Mindy Mejia - Leave No Trace

I found other stories – Timothy ‘the Grizzly Man’ Treadwell, Christopher McCandless of Alaska, and Christopher Knight, the Maine woods hermit, all loners who saw the open land as more pure and untainted by human civilization – but the Lykovs and Ho Vans were different. They were families, people bonded by love. The sacrifices they made were for each other.

I taped up pictures of the Ho Vans next to the others, my refrigerator transforming into a giant milk carton of the missing, and then stood back, squinting my eyes, letting the lines between them blur. The Lykovs and the Ho Vans were driven into the wilderness by tragedy and murder, by the ugliness of worlds they might not have survived. Something galvanized them, something they couldn’t fight or ignore.

What had galvanized Josiah? He wasn’t fleeing from religious persecution or escaping a war, but something made his son shake with fear ten years later. I won’t turn him over. I needed him to talk to me, to trust me, to tell me something more substantial than how disgusting the food was today. I was done being his breezy friend.

Agafia. Lang. Lucas. I stared at their pictures on the fridge, the children of world-abandoning decisions. They hadn’t chosen to disappear, yet they stayed. They’d remained in the wilderness for reasons beyond fear, beyond danger, because something in their environment fed them. Most children grew up hungering to see more of the world, but they had been satiated.

And just like that, I knew what to do.

Congdon wasn’t only a building; the facility boasted sprawling grounds enclosed by a ten-foot wrought-iron, spiked fence. The entrance and parking lot took up the west side, the flower and vegetable therapy gardens were shriveled with their last gourd vines in the south, and the north and east sides boasted wooded, leaf-covered trails. Grass crunched under our feet as Bryce and I walked Lucas around the building, dressed in an oversized hooded coat. I glanced at the fence every few seconds and didn’t breathe easier until we reached the evergreen cover of Congdon’s own private forest.

‘Wait here. Keep an eye out,’ I told Bryce, who shrugged and dropped onto a bench, pulling out his phone.

I led Lucas through the trees, winding our way back to a corridor of evergreens where it was darker and colder. Outside the grove the trees looked like they grew straight into the air but from within they loomed toward an invisible center point, blocking out the sun and dimming even the memory of brilliance. There were no paths in here, only layers of wet needles that infused the air with pungent decay. None of the patients who had grounds privileges came here on their walks; it was too quiet, too confined.

I stopped when the shadows engulfed us, when I couldn’t see anything beyond the trees. The sounds of traffic and a distant airplane still intruded, but at least we were hidden from any of the protesters who might be prowling the edges of the property. It was the closest thing to the Boundary Waters I could give him.

He walked a few paces further, reaching a hand out to brush a low hanging branch. Then he squatted down, both feet planted firmly in the needles, and closed his eyes. His chest rose and fell, and no one in yoga class had ever looked more at one with their universe.

‘Thank you.’ The words were barely audible.

I sat cross-legged nearby and picked up a pine cone, rolling it back and forth in my hands, waiting for him to breathe his fill. Long minutes passed, but I wasn’t impatient. He wasn’t the only one who found solace in the shadows.

Eventually he moved, exploring the dank oasis – needles, dead branches, the hard-packed ground – and then crept over to examine me, as if I was a castoff of the trees, too. He pulled on a few strands of my hair and frowned, asking what color it was supposed to be.

‘Brown.’

His eyes narrowed and then a ghost of a smile played over his face. ‘That’s ten points.’

The Grinch had been teaching him Scrabble.

‘Only if you don’t land on a bonus tile.’ I kept my hands loose in my lap. ‘And you should really start stacking your words. Do you know what “oe” is?’

He shook his head.

‘The Scrabble dictionary calls it a westerly wind. You have no chance without oe.’

He grinned, but the smile died as soon as he looked at my hair again. ‘Was it ever long?’

‘Yes.’

He drew back, as if long, brown hair frightened him. As I stared at his head, trying to figure out what was churning inside, he reached out again and picked up one of my hands, turning it over and tracing the lines of purple veins like a map he’d finally gotten permission to inspect. I let him, remaining silent until he began pressing on the pad of my thumb and watching the skin turn white before the blood flooded back into the tissue.

‘We talked last week about your father.’

No reaction, except an increase of pressure on my thumb.

‘You said no one could help you and that’s why you disappeared.’

Again, nothing. His head stayed stubbornly down.

‘Lucas.’ I tugged on my trapped hand. ‘What did you need help for?’

The pressure on my thumb was almost bruising now. He squeezed bone and tendon together as the red rushed in and out underneath the skin.

‘You don’t know?’ he asked my hand.

I wrenched it out of his grip, pulling him forward so he had to catch himself before landing in my lap, his face inches from mine. His pupils were almost completely dilated, his breath unsteady.

‘I wouldn’t ask you if I did.’

He drew back and began inching away, but I followed, not allowing him the avoidance. As we edged over the beds of needles, his back started to tremble.

‘I don’t know what to believe. It could be a trap. Look at you.’ He shoved a handful of dead needles in my direction. ‘I thought you were her and that’s why they sent you. To trick me into talking. But she’s not you because you’re fine. You’re right here and you’re fine and she wasn’t. She wasn’t fine.’

He backed up all the way to the base of a pine, pressing himself against the trunk and burying his head in his arms. I crept underneath the sharp branches, heart pounding.

‘Who, Lucas? Who are you talking about?’

He raised his head. ‘Santa’s bag. She was draped over his shoulder, all wrapped up like a bag of toys.’

‘Who?’

Lucas stared into the branches with unfocused eyes and a tremor rocked him back and forth before he swallowed and said in a plain, low voice.

‘The body.’

I saw it in a flash, a woman’s lifeless form thrown over a shoulder, her long brown hair swinging toward the ground. Obstruction of justice and an escape from the world, to a place where justice didn’t exist.

‘Lucas, tell me about her. Did you know who she was?’ I grabbed his arm and the contact yanked him from his memories and sent him reeling back, hitting his head against the pine.

‘I don’t know where she is.’

‘Lucas.’ I made my voice as calm as possible, inching closer. ‘Stay with me here. It’s okay. I’m the last person in the world who would—’

Without warning he pulled my feet out from underneath me. My spine hit the ground and a rock grazed my head. The white noise of crunching needles made me roll over to see Lucas sprinting out of the trees.

Shouting for Bryce, I scrambled through the underbrush. When I broke into the clearing near the fence Lucas had already climbed three fourths of the way to the top.

‘Don’t do this, Lucas!’ I jumped for his leg, but he kicked me off and I stumbled back. ‘This isn’t the way.’

He chanted as he climbed, hoisting one foot in between the spikes, and it was only when he turned back to look at me that I caught what he was saying.