Mindy Mejia - Leave No Trace

‘I don’t want to take Lucas back to our place right now. Can we stay here a little longer?’ He pulled out the half-dead flower and offered her its drooping petals encased in plastic.

She looked past it, into the bag of medicine and melting Popsicles, and told him he could sleep on the couch.

Lucas slept most of the day, only rousing when Josiah made him drink fluids and he didn’t seem very coherent even then. He needed help to get to the bathroom and fell exhausted into bed afterward, saying his body hurt everywhere. When the fever hit he threw the covers off the bed, only to shrink into a ball and shake uncontrollably from the wave of chills that followed. Josiah kept watch as shadows stretched over the walls, and the only sign of life outside of the bedroom was an occasional rustle that could have been either Jane or a mouse.

After dusk, though, she built a fire at the edge of the lake and he debated leaving her alone, but the hiss and burn of the logs called him, Lucas was sleeping soundly, and the low ceiling of the small room had begun to feel suffocating. She didn’t comment when he joined her and sat silently for a while, soaking in the early spring night that hadn’t yet given rise to summer’s legions of mosquitos. Soon Josiah found himself talking, at first just trying to explain the police situation and Heather Price, but gradually he told her more and more. He told her about shoving Heather, about giving her the money and hoping it would make her go away. He hadn’t cared how and he still didn’t, wondering aloud how someone could be missing when nobody missed her. Jane listened without reaction. There was something about the way she looked at him, without pity or blame, without lust or dismissal; he might have been speaking to the Boundary Waters itself. He told her about Sarah, about the drifting, all the national parks and wildernesses he and Lucas had seen, and she let him talk, commenting little except to agree that most roofs were ugly, to the very last one people put over their heads.

‘I want to be buried out there somewhere.’ She stared into the black horizon of trees across the water. ‘To leech into the soil or return to silt at the bottom of a lake. I don’t want to end up in a box.’

‘How about burning? Cremation?’ He poked the fire with a stick, sending a torrent of sparks into the air.

‘I’ve been pollution already. I’d rather be useful, for once.’

Then slowly she began talking. She told him the history of the BWCA, all the way back to the volcanic rifts and crushing glaciers, and it felt like she was telling him her own story, just as he’d shared his. When he’d asked her name yesterday, she’d faltered and the word seemed foreign on her tongue, but now, describing Ely greenstone and its 2.6 billion–year journey she had an almost desperate confidence, as if she needed to pass on some vital knowledge. She talked about what humans took from the Boundary Waters, from the Knife Lake siltstone ten thousand years ago to the sulfide deposits the mining companies now hunted for their nickel and copper, and she bent further and further forward as she spoke, as though the minerals were being carved from her own core. He’d never met anyone like her. Her inaccessibility didn’t repel. Her sad beauty didn’t attract. But the longer they sat and added more logs to the fire, the less he worried about Heather Price and the world outside. Here, they became in . Everything else was out .

When she started to shiver, he moved their log bench closer to the fire and for a while she rested her head on his shoulder. No one had done that, drawn that simple comfort from him, since Sarah had died and he absorbed the long-forgotten feeling, the scent and weight of a woman’s head seeking rest. He let his arm drift to the curve of her side, and they sat like that watching flames lick the sky and the lake shimmer in the firelight. At one point he felt a drip of something and saw the front of his jacket was streaked wet. Sarah hadn’t been a teary woman. He didn’t have any practice comforting one, but he did what felt natural and pressed a kiss into her hair. She accepted it with no response, just like she ignored the cracking branch in the distance that must have signaled some creature finding passage through the night. Josiah looked, but saw only shadows and moonlit wood smoke from the neighboring cabin. Later, after the moon disappeared below the tree line, he broke their strange peace by asking about her daughter again. Everything in her stiffened and, standing abruptly, she left the fire and walked into the house. He watched her go with the uncomfortable thought that the girl was dead. Sighing, he went to get a bucket of lake water and put out the fire, but before he could douse it Jane returned, cradling something in her hands.

‘Do you know what this is?’

He stared at it, wondering if it was a trick question. ‘A rock?’

An echo of a smile crossed her face. Then she turned it to a different angle, illuminating a striped pattern that looked like ripples in a pond. ‘It’s a fortification agate. See how the banding looks like the walls of a fort?’

She kept shifting it in her hands, smoothing her fingers over the stripes and then running them along a rough edge that ended at a point and pressing against it, like she was trying to draw blood.

‘Agates are born inside the hollows of basalt and they’re stronger than everything around them. They survived the glaciers while the basalt was pulverized. When I found this I was only a sophomore in college, but I knew it meant I was going to have Maya, and she would become everything I’m not.’

Jane pressed the rock to her mouth before kneeling and rearranging the stones circling the firepit, nestling the agate into a spot like a diamond in a ring.

‘Aren’t those valuable?’ Josiah asked.

‘It’s hers,’ she said, choking up as she patted it into place. ‘She’ll find it.’

‘She’s alive?’

Jane looked up, startled.

‘I’m sorry, I just… from the way you’re acting and being here alone and all, I thought maybe something happened to her.’

‘She’s fine. Now she’s fine, now that I’m gone.’ She turned back to the fire, eyes vacant, and arms hanging limp at her sides. ‘I was the one who was killing her. Every day, being around me, trying to make me okay, to be okay for both of us. I tried medication, but it made me worse. I did something terrible. And I couldn’t bear for her to watch if I did something terrible again. So I left.’

‘You left your daughter?’

‘She’s with my husband. She’s twelve now. Almost a woman.’ Then she saw the outrage in Josiah’s expression. ‘It’s better this way.’

He couldn’t sit any longer, couldn’t listen to this. ‘I was going out of my mind in that police station, not knowing if Lucas was okay. I would do anything for him, protect him from any danger.’

‘What if it was you?’ Slowly, she uncurled herself and rose to her feet. ‘What if the most dangerous thing to your child was you?’

She stared him down and, when he had no reply, glanced up the hill where a single light illuminated the bedroom in which Lucas slept. Then she turned and walked into the shadows, disappearing between the shoreline and the trees. Josiah sat there for another hour, watching the fire die and not understanding anything about the last two days of his life, especially not why he felt compelled to stay and keep watch, putting himself between Jane’s empty eyes and his son.

The next morning when Josiah woke up, Jane was gone. He fed Lucas Popsicles and made coffee, noticing her car in the driveway. They could take it and leave, but Lucas’s eyes were still glassy and dull, and where would they go? He didn’t have to be back at work until Monday and as far as the police were concerned, he had a registered permit that said he was camping in the Boundary Waters. He paced through the woods around the cabin and down to the lake, realizing Jane’s canoe was gone. Squinting over the open water, blinded by the reflected sun, he wished he could trade places with her, that he and Lucas could paddle out and just keep going, never looking back. It would take strength, he thought, staring at the agate by the firepit, and he had strength. He had will. The dangers in the wilderness were all external, and together he and Lucas could face every one.