The Raccoon That Fixed Us

Akari Ortega was thirty-four years old and she was sulking about a granola bar she hadn't lost yet. That was the kind of week she was having.

It had started on a Tuesday, over the dishes. Ophelia had said something about how Akari checked her phone at dinner, and Akari had said something back about how at least she didn't talk to rocks for a living, and then somehow there was a bet on the table. Ophelia bet that Akari couldn't do three days on the Switchback Trail without touching her phone once. Not for navigation, not for the weather, not for the tenure email she swore she wasn't obsessing over.

"And if I win?" Akari had asked, arms crossed over her dish towel.

"Then I fold all the laundry for a month. Including the fitted sheets."

"And if you win?"

"Then you stop grading papers at two in the morning and come to bed when I do. For a month."

Akari had said yes mostly because she hated losing. She could admit that now, a little. She was a history professor, or an assistant professor anyway, and the tenure decision was coming in December, and she had been what Ophelia called "wound tight" and what Akari called "thorough" for about four months straight. They had been married for over a year. They had met in a grad seminar when they were both twenty-six, and Ophelia had been patient then too, and Akari had been competitive then too, and somehow it had worked. Lately it worked less.

So that was how Akari ended up at the trailhead of Cedar Ridge National Park on a cold late-autumn morning, hoisting the heavier of the two packs onto her own back while her wife watched.

"I'll take the big one," Akari said, already buckling straps. "You take the light one."

"Akari, you don't have to prove anything. I've been hiking since I was twenty-one. I know how to split a load."

"I'm not proving anything. I'm stronger than I look."

"You look strong," Ophelia said, and she said it plain, no teasing in it, which was somehow worse. "Fine. Take it. But if your shoulders give out by the creek, you hand it over without a speech."

"Deal."

They shook on it, actually shook on it, which was the kind of thing they did when they were turning a marriage into a contest. Akari shouldered the pack and immediately regretted it. It was maybe forty pounds, and Ophelia had packed it as if she expected the world to end halfway up a mountain. Water, extra water, a stove, a tent, rope, a first aid kit that could handle a bear attack. Akari's own pack had the food, the sleeping bags, and her phone, which was the whole point of the bet, and which she was already thinking about.

The Switchback Trail went up through hardwoods that had gone gold and red and mostly brown, and the leaves crunched under their boots for the first mile. The air smelled like cold dirt and dead leaves. Akari counted her breaths. That was something she did when she was working too hard, counting instead of talking, and Ophelia let her do it, walking a half step ahead with her hands loose at her sides like she was out for a stroll around the block.

At the second junction they stopped, and Akari pulled out the map.

"We go left here," she said, tracing the line with her finger. "The creek bends around and the trail follows it up."

Ophelia leaned over her shoulder. She didn't say anything for a second, and then she did.

"That's the old route. See the little dashes? They closed that section two years ago when the bridge washed out. We want right, up over the ridge, then down to the creek. It's marked on the legend."

Akari looked. The dashes were there. She had read right past them because she had decided in her head where the trail went before she looked at the paper. She felt her face get hot, and she heard herself snap before she could stop it.

"I can read a map, Ophelia. I have a doctorate."

"I know you can. I just read it wrong too, first time I came through here." Ophelia's voice stayed level, which made Akari feel about an inch tall. "Everybody does. That's why I remembered it."

Akari stood there with the map in her hands and her pack straps digging into her shoulders and her pride sitting somewhere around her boot tops. The thing was, Ophelia never fought back. Akari poked and poked and Ophelia just absorbed it, and somehow that made Akari poke harder, and then she felt awful about it, and then she did it again next week. She was aware of the pattern. Knowing a pattern and stopping it were two different things.

"I'm sorry," she said. "That was uncalled for. You're right, it's the old route."

"It's fine."

"It's not fine. I've been snapping at you for a month and you keep just taking it and I keep letting you."

Ophelia took the map from her, and their hands brushed on the handoff, fingers against fingers for a second longer than a handoff needed. Akari felt it all the way up her arm. Three days in the woods, she thought. One phone-free day down and it was barely nine in the morning.

"Apology accepted," Ophelia said. "Now come on. The ridge climb's the hard part and you're carrying forty pounds of my paranoia."

They went right, up over the ridge, and it was as hard as Ophelia had promised. The switchbacks did what switchbacks do, doubling back on themselves until Akari lost count, and by the third one she had stopped counting breaths and started just breathing. Ophelia set a pace that was slower than Akari would have set and exactly the pace Akari could actually hold. Every time Akari started to pull ahead out of pure reflex, the pack brought her back down to earth.

Halfway up, Ophelia handed her the water bottle without being asked. Akari drank and handed it back and said nothing, because there was nothing to say that wasn't either thank you or I love you, and she wasn't ready to say either one yet. Not while she was still mad about being right about the map being wrong.

They crested the ridge around noon and ate sandwiches on a rock with the whole valley laid out below them, brown and gold with the creek threading through it silver. Akari's shoulders were screaming. She did not say so.

"How are the shoulders," Ophelia said, because she was not stupid.

"Fine."

"Akari."

"They're fine. They're going to be sore tomorrow, is all. That's normal. That's the deal with carrying forty pounds."

"That was the deal. You made the deal, you keep the deal." Ophelia brushed crumbs off her hands and stood. "But when we hit the creek, I take the big pack and you carry the light one the last half mile. Not because you lost. Because I want to and you'll let me."

"That's not how deals work."

"That's how marriage works," Ophelia said, and started down the far side of the ridge before Akari could come up with a comeback, which was her way of winning arguments that weren't arguments.

Akari sat on the rock one more second and looked at the valley. The tenure email would come sometime in the next three weeks, and she would be somewhere with no signal when it did, and some part of her had arranged this whole trip in her head as a test of whether she could stand that. Another part of her, the part she didn't look at directly, suspected Ophelia had planned it for the same reason. You didn't spend a year married to a geologist without learning that pressure made rocks do interesting things.

Then she got up and followed her wife down the trail, because the light one was still lying by the rock and Ophelia had taken neither, waiting, of course, for Akari to catch up.

The creek campsite was half a mile off the main trail down a faded spur, in a grove of hemlocks with the water running over flat stones ten yards away. Ophelia had been there before. She said so three times on the spur trail, each time like she was sharing a secret. They got in around four, with maybe two hours of light left, and Ophelia took the big pack off Akari's shoulders without a word, just lifted it right off her, and Akari let her.

"Tent or firewood," Ophelia said. "Pick one."

"Tent. I'm no good at firewood and we both know it."

"You're adequate at firewood. You just get bored halfway through and start sorting sticks by some system only you understand."

"There's nothing wrong with a system."

"I never said there was." Ophelia was already kneeling at the fire ring, clearing old ash. "Go. I'll holler if I need you."

Akari got the tent up in under twenty minutes, which she counted as a personal victory, and when she came back down Ophelia had a proper fire going and was warming her hands over it. The light was going blue at the edges of the grove. It was cold, real cold, the kind that made a fire feel like a luxury instead of a chore. Akari sat down next to her wife on the same log, close enough that their hips touched, and Ophelia didn't move away and didn't move closer, just stayed there, solid as the log itself.

"Day one," Akari said. "No phone. I won."

"Day one's not over."

"It's over enough. Nothing's happening between now and sleep except dinner and staring at you."

"That's a nice way to spend an evening," Ophelia said, and put her arm along the log behind Akari, not around her, just resting there, an offer more than a hold. Akari leaned back against it. The fire cracked. Somewhere up the creek, something moved in the bushes, and neither of them thought much about it yet.

They ate rehydrated chili out of the same bag, passing the spork back and forth, because Ophelia had only packed one spork and Akari had packed two and then left both of them on the kitchen counter at home. Ophelia did not bring this up. Akari brought it up herself, twice, and Ophelia just said the spork washed fine between uses, which was true and somehow made it worse.

After dinner they sat by the fire until the wood burned down to orange lumps. Akari's hips ached and her shoulders had gone from screaming to a dull grudge she carried everywhere. Ophelia got out the little bag of trail mix and held it out.

"Last handful. Take it."

"You take it. You carried more weight today."

"I ate more weight today. Take it, Akari."

Akari took it. The chocolate bits were mostly gone, melted into a brown smear at the bottom of the bag, and Akari found herself genuinely annoyed about that, and then genuinely annoyed about being annoyed about trail mix. She put the bag back in the bear canister and hung it from the branch Ophelia had picked out, ten feet up and four feet off the trunk, and she did that part right, and she knew she did it right, and Ophelia told her she did it right, and Akari still could not enjoy it.

They got into the tent and into the double sleeping bag, which Ophelia had insisted on bringing and which Akari had called a luxury and which now felt like the smartest purchase either of them had ever made. Ophelia was warm. She was always warm, like a rock that had sat in the sun all day. Akari lay with her back against her wife's side and listened to the creek and felt the day drain out of her muscles one ache at a time.

"Good first day?" Ophelia said, into her hair.

"It was an adequate first day."

"Adequate. That's your word for things you liked and won't admit."

"Go to sleep."

Ophelia laughed, a low sound against Akari's neck, and went to sleep. Akari stayed up a while longer, thinking about pressure and rocks and the tenure committee, and then even that got heavy and slid off the bed of the tent.

Something woke her in the night. A scraping, a rustle, the sound of a zipper being worked by something with no thumbs and a lot of patience. She sat up and hissed Ophelia's name and Ophelia was out of the sleeping bag and unzipping the tent door before Akari had both eyes open, and by the time Akari got the flashlight turned around the right way, Ophelia was standing in the freezing dark in her long johns yelling at the tree line like a neighbor chasing kids off her lawn.

"Get out of it. Go on. Shoo."

The bear canister was on the ground, ten feet from where Akari had hung it, and the branch was stripped clean of cord. Nothing was chewed through. Ophelia stood there in her socks in the frost and inspected it and then turned around with a face like a held-back laugh.

"Raccoon," she said. "A big one. Clever hands. He got the carabiner off the branch and let the whole thing down."

"How does a raccoon work a carabiner."

"The same way a grad student does. Trial and error and no fear of failure." Ophelia rehung the canister higher, then hung the cook pot off it as a noisemaker, and came back into the tent smelling like cold air and woodsmoke. Her feet were blocks of ice and she put them on Akari's legs without apology, which was marriage, and Akari yelped and let her, which was also marriage.

In the morning the raccoon was gone and so was one thing: the last granola bar. He had unzipped Akari's pack pocket, the one under the flap, the one Akari thought of as the secure pocket, and taken exactly that and nothing else. Ophelia held the torn open wrapper like evidence at a trial.

"He left the trail mix. He left my bars. He took yours specifically."

"Because mine were at the top."

"Or because he could tell the difference."

"You think a raccoon has taste."

"I think that raccoon has opinions about honey versus peanut butter, and he voted." Ophelia put the wrapper in the trash bag and grinned at her. "You got robbed, professor."

"I got robbed. Fine. I'll file it under the trip so far." But Akari was grinning too, which surprised her, because a day ago she'd have turned that into a competition about pack organization, and today it just came out as a joke. She noticed that. She