by Mindy Mejia
I changed up the security I brought to our sessions, dragging along all genders and races. No one on support staff was smaller than me, but I found a petite, sweet-looking nurse to come one day, who agreed on the condition that I let her smuggle a can of pepper spray in her bra. Lucas looked each and every one of them up and down when they came into his room, as if scanning for weaknesses, but never took a step in their direction. I asked Carol the kitchen attendant to chat with him while he ate his meals, which she probably would have done anyway. After lunch, I took him to the men’s group physical therapy in the gym. When we walked in the first time, with Bryce and me shouldering him on either side and a security guard posted outside the door, he stopped short and surveyed the room. Twenty-odd patients, representing a spectrum of psychological disorders, were all doing yoga. Or the Congdon version of yoga. Three or four actually followed the instructor’s poses, while the rest either stayed in seated meditation or flowed it their own way. Big George was trying to balance on his head and shoulder with one arm reaching for the ceiling. A few stared at the walls, rocking back and forth.
“What’s wrong with them?” Lucas asked.
“No more than what’s wrong with you.” I shot back without thinking, then cringed, but Lucas actually cracked a grin. It was the first time I’d seen him smile and it made him appear like the teenager he was.
“I look like that?” He nodded at Big George, who was waving gleefully at me. I waved back.
“We have patients with a variety of abilities. There are a dozen cognitive disorders in this room right now, but that’s not who these men are. It doesn’t define them.” I bumped his shoulder with mine, a deliberately friendly contact that he received without any defensive reaction. “Come on. Let’s vinyasa.”
On the days group exercise went into the grounds, he had to stay in isolation. I couldn’t take him outside, not only because he’d run but also because I’d begun noticing something strange when I drove into work. People lingered outside the gates every morning when I arrived, staring into my car, pointing their phones at the building’s facade. I didn’t know who they were, but I knew instinctively who they were watching for. No one had stood outside Congdon before Lucas’s arrival. They’d never thought about the people living here except to be grateful for the fence, for the line of demarcation that separated us from them.
Since I couldn’t bring him out, I brought the outside in: a handful of acorns that he built into a tower, a cup of powdery sand from Park Point beach, a scattering of fallen leaves, their brilliant colors leeching to brittle brown. I didn’t interrogate him and I asked him nothing about his past, keeping my questions light. Did he like the food here? No. Did he know how to read? Yes. I brought him books from the Congdon library, first The Lorax, then The Swiss Family Robinson, and read him passages from it. He listened without comment, always glancing at the orderly, the locked door, the bars encasing the window, crushing the leaves between his fingertips until they turned to dust on the table.
There were things that made sense about Lucas. He hated loud noises and tended to cover his ears when another resident began screaming. During group exercise, he flinched away from sudden bursts of laughter and stayed at the fringes of the room, gravitating toward the quiet misery of the dementia patients. He made absolutely no sound when he walked and I found myself studying his footfalls, how he hit the floor with the ball of his foot, placing each step with the sureness of a lynx on a rocky slope. And as much as I tried to draw him out, as sure as I was that he had absolutely no speech disorders, he spoke as little as possible. He gave one-word answers, shrugs, refusing to elaborate on any subject, his expression the definition of involuntary.
It was the other things, the stuff that didn’t make sense, that kept popping up at three in the morning when I should have been at least resting if not sleeping, but rest seemed impossible around Lucas, like his tension was contagious. I hadn’t brought up his comment from the first day—I know you—because it was wrong. All the time I’d spent in the Boundary Waters ended years before he and his father had gone missing. I hadn’t met Lucas Blackthorn outside these walls. I would’ve remembered those ridiculous blue eyes, how they became sharper, eerier, the longer they stared at you. And he did. He studied me from the minute I walked into his room until the door closed between us. He watched my face, my hands, my shifting postures, once I even caught him staring at my breasts and it would have been so much easier to say I was simply the first girl he’d ever met. Was there anything more fascinating to hetero teenage boys than breasts? But I couldn’t make myself believe it. There was something more in his face, a caged fear that made me certain he wanted to snatch back those three whispered words. He knew me, and it made him afraid.
I consulted with Dr. Mehta every afternoon, sharing my session notes and my frustration. She had a stocked inventory of rational explanations; I might remind him of someone from his early childhood; I represented an institution he didn’t understand or trust; he’d probably spent years in silence and solitude and could be dealing with a form of social anxiety. She coached me, soothed me, gave me fresh ideas and insight, and on the night before my last shift of the week she told me there was a bed open in ward two.
“If he can maintain his self-control through your session tomorrow, we’ll transfer him to the common men’s ward and see how he does.” Her eyes narrowed. “Challenge him. I believe he’s ready for it.”
* * *
The next day when I went to Lucas’s room, I went alone.
He was waiting for me in what had become his usual spot, cross-legged at the end of the bed with The Swiss Family Robinson dog-eared on the mattress next to him, twirling one of the acorns I’d brought by the stem.
When he realized no one was coming in behind me, his eyebrows lifted.
“Congratulations,” I said, moving to the table. “You’ve been upgraded to a lower risk status.”
Lucas followed me and sat down, carefully setting his hands palm down on the table like always, a study in restraint.
“No more bouncers,” I said, without knowing whether Stan was watching us through the door. “And after today you could be moving to a different floor.”
“A different floor.” He repeated it and the tendons in his hands clenched. “Not out?”
“Not yet. We’ll have to talk about other things, when you’re ready.” I held his gaze and waited a beat, then two, as the silence built between us.
It bubbled up again, that tremor of fear. No matter how much Dr. Mehta tried to explain it away, the fact was he didn’t react this way to any of the other staff. Just me. As if he thought I alone knew something about him, something damning. Watching for any sudden movements, I pulled a large sheet of paper out of the surprise bag and unfolded it on the table. Lucas blinked at the map and, after a moment’s hesitation, leaned in to study it more closely.
“This is Duluth.” I pointed out Congdon’s location on the summit of the hill, overlooking the entire city, then showed him some of the main areas and landmarks. After watching my finger trace roads and parks for a while, he asked where I lived, so I pointed to my neighborhood and talked about it. To my surprise, he started asking questions. How long had I lived in Duluth? Could I see the water from my house? Did I like watching the ships? Did I live alone? He processed everything I said before asking the next thing, and the next thing, and by the time I looked at my watch the entire hour had almost elapsed.
My heart kicked up as I reached into the bag for the other map and carefully unfolded it over the top of Duluth. This map was a wash of blues and greens, charting over a million acres that stretched along the Canadian border for almost a hundred and fifty miles. The lakes squiggled over the page, pouring into each other in rapids and waterfalls, creating endless waterways dotted with islands and hugged by fat peninsulas. The land was a sea of pine, fir, and spruce towering over the water, an evergreen empire built on less than one foot of topsoil before their roots hit solid granite. I knew those shoreli
nes and shadows, could hear the loons calling each other, and feel the razor gaze of the eagles soaring overhead. No matter how long you stayed away, the Boundary Waters never left you.
Lucas recognized it immediately, I could tell, but instead of leaning closer and engaging as he’d done with Duluth, he braced himself against the back of the chair.
“It’s your turn.” I spread the map out, trying to make my voice as smooth as the paper. “Tell me about your home.”
He was frozen for a moment, then he sprung out of his chair and began pacing along the back wall, his shoulders tensed, hands fisted. My mind raced, wanting the answers only he knew but afraid to push him too far and risk an episode that would keep him locked in isolation. I took a deep breath and spoke as calmly as I could.
“How long did you live in the Boundary Waters?” I parroted his question to me back at him.
He spun away and started tracing the wall, as if searching for fault lines. I waited, holding my breath. Then, just when I thought he’d gone nonverbal again, he spoke.
“Ten years.”
Two words, and they opened up a hundred questions in my mind. How did he know it was that long? Did someone tell him when he’d arrived at Congdon or had he used some kind of calendar? Maybe he’d counted, winter by bone shuddering winter. Ignoring the impulse to press further, I moved to the next question he’d asked me.
“Could you see the water from your home?”
He turned and, registering my small smile, caught on to the game we were playing. I waited, while he decided how he was going to handle round two. After a flickering glance at the map, he nodded.
Which lake? I wanted to know. There were hundreds, water in every direction; water was the highway of the Boundary Waters. But again, I repressed the bubbling questions.
“Did you like watching the canoes?”
Another nod, and this one didn’t surprise me. Some of the reporters had speculated on whether he’d been lost, painting melodramatic pictures of a boy trapped in the wilderness, desperate and alone, and maybe it could have been true for the space of one winter when campers were few and far between. In the summer, though, someone was always paddling quietly through the pristine woods. For a boy with the endurance to survive, help would have been easy to find. He hadn’t reached out—he hadn’t been lost. The Bigfoot stories, the wild man in the woods, were probably born of glimpses of Lucas skirting the edges of the campsites, watching the parade of humans from a comfortable distance.
Then, the question we both knew was coming next.
“Did you live alone?”
I stood up and moved around the table, closing the distance between us. Lucas backed into the wall and something dark flashed across his face.
“Ten years ago your father, Josiah Blackthorn, took you camping in the Boundary Waters. You were nine years old. He was thirty-six. No one saw either of you again. Your campsite was found ravaged by what looked like a large predator, maybe a bear, and even though you’ve both been on the missing persons list all this time, everyone assumed you were dead.”
I thought of the photo they kept posting on the news, a half-lit shot of the dark-haired man and boy sitting on a dock. As a boy, Lucas had been slender and bright-eyed, leaning into his father’s side and grinning at the camera while the man stared past the lens toward the lake. The picture had been taken at a park in Iowa, three months before they disappeared.
“Do you remember your father?”
He let out a gunshot of a laugh, void of any humor, and his jaw trembled. There were memories—vicious, raging memories.
“How long was he with you? When did you last see him?”
He locked his eyes on mine, exhaled unsteadily and spoke.
“Fifteen days ago.”
I took another step forward, my mouth dropping open.
“You’ve been together all these years? He’s alive?”
His head dropped and his voice came low and clipped. “I don’t know.”
“Where is he?”
“Why are you asking?” His arms flew up, shoving me away, and I stumbled into the table before catching my balance.
Agitation. Focused aggression. Instead of trying to calm him and de-escalate the situation, I put my finger on the wound and pressed. “If he’s sick or hurt, he needs help.”
“Like you’re helping me?” He raged, pacing the perimeter again, but I put myself in his path, blocking his way. He tried to push me aside but I grabbed his hand, not really holding it so much as arm wrestling in midair. We struggled for a minute. When he finally gave up, he jerked back against the wall and glared at me. I lowered our hands, keeping an awkward grip around his knuckles.
“I promised I’d help get you out, didn’t I?”
He shook his head and stared at the locked door, his eyes filling with tears that he furiously blinked away. “Not that way. I’m not turning him over, not even if I have to rot in here.”
“Turn him over?” I repeated, my mind scrambling to catch up.
He pulled his hand free and scrubbed at his face. I watched his chest rise and fall as he worked to bury the emotion. When he finally spoke, it was with a horrible, quiet certainty.
“No one can help us. That’s why we disappeared.”
6
* * *
KARP LYKOV WAS a man who had to disappear. In 1936, he lived in a remote village in Siberia and was working in the fields when a Communist patrol shot his brother at his side. The Bolshevik government had made it their mission to systematically eradicate religion from the country, seizing church property, harassing believers, reeducating children, and executing priests and the devout like the Lykovs. In the wake of his brother’s murder, Karp gathered his wife and children and fled to the only place the Communists couldn’t follow: the taiga, three million square miles of unforgiving wilderness. They lived for over forty years in total isolation, using only a few pots, a spinning wheel, and a loom for tools. The family built their log cabin by hand and planted crops on a mountainside, surviving famine and endless winters without any contact with the outside world, that is, until 1978 when a group of prospecting geologists happened upon them.
By that time Russia had changed. Instead of ordering executions, the government sent religious people to mental hospitals and diagnosed them with “philosophical intoxication.” Psychiatry had become a political weapon, but one that couldn’t touch the Lykovs. They refused to leave their wilderness home. They accepted few gifts from the geologists and those only grudgingly, as though the pleasures of salt, forks, and paper were inherently sinful. Ultimately it wasn’t the spices or tools that struck the Lykovs down, but a series of illnesses due to their harsh existence. One by one, the entire family died in the 1980s except the youngest daughter, Agafia. Concerned, the geologists tried to convince her to return to civilization with them, but she refused. Standing sentinel near her family’s graves, she urged the geologists to leave and waved them on when they hesitated.
In her seventies now, Agafia Lykov still lives in the taiga, the place where she was born and where someday she’s determined herself to die.
* * *
“Josiah Blackthorn is alive.”
Dr. Mehta spooned spices from various pots into her pestle and began grinding them with the mortar. Her office filled with the familiar pungent fragrance, making the air heavy and sharp. It took ten minutes to prepare a traditional chai, five minutes to let it cool, and another fifteen for her to drain the entire pot while I pretended to sip my single cup. That was a half an hour, measured in blisteringly bitter tea, for our monthly “check-in” sessions.
“That’s why Lucas keeps trying to escape. It’s not just leaving Congdon, it’s not just the Boundary Waters: He’s trying to get back to his father.”
“Believe me, Maya,” she poured the spices into an electric tea kettle and set a timer, “no one is more gratified than me to hear Lucas has trusted you with this information. The U.S. Forest Service is making renewed efforts to locate Josiah a
nd any information from his son will help. They’ve canvassed the western area closest to Ely by both water and air, trying to find any trace of him but so far have turned up nothing.”
“What about Quetico?” The rangers wouldn’t have any authority to search the Canadian reserve, which extended the wilderness by almost another two thousand square miles.
“To my understanding, they’re working in tandem with the Canadian authorities and”—she cut over my attempt to ask another question—“we’ll go over this in detail, I assure you, but right now we’re here to discuss Maya Stark, not Josiah Blackthorn.”
I dropped into my usual spot in one of her overstuffed chairs and stared at the moss-eaten trunk of an old oak outside the window. Dead leaves circled the ground around it and its branches curled naked into the sky. “There’s not much to say. My boss trusted me with a challenging assignment and it’s taking over my life.”
“What did you do this weekend?”
I’d spent most of it replaying my last conversation with Lucas over and over to the beat of Jasper’s paws hitting the boards of the lake walk, but she didn’t want to hear that.
“I went to the hardware store. The nickel handles I put in the bathroom are all wrong. Copper would be perfect with the wood tones and the floor, but then I’d have to get new fixtures, too.”
“Is it possible,” she ruminated while pulling out two squatty brown cups, “that your fixation on this bathroom allows you to avoid other areas of your life?”
“Like remodeling the kitchen?”
“Like making friends. Socializing. Pushing yourself out of your avoidant attachment style and opening up, building relationships and trust. It all starts through meaningful interaction with someone outside of Congdon.”
“I signed up for three different social media accounts in the last week. My phone’s been going crazy.” The notification buzzes had made my pocket vibrate all morning. I pulled the phone out and she came over, donning her glasses to examine the screen.
