Mindy Mejia - Leave No Trace

‘I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m sorry.’

‘Don’t. Be. Sorry.’ I grunted as I hauled myself up an iron post and locked a hand over his trailing ankle. ‘Be. Better.’

He tried to lift his body over the spikes, but I let go of the bar with my other hand and wrapped both around his foot. If he was going to escape, he’d have to haul me out with him.

A bang sounded right behind my head. I couldn’t look. ‘Bryce?’ More scrambling, scraping, a heavy breath, and just as Lucas pulled me up another foot, hoisting his torso over the top of the spikes with a Herculean effort, an arm shoved its way over my body and connected with Lucas’s shin. I don’t remember the actual contact. I saw the arm, thick and blotchy, and something clutched in the hand. A round black device, like a flashlight, but I knew it wasn’t a flashlight. Before I could let go of Lucas’s ankle, the current hit me and an overpowering clicking noise pounded the walls of my brain. Everything seized. My body turned into one solid ­contraction – muscles, tendons, and nerves all fused together. I was frozen, glued to Lucas’s foot except there was no foot, there wasn’t anything except a giant master power switch that had been flipped on inside my body and the relentless click, click, clicks that shot lightning from my head. An eternity passed before someone turned off the switch and all my muscles gave out.

The dull smack of the ground was a relief. I lay on the dead leaves with my legs twisted underneath me as my senses blinked back into focus, brain foggy but blissfully quiet. Someone ran through the leaves, crunching a frantic trail away from me and a voice began shouting in the distance. I rolled over and forced my arms, which felt like I’d been carrying my weight in granite, to brace me up. When I looked toward the fence, I saw what the yelling was for.

Lucas’s body lay on the sidewalk through the bars and a spreading line of red snaked out from underneath his skull.

‘LUCAS!’

I crawled to the fence and reached through the bars to shake his arm, but he was too far away. His body was crumpled toward the street and the thick gray coat prevented me from even seeing if his chest was rising. I kept repeating his name, telling him to stay with me as I worked to pull the phone out of my jeans pocket. It seemed impossible to extract. Every muscle in my body felt weak. Just as I finally worked it free a thundering of feet sounded from the sidewalk outside the fence and two security guards and Bryce descended on Lucas’s still-as-death form.

Bryce felt his throat – ‘He’s alive!’ – and then started to push him to his back.

‘Don’t move him!’

‘I’m not!’ Bryce drew back and glanced at the security guard who paced the sidewalk and checked each direction of the street every two seconds. The other one clutched a phone to his head, muttering answers to the person on the line while he stared at the blood trailing along the sidewalk. I was on the wrong side of the fence, trapped. I wanted to run to the entrance and double back along the street, except one – I didn’t dare leave Lucas alone with these guys, and two – I honestly didn’t know if my legs worked properly yet.

‘What the hell were you thinking, tasing him ten feet off the ground? You could have killed him.’

‘What was I supposed to do?’ Bryce fired back. ‘You nearly let him escape. Awesome plan, Maya. They teach you that in therapy school?’

Arguing with morons was like kicking a boulder; your feet would bleed before you found a fissure, but anger with Bryce was the only thing keeping the terror at bay. Bloody feet were all I had.

‘I had his foot. You could’ve called security, or didn’t they teach you how to ask for help in kindergarten?’

We traded insults for another minute until one of the security guards stopped pacing and waved his arms in wild circles. An ambulance sped to a halt in front of us right as Nurse Valerie jogged down the sidewalk with two of Lucas’s fans right behind her. The medics and Valerie examined Lucas while the security guards fought to push back the fans who were arguing about the right to peaceful assembly and holding their phones up, trying to catch as much as they could on camera. I struggled to hear the medical team’s comments. Broken shoulder. Laceration near the temple. Multiple contusions. And then – making me release a giant breath I hadn’t known I was holding – pulse stable.

As they loaded Lucas into the ambulance I stood up and immediately fell into the iron bars. The tingling ache in my body raced into my left ankle, concentrating itself into a massive throb.

‘Are you okay, miss?’ A medic appeared on the other side of the fence.

‘I’m fine.’ I batted him off and took a lurching step sideways to prove it. ‘Go.’

‘She’s the other tase,’ Bryce said, like his only responsibility for this situation was standing off to the side making up bullshit words.

‘Follow us to St Mary’s,’ the medic ordered before climbing in the back and shutting the doors. The ambulance took off, lights and siren blaring.

‘You shouldn’t walk on that, Maya,’ Valerie was saying, but I’d already turned and begun limp-running to the building.

I ducked through the pines, putting as little weight on my left side as possible but every step felt like shoving my foot into a raging bonfire. Tears were streaming down my face by the time I retrieved my bag out of my locker, limped back to the parking lot, and got to my car. I fumbled the keys out, thanking God and Buddha and Henry Ford for designing cars with all the pedals on the right. As Nurse Valerie ran after me with an ACE bandage, I waved her off and gunned the car out of the lot and into the residential streets, zigzagging my way down the hill to St Mary’s hospital while my hands shook on the steering wheel. My only thought, as my phone buzzed incessantly from somewhere at the end of a long tunnel, was getting to Lucas.

A brace, four hours, and five refusals of ibuprofen later, I sat in Lucas’s hospital room waiting for him to wake up. Dr Mehta didn’t look much better than me when she arrived. She’d been presenting at a conference in Rochester when she got the call and drove straight to Duluth, only stopping to pick up her luggage at the hotel. As I filled her in with what I knew, the attending doctor stopped by to check on Lucas.

‘He’s incredibly lucky to be alive. The fall could have been fatal, but he’s going to walk away with only minor fractures to the skull and shoulder, and likely a concussion, although we had some difficulty assessing that.’

Lucas stirred behind us, clanking his handcuffs against the bars of the hospital bed and groaning softly. I watched him until he quieted back down, half listening to the two of them discuss his test results, expected recovery time, and eventual transfer back to Congdon. My phone hadn’t stopped buzzing since I’d left Congdon and I reluctantly checked the sites, already knowing what I would find.

The video was posted to the Facebook fan page, a forty-five second clip of the medics hovering over Lucas, trying to zoom in on his face, and then panning over to me laying behind the fence and Bryce hulking in the background. Three hundred people had already commented and, scrolling through the noise, I caught Bryce’s name being mentioned and at least one of the guards. Swallowing, I felt a hand touch my shoulder.

‘You’ve been here the whole time?’

The attending doctor had returned to his rounds, leaving the two of us alone next to Lucas’s bed.

‘Look at this.’ I tilted the phone. ‘It’ll be on the evening news.’

‘Yes, I was talking to the board on the way here, discussing the best way to handle the publicity.’