Mindy Mejia - Leave No Trace

‘What’s wrong with them?’ Lucas asked.

‘No more than what’s wrong with you.’ I shot back without thinking, then cringed, but Lucas actually cracked a grin. It was the first time I’d seen him smile and it made him appear like the teenager he was.

‘I look like that?’ He nodded at Big George, who was waving gleefully at me. I waved back.

‘We have patients with a variety of abilities. There are a dozen cognitive disorders in this room right now, but that’s not who these men are. It doesn’t define them.’ I bumped his shoulder with mine, a deliberately friendly contact that he received without any defensive reaction. ‘Come on. Let’s vinyasa.’

On the days group exercise went into the grounds, he had to stay in isolation. I couldn’t take him outside, not only because he’d run but also because I’d begun noticing something strange when I drove into work. People lingered outside the gates every morning when I arrived, staring into my car, pointing their phones at the building’s facade. I didn’t know who they were, but I knew instinctively who they were watching for. No one had stood outside Congdon before Lucas’s arrival. They’d never thought about the people living here except to be grateful for the fence, for the line of demarcation that separated us from them.

Since I couldn’t bring him out, I brought the outside in: a handful of acorns that he built into a tower, a cup of powdery sand from Park Point beach, a scattering of fallen leaves, their brilliant colors leeching to brittle brown. I didn’t interrogate him and I asked him nothing about his past, keeping my questions light. Did he like the food here? No. Did he know how to read? Yes. I brought him books from the Congdon library, first The Lorax , then The Swiss Family Robinson , and read him passages from it. He listened without comment, always glancing at the orderly, the locked door, the bars encasing the window, crushing the leaves between his fingertips until they turned to dust on the table.

There were things that made sense about Lucas. He hated loud noises and tended to cover his ears when another resident began screaming. During group exercise, he flinched away from sudden bursts of laughter and stayed at the fringes of the room, gravitating toward the quiet misery of the dementia patients. He made absolutely no sound when he walked and I found myself studying his footfalls, how he hit the floor with the ball of his foot, placing each step with the sureness of a lynx on a rocky slope. And as much as I tried to draw him out, as sure as I was that he had absolutely no speech disorders, he spoke as little as possible. He gave one-word answers, shrugs, refusing to elaborate on any subject, his expression the definition of involuntary.

It was the other things, the stuff that didn’t make sense, that kept popping up at three in the morning when I should have been at least resting if not sleeping, but rest seemed impossible around Lucas, like his tension was contagious. I hadn’t brought up his comment from the first day – I know you – because it was wrong. All the time I’d spent in the Boundary Waters ended years before he and his father had gone missing. I hadn’t met Lucas Blackthorn outside these walls. I would’ve remembered those ridiculous blue eyes, how they became sharper, eerier, the longer they stared at you. And he did. He studied me from the minute I walked into his room until the door closed between us. He watched my face, my hands, my shifting postures, once I even caught him staring at my breasts and it would have been so much easier to say I was simply the first girl he’d ever met. Was there anything more fascinating to hetero teenage boys than breasts? But I couldn’t make myself believe it. There was something more in his face, a caged fear that made me certain he wanted to snatch back those three whispered words. He knew me, and it made him afraid.

I consulted with Dr Mehta every afternoon, sharing my session notes and my frustration. She had a stocked inventory of rational explanations; I might remind him of someone from his early childhood; I represented an institution he didn’t understand or trust; he’d probably spent years in silence and solitude and could be dealing with a form of social anxiety. She coached me, soothed me, gave me fresh ideas and insight, and on the night before my last shift of the week she told me there was a bed open in ward two.

‘If he can maintain his self-control through your session tomorrow, we’ll transfer him to the common men’s ward and see how he does.’ Her eyes narrowed. ‘Challenge him. I believe he’s ready for it.’

The next day when I went to Lucas’s room, I went alone.

He was waiting for me in what had become his usual spot, cross-legged at the end of the bed with The Swiss Family Robinson dog-eared on the mattress next to him, twirling one of the acorns I’d brought by the stem.

When he realized no one was coming in behind me, his eyebrows lifted.

‘Congratulations,’ I said, moving to the table. ‘You’ve been upgraded to a lower risk status.’

Lucas followed me and sat down, carefully setting his hands palm down on the table like always, a study in restraint.

‘No more bouncers,’ I said, without knowing whether Stan was watching us through the door. ‘And after today you could be moving to a different floor.’

‘A different floor.’ He repeated it and the tendons in his hands clenched. ‘Not out?’

‘Not yet. We’ll have to talk about other things, when you’re ready.’ I held his gaze and waited a beat, then two, as the silence built between us.

It bubbled up again, that tremor of fear. No matter how much Dr Mehta tried to explain it away, the fact was he didn’t react this way to any of the other staff. Just me. As if he thought I alone knew something about him, something damning. Watching for any sudden movements, I pulled a large sheet of paper out of the surprise bag and unfolded it on the table. Lucas blinked at the map and, after a moment’s hesitation, leaned in to study it more closely.

‘This is Duluth.’ I pointed out Congdon’s location on the summit of the hill, overlooking the entire city, then showed him some of the main areas and landmarks. After watching my finger trace roads and parks for a while, he asked where I lived, so I pointed to my neighborhood and talked about it. To my surprise, he started asking questions. How long had I lived in Duluth? Could I see the water from my house? Did I like watching the ships? Did I live alone? He processed everything I said before asking the next thing, and the next thing, and by the time I looked at my watch the entire hour had almost elapsed.

My heart kicked up as I reached into the bag for the other map and carefully unfolded it over the top of Duluth. This map was a wash of blues and greens, charting over a million acres that stretched along the Canadian border for almost a hundred and fifty miles. The lakes squiggled over the page, pouring into each other in rapids and waterfalls, creating endless waterways dotted with islands and hugged by fat peninsulas. The land was a sea of pine, fir, and spruce towering over the water, an evergreen empire built on less than one foot of topsoil before their roots hit solid granite. I knew those shorelines and shadows, could hear the loons calling each other, and feel the razor gaze of the eagles soaring overhead. No matter how long you stayed away, the Boundary Waters never left you.

Lucas recognized it immediately, I could tell, but instead of leaning closer and engaging as he’d done with Duluth, he braced himself against the back of the chair.

‘It’s your turn.’ I spread the map out, trying to make my voice as smooth as the paper. ‘Tell me about your home.’