By AMY STUBER
Alice wants to walk on the trail, but Renee wants to wander. At least that’s what I imagine.
Maybe Alice tells Renee, “It takes two hours to get to the lake. Let’s keep moving,” and probably Renee heads down offshoot paths to get closer to the falls. In the first half-hour, on their way to the lake at the peak, they see a fox, a mother and baby moose, and three animatronic-looking deer.
“What if they aren’t even real,” Renee says, pointing to the deer. She drinks too much from her water bottle too early, while Alice conserves. “What if they are humans in deer suits?”
“Funny,” Alice says, but she doesn’t show teeth.
“Okay, I’ll shut up,” Renee says, and they stop where a rock as big as a Fiat sits beside a green field with a river unfurling into it.
Alice climbs onto the rock and sits. The silver-backed leaves on the Aspen trees flutter. White blobs of fungi puff out of a crack in a nearby pine.
“I guess we’re stopping,” Renee says. She takes off her backpack and pulls out the trail mix she would never buy at home, nuts filmy with salt and cranberries covered in white sugary stuff the packaging claims is yogurt.
The trip was Alice’s idea and involved three flights, two transfers, and a two-hour rental car ride from the airport that ended at a cabin with a door knocker made of an elk’s foot. They spent the first two days doing short hikes to adjust to the altitude, as Alice said was recommended. A walk around a lake. A drive into the national park to see an historic trout camp. Some kayaking. Ice cream while watching kids dig in the sand by the water. A bookstore. Petting other people’s dogs. Dinner at a lodge where the salmon was cooked so much Renee whispered it was “beyond dead and maybe reincarnated.” It wasn’t that funny, but Alice laughed, and this made Renee happy. They did the obligatory beginning-of-vacation fucking on the screened-in porch and were startled by a moose that wandered into the yard, looked up at them with big, blank eyes, and proceeded to decimate a shrub outside the porch screen. This, this is really living, Renee thought while above the moose’s antlers, the stars and the clouds made a pattern against the nighttime sky.
A family passes on the trail near where Alice and Renee sit on the rock. Every person in the family wears some version of the American flag: shorts on the dad, a hat on the mom, the boy and girl, both sweaty and looking miserable, in matching flag-adorned t-shirts.
It’s all so stock and on the nose that Renee almost laughs out loud. It’s close to the Fourth of July, a holiday Renee and Alice both hate, especially Alice, for the forced nationalism and loud noises.
“Are we getting close?” the flag shorts dad says, looking at Alice. He wipes his brow with a bandana and laughs. “We’re not the most experienced hikers.” The man’s backpack is one of those insubstantial ones they give away at a hospital or a car dealership. Renee sees him look at her breasts and look away.
Alice puts her phone down on the rock and says, “You mean to the meadow or the lake?”
“The lake,” the woman says. She’s unsmiling below aviator glasses and carrying those poles you hold out in front of you like antennae. The kids glare at each other. The girl sighs and rolls her eyes. The boy wears thick glasses and is panting. He kicks the ground and says something under his breath. There’s really no telling, Alice thinks, how your kids will turn out.
Alice and Renee have spent the last few months in the trenches of a discussion about having or not having children. At forty, they’re both aware of their shelf lives for biological children. Alice sometimes imagines herself in the park looking at birds with a small boy, but she also feels hemmed in by the idea of parenthood being a required hoop to jump through to give their lives meaning. Renee’s own mother died young, when her mother was just thirty-nine and when Renee was starting college. It makes Renee panicky about her lateness to the big things in life. Her ghost mother appears sometimes in front of Renee, in the kitchen, for example, beautiful in a silk robe, tapping an old Timex and mouthing, tick-tock.
“Oh, yeah, you’re pretty close to the lake, not far at all,” Renee says to the man. Alice pinches her thigh, but Renee doesn’t react.
“Okay, then, we soldier on,” the man says. “You two,” he says and pauses, “have a good time,” and the family continues up the path.
“Why the hell did you lie?” Alice whispers. “The lake is definitely more than an hour from here.” She looks at the trail map she photographed on her phone.
“I don’t know. I didn’t have the heart to tell them,” Renee says and grabs the trail mix, tips the bag into her mouth, and lets too many nuts and dried cranberries tumble in. The reality is that she didn’t like the family for how they looked at them and didn’t mind the thought of them suffering slightly. She doesn’t want to admit this to Alice, but she’s pretty sure Alice already knows.
The sun comes out from behind a cloud like one from a children’s book, and the rocks on the trail sparkle.
Alice points to the spot where, below the trail, a deer is lying in the grass, making a mini crop circle.
“Is it dead?” Renee asks.
“Of course it’s not dead. Not every prone thing is dead. It’s sleeping.”
This is how they are: Alice and Renee, together two years now.
(My friend Sela, The Writer, drinks her drink and pulls at one of her three gold chains, each with a different charm: wishbone, letter S, pineapple. The bar where we always meet after work is uncrowded, and the music, something I recognize from my childhood but can’t name, is loud.
She leans in, holds her paper straw in front of her, and says, “So, don’t take this the wrong way, but I was wondering. Aren’t Alice and Renee each a bit too much of a type? I wanted them to be maybe more nuanced. Also, I don’t know if you can write about lesbians, like if you’re allowed. You’re, what, loosely bisexual at best?”
I blink a few more times than is necessary and look over at the window glass that reflects a series of electric cars, tiny and jewel colored, all plugged in and waiting to go somewhere else. Sela and I met in a creative writing class in college, taught by a famous writer who was more beautiful than should be acceptable for someone also so creative.
I reach out to adjust her necklaces. “I’m more than loosely bisexual,” I say to her, but my cheeks go red.
Between the two of us, Sela is the more successful. She has a book deal. Better hair and clothes. A living mother who calls her the right number of times a week. A one-bedroom instead of a studio. I can try to make myself feel better by thinking all of this makes her uninterestingly typical, but the truth is, I know she will probably always have an easier time than me, will always be happier than me, and it stings to think it.
Sela laugh-coughs and says, “Come on, girl, you know what I mean.”)
Alice and Renee ascend a series of unshaded switchbacks without talking while birds they can’t see make noises in the trees.
The thing about even thinking about having children is that it calls to mind your own mother, yourself as a child, both things that can be fraught, as if strung together by a series of trip wires. Remember how you decapitated Barbies, Renee’s ghost mom says. She’s smoking a thin cigarette and listening to Elton John. Remember the kitten you couldn’t handle, she says, and she exhales smoke that blurs her face.
“Did you hear something?” Renee asks. She’s convinced they will see a bear, even though a ranger at the start of the path by the trail sign told them it was “highly unlikely.”
“I did not,” Alice says.
“It’s not supposed to storm, is it?” Renee asks Alice, who is looking down at her phone. The clouds coming over the ridge above them are more gray than white, and the wind heaves in the trees.
“I’m not getting service here, but I checked a while ago, and there was nothing on the radar.”
They cross over two logs that make a bridge. Renee feels like she’s Laura Ingalls Wilder and wants a time before cars, before sea levels rising. Alice wonders about the process of cutting the logs to make a bridge, as in, did it occur somewhere else, and the logs were hauled here, or did someone bring the saw on site.
Alice and Renee are both still relatively new to being with women, so there is that breath of awkwardness before they even use the word lesbian. It sounds antiquated, too, but queer doesn’t feel like theirs to say. They were both married to men when they met, and soon after meeting, they left their husbands. Renee moved into Alice’s apartment, a place nicer than anywhere Renee lived before, a place that contains things she’s never owned before, like a ceramic dish for roasting garlic or a mesh bag to put bras in, so the dryer doesn’t mangle them.
When they first got together, they decided their marriages were flawed because they were with the wrong people, men, and that being together after that would somehow lead to a better life. It hasn’t worked that way. Renee is still often impulsive and temperamental, and Alice is still sometimes icy and imperious. Also, the easy way they left their past relationships sits like a block between them. They have happy stretches, though. Sometimes they watch a whole season of a bad reality show in one weekend while sharing pea protein ice cream and rubbing each other’s feet.
Alice stops to photograph a cluster of meaty, speckled mushrooms.
“Ooh, maybe we should forage,” Renee says.
“These are incredibly poisonous,” Alice says.
“Oh, okay then,” Renee says and walks faster, ahead of Alice on the trail.
“Are you still mad?” Alice asks, even though she knows she should leave it alone. Last night, after the moose, Alice told Renee she didn’t know if she had it in her, a baby, kids in general.
Renee then went into the second bedroom without saying anything. When Alice tried to lie down by her, Renee asked her to leave. The temperature in the mountains was higher than normal, but neither one of them felt okay about turning on the air conditioning. Renee, alone in the room, spread herself out on the bed and watched food reels on Instagram until she was able to fall asleep with one leg hanging off the mattress and one arm above her head and the fan on high. She dreamed of pudding made of bananas and protein powder and woke up feeling terrible.
“Are you saying I shouldn’t be mad?” Renee stops and reties her shoes. A bee hovers over an orange flower before disappearing inside of it. In a few days, they will be back at desk jobs in their respective tall buildings, sending emails, taking elevators down to lobbies and trying to decide what carryout sounds best.
“That’s not what I’m saying at all. Look, I’m sorry,” Alice says and, from behind, catches one of Renee’s hands, and Renee lets her hang onto it, so they are connected for a few strides until Renee shakes her hand free. It’s enough for Renee to feel warm, though, to feel less alone. Her ghost mom says, You’ve always been so needy, Renee, because this was a lesson Renee’s mom gave her: to be tough and unyielding was preferable to being ready to receive love, and, though Alice is good at making her exterior rock-like, Renee is not. Renee wants to yell back to her ghost mom: It’s true! It’s true. She is soft, and though she once thought that at forty she might have grown out of the things that make her feel porous and child-like, she has not.
(On the way from drinks to the second bar with a bocci court on the back patio where we are supposed to meet up with two men from Sela’s work, Sela says, “I didn’t want you to feel weird about the book thing, so I didn’t mention it initially. I just, I know you’ve been trying to get an agent for fucking ever. It’s honestly a racket anyway, the black hole that opens up the second you send something off to them, it’s like, hello? Did you not tell me you wanted this?”
One of Sela’s heels gets stuck in a street grate in front of the bar, and I think, This is why block heels are better for the city, Sela, but she gets it loose with a small tug. Behind the tinted glass, I can see the outlines of people but not their faces. I reapply my lip gloss, about which my mother might have said, “Orange is not a color meant for the lips.”
Sela leans closer to the glass to see herself better, pulls the gloss from my hand, and uses it, too. “Anyway,” she says as she’s dabbing at her mouth with her pinky, “this place is hilarious. Bocci? Really? I feel like it should maybe be, like, shuffleboard, something old school but not with a veneer over it, you know?”
“Yes, for sure, shuffleboard would be better,” I say and put the lip gloss back in my bag. I’ve been in the city for three years post-college, and Sela, though I don’t always like her, is my best friend.
Being an adult in the world is a wilderness, though, and one is allowed to do all the things that the strictures of childhood did not allow, even though sometimes its boundlessness can feel confining. All that space. All that thought about who you are supposed to be and aren’t yet and maybe won’t be anyway.
In the bar, Sela sits next to the cuter of the two men and grabs his hand immediately, and it’s clear right then that she will fuck him later, and I will go home to watch a show about people working on rich people’s boats, and I’ll have a quick thought, like an insect alighting on a hand before flying somewhere else, about calling my mother and realize for the thousandth time that she’s dead.)
A plane goes by overhead, one of those military ones that’s louder than a commercial jet. Renee puts her hands over her ears.
“Woo-hoo,” someone yells from ahead of them on the path. The American flag family is coming back toward them. Their faces are red, and they look defeated and sweaty. Renee and Alice step to the side so the family can pass.
“There was no lake,” the dad says, “At least not one we could find.” He’s trying to be friendly, but he’s also gritting his teeth. Flag mom says nothing and stabs her poles ahead of her in the dirt and keeps walking. The two kids stare down at the path and try to keep up with her.
The dad sighs in a dramatic way, says, “Oh well.” He lingers. His family keeps walking, and in a minute, they are out of sight.
“Did you lie about the lake?” the man says. His face is as ruddy as cowhide.
Renee starts to say something about the lake, an apology maybe, an equivocation, but Alice looks at her like, Don’t, so she says nothing. Renee’s ghost mom is there. She calls the man a piece of work. She says he’s up to no good.
The man shifts his feet and puts his hands on his hips. “You can tell me, really. I won’t be mad,” he says to Alice and Renee. He walks closer until he’s a few inches from them where they are backed up by a stand of trees and shoulder to shoulder.
They are at a juncture above a big meadow where the path curves along the side of the mountain. On the right, Aspens make a barrier wall, and on the left, the mountain drops off. Buttercups and sage grow out of the rocks near the edge. The meadow far below radiates an almost fluorescent green.
As a child, Alice organized her toys as if they were in a card catalog: alphabetically. Blocks to the left of dolls and animals (stuffed) to the left of blocks. When Renee was a child, she was into motocross and pulled crawdads from a creek with her mother who boiled them in a copper pot.
There’s no sound but the wind. “Really, I won’t be mad, it’ll be like we’re in on a joke. You know, ha ha,” He reaches one red hand toward Renee, who is a few inches closer to him.
It’s then he loses his footing. Or maybe it’s then Renee taps him with her forefinger, or maybe she exhales in a way that somehow carries force, or maybe she pushes him with her whole hand. Later, they won’t remember exactly what happened. Their brains will have reknitted the series of moments together. When Renee can’t sleep that first night back in the city, when someone is yelling on the street, her ghost mom is there by the window in her robe, her hair loose on her shoulders, shaking her head saying, Oh, you know.
To Renee, the sound of him falling is like the sound of a full bag going down the long, dark trash chute in their building. To Alice, the sound of him falling is like the subway train at a distance rumbling closer. This is the thing: there is a space that will always be between them. A cloud, an exhale, a sigh, a gasp.
(Sela, drunk, leans in and scream whispers, “Don’t you love that we’re eating nachos like we’re straight out of the 1980s, like fucking keto or whatever doesn’t even exist, like bodies don’t exist, like we’re just nacho-eating blobs bobbing through life without any worries?” Sela’s phone buzzes. She picks it up and puts it down. “God, my fucking mom again,” Sela says. “I can’t take another video of like, a chicken and a goat who are best friends.”
I wouldn’t mind seeing the chicken and goat friends video. In fact, I’d watched a whole series about unlikely animal friends and had, over those weeks, grown sure that sometimes crows on power lines were talking directly to me.
The two men from Sela’s work drink sour beer and play pool. I push my drink too hard, and it tumbles onto its side. The ice and liquid roll a small lake over the table. Some of it drips onto Sela’s lap before she can jump away, so she’s sticky with whiskey lemonade, and I let it sit there for what feels like a full minute without jumping up and doing that nice friend thing of trying to dab it away.
“It’s fine, it’s fine,” she says one too many times and then settles back onto her stool. “Okay, so I was thinking about your story,” she starts up again, “and maybe there should be more of like a motivating factor for the motherhood thing for Renee, like why now?” Sela shakes her hair out of a clip and sets the clip on the table. She says, “All I’m saying is it would help the story’s emotional resonance to know why kids, why now.”
She gets up to go to the bathroom and leaves her phone on the table. I pick it up. It’s not password protected. I open her texts and heart all five of the most recent ones from her mom and then type: lol mom ur the best, and it gets hearted by Sela’s somewhere-out-there mom immediately. Sela takes forever in the bathroom, so there’s enough time for me to imagine saying to her, to even sit at the table and make my mouth run through the words: I don’t know, Sela, sometimes people just do things.)
Alice goes to look over the edge first, and Renee can tell by the way Alice’s shoulders untense that the man is not dead.
“Help me, you cunts,” the man yells, and it’s exactly what they expected him to yell, but very soon after, he says, “Just help me.”
Beyond the ledge is a drop and then another ledge and then a more extreme drop. The meadow grass below where he’s lying on the outcropping bends with the wind.
They can leave him. Eventually, he might make his way up to the path, or his family will reel back their steps and shout for him, or someone else passing will hear him. Or maybe, and this is unlikely, he will fall more, drop down to the meadow below, and mountain birds will pick apart his body.
Renee moves past Alice and climbs down to the man, and Alice holds onto Renee’s arm to keep her steady.
“I can get back up myself,” he half grunts, but he can’t. His face and leg are bleeding into the dirt. His string backpack is all the way down the side of the rock wall like a sad dead bunny on the floor of the meadow. Whatever was in it is lost.
In a chain of three people, they inch him over the few feet he’s fallen until they are all back on the path. When they see he can stand, when it seems clear nothing obvious is broken, when he spits on his hands and wipes his dirty wet hands across the blood on his face, Alice and Renee take off running, alongside the path above the meadow and then back through the trees and all the way to the lake. It’s just as pretty as the guidebook said it would be. Pines rise up on all sides. Wildflowers skim the edges. Soaked logs lodge at its perimeter.
“Oh my fucking god,” Renee says, and Alice says back, “Oh my fucking god.” They lean hands onto thighs and breathe heavily. Renee even starts laughing. She stops at a spot that’s flat and green and right by the water.
“Are we not going to talk about what happened,” Renee says.
“Let’s not,” Alice says. She wipes her face with her shirt sleeve.
“Okay.” She pauses and counts to ten. “Really? Not at all?”
Alice doesn’t answer. Her breath starts to even out. She does a series of slow inhales and exhales.
“We should live here,” Renee says to break the long silence. “Why is our whole life about labor? Maybe if we lived here, it could be about something else, something better,” Renee lays completely flat on her back, spreads her arms out, and closes her eyes. America, she thinks, is dumb and exhausting, gone in all the wrong directions.
“I don’t know. I like our life,” Alice says. She knows what Renee means, though. Still, it’s a luxury to want to carve a utopia and pocket yourself away while the whole rest of the world unravels. “You’re going to get a million bug bites,” Alice says.
“I don’t care,” Renee says.
Alice lies back next to Renee, and their arms touch all the way down, shoulder to wrist. Whatever complexity had been making a taut wall between them dissolves.
How were we ever not together, is something Renee almost says to Alice but doesn’t. This could last, is something Alice thinks but will never speak.
“Okay,” Alice says after many minutes without noise, “We should go.”
They stand and start making their way down, down, down.
The sky is blue over the peak. This is how the weather is here: one thing one minute and another the next. They keep looking for but not seeing more animals. They both worry about the man but don’t mention it. They are slow around all the turns, though, thinking he might be waiting.
After this, they will hike back to their car, sleep, wake, pack, get on a plane, eat circular pretzels, drink vodka tonics, Uber back to their apartment, light candles that smell like flowers and spices, eat wood-fired pizza, and try to sleep seven hours before going to work in the morning. Still, it’s something for them to be here with trees buzzing, flowers trembling, sky blue, their hands alive from the adventure of all of it. The lake, now far behind them, still holds its picture of the sky. They stop and get out their last snack, an expensive chocolate bar they pass back and forth.
“I hope there won’t be cops waiting for us at the bottom or something crazy,” Renee says.
“No,” Alice says, “this is a story that man won’t tell anyone.”
“When we get home and tell our friends about this, they won’t believe us,” Renee says.
“It’s like something out of Flannery O’Connor,” Alice says.
“Except no one is murdered,” Renee says.
“Yet,” Alice says, and they both laugh. Renee’s two front teeth are smeared with chocolate. Alice stops on the trail, pushes Renee against a tree and kisses the chocolate off Renee’s teeth, licks, sucks, sticks her hand into Renee’s pants, and doesn’t, for once, wonder if anyone is around.
“Maybe we could,” Alice says, and Renee knows she means: baby.
Renee’s ghost mother is there. She doesn’t laugh. She cackles. You, with a baby, she says. Her breath is a cavern inside of which Renee can see her whole childhood. Look at you, her mother says then, living your best life. It’s not nice, though. It’s a knife.
(The next morning at brunch, Sela looks like she has smudged her eyeliner to appear glamorously world weary. She leans forward so her tits hang just right. She says, “Hey, girlie, I’m sorry. Your story was actually really good. You had me thinking they were going to get, like, eaten by bears or fucking assaulted. But, like, I wonder if the flag bro should actually die? And for it to be this super dark moment, like he could die in a really weird, troubling way? Like a wind gust comes, and the man is impaled by a tree branch or something, like something you’d never expect?”
The thing is: there are only a few stories. Someone meets someone. Something unusual happens. Someone dies. People are sad, and they try to be happy. Adults carry their sad baby selves around with them their whole lives and are sometimes stern with them and sometimes sweet. Together, they hit against things, and maybe they come out better, or maybe they come out the same.
Servers tool around the room with croissants on pink, pearly plates and iced matchas with their bamboo straws rattling glasses. The day outside the window is sunny, and it’s nice that it’s a Saturday, and there’s nothing else I have to do. I stand and regret the lace-edged white socks Sela talked me into buying to wear with my loafers. I pull cash from my bag, think of my mother’s face wide and open, when we were in those long waiting months, when life felt like a short sentence with a visible period. I set the cash on the table, and say to Sela, “Death doesn’t have to be a spectacle. Sometimes it just happens,” and walk into the late morning where dog walkers pull along packs of dogs, and people sit alone but happy seeming on benches. It’s one of those movie moments: the light is right on the trees and buildings, so right that if I took a selfie, I might, for once, actually like it. I decide to become someone who owns kitten heels and oversized blazers, someone who walks with purpose, someone who leaves behind naivete with intention. Maybe my life will be the better one.)
The plane goes by again, coming back from wherever it was, this time lower and louder. America, America, the plane seems to be saying, brash, pulsing, and generally too much. It doesn’t matter that Alice and Renee almost never drive, that they eat organic, that they use rechargeable batteries, that they set their AC to 76 except on the hottest days. The world, well, the people of the world, may still end before the child they have, the children they have, two of them, grow old. No amount of worry and planning can change that.
A deer walks behind where they are standing, and they are too busy to see it. Its fur is matted in spots, maybe from a tangle of barbed wire or a winterlong skin ailment. The deer watches them from behind the tree, blink, step, blink. The world right then is circles in circles in circles, and time is a stupid bee buzz you don’t ever want to hear again. Make it good, make it mean something, make it matter, Renee’s ghost mom says.
Anyway, tomorrow they will be home.
“Day Hike” is excerpted from the debut story collection Sad Grownups, out October 8 from Stillhouse Press.
Amy Stuber’s writing has appeared in the New England Review, Flash Fiction America, Ploughshares, The Idaho Review, Cincinnati Review, Triquarterly, American Short Fiction, Joyland, and elsewhere. She’s the recipient of the Missouri Review’s 2023 William Peden Prize in fiction, winner of the 2021 Northwest Review Fiction Prize, and runner-up for the 2022 CRAFT Short Fiction Prize. Her work received a special mention in Pushcart Prize XLIV, appeared on the Wigleaf Top 50 in 2021, has been nominated for Best of the Net, and appears in Best Small Fictions 2020 and 2023. She has a PhD in English and has taught college writing and worked in online education for many years. More at amystuber.com.
