Page 4 of Leave No Trace
‘Look at your neck, Maya. That’s unacceptable. I’m going to talk to Dr Mehta—’
‘No, you’re not. I’m twenty-three years old and this is what I do. I got the job done tonight, and I’m going back to work tomorrow, and the day after that. Dr Mehta knows what I’m capable of.’
‘She’s—’
‘We talked about this when I agreed to stay here,’ I remindedhim.
My fingers spread over the shoals and dug into the dark basins. All their notes and arcs of possible routes had turned the lake into a biology class dissection of something still alive. ‘Dad, it’s theBannockburn. I wouldn’t even be here if it wasn’t for theBannockburn.’
He drew back. We hadn’t talked about her in years and even then it had been about endings, not beginnings. His hand dropped to the western edge of the lake and brushed over the cliffs and towering pine forests where he’d met my mother.
She’d told me the story, one of the few she shared. A geology
student at University of Minnesota Duluth, she’d been studying how ice formed in the cracks of the North Shore’s basalt face and caused rock slides over time. It was why the world’s largest lake was getting even larger; it ate the land around it. She needed to document the cliffs from the water and hired Brian Stark, a young salvage tug
captain, to pilot her along the shore. He asked her out every time they sailed, as determined as the lake breaking against the rocks, but she didn’t agree until he told her the story of theBannockburn.
In 1902, a young crew set out on Lake Superior in the S.S.Bannockburnwith 85,000 bushels of wheat in her hold. They didn’t know the gales were coming, or maybe they did, but they didn’t know enough to be afraid. Every November the lake turned gray, the water churned and raged against the coming winter, and hurricane-force winds whipped the waves into forty-foot crests. The lake became hungry.
TheBannockburnwas downbound that day and spotted by two other ships also fighting their way through the storm. Then she vanished. A single life jacket printed with the boat’s name washed up onshore three weeks later. A few other clues surfaced, fragments here and there, but the lake didn’t give up any secrets. Countless ships had disappeared on Superior, but theBannockburnwas the only one sighted after she was lost. Tales of glimpsing theBannockburn’s profile on the horizon of the water spread through the Great Lakes. It sailed as a ghost ship on the waves, warning other boats of impending danger before disappearing into the wind.
Something about that had appealed to my mother, something my dad couldn’t have predicted at the time, but it got him a date and – a few years later – a marriage and baby, too. My earliest memories were on Dad’s tugboat, squealing at the empty horizon and claiming I’d seen a phantom ship as we sped into the endless blue. TheBannockburnwas one of the great mysteries of Superior, and now Dad and Butch were going to chase it down.
‘Don’t worry about me.’ Ignoring the discomfort in my throat, I smiled at Butch. ‘I’ll have Jasper for company.’
Butch gave the dog a dirty look and grunted.
‘And I still have the bathroom to finish. I was thinking about new hardware, because I don’t like how—’
‘Maya,’ Dad scanned me up and down, still searching for hidden wounds. ‘Someone just tried to kill you.’
‘He wasn’t trying to kill me.’ And then, before I could stop it. ‘Trust me, I know the difference.’
Pain glanced over Dad’s face and suddenly neither of us knew what to say. There were too many ghosts in the room, and none of them had sunk with theBannockburn. After a minute I mumbled goodnight, slung the backpack over my shoulder, and left the kitchen, forgetting my noodles in the microwave until I found them the next morning, a cold, tightly coiled lump that had lost any chance for salvage.
Jasper followed me into the bathroom, where I splashed water on my face and avoided looking at the angry, red line bisecting my neck, instead staring glassy-eyed at the handles of the knotty pine cabinet I’d installed last year. Nickel. Maybe brushed nickel. My throat ached and my head began to pound, but it wasn’t until Jasper nudged me that I flipped the light off and crawled under my duvet.
He curled up at my feet, facing the door and the voices that drifted down the hallway, while I booted up the computer and began outlining my incident report. Hours later, long after Butch’s truck had fired up in the driveway and Dad shuffled off to bed, after even Jasper’s vigilance had faded to huffs and doggie snores, I was still awake with the ghosts.
3
The nextday, after helping Dad load the pickup and promising to text every day and use the radio to hail him for emergencies, I clocked in at Congdon and went to make my rounds. I always walked the wards before my sessions; it let everyone know I was there and that today was a speech therapy day. Nobody liked surprises in a psychiatric facility.
During my rounds, I stopped and chatted with any patients open to it. Some saw my bright maroon hair coming and hit the decks. Others seemed starved for attention and followed me from one end of their ward to the other. Today’s hot topic was the angry red bruise circling my neck. Eliza, a teenage cutter with some cleft palate issues, kept trying to touch the mark like it was a holy relic.
‘Did it hurt?’ she whispered.
‘It sucked, Eliza. I don’t recommend it.’
She just stared at my throat.
‘Are you working on your presentation for later?’ Eliza was part of my advanced group being prepped for discharge. I’d assigned them all the task of speaking about their stay at Congdon, what had brought them here, and what they’d learned about themselves. There was no time requirement, no formal structure or underlying assessment, but it was probably the most important speech they’d ever have to make. If they could articulate their thoughts, find words big enough, true enough, they might find a way to own their stories.
‘I’ve thought about it. I didn’t write anything down yet like you asked us to.’ She dropped her head on thes’s, forcing the words out past the slight nasal emission.
‘No problem, you’ve still got a few hours. Grab your journal and see what happens.’
She glanced back up and met my eyes this time, hesitantly making that connection. It had taken months for her to become confident enough to do that. I acknowledged her progress with a smile and pointed to her room. ‘Go.’
