Leave No Trace

by Mindy Mejia

  Shaking her head, she reached out for the cup and rotated it slowly.

  “It’s a good source of manganese. Red wine. Prevents rust and corrosion. An essential trace mineral, but too much of it will kill you.” Her words were jerky, like the thoughts had been pulled at random from dark corners of a disused wardrobe.

  “Aren’t you going to ask what the police wanted with me?”

  She got up and went to the sink. “I thought you’d left him. I didn’t think you were coming back.”

  “That’s my son in there. How could I abandon him?”

  Rinsing out the glass, she carefully set it next to the sink, bottom up, and watched the drips collect and pool underneath the rim, trapped. “Maybe you thought he’d be better off without you.”

  “He needs me.” Josiah got up and paced to the bedroom doorway, staring at the smooth curves and planes of his son’s face, the traces of Sarah in his nose and jaw, the miraculous rise and fall of the quilt over his narrow chest. “Almost as much as I need him.”

  He retrieved the gas station bag from the bed and paced back to the kitchen, where Jane still leaned into the counter and stared out the window, motionless. He wanted to be outraged that she would even suggest he’d abandoned Lucas, but the fact was he had. He’d left his son for twenty-four hours and if the police had charged him, it would have been even longer; Lucas could have been stuck with this ghostlike woman indefinitely. And Heather Price was still missing. He sighed, not at all sure about what he had to ask next.

  “I don’t want to take Lucas back to our place right now. Can we stay here a little longer?” He pulled out the half-dead flower and offered her its drooping petals encased in plastic.

  She looked past it, into the bag of medicine and melting Popsicles, and told him he could sleep on the couch.

  * * *

  Lucas slept most of the day, only rousing when Josiah made him drink fluids and he didn’t seem very coherent even then. He needed help to get to the bathroom and fell exhausted into bed afterward, saying his body hurt everywhere. When the fever hit he threw the covers off the bed, only to shrink into a ball and shake uncontrollably from the wave of chills that followed. Josiah kept watch as shadows stretched over the walls, and the only sign of life outside of the bedroom was an occasional rustle that could have been either Jane or a mouse.

  After dusk, though, she built a fire at the edge of the lake and he debated leaving her alone, but the hiss and burn of the logs called him, Lucas was sleeping soundly, and the low ceiling of the small room had begun to feel suffocating. She didn’t comment when he joined her and sat silently for a while, soaking in the early spring night that hadn’t yet given rise to summer’s legions of mosquitos. Soon Josiah found himself talking, at first just trying to explain the police situation and Heather Price, but gradually he told her more and more. He told her about shoving Heather, about giving her the money and hoping it would make her go away. He hadn’t cared how and he still didn’t, wondering aloud how someone could be missing when nobody missed her. Jane listened without reaction. There was something about the way she looked at him, without pity or blame, without lust or dismissal; he might have been speaking to the Boundary Waters itself. He told her about Sarah, about the drifting, all the national parks and wildernesses he and Lucas had seen, and she let him talk, commenting little except to agree that most roofs were ugly, to the very last one people put over their heads.

  “I want to be buried out there somewhere.” She stared into the black horizon of trees across the water. “To leech into the soil or return to silt at the bottom of a lake. I don’t want to end up in a box.”

  “How about burning? Cremation?” He poked the fire with a stick, sending a torrent of sparks into the air.

  “I’ve been pollution already. I’d rather be useful, for once.”

  Then slowly she began talking. She told him the history of the BWCA, all the way back to the volcanic rifts and crushing glaciers, and it felt like she was telling him her own story, just as he’d shared his. When he’d asked her name yesterday, she’d faltered and the word seemed foreign on her tongue, but now, describing Ely greenstone and its 2.6 billion–year journey she had an almost desperate confidence, as if she needed to pass on some vital knowledge. She talked about what humans took from the Boundary Waters, from the Knife Lake siltstone ten thousand years ago to the sulfide deposits the mining companies now hunted for their nickel and copper, and she bent further and further forward as she spoke, as though the minerals were being carved from her own core. He’d never met anyone like her. Her inaccessibility didn’t repel. Her sad beauty didn’t attract. But the longer they sat and added more logs to the fire, the less he worried about Heather Price and the world outside. Here, they became in. Everything else was out.

  When she started to shiver, he moved their log bench closer to the fire and for a while she rested her head on his shoulder. No one had done that, drawn that simple comfort from him, since Sarah had died and he absorbed the long-forgotten feeling, the scent and weight of a woman’s head seeking rest. He let his arm drift to the curve of her side, and they sat like that watching flames lick the sky and the lake shimmer in the firelight. At one point he felt a drip of something and saw the front of his jacket was streaked wet. Sarah hadn’t been a teary woman. He didn’t have any practice comforting one, but he did what felt natural and pressed a kiss into her hair. She accepted it with no response, just like she ignored the cracking branch in the distance that must have signaled some creature finding passage through the night. Josiah looked, but saw only shadows and moonlit wood smoke from the neighboring cabin. Later, after the moon disappeared below the tree line, he broke their strange peace by asking about her daughter again. Everything in her stiffened and, standing abruptly, she left the fire and walked into the house. He watched her go with the uncomfortable thought that the girl was dead. Sighing, he went to get a bucket of lake water and put out the fire, but before he could douse it Jane returned, cradling something in her hands.

  “Do you know what this is?”

  He stared at it, wondering if it was a trick question. “A rock?”

  An echo of a smile crossed her face. Then she turned it to a different angle, illuminating a striped pattern that looked like ripples in a pond. “It’s a fortification agate. See how the banding looks like the walls of a fort?”

  She kept shifting it in her hands, smoothing her fingers over the stripes and then running them along a rough edge that ended at a point and pressing against it, like she was trying to draw blood.

  “Agates are born inside the hollows of basalt and they’re stronger than everything around them. They survived the glaciers while the basalt was pulverized. When I found this I was only a sophomore in college, but I knew it meant I was going to have Maya, and she would become everything I’m not.”

  Jane pressed the rock to her mouth before kneeling and rearranging the stones circling the firepit, nestling the agate into a spot like a diamond in a ring.

  “Aren’t those valuable?” Josiah asked.

  “It’s hers,” she said, choking up as she patted it into place. “She’ll find it.”

  “She’s alive?”

  Jane looked up, startled.

  “I’m sorry, I just . . . from the way you’re acting and being here alone and all, I thought maybe something happened to her.”

  “She’s fine. Now she’s fine, now that I’m gone.” She turned back to the fire, eyes vacant, and arms hanging limp at her sides. “I was the one who was killing her. Every day, being around me, trying to make me okay, to be okay for both of us. I tried medication, but it made me worse. I did something terrible. And I couldn’t bear for her to watch if I did something terrible again. So I left.”

  “You left your daughter?”

  “She’s with my husband. She’s twelve now. Almost a woman.” Then she saw the outrage in Josiah’s expression. “It’s better this way.”

  He couldn’t sit any longer, couldn’t listen to this. �
��I was going out of my mind in that police station, not knowing if Lucas was okay. I would do anything for him, protect him from any danger.”

  “What if it was you?” Slowly, she uncurled herself and rose to her feet. “What if the most dangerous thing to your child was you?”

  She stared him down and, when he had no reply, glanced up the hill where a single light illuminated the bedroom in which Lucas slept. Then she turned and walked into the shadows, disappearing between the shoreline and the trees. Josiah sat there for another hour, watching the fire die and not understanding anything about the last two days of his life, especially not why he felt compelled to stay and keep watch, putting himself between Jane’s empty eyes and his son.

  * * *

  The next morning when Josiah woke up, Jane was gone. He fed Lucas Popsicles and made coffee, noticing her car in the driveway. They could take it and leave, but Lucas’s eyes were still glassy and dull, and where would they go? He didn’t have to be back at work until Monday and as far as the police were concerned, he had a registered permit that said he was camping in the Boundary Waters. He paced through the woods around the cabin and down to the lake, realizing Jane’s canoe was gone. Squinting over the open water, blinded by the reflected sun, he wished he could trade places with her, that he and Lucas could paddle out and just keep going, never looking back. It would take strength, he thought, staring at the agate by the firepit, and he had strength. He had will. The dangers in the wilderness were all external, and together he and Lucas could face every one.

  That night Lucas ate some canned soup and bread and took a cool bath by himself before going back to bed.

  “Where’s the lady?” he asked. “The one you were fighting with?”

  Josiah frowned at the window, unsure if the sound from the bonfire had carried last night or whether Lucas had experienced another hallucination. Later, after Lucas drifted off to sleep and the sun was setting through the trees, Jane came back. She looked unbalanced, exhausted from paddling and flushed from the wind. Glancing at Josiah as if surprised to still see him there, she dropped into the nearest chair and held her head.

  “I’m sorry,” he said from across the room. “We can leave tomorrow if you’ll give us a ride to my car. It’s not too far.”

  She made a noise he couldn’t decipher.

  “We’ll wash up the sheets before we go. And I can pay you.”

  At that, she shook her head violently.

  “No, really. You helped us and I appreciate it.”

  Pushing herself up, Jane staggered into Lucas’s room. Josiah came to the doorway to see Jane rocking back and forth at the head of the bed, clutching something in her hand.

  Crossing to her in two steps, he hissed, “What are you doing?”

  She blinked in slow motion and now that he was close to her he could smell the sweet stink of wine rising off her skin. Pulling her out of the room, he half carried her to the steps and shoved her toward them.

  “Maya.” She reached past Josiah, struggling to go back to Lucas. He grabbed her by the arms and pushed her up the steps.

  “That’s not Maya. That’s my son and we’ll be gone the minute you sober up and drive us to our car. Got it?”

  She braced herself against the wall, looking like she might vomit, then nodded carefully. “They’re different from us. They won’t be us.”

  When she looked up her face was dry, composed, and she transferred something into his hand, the thing she’d been holding. “Some people are strong and beautiful and not even glaciers can destroy them. Others are weak and brittle, and the best thing they can do is birth a gemstone.”

  “You’re not weak, you’re drunk,” he said, even as she started to tremble and shake.

  “Maybe he’ll be strong. Like her.” Then she stumbled up the stairs to the loft. As the bed creaked, he opened his hand to see a rock covered in crumbles of cold, wet dirt. It was too dark to see what it was.

  Josiah slept on the floor next to Lucas’s bed that night, listening for any noise, any hint that Jane might come back down and try to approach Lucas again, but the cabin was silent. Later, when he got up to go to the bathroom, he smelled something sour. He checked back in Lucas’s room, but the only scent there was sweat and boy and dirty clothes. It wasn’t the kitchen sink. It wasn’t the garbage. It was stronger at the base of the stairs, and—after a moment of indecision—he climbed up to Jane’s bedroom, turned on the light, and immediately wished he hadn’t.

  She lay faceup, eyes open and blank, crusted vomit spilled over her face, chest, and hair. On the nightstand next to the bed were the three extra packages of Tylenol he’d bought at the gas station, all empty.

  He stared in shock for what felt like an hour before the reality sunk in. He was alone in the woods with a dead woman, not two days after being implicated in the disappearance of another woman. They couldn’t blame him for this, could they? But he’d bought the Tylenol. His fingerprints were all over the house. Looking around the room, he even found a gun on the floor under the bed, like she’d been afraid for her life. Jesus Christ. He didn’t risk touching the gun but went on a frantic search of the rest of the cabin for the missing wine bottle and found it discarded in the trash outside, with remnants of crushed up medicine clinging to the sides. He’d touched that, too, the morning he’d been released from jail. Swearing, he kicked the garbage can, beating the thing again and again until he stopped hearing Sergeant Coombe’s voice in his head. One day you’re going to give me a reason.

  Not today. Goddamnit, why couldn’t she have waited to kill herself until they were gone? Panting, he walked away from the garbage and looked up, above the tips of the trees into the star-studded sky. His breathing settled down as he stared into the endless night, and then he realized what she wanted him to do. What she’d been asking him when he was too stupid to know it.

  Nothing in this world is free, his foster mother had said, and this was the price of their sanctuary.

  He lined the car trunk with garbage bags, went back inside and wrapped her body in the soiled sheets, hauled it out over one shoulder, and drove to a place he thought she would have liked. A place under the stars where the rocks were soft and some—he was surprised that he even noticed—shone in the moonlight.

  * * *

  “I can tell you where she is.” Josiah’s voice, ragged and halting, sounded like it was gutting him. For the last half hour, he’d talked without stopping, eating handfuls of snow when his mouth got too dry, closing his eyes when a shudder of pain wracked him, driven to continue by something that had no connection to the gun wavering at his chest.

  I’d been ready to pull the trigger, waiting for whatever bullshit he’d invented: excuses, reasons, pleas for sympathy. I had an answer for all of that and I wanted it so badly. I wanted a bad guy to shoot. I was prepared to trade everything for the purity of that rage, even Lucas—beautiful, loving Lucas—but when Josiah repeated her words exactly, as if he’d spent ten years memorizing their last conversation, even vengeance was stripped away from me.

  Birthing agates. The same thing she’d written to me before she first tried to kill herself.

  “She’s not far from the cabin. It’s just beyond—”

  “No.” I jerked the gun at him. “I don’t want to know.”

  He nodded once. Snow had settled on his shoulders and legs, slowly burying him while it skittered away from me as I rocked uncontrollably back and forth, like a screaming baby someone was trying frantically to shush. We faced each other, the gun shaking between us, while I tried to grasp the reality of my mother’s death.

  After a long pause, he took another handful of snow and said, so low I almost didn’t hear it. “Go ahead.”

  “What?”

  “I’d like to be buried here, like her.” His eyes moved past me, into the shadows. “In the Boundary Waters.”

  A branch cracked uphill from us and Lucas shouted my name.

  “It’s okay.” Josiah looked up at his son and forced his skeleton
face into a smile. “I wanted to hang on long enough to see you again. To tell you some things about your mother”—he glanced at me—“both your mothers, but I’ve told Maya now. She knows. And now she’s doing this for me.”

  Lucas dropped to his knees and crawled down the embankment. “No! Give me the gun, Maya. Don’t do this. Don’t you take my father away.”

  Tears poured down my face as I looked from Blackthorn to Blackthorn, both beseeching me, one for life, the other for death, each asking for their own impossible ends. I wavered, and the gun fell a fraction of an inch. Josiah’s eyes burned as bright as his son’s as he made himself lean forward.

  “She loved you, Maya. As much as I love Lucas. I think that’s why she left.”

  I broke then, dropping the gun, and fell sobbing onto the frozen, snow-covered rocks.

  29

  * * *

  Two years later

  WHAT MAKES someone crazy?

  It’s not a word we’re supposed to use. Everything is a disorder, a diagnosis and a treatment plan for some abstract label that’s supposed to provide meaning to the hell some of us live every day. Like knowing you’re obsessive compulsive will make your hands stop bleeding from being washed too many times. I know it’s not right, but there’s something addictive about the word. It’s visceral. It draws a line and says if you cross this, you’re out of the game. You can’t be held accountable for the mixed-up chemicals and imbalances in your head. They’ll put you somewhere—a home, a hospital, a prison—and you can stare at yourself, or yourselves, while most of the world is happy to let you rot.

  My mother couldn’t bear the weight of her life and committed suicide.

  Josiah Blackthorn was afraid of ceilings and escaped into the wilderness.

  Lucas raged against a society he didn’t know or want to understand.