Trail Light

Sandra saw the sign for Aspen Hollow as the last light faded behind the ridge. A wooden board, faded paint, an arrow pointing up a gravel road. She would have driven past it if Bridget had not shouted from the passenger seat, "There! That's it, that one, slow down."

"I see it." Sandra turned in. The gravel crunched under the tires. Her Honda had not loved the last twenty miles of winding road, and neither had her shoulders.

The campground sat in a bowl of aspens, most of them already bare. A small creek ran along the east edge, loud enough to hear with the windows up. Three other loops of sites, all empty. Late October did not bring crowds up here.

"Nobody," Bridget said, pleased. She had her seatbelt off before the car fully stopped. "We got the whole place."

"Off season has its perks." Sandra killed the engine and sat a second longer than she needed to. Her knees announced themselves when she finally got out. Forty-three years old, and her knees had started filing reports every morning. Office manager, eight hours a day in a chair, and it showed in ways she did not like to think about.

Bridget was already at the tailgate. She got there fast, the way she did everything. Even in the dimming light Sandra could see the faint green shimmer along her forearms where the skin caught what was left of the sun. Bridget never wore long sleeves for it. She said hiding it was a full time job she had quit years ago.

She was thirty-one and built like she had been designed for exactly this. Climbing out of the car, hauling gear, pointing at things. Her dark hair was in a braid down her back and her eyes did their amber catching-the-light thing when she turned around and grinned.

"Okay, captain. Tent first or fire first?"

"Tent. Before I change my mind and sleep in the car."

"You're not gonna change your mind." Bridget hauled the tent bag out one handed. "Come on. You promised me a whole weekend and I intend to collect."

Sandra had promised. That was the truth of it. Three weeks ago, on a Tuesday, Bridget had spread a map she drew herself across the kitchen table and put one finger on a spot in the foothills of the Klamaths and said, "There. High meadow. You can see the whole valley. I found it two years ago and I've been saving it."

Sandra had said yes because she loved her. She had also, privately, in the privacy of her own skull, wondered whether she had the legs and lungs for it. That thought had ridden along in the car the whole way up, quiet and heavy, like a cooler nobody wanted to carry.

They got to work. Bridget worked, anyway. Sandra held things.

The tent was one of those modern pop-up deals that Bridget swore was easy. Sandra unpacked the poles and laid them out on a tarp and looked at them like they were a form she had to fill out in triplicate.

"This connector goes here." Bridget pointed without looking up from her side.

"Uh huh."

"Sandy. You're gripping it like it's gonna bite you."

"It might. I don't trust camping equipment. It's all in league against me." Sandra fed the pole through its sleeve. It went halfway and stopped. She fed it again. It stopped in the same place.

"You have to hold the sleeve open."

"I am holding the sleeve open."

"You're holding it shut." Bridget came around, crouched, put her hand over Sandra's, and adjusted her grip two inches to the left. The pole slid home with a click. "There. See? You're good at this."

"I'm forty-three, not incompetent."

"Never said incompetent." Bridget kissed her on the cheek and went back to her side. "Said gripping it wrong."

They got the tent up between the two of them, mostly Bridget, some Sandra. Bridget staked the corners with these fast economical swings of the mallet that made it look like it was the simplest task in the world. She had done this her whole life, apparently. Grown up outdoors, hiked solo at nineteen, twenty, twenty-two. There had been stories over the years. A fling with some fellow hiker when she was twenty-two, told once, early, with a shrug and a laugh and no weight to it at all. Sandra had never minded. That was before her. Ancient history by any reasonable measure.

Sandra, meanwhile, wrestled a camp chair out of its bag and lost the fight twice.

The light went from gold to gray to blue. By the time the tent stood and the chairs sat and the cooler was on the picnic table, the first stars were showing over the ridge and Sandra's lower back had filed a second report.

Bridget built a fire in the pit between the tent and the picnic table. She did it fast, no fuss, a little nest of tinder, kindling leaned like a tiny cabin, one match. The dry wood caught with a sound like a whispered word. Sandra watched from her chair with a beer that had gotten warm in the car and did not care.

"You're staring," Bridget said without turning.

"You're showing off."

"Absolutely I am." She fed the fire another stick and finally turned. Firelight did something to her face. It always did. The green in her skin went warmer and her eyes went bright and Sandra, who had spent three years learning this woman, still got caught off guard by it.

"How's the back?" Bridget asked.

"Fine."

"Liar."

"It's fine. It's a weekend. People do this every weekend." Sandra took a drink. "People my age do this every weekend and then go to work Monday like it's nothing."

"Nobody's making you go to work Monday."

"No. That's the one good thing about it."

Bridget left the fire and came over. She sat on the arm of Sandra's chair, which groaned but held, and put a hand on Sandra's shoulder. Her hand was warm. She ran warm all over, always had. Sandra leaned into it a little, in spite of herself.

"You've got the look," Bridget said.

"What look?"

"The one where you're doing math in your head. Adding up how tired you are and subtracting how much fun you're supposed to be having."

"I don't do math like that."

"You do exactly that math." Bridget's thumb moved in a small circle on her shoulder. "I've watched you do it at every family thing and every work party for three years."

Sandra looked at the fire. It was a fair hit and she did not want to admit it, so she said nothing, and Bridget did not push. That was another thing about her. She poked and then she waited. She had patience Sandra did not expect from someone so restless.

The creek ran on. Somewhere back in the trees an owl asked its one question and got no answer and asked again.

"Dinner in twenty," Bridget said finally, standing. "I'm doing the foil packets. Potatoes, the little carrots, and those sausages we got at the market."

"The fancy ones with the cheese in them."

"The fancy ones." She headed for the cooler. "And then tomorrow we go up. It's like four miles to the meadow. Gentle grade, mostly. I wouldn't bring you up anything mean."

"Mostly gentle."

"Mostly. There's one switchback section."

"Bridget."

"It's fine, it's fine. Steps are cut into it. Some of them. Half of them."

"Bridget."

Bridget laughed, that big easy laugh that came out of her whole chest, and started unpacking dinner, and Sandra sat in her warm-ish chair by the good fire and felt the tired in her body and, underneath the tired, something else. Something she had not felt in a long while and could not name right away.

She figured it out halfway through the sausage. It was appetite. Plain appetite. For the weekend, for the walk, for whatever came next.

She finished her beer and held out her plate for more.

The fire got low and the sky got serious. Full dark out here, no streetlights, no neighbor's porch. Just stars, more of them than Sandra ever saw from the backyard at home.

She had gone back for seconds on the potatoes and didn't regret it. The foil had done its job. Everything came out soft and a little charred at the edges and tasting like it had earned its salt.

"Okay," Bridget said, wiping her fingers on her jeans. "Hit me."

"Hit you with what?"

"The question. You've been holding it all night. You keep glancing at my arms."

Sandra looked at her own plate. Caught.

"It's not a bad question," Bridget said. "Ask it."

"Fine. The shimmer. It's brighter tonight. Or it looks brighter. Is that a fire thing or a..."

"Fire thing. And a dark thing. We run a little warmer at night. The green comes up when I'm warm and happy." She held an arm out over the fire, not too close, and the light moved through it. Like looking at a leaf held up to the sun. "Mom's side. It doesn't do anything useful. It doesn't glow in the dark or anything. I'm not a nightlight."

"I never thought you were a nightlight."

"You were wondering."

"Maybe I was wondering a little." Sandra set her plate down. "Okay, real question then. The eyes. When we turned off the gravel road and you killed the headlights, you didn't slow down at all. You knew where every dip was."

"Because I could see every dip." Bridget leaned back in her chair, boots crossed at the ankle. "Night vision. Good one, too. Not perfect, but good. And the hearing, that's the better party trick. I heard that owl before you did. I heard it back at the sign, probably."

"The owl from the sign?"

"You know what I mean. I hear things way off. It's why I can't stand stores with the piped-in music. All that overhead stuff, the register beeps. It stacks up." She wrinkled her nose. "Grew up with it. You just learn to sort it. Stream there. Wind up high. Two deer moving through the trees behind you, that kind of thing."

"Two deer. Behind you."

"Once. Age twenty-one. Dad was so mad I didn't say anything until they were already gone. I thought it was obvious everyone could hear them." She grinned. "It is not obvious. Most people hear almost nothing. It's kind of sad, actually. All that going on and most of you sleep right through it."

Sandra shook her head slowly. Not in disagreement. In something like appetite again, the same one from the sausage.

"I keep waiting for it to scare me," she said.

"What, the monster thing?"

"That. All of it. My whole life there was a box for this stuff. Movies, mostly. And then I met a woman whose forearms shimmer when the sun hits them and whose ears work like radar and my main thought, the whole time, is that I want to know more." She picked up her beer, found it empty, set it down again. "It doesn't scare me. It fascinates me. That's the confession, I guess."

Bridget was quiet a second. Then, softer than her usual voice: "That's a good confession. Most people lead with the other one."

"I don't have the other one."

"I know. I checked. Three years of checking."

They let the fire talk for a while. A log settled and threw up a little crowd of sparks and both of them watched it go up.

"Okay," Sandra said. "Walk. I need to walk or I'm going to fall asleep in this chair and you'll draw a picture of it."

"I would. And I'd label it."

"Exactly."

Bridget grabbed the small flashlight off the table and then, after a look at Sandra, put it back. "Trust me. Creek's along the east edge. Easy walk. Keep to my voice."

The dark was total for the first ten steps and then it wasn't. Sandra's eyes did what they could, which was not much. But Bridget moved ahead of her like it was late afternoon, easy stride, no hesitation at the roots and rocks, her braid swinging. Twice she called back "root, left side" and "little dip here" and Sandra stepped where she said and it was fine. It was better than fine. It felt like being taken care of, which was a feeling Sandra had not let herself have in years and years and had missed more than she knew.

The creek showed up first as sound. Then as a paler dark in the dark. Bridget stopped at the bank.

"Three stones. Big ones. I'll go first, then you. Hand out."

Sandra gave her the hand.

Bridget's hand was warm. Not summer-warm, not hand-around-a-mug warm. Genuinely warm, like the fire had a sister somewhere and it