Mindy Mejia - Leave No Trace

I touched my ear and pointed at the men, but he pointed in the opposite direction, making a gesture I didn’t understand. I shook my head. He pointed away again and leaned in until his mouth grazed my ear.

‘Now, before it gets lighter.’

Then he drew me to my feet and we moved like shadows into the fading night.

Lucas led us back to the canoe as easily as if we were crossing through my yard to the garage. We didn’t speak until we reached the portage trail and stood over our packs.

‘We’ll make camp here.’

‘We should get farther away. Head in the opposite direction of where they talked about going.’

He moved until he was only inches away and his fingers caught me in the side, pushing enough to make me wince.

‘You’re not going any further tonight.’ Then he lifted both packs, one in front and the other on his back, before shouldering the canoe and stepping back onto the trail we’d just made. ‘Anyway, the safest place to be is the site they’re leaving. Get a branch and cover our tracks.’

We waited until they packed and left before setting up a few hundred feet away, close enough to catch a glimpse of the icy water but still well hidden, situating the tent behind a giant fallen pine, jeweled with cones. By the time I crawled inside, the hand warmers had given out and my boots were covered in ice from hauling the canoe in and out of lakes. We ate and drank without speaking, then rolled out the sleeping bag.

‘Just one?’ He raised an eyebrow.

‘It’s a double. Better for body heat.’

His eyes caught mine in the dim flashlight, before skimming down my body.

‘Lay down.’

‘Lucas—’

‘Now.’

When I did, he pulled my shirt up and redressed the wound. The soiled bandage had bloodstains mixed with a greenish-tinted fluid that had soaked to the edges of the padding. Neither of us commented on it. Silently, he swabbed the stitches with alcohol, found more clean dressing, and bandaged me with ridiculously tender fingers, as if trying to make amends for poking me on the trail. I blinked at the ceiling of the tent, illuminated by the first, fragile morning light as he smoothed tape over my ribs and tugged the shirt back down. Then he slid carefully to my other side and zipped us both into the bag. There was enough room to sleep side by side and that’s what I should have done. I should have turned as far away as I could, but I was cold and hurting and too weak to resist the warmth of his body. Instinct took over and we curled into each other, fitting curves into hollows, cushioning bone with flesh. For eight years I’d dreaded going to bed, preferring insomnia to the nightmares and ghosts. I’d never spent the night with a live person before; I’d never felt this foreign surge of comfort or experienced the gift of listening to someone else’s heartbeat through their chest, and I knew I didn’t deserve it. I didn’t deserve anything about Lucas Blackthorn, this boy who’d gone from a panicking, violent kid to someone who lovingly redressed wounds in the arctic dawn, whose lips were brushing over my hair and whose fingers nestled in the dips between my vertebrae.

He should have choked me to death the first day we met, I thought as I drifted into the no-man’s-land between consciousness and sleep.

Because I was going to avenge my mother. I was going to orphan him.

IWOKE UP shaking, turned my head to check for Lucas, and sat bolt upright in the sleeping bag. He was squatting near the tent entrance and rummaging through my pack.

‘What are you doing?’

‘Getting us something to eat. I wanted to let you sleep a little longer.’ He didn’t move away from the bag.

‘The protein bars are on top.’

‘That’s not the only thing in here.’

Adrenaline flooded my chest and I tried to keep my voice steady. ‘What do you mean?’

Turning, he held up a small pot and two bowls of instant udon noodles. His lopsided grin told me he remembered eating them at my house and I stuttered, because it was the exact reaction I’d been hoping for when I packed them a lifetime ago, planning his rescue and the journey to rescue his father. Leaning over to kiss me, he promised to go start the fire and make me some ‘delicious food.’ I nodded and forced myself to smile.

The snow started as we finished eating, slurping the last of the broth and heating a fresh batch of filtered water over the dying embers. I was trying to find us on the map, the one I’d taped together at the library, but the snow quickly covered the paper, falling in swirls of obliterating white. Snow was good. Snow meant we’d be harder to track. It also provided a layer of insulation over any lakes that had started to freeze, preventing further ice formation. We added layers, packed up, and hiked back out to a different trail that led us through towering pine shadows, down into a frozen marshlike clearing, and winding over another hill. I started to wonder if we were even on a trail anymore, but Lucas didn’t hesitate. Every once in a while, he reached a hand out from under the canoe to skim the trunk of a tree, running his gloves over them like they bore messages in braille. A roaring noise grew louder as we made our way through the white world until Lucas stopped and gestured to an opening in the trees. I looked over the edge of a cliff and barely made out the still-rushing rapids below. Finally, we descended to a winding river where the force of the current kept the water open. As we climbed into the canoe and pushed our way through the frozen weeds, I glanced into the shadows on either bank.

‘Are there campsites along here?’

‘No, people canoe through here but they don’t get out except when they have to portage the rapids.’

Which was exactly where the rangers would be looking, in the most remote spots. We knew their route for this morning, but after that they could be anywhere. Maybe the snow didn’t matter at all, maybe they used infrared scanners, or even more advanced tracking equipment. We were close, I knew. And the closer we got to Josiah, the more scared I became of being caught before we could reach him, before I could make him pay.

We paddled to another set of still-rushing rapids and portaged up the hill, a fifty-foot climb that felt like five hundred. After we set back in I started getting warm, too warm, the heat burning through my clothes and throbbing into my side. My wound didn’t feel any worse, though. I wondered if I should eat again, even though the thought of food suddenly made my stomach turn. Water sounded better, but everything seemed out of reach. The filtration bottle might as well have been at my mother’s cabin as in the pack behind me. I took off my hat and unzipped part of my jacket.

My deteriorating state wasn’t lost on Lucas. He wanted to pull the canoe over and find a spot to rest, but I pushed us away from every bank he steered us toward. Fumbling blindly in the pack behind me, I grabbed the first aid kit and took another dose of antibiotics and a half pain pill, trying to pacify him and keep him carrying us forward, which was becoming more of an abstract concept. The white in front of us was impenetrable. Boulders and bends in the river appeared like they’d been conjured from the storm itself, obstacles with less and less meaning.

The quote on Dr Mehta’s office wall snaked through my consciousness. What lies behind us and what lies before us are tiny matters compared to what lies within us. Something within me had begun to burn.

‘Maya, I want you to promise me something.’ I’d long given up paddling when Lucas’s voice floated through the whorl of white.

I waited, not sure if it was really him or something my ill brain was manufacturing.

‘Promise me you’ll hear him out. Listen to him like you listened to me. That’s all I’m asking.’ A pause, drifting into the wind, bowing the groaning branches of a pine tree over our heads. ‘Maya?’