Leave No Trace

by Mindy Mejia

  Forty years passed and Lang became the caregiver as Thanh aged and sickened. They didn’t know the war had ever ended until nearby villagers heard rumors of the men in the jungle and made contact with them. When Thanh’s condition became known, a team of people were sent to “rescue” them. Thanh was forcibly carried off the mountain and Lang met the world for the first time, wide-eyed and silent. Both father and son fell into a clinical depression in the months that followed and all the viruses Lang had never encountered made him as sick as his father. It took them a year to recover and eventually they moved to a small house near their jungle. Lang adjusted to life in the village, but Thanh never did. His main ambition at eighty-seven years old was to return to the wilderness. When a reporter asked to see the place they’d lived for so many decades, Lang also jumped at the opportunity to go back and set off into the jungle without a second’s pause.

  I found other stories—Timothy “the Grizzly Man” Treadwell, Christopher McCandless of Alaska, and Christopher Knight, the Maine woods hermit, all loners who saw the open land as more pure and untainted by human civilization—but the Lykovs and Ho Vans were different. They were families, people bonded by love. The sacrifices they made were for each other.

  I taped up pictures of the Ho Vans next to the others, my refrigerator transforming into a giant milk carton of the missing, and then stood back, squinting my eyes, letting the lines between them blur. The Lykovs and the Ho Vans were driven into the wilderness by tragedy and murder, by the ugliness of worlds they might not have survived. Something galvanized them, something they couldn’t fight or ignore.

  What had galvanized Josiah? He wasn’t fleeing from religious persecution or escaping a war, but something made his son shake with fear ten years later. I won’t turn him over. I needed him to talk to me, to trust me, to tell me something more substantial than how disgusting the food was today. I was done being his breezy friend.

  Agafia. Lang. Lucas. I stared at their pictures on the fridge, the children of world-abandoning decisions. They hadn’t chosen to disappear, yet they stayed. They’d remained in the wilderness for reasons beyond fear, beyond danger, because something in their environment fed them. Most children grew up hungering to see more of the world, but they had been satiated.

  And just like that, I knew what to do.

  * * *

  Congdon wasn’t only a building; the facility boasted sprawling grounds enclosed by a ten-foot wrought-iron, spiked fence. The entrance and parking lot took up the west side, the flower and vegetable therapy gardens were shriveled with their last gourd vines in the south, and the north and east sides boasted wooded, leaf-covered trails. Grass crunched under our feet as Bryce and I walked Lucas around the building, dressed in an oversized hooded coat. I glanced at the fence every few seconds and didn’t breathe easier until we reached the evergreen cover of Congdon’s own private forest.

  “Wait here. Keep an eye out,” I told Bryce, who shrugged and dropped onto a bench, pulling out his phone.

  I led Lucas through the trees, winding our way back to a corridor of evergreens where it was darker and colder. Outside the grove the trees looked like they grew straight into the air but from within they loomed toward an invisible center point, blocking out the sun and dimming even the memory of brilliance. There were no paths in here, only layers of wet needles that infused the air with pungent decay. None of the patients who had grounds privileges came here on their walks; it was too quiet, too confined.

  I stopped when the shadows engulfed us, when I couldn’t see anything beyond the trees. The sounds of traffic and a distant airplane still intruded, but at least we were hidden from any of the protesters who might be prowling the edges of the property. It was the closest thing to the Boundary Waters I could give him.

  He walked a few paces further, reaching a hand out to brush a low hanging branch. Then he squatted down, both feet planted firmly in the needles, and closed his eyes. His chest rose and fell, and no one in yoga class had every looked more at one with their universe.

  “Thank you.” The words were barely audible.

  I sat cross-legged nearby and picked up a pinecone, rolling it back and forth in my hands, waiting for him to breathe his fill. Long minutes passed, but I wasn’t impatient. He wasn’t the only one who found solace in the shadows.

  Eventually he moved, exploring the dank oasis—needles, dead branches, the hard-packed ground—and then crept over to examine me, as if I was a castoff of the trees, too. He pulled on a few strands of my hair and frowned, asking what color it was supposed to be.

  “Brown.”

  His eyes narrowed and then a ghost of a smile played over his face. “That’s ten points.”

  The Grinch had been teaching him Scrabble.

  “Only if you don’t land on a bonus tile.” I kept my hands loose in my lap. “And you should really start stacking your words. Do you know what ‘oe’ is?”

  He shook his head.

  “The Scrabble dictionary calls it a westerly wind. You have no chance without oe.”

  He grinned, but the smile died as soon as he looked at my hair again. “Was it ever long?”

  “Yes.”

  He drew back, as if long, brown hair frightened him. As I stared at his head, trying to figure out what was churning inside, he reached out again and picked up one of my hands, turning it over and tracing the lines of purple veins like a map he’d finally gotten permission to inspect. I let him, remaining silent until he began pressing on the pad of my thumb and watching the skin turn white before the blood flooded back into the tissue.

  “We talked last week about your father.”

  No reaction, except an increase of pressure on my thumb.

  “You said no one could help you and that’s why you disappeared.”

  Again, nothing. His head stayed stubbornly down.

  “Lucas.” I tugged on my trapped hand. “What did you need help for?”

  The pressure on my thumb was almost bruising now. He squeezed bone and tendon together as the red rushed in and out underneath the skin.

  “You don’t know?” he asked my hand.

  I wrenched it out of his grip, pulling him forward so he had to catch himself before landing in my lap, his face inches from mine. His pupils were almost completely dilated, his breath unsteady.

  “I wouldn’t ask you if I did.”

  He drew back and began inching away, but I followed, not allowing him the avoidance. As we edged over the beds of needles, his back started to tremble.

  “I don’t know what to believe. It could be a trap. Look at you.” He shoved a handful of dead needles in my direction. “I thought you were her and that’s why they sent you. To trick me into talking. But she’s not you because you’re fine. You’re right here and you’re fine and she wasn’t. She wasn’t fine.”

  He backed up all the way to the base of a pine, pressing himself against the trunk and burying his head in his arms. I crept underneath the sharp branches, heart pounding.

  “Who, Lucas? Who are you talking about?”

  He raised his head. “Santa’s bag. She was draped over his shoulder, all wrapped up like a bag of toys.”

  “Who?”

  Lucas stared into the branches with unfocused eyes and a tremor rocked him back and forth before he swallowed and said in a plain, low voice.

  “The body.”

  I saw it in a flash, a woman’s lifeless form thrown over a shoulder, her long brown hair swinging toward the ground. Obstruction of justice and an escape from the world, to a place where justice didn’t exist.

  “Lucas, tell me about her. Did you know who she was?” I grabbed his arm and the contact yanked him from his memories and sent him reeling back, hitting his head against the pine.

  “I don’t know where she is.”

  “Lucas.” I made my voice as calm as possible, inching closer. “Stay with me here. It’s okay. I’m the last person in the world who would—”

  Without warning he pulled my feet out fr
om underneath me. My spine hit the ground and a rock grazed my head. The white noise of crunching needles made me roll over to see Lucas sprinting out of the trees.

  Shouting for Bryce, I scrambled through the underbrush. When I broke into the clearing near the fence Lucas had already climbed three fourths of the way to the top.

  “Don’t do this, Lucas!” I jumped for his leg, but he kicked me off and I stumbled back. “This isn’t the way.”

  He chanted as he climbed, hoisting one foot in between the spikes, and it was only when he turned back to look at me that I caught what he was saying.

  “I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m sorry.”

  “Don’t. Be. Sorry.” I grunted as I hauled myself up an iron post and locked a hand over his trailing ankle. “Be. Better.”

  He tried to lift his body over the spikes, but I let go of the bar with my other hand and wrapped both around his foot. If he was going to escape, he’d have to haul me out with him.

  A bang sounded right behind my head. I couldn’t look. “Bryce?” More scrambling, scraping, a heavy breath, and just as Lucas pulled me up another foot, hoisting his torso over the top of the spikes with a Herculean effort, an arm shoved its way over my body and connected with Lucas’s shin. I don’t remember the actual contact. I saw the arm, thick and blotchy, and something clutched in the hand. A round black device, like a flashlight, but I knew it wasn’t a flashlight. Before I could let go of Lucas’s ankle, the current hit me and an overpowering clicking noise pounded the walls of my brain. Everything seized. My body turned into one solid contraction—muscles, tendons, and nerves all fused together. I was frozen, glued to Lucas’s foot except there was no foot, there wasn’t anything except a giant master power switch that had been flipped on inside my body and the relentless click, click, clicks that shot lightning from my head. An eternity passed before someone turned off the switch and all my muscles gave out.

  The dull smack of the ground was a relief. I lay on the dead leaves with my legs twisted underneath me as my senses blinked back into focus, brain foggy but blissfully quiet. Someone ran through the leaves, crunching a frantic trail away from me and a voice began shouting in the distance. I rolled over and forced my arms, which felt like I’d been carrying my weight in granite, to brace me up. When I looked toward the fence, I saw what the yelling was for.

  Lucas’s body lay on the sidewalk through the bars and a spreading line of red snaked out from underneath his skull.

  9

  * * *

  LUCAS!”

  I crawled to the fence and reached through the bars to shake his arm, but he was too far away. His body was crumpled toward the street and the thick gray coat prevented me from even seeing if his chest was rising. I kept repeating his name, telling him to stay with me as I worked to pull the phone out of my jeans pocket. It seemed impossible to extract. Every muscle in my body felt weak. Just as I finally worked it free a thundering of feet sounded from the sidewalk outside the fence and two security guards and Bryce descended on Lucas’s still-as-death form.

  Bryce felt his throat—“He’s alive!”—and then started to push him to his back.

  “Don’t move him!”

  “I’m not!” Bryce drew back and glanced at the security guard who paced the sidewalk and checked each direction of the street every two seconds. The other one clutched a phone to his head, muttering answers to the person on the line while he stared at the blood trailing along the sidewalk. I was on the wrong side of the fence, trapped. I wanted to run to the entrance and double back along the street, except one—I didn’t dare leave Lucas alone with these guys, and two—I honestly didn’t know if my legs worked properly yet.

  “What the hell were you thinking, tasing him ten feet off the ground? You could have killed him.”

  “What was I supposed to do?” Bryce fired back. “You nearly let him escape. Awesome plan, Maya. They teach you that in therapy school?”

  Arguing with morons was like kicking a boulder; your feet would bleed before you found a fissure, but anger with Bryce was the only thing keeping the terror at bay. Bloody feet were all I had.

  “I had his foot. You could’ve called security, or didn’t they teach you how to ask for help in kindergarten?”

  We traded insults for another minute until one of the security guards stopped pacing and waved his arms in wild circles. An ambulance sped to a halt in front of us right as Nurse Valerie jogged down the sidewalk with two of Lucas’s fans right behind her. The medics and Valerie examined Lucas while the security guards fought to push back the fans who were arguing about the right to peaceful assembly and holding their phones up, trying to catch as much as they could on camera. I struggled to hear the medical team’s comments. Broken shoulder. Laceration near the temple. Multiple contusions. And then—making me release a giant breath I hadn’t known I was holding—pulse stable.

  As they loaded Lucas into the ambulance I stood up and immediately fell into the iron bars. The tingling ache in my body raced into my left ankle, concentrating itself into a massive throb.

  “Are you okay, miss?” A medic appeared on the other side of the fence.

  “I’m fine.” I batted him off and took a lurching step sideways to prove it. “Go.”

  “She’s the other tase,” Bryce said, like his only responsibility for this situation was standing off to the side making up bullshit words.

  “Follow us to St. Mary’s,” the medic ordered before climbing in the back and shutting the doors. The ambulance took off, lights and siren blaring.

  “You shouldn’t walk on that, Maya,” Valerie was saying, but I’d already turned and begun limp-running to the building.

  I ducked through the pines, putting as little weight on my left side as possible but every step felt like shoving my foot into a raging bonfire. Tears were streaming down my face by the time I retrieved my bag out of my locker, limped back to the parking lot, and got to my car. I fumbled the keys out, thanking God and Buddha and Henry Ford for designing cars with all the pedals on the right. As Nurse Valerie ran after me with an ACE bandage, I waved her off and gunned the car out of the lot and into the residential streets, zigzagging my way down the hill to St. Mary’s hospital while my hands shook on the steering wheel. My only thought, as my phone buzzed incessantly from somewhere at the end of a long tunnel, was getting to Lucas.

  * * *

  A brace, four hours, and five refusals of ibuprofen later, I sat in Lucas’s hospital room waiting for him to wake up. Dr. Mehta didn’t look much better than me when she arrived. She’d been presenting at a conference in Rochester when she got the call and drove straight to Duluth, only stopping to pick up her luggage at the hotel. As I filled her in with what I knew, the attending doctor stopped by to check on Lucas.

  “He’s incredibly lucky to be alive. The fall could have been fatal, but he’s going to walk away with only minor fractures to the skull and shoulder, and likely a concussion, although we had some difficulty assessing that.”

  Lucas stirred behind us, clanking his handcuffs against the bars of the hospital bed and groaning softly. I watched him until he quieted back down, half listening to the two of them discuss his test results, expected recovery time, and eventual transfer back to Congdon. My phone hadn’t stopped buzzing since I’d left Congdon and I reluctantly checked the sites, already knowing what I would find.

  The video was posted to the Facebook fan page, a forty-five second clip of the medics hovering over Lucas, trying to zoom in on his face, and then panning over to me laying behind the fence and Bryce hulking in the background. Three hundred people had already commented and, scrolling through the noise, I caught Bryce’s name being mentioned and at least one of the guards. Swallowing, I felt a hand touch my shoulder.

  “You’ve been here the whole time?”

  The attending doctor had returned to his rounds, leaving the two of us alone next to Lucas’s bed.

  “Look at this.” I tilted the phone. “It’ll be on the evening news.”

&
nbsp; “Yes, I was talking to the board on the way here, discussing the best way to handle the publicity.”

  The sound of metal on metal came again. Even in sleep Lucas was restless. They said he was awake for the CAT scan but refused to answer any of their assessment questions about concussion symptoms, and the IV of pain medication had sent him back to la-la land before I gained access to see him.

  “I’m curious about your decision to take Lucas outside, given his case history,” Dr. Mehta asked.

  I turned to the window. Only a sliver of Superior was visible above the old brick Victorians of downtown and the water looked gray, like a storm was coming in. “I thought he would feel more comfortable surrounded by trees instead of walls.”

  “And did he?”

  “Yes, at first. We talked about Scrabble and then he told me a bit about his childhood.” Dr. Mehta’s gaze followed me as I sat down. Her reading glasses were still balanced on the end of her nose from when she’d been looking over the chart and I felt like a specimen in a petri dish, another lab result she could trust for answers. My skin felt too tight and a sickness began contracting my stomach.

  “Did he give you any more details about his father?”

  “No,” I lied.

  “I know you’ve had a traumatic day yourself, but can you pinpoint any correlation between your discussion and what made him attempt to escape again?”