by Mindy Mejia
Within their first month in Ely, it became obvious Heather Price was part of no such community. No visitors came in or out of her side of the duplex. She never spent time outside and when Josiah found a citation for yard maintenance in their mailbox, he had to knock on her door for a solid minute before she answered and then she tumbled into an incoherent speech about mayors and her work schedule and neighbors who were trying to repossess her house. Josiah left her mid-rant and found a broken lawn mower in the garage, showed Lucas how to take it apart and fix it, and then mowed the tiny lawn every week until the snow came. Heather watched him from her window, her seemingly lidless eyes following his every move. Lucas studied her in his turn and, like a budding naturalist, called out his observations from their living room window. “It’s Work Heather today” or other days “Ugh, Home Heather” and the two were easy to differentiate. Work Heather had wet hair pulled back into a ponytail and white lab coats frayed at the edges; she stumbled down the street toward some job that required breath mints and hastily applied lipstick. Home Heather, the one they’d seen during the duplex tour, rarely went anywhere and when they did run into her outside it felt somehow calculated. She fawned over Lucas, who at nine years old was long past the age when boys wanted to be fawned over, petting his hair and telling him bizarre facts about his classmates as Lucas jerked out of her spindle-armed reach.
Then, as winter set in, the price of her free rent started coming due. She began asking for money early each month, knocking on their door at two in the morning when they both worked the next day, always with a reason ready—the utility company was screwing her over or she’d gotten scammed by a credit card collector. When that didn’t work she started offering up her body, not like a barter so much as something she wanted to be rid of. Josiah stopped answering the door. He listened to the knocking while lying in bed, staring at the water stains spreading over the bedroom ceiling like an insidious cancer.
In a perfect world Josiah would have helped her, invited her into his life and tried to show her she was worth something, but in reality he just wanted her to stay as far away as possible from him and his son. At the very least they should’ve moved, they should’ve packed up and found some other place in Ely or even Babbitt, which was only twenty minutes down the road, but two hundred and fifty a month was dirt cheap. He was saving more than ever, stockpiling money for all the things Lucas might someday need—casts for broken bones, his first car, college tuition, or maybe a trip around the world. He might actually be able to see the Amazon or the Nile, all the rivers he pretended to navigate from the carpet-grounded canoe in their living room. So they stayed. He shot down Heather’s advances, installed a chain lock on their door, and put the cash in her mailbox on the first of every month. It didn’t take someone with his police record to smell the trouble reeking from the holes in her arms. He itched to move on, counting down the days until Lucas finished third grade, and in the meantime they found sanctuary in the Boundary Waters.
Camping most weekends and on school holidays, they explored the giant wilderness where civilization was strictly prohibited. No motorized boats. No cans. No bottles. Any stain of human habitation had to be scrubbed when you left. It was the guiding principle, the bedrock rule for entering the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness, a place that changed even the language people used to describe it. When passing other paddlers, everyone asked the same questions. “When did you come in?” “When do you go out?” The paradigm shift was subtle, but complete. This world where bear and moose still roamed, where loons cried like melancholy ghosts and the Milky Way raged overhead in a storm of shadows and stars, this place was the pulse, the center, the inside, and everything else, the stuff people built their lives on, was merely the out.
They camped from the end of summer through the fall, and in the winter Josiah bought his first auger and they taught themselves how to ice fish. Robert Anderson, the man who’d sold them their canoe and the auger, helped them map out some of the best spots to tap the labyrinths of underwater boulders and find the elusive winter fish. They experimented with snow packed tents, heaters, and chimney positions, testing the limits of snowshoes and sleds. Sometimes entire days passed during which they’d hardly spoken a word, bundled up in their hoods and scarves, but they worked together with an implicit understanding, shifting positions on the sled with a touch on the shoulder, signaling a firewood expedition with just a nod to a shrinking pile of kindling. Lucas seemed wise beyond his years and Josiah watched, awestruck, as he grew stronger by the day. Subzero temperatures didn’t faze him. He paced his strides to Josiah’s, reaching his legs longer and farther, and then giggled—transformed into a nine-year-old boy again—when he fell over into a pile of fresh powder. The kids at his school played sports and video games, and when Josiah asked if he wanted to get a Wii, Lucas shook his head and frowned. “Why would I want to sit around and pretend to do things when we really do them?” It wasn’t a question either Blackthorn could answer.
On the first day of Lucas’s spring break, they packed for a weeklong trip and set out on the freshly thawed Fall Lake but had to turn around when Josiah remembered he’d been in such a hurry to leave he’d forgotten their tent. Laughing, they drove back to town and Josiah told Lucas to stay in the truck while he jogged inside the duplex only to find Heather trying to break into the safe where he stored all his cash.
“What the fuck?”
She panicked and bolted for the door. Grabbing her, he dragged her out of the bedroom and threw her into the wall in the hallway. She bounced off it, unfazed by the pain or maybe too far gone to even feel it. Her eyes were bloodshot and the corner of her mouth was cracked and scabbed over. She screamed and swore at him, accusing him of withholding rent, of stealing from her, and threatened to call the police. He pushed her back into the wall, and right as he heard the satisfying crack of her head against the plaster, there was another noise, this time from behind him.
“Dad?”
He whipped around and saw Lucas wavering in the front door. His eyes were wider than Josiah had ever seen them, but his narrow shoulders tensed and shifted, squaring up, ready to come to his father’s aid.
“Get back in the car.”
Lucas hesitated, his hands creeping into trembling fists at his sides, before Josiah barked the order again and he jerked backward, running to the truck that was still idling in the driveway.
“It’s just a few bucks.” Heather’s voice was broken, panting. “Just a loan. I gave you a free month’s rent, remember? You owe me. I’ll pay you back on Tuesday, as soon as I get my next check.” Then with barely a pause for air, “I took you in with no questions, no applications, or background checks, and everyone knows you’re a goddamn felon. Get your hands off me. I’m calling the police.”
He gave her one last bone-crunching push into the wall and walked back to the safe, emptying the whole thing in front of her, stuffing thousands of dollars in a bag with the tent just so she could smell the ink before tossing two hundred-dollar bills at her face.
“There’s our first month’s rent, minus lawn mowing fees. Go put that in your fucking arm.” He didn’t know how much heroin cost, but two hundred dollars had to be enough to keep her high and out of his house for the rest of the week. Dragging her across the living room to the patio door, where Lucas wouldn’t be able to see them, he shoved her out onto the concrete. “When we get back from this trip, we’re moving out.”
Then she raged about the lease and taking him to court, hitting him with the wadded-up bills clutched in her fist until he swatted her off and she fell into a heap on the filthy remains of last winter’s snow. Neither of them saw the neighbors frozen in their kitchen window, one holding a coffee cup suspended halfway to his mouth and the other bent over the sink as the unexpected altercation spilled into their weekday breakfast routine. Josiah wouldn’t find that out until seventy-two hours later when the police interrogated him, telling him he was the last person to see Heather Price alive.
18
* * *
IT CAN’T BE a good sign, can it?” Dr. Mehta muttered as she stepped her kitten-heeled boots carefully up the gangplank to my dad’s tugboat. “The top isn’t supposed to be wet.”
“It’s only mist.” I swallowed a smile, trying not to be amused by Dr. Mehta’s surprise aversion to boats. Who would have thought psychiatrists had phobias, too?
After the confrontation at Twin Ponds, I’d modified my field trip plans. Split Rock Lighthouse was one of the most famous landmarks on Superior and far too public a venue for Lucas to make an appearance. If he was chased down at as quiet a place as Twin Ponds, he’d be mobbed at Split Rock, so I’d modified the agenda with a little help from Dad. Yesterday Stan and I had taken Lucas to the docks by the longest route possible, driving up through the University neighborhood and weaving our way down the hill to Garfield Avenue, where we doubled back through the industrial stretch twice to make sure no one was following us or hanging around. Dad’s dock was in the middle of the harbor and Lucas spent the morning learning how to detail the boat while Stan and I watched with Jasper on the sidelines, pointing and yelling our advice. Butch taught Lucas several key swear words to use on us, but Lucas just kept working, absorbing the nautical nuances and the industry surrounding us on all sides. He didn’t flinch at sudden noises and was even laughing by the end of the outing, scratching Jasper’s scruff as the dog barked at some circling gulls.
Today was our last field trip—a sunrise cruise on Dad’s tugboat—and after that, with Dr. Mehta’s approval, the Boundary Waters. At the moment, though, she was having trouble focusing on anything besides the giant orange and white hull in front of us.
“When was the last time this vessel has even been serviced? Did you check?”
I started to reply when a baritone voice cut in over my shoulder. “She was dry docked last winter and we do weekly inspections during the shipping season.”
Turning, I caught Butch’s indulgent wink and introduced Dr. Mehta to my dad’s first mate. He offered a tattooed arm to assist her the rest of the way up and started pointing out the early morning activities around the harbor, doing his best to put her at ease. I didn’t see Dad anywhere and assumed he was on the bridge.
Below us, Lucas leaned over the rail and peered into the water as if trying to see to the bottom. Bryce squinted up the gangplank with bloodshot eyes and steered Lucas onto the boat, with the other hand resting on his Taser.
“Do you really need that?” I muttered as they boarded.
Bryce glared at both of us before releasing his grip on Lucas. “I don’t have any other patients who try to jump fences or sick their crazy fans after me.”
“Lucas didn’t sick anyone on you. Anyway, that’s why we’re here before dawn. Crazy sleeps in.”
He grunted and stalked away. When I filed the incident report for Twin Ponds I’d specifically asked for Stan on the rest of our field trips, but today was Stan’s day off and none of the other orderlies had as much experience with Lucas, so we were stuck with Bryce.
Once everyone was on board Butch brought us into the cabin and gave a quick safety talk as we chugged out into the harbor and waited for the lift bridge to raise. The boat boasted a 3,000-horsepower diesel engine that could steer thousand-foot freighters with ease. Its two decks were full of lights, winches, and rope that an F-16 fighter jet couldn’t break. The lower deck cabin had only a single wooden bench for us to sit on, otherwise we could climb up to the open-air deck behind the glass encased captain’s bridge for better views. Butch pointed out the bathroom, which wasn’t a huge step up from the latrines dug at the Boundary Waters campsites and nothing like the facilities on the yacht-style passenger cruisers that catered to the tourists on Lake Superior. The tugboat, though, was infinitely safer, a controlled environment away from the general public. When I’d texted Dad at the beginning of the week, he agreed to take us out and even turned down a job to arrive back in port early. After the safety talk, Dad came down to the lower deck and showed us the map tacked up on one of the walls, pointing out their attempts to locate the Bannockburn, before moving on to describe the shipwreck of the Onoko—our destination for today’s cruise.
At the top of the hour, the lift bridge closed to car traffic along the peninsula and cranked up its metal scaffolding to the accompanying scream of fire alarm bells. The bridge was an icon, the symbol of Duluth and as far as alarm clocks went, a piercing start to the day. We filed out of the warmth of the cabin to watch the bridge rise. Bryce smoked a cigarette in the bow, legs wide and taking the slap of the wind head-on. Lucas watched in silence, absorbing the spectacle while Dad stood behind him and Butch’s head moved around on the bridge. The only person missing was Dr. Mehta.
I let the wind blow me back to the cabin and found her braced on the bench, watching the cement canal pass outside the windows. She looked paler than normal, smaller. It took a few minutes, but I convinced her to come out for the sunrise. We cleared the canal and cruised along the shoreline while Butch pointed out landmarks on the loudspeaker that no one looked at. Instead everyone faced east, into the endless sightline that showed the curve of the Earth itself and watched in silence as the thick gray morning became infused with an illumination that seemed to have no source. A haze of clouds shrouded the water, but somewhere behind them the sun was rising. A shimmer of pink glanced off the waves and made the buildings on Duluth’s hillside glow. It was a sunrise with no sun, a morning without light, and before anyone could do more than huddle into their jackets and gaze around, it vanished and the day began.
I turned to Dr. Mehta, eager to share the moment, but she was quaking against the rail.
“I always get seasick. It’s not the boat or the water I’m afraid of,” she admitted. “It’s vomiting in public.”
Biting my lip, I gave her a hesitant pat on the back. “Dad says seasickness comes when your body insists on being vertical. If you let go of that need, stop focusing on the horizon and what you think should be up or down, then the sickness will pass.”
She squinted across Superior, where the gray below met the gray above. “There is no horizon.”
I tried not to smile. “One less problem. Just try to remember: up isn’t up. Down isn’t down.”
Dad came over and, after hearing the situation, offered to take her back to the cabin. She accepted his arm, too queasy to even grumble about being led around like an old lady, while he told her about the Onoko’s hull failure and spectacular flipping explosion and sinking, presumably to cheer her up. When Bryce took Lucas inside for a supervised bathroom trip, I climbed the stairs to the second deck and curled up beneath the sightline of the captain’s bridge, using it as a buffer against the unrelenting wind. The gales had begun.
Shivering, I watched the churn of the water until Lucas appeared on the stairs. Bryce’s head popped up behind him and I waved him off, agreeing to supervise. Negotiating the deck unsteadily, Lucas leveraged the winches and coils of rope to make his way to the bench and sit down. Silently he gripped the rails of the seat and I wondered if he was going to be sick, too.
The boat progressed up the shore where the sprawl of Duluth gave way to secluded mansions, towering homes sitting regally on the cliffs, and then we turned and headed into the open water toward the site of the wreck. Dad climbed up to the captain’s bridge and passed us without comment or hurry, seemingly immune to the blast of wind, the Arctic’s first attempt to take Superior.
As the shoreline receded, I felt Lucas relax and start to absorb the morning. This. This is what I wanted to show him, the moment I’d secretly hoped for when I planned these field trips with Superior lurking behind every outing—first a view from the hill, then a trip to the docks, now cruising over the water itself. Duluth lived at the mouth of this inland sea, at the whim of the water. We took the wind, the squalls, the snow, and the flooding. We took everything the lake gave to or inflicted on us, knowing there would always be more. This was a resource we could not exhaust. It wasn’t prote
cted like the Boundary Waters, it didn’t sink quietly into your soul; it dominated everything it touched and we were the ones who needed protection from it. The water would always win, no matter if it was beating at the basalt cliffs that tried to contain it or reforging our empty bottles into lake glass as beautiful as gemstones. This gray wind-tossed water, raging at the gales, the water that sucked ships into oblivion, that roared so loud you forgot the storm in your head, this was what I loved most about Duluth—the absolute reign of Superior.
I didn’t realize I was shivering until Lucas slid over, closing the gap between us and slipping his arm around my shoulders. I stilled. Even the tremors died as I felt the length of him press into my side, offering his own body heat.
“Your ears are red,” he murmured, so close I could hear him above the wind and the roar of the engines. Too close.
I pulled away, putting distance between us. Someone was walking in the bridge behind our heads and Bryce and Dr. Mehta were right under our feet. I should have joined them downstairs and ended the insanity of this stolen, frigid moment before someone discovered us, but not even that threat was enough to make me sever it completely. I threaded our gloved fingers together on the bench, trying to pretend I was watching the few gulls screaming overhead, fighting the immense pull of the air currents.
Lucas gripped my hand. I could feel him searching my profile but after a while—when I refused to do anything more than stare at the birds—he turned to the water. “The search party.”
