the sky above the pines, an unbroken Delft blue.

Things can change, she thought, especially this late in the season. Her original permit had been for the Thursday before Labor Day. It could snow or hail or thunderstorm on any given day in the Sierras, but early September was usually dry. She’d had to surrender that start date when Dante insisted on tagging along, because he didn’t have a permit. They were forced to take their chances with the weather, two weeks closer to winter.

And here it was, September fifteenth. A picture-perfect day. Dante’s beaming face looked like a guarantee of twenty more like it.

·   ·   ·

When he’d first seen the elevation profile of the John Muir Trail, Dante said it resembled the ECG tracing of someone having a heart attack. Up thousands of feet, down thousands of feet, up thousands of feet, down thousands of feet, day after day.

“You’re going to love Day One in particular,” she’d said, pointing out Yosemite Valley at four thousand feet, then, twelve miles along the trail, their first night’s destination at ninety-six hundred feet.

He’d shaken his head. “Impossible.”

“Difficult, yes. But entirely possible.”

He’d argued that since they would arrive at Tuolumne Meadows the second day, and could easily drive through the park and pick up the trail there, they should skip that nasty climb.

“That would be cheating,” she’d said.

“It could be our little secret.”

“I’m doing the whole John Muir Trail.”

He’d sent her a doleful look, but didn’t bring it up again.

At least not until they’d been climbing for two hours. Panting, he undid his hip belt and slid his pack to the ground. Dark patches of sweat stood out on his green T-shirt. Liz stepped aside to let a group of day hikers pass. She leaned forward on her trekking poles, but did not take off her pack. They’d already taken two breaks and hadn’t yet reached the top of Nevada Falls, two and a half miles from the start.

He plunked himself onto a boulder, took off his cap and wiped his forehead with his sleeve. “It’s not too late to turn around and drive to Tuolumne.”

She stared out across the valley. “Breathtaking” didn’t begin to describe it. A mile away, the falls shot out of the granite cliff like milk spilling from a pitcher and crashed onto a boulder pile before being funneled into a foaming river. She could make out the tiny colored forms of people at the falls’ edge. The tightness in her chest loosened slightly at this first hint of vast space. Above the falls was Liberty Cap, an enormous granite tooth, and beyond that, Half Dome. Its two-thousand-foot sheer vertical wall and rounded crown made it appear to once have been a sphere split abruptly by an unimaginable force, but Liz knew better. A glacier had erased it, bit by bit.

Her back to Dante, she said, “Let’s keep going to the top of the falls. Then we can have lunch, okay?”

The trail leveled out after Nevada Falls, no longer as steep as a staircase. After a set of switchbacks, they passed the turnoff for Half Dome, where all but a few of the day hikers left the main route. The early-afternoon sun was a heat lamp on their backs, and by two o’clock they’d finished the three liters of water they’d carried from the valley floor. At the first crossing of Sunrise Creek, Liz unpacked the water filtration kit. She’d shown Dante how it worked at home—for safety’s sake—but gadgets weren’t his strong suit. He might be inclined to coax bacteria, viruses and parasites out of the water with a wink and a smile, but she was the professional gizmologist. She designed prosthetic limbs, myoelectric ones that interfaced with living muscle. He worked for the same company, on the sales side.

Crouching on the grassy bank, she attached the tubes to the manual pump and dropped the float into a small current. It took five minutes to filter three liters. She handed Dante a bottle. He took a long drink.

“So cold and delicious!”

She disassembled the filter and carefully placed the intake tube in a plastic bag she’d labeled “DIRTY!” “And what’s strange is that every stream and lake tastes different. Some are flinty, some are sweet, some are just . . . pure.”

She zipped the pouch closed and looked up. Dante had that expression he reserved for her. His dark brown eyes were soft and a smile teased at the corner of his mouth, as if someone were poised to give him a gift he’d been wanting forever. She held his gaze for a moment—his love for her running liquid through her limbs—and got up to stow everything in her pack.

Liz had consulted the map when they’d stopped and knew they had to climb more than five miles and fifteen hundred vertical feet before making camp. Her feet were sore and her thighs complained as she hoisted herself—and her thirty-pound pack, nearly a quarter of her body weight—ever upward. She was fit, as was Dante, but this first day was asking far more of her body than it was accustomed to. Hiking would get easier as they got stronger, but there was no getting around it: today was a bitch.

They walked in silence, kicking up small clouds of dust. The creek stayed with them, then disappeared, and they were left with only pines, boulders and trail. After an hour or more, they came over a rise. The trail followed the crest for a short stretch, then dipped toward a creek bubbling down a seam between steep slopes. On the near bank two hikers were resting—the first they’d seen since the Half Dome turnoff. Each man sat leaning against a pine tree. The nearer man was large, and imposing even while seated. He’d taken off his boots and socks, and his long legs were crossed at the ankle. His head was tipped back, and his eyes were closed. When the other, smaller, man swiveled in their direction and lifted his hand in greeting, Liz immediately noticed their resemblance. The same lank, sandy hair, the same square jaw and full mouth. Brothers. They even had identical cobalt blue packs.

“Hey,” she said.

The big one opened his eyes and massaged his jaw. “Hello.”

Closer now, she judged they were both in their twenties. The big one...