Mindy Mejia - Leave No Trace

Lucas’s head lolled toward me on his pillow. A dusting of beard colored his cheeks, which looked more sunken than yesterday. His wrists were raw from unconscious fights with the handcuffs. Grabbing a bottle from a side table, I picked up his hand and carefully rubbed some lotion over the red welts, feeling his pulse thrum in time to the blips on the monitor. As I finished one side, his fingers twitched and closed over mine.

‘Lucas?’ I leaned closer. ‘Can you hear me?’

His head flopped away, but his fingers tightened.

‘I need you to wake up. Do you know the name Heather Price?’ I said it again, studying his face for any reaction. Another head jerk and a few mumbled words. Nothing I could decipher. I moved to his other wrist, trying to figure out why I was playing nursemaid to an unconscious, difficult patient who only gave me injuries and riddles. His wrists were warm, though, and for a second I tried to remember the last time I’d reached out and voluntarily touched another person outside of work. No memory came to mind. I glanced at the door to make sure we were alone before carefully closing my hand around his and drawing it to my coat.

‘I’m here, see? I’m right here, but you’ve got to wake your lazy ass up.’ Then I dropped my voice even further and admitted what I would never say to anyone conscious. The reason I was standing here with lotion-covered hands.

‘I miss talking to you.’

My time was up; I had to get back to Congdon before the after­noon sessions began. Capping the bottle, I limped over to scoop up the police papers and stuff them away, then – on an impulse – I left the picture of Heather Price on Lucas’s bedside table, writing a note on top of it in thick black marker.

Her?

– Maya

Eight hours later I pulled up to the house and forced myself to get out of the car. In my first afternoon session one of the female patients stomped on my ankle, laying me out flat and all I could think as I gasped and clutched it was that I should have known better than to wear the brace; some people looked at Achilles and only saw a heel. I used a crutch from Nurse Valerie for the rest of the day, refused the ibuprofen she tried to give me, and spent the drive home counting the number of incident reports I’d had to file in the last two weeks. My phone buzzed with an incoming call from Dr Mehta, but I let it go to voicemail and pulled up in front of the house. At least the day was over. All I had to do now was get myself from the car to my bed. No problem.

I kept up the silent pep talk as I hobbled through the gate toward the house, where Jasper barked with manic excitement. As soon as I opened the door he shot out to pee without even a sniff or a lick hello.

‘Sorry, Jazz. I know it was a long day.’ Guilt wormed its way through the pain as I waited for him to take care of business, until a voice too close to me said –

‘Long, but interesting.’

I whipped around, peering through the shadows to see Lucas standing by my front steps.

‘WHAT THE—’ was all I got out before Jasper flew across the lawn.

Lucas sprang backward and almost cleared the fence, but Jasper caught him by the foot and held on fast. Kicking, Lucas tried to shake the dog while straddling precariously on top of the chain link.

‘Jasper! Heel!’

He dropped Lucas’s foot immediately and ran across the yard to stand guard between me and our trespasser, a low growl still trembling in his throat.

‘Good boy.’ I scratched behind his ears.

‘Good boy?’ Lucas echoed, squatting on the other side of the fence, holding his foot. Jasper barked.

I stared at his huddled form, trying to wrap my head around the fact that he was somehow here and not unconscious in his hospital bed. How did he get out? How could he have walked all this way without being spotted by his ‘Free Lucas Blackthorn’ fans? Three of them were stationed outside Congdon right now, holding signs as I’d driven through the gate. Smoothing Jasper’s fur, I checked both directions, finding no signs of life on the cracked pavement or behind the drawn shades lining either side of the street. Maybe it was the throb in my ankle, or the darkness, or the nervous rumbles vibrating under my hand, but long seconds passed where everything felt like I’d crossed into some alternate world in which cause and effect had simply drifted away from each other, disappearing as effortlessly as balloons in the night. I gave up. Turning in slow motion, I pulled Jasper inside.

I took him to his kennel and paused to nuzzle the warmth of his bristly neck, to breathe in his earthiness until I felt grounded again. When I latched the door shut and turned around, Lucas was standing inside the front door watching me.

He wore a long, tan coat with one sleeve hanging loose because of the sling couching his fractured shoulder. His face looked even more drawn than when he’d been sleeping, shadowed with beard and eclipsed by those blue eyes. They followed me now as I slowly rose and faced him.

I opened my mouth, torn between a dozen burning questions, before finally settling on a simple demand.

‘Explain.’

‘Okay,’ he agreed but said nothing else, instead peering inside the kitchen doorway. Then he moved along the hallway and looked in each room as if he’d never seen a house before. I supposed he hadn’t, at least not in the last ten years. He disappeared into my room and I limped down the hall to find him staring at the bed. He startled when he heard me and ran a hand along the wall, stopping at a bookshelf full of rock guides and speech pathology textbooks.

‘This is where you sleep.’

‘Yes.’

He frowned at the dark blue walls and took a few halting steps into the room before edging back around me, so close I could smell alcohol swabs and the bleached cotton of his hospital scrubs. ‘And the other door?’

‘Where my father sleeps, when he’s not on the boat.’

As he turned on Dad’s bedroom light and surveyed the room, I flexed my foot, testing it, putting weight on it. If it came down to my sprained ankle vs. his broken shoulder, my ankle would win. Lucas barely seemed aware of my presence, though, instead inspecting the minutia of the bedroom – an end table cluttered with work gloves, drill bits, and creased maps, rows of weatherproof jackets in various stages of succumbing to the weather, hanging in the closet, and a dark wood jewelry box, set back in the corner away from everything else.

‘What are you doing?’

Skirting past me again, he opened the linen closet and then went into the bathroom. When I followed he was standing next to the toilet, staring at the piece of driftwood I’d found on the shore last summer. I’d cleaned, sealed, and mounted the gnarled branch on one of the leftover slate tiles, and when Dad first saw it his mouth had dropped open. It’s beautiful, Maya , he said. I can’t believe you took garbage and made it into this. Running a hand over the wood, Lucas turned, shaking his head at the space I’d worked so hard to transform.

‘Lucas.’ I squared off, blocking the door.

‘I don’t know this house.’ His wrists were still raw from the handcuffs he’d somehow escaped.

I took a step forward and braced my weight. ‘Of course you don’t. You’ve never been here before.’

‘I remember…’ He swiveled around, searching the walls. ‘I remember a mountain of salt.’

A mountain of salt? I shook my head, trying to make sense of what he was saying. There were giant sand and taconite piles in the commercial zones near the harbor, but salt? Where would he have seen something that looked like a mountain of salt?

‘I only have a little salt shaker here. Do you want to see it?’