by Mindy Mejia
“Shut the door.” Lucas said from somewhere nearby, and I did, leaving only darkness and strange noises: a rustle of fabric, a scrape of metal, someone fumbling with mechanical objects, and underneath all that, another sound—the unsteady whistle of ragged lungs.
I huddled near the door, waiting, until a flare of light illuminated the tent. Lucas crouched near the chimney in the middle, adjusting the brightness of the lantern. Supplies were stacked along the front wall near me—canisters of beans and dried vegetables, bags of rice, and a hanging rack of tools. I stared at the tip of an ice pick, inches from my face, until a noise from the far side of the room drew my attention. Lucas was bent over a cot, blocking the person lying on it. He unzipped the sleeping bag, unleashing a putrid smell that fell somewhere between unwashed flesh and decaying meat. Gagging, I covered my face with an arm as Lucas whipped away, also fighting for control. His eyes flooded as he coughed. A hand lifted behind him, the fingers bare and skeletal, and grasped Lucas’s knee. That was the last thing I saw before my stomach heaved.
Unzipping the tent, I scrambled out from the boulders and as far away as I could before vomiting into the snow and leaves. The pack cracked against my skull and my skin burned hotter than ever as each contraction ripped at the stitches in my side, turning every retch into a sob. When it was finally over I covered the mess with an armful of needles and crawled a safe distance away.
Lucas came out a few minutes later, his face wet with tears.
“Are you okay?”
I’d unhooked the pack and was clutching it like a buoy, panting and still haunted by that deathly hand rising from the shadows. “He’s alive.”
He nodded and fell to his knees in front of me, covering my hands that were gripping the pack. “He’s so much worse. He’d lost weight over the summer, but now he doesn’t even look like my father.”
Maybe he’s not, I wanted to say. Maybe he was never the man you thought him to be. Instead I pulled a hand out from under his and lifted it to his face. He jerked in surprise. “You’re burning up.”
“Is he lucid?” I pressed. “Does he recognize you?”
Lucas nodded.
“Good. He needs a bath.”
I instructed Lucas to go fetch some fresh water while I stayed with his father and started preparing food. Then, together, we could assess his condition and figure out which medicine to try first. He hesitated, not wanting to leave, but finally agreed and said it wouldn’t take him long to get to the marsh and back. Inside the tent, the fresh air had cleared the worst of the odor and Lucas tugged me forward to his father’s bedside.
Josiah Blackthorn lay on his back. His face was sunken, with the only visible skin stretched pale and gaunt, sandwiched between a dirty hat and beard. The hand that had reached for Lucas earlier dangled off the cot, as if unconnected to any living thing. There was no life in him except for his eyes, which were the same impossible, ghostly blue he’d given to his son and they followed Lucas now, gorging on the sight of him.
“Dad, this is Maya. She’s—” He didn’t know how to continue.
“I’ll stay with you while Lucas gets water.” I nodded at both of them and settled myself on the ground.
When the sound of Lucas’s footsteps faded away, I turned to the living corpse on the cot. Every trace of the gorgeous, brooding man who’d escaped into the Boundary Waters ten years ago was gone. This was a flesh-covered skeleton, except for two unnatural growths that bulged out of his neck.
“The snow’s tapering off and it’s not too cold. Would you like some fresh air?”
The blue eyes stared at me. Without waiting for an answer, I pulled the sleeping bag off him and propped him up, threading my arms under his and trying not to breathe through my nose. Dragging him off the cot and out of the tent, I squeezed him through the boulders and in the opposite direction from the marsh. The hugging trees receded into the background of the forest as I jerked his legs over rocks and down inclines. He weighed almost nothing. I could feel the crush of his bones through his jacket and shuddered when, instead of fighting me, his fingers slowly closed over my forearms. On the last drop, I stumbled and fell. Josiah tumbled against a log and I landed a few feet away on a massive boulder, popping at least one of the stitches and crying out in pain.
Holding the bandage and gasping, I waited for Josiah to weakly push himself over and lean against the tree before I remembered my manners.
“I’m Maya Stark, Jane Stark’s daughter.”
His mouth fell open, but no words came out. This was the culmination of my entire life. Every question I’d been too afraid to ask, every answer I didn’t think I deserved to know, every lock I’d learned to pick, every law I’d broken, every patient I’d subdued, every class I’d taken, every palate strengthener, pronunciation exercise, and vocal pattern, every trick and reward, coaxing the nonverbal to speak, bringing words to the wordless, helping person after person because I’d never been able to have the only conversation that mattered.
But now here it was, the moment of fucking truth, and on top of everything I would keep my promise to Lucas, too.
I pulled the gun out of my boot and pointed it at his chest. “Start talking.”
28
* * *
In the depth of winter I finally learned that there was in me an invincible summer.
—Albert Camus
JOSIAH
Leaving Heather Price crumpled on his patio with the money she’d been hunting for, Josiah went back to the truck where Lucas stared ashen-faced out the window. Wrong ad. He’d picked the wrong advertisement, the wrong landlord, probably the wrong life. Throwing the truck into reverse he felt like shit, like the stink of Heather’s sickness had rubbed off on him and was making his own son turn away from the smell.
“She was trying to rob us.” He explained as they headed back to the entry point.
Lucas kept his face turned toward the woods that quickly closed in around them. “Then why didn’t you call the police?”
Josiah wiped a hand over his mouth and checked the rearview mirror. “Because they don’t help.”
Another mile passed before Lucas broke the silence. “I don’t want to leave again. I like it here.”
“In Ely?”
“The Boundary Waters.”
Lucas didn’t speak again for the rest of the drive. Josiah debated the odds of finding a new rental, a short-term lease to get them through the end of the school year and possibly even beyond. He doubted Heather would actually take them to court when she barely seemed able to leave her house to go to work. They could find a bunkhouse to start and then maybe he could buy a trailer or even an old cabin somewhere nearby. He hated the idea of a permanent ceiling, but at least there’d be no more landlords, and the Boundary Waters would be right out their back door.
With that idea in mind, they paddled back out for their spring break vacation, sticking to the bigger lakes that had already thawed, and set up camp on an island melting in the afternoon sunlight. Lucas was reticent while they put up the tent and tarp. He became listless, crawling into his sleeping bag instead of exploring the campsite with his usual energy. He didn’t want breakfast the next morning and wouldn’t do more than sit at the fire and stare. At first Josiah had chalked it up to witnessing the fight with Heather, but when Lucas’s eyes glazed over he figured he’d caught a cold and let him sleep. In the middle of the next night, though, as Josiah was watching his campfire turn to embers, Lucas began screaming. He thrashed at the sides of the tent, pulling the stakes out and clawing at the fabric. Josiah dove inside and wrestled Lucas free, but he wouldn’t stop flailing or yelling about bugs. Bugs everywhere, attacking him, except they weren’t. It was too early for insects, too cold, but no amount of reason could calm Lucas, whose skin—to Josiah’s horror—felt hotter than the charred wood in the firepit.
There was no medicine in their camp and no way out, not when Lucas could thrash over the side of the canoe or capsize the whole thing in his panicking state. It wa
s too dangerous. He held the last remnants of snow to his son’s forehead and murmured the same hollow reassurances over and over on a loop, willing the seizures and hallucinations away. When he saw a light flashing over the water, he thought he might be hallucinating, too. Then it drew closer and he made out a lone figure in a canoe.
He shouted over the water and pleaded for help. The light faltered and turned off and again he thought it was a mirage, until finally the bow of a boat slid onto the island’s shore.
A small woman bundled in all-weather gear stepped out. Only the top half of her face was visible as she eyed their campsite warily. He explained the situation and asked if she would bring them in. “I can hold him still while you paddle.”
After a long pause, where she searched the horizon of trees as if hoping anyone else might come along and volunteer for this job, she finally nodded her head toward the canoe. They loaded the essentials and Josiah strapped a life jacket on Lucas, propping him on his lap in the front, while the woman powered them from the stern, setting off into the night.
They moved slowly, inching through the black. Her strokes were measured and steady and she seemed to know where the shallows and boulders lay even without the flashlight’s beam. He didn’t inquire what she was doing by herself in the middle of a still-frigid April night. She didn’t ask him anything except about Lucas’s symptoms, and showed no reaction when Josiah listed them out.
It was almost dawn by the time they reached a small, rock-filled beach where the woman led him to a cabin nestled in the trees. She pointed out a small bedroom, where Josiah laid Lucas’s unconscious body that had now begun to shake and told him she thought Lucas had the flu.
“Influenza. My daughter had it once.”
Josiah glanced around at the empty cabin. “Was your daughter okay?”
She nodded and turned away. “She is now.”
While he wiped Lucas’s brow with a cool cloth, she told him the doctors had given her a prescription for Tamiflu. Josiah asked if he could use the phone.
“It’s not in service.”
Then he asked if he could use her car as soon as business hours began. She nodded and disappeared out the front door. Ten minutes went by, then twenty. After the night he’d endured, he wouldn’t have been surprised if she’d simply collapsed into the shadows of the woods. There was something spent about her, as if she’d given away all her vital organs and the frame that was left was fragile, unsupported. Just as the sun cleared the trees, though, she returned with a thermometer and a small manual, a medical reference book they used to look up influenza, its symptoms and treatment. The hallucinations, Josiah hoped, were the product of a fever that the thermometer read to be a hundred and two degrees. Since his breathing was normal and skin didn’t have a bluish tinge, he didn’t appear to be in immediate danger. He just needed fluids and medicine. The woman didn’t have any Tylenol—she didn’t seem to own much of anything the more Josiah looked around—but she handed him her car keys.
“Would you go?” He took a step back toward the bedroom. “I’m sorry, I don’t want to move him again yet. I’ll give you money.”
“They won’t give me the prescription.” She moved to a window, her silhouette ghostly in the half-light of the morning.
“Shit.” He didn’t want to make Lucas endure a doctor’s visit.
“It’s okay to leave him here. I’ll watch him until you get back.”
He pulled his boots on and was halfway out the door before stopping and turning back. “What’s your name?”
“Jane,” she said and he couldn’t tell whether or not she was lying.
He glanced at the bedroom behind her, realizing that for the first time in nine years he was going to leave his son with a total stranger. She dropped her head, shirking his stare and making him hesitate further, but the longer he stood around the longer Lucas went without medicine. He slammed the door and raced to the car.
* * *
When he got into town, driving seventy in a thirty-mile-an-hour zone, the doctor’s office still wasn’t open yet so he stopped by the duplex to pick up extra clothes. Two squad cars were waiting in the driveway. Before Josiah could process what was happening, the officers took him down to the station to question him about Heather’s disappearance and when he lied and said he hadn’t seen her—because who the fuck cared about Heather Price, he needed to get medicine back to his son—they threw him in jail for obstruction of justice. They flashed his record, as if that would scare some bullshit confession out of him, and played a game of bad cop/bad cop that had more to do with him than about finding Heather Price. He’d run into local boys like this all his life, the ones who stared at the same few miles of land so much they thought they owned anyone who dared to walk on it. Cooperating, he described the fight he’d had with Heather, leaving out the part where he’d shoved her into the walls, and asked them to dust his apartment for fingerprints.
“She probably took the money straight to her dealer.”
“Heroin?” Sergeant Coombe, the overfed desk cop who seemed to be in charge, chewed on that idea like it had a funny taste he couldn’t identify. “We don’t have an opioid problem up here.”
An opioid problem. Josiah bit back the impulse to ask him if they didn’t have “the Internets,” either. “Maybe that’s why Heather didn’t have any friends.”
“It’s easy preying on a woman with no friends, isn’t it?”
He felt a flash of panic, not over Heather—all he’d ever done to Heather was say no, thank you—but about the hollow-eyed woman who paddled alone in the dead of night. He’d left her cabin hours ago and the more time that passed, the less he could remember about her. The color of her hair, the pitch in her voice, the expression on her face when she looked at Lucas: all of it wavered out of his memory, leaving a dark outline that could be inhabited by any manner of person. And Lucas—what would Lucas think when he woke up? If he woke up? The fever might have spiked again. A dozen possibilities competed for the worst-case scenario as Josiah stared at the beige on beige ceiling, crumbled at the corners and hacked up with holes for electrical equipment and video surveillance. He loathed it more with every minute he sat underneath it in handcuffs.
“I’ve cooperated, haven’t I? I’ve told you everything that happened that day, so there’s no grounds to hold me anymore. I’m not hiding anything.”
“No, you’ve been pretty straight with us about giving a missing woman money so she could buy illegal drugs.”
“I paid her rent. What she did with the money after that is her business.”
Sergeant Coombe flipped a paper over and scanned it. “What about your son?”
Josiah went cold. “What about him?”
“Would he agree with your version of events? Neighbors claim you’re two peas in a pod. They never see one of you without the other.”
“Lucas has nothing to do with this. Leave him out of it.”
“Listen here, Brad Pitt.” Sergeant Coombe leaned over the interrogation table. “I’m sure you get away with ordering people around like that in most areas of your life, but I’m the one wearing the badge. I’m the one who’s going to find out what happened to Miss Price. And I hope—I really, truly hope—that you had something to do with it, because I would love to see your pretty face behind bars.”
“Really?” Josiah mirrored him, leaning in over his cuffed hands. “Because if I were you, I’d hope Miss Price was found alive.”
The sergeant slapped Josiah’s file on the table. Neither man blinked.
“I know your type. I arrest your type. You might as well say goodbye to that kid of yours because one day you’re going to give me a reason. Maybe not today. Maybe not even this case, but if you decide to stick around my town it’ll happen. And I guarantee you I’ll be there when it does.”
They threw him back in the cell to wait out the entire twenty-four hours before they had to either charge or release him, and by the time he got out it was Saturday and all the doctors’ offices we
re closed. He grabbed four boxes of Tylenol, Popsicles, and a wilting rose at the gas station, then raced back to Jane’s cabin, hitting the steering wheel and cursing Heather Price the entire way.
“How is he?” He burst through the door and past Jane into the bedroom, where Lucas was alive and sleeping. His skin seemed cooler, but nowhere near normal. Fumbling with the packages, he read the dosing instructions. The adult ones started at age twelve so he switched to the pediatric, but they were based on age and weight. Did he have to know both? Jesus, he couldn’t remember the last time he’d weighed his son. “Do you have a scale?”
No answer from the main room.
He walked back to where she sat at the kitchen table, hands in her lap and an empty juice glass in front of her with a wine ring at the bottom. It was nine in the morning. “A scale. Do you have one?”
She shook her head.
“Fine. Whatever. It doesn’t matter.” He screwed open the bottle and shook out three pills, then went in to wake Lucas, who was weak and disoriented. Josiah fed him the medicine and made him drink as much water as he could before he fell asleep again. Sitting on the edge of the bed, petting Lucas’s hair, watching him breathe, Josiah felt like the climber hanging one-handed on the edge of the cliff in the picture on the wall. Lucas was all he had. Lucas was the only thing that mattered. And if he lost his grip on his son, if Heather Price turned up dead and they found a way to blame him for it, there would be no end to his fall.
He’d already had the worst moment of his life, goddamnit.
After a while, when Lucas’s breathing seemed to even out, he went into the main room again. Jane hadn’t moved from the table. He sighed and sat in the other kitchen chair.
“I’m sorry. I got detained by the police.”
She stared at the empty juice glass as if he hadn’t spoken, as if he wasn’t even there. He looked around, found the wine on the counter, and picked up the dusty bottle that still felt full. “More?”