Page 70 of The Ripple Effect

We scramble back up the trail, my runner’s legs putting me in the lead, my heart galloping even faster than my feet.

Kneeling in a patch of low brush to the side of the path is Lori, face streaked with tears and snot, blowing and blowing her whistle. “Mitch,” she sobs between blasts, “Mitch, where are you?”

“Lori,” I shout, my hands blocking my ears. Christ, that thing is loud enough to rupture both tympanic membranes. And where are Trevor and Petra?

My mind jumps straight to the worst-case scenario: two clients missing, another hurt. “Lori, stop. Stop! What happened?”

“I don’t know, I don’t know,” she sobs. She’s covered in leaves, the elbow of her shirt bloodied and torn. Her skinned knuckles leave streaks of red across her cheeks.

McHuge pulls up, too out of breath to talk, but we don’t need words. Whatever I need, he’ll make it happen.

“I’m going to take good care of you, Lori. Give me some deep breaths now.” I take her wrist, fingers on her pulse, my heart exploding with fear. “Focus on my finger. Now follow it as it moves. Good. Tell me your full name?”

Running footsteps catch up to where Lori, Lyle, and I crouch in the damp leaf litter. “We only left her for a minute,” Trevor pants. “My sunglasses fell out of my pocket. Petra figured we’d be able to backtrack faster on our own.”

“Oh,Ifigured that?” Petra snaps.

“Why are you mad atme? You left her, too.”

“Now’s not the time, you two. Go find Mitch.” The sounds of their argument move away, and I turn back to Lori. Her skin is warm and pink. She’s awake and talking. Her heart rate is fast but steady. No signs of a bump to the head, no broken bones, and she’s moving all four limbs. She knows her name and birth date, but once I wipe her face and give her a tissue to blow her nose, she starts dodging my questions.

“What’smyname, Lori?”

She flaps the tissue at me. “Don’t be silly. I know who you are.”

“Humor me.” If I were in the emergency room, I’d be getting an EKG, considering an MRI of her brain, testing her urine and blood. Out here, without even a stethoscope, I’m not particularly useful.

We have to call 911.

“Lori!” Mitch rounds the corner, no sign of a rock in her shoe now. Brent follows her, gawking. I tilt my head at Lyle, who immediately moves to block his view.

“Mitch!” Lori’s lower lip trembles, fresh tears pooling in her usually laughing brown eyes. “I’m having a bad day. I want to go home. Can we go home?”

Mitch doesn’t look surprised to find Lori confused and bleeding on a mountain trail. She falls to her knees beside her wife, taking Lori in her arms. “Yes, baby. We can go home now. Don’t cry, love.”

I look over at Lyle, reading the understanding in his eyes. He’s an expert on the human mind; he’s figured it out, too.

Everything’s about to get much more complicated.

Both Lori and Mitch decline the option to call 911, so the three of us take a rideshare to the hospital for a checkup. Everyone else piles into the Mystery Machine and heads back to camp. It’s barely afternoon, but all of us are done for the day.

Lori falls asleep against Mitch’s shoulder, exhausted and cried out.

“I hate to say this, Mitch, but I have to talk to Lyle about today. If that had happened on the river…”

“I’m sorry,” Mitch sighs. “Truly. We wanted to keep doing the thing we love as long as we could. I thought it might be the last time. Guess it is. Guess itwas,” she corrects herself sadly. “I wouldn’t blame you for asking us to leave.”

I put my hand on her arm, giving it a gentle squeeze. “We’ll need to figure out whether Lori will be safe on the capstone trip. But as long as her health checks out, you’re welcome at camp tonight.”

“I’d like that. She would, too. You know,” Mitch says softly, glancing at the driver’s earbuds, “I never would have taken up canoeing if it wasn’t for Lori. Maybe you’ve noticed there aren’t a lot of Black faces in the wilderness. But if you love your wife, you grow to love the things that make her who she is. Have you ever been married, Stellar?”

“No. I almost got engaged once. Before Lyle,” I amend hastily, hoping she didn’t notice my slip. “But we didn’t have time for each other’s hobbies.” I hardly had my own hobbies, those two years with Jen. My extracurricular activities were the hours upon hours of unpaid work for the department—research, teaching, administration. Medicine was the beginning and end of many of my colleagues’ lives. My life, too.

“Lucky you found McHuge, then,” Mitch says. “And lucky I found Lori. She’s so smart, my Lori. Did you know she was a film studies professor? She could recite every line from the movies she taught. Then she’d mix up a word here and there. Neither of us thought too much of it until one morning she decided to bake bread, then forgot it in the oven and damn near burned down our house.” Mitch looks at her with a tenderness that might stop my heart, it’s so full of love and loss.

She heaves a long sigh. “Life is strange. I thought she’d be the one taking care of me, with my diabetes. But it’s the other way around. Earning money, taking care of the house, memory keeper—it’s all my job now. Lori and I have to find value in our choice to love and care for each other, to honor the love we have, and cherish the memory of the love that used to be.” Mitch wipes her tears with her sleeve.

I have to press my fingers underneath my own eyes to stay dry. “You two are beautiful together, Mitch.”

---