Mindy Mejia - Leave No Trace

My mother couldn’t bear the weight of her life and committed suicide.

Josiah Blackthorn was afraid of ceilings and escaped into the wilderness.

Lucas raged against a society he didn’t know or want to understand.

I saw my mother in a rock and she told me to cave someone’s skull in.

Pick the crazy person. Draw the line. See, it’s easy until someone hands you the pen.

The truth is that the people on this side, the so-called sane people, don’t have it any better. Feel like crap? Too bad. Not enough money? Don’t eat. No one to love you? Boo hoo. On this side of the line you’re responsible for everything. One remark can get you fired. One bad day can destroy your life.

I’d walked both sides of the sanity line and when I was prosecuted for the crimes of kidnapping and assault, along with the laundry list of other charges, I was found competent to stand trial. I took responsibility for my bad day and prepared to pay for it with seven years of my life. At the sentencing hearing, reporters from all over the country crowded into the St. Louis County courthouse, overwhelming the bailiffs and irritating the judge. The media listened, impatient, as one by one people got up to testify. The victims had their say – Nurse Valerie soaked up the attention, the orderly I’d kicked in the throat described his injuries – but it was the main victim who everyone came to hear. Lucas took the stand with extreme discomfort. He avoided looking out into the observation area and spoke directly to the judge, telling her in carefully picked words the essentials of what happened, a trail of facts scrubbed of all depth of meaning. He’d tried to escape Congdon a number of times to return to his father. He’d formed an attachment to me, asking me to help him leave, and one night I did. We’d traveled to the Boundary Waters and found Josiah, who was gravely sick but still alive. At the end of his monotone statement, he paused and made himself turn to the sea of faces.

‘I don’t understand it here and I’m not stupid; I’m not a savage. My father and I were happy in the Boundary Waters. The only thing we wanted was to be left alone. Maya Stark gave up everything to reunite us.’ He stopped, swallowed, and faltered on the last words. ‘More even’ – he wouldn’t look at me – ‘than she thought she had.’

Afterward Dr Mehta took the stand, testifying on both Lucas’s mental state and my history of abandonment which had made me, in her expert medical opinion and ‘regrettable hindsight,’ particularly vulnerable to the Blackthorns’ situation. Despite the damage I had wrought to her reputation and professional standing, she asked the judge for leniency.

In the end I was sentenced to twenty-four months and served sixteen. During those sixteen months in the Minnesota women’s correctional facility I met a lot of women who should have been at Congdon, women who were probably called crazy, who hadn’t gotten the help they needed. Some of them were shrinking into nothing like my mother. Others had blazed into self-destruction like me. One prisoner, an eighteen-year-old taking her last deep inhale between girl and woman, never spoke and I found out through the grapevine she had a stutter. I began sitting with her for meals, teaching her vocal exercises even as she flipped me off and stormed away. It took two weeks for her to tolerate my company and three until she began to try the exercises, under her breath, as though scared to be caught with her mouth moving. After four months she was reading full paragraphs and speaking spontaneously without a repetition and when she asked about me, about my life and what I’d done to get there, I didn’t shut down or distance myself from the conversation. I told her the truth, and she didn’t run away. By the time I was released the following spring, she’d become the close friend Dr Mehta had always encouraged me to have.

Two years after the journey to find Josiah, I don’t know which side of the line I inhabit, where in the spectrum of sanity I fall. Lucas and I live in my mother’s cabin, the cabin that – according to her will, since she’s been declared legally dead – now belongs to me. I can’t pass a background check for most jobs, and the local elementary school flat out rejected my volunteer application, but Robert Anderson agreed to hire me for seasonal work at his outfitter store, and that’s enough to get us by.

We could’ve had millions. Agents, book publishers, and even television and movie producers had all approached Lucas, offering more money than crazy people knew what to do with, if he would tell his story. Lucas rejected every one. He’s talked about applying for a job with the Forest Service someday, but for now we live ­quietly and breathe deep. We do yoga while Jasper chases chipmunks in the yard, catch trout so Harry can teach us how to smoke fish, and when we travel to Duluth for therapy we visit my dad, who pats Lucas on the back in his gruff, awkward way and tells him all the ways a ship can be wrecked. Dad never found the Bannockburn , and after the grant money ran out, he stopped looking. I think he was ready to let go of the ghosts, but we don’t reminisce about the past. Instead, we demolished the kitchen and picked out new cupboards, hardwood with clean lines and soft closing doors. He and Butch drove up to the cabin for the holidays and we ice fished and drank eggnog and on Christmas morning Dad gave me a new chain, shimmering and strong, for the agate pendant. I wear it every day, sometimes over my clothes, sometimes against my heart where I can feel its heavy warmth, and Lucas loves to trace the banding, following the pattern out past the confines of the necklace and drawing the layers into my body. I used my discount at Robert’s store to buy a pair of secondhand kayaks, and for the Fourth of July we took a trip to Lake Macbride, where Lucas’s parents first met. We paddled with the strange double-bladed oars, using new muscles and sitting closer to the water, a small shift in perspective that seemed to change everything. Slowly we’ve become more agile. We’ve learned how to play.

There are still nights, even two years later, when we huddle together in the bedroom under the stairs, our sorrow inseparable from one another, but there are other nights, too, where we find solace on the shores of countless lakes all across the Boundary Waters. All except one.

There’s one lake we never return to, the lake whose name we can’t even speak, because some things are beyond language, and some pieces of us never left.

That day, the day of revelation in the woods, we brought Josiah back into the burrow and tried to make him comfortable. He refused all of the stolen medicine, even the pain pills, and based on the growths on his neck I didn’t think anything short of chemotherapy would make a difference. Lucas didn’t want to hear it. He ignored my half-mumbled explanations and his father’s eyes that pleaded silently for death. Taking the gun outside, he fired it until it was empty, deafening all three of us and making tears leak into the cracks of Josiah’s face. Lucas gathered up all the other potential weapons – hatchets and saws, even fishing lures – and took them somewhere beyond our reach. I didn’t ask. I had no questions left in me. We stayed the night, me feverish and fighting a raging infection in one bed, Lucas tending his father in the other. No one slept. Every once in a while, Josiah would whisper something. He told Lucas how he held him as a baby, fitting Lucas’s entire head into the curve of his palm. He talked about hiking through giant sequoias and dusty canyons and he told Lucas he was proud of him, and how he knew Lucas would find his own path. They were love letters, goodbye letters, and I tried not to listen because they weren’t for me.

Before first light, Josiah surprised both of us by asking to be taken to a doctor. Relieved, Lucas agreed and quickly broke camp. I made tea and crushed a pain pill into it, getting Josiah to drink almost half the cup before he choked and coughed. We turned his cot into a stretcher, bundling and strapping him to it, and then set off toward the canoe. It was slow progress, with Lucas hauling his father through the fresh snow and me burning a trail behind them. I might have been talking, but I couldn’t say about what. I only remembered Josiah’s face, the pitifully small puffs of air that trickled out of him, and his unblinking eyes, asking me things I didn’t want to answer.