How to Be a Sister by Eileen Garvin (icecream ebook reader .TXT) 📗

of us said much. But it was an easy silence. Easier, anyway, than it had been in the past. As we neared the exit for the town of Coeur d’Alene, I got nervous. We would pass our marina on the way to the hike I’d chosen. Even though she said she wanted to go hiking, this could be disastrous, since disrupting Margaret’s routine has always been a sure way of setting her off. I was picturing myself driving east on I-90 with my sister wailing and thrashing in the passenger seat as I tried to keep the van on the road: “You’re going to the LAAAAAAKE! You’re going to the LAAAAAAKE! Aaaaaaaaah!” over and over again. That’s what I saw in my head. That’s what I used to see all the time. My sister. Freaking out and inconsolable. (And a driving hazard, I might add.) But I was wrong again. We passed right by the exit to our marina, and Margaret simply turned her head to watch it go past.

Ten more miles of I-90. Three miles of Highway 97 south. We pulled into the trailhead and climbed out of the car. I had brought my CamelBak for Margaret to wear and loaded another pack with water, snacks, sunscreen, and a map. My intention was to make sure Margaret, a novice hiker, was as comfortable as possible so that she’d have a good time. Boy, did I feel prepared. I managed to get the CamelBak straps over Margaret’s slender shoulders, but the waist strap just wouldn’t meet in her Rubenesque middle. So the CamelBak was going to have to hang from her shoulders. She seemed okay with that.

“Ready?”

“You’re going hiking, Eileen!”

I couldn’t believe how smoothly things were going. What had I been worried about back there in my front yard?

“Let’s go!” I said to Margaret, and to Dizzy, who leaped in the air and licked my nose. I turned my heel and headed toward the trailhead. We were off to see the freaking wizard!

Then behind me I heard Margaret say, “Lunch?”

My heart sank. I knew I’d forgotten something.

“Margaret, what did you have for breakfast?”

“Froot Loops!”

Terrific. Not exactly the breakfast of champions. And that had probably been about five hours ago, since she usually rose at dawn. So I handed my sister a peanut butter Luna bar and hoped for the best.

It was a climb. The trail moved up through tall shadows of Ponderosa pine. Snowberry and thimbleberry bushes bordered the soft track of dirt and needles. Wild lupine, yarrow, and daisies splashed the green with color. Dizzy bounded up the trail and into the bushes and circled back to us over and over again, smiling her enigmatic canine smile.

My sister broke a sweat within the first few minutes. She wasn’t huffing and puffing, but she was breathing hard. I slowed down. We took a break in the shade. I showed her how to use the CamelBak to suck out the water. We are both healthy perspirers, and Margaret’s underarms were already soaked. So were the straps of my CamelBak. I had not foreseen this element in sharing gear until now. I didn’t know what disturbed me more: the fact that my big sister was sweating all over my pack or the fact that she was wearing a pack that I had sweated all over. I tried to think about the Shasta daisies to get my mind off the bacteria.

We climbed. We rested. We drank water. There was no one else on the trail. It was absolutely quiet but for the sound of our feet, the jingle of Dizzy’s collar. Every once in a while we heard a voice float up from the lake below, the peep of a chickadee, the musical call of a flicker. As the crow flies, we were only a few miles from our childhood lake cabin, and yet we’d never been on this trailhead before. The smell of the woods and the water was familiar, built into my memory of summer and childhood. I imagined it was familiar to Margaret, too.

WE BOTH WANDERED freely in those woods when we were children, me with a pack of brothers and cousins. Margaret was more apt to wander off by herself. When we were very young, my mother had clipped a rope to the back of Margaret’s life jacket to make sure she didn’t head off by herself. But it didn’t take her long to figure out how to take it off if she wanted to. She was quick, smart. Margaret the Fox, my parents called her. She’d get focused on something and wouldn’t seem to hear people calling her. She went missing more than once, which was terrifying to me because of the look it put on my mother’s face. Her absence would put the household in an uproar. I never forgot the sound of fear in my mother’s voice as we hiked the hill behind the house calling my sister’s name.

But just as she always stopped hitting and spitting and pinching when she felt like it, Margaret always showed up eventually, usually before dark. Years later we discovered that she had befriended the Ulmans, the cookie-making couple down the bay. That must have been where she was much of the time. Margaret and the Ulmans had first met in their kitchen one day after she had let herself into their house to make toast. Margaret didn’t speak much then, so she would have been unable to explain herself. Apparently they welcomed her just the same, let her make herself toast, sit and eat it, and leave silently. She came back later to make cookies. Another one of her secrets.

HIKING, WE MADE it about halfway into the 3.5-mile loop, which is to say that if we turned around there, we would end up covering the same distance as if we’d completed the loop, but without the satisfaction of going full circle. But by the time we reached this place in time and caloric output,