Leave No Trace

by Mindy Mejia

  I grabbed an ice pack from the freezer, remembering how I’d showed him my street on the map of Duluth. It was a mistake real psychiatrists wouldn’t make, giving personal information to their patients.

  As I came back to sit at the table Lucas described the people he’d seen roaming the streets: the homeless, the packs of college kids, the drunken tourists, and the older couples bundled in their peacoats for a dinner on the town. I waited for him to finish, then casually asked if anyone had noticed him. As far as I knew, he was totally unaware of his fame or the controversy his reappearance had created. He said he’d stuck to the shadows, no one had spoken to him. I nodded, glancing into the darkness outside the window.

  “Why?” The question slipped out before I could find a more professional frame for it. “Why are you here?”

  His gaze lingered on me. Slowly he drew my hand across the table, taking the ice pack from me and setting it down.

  “A couple reasons. The first is that I missed talking to you, too.”

  Too? I pulled back in surprise as it registered. “You were awake?”

  “Sort of. I was surfacing when you were there and by the time I woke up, you’d left.”

  “I would have come back tomorrow.”

  He shrugged. “That wasn’t soon enough.”

  The way he said it made heat flood my cheeks and, embarrassed, I ducked my head and started to remove my boot, but he lifted my foot onto his lap.

  “What are you doing?”

  “You fixed my foot. I’ll fix yours.” He pulled off the boot and sock to reveal the swollen, wrapped ankle. “I saw you limping when you got out of the car. What happened?”

  “Gymnastics injury.” I nodded to the ice pack, which he applied to the swelling,

  His hands closed around my calf and beneath my foot I could feel his whole body tightening. He seemed to be searching for something in me, a sign, and I didn’t know what to do besides return his turbulent stare and wait.

  Finally, he took a deep breath and decided.

  “We never talked about it, my dad and I. Sometimes I even thought I dreamed the whole thing.” He paused, and his gaze turned inward, seeing things I couldn’t.

  “He only told me one thing about the world outside—that they would take me away from him. They would separate us and we would lose each other, maybe forever. He promised he would never let that happen, but now it’s happened anyway, because of me.”

  He leaned in until I could see my own reflection in his eyes, tiny and paralyzed.

  “That’s the second reason I’m here—to ask for your help. It’s why I’m going to tell you.” He paused, faltering.

  “Tell me what?”

  “Why we had to hide.”

  * * *

  I made some noodles, the nice udon ones instead of ramen, and foraged the kitchen for mushrooms, onion, and shreds of leftover chicken to stir into a simmering soup that could warm the coldest of Duluth stomachs. Lucas stared at the pictures on the refrigerator while I cooked, the Blackthorns, Lykovs, and Ho Vans all lined up like members of the same social experiment performed every forty years across the globe. The boy Lucas was the only one smiling, beaming out at us, unaware of his fate, while adult Lucas swallowed and quickly moved on to examine the appliance itself, tracing the lines of the doors, the hardware, practically getting his head caught between the fridge and the wall in order to see how the wiring worked. When the soup was done, I set one of the bowls in front of his chair and put mine on the opposite side of the table.

  “You have to slurp these. It’s polite.” I showed him how to grab the noodles with the chopsticks and suck them out of the broth. He mirrored my every move as carefully as he’d done during those first tense therapy sessions. Mastering the chopsticks without an issue but slurping too quickly, he whiplashed one of the noodles and ended up with broth all over his face. Laughing, I handed him a napkin.

  “We didn’t eat food like this—my dad and I.” Lucas commented after a while, swirling his noodles with the chopsticks and smiling at the merry-go-round it created in his bowl. “We had a lot of rice and fish, dried fruit, dried vegetables. Once we had a huge container of oatmeal, and we added blueberries and spices. It was way better than the stuff Carol at Congdon calls oatmeal. Are there different kinds?”

  “Institution meals aren’t the best of Minnesota cuisine.”

  “And this is?” He took another bite, slurping respectably loud enough.

  I shot him a dirty, noodle-chewing look.

  “It isn’t terrible,” he offered.

  “Thank you for sharing your delicious food, Maya,” I prompted, dabbing my mouth with a napkin.

  “Thank you for sharing your food, Maya.” He replied pointedly, grinning.

  We finished the udon with only the occasional whine from Jasper interrupting the silence, looking at each other, then away. He’d taken off the stolen jacket and it was hard not to notice the line of muscle in his arms as he lifted the bowl and drank his broth, arms that had easily overpowered me the first time we’d met, that had practically scaled ten feet of fence before I’d caught up with him. He said he needed my help, but if I understood anything about Lucas it was that he was unpredictable. Even with one limb in a sling, I didn’t know what those arms were going to do next.

  I collected the bowls and rinsed them out, then limped to the living room and let Jasper out of his kennel, murmuring to him to behave. Lucas stepped into the edge of the room and waited. After a moment’s hesitation Jasper trotted over, sniffed his legs and feet, snorted disdainfully, and went to his dog bed to lounge.

  Lucas lifted an eyebrow. “So I’m okay now?”

  “As long as I like you, he likes you.” I dropped into the faded blue armchair next to the dog bed and absently scratched his ears. “I told you he’s a big softie.”

  Lucas walked to the window, moving more stiffly than before we ate, which meant the meds were probably wearing off. With only the kitchen light to illuminate him, he looked tall and somehow lonely.

  “I lived in a house like this when my mother was alive. Now the memory of it is mixed up with my memory of her. I remember warmth, soft lights, her legs folded into a rocking chair. There was a box with a bright orange fish that she fed and afterward her hands smelled like the lake in a morning fog. Sometimes I just sat on the shore and inhaled, years later, thinking of her.”

  He turned toward where I sat in the shadows.

  “She died when I was in kindergarten. Aneurysm.”

  “I know. I read your file.” I couldn’t tell him I was sorry. At least he’d had a mother who’d loved him, whose departure hadn’t been by choice.

  “Did my . . . file”—he spoke hesitantly, obviously not having used filing systems in the middle of the forest—“tell you what my father did?”

  “He was a mechanic.”

  “No, I mean what he did after she died.” Slowly, he dug into the pocket of his scrubs with the hand that wasn’t trapped in the sling. A piece of paper crackled as he pressed it against his stomach, flattening it out, then held it up to catch the meager light.

  It was the picture of Heather Price with my writing scrawled at the top.

  I half rose, but my ankle throbbed and pushed me back in the chair. “You remember.”

  “What do you know about her?”

  I told him the little I’d read about Heather Price’s life and death, careful to omit any mention of his father. Each detail seemed new to him, adding color and depth to the image I’d left on his bedside table. He began swaying slightly and stared at the face long after I’d finished. Then he crumpled the paper, driving the heel of his hand into his temple.

  “She used to watch him. She smoked cigarettes and stared out the window while he mowed the lawn, but she wouldn’t come out of the house. Dad always said that buildings smothered people and I remember thinking she was suffocating in there. I can still see her hazy face in the window.”

  His swaying got worse until I made myself get up and h
obble over to him. “Come on, lie down.”

  I brought him to the couch, checked his pupils, and gingerly felt along his shoulder to see how swollen it was. He gave one tight nod, looking a little pale, so I retrieved the ice pack and wished for the first time since my mom had overdosed that we kept some aspirin in the house.

  He relaxed into the couch cushions as I held the ice to his shoulder and while the condensation dripped over my hand he began telling me about his childhood. The memories were fragments, scattered over a dozen different houses, apartments, and RVs in the wake of his mother’s death. He hadn’t made many friends at any of the schools he’d rotated through, although he liked the science and gym classes. They’d visited a sour smelling building full of old people where a man in a wheelchair faced the wall. And the woods. He had countless memories of camping, canoeing, hiking, learning about all the plants and life cycles teeming around them. Lucas loved the woods best in the summer, but his father preferred winter, the silent, white days insulated from fair-weather nature lovers.

  I stared at the ice pack, afraid to look up, afraid that if I made eye contact he’d stop talking, but Lucas barely even paused. The floodgates had opened. Something had shifted and all the words he’d held back came pouring out in the faded intimacy of my living room.

  They’d been camping one summer on a remote lake somewhere near Canada when Lucas got sick.

  “I was fine the first night. We caught fish and toasted s’mores, but I woke up the next morning with my skin on fire and everything hurt. I couldn’t even get out of the sleeping bag. Dad thought it was a cold and told me I’d feel better within a day or so. Then I started seeing bugs everywhere. Bugs crawling over the tent, bugs marching on my arms. I don’t remember a lot of what happened, but somehow Dad brought me back out of the woods. The next thing I knew I was in a bedroom. A woman was giving me something to swallow, a woman with long, brown hair and flat eyes, like she’d been inside too long.”

  He shifted his gaze from the ceiling to me.

  “I thought it was you. When I got to Congdon—I don’t know—there was something different about you, familiar. I thought you were the woman who’d taken care of me when I was sick and somehow”—he shook his head, as if trying to clear it—“that’s how the doctors were trying to get me to talk.”

  “That’s why you said you knew me, why you were afraid of me?”

  He nodded, lifting the picture of Heather Price again. “It was her. When I woke up in the hospital today and saw her face, I recognized it immediately. I remember her shouting at my dad and his fists, balled tight into his sides. I don’t know what they were arguing about. I don’t know what happened between them. It felt like I was in that strange bed twisted up with fever forever, until one night—when all the lights were out—I finally felt good enough to get up on my own.”

  His breathing picked up speed and his eyes darted around the living room, seeing nothing.

  “Someone was moving on the stairs, bumping into the wall, walking slowly. I crept to the door of the room and peeked out, waiting for the noise to appear. Then it did. I saw my father’s profile moving across the house and I almost went to him, but he was carrying something big, something draped over his shoulder.”

  “A body,” I murmured.

  “I watched him haul it out the front door and then a few minutes later the lights of his car turned on and he drove away. I went back to bed and waited. I remember feeling weak and sweaty and scared, but not of my father—I’ve never been afraid of my dad in my entire life. I was scared of the body, the way the hair swayed each time he took a step and the arm that hung along his back skimming the walls, the furniture. I was afraid the arm would reach out and find me, even though I knew my father was making it go away. He was taking care of it. The sun was up by the time he got back and he made us breakfast and told me we were going to camp for a while as soon as I felt better. I didn’t hesitate; I wanted out of that place. I told him I was ready and later that day we canoed into the Boundary Waters and never came out.

  “I know what you’re thinking,” Lucas said, “but he didn’t do it. I can’t explain it, I just know. Have you ever known something about your parents, like the knowledge is in your blood?”

  I had a mother who’d abandoned me and a father who chased ghost ships, trying to salvage the impossible. I looked away, as if Lucas could read the legacy in my eyes.

  “My dad spent the last ten years protecting me, providing for me. He hiked out a few times a year and came back with fresh supplies, boots when I outgrew my old ones, books and science experiments for us to try. He taught me everything he knew, including what the world was like and what they’d do to us if we ever left the Boundary Waters. He didn’t tell me why. He didn’t need to, because I was protecting him, too.”

  “But you left anyway. Why did you raid the outfitter’s store?”

  He covered his face with a hand. “In the last few months dad became sick, weak. He could hardly stand up, let alone hike out of our camp. When he started mumbling and sweating through his blanket I made him take the emergency medicine and went to get more, but I didn’t even know what I was looking for. I waited until it was night and tried to be quick, to not get caught.

  “That was three weeks ago.”

  Without warning Lucas sat upright and grabbed my arm, almost bruising it with the sudden force. The movement brought Jasper to his feet, but Lucas paid no attention. “If he’s dead, it’s my fault for leaving him. There’s no one else to blame. And if he’s alive I’ve still abandoned him. I have to get back there, Maya. Now. We need to leave today.”

  Jasper advanced with his ears standing straight up, a nervous growl working up his throat, the rumble of it filling the room. I could feel Lucas’s heart racing through the ice pack caught between us. He was too close; I couldn’t breathe.

  I broke away and tugged Jasper’s collar, processing everything as I pulled a hundred pounds of anxious muscle across the room on one good leg. “You want me to help you—” I broke off as Jasper whined in frustration.

  “Find my father. We have to go alone.”

  Was he joking? We barely had one working body between us. “Lucas, you’re not the only person who wants to find your father. The entire world is asking what happened to him. Do you have any idea how much attention your story has gotten? And there’s Dr. Mehta, Officer Miller, and everyone working the missing persons case. U.S. Forest Service rangers are searching for him right now.”

  “They won’t find him.”

  “He’s not wanted for any crime. No matter what really happened with Heather Price, her case is closed. They won’t take you away from each other.”

  He shook his head. “It doesn’t matter. He won’t come out. The Boundary Waters . . . it’s part of him . . . he couldn’t survive in this world anymore. Whatever’s killing him is nothing compared to making him leave, and that’s what all those other people would do, right? No, we have to go alone.”

  “Why me? Why did you come here when you could have been halfway to Canada by now?”

  I let Jasper pull me back a step and looked Lucas directly in the eye, trapping his gaze in a way I’d never done with another patient. I always gave them a way out, room to be comfortable, the space they needed to grapple with their own voice. This, though, was way past the point of comfort. I wasn’t asking him for a fluent, compound sentence; we weren’t working through aphasia or a stutter. An escaped psychiatric patient was asking me to reunite him with his potential-murderer father somewhere in the wilderness, with a Minnesota winter bearing down fast.

  Lucas stood up and walked over, ignoring Jasper’s warning growl. He stopped a few feet away and reached out to take my free hand. “I heard you talking to Dr. Mehta yesterday.”

  “Jesus, don’t you sleep at all?”

  He laughed once. “Not really. There’s too much noise here.” Then, growing serious again. “You didn’t tell her about the body. She asked if anything made me run and you lied to her.
”

  “Yeah.” I didn’t try to explain, even though he seemed to be waiting for me to do just that.

  Eventually he took a step closer. “You told me I could trust you before, but I didn’t believe it. Not until now. So I’m trusting you, Maya. I’m trusting you with my father’s life.”

  The directness in him—the openness, after so many sessions of careful avoidance—was stunning. I forgot about danger. I forgot about psychology and my job and the relationship we were supposed to have and what was possible and impossible. I had a flash of stumbling through the Congdon grounds on a sprained ankle, thinking of nothing except the trail of blood spreading underneath Lucas’s body and getting to the hospital as fast as possible. The desperation had consumed me beyond all reason and only now was I beginning to understand it. I was the girl who didn’t need anyone and made sure things stayed that way—no matter how many therapy students had tried to befriend me or occasional, brave-hearted guys asked me out. I turned them all down and I was relieved when Dad went out on the lake and left me with only the dog for company. My life was lonely, but there was something vital in the loneliness, an imperative that I keep the space around me empty and weightless. The only time I let myself get close to people was at Congdon and even though I loved helping my patients beat down their barriers, it was always so they could stand on their own someday, not near me. My work didn’t build relationships; it created more Mayas.

  Somehow Lucas had changed everything. If it was possible, he was even more fiercely independent than me, yet he’d broken out of a guarded hospital room and traveled halfway across the city to find me, because he needed me. Not a random therapist doing their job. Not anyone else they’d tried to send to him. Me. And for the first time since my mother left, I wanted to be needed.

  I realized I hadn’t said anything for a good minute, standing in the middle of the living room with Lucas staring at me, yet he didn’t seem bothered by the silence. He wasn’t fidgeting or pressing me for a reply like most people would and it occurred to me that his life up until now must have been one decade-long conversation with his father, where a pause could fill a breath, an hour, or several sky-bleeding sunsets.