Leave No Trace

by Mindy Mejia

  “ ‘Stephanie posted to Lucas Blackthorn’s timeline?’ ‘Lake Superior and 5K others liked @therealblackthorn’s tweet?’ ” She handed it back. “The lake liked it?”

  “It’s got an account, too.”

  “Of course it does.” Dr. Mehta perched in the chair across from me. Behind her head hung a framed quote that had been in this office for as long as I’d known her. It read, What lies behind us and what lies before us are tiny matters compared to what lies within us. Dr. Mehta had spent eight years and counting trying to counsel what lay within me.

  “I said meaningful interaction, Maya. I don’t imagine you’re contributing to these conversations, as it would violate HIPAA confidentiality.”

  “No, but some of these people are obsessed. And I’m talking the clinical definition.” I pulled up one of the apps and scrolled through the comments. “They’re reposting all the photos of Lucas, turning them into memes and artwork.”

  I showed her a picture of Lucas’s face—captured when they were transferring him to Congdon—superimposed over a forest. Another version showed him half in shadows with the bottom of the frame bleeding into red. Someone posted one last night of Josiah fractured into a broken tile mosaic of greens and blacks, and the amount of detail and painstaking nuance must have taken hours, even days.

  “They’ve divided into camps, people sympathetic to Lucas who are outraged that he’s here, and the others who want him to rot in prison for what he did to the Andersons. They think he killed his father and buried him somewhere in the Boundary Waters.”

  The timer beeped and Dr. Mehta returned to the tea, stirring in milk and sugar with unhurried strokes.

  “Haven’t you noticed the people outside?” I peered beyond the oak branches toward the entrance. Something moved near the guardhouse. It was too far away to identify, but the lurkers were out there. I’d seen evidence of them online: pictures of the front entrance and even blurry shots of patients walking through the grounds, which prompted rabid speculation on whether any of them could be Lucas.

  “Yes, the guards are aware of the issue. We’ve temporarily doubled security at the gate. Lucas has accumulated a large amount of fan mail—and some hate mail—as well.”

  “What?” My spine straightened.

  “Which is all the more reason”—she brought two mugs over and handed one to me—“to get him to talk. The sooner the better. We need him to tell the authorities his story before the public superimposes their own. Eventually Lucas will be rejoining this society and we want him to be positioned to successfully engage with it, not recoil into a protective shell and redo his bathroom for the rest of his life.”

  I swallowed the tea without tasting it, but the astringency still puckered my tongue. “Someday you have to teach me that trick where people think you’re nice.”

  “Happily.” Smiling, she inhaled the steam from her cup. “How about the day when you don’t try to divert attention to someone else during your therapy sessions?”

  When I didn’t reply, she took a sip and settled more comfortably into her chair. “Now, shall we discuss your progress in letting yourself form attachments? Or would you rather talk about your fears of the Ely police?”

  Shifting, I took another bracing mouthful of tea.

  Twenty minutes later the “check-in” was over and Dr. Mehta kept her promise to tell me the details of the search for Josiah. The police wanted to talk to Lucas as soon as possible. Once winter came, the lakes would freeze over and any search parties would be fighting subzero temperatures on snowshoe or by dogsled, and without Lucas’s help they’d be searching blind.

  I’d been shaking my head long before she finished. “He won’t talk to them. He said he’d rot in here before turning his father over. Doesn’t that sound like his father committed a crime?”

  “The police haven’t mentioned any outstanding warrants.”

  “What else could he mean?”

  Dr. Mehta set aside her cup and laid a hand on my arm.

  “You’re doing a wonderful job with him, Maya—and I know this is frustrating—but you have to focus on reaching Lucas. His health is our priority. Work on gaining his trust, acclimating him, and hopefully we can get him to speak with the police soon.” She turned back to the window. “It seems the path to the father is through the son.”

  I left her office, my stomach suddenly calm as I understood what I had to do. If I was going to get Lucas to talk, I needed to uncover what drove them into the Boundary Waters, trace their steps back to that first leap, which brought me to a catch-22. The path to the father might be through the son, but the path to the son was indisputably through the father. To reach Lucas, I needed to know Josiah.

  * * *

  In the following days I didn’t press Lucas to say anything further about his father or the Boundary Waters, which was good because adjusting to his transfer proved difficult. Ward two, the high security common men’s ward, was exclusively used for forensic patients, the ones who’d been sent here by the courts rather than those who sought care of their own free will. Most of their crimes were the logical result of impulse and lack of control—theft, creating a disturbance, resisting arrest, assault—with a few more serious offenses sprinkled in. One man had driven a car into a bus full of children with a homemade bomb that didn’t explode. Another had hacked up his neighbors on Christmas Eve. That guy, a schizophrenic recluse who some of the nurses called the Grinch behind his back, responded well to his meds and had been transferred here from the state security hospital after ten years of perfect behavior. Sometimes he asked me to play Scrabble after I finished up with other sessions. He beat me every time.

  Ward two was laid out over one long wing for continuous sight lines. The staff station was encased in glass and always had at least two nurses dispensing medication, herding patients to their scheduled activities, and buzzing them between the common areas and the sleeping areas. The open living room boasted couches bolted to the floor and squishy chairs that didn’t cause major injuries when thrown. Classical music piped in after lunch and dinner and the walls were painted in soft grays and blues, like a cloudy day that might be clearing. I don’t know if the window dressing made much of a difference with this crowd, though. To most forensic patients, Congdon was a prison and they were serving a sentence with no release date.

  When security cleared me through on Monday morning for my first session with Lucas in the new ward, there was a scuffle going on in front of the TV and I helped the orderlies break up what turned out to be a disagreement over a channel change. Lucas wasn’t anywhere in the living room or adjoining dining area. I finally found him in a classroom next to the nurse’s station, the room where different therapists taught social skills, life skills, art, even cooking. Lucas sat on the floor behind the rows of benches, visible to the wall of windows connecting it to the nurse’s station but hidden from the group of men still arguing over the TV. One of them began shouting again, and I walked into the room in time to see Lucas burying his head in his arms and rocking on the floor.

  “There you are.”

  His head shot up at my voice and relief swamped his face, startling me.

  I closed the door to the classroom, blocking some of the noise and set up our session on one of the benches. He sat closer to me than I expected and didn’t even seem to consider whether he could use the felt tip pen I produced as a weapon. I gave him some loose-leaf paper and asked him to start a journal.

  He frowned. “Is that going to get me out of here?”

  I uncapped the pen and put it in his hand. “It’s another step. Journaling can help synthesize experience.” I explained how the act of writing engaged both hemispheres of the brain equally, making it a uniquely suited tool for processing and learning. Then he wanted to know about brain hemispheres and we spent twenty minutes talking about cognitive function, the nervous system, and right- vs. left-brained people. When the session was over, he touched the chipped silver polish on my fingernails and asked when I wou
ld be back, then watched from the safety of his classroom cave until I left the ward.

  He wrote halting paragraphs over the next few days—poorly spelled and sometimes hardly legible—commenting on how awful the food tasted, how loud his roommates snored, how many times he could hear an alarm shrieking through the echoing old walls of the building, nothing that even hinted at his father or his life before Congdon. From what I could tell, he stayed as far away from the other patients as possible. He didn’t socialize, he didn’t speak when spoken to. He obeyed the staff directions on the second or third time given and sat through group classes staring out the window. One of his OCD roommates started monitoring Lucas and gave me a full report every time I appeared. Lucas gave his breakfast to Big George today he went to the bathroom twice and stayed in the second time for sixteen minutes he’s over there behind the second couch. And then, when Lucas saw me, he would immediately rise and follow me to the classroom. He began starting our conversations, asking questions or bringing up points that he seemed to save up over the course of the day, although if Dr. Mehta stopped by or anyone else entered the room he would fall into characteristic sullen silence.

  I played the part of his breezy friend, a warm and casual acquaintance happy to chitchat while correcting his spelling and grammatical errors. I brought him brochures for GED programs and colleges, which he didn’t even glance at, a book of Sudoku puzzles, which he devoured with a rabid obsession, and Oreo cookies, which he spit out into a napkin after chewing one bite, making me question his entire capacity for judgment. The less I prepped for each session, the more he gravitated toward me. I didn’t have time to wonder about his change of heart, though; I was too busy researching his father.

  The Internet, for all its wastelands and perversions, was sometimes a beautiful thing. I searched for Josiah in a people finder database and got two hits, one of which was a ninety-two-year-old man living in New Hampshire. I ordered a full background check on the other one, Josiah Blackthorn, age forty-six, aka J Blackthorn, aka Joe Blackthorn, with a birth certificate registered in Detroit and previous addresses scattered all over the upper Midwest. There were no marriage certificates. He hadn’t owned much property—a few trucks registered in his name every ten years or so, no houses or anything that would’ve fixed him in one place for any length of time. He’d received an associate degree in automotive technology in Illinois. Known relatives: two dead foster parents and one child, listed missing. I might have spent fifty bucks only to find out Josiah Blackthorn had been a drifter, except for the arrest records.

  1992. DWI.

  1995. Disorderly conduct.

  1996. Public Intoxication. Disturbing the peace.

  1996. Open container. Attempted assault.

  And then nothing until a week before his disappearance when he’d been arrested for obstruction of justice in Ely, Minnesota, the same town where his son was taken into custody a decade later. Ely, the town I’d avoided for all of my adult life. There was no conviction or even a court record following that arrest, and no further information given. I stared at the bland paragraph, circled it, tried to google it and got no results. All the other arrests added up to a violent drunk, someone with a pattern of aggression who’d abruptly gone straight and kept his record clean. But obstruction of justice, after so many years of living quietly? Justice for what, or whom?

  After Lucas’s emergence none of the news stories mentioned that arrest, but the media had found a few other tidbits on Josiah. A couple of old coworkers gave interviews describing him as a solitary guy who packed his son up to go hiking every weekend and camping for weeks at a time. One of Lucas’s teachers remembered the two as being startlingly similar. Inquisitive, you know. Both asking follow-up questions, always wanting to know the why’s and reasons for things. And of course they looked . . . they looked a lot alike. The fluster, well camouflaged, but still there a dozen years later and it wasn’t hard to see why. I printed out the picture of Josiah and Lucas on the dock together and taped it to the refrigerator, staring at it every time I felt hungry. If Lucas had been a beautiful child, Josiah was the rugged, brooding, startlingly handsome father. I didn’t blush like the teacher, though; I looked closer.

  Next to the Blackthorns’ picture I’d taped another one, a shot of the Lykovs taken by the geologists who’d discovered them. There was nothing pretty about the Lykov family, not on an aesthetic scale, but something in their expressions made me pause as I stood in front of the refrigerator eating lo mein out of the carton. Joy emanated from their faces, a basic and consuming happiness. One of the rangers who visited Agafia in her later years told a documentary crew that the taiga purified people. Bad people couldn’t survive in those subarctic forests; the deadly ravines and icy bogs would swallow them whole. Taiga, he said, cleanses your soul.

  The Boundary Waters had the same power. I’d heard it in my mother’s breath as she stared up at glacier-scarred cliffs, I’d seen it as we passed other campers portaging their canoes and gear, their entire lives distilled into sweat-stained backpacks with no room for abstractions like justice or its obstruction. They possessed a peace, I realized as the cold noodles slithered down my throat, that Josiah Blackthorn’s face was screaming for.

  There were no outstanding warrants, Dr. Mehta had said, but that final arrest stuck in my head. What was it that Josiah had needed to cleanse from his soul?

  7

  * * *

  The woods are lovely, dark and deep,

  But I have promises to keep,

  and miles to go before I sleep.

  —Robert Frost

  JOSIAH

  For as long as he could remember, Josiah Blackthorn hated roofs. When he was a child, ice dams had formed on the eaves of his foster parents’ house and melted through the ceiling, dripping into the cupboards so all the food had to be stored in cardboard boxes while his foster dad spent the rest of the winter in a pissing match with the claims adjustor. They were ugly things, ceilings. His social worker’s office was covered with pockmarked, foam tiles, the grocery store lived under dusty metal crossbeams, and he’d spent countless hours staring at the bug carcasses littering the fluorescent light fixtures at his school. There was always one shadow still moving, hurling itself against the plastic molding in frenetic arcs, but in all the time Josiah watched them he never saw a single bug escape.

  All roofs came with a price. His foster mother showed them the gas and electricity bills every month. She did the same thing with grocery receipts and the register slips from Goodwill when they went clothes shopping. “If you get something for free,” she told all her foster children, “that just means you don’t know what it’s going to cost yet.” She wasn’t an unkind woman, just mean with a dollar. She rubbed Calendula on their cuts instead of buying Band-Aids and made teas out of mullein leaves for their colds. As soon as the first spring rains came, she sent the boys into the woods behind their house, showing them how to find mushrooms, fiddlehead ferns, and dandelion greens. Josiah turned out to be a natural forager, instinctively memorizing the landscape, working his way farther into the shadows and hills where sometimes he would find a break in the trees and roll out an old sleeping bag so he could count the stars and hear his breath mingle with the scrapes and chirps of fellow night explorers. It was worlds better than sleeping under a stained ceiling with whichever foster boy was spoiling for a fight that week and as long as he came home with a basket full of morels, no one minded his absence.

  The only thing he liked over his head, his foster dad joked as he grew up, was the hood of a car. Engines intrigued Josiah at the same level as the woods; they were a mechanical ecosystem and every part contributed to the function of the whole. He was the only kid in school who checked out books on cars and botany together. Eventually his foster parents helped him get a job doing tune-ups and let him tinker with their rusting Chevys until he saved up enough money to buy one of his own. When the foster subsidies ran out on the day he turned eighteen, they gave him a secondhand tent, wished him
luck, and sent him on his way.

  Josiah saw a lot of roofs over the next years and sometimes he wondered if he was the only person who noticed them. Every garage he worked at had a mechanic who’d been there for decades, with skin so stained they practically disappeared into the oil-splattered walls and telling stories that always ended with “Just you wait . . .” Josiah didn’t wait. He worked as long as he could before the ceilings started to close in and the alcohol—which numbed much better than his foster mother’s aloe vera—led to fights, cops, jails, and the inevitable firings. Camping until he ran out of money, he moved to the next town, which started the cycle all over again. He fantasized about leaving it all behind, building a little cabin somewhere so remote he could never find a way back, when he met a kayaking hippie named Sarah Mason.

  * * *

  The girl caught Josiah’s eye the second she stepped out of her tent. She had dirty blond ringlets spilling out of a bandanna and tattoos peeking out of her tank top. Her nose was burnt watermelon pink and she seemed to be alone, too, their tents pitched on adjoining campsites along Lake Macbride in the tumbling hills of eastern Iowa. He leaned back in his camp chair as she tugged her boat down to the water.

  “Can I help?” he asked.

  “I doubt it.” Flashing a smile, she set the boat in the lake without a backward glance. It was a two-person kayak and she used the second seat to prop up her bare feet as she paddled away.

  It was the Fourth of July in a year no different from a half dozen before it. Josiah was between jobs again. He had a full cooler of beer, a week’s worth of food, and every intention of not speaking to another living soul for as long as he could avoid it, yet all that mattered to him in that moment was watching the girl lift her face to the sun. She stroked leisurely across the lake, a solar powered creature he’d never encountered in nature before.