The Middle of Somewhere(71)

“You can say it. It was wrong.”

“Did you know it at the time?”

“Yes. But I knew what I wanted. I was determined. I felt my father owed me for being so unreasonable about my future.”

“What do you think now?”

He let out a sigh and ran a hand through his hair. “I feel guilty. I’m considering paying him back when I can.”

“He’d probably respect that.”

“Only if I included interest.”

Liz could sympathize with Dante’s desire for an American education, but was surprised he’d strung his father along for so many years. She wondered whether Dante’s actions were fueled as much out of anger at being pushed into the family business as out of determination to earn a premium degree in the land of opportunity. She herself had never put her hand in her pocket for her schooling, and was reticent to judge. And at the moment, it mattered more to her that he had told her.

“Let’s hit the tent,” she said, putting her arms around him. He returned her embrace, his arms strong and warm against her back. They held each other as the wind whistled low between the peaks and swept the last of the day into the valleys below. In the remaining shreds of light, they tucked their packs and gear under the boughs of a stout pine, climbed into the tent and zipped themselves in.

Early the next morning, the sun cast a pale yellow glow on the peaks above the lake. Dante noticed the McCartneys were up, so he and Liz clambered down the hill and explained why they had kept to themselves last night. Paul and Linda agreed the Roots probably had continued over Pinchot Pass.

“I’d be happy to have seen the last of them,” Paul said. “Bloody weird pair.”

Liz asked Linda, “How’s your leg?”

“Not too bad. When it hurts in the night I just stick it out of the sleeping bag and it goes numb in a few minutes.”

The couples separated to break camp, then set off together for the Rae Lakes, sixteen miles away.

No two passes they’d encountered had been the same: a notch sliced in the V between sharp peaks, a flat gravel lot on a broad saddle, or a site for a shelter, such as Muir Hut. Pinchot Pass was the highest thus far, and Liz was surprised to arrive there so easily along a gradual incline. Reaching a pass was usually cause for a small celebration, but not at Pinchot. Though early in the day, the wind howled from the north, swept up the slope and hurled itself over the edge with icy abandon.

“I lived in Wales for a year,” Linda said, yanking the collar of her jacket tighter. “They called winds like this ‘lazy.’”

“Why?” asked Dante. “Doesn’t feel lazy to me.”

“Because instead of going around you, it goes straight through.”

They turned their backs to the wind and descended. As on Mather Pass, the north side of Pinchot was precipitous. Narrow switchbacks covered in broken stone prompted Liz to watch her step. At the bottom, she paused and craned her neck to see the way they had come, but the rock wall was too steep and she lost the trace of the trail halfway up. She turned her gaze south to admire Mount Cedric Wright, so broad and imposing it might have been a range unto itself. She remembered from the guidebook Cedric Wright had been a mentor and friend to Ansel Adams. Wright’s ashes had been scattered on this peak, above which a few small clouds had already gathered. She shivered at the prospect of a change in weather.

After a water break, Dante walked in front, and Liz allowed the gap between them to grow until she could no longer hear the tap of his poles on the rocks or the crunch of his boots on the ground. If she lifted her head, she could see him—the terrain was open, for the most part—but if she gazed into the middle distance and allowed her mind to wander, she was alone.

She wondered if Dante’s father would ever forgive his son, and if repaying the debt would matter. She wondered if forgiveness was real. Perhaps it could be, for the one doing the forgiving. But for her there was no possibility of a clear conscience, merely the weak absolution of honesty, of confession. If only she had been raised Catholic—or within another religion that embraced the concept—she might find forgiveness and believe in it. But faith was not part of her fiber. She could not buy into the cycle of sin and penance, of death and resurrection. She would always remember what she had done, and it would always sting. She would not be washed clean.

But next to this certainty was another truth: mornings on the trail gave her hope. Hope of what precisely, she couldn’t say. Each morning of this journey, even after a terrible night, proposed a new beginning. She crawled out of the tent and started over by breaking camp—undoing what she had constructed the night before. When it was as it had been, save for a few boot marks, she returned to the task of walking. But she did not walk over the same ground—everything was new, in the intricate and fractal sameness of rock, lake and sky.