Leave No Trace

by Mindy Mejia

  “Yes, he still needs to acclimate and of course integrate his childhood experiences with the larger world, but Mr. Blackthorn strikes me as someone who needs a path forward. He should be thinking about short- and medium-term goals.”

  “We’ll start working on that right away.” Obediently, I made a note of it, turning to leave.

  “I haven’t decided who his speech therapist will be yet.”

  “What?” Halting in mid-escape, I swung on Dr. Mehta. “I’m his therapist.”

  “Shut the door and sit down, please, Maya.”

  I complied, watching her warily as she sat opposite me and carefully picked cat fur off her pants.

  “You haven’t told me what happened the night of Lucas’s escape.”

  In a clear, even voice, I told her the same story Dad had given to the police. Unlike the officers, though, Dr. Mehta didn’t appear the tiniest bit convinced.

  “You weren’t answering my calls earlier that evening.”

  “I’m sorry. I was tired and off duty.”

  Dr. Mehta nodded and let her gaze slide somewhere closer to my heart. “A perfectly reasonable explanation and if it was any of my other staff, quite in character.”

  My tongue pressed against my palate and held. After a moment, she sighed and clasped her hands. “And then we have Mr. Blackthorn. He left the hospital almost two hours before your father discovered him, claiming he was standing in plain sight in the middle of one of the busiest docks in Duluth.”

  “That’s where Dad found him.” I met her gaze head-on, mixing mine with the right amounts of irritation and confusion.

  “It still seems like a long gap of time to me.”

  “Did you ask him where he went?” I countered.

  “We did. He said he was wandering.”

  Dr. Mehta stared at me with her all-knowing look. Every muscle in my body tensed, and I barely made myself nod and murmur an acknowledgment.

  “Lucas Blackthorn doesn’t strike me as the wandering type.”

  I took a deep breath. “So I’ll try to figure out what his goal was during our next sessions. I haven’t worked this hard to earn his trust for nothing.”

  “Yes, I have no doubt that you’ve gained it. He’s been asking for you—extremely politely, I’m told—with every new nurse at every shift change. He even struck up a conversation with one of the janitors about you. Your interests. Your background. Hector wasn’t extremely helpful in the situation, apparently only knowing you as ‘that little punk girl with the shit in her ear.’ ”

  “See?” I ignored the sudden upbeat in my pulse. “So why would you make him start all over again with someone new?”

  “Because I’m worried about your attachment to each other.”

  Jesus. She didn’t pull any punches. I felt myself flushing, which might as well have been a big fat confirmation of our “attachment.” Dropping my gaze, I tried to find words that were both true and harmless.

  “I like him.”

  “Obviously. You spent hours at his bedside in the hospital, off the clock, and when you brought him back here you barely moved from his side all night. The medical team noticed what they called an ‘unspoken communication’ between you.”

  “Well, for one, that sounds like gossipy bullshit.”

  Dr. Mehta chuckled.

  “And two,” I sighed and tossed my hands in the air. “You’re right. I have become attached to him. He reminds me of me, I guess. But is that so bad? I mean, don’t you ever become fond of any of your patients? What about Big George? That man is a human-sized teddy bear. How can you not love him?”

  “Don’t shift the topic. There’s a difference between professional compassion and personal attachment.”

  I made myself laugh. “I’m not going to ask him to go steady, okay?”

  “It’s against policy, it’s dangerous, and to be completely honest I’m more worried about the consequences for you than for Mr. Blackthorn.”

  “This is insane.” I launched myself out of the chair and paced behind it. “In the eight years I’ve known you, all you’ve ever told me is that I need to let myself connect with people, to open up to love and loss again and all that crap. Then you force me to work with Lucas against my will and outside my professional scope. And now you’re upset because I’m too close to him?”

  She steepled her fingers under her chin, undisturbed by my outburst. On the scale of emotional incidents around here, we might as well be having a sedate tea. After a moment’s consideration, she nodded.

  “I’ll authorize you to continue your sessions for the time being, but I’ll be monitoring your work closely. And please know, Maya”—she stopped me as I headed for the door—“I believe in you.”

  * * *

  Belief is a powerful thing. It grabs you, unmakes you, changes the tilt and angle of everything around you into an entirely different geometry. You see the world in a new shape and no matter how horrible the belief, no matter what awful things it makes you do, a part of you is still grateful for the structure.

  I’d believed a lot of things in my life, most of them about my mother.

  I’d believed in Santa Claus until I found the frosted animal crackers I only got once a year in my stocking, tucked away in Mom’s sock drawer. They were brittle cookies, animal shapes coated with a careless icing like snow drifted into patches along back alleys, and the ones I found were leftovers, crumbled into tiny rocks at the bottom of the bag. She cried when I brought them out, perplexed by my discovery, and after she broke down I immediately wanted to hide the bag, to bury it at the bottom of a snowbank that would never melt. I’d believed our rock garden would make her happy, and that if I could memorize just one more mineral her eyes would blink into focus again and she would hug me with pride. Later, when she left us, I believed every word of her goodbye letter. Everything shifted into place: the jobs she could never keep, the long silences when Dad was gone, how her sadness swamped her at the strangest times—in the grocery store or walking me to school. I’d look up and her face would be wet, eyes averted and unwiped. If I tried to hug her, it seemed to make her worse. If I ignored it, the gap between us only widened. She hadn’t wanted me, hadn’t wanted this life, and disappeared like the Bannockburn before I could demand a reason why. To ask what I’d done that was so intolerable.

  Sometimes I even wondered if I’d studied speech so I could dissect my memories of her. I played old videos of us over and over but could never find any hint of her intentions. I hated the counselors who pulled me into their offices, the words that came so easily to them and had been impossible for her. The thing no one understands, when your parent abandons you, is that it doesn’t happen just once. They leave every day, every moment that you remember them is a door slamming shut in your face. And with every slam, you believe—a little more each time—that you probably deserved it.

  My belief about Lucas Blackthorn was nothing like that creeping kind of blame. It didn’t gradually take root in my consciousness over years; I woke up this morning with a certainty flowing through me that not even Dr. Mehta could derail. I hated myself for lying to her—sane Dr. Mehta, sober Dr. Mehta, a woman who had faith in the faithless and confidence in the worst people you could imagine. After all, she’d hired me. She’d challenged me, elevated me, believed in me, but now I wondered how much she really understood me. If she did, she never would have given me this assignment. Before I met Lucas, I don’t think I’d even understood myself.

  This is what I knew now:

  A father had disappeared. A son was desperate to find him.

  And I would tell a thousand lies if it brought him one step closer.

  The path before me seemed so clear and it gave meaning to everything I’d survived to get to this point. I had to help Lucas find his father. No matter what Josiah had done, no matter what had driven them into the Boundary Waters, they needed to find each other and I was possibly the only person in the world who understood how much. But the clock was ticking. Every day the wi
nds blew harder and colder, the gales raged in a losing battle against the coming winter. Soon the ice would win, soon Josiah might be dead, and we’d be out of time.

  I gathered up my session supplies and jogged up the stairs to ward two. I could feel the organs in my body pumping, expanding, the excitement set loose in every nerve ending, flashing with a life I hadn’t known was even inside me. Without any premonition of what lay ahead, I badged in to ward two and caught a flash of Lucas’s face before the world jerked sideways.

  13

  * * *

  A CRUSHING WEIGHT knocked me to the ground, sending the air whooshing out of my lungs. Several people yelled my name, the loudest one right in my ear.

  “Tag, Maya! Tag, Maya!” the voice shouted gleefully.

  I twisted around and pulled his skull into a headlock as Lucas appeared above us, grabbing a massive arm and ripping it backward. Big George shrieked in pain.

  “Back off, Lucas! Now.” I managed to order as two nurses came to pry our tag player off me. After we got untangled and de-escalated the situation, the other staff and I led Big George to his favorite squishy chair and sat him down. He held his arm and rocked, refusing to make eye contact with anyone. I nodded to the nurses and they gave us a little distance, returning to the bustle of the adult men’s common room. Most of the other patients watched us to see how the show would turn out, but when nothing more exciting happened than Big George sniffling into the crook of his arm they gradually resumed their card games, books, and TV programs. Faces turned away from the window of the classroom, where one of the life skills coaches held up a rainbow-colored chart. Lucas paced behind the row of sofas in front of the TV, and even though he didn’t look over once I knew I had his undivided attention.

  Big George was holding his throat now and he’d gotten himself into a loop, repeating “Ow” over and over.

  “What hurts, George? Tell me.”

  Instead of verbalizing, he pointed to his arm and neck and then, as he always did when something ached, he doubled over and pressed his palms against his head.

  Big George had lived at Congdon for twenty years, ever since he and two friends robbed a grocery store at gunpoint in Cloquet, loaded up trash bags with cash and food, and met a squad car on their way out. The other two began shooting at the police and were killed on sight but George was “lucky”; he’d been hunched over a box of Triscuits when they opened fire and the angle of the bullet through his brain missed every major artery. He had the aptitude of a four-year-old now, ate every meal as if his life depended on it, and was aggressively cheery unless he felt the slightest twinge of pain—reminding him a phantom bullet lived in his head—or if he saw anything resembling a tan, plaid square, which would send him spiraling into a meltdown. Triscuits were strictly banned in the men’s ward.

  I gave him a second to work through his feelings and then doubled over my own legs, mirroring his pose. When I got his attention, I pointed to the ankle Bryce’s Taser had sprained.

  “I’ve got a place that hurts, too.” As George reached out to tap my shin, I asked him. “Where am I hurt?”

  “Leg.”

  “This is my leg.” I sounded as excited as anyone could about discovering a piece of their body and he caught on to my enthusiasm, pointing to his head.

  “This is my ow.”

  Keeping my grin in place with a Herculean effort, I corrected him. “No, silly. That’s your head.”

  He cackled and we kept going, the body part naming game an old favorite and a comfortable way for him to articulate complete sentences. I’d tucked a bunch of fabric samples in the surprise bag with another exercise in mind, but swatches could wait. We played while tears dried on the dark mounds of his cheeks, until I’d pushed him beyond all the body parts he knew and into the more phonetically uncomfortable territory of forearm and spine, where cognitive fatigue soon settled in. Sessions with George were always brief.

  To end, I pulled him to his feet and we sang a version of “Dem Bones,” hopping around the common room. “Toe bone connected to the foot bone, foot bone connected to the heel bone . . .”

  George loved singing and was oblivious to the snickers and stares. We spun and danced while recapping all the body parts he might need to verbalize to his doctors in the event of illness or injury. After we finished, the easy grin melted into a more complicated emotion and his next words came out in a quiet, but perfectly clear cadence. “Sorry, sorry, sorry.”

  “What are you sorry for, George?”

  “Tag, Maya. I’m sorry.”

  “Thank you for finding those words.” I touched his arm and grinned into his contrite face. “Next time you play tag, you’ve got to remember you’re a big, old bear. You can’t go around tagging little gnats like me.”

  “Bird.” He petted my hair and cracked a smile. “Maya’s a bird.”

  “Bears have to be careful of birds, okay?”

  “Okay, Maya.”

  I left Big George in the care of one of the nurses and wandered through the ward with his words repeating in my head. This is my ow.

  When I was first promoted to speech therapist I’d focused on one thing—helping my patients speak. I spent all my sessions working on palate exercises, pronunciation, articulation, and sound. The goal was form. Whatever coherent subject matter they produced had ended up on their doctor’s plate, not mine, but now Lucas was changing everything. I couldn’t ignore the meaning behind their words, couldn’t keep describing the water in the boat without wanting to plug the holes. This is my ow. My heart ached for Big George, for the broke, hungry kid who would probably grow old inside these walls. He had no support network outside of Congdon, nowhere to go if he was ever released, and no hope of becoming self-sufficient. All I could do was point to my forearm, teach him words he would forget by our next session, and try to make him smile.

  I poked my head into every room along the corridor, trying to locate the one person in this building who’d actually asked for my help, and who had suddenly—if characteristically—vanished. Finally, I found him at the far end of the dining room and what he was doing stopped me in my tracks.

  He ran full speed at the wall and then, without slowing down, ran up the side of it, turned sideways and landed lightly back on his feet, jogging to where he began. The sling he still wore on one arm didn’t slow him down at all, or maybe it did. Maybe if he hadn’t been wearing it he could’ve scaled further, gone higher. I had a vision of the fence outside, of Lucas clearing the entire thing in one giant leap. I might have been George’s bird, but Lucas was the one who was trying to fly.

  I watched him repeat the trick two more times with my mouth hanging open before realizing I wasn’t his only audience. The Grinch sat at a nearby table, puffing on an e-cig with a slight head twitch as Lucas went almost horizontal against the cement blocks.

  “I think I’m having an episode.” He puffed, eyes straight ahead and unblinking.

  “Me too.”

  He grunted in acknowledgment. The Grinch was another lifer, but for far different reasons than Big George. His schizophrenia was well managed with medication and he’d conquered most of his paranoia, even completing some vocational training he would never have the opportunity to use. He’d been found not guilty by reason of insanity for hacking up the young couple and their two-year-old twins who lived next door to him, but guilt didn’t matter with some crimes. There would never be any protesters at the gates for the Grinch, demanding his release. People might understand, rationally, that his illness had caused the crime, but they would keep the man locked up long after the illness had been treated. After a decade of perfect behavior, the only concession the system had granted him was a transfer from the state security hospital, where most of Minnesota’s criminally insane residents lived, to the relatively progressive environment of Congdon. He would die in the high security ward here, a Scrabble champion who would never feel the breeze of an oe on his upturned face.

  My story was the exception, and I always assumed
the basis of Dr. Mehta’s affection for me. Most of her beds were taken by forensic patients and the longer ones like Big George and the Grinch stayed, the fewer voluntary patients she could accommodate. Rather than treat patients when they actually sought help, she had to wait until their mental illness caused them to commit a crime and then hope the courts would send them to Congdon instead of prison. I was lucky—I’d been in and out in under six months, barely a blink of Big George’s eye—and now I had to help Lucas get even luckier.

  Finishing his show and not even out of breath, Lucas walked over to the tables. He leaned down to murmur something in the Grinch’s ear, then clapped him on the shoulder and walked past me without a word or glance. I was still so stunned that it wasn’t until he left the dining room I realized he was blowing me off.

  Pivoting out into the hallway, I raised my voice.

  “We have a session, Mr. Blackthorn.”

  He turned around at the other end of the corridor. “You told me to back off.”

  “That was then. This is now. Keep up with the schedule, will you?”

  “So you’re done being tackled by huge men?” Even across this distance, his irritation was palpable. I tried not to laugh.

  “In the grand scheme of things, let’s hope not. But today . . .” I shrugged and went back to the dining room, pulling out papers from the surprise bag and laying them in rough geographic order on the nearest table. The Grinch paced the wall where Lucas had been running, muttering to himself in a monotone and taking drags of his e-cigarette. I kept working even after I sensed Lucas standing behind me.

  Once everything was arranged I started marking places with a pen, narrating in a voice that could have easily been just to keep myself company.

  “Here’s where you were found.” I pointed to the blue X and talked through the paths that grew like tree branches through the paddle and portage routes beginning in Ely, stopping when I hit the fifteen-mile range and the jagged edge of the international border. I lingered on the line, drawn like a stuttering heart monitor, and finally turned my head to acknowledge Lucas’s presence.