Bending down to pick up the letter opener, I see a shadow in the shape of feet under the gray bed skirt that skims the floor. Almost as if someone is standing at the other side of the bed, watching me. But lifting the bed skirt, everything slips into focus: they’re just shoes. I pull out the boots, which turn from shadowed shapes to a muddy brown in the sunlight. The rubber soles still have pebbles lodged in the grooves. The laces are undone and stiff from dirt and dried water. I put them aside, thinking trash—because really, they’re kind of gross—but they’re also pretty good hiking boots, or so he informed me.
When we went hiking in the beginning of June, I wore sneakers. My running shoes. They’d gotten me through all sorts of terrain, up and down hills during cross-country practice, through wind and rain and the occasional snow day.
Caleb picked me up that Saturday morning before dawn, and I was the only one awake in my house. It felt like the world was ours. He raised an eyebrow at my gray and purple bag. My backpack, really. And my choice of footwear. My sneakers. It felt like he was criticizing me with his look, when all he’d said the day before was, Will you come on a hike with me tomorrow?
“Sorry, I didn’t have time to go shopping for camo-style hiking gear,” I said. “But it gets the job done.”
We left at six a.m. and drove for just about two hours, past signs for the Delaware Water Gap.
I slept on and off most of the way there. The crunch of loose gravel under the tires was what woke me, as we pulled off the main road. My head was leaning against the window. I caught Caleb staring out the front window, looking up.
“We’re here?” I asked.
We pulled off the road at a sign with an arrow, a hiking trail name, an icon for picnic tables. Caleb eased slowly into a small circular lot made of dirt, where another pair of hikers were loading up supplies from their trunk.
He shifted into park. Twisted in his seat for his hiking boots, changed out of his sneakers.
This was my second indication that hiking was not going to be what I thought it was. My first indication being the six a.m. start time.
It didn’t take me long to realize that the sneakers were a mistake. The rocks were slippery with morning dew, nearby moisture from the stream trickling down beside us. I stayed on the dirt path, feeling blisters forming at my heels, even though I’d run in these shoes up and down hills and dirt tracks before. There was something to the motion that was different, and at one point I threw my backpack to the ground and let out a huff.
“Come on,” Caleb said, unamused.
“Maybe I should leave the bag and just try running.”
He checked his watch, looked up the trail again, tapped his heel against a rock while I adjusted my socks. “Anything that will make you go faster,” he mumbled.
I swatted him with my bag as I hooked it back on my shoulders, and he grinned, relenting.
I kept my eyes on his boots while we moved, trying to step in his steps, breathe when he breathed. Within minutes, I was in perfect sync with Caleb, and I felt close to him, even as he was facing away, looking away, in silence.
Eventually his steps sped up, and he was scrambling up the rocks, and I fell out of sync, silently cursing both the lack of traction on my shoes and Caleb for not waiting. Then, abruptly, he stopped. I almost ran smack into his back. He was frozen in a clearing made of boulders, and we were on the top of the mountain. There was a drop-off beyond, and the valley and the river stretched below us, in endless green and blue.
“Oh,” I said as I came to rest beside him.
Caleb’s mouth was slightly open, and his eyes had this faraway look, and I thought, in that moment, that he was heartbreakingly beautiful. Without looking, he reached a hand over for mine, lacing our fingers together—both of our hands pulsing hot from the hike, a sharp contrast against the cold of the breeze on the exposed overlook.
He didn’t take a picture, and neither did I, because I understood. You couldn’t really capture it. Anything we did, forcing the look and feel into a flat two dimensions, would strip the moment for the both of us.
I sat on the rock behind us, and Caleb looked down at me. “We’re not done,” he said.
I scrunched up my face. Thought about the length we’d already walked, and would most likely have to walk back. “You were right,” I said. “About the sneakers.”
He reached a hand down and pulled me up, pulled me close, so it was just us and the trees and the sky. “It’ll be worth it. I promise.”
The trail snaked downward this time, down off the mountain, into the trees, the path turning back to roots and dirt. The sound of birds calling, insects crying, and the hint of something more, in the distance.
We were making our way toward something—what had started as a faint hum was slowly becoming a roar. Eventually we reached a clearing, which gave way to a wide river trailing between large, flat rocks, and a waterfall streaming down from the rocks behind us. Close to the shore, the mist rose up off the water, coating everything.
On the other side of the river, there was a group of people having lunch, and a few others swimming. In the distance, through the trees, there were a scattering of tents, a makeshift campground. Caleb sat on a stone at the water’s edge, used a stick to try prying a rock from the sole of his boots.
“This is the end,” he said.
“Of the hike?”
He grinned. “That. And New Jersey.”
“Ohh,” I said, raising my hand to my forehead, as if surveying a foreign territory. “The fabled land of Pennsylvania? I’ve heard stories of such a place.”
He laughed, extracted a larger section of mud from his shoe, and tossed it into the river. Then he fell silent. He was watching the group on the other side of the river—a father, a mother, children. There were other adults, presumably relatives. A few people were swimming, independently, closer to the waterfall. I wondered if he yearned for something, if he saw what was lacking in his own life. Or if he was just hungry for their food.
“We should’ve done the picnic thing,” I said.
He seemed startled by me standing there beside him. The sound of the water was hypnotic, making the nearby voices fade away.
“Oh, and who would’ve carried that?” He shook his head and pulled out his camera. “Come on,” he said, unlacing his shoes.
I did the same, glad track season was over, because my feet were pretty beat-up looking from the hike, and my coach would have a fit if I came to practice complaining about blisters.
Caleb waded out a little into the river, holding my hand, and I was unprepared for the shock of cold. But he kept moving, until we were as deep as I wanted to go, in clothes. The water was up past our knees, touching the base of his shorts, and mine.
We stood in the river, on the border, rocks and dirt under our toes. “We’re not in New Jersey anymore. But we’re not in Pennsylvania, either,” he said.
“We’re nowhere,” I said, and the current ran over my bare feet, up my bare legs, numbing and enticing all at once.
I hopped onto his back, made him carry me out, laughing as my toes tapped the surface of the water when he pretended to drop me.
We tried to get a picture when we were back on the shore, the two of us in a frame, the waterfall behind us. But our faces were too close, blocking everything. One of the men who’d been swimming was now wading up to his knees, and he offered to take the photo for us. “You guys look like you could use some help.”
Caleb passed him the camera, and the man shook off his hands to dry them first before taking it. He didn’t count us down, or say ready or anything; he just took the shot and handed the camera back. In the photo, I’m half wincing from the cold on my feet, and Caleb seems distracted, looking somewhere beyond the camera. Neither of us is truly smiling, but there’s something beautiful about it, still. Maybe it’s the waterfall. Maybe it’s the way we were both caught unprepared. Or maybe it’s everything surrounding us. The mist coming up off the water. The scattering of people at the end of the frame, caught midmotion, hands scooping water, an arc of water droplets, a child with his hand on the way up to block his face.
It was worth it later, he was right. If only for the drive back, and the stop at the drugstore, and the way he set me in the backseat, holding my bare foot in his hand, wrapping the Band-Aid around.
And because, when he dropped me off, my legs sore, my body sweaty and gross, he said, “Thanks for today, Jessa.”
It was the last time he thanked me for anything and meant it.
I throw the hiking boots in an empty box and the sound echoes through the room. I remember that waterfall photo—the last photo of us that had been on the wall. The beginning of the end. I make my way back to his desk, needing more.