Mindy Mejia - Leave No Trace

‘You have to slurp these. It’s polite.’ I showed him how to grab the noodles with the chopsticks and suck them out of the broth. He mirrored my every move as carefully as he’d done during those first tense therapy sessions. Mastering the chopsticks without an issue but slurping too quickly, he whiplashed one of the noodles and ended up with broth all over his face. Laughing, I handed him a napkin.

‘We didn’t eat food like this – my dad and I.’ Lucas commented after a while, swirling his noodles with the chopsticks and smiling at the merry-go-round it created in his bowl. ‘We had a lot of rice and fish, dried fruit, dried vegetables. Once we had a huge container of oatmeal, and we added blueberries and spices. It was way better than the stuff Carol at Congdon calls oatmeal. Are there different kinds?’

‘Institution meals aren’t the best of Minnesota cuisine.’

‘And this is?’ He took another bite, slurping respectably loud enough.

I shot him a dirty, noodle-chewing look.

‘It isn’t terrible,’ he offered.

‘Thank you for sharing your delicious food, Maya,’ I prompted, dabbing my mouth with a napkin.

‘Thank you for sharing your food, Maya.’ He replied pointedly, grinning.

We finished the udon with only the occasional whine from Jasper interrupting the silence, looking at each other, then away. He’d taken off the stolen jacket and it was hard not to notice the line of muscle in his arms as he lifted the bowl and drank his broth, arms that had easily overpowered me the first time we’d met, that had practically scaled ten feet of fence before I’d caught up with him. He said he needed my help, but if I understood anything about Lucas it was that he was unpredictable. Even with one limb in a sling, I didn’t know what those arms were going to do next.

I collected the bowls and rinsed them out, then limped to the living room and let Jasper out of his kennel, murmuring to him to behave. Lucas stepped into the edge of the room and waited. After a moment’s hesitation Jasper trotted over, sniffed his legs and feet, snorted disdainfully, and went to his dog bed to lounge.

Lucas lifted an eyebrow. ‘So I’m okay now?’

‘As long as I like you, he likes you.’ I dropped into the faded blue armchair next to the dog bed and absently scratched his ears. ‘I told you he’s a big softie.’

Lucas walked to the window, moving more stiffly than before we ate, which meant the meds were probably wearing off. With only the kitchen light to illuminate him, he looked tall and somehow lonely.

‘I lived in a house like this when my mother was alive. Now the memory of it is mixed up with my memory of her. I remember warmth, soft lights, her legs folded into a rocking chair. There was a box with a bright orange fish that she fed and afterward her hands smelled like the lake in a morning fog. Sometimes I just sat on the shore and inhaled, years later, thinking of her.’

He turned toward where I sat in the shadows.

‘She died when I was in kindergarten. Aneurysm.’

‘I know. I read your file.’ I couldn’t tell him I was sorry. At least he’d had a mother who’d loved him, whose departure hadn’t been by choice.

‘Did my… file’ – he spoke hesitantly, obviously not having used filing systems in the middle of the forest – ‘tell you what my father did?’

‘He was a mechanic.’

‘No, I mean what he did after she died.’ Slowly, he dug into the pocket of his scrubs with the hand that wasn’t trapped in the sling. A piece of paper crackled as he pressed it against his stomach, flattening it out, then held it up to catch the meager light.

It was the picture of Heather Price with my writing scrawled at the top.

I half rose, but my ankle throbbed and pushed me back in the chair. ‘You remember.’

‘What do you know about her?’

I told him the little I’d read about Heather Price’s life and death, careful to omit any mention of his father. Each detail seemed new to him, adding color and depth to the image I’d left on his bedside table. He began swaying slightly and stared at the face long after I’d finished. Then he crumpled the paper, driving the heel of his hand into his temple.

‘She used to watch him. She smoked cigarettes and stared out the window while he mowed the lawn, but she wouldn’t come out of the house. Dad always said that buildings smothered people and I remember thinking she was suffocating in there. I can still see her hazy face in the window.’

His swaying got worse until I made myself get up and hobble over to him. ‘Come on, lie down.’

I brought him to the couch, checked his pupils, and gingerly felt along his shoulder to see how swollen it was. He gave one tight nod, looking a little pale, so I retrieved the ice pack and wished for the first time since my mom had overdosed that we kept some aspirin in the house.

He relaxed into the couch cushions as I held the ice to his shoulder and while the condensation dripped over my hand he began telling me about his childhood. The memories were fragments, scattered over a dozen different houses, apartments, and RVs in the wake of his mother’s death. He hadn’t made many friends at any of the schools he’d rotated through, although he liked the science and gym classes. They’d visited a sour smelling building full of old people where a man in a wheelchair faced the wall. And the woods. He had countless memories of camping, canoeing, hiking, learning about all the plants and life cycles teeming around them. Lucas loved the woods best in the summer, but his father preferred winter, the silent, white days insulated from fair-weather nature lovers.

I stared at the ice pack, afraid to look up, afraid that if I made eye contact he’d stop talking, but Lucas barely even paused. The floodgates had opened. Something had shifted and all the words he’d held back came pouring out in the faded intimacy of my living room.

They’d been camping one summer on a remote lake somewhere near Canada when Lucas got sick.

‘I was fine the first night. We caught fish and toasted s’mores, but I woke up the next morning with my skin on fire and everything hurt. I couldn’t even get out of the sleeping bag. Dad thought it was a cold and told me I’d feel better within a day or so. Then I started seeing bugs everywhere. Bugs crawling over the tent, bugs marching on my arms. I don’t remember a lot of what happened, but somehow Dad brought me back out of the woods. The next thing I knew I was in a bedroom. A woman was giving me something to swallow, a woman with long, brown hair and flat eyes, like she’d been inside too long.’

He shifted his gaze from the ceiling to me.

‘I thought it was you. When I got to Congdon – I don’t know – there was something different about you, familiar. I thought you were the woman who’d taken care of me when I was sick and somehow’ – he shook his head, as if trying to clear it – ‘that’s how the doctors were trying to get me to talk.’

‘That’s why you said you knew me, why you were afraid of me?’

He nodded, lifting the picture of Heather Price again. ‘It was her. When I woke up in the hospital today and saw her face, I recognized it immediately. I remember her shouting at my dad and his fists, balled tight into his sides. I don’t know what they were arguing about. I don’t know what happened between them. It felt like I was in that strange bed twisted up with fever forever, until one night – when all the lights were out – I finally felt good enough to get up on my own.’

His breathing picked up speed and his eyes darted around the living room, seeing nothing.

‘Someone was moving on the stairs, bumping into the wall, walking slowly. I crept to the door of the room and peeked out, waiting for the noise to appear. Then it did. I saw my father’s profile moving across the house and I almost went to him, but he was carrying something big, something draped over his shoulder.’