Page 87 of Happiness for Beginners

“How long can the human body go without fresh water?” Dosie asked.

“Three days,” Jake answered. “Well, two days before the hallucinations set in, anyway.”

“Jake—” I said.

“It’s the rule of threes,” Jake said, like it was just empirically interesting. “You can go three minutes without air. Three days without water. And three weeks without food.”

“Not helping,” Mason finished.

“Haven’t people died on these trips before?” Dosie asked next.

“They’re under new management,” Jake and I said, in unison.

It took a total of four hours before we hit the trail again. But oh, God, was it glorious to see it. Breathless and bleeding, we all hugged anyway. We were saved.

Except. We’d backtracked a bit coming down the hill and rejoined the trail in a spot we’d already passed. If the map was correct, and if I was reading it right, it was still a good mile to the stream crossing—and it was already five in the afternoon.

It took us another hour to hike that last mile. And when we reached the stream crossing at last, we realized something I hadn’t noticed on the map. A stream did cross the trail, just as I’d insisted, but the stream was at the bottom of a steep ravine. A hundred feet down, or so. The trail actually used a terrifyingly rickety rope bridge to cross it, like something out of a spaghetti Western.

We walked to the point where the rope bridge met the trail, and peered over. And it occurred to me suddenly that the creek bed, after all this, might be dry. I crossed my fingers. We looked down. Way below, it was wet.

I closed my eyes. “Thank God,” I said.

Jake gave me a high five. “It’s going to be a bitch to get to,” he said, “but it’s there.”

And so, we set up camp. On closer inspection, there was a footpath down to the creek. Jake offered to take all four water bottles and a cookpot down to load up at the stream, though, looking back, why we gave the guy with Coke-bottle glasses that job I can’t imagine. Dosie started dinner, and Mason and I went to set up the tarp.

When the tarp was ready, I went back to the kitchen to find that Jake still hadn’t come back with the water. We were starting to lose the light, now, too.

Something was wrong. I just knew. “I bet it’s hard to climb that ravine with an open pot of water,” I announced to the rest of the group, even though nobody was paying attention. “I’ll go help Jake out.”

The path to the water was steep, and bumpy, and counterintuitive. You often had to go up to go down or sideways to go forward. Also, probably half of the big rocks that I stepped on in the path were wobbly. The farther along I got, the more I started to worry that I would find Jake unconscious at the bottom of the trail, splayed out on the rocky riverbank.

I made it to the bottom before I found him. He wasn’t unconscious, but he did look like he’d fallen. He was on his hands and knees, panting and frantic. When he heard me, he looked up, but didn’t see me. His eyes were red, like he’d been crying. “Don’t come any closer!” he said. “I’ve lost my glasses.”

I took a few steps closer.

“Stop!” he shouted. “You’ll step on them!” His face was all agony.

“I won’t step on them,” I said. “They’re not a contact lens.”

“I’m serious! Stop!”

“Okay,” I said. He was serious. Seriously freaking out. I switched into teacher mode and infused my voice with calm. “I’ll help you. We’ll find them.”

He shook his head. He wasn’t listening. “I’m telling you. They’re lost.”

“We’ll find them,” I repeated, sinking to my knees and starting to crawl across the beach toward him. “I’m going slow,” I said. “I’m crawling. We’ll find them.”

He was breathing like he’d just sprinted a marathon.

“Take a deep breath,” I said. “Slow down.”

He nodded and tried to slow down.

I kept crawling toward him.

“It’s Helen, by the way,” I said.

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