Mindy Mejia - Leave No Trace

That night Lucas ate some canned soup and bread and took a cool bath by himself before going back to bed.

‘Where’s the lady?’ he asked. ‘The one you were fighting with?’

Josiah frowned at the window, unsure if the sound from the bonfire had carried last night or whether Lucas had experienced another hallucination. Later, after Lucas drifted off to sleep and the sun was setting through the trees, Jane came back. She looked unbalanced, exhausted from paddling and flushed from the wind. Glancing at Josiah as if surprised to still see him there, she dropped into the nearest chair and held her head.

‘I’m sorry,’ he said from across the room. ‘We can leave tomorrow if you’ll give us a ride to my car. It’s not too far.’

She made a noise he couldn’t decipher.

‘We’ll wash up the sheets before we go. And I can pay you.’

At that, she shook her head violently.

‘No, really. You helped us and I appreciate it.’

Pushing herself up, Jane staggered into Lucas’s room. Josiah came to the doorway to see Jane rocking back and forth at the head of the bed, clutching something in her hand.

Crossing to her in two steps, he hissed, ‘What are you doing?’

She blinked in slow motion and now that he was close to her he could smell the sweet stink of wine rising off her skin. Pulling her out of the room, he half carried her to the steps and shoved her toward them.

‘Maya.’ She reached past Josiah, struggling to go back to Lucas. He grabbed her by the arms and pushed her up the steps.

‘That’s not Maya. That’s my son and we’ll be gone the minute you sober up and drive us to our car. Got it?’

She braced herself against the wall, looking like she might vomit, then nodded carefully. ‘They’re different from us. They won’t be us.’

When she looked up her face was dry, composed, and she transferred something into his hand, the thing she’d been holding. ‘Some people are strong and beautiful and not even glaciers can destroy them. Others are weak and brittle, and the best thing they can do is birth a gemstone.’

‘You’re not weak, you’re drunk,’ he said, even as she started to tremble and shake.

‘Maybe he’ll be strong. Like her.’ Then she stumbled up the stairs to the loft. As the bed creaked, he opened his hand to see a rock covered in crumbles of cold, wet dirt. It was too dark to see what it was.

Josiah slept on the floor next to Lucas’s bed that night, listening for any noise, any hint that Jane might come back down and try to approach Lucas again, but the cabin was silent. Later, when he got up to go to the bathroom, he smelled something sour. He checked back in Lucas’s room, but the only scent there was sweat and boy and dirty clothes. It wasn’t the kitchen sink. It wasn’t the garbage. It was stronger at the base of the stairs, and – after a moment of indecision – he climbed up to Jane’s bedroom, turned on the light, and immediately wished he hadn’t.

She lay faceup, eyes open and blank, crusted vomit spilled over her face, chest, and hair. On the nightstand next to the bed were the three extra packages of Tylenol he’d bought at the gas station, all empty.

He stared in shock for what felt like an hour before the reality sunk in. He was alone in the woods with a dead woman, not two days after being implicated in the disappearance of another woman. They couldn’t blame him for this, could they? But he’d bought the Tylenol. His fingerprints were all over the house. Looking around the room, he even found a gun on the floor under the bed, like she’d been afraid for her life. Jesus Christ. He didn’t risk touching the gun but went on a frantic search of the rest of the cabin for the missing wine bottle and found it discarded in the trash outside, with remnants of crushed up medicine clinging to the sides. He’d touched that, too, the morning he’d been released from jail. Swearing, he kicked the garbage can, beating the thing again and again until he stopped hearing Sergeant Coombe’s voice in his head. One day you’re going to give me a reason.

Not today. Goddamnit, why couldn’t she have waited to kill herself until they were gone? Panting, he walked away from the garbage and looked up, above the tips of the trees into the star-studded sky. His breathing settled down as he stared into the endless night, and then he realized what she wanted him to do. What she’d been asking him when he was too stupid to know it.

Nothing in this world is free, his foster mother had said, and this was the price of their sanctuary.

He lined the car trunk with garbage bags, went back inside and wrapped her body in the soiled sheets, hauled it out over one shoulder, and drove to a place he thought she would have liked. A place under the stars where the rocks were soft and some – he was surprised that he even noticed – shone in the moonlight.

‘I can tell you where she is.’ Josiah’s voice, ragged and halting, sounded like it was gutting him. For the last half hour, he’d talked without stopping, eating handfuls of snow when his mouth got too dry, closing his eyes when a shudder of pain wracked him, driven to continue by something that had no connection to the gun wavering at his chest.

I’d been ready to pull the trigger, waiting for whatever bullshit he’d invented: excuses, reasons, pleas for sympathy. I had an answer for all of that and I wanted it so badly. I wanted a bad guy to shoot. I was prepared to trade everything for the purity of that rage, even Lucas – beautiful, loving Lucas – but when Josiah repeated her words exactly, as if he’d spent ten years memorizing their last conversation, even vengeance was stripped away from me.

Birthing agates. The same thing she’d written to me before she first tried to kill herself.

‘She’s not far from the cabin. It’s just beyond—’

‘No.’ I jerked the gun at him. ‘I don’t want to know.’

He nodded once. Snow had settled on his shoulders and legs, slowly burying him while it skittered away from me as I rocked uncontrollably back and forth, like a screaming baby someone was trying frantically to shush. We faced each other, the gun shaking between us, while I tried to grasp the reality of my mother’s death.

After a long pause, he took another handful of snow and said, so low I almost didn’t hear it. ‘Go ahead.’

‘What?’

‘I’d like to be buried here, like her.’ His eyes moved past me, into the shadows. ‘In the Boundary Waters.’

A branch cracked uphill from us and Lucas shouted my name.

‘It’s okay.’ Josiah looked up at his son and forced his skeleton face into a smile. ‘I wanted to hang on long enough to see you again. To tell you some things about your mother’ – he glanced at me – ‘both your mothers, but I’ve told Maya now. She knows. And now she’s doing this for me.’

Lucas dropped to his knees and crawled down the embankment. ‘No! Give me the gun, Maya. Don’t do this. Don’t you take my father away.’

Tears poured down my face as I looked from Blackthorn to Blackthorn, both beseeching me, one for life, the other for death, each asking for their own impossible ends. I wavered, and the gun fell a fraction of an inch. Josiah’s eyes burned as bright as his son’s as he made himself lean forward.

‘She loved you, Maya. As much as I love Lucas. I think that’s why she left.’

I broke then, dropping the gun, and fell sobbing onto the frozen, snow-covered rocks.

WHAT MAKES someone crazy?

It’s not a word we’re supposed to use. Everything is a disorder, a diagnosis and a treatment plan for some abstract label that’s supposed to provide meaning to the hell some of us live every day. Like knowing you’re obsessive compulsive will make your hands stop bleeding from being washed too many times. I know it’s not right, but there’s something addictive about the word. It’s visceral. It draws a line and says if you cross this, you’re out of the game. You can’t be held accountable for the mixed-up chemicals and imbalances in your head. They’ll put you ­somewhere – a home, a hospital, a prison – and you can stare at yourself, or yourselves, while most of the world is happy to let you rot.