by Mindy Mejia
Harry startled me out of my fixation. He reached out from his perch, a glint of light cupped in his hand. When I stepped closer, the light turned into a key.
“Your dad asked me to keep an eye on the place, check the pipes and furnace and whatnot. He keeps the heat and electricity going, so nothing freezes. One year I had to put a cat over there to clean out the mice. Haven’t been by in a while. You should go.”
I didn’t want to touch that key, but I forced myself to pick it up and fold it into my hand. Lucas caught sight of me and started to come over, but I waved him off. He smiled and picked up another section of tree trunk, cleaving it in half with one swing. Apparently his shoulder was all healed.
“I’ve never been inside without her. Even that day . . . I didn’t know the security code.”
“0-6-1-2.”
The tears blurred everything into a painful, sun-washed brilliance. She’d used my birthday.
I shook my head, furiously blinking the water away. “It’s been twelve years, Harry. Over half my life ago.”
“Couldn’t’ve been that long. Ten years at the most.”
“It’s not the kind of thing you forget, your mother abandoning you.”
“Yeah, I know you guys stopped coming for a while but then she brought you back.”
“What?” My vertebrae popped I snapped my head so fast. “What did you say?”
Harry uncrossed and recrossed his arms, rocking back, and frowning. “It wasn’t more than ten years since she came back here with you and that new man. I didn’t see you myself, but she came over here to borrow my Merck Manual because she said you were sick. Down with the flu or something.”
Every word hit me like a truck, one body blow after another. Harry kept on in his meandering drawl, completely unaware of the effect his speech was having.
“You only stayed a little while that time and I guess you were sick so maybe you don’t remember. Caught a glimpse of her and that guy sitting on the beach together, talking over a fire. They, uh . . . well, I went about my business after that.”
“They what?” I demanded.
“They were just hugging, seemed about as cozy as you two.” Harry nodded at me and Lucas, then hauled himself up with cracking joints. “I didn’t mention anything to your dad. He’d already told me she left, and it’s not the kind of thing a man wants to hear about.”
Then he squinted into the sun and stretched. “Mighty nice to have help chopping wood. Guess I’ll go start some soup for dinner.”
I stood paralyzed, reeling in the harsh November sun that bounced light off every snow-covered surface between me and the cabin in the distance. All my life, no matter if I’d spent it with or without her, I’d known my mom was depressed, a woman who couldn’t seize the world around her, who shrank away from me and my dad and hardened into her shell like a slab of basalt, porous and brittle. She’d tried to kill herself when I was eight years old, for God’s sake, and I’d spent the better part of my teenage years learning a story, the narrative I built for her with Dr. Mehta’s help, and it went something like this: Her depression wasn’t my fault. There was nothing I or anyone else could’ve done to help her recover. She loved me, but it wasn’t enough to battle back the chemical imbalances in her brain. And without batting an eye or lifting a finger, Harry McKinley had smashed that story into oblivion.
My mother had never come back for me.
I’d never seen her with any man besides my father and not here, not in the one place where we’d been happy together, our place, our cabin in the woods, our paddles dipping in time through the pristine, mirrored surface of the Boundary Waters. She couldn’t have. She didn’t—because if she did, everything I’d told myself about my mother’s disappearance was a lie. It wasn’t true that no one could save her. We just hadn’t been good enough to save her.
“Where are you going?”
I didn’t even realize I was moving until I heard Lucas’s voice behind me, farther away than it should have been, and felt the edges of a bush scraping against my side. I gripped the key, gouging it into my flesh as I crossed the uneven ground between the cabins. The driveway was cracked and strewn with snowcapped piles of leaves and needles. Cobwebs rippled against the door frame and my hand shook as I pushed the key into the lock.
“Are you sure you’re up for this?” His voice again, this time close to my ear, and a hand I barely registered smoothed over my shoulder. “How’s your stomach?”
The shriek of the alarm kept me from having to answer. I punched in the code, my birthday, the day we’d always spent here because I knew she couldn’t handle throwing me a party with friends and cake and the chattering of strange mothers at our door. Instead we drove up here as soon as school let out, going “Up North” like all true Minnesotans, and we roasted the first s’mores of the summer over a birthday bonfire at the water’s edge. She only made those bonfires for me and sometimes my dad on the few days he could leave work during the busy shipping season. No one else was ever invited into this house.
With the alarm silenced, I looked around, slowly pivoting to take it in. The living area and kitchen took up the main room, with a screened-in porch opening up to the lake below. A small bedroom—my bedroom—and the bath were tucked under a stairway that led up to a loft in the rafters, where her sleeping area overlooked the first floor. Everything was the same. The same rag rug laying in front of the fireplace, the same stack of Rock & Gem magazines on the coffee table, the same rips in the vinyl of the 1950s kitchen chairs, tucked underneath the metal soda shop table. I moved through the main floor, touching nothing, a shell-shocked investigator who’d somehow traveled back in time to search for evidence.
When I turned the light on in my old bedroom, a mouse scurried across the floor and disappeared under the twin bed. Nothing was out of place. The bed was made up with the faded daisy quilt I used to hide under with a flashlight to read stolen copies of her geology magazines, scouring them for tidbits that might impress her or something I could ask her, anything to engage her attention. She came alive when she talked about minerals and sometimes we even went on rock hunts, scouting the wilderness for days on our geology adventures. I opened the closet, pulled out drawers, and found nothing except a few rocks here and there, which—when I held them up to the light and ran a finger over the waxy surfaces—I found were all agates. Turning to go upstairs, I glanced at Lucas’s face and stopped dead.
“What?” I glanced at the spot where he was staring, a faded picture on the wall of a cliff and a man dangling off the edge by one hand. Believe, it said in thick black letters underneath the image. I’d never been sure what I was supposed to believe by looking at that picture. That he was strong enough to hold on? That the cliff wouldn’t crumble? Or that his grip would eventually give out, that no matter how capable he was he couldn’t hold on forever. I looked back at Lucas, who’d gone as pale as the petals of the daisies on the bedspread. “What is it?”
He didn’t answer. Walking to the bed, he sat down on the pillow and stared at the picture again, now directly in front of him, then he craned his head to take in every detail of the room. There wasn’t much to see and nothing to justify his sudden agitation.
“No.” He ejected himself off the mattress and ran to the door, leaning into the frame as his breathing became ragged.
“Lucas, what?” I pulled his arm and, when that had no effect, shook him as hard as I could, suddenly angry for no reason I wanted to name.
His eyes bounced around the cabin, unable to settle, and he lifted his hands to squeeze his head, heaving air in and out, manifesting all the signs of a panic attack. I tried to pull his arms down and get him to look at me when he began chanting and shaking violently. One unbroken “Nononononononono.”
“Lucas!”
“It was here.” He broke away, lunging back into the great room and pacing the edges like a caged animal.
“What are you talking about? What was here?”
“I was.” He stopped dead, lifting
his shocked face to mine.
We stared at each other across the room as I tried to make sense of the words, but what he was saying was impossible. A delusion. When I moved toward him, he jerked back, ducking away.
“I don’t understand.”
“My father and I—we were here. This is where I was sick. That guy hanging off the cliff in the picture. I remember it.” He swung an arm toward my bedroom before his eye caught on a dust-covered picture frame orphaned on a corner table. Grabbing it, he wiped the dirt off and stared at the unsmiling woman and girl. My dad had taken the photo, not fifty feet from where we were standing. “She told me the cliff was made out of salt and I couldn’t stop thinking about it. A mountain of salt.”
A dawning horror began to clench my body, gripping me, choking me. I couldn’t feel my feet. The fish we’d eaten for lunch began moving in my stomach, threatening to swim back up my throat. I stepped closer, until the woman in the picture snapped sickeningly into place.
“Basalt,” I whispered. “The cliff was made out of basalt.”
Tears spilled down his cheeks as he looked at me.
“It wasn’t Heather Price’s body.”
25
* * *
I DIDN’T REMEMBER falling to the floor or clawing at the sudden burst of pain in my abdomen. One minute Lucas was across the room, the next he was prying my fingers off my side, his face too close, the breaking glass of the picture frame still echoing against the walls of the cabin.
He knelt in front of me, pleading, sucking all the oxygen from the air. It was too much. I pushed him off and scrambled as far away as I could, wedging my body into a corner of the kitchen and holding a hand in the air—a warning. Still kneeling, the entire story poured out of him, all the thoughts and feelings I’d been so patiently working to get him to reveal and to which now I could barely force myself to listen.
When Lucas had been brought to Congdon and met me, he said, he began fighting a war with his memories. I’d reminded him of the woman who’d nursed him when he was so sick as a child, the pale lady with long brown hair who questioned him about his symptoms while reading a little book. The same little book, I realized, my mother had borrowed from Harry. The Merck medical manual. She’d laid cool rags on his forehead and told him about the salt cliff, she’d stared at him from the end of the bed and didn’t reply when he asked for his father, making him squeeze his eyes shut and wait for her to leave. One night, after he’d begun to feel better, he’d heard noises on the stairs and crouched behind the door as his father carried a body outside. The car engine started, headlights flashed across the living room—this living room—and he never saw the woman again. Ten years later, when he barely remembered what she looked like, I’d walked into his isolation room.
He didn’t make the connection immediately, not until I brought the minerals and began explaining them, forcing his mind back to the bedrock of his life in the Boundary Waters, the reason for their disappearance. That’s when it clicked, when the horrible connection was forged. I know you. Every time he saw me after that was torture. He felt drawn to me, compelled to confess and find out who I was, yet afraid at the same time, trusting nothing and no one in the place that had stolen his every freedom. He began to think Congdon knew about the body and they’d deliberately planted me to get him to hand over his father. Ward two had no shortage of paranoia, and some of it had worked its way into his mind as the strange noises kept him awake every night, never knowing what the next day would bring. It culminated on the day I took him into the grounds, when he thought I was tricking him into betraying the only person he loved.
It wasn’t until he woke up in the hospital and saw the picture of Heather Price that he questioned his own memories. He’d been so sick when it happened, hallucinating about bugs in the sky. Mountains of salt. Maybe he’d hallucinated more than he’d thought—and layered on top of the doubt was certainty, a bone-deep certainty that he’d known the woman in that picture on his hospital table, he’d seen his dad fighting with her. And whoever she was, she wasn’t me. He was overcome with the need to find me, away from the eyes and ears of Congdon, and when he did the details I gave him about Heather’s death made sense—the timing, the overdose—in a way that made him believe.
“That’s why I went to your house when I escaped from the hospital.” He inched closer and I jerked back, knocking my head into the cupboard. His face contorted and he sat down, keeping his distance as he explained looking through my house that night for anything he might recognize, even trying to find the mountain of salt picture he’d thought he’d seen. It became obvious he’d never been to my house before and he convinced himself that I looked like someone who’d only been a figment of his fevered imagination. That’s when he told me what he’d witnessed. That’s when he asked for my help finding his father.
The words rolled over my head, landing in some distant part of the cabin. I heard the tremor in his voice, the rush of air as the explanations tumbled out, one on top of the other, as if any of it could change what my brain was still working to grasp. Harry’s story had shocked me enough. To think about my mother here, with another man and child, was already as much revelation as I could handle. I’d been reeling from the idea that my mother had replaced me, that she’d found happiness with a new family.
She hadn’t adopted a new family and run away to a better life.
A new family had murdered her and escaped into the wilderness.
That’s why her rocks stopped coming. It wasn’t because I was inadequate or worthless. She hadn’t forgotten me or moved on. She was dead. She was dead and so was the insane dream that someday I would see her again, that she would find her way back to us and we could start over. I’d imagined her walking into the bathroom I’d remodeled and seeing how I’d made it into the Boundary Waters, how it would be a place she could thrive and she’d never again have to feel like the soft rock crushed beneath the weight of overpowering forces.
My mother was dead.
“I didn’t know you had this cabin. How could I know?” As if he didn’t understand the world had stuttered to a halt, that nothing he could possibly say would matter now. He was babbling, creeping toward me again, his face etched in a bald, unbearable need for sympathy. He wanted my sympathy.
I pushed myself off the kitchen floor and ran toward the front door.
“Wait!” Lucas caught me before I could escape and we fought in a silent struggle of hands and arms, his grasping, mine trying to wrench themselves free.
“You let him take her.” I threw blind elbows and heels behind me, thrashing against his grip. “You let him get away with it.”
“Maya. Please. Stop.” He grunted as I landed a blow to his gut, but the jab doubled me over, too, reverberating back into my muscles and setting fire to the stitches in my side. We fell into the counter like one creature, tangled beyond separation in our rage and grief and pain. I clutched the bandage that had become slippery against my skin and tried to control the sobs that began heaving through my chest, because if I let them out I didn’t know if they would ever stop.
“Lucas—” I choked out, but a flash of movement through the kitchen window killed any other words in my throat. A car turned off the highway and pulled through the trees into the driveway. A police cruiser.
I stumbled back and looked wildly around the cabin. My heart, already abused beyond repair, kicked into a sprint. Every room on the main floor had at least one window and there was no basement, which left only one place to hide. Locking the front door, I ran to the stairs and was halfway up before I remembered.
“The picture frame. The light,” I hissed and we flew back down. I hit the light switch off in my bedroom and Lucas shoved the broken frame under a couch as the sound of a slamming door echoed in the front yard. We rushed back up the stairs that creaked and groaned with every step, dove to the loft floor, and lay side by side on the scratchy carpet littered with mouse droppings, reining in our breath, listening.
The rap on t
he door sent a jerk through my entire body. Silence. Then another knock. No voices. The upstairs loft was open on three sides, with only a railing gating the platform from the rafters. If we crawled to any of the edges, we could see what was happening on the first floor. But then anyone on the first floor could see us. After a long pause, one of the living room windows rattled and a beam of light glanced off the rough beams of the ceiling. They were circling the perimeter of the cabin, looking for signs of life. Signs of us.
We listened as they worked their way along the foundation, crunching leaves underfoot, shining flashlights throughout the main level and even illuminating the headboard of the loft bed, so close that we could see the dust motes spinning in the air. At one point, when the silence stretched out and it was impossible to tell where they were or what they were doing, Lucas reached over and covered my hand.
I squeezed my eyes closed and gulped back the silent convulsions in my chest. I could feel his warmth next to me, his absolute stillness save the fingers that pressed into mine, offering what he could never articulate—not even if we had the world to ourselves and all the languages in it—and I had no choice but to twist my hand into his, gripping the very thing that had shattered me.
After another minute, we heard a branch snap in the distance. Lucas rose up and crawled silently to the tiny, second floor window to peek outside.
“There’s two of them. They’re following our tracks back to Harry’s house.”
I still couldn’t move. Lucas watched from the shadows, eyes trained on the neighboring property.
“It doesn’t look like Harry’s answering his door. They’re walking around his house, too.” A pause. Waiting. “Now they’re back in the driveway. They’re looking at the cars. One of them is wiping snow off the back of ours.”
“They’re running the license plate.” I covered my face, trying to steady my breath. If Butch hadn’t come home and reported his car missing yet, there wouldn’t be an immediate link. We might have a few hours, a day tops, before they put the pieces together and got a warrant. They’d find me, arrest me, and send me where I’d been heading before Congdon had stepped in all those years ago and postponed the inevitable. At least my mother would never know. She’d never have to witness what her daughter had become.
