Mindy Mejia - Leave No Trace

‘Yeah, right.’ Bryce took another drag. ‘So what are we doing here?’

I pointed out the Superior Hiking Trail that led into the woods at the south side of the Twin Ponds. It wound up through the park and toward Enger Tower, the five-story bluestone observation building. ‘And if you try to run or incapacitate Bryce or me in any way during this walk, Jasper is going to have you for lunch. Understand?’

I said it mostly for Bryce’s benefit, but Lucas still shifted uneasily.

‘I understand.’

‘Okay, then. Let’s hike.’

The four of us set off. Enger Park was situated on the peak of the bluff overlooking Superior. Below us to the east, Victorian houses and brick buildings stood in varying degrees of disrepair from the constant punishment of the winds. To the west the land flattened out into college campuses, strip malls, and suburban housing before giving way to forests and the Iron Range beyond. The temperature on top of the hill was always at least five degrees warmer than downtown at the water’s edge. Sometimes ten. Today that meant we were flirting with fifty degrees and only traces of the blowing snow from a few days ago remained, swept into the crevices underneath rock ledges and gathered at the base of evergreens. I led our strange little troop on to the trail and up toward the summit.

Jasper led the pack with Lucas and me following and Bryce bringing up the rear. The path was littered with dead and decaying leaves and I sensed Lucas looking around, trying to gauge the extent of the forest. He stared at the tower on the hill and seemed surprised when we descended into a parking lot in the middle of the trees. I kept walking, moving away from the cars and the few people milling near the tower, directing us up a set of stone steps to a giant gazebo with pergolas on either side. A slope of exposed rock – anorthosite gabbro dotted with scrub bushes – provided a perfect outcrop in front of the gazebo to get a panorama of the largest freshwater harbor in the world.

Lucas stared at the horizon of blue. ‘Where’s the other side?’

Bryce huffed out a laugh and shook his head.

‘It’s out there,’ I shrugged. ‘I’ve never seen it.’

‘Your dad has.’

I nodded, scanning the blur where clouds met water. ‘He’s out there somewhere, too.’

After examining the drop-off around the outcrop and eyeing Jasper’s position – within biting distance of the meaty part of ­Lucas’s leg – Bryce wandered back up to the gazebo and lit another cigarette. I watched him pull out his phone and start texting ­people, apparently too wrapped up in his unwanted Internet attention to worry about our patient escaping. Leading Lucas and Jasper over to a bench, I wrapped my coat around my middle and curled up on the iron slats. After a beat, Lucas sat down next to me.

‘What is it?’ I asked.

He shook his head, refusing to respond even as he glanced back at the trees again.

‘Don’t even think about it. Jasper is much faster than you.’

He heaved out a sigh and crossed his arms, staring sightlessly at the vista. ‘Why should I tell you what the matter is?’

The retort, an angry teenager’s reply, sent my brain stumbling back. I thought we were beyond this. Keeping my tone casual, I reached down to scratch Jasper behind the ears. ‘Well, I’m glad you asked. This is what we call therapy. The modern form of psychoanalysis was developed ages ago by a guy named Freud, who incidentally could have used some of his own medicine, but informally the idea of communicating to resolve conflict dates back to—’

‘I didn’t ask for therapy, I asked for your help,’ he interrupted. ‘All those people outside Congdon want me to be free. You said you were going to help me, but here we are. In Duluth. Not. Going. Anywhere. Do you know how frustrating it is when someone you love is suffering and you can’t get to them?’

I swallowed and stared at the fractures in the rock where the weeds kept growing even with the nightly frost freezing their leaves. They would be back next year and the next, never flourishing, never giving up.

‘Yes.’ I nodded at the rock. ‘I do know what that’s like.’

‘That’s the problem,’ he said. ‘I don’t know anything about you, do I? I tell you everything and you tell me nothing.’

Turning to face him, I looked him straight in the eye, giving him my complete attention. ‘What do you want me to tell you?’

‘Why were you a patient at Congdon?’

My mouth fell open in sheer surprise. Lucas watched me, waiting, until I exhaled, long and heavy.

‘What does that have to do with anything?’

‘It tells me what kind of person I’m trusting with my father’s life.’ Then his head dropped and his jaw tightened, struggling with the qualification. ‘If he’s alive.’

I tried to put myself in his place, tried to remember how it felt before I’d really gotten to know Dr Mehta – the one-sided revelation called counseling. It had been uncomfortable, exposing, like I was stripping naked and prancing around in front of fully clothed, expressionless people. As Lucas’s speech therapist, I wasn’t supposed to tell him my life story. But as a friend…

‘There’s not much to tell. My mom…’

‘Didn’t stick around,’ he supplied, startling me with his uncanny recall.

‘Yeah.’ I plowed ahead, trying to do it quick, like a Band-Aid. ‘I didn’t handle it well. Neither did my dad. He disappeared out there’ – I waved to the lake – ‘as much as he could and left me with a woman who didn’t care what I did so long as my dad’s checks cashed. She lived over there.’

I pointed to an area even further south of our house, where violence, drugs, and drunkenness saturated the neighborhood with a reek even the lake winds couldn’t blow away.

‘I started hanging out with random kids on the street. Getting into trouble.’

‘What kind of trouble?’

‘The usual. Stealing, destruction of property, breaking and entering. I discovered I had a knack for picking locks, which endeared me to a certain group of people.’

‘And that’s why you got sent to Congdon?’

‘No.’ Bryce stubbed out his second cigarette and headed across the outcrop toward us. I turned back to Lucas, my face carefully blank, and told him what I’d never shared with anyone outside of Congdon’s walls.

‘I got committed because I killed a man and painted my face with his blood.’

Lucas gaped as Bryce reached us. I stood up and stretched.

‘Are you done yet?’ Bryce asked.

I patted Jasper on the head. ‘Yeah, let’s go.’

SOMETHING HAPPENS to you after you kill a person.

I’m not talking about the guilt or the doubt or the nightmares that make you do it over and over, each time a little different, each time like you have a chance to change it but you never can. What happens, in the daylight hours, is a bubble forms between you and everyone else, invisible and impenetrable. Everyone on the outside is all the same. They work and they hustle and they complain about what they don’t have and then they go home and crawl into their beds and drift away. And you can never be part of them, because something is awake in you that doesn’t know how to sleep.

I still remember the crunch of his skull, how it didn’t feel broken as I smashed the rock into it – there was no sudden give, no tremor of anything reverberating through my fingers – but I heard the pop of fracturing bone. It was a dull sound, the kind of noise that would have been forgotten in the next breath if it meant anything else and it wasn’t even the sound itself that haunted me; it was the feeling that washed through me the instant I heard that crack and saw his body go limp. Not horror. Not regret. Not even relief. It was happiness, a raw, savage joy that flooded my veins as I stood over him.