Wild

“I’ve gone backpacking!” I’d said indignantly, though he was right: I hadn’t. In spite of all the things I’d done that struck me as related to backpacking, I’d never actually walked into the wilderness with a backpack on and spent the night. Not even once.

I’ve never gone backpacking! I thought with a rueful hilarity now. I looked suddenly at my pack and the plastic bags I’d toted with me from Portland that held things I hadn’t yet taken from their packaging. My backpack was forest green and trimmed with black, its body composed of three large compartments rimmed by fat pockets of mesh and nylon that sat on either side like big ears. It stood of its own volition, supported by the unique plastic shelf that jutted out along its bottom. That it stood like that instead of slumping over onto its side as other packs did provided me a small, strange comfort. I went to it and touched its top as if I were caressing a child’s head. A month ago, I’d been firmly advised to pack my backpack just as I would on my hike and take it on a trial run. I’d meant to do it before I left Minneapolis, and then I’d meant to do it once I got to Portland. But I hadn’t. My trial run would be tomorrow—my first day on the trail.

I reached into one of the plastic bags and pulled out an orange whistle, whose packaging proclaimed it to be “the world’s loudest.” I ripped it open and held the whistle up by its yellow lanyard, then put it around my neck, as if I were a coach. Was I supposed to hike wearing it like this? It seemed silly, but I didn’t know. Like so much else, when I’d purchased the world’s loudest whistle, I hadn’t thought it all the way through. I took it off and tied it to the frame of my pack, so it would dangle over my shoulder when I hiked. There, it would be easy to reach, should I need it.

Would I need it? I wondered meekly, bleakly, flopping down on the bed. It was well past dinnertime, but I was too anxious to feel hungry, my aloneness an uncomfortable thunk that filled my gut.

“You finally got what you wanted,” Paul had said when we bade each other goodbye in Minneapolis ten days before.

“What’s that?” I’d asked.

“To be alone,” he replied, and smiled, though I could only nod uncertainly.

It had been what I wanted, though alone wasn’t quite it. What I had to have when it came to love was beyond explanation, it seemed. The end of my marriage was a great unraveling that began with a letter that arrived a week after my mother’s death, though its beginnings went back further than that.

The letter wasn’t for me. It was for Paul. Fresh as my grief was, I still dashed excitedly into our bedroom and handed it to him when I saw the return address. It was from the New School in New York City. In another lifetime—only three months before, in the days before I learned my mother had cancer—I’d helped him apply to a PhD program in political philosophy. Back in mid-January, the idea of living in New York City had seemed like the most exciting thing in the world. But now, in late March—as he ripped the letter open and exclaimed that he’d been accepted, as I embraced him and in every way seemed to be celebrating this good news—I felt myself splitting in two. There was the woman I was before my mom died and the one I was now, my old life sitting on the surface of me like a bruise. The real me was beneath that, pulsing under all the things I used to think I knew. How I’d finish my BA in June and a couple of months later, off we’d go. How we’d rent an apartment in the East Village or Park Slope—places I’d only imagined and read about. How I’d wear funky ponchos with adorable knitted hats and cool boots while becoming a writer in the same romantic, down-and-out way that so many of my literary heroes and heroines had.

All of that was impossible now, regardless of what the letter said. My mom was dead. My mom was dead. My mom was dead. Everything I ever imagined about myself had disappeared into the crack of her last breath.

I couldn’t leave Minnesota. My family needed me. Who would help Leif finish growing up? Who would be there for Eddie in his loneliness? Who would make Thanksgiving dinner and carry on our family traditions? Someone had to keep what remained of our family together. And that someone had to be me. I owed at least that much to my mother.