Truth is, I want to try. I know it won’t work but it turns out old habits die harder than I expected and she’s here, now, suggesting something, and despite all evidence to the contrary I can’t help but think: could be fun.
Which is stupid of me.
“No, it’s not worth a try,” I tell her, folding my arms over my chest. “These straps can’t hold a five-ton truck and in the course of trying to get it to work, one of us will probably injure ourselves attempting the impossible and then we’ll be well and truly fucked because it’ll also be darker, colder, and the snow will be deeper. Any other genius ideas while you’re at it?”
I’m not shouting but I say the last sentence way, way louder than was necessary and Andi’s eyes go wide, her face pale in the bright light and oddly angled shadows of her headlamp. How dare she? How dare she get us into this stupid, dangerous situation and then have the nerve to look like a cornered animal when I tell her that?
I’m tempted to say all that out loud. It would probably feel pretty good right now. I don’t, because I’m an adult and this is already strained enough.
“No,” she says at last, voice steady, chin up. I take another deep breath in a seemingly endless succession of deep breaths and look around, the beam from my headlamp sweeping over snow and trees and… that’s pretty much it. I turned the truck’s headlights off—if the battery ran out we’d be even more fucked than we already are—and the paleness of tree trunks against the blackness beyond makes the forest feel shallow, like it’s all set dressing with no depth. I breathe again and manage to engage the part of my brain that wants to do something besides shout.
“In the past year I’ve had to rescue three cars from a ditch,” I tell her, now at a normal volume. Andi stares right back at me without moving.
“You drove into three ditches?”
“No,” I huff, my breath catching the light for half a second. “Three of my idiot siblings drove into ditches. I pulled three of my idiot siblings out of three ditches. I’ve never driven into one ditch, let alone three.”
“Oh,” she says, and she sounds way too skeptical. “Right.”
“I got this truck all the way to you and almost all the way back,” I point out. “That was a fucking miracle. No. Not a miracle. That was a feat of skill.”
“I wasn’t saying—” My face must do something, because she holds both her gloved hands up and takes a small step back. “Sorry. Your driving is perfect.”
“Point being, I understand the forces involved in moving a stuck vehicle and a tie-down strap or even ten tie-down straps aren’t gonna do it right now,” I say, adjusting my hat a little because it’s making my forehead itch. “And some Chucklefuck McFucknuts didn’t put the snow chains back in last winter, so this isn’t going anywhere.”
Andi takes a shaky breath and glances sideways at the truck. “Shit,” she breathes. “So, we’re stuck here.”
“Can you hike?”
“What?”
“Can. You—”
“We can’t leave the truck.”
“I doubt anyone’s gonna steal it,” I say, opening the driver’s side door. The dome light comes on, and I blink hard. “And if they do, they’ve earned it.”
“No, that’s like—the first thing you learn from every single outdoors guide, website, and ranger talk,” Andi says, her voice pitching a little higher. “If you get lost, you stay with your vehicle and don’t wander off into the woods at night in the middle of a blizzard!”
“We’re not lost,” I tell her, leaning over the driver’s seat.
“We’re way deep in the woods at night in the snow in the middle of nowhere and that’s how people die of exposure!”
I do not point out where I found her earlier.
“It’s a mile,” I call back. “Maybe a mile and a half. One hour, tops, even in the snow.”
“To the road? No, it’s not.”
“To the cabin.”
“What cabin?”
I pull my GPS unit and my backup GPS unit from where they were plugged into the center console, then dig through the glovebox for the paper map.
“The cabin where we’re staying in,” I tell her, snapping the glovebox shut.
When I turn around, her face is very pale, her eyes are very wide, and she’s standing very still.
“Oh,” she says. She’s watching me like she needs to be ready for me to do something, then speaks with a forced calm. “I see. I had thought we were going to the Parkway.”
“That’s the opposite direction,” I say, baffled. “We’ve been heading away from the Parkway for miles.”
“I didn’t realize.”
“How did you not—” I stop myself. I know the answer, which is that most people don’t know which direction is which when they’re in the middle of the woods. They don’t even know it in their own neighborhoods. “Here’s the plan: we hike the mile back to the cabin, which has shelter, heat, and food. Tomorrow or the day after, once the roads are clear, I take you down the mountain and into town. There’s no way the Parkway’s been cleared, and there’s no way we’d make it the twenty miles into town.”
Andi chews on her lip for a few moments, glancing away, breath fogging in front of her.
“Okay,” she says. “I still think we should stay with the truck. Every survival guide is very clear—”
“What do they say about chaining yourself to a tree in the winter?” I snap. I’m louder than I should be, again. “Is that more advisable than hiking to safety or is it—”
“That was also stupid and I was also scared!” she shouts.
Everything goes silent, her words swallowed by the snow. Now her face is blotchy and red, even in the weird light from her headlamp, her jaw clenching, and—
Fuck.
I’m being an asshole.
I’ve got good cause for being an asshole, but suddenly I’m paying attention to Andi instead of looping the thought this is her fault how do I get us out of this over and over again and Jesus, fuck, she’s not just scared, she’s scared of me. Andi’s never been scared of me before.
Fucking… shitfuck. I feel like dirt scraped off the bottom of a shoe. I feel like the ground should be swallowing me whole.
“Andi,” I say, and I try to sound as warm and fuzzy as I can, which isn’t very warm and fuzzy at all but at least I’m trying. “First, we’re not lost. Here.”
I turn on the GPS, wait for it to boot, and show her the screen. She glances at it, then glances up at the sky, as if that’ll help orient her. I swallow and try to channel every bit of helping-a-wounded-animal-calm I can get a hold of.
“Okay,” I say, and pull a glove off with my teeth so I can mess with the screen. “This dot is us, right now, and this little cabin-shaped symbol is the cabin.”
Andi looks at it for a moment, biting her lips together, then glances north. Then she glances northeast, toward the cabin.
“Those survival guides are aimed at amateurs,” I point out, very patiently. She takes the GPS unit from my hand, removes her own glove, and keeps poking at it. “Not wilderness professionals with two GPS units, a map, and a lot of familiarity with this exact location.”