by Mindy Mejia
I saw my mother in a rock and she told me to cave someone’s skull in.
Pick the crazy person. Draw the line. See, it’s easy until someone hands you the pen.
The truth is that the people on this side, the so-called sane people, don’t have it any better. Feel like crap? Too bad. Not enough money? Don’t eat. No one to love you? Boo hoo. On this side of the line you’re responsible for everything. One remark can get you fired. One bad day can destroy your life.
I’d walked both sides of the sanity line and when I was prosecuted for the crimes of kidnapping and assault, along with the laundry list of other charges, I was found competent to stand trial. I took responsibility for my bad day and prepared to pay for it with seven years of my life. At the sentencing hearing, reporters from all over the country crowded into the St. Louis County courthouse, overwhelming the bailiffs and irritating the judge. The media listened, impatient, as one by one people got up to testify. The victims had their say—Nurse Valerie soaked up the attention, the orderly I’d kicked in the throat described his injuries—but it was the main victim who everyone came to hear. Lucas took the stand with extreme discomfort. He avoided looking out into the observation area and spoke directly to the judge, telling her in carefully picked words the essentials of what happened, a trail of facts scrubbed of all depth of meaning. He’d tried to escape Congdon a number of times to return to his father. He’d formed an attachment to me, asking me to help him leave, and one night I did. We’d traveled to the Boundary Waters and found Josiah, who was gravely sick but still alive. At the end of his monotone statement, he paused and made himself turn to the sea of faces.
“I don’t understand it here and I’m not stupid; I’m not a savage. My father and I were happy in the Boundary Waters. The only thing we wanted was to be left alone. Maya Stark gave up everything to reunite us.” He stopped, swallowed, and faltered on the last words. “More even”—he wouldn’t look at me—“than she thought she had.”
Afterward Dr. Mehta took the stand, testifying on both Lucas’s mental state and my history of abandonment which had made me, in her expert medical opinion and “regrettable hindsight,” particularly vulnerable to the Blackthorns’ situation. Despite the damage I had wrought to her reputation and professional standing, she asked the judge for leniency.
In the end I was sentenced to twenty-four months and served sixteen. During those sixteen months in the Minnesota women’s correctional facility I met a lot of women who should have been at Congdon, women who were probably called crazy, who hadn’t gotten the help they needed. Some of them were shrinking into nothing like my mother. Others had blazed into self-destruction like me. One prisoner, an eighteen-year-old taking her last deep inhale between girl and woman, never spoke and I found out through the grapevine she had a stutter. I began sitting with her for meals, teaching her vocal exercises even as she flipped me off and stormed away. It took two weeks for her to tolerate my company and three until she began to try the exercises, under her breath, as though scared to be caught with her mouth moving. After four months she was reading full paragraphs and speaking spontaneously without a repetition and when she asked about me, about my life and what I’d done to get there, I didn’t shut down or distance myself from the conversation. I told her the truth, and she didn’t run away. By the time I was released the following spring, she’d become the close friend Dr. Mehta had always encouraged me to have.
* * *
Two years after the journey to find Josiah, I don’t know which side of the line I inhabit, where in the spectrum of sanity I fall. Lucas and I live in my mother’s cabin, the cabin that—according to her will, since she’s been declared legally dead—now belongs to me. I can’t pass a background check for most jobs, and the local elementary school flat out rejected my volunteer application, but Robert Anderson agreed to hire me for seasonal work at his outfitter store, and that’s enough to get us by.
We could’ve had millions. Agents, book publishers, and even television and movie producers had all approached Lucas, offering more money than crazy people knew what to do with, if he would tell his story. Lucas rejected every one. He’s talked about applying for a job with the Forest Service someday, but for now we live quietly and breathe deep. We do yoga while Jasper chases chipmunks in the yard, catch trout so Harry can teach us how to smoke fish, and when we travel to Duluth for therapy we visit my dad, who pats Lucas on the back in his gruff, awkward way and tells him all the ways a ship can be wrecked. Dad never found the Bannockburn, and after the grant money ran out, he stopped looking. I think he was ready to let go of the ghosts, but we don’t reminisce about the past. Instead, we demolished the kitchen and picked out new cupboards, hardwood with clean lines and soft closing doors. He and Butch drove up to the cabin for the holidays and we ice fished and drank eggnog and on Christmas morning Dad gave me a new chain, shimmering and strong, for the agate pendant. I wear it every day, sometimes over my clothes, sometimes against my heart where I can feel its heavy warmth, and Lucas loves to trace the banding, following the pattern out past the confines of the necklace and drawing the layers into my body. I used my discount at Robert’s store to buy a pair of secondhand kayaks, and for the Fourth of July we took a trip to Lake Macbride, where Lucas’s parents first met. We paddled with the strange double-bladed oars, using new muscles and sitting closer to the water, a small shift in perspective that seemed to change everything. Slowly we’ve become more agile. We’ve learned how to play.
There are still nights, even two years later, when we huddle together in the bedroom under the stairs, our sorrow inseparable from one another, but there are other nights, too, where we find solace on the shores of countless lakes all across the Boundary Waters. All except one.
There’s one lake we never return to, the lake whose name we can’t even speak, because some things are beyond language, and some pieces of us never left.
That day, the day of revelation in the woods, we brought Josiah back into the burrow and tried to make him comfortable. He refused all of the stolen medicine, even the pain pills, and based on the growths on his neck I didn’t think anything short of chemotherapy would make a difference. Lucas didn’t want to hear it. He ignored my half-mumbled explanations and his father’s eyes that pleaded silently for death. Taking the gun outside, he fired it until it was empty, deafening all three of us and making tears leak into the cracks of Josiah’s face. Lucas gathered up all the other potential weapons—hatchets and saws, even fishing lures—and took them somewhere beyond our reach. I didn’t ask. I had no questions left in me. We stayed the night, me feverish and fighting a raging infection in one bed, Lucas tending his father in the other. No one slept. Every once in a while, Josiah would whisper something. He told Lucas how he held him as a baby, fitting Lucas’s entire head into the curve of his palm. He talked about hiking through giant sequoias and dusty canyons and he told Lucas he was proud of him, and how he knew Lucas would find his own path. They were love letters, goodbye letters, and I tried not to listen because they weren’t for me.
Before first light, Josiah surprised both of us by asking to be taken to a doctor. Relieved, Lucas agreed and quickly broke camp. I made tea and crushed a pain pill into it, getting Josiah to drink almost half the cup before he choked and coughed. We turned his cot into a stretcher, bundling and strapping him to it, and then set off toward the canoe. It was slow progress, with Lucas hauling his father through the fresh snow and me burning a trail behind them. I might have been talking, but I couldn’t say about what. I only remembered Josiah’s face, the pitifully small puffs of air that trickled out of him, and his unblinking eyes, asking me things I didn’t want to answer.
When we got back to the canoe, I saw a second boat was also stored under the giant pine. Lucas tied the two together, cut the rope on the stretcher, and lifted Josiah into the bottom of the trailing canoe, propping him against the yoke while I tucked blankets around him.
We set off in the opposite direction from the way we came, Luc
as powering the entire caravan while I broke up the layer of ice that had formed overnight. Eventually the river opened up into a wide, island-dotted lake, frozen over at the edges but still navigable. We paddled out to the center and passed an island on which a campsite came into view. Two men stood on the ice next to a packed canoe, clearly preparing to leave. Even from several hundred feet away, I could see it was the Forest Service rangers.
For a moment everything stopped. Lucas quit paddling and the four of us stared at each other across the water, waiting for someone to make a first move. Then the slapping noise of rope hitting water cut through the morning air, and Lucas and I both turned to see Josiah’s canoe unmoored and drifting away. He crouched unsteadily, holding the gunwales for support, and in one of his hands was Harry’s knife.
Lucas paddled backward, shoving bucketfuls of water with each desperate stroke. Josiah’s mouth moved, but I couldn’t hear what he was saying. He straightened up, standing precariously as the canoe shuddered and rocked, and lifted a hand to uncover his head. Strands of thin, gray hair fluttered in the breeze, the growths on his neck bulged unnaturally, but it was his smile that overtook that moment, his sublime gratitude as he surveyed everything around him: the dark water, the solemn white pallbearers of the trees, the land that had harbored him and his son, and then—lifting his face—the perfect, endless sky stretching above, that infinite wilderness into forever. He looked back at Lucas one last time with the unmistakable words forming on his lips—I love you—then turned away from us, sliced his throat open, and fell into the lake. Lucas leaped from the canoe and began swimming desperately toward him, but by the time he reached the other boat, the lake had already taken Josiah, pulling him down into the shadows, leaving no trace.
* * *
Maybe our parents are only ever ideas in our heads, poorly enacted by the people who brought us to life. It’s unbearable, what we heap upon them, almost as unbearable as what they see in us. All we can do is hope the bonds tying us together are stronger than those constructs, outlasting our delusions and our failures, maybe even our lives. I talk to my mom in the cabin sometimes. I bring her specimens of minerals and I’ve begun building her a rock garden with her agate in the center, down by the water’s edge where the wildflowers bloom in the summer. Maybe I’m crazy for living in the house where my mother committed suicide, talking to her ghost, and finding her in pieces of basalt littered over the country. Maybe I’m more unstable than the mental health patient I fell in love with. I don’t think it matters anymore, which side of the line we walk, now that Lucas and I have decided to try to walk together.
There are some places, though, we can only go alone. Lucas now has permits to enter the Boundary Waters and sometimes he’ll disappear for a few days or even a few weeks at a time. The Forest Service rangers took down the Blackthorns’ burrow and removed any trace of their habitation, but I don’t know if Lucas even returns there when he paddles or snowshoes in. He never tells me when he’s leaving. I’ll wake up in the morning and his side of the bed will be empty, as if he never existed. I imagine he goes to the lake, the lake we don’t paddle through, where something of Josiah maybe still lingers. And I let him leave, accepting every little abandonment as my penance, because there are places I have to endure alone, too.
He’d been so busy breaking camp that morning, packing what we needed and planning the details of our journey, consumed by the hope that his father might be able to recover if we found help fast enough. Neither of us knew when Josiah stole the knife—we’d confirmed the details of the morning to the authorities and to each other—but what I never told anyone was that I saw it later. As we loaded Josiah into the canoe and I tucked the blankets and sleeping bags around his frail body, I caught sight of Harry’s gift clutched in Josiah’s hand. All the disarming techniques from Congdon flew through my fevered brain and even with an infection storming inside my body I knew I could overpower him, but I didn’t. I did nothing. I crouched over him as he jerked the blade under the cover of the blankets and we stared at each other, the sick and the dying, until he gave me a weak nod.
“You take care of each other,” he whispered and we both looked at Lucas’s back as he tested the connection between the canoes, making sure he could keep his father close and protected. With shaking fingers, I tucked the blanket loosely over the knife he’d concealed, and laid my hand on top of it, blessing it, giving him the permission his son never could.
“Take care of my mom.”
He gave me a dark, watery smile, accepting the price of my silence.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Finding Josiah Blackthorn was easy compared to finding my way through this book. I could never have imagined the Blackthorns without hearing the incredible stories of the Lykovs and the Ho Vans, and I will always be grateful to Patty Loew for pointing me in the right direction. Thank you to Angela Mejia for her wonderful knowledge of and love for Duluth. Thank you to Tara and Andrew Griffin for their medical expertise and preference for liver punctures. I’m grateful for my fellow Boundary Waters voyagers, Amy Anderson and Michelle Thorsness, who hang a mean bear bag and understand the importance of wine. Thank you to Virginia, Steve, and Kathleen at the Spirit of the Wilderness outfitters for all their Boundary Waters and Ely wisdom. Thank you, Sean Montgomery, for getting tased and telling me all about it. Thank you to Philip Mejia, who knows the best way to sabotage cars, and to Sergeant Brandon Howard, who knows the best way to take down a suspect. For their endless support and encouragement, thank you to Tom, Linda, Mya, Liz, Marc, Kristen, Nick, Melonie, Doc, and Godo.
I’m indebted to the research and subject matter authority I found in Lake Superior Rocks & Minerals by Bob Lynch and Dan R. Lynch, A Year in the Wilderness: Bearing Witness in the Boundary Waters by Amy and Dave Freeman, Assessment in Speech-Language Pathology (3rd Ed) by Kenneth G. Shipley and Julie G. McAfee, and Julius F. Wolff Jr.’s Lake Superior Shipwrecks. I must also thank the Loft Literary Center, in whose writing studios part of this novel was born.
This book would not have found its way into the world without The Gernert Company and Emily Bestler Books. Thank you to Stephanie Cabot, my incredibly generous and visionary agent, as well as Ellen, Will, Anna, and the whole Gernert team. Thanks are simply not enough for Emily Bestler, who saw past what I was writing and guided this book back to its Northwoods home, and I’m forever grateful for the hard work of Lara, David, and everyone who creates the Emily Bestler Books magic. I would be remiss if I didn’t also thank Jane Wood and Therese Keating at Quercus for their invaluable feedback through multiple revisions.
Finally, at the heart of it all is Rory, who said she’d follow me into a house. She’d follow me into the wilderness. Wherever I was, she wanted to be. Rest easy, little girl. We aren’t burying any bodies yet.
Leave No Trace
by
Minda Mejia
This reading group guide includes an introduction, discussion questions, and ideas for enhancing your book club. The suggested questions are intended to help your reading group find new and interesting angles and topics for your discussion. We hope that these ideas will enrich your conversation and increase your enjoyment of the book.
INTRODUCTION
From the author of the “compelling” (Star Tribune, Minneapolis) and critically acclaimed Everything You Want Me to Be, a riveting and suspenseful thriller about the mysterious disappearance of a boy and his stunning return ten years later.
There is a place in Minnesota with hundreds of miles of glacial lakes and untouched forests called the Boundary Waters. Ten years earlier a man and his son trekked into this wilderness and never returned.
Search teams found their campsite ravaged. They are presumed dead until a decade later, when the son appears. Discovered while ransacking an outfitter store, he is violent and uncommunicative and consequently sent to a psychiatric facility. Maya Stark, the assistant language therapist, is charged with making a connection with their high-profile patient. No matter how she tries, howe
ver, he refuses to answer questions about his father or the past ten years of his life.
But Maya, who was abandoned by her own mother, has secrets, too. And as she’s drawn closer to this enigmatic boy who is no longer a boy, she’ll risk everything to reunite him with his father, who has disappeared from the known world.
TOPICS & QUESTIONS FOR DISCUSSION
1. Leave No Trace is set in present-day Minnesota, both in the wilderness of the Boundary Waters and its more urban landscapes. What details does Mejia use to create atmosphere and build the setting? How does place affect the action of the story?
2. What was your first impression of Maya? Did your feelings toward her change throughout the novel? What did you think of her when she confessed to killing Derek?
3. Family relationships are at the heart of Leave No Trace; compare and contrast the parent-child relationships in the novel. What themes does Mejia explore within these relationships?
4. The geography of the Boundary Waters is integral to Leave No Trace. Note the way Mejia balances the beauty and danger of this remote location in her descriptions. What passages do you find most emphasize the unique place?
5. The other “disappeared” people Mejia mentions in the story, such as Ho Van Thanh, Agafia Lykov, and Christopher Knight, are all real people. Pick one or two and research their stories. Which disappearance most intrigues you? What do you think captures the imagination about people living away from society?
6. What role does the Bannockburn shipwreck play in the novel? How does its story parallel the stories of characters in Leave No Trace?
7. At the end of the novel, Mejia writes, “There are some places, though, we can only go alone.” Think about the spaces (physical, mental, emotional) that Mejia’s characters experience by themselves. Are there any common factors?
