Mindy Mejia - Leave No Trace

When I woke up, I was curled into a sweaty ball. No one else was in the living room and the house was quiet.

‘Lucas?’

No answer.

Carefully, I stretched my arms and legs and sat up. A jar of ibuprofen lay next to the couch and I ignored it, examining my abdomen instead. Harry’s stitches were neat and even, reminiscent of the cross-stitch that hung on the wall. A stain of blood still coated the skin around the wound, but it was dried and dark – no bright red to speak of – and when I got up to go to the bathroom the raw pain had dulled to a nagging throb. With slow movements and deep breaths, I was good as new.

I splashed some water on my face and found a rag to do a quick hospital-style sponge bath. I had clean clothes in the car if I’d felt motivated enough to attempt the trip. Instead I traded my bloody shirt for Lucas’s hospital scrubs and crept through the house, peeking in doors, looking for any sign of life.

‘Harry?’

Harry’s house wasn’t big. It was a single-story rambler with a few small bedrooms clustered on one side and a living room and kitchen on the other. I found a door that led to a pitch-black basement, but I didn’t feel like pushing my luck on the stairs.

‘You guys down there?’

Then I heard it – a cracking, punching noise from outside the cabin. I crossed to the kitchen window, searching for the source, then hurried back into the living room and pulled on my boots and coat to head into the blinding sunshine. Harry’s classic Chevy was parked next to Butch’s car in the driveway and everything from the trees to the steps were covered in a thin veil of snow. A sign posted at the end of the driveway said the same thing I’d seen in town: Friends of the Boundary Waters. Everything was bright white and silent until suddenly the punch of noise came again, louder now, echoing off the snow-covered branches. I ran along the siding, each step becoming more painful as the hacked-up muscles in my side took the impact, and rounded the edge of the garage, wincing and panicked.

Harry sat on a tree stump, arms crossed, face into the sun, as Lucas chopped firewood. Neither of them noticed me.

I heaved out a sigh and checked the tree coverage between them and the road, gauging the distance and speed of any potential cars. If someone wasn’t looking for an escaped mental health patient, they’d drive right by without a sidelong glance and Lucas, whether by design or accident, was facing away from the street. He looked more comfortable than I’d ever seen him, swinging the axe expertly, easily breaking logs with one or two swings and stacking them into a fast-growing pile of firewood. He’d probably performed the chore a thousand times. As the landscape settled into me and the pain quit snarling, my attention drifted to a log building obscured by pine trees in the distance. The cabin. My mother’s cabin.

I could only see the snow-covered roof and part of one wall, the logs dark and worn by countless winters. Sometimes birds had built nests under the eaves, defying gravity, weaving them from forest floor debris, and as a girl I’d crept up and listened day after day, waiting for the morning when I heard those first weak cheeps.

‘Here.’

Harry startled me out of my fixation. He reached out from his perch, a glint of light cupped in his hand. When I stepped closer, the light turned into a key.

‘Your dad asked me to keep an eye on the place, check the pipes and furnace and whatnot. He keeps the heat and electricity going, so nothing freezes. One year I had to put a cat over there to clean out the mice. Haven’t been by in a while. You should go.’

I didn’t want to touch that key, but I forced myself to pick it up and fold it into my hand. Lucas caught sight of me and started to come over, but I waved him off. He smiled and picked up another section of tree trunk, cleaving it in half with one swing. Apparently his shoulder was all healed.

‘I’ve never been inside without her. Even that day… I didn’t know the security code.’

‘0-6-1-2.’

The tears blurred everything into a painful, sun-washed brilliance. She’d used my birthday.

I shook my head, furiously blinking the water away. ‘It’s been twelve years, Harry. Over half my life ago.’

‘Couldn’t’ve been that long. Ten years at the most.’

‘It’s not the kind of thing you forget, your mother abandoning you.’

‘Yeah, I know you guys stopped coming for a while but then she brought you back.’

‘What?’ My vertebrae popped I snapped my head so fast. ‘What did you say?’

Harry uncrossed and recrossed his arms, rocking back, and frowning. ‘It wasn’t more than ten years since she came back here with you and that new man. I didn’t see you myself, but she came over here to borrow my Merck Manual because she said you were sick. Down with the flu or something.’

Every word hit me like a truck, one body blow after another. Harry kept on in his meandering drawl, completely unaware of the effect his speech was having.

‘You only stayed a little while that time and I guess you were sick so maybe you don’t remember. Caught a glimpse of her and that guy sitting on the beach together, talking over a fire. They, uh… well, I went about my business after that.’

‘They what?’ I demanded.

‘They were just hugging, seemed about as cozy as you two.’ Harry nodded at me and Lucas, then hauled himself up with cracking joints. ‘I didn’t mention anything to your dad. He’d already told me she left, and it’s not the kind of thing a man wants to hear about.’

Then he squinted into the sun and stretched. ‘Mighty nice to have help chopping wood. Guess I’ll go start some soup for dinner.’

I stood paralyzed, reeling in the harsh November sun that bounced light off every snow-covered surface between me and the cabin in the distance. All my life, no matter if I’d spent it with or without her, I’d known my mom was depressed, a woman who couldn’t seize the world around her, who shrank away from me and my dad and hardened into her shell like a slab of basalt, porous and brittle. She’d tried to kill herself when I was eight years old, for God’s sake, and I’d spent the better part of my teenage years learning a story, the narrative I built for her with Dr Mehta’s help, and it went something like this: Her depression wasn’t my fault. There was nothing I or anyone else could’ve done to help her recover. She loved me, but it wasn’t enough to battle back the chemical imbalances in her brain. And without batting an eye or lifting a finger, Harry McKinley had smashed that story into oblivion.

My mother had never come back for me.

I’d never seen her with any man besides my father and not here, not in the one place where we’d been happy together, our place, our cabin in the woods, our paddles dipping in time through the pristine, mirrored surface of the Boundary Waters. She couldn’t have. She didn’t – because if she did, everything I’d told myself about my mother’s disappearance was a lie. It wasn’t true that no one could save her. We just hadn’t been good enough to save her.

‘Where are you going?’

I didn’t even realize I was moving until I heard Lucas’s voice behind me, farther away than it should have been, and felt the edges of a bush scraping against my side. I gripped the key, gouging it into my flesh as I crossed the uneven ground between the cabins. The driveway was cracked and strewn with snowcapped piles of leaves and needles. Cobwebs rippled against the door frame and my hand shook as I pushed the key into the lock.

‘Are you sure you’re up for this?’ His voice again, this time close to my ear, and a hand I barely registered smoothed over my shoulder. ‘How’s your stomach?’