Page 15 of Leave No Trace
She paused near the security desk, putting her hat on. ‘That’d be public record. You know how to fill out forms, right?’
‘It’s urgent. And there might be a related case, but I don’t know the details. I wouldn’t know what to request.’
The men in ward two had exhibited acute stress response symptoms at the sight of Officer Miller’s uniform. Paleness. Dilated pupils. Shaking. I kept my hands still and waited while she looked me up and down. ‘You’re his speech therapist. Your job is just to help him talk, right?’
‘Maybe it’ll give us something to talk about.’
After a beat she nodded, slipped her sunglasses on, and told me to email her the details of the arrest.
Officer Miller and I had gone through the Congdon orientation together along with a roomful of other new hires and volunteers, back when I’d first started as an orderly and she was rotating in as our liaison to the Duluth police force. For two full days we watched outdated videos and reviewed policies while she compulsively checked her phone like she was praying for a domestic disturbance to save her from the PowerPoint. I assumed she’d drawn the short straw for this gig until the end of the orientation, when Dr Mehta joined us and invited the group to share any experiences that had compelled us to work at Congdon. A moment of silence suffocated the room before, one by one, everyone started telling their stories. Someone had a bipolar friend. Another person’s father was diagnosed with an antisocial personality disorder. One of the volunteers suffered from bulimia for most of her childhood until realizing she needed help. Every person in the room spoke up except the two of us, but then – after the tissues had been passed and all the bolstering smiles began to fade – Officer Miller cleared her throat.
‘I had a brother who was off, always low, never wanted to get help, never even wanted anyone to look at him. But I saw him. I saw him right up to the first morning of his junior year when he slit his wrists in the bathtub.’ Her eyes shimmered with deep pools of tears. I’d never seen an eye hold on to that much water, refusing to let it go.
That was my cue. I should have reached out for Officer Miller’s hand or touched her forearm and told them how every night when my mother tucked me into bed I could see fault lines of pain cracking through her body, how the tighter I hugged her the more she crumbled away, as if the density of my love was too much to withstand, until one night she broke completely. She left a note on my nightstand, went to the bathroom, and ate two bottles of aspirin.
Everyone at Congdon had a story. Some of us had more thanone.
‘I used to be a patient here,’ I murmured and picked at a chipped spot on the table until human resources started handing out badges and explaining the building’s layers of security.
What makes someone disappear?
After my mom’s suicide attempt, we all tried to pretend things were fine. Mom cleaned the house and lingered in the shadows outside my school, waiting to walk me home. She showed me how to make grilled cheese and ramen noodles and how to tell the difference between gabbro and basalt. We built a rock garden in a corner of the yard and I memorized every mineral, their Mohs scale hardness, whether they were igneous, sedimentary, or metamorphic, knowledge that seemed more vital than anything I was learning at school. Dad spent hours analyzing the composition of the lake bed, the shoals, all the underwater hazards that had wrecked countless ships like theBannockburn. Maybe he thought it was something they could share, the intersection of rock and water, but we both saw how her eyes drifted off the map to places we couldn’t follow.
During Dad’s busy season in the summer, she took me up to her family cabin near the Boundary Waters, just her and me, and that’s where she seemed the strongest. We paddled through lake after lake, silent amid the towering pines that surrounded us like a cathedral, our feet baptized on the shores of every portage. When we returned to Duluth in the fall everything seemed dirtier, harder. She stopped waiting for me after school. Then one day she accepted a job conducting a copper study on the Iron Range – Minnesota’s mining belt that had once turned Duluth into a boomtown – packed a bag and left us a note saying she might not be back. Two months later she quit the job and began sending me rocks in the mail: a hunk of granite at the first snowfall, a nugget of amethyst for spring, carefully polished agates gleaming like birthday candles. I kept a rock and mineral field guide by my bed and studied them, trying to interpret whether a white hue meant purity or sorrow. Could I dissect her state of mind from an intricate banding pattern? There were never any return addresses on the boxes and the postmarks came from further and further away – North Dakota, Wyoming. I tried googling the towns, searching for her in newspaper photos and company directories, but the rocks were the only evidence she existed until one day even they stopped coming. She disappeared without a physical or digital trace. It was a gradual abandonment, like inching slowly into deeper, more frigid water until the bottom gives way. Was that better than Officer Miller’s brother, two swift cuts and a last cascade spilled neatly into the tub’s drain? They were both gone, leaving no path for anyone to follow.
If Josiah had left a path, I was going to find it.
While I waited for Officer Miller to find the arrest records, I began hunting, looking for other families who’d turned away from society. There had to be a precedent, a pattern. As the gales started battering the house, I curled up with my laptop and searched. The first and most famous case was the Lykov family of Siberia, and after I read everything I could find about them I discovered another story, this time in a different generation on a new tilt of the globe.
Ho Van Thanh had lived a quiet life until the Vietnam War spilled into his village and he watched his family die in an explosion. Some accounts said a mine blew up, others that the village came under siege by American bombers, and even the identity of the family members who died varied depending on who was telling the story, but they all agreed on what happened next. Thanh scooped up his infant son, Lang, and fled into the jungle. Eventually the war ended and life got back to normal, but Ho Van Thanh never returned. He raised Lang in a handmade treehouse where they ate corn and fruit. They caught animals in traps, made their clothes from tree bark, and every time the nearby villages grew and expanded, Thanh led his son further into the jungle, retreating almost to the top of a mountain in order to stay hidden from the world outside.
Forty years passed and Lang became the caregiver as Thanh aged and sickened. They didn’t know the war had ever ended until nearby villagers heard rumors of the men in the jungle and made contact with them. When Thanh’s condition became known, a team of people were sent to ‘rescue’ them. Thanh was forcibly carried off the mountain and Lang met the world for the first time, wide-eyed and silent. Both father and son fell into a clinical depression in the months that followed and all the viruses Lang had never encountered made him as sick as his father. It took them a year to recover and eventually they moved to a small house near their jungle. Lang adjusted to life in the village, but Thanh never did. His main ambition at eighty-seven years old was to return to the wilderness. When a reporter asked to see the place they’d lived for so many decades, Lang also jumped at the opportunity to go back and set off into the jungle without a second’s pause.
I found other stories – Timothy ‘the Grizzly Man’ Treadwell, Christopher McCandless of Alaska, and Christopher Knight, the Maine woods hermit, all loners who saw the open land as more pure and untainted by human civilization – but the Lykovs and Ho Vans were different. They were families, people bonded by love. The sacrifices they made were for each other.
I taped up pictures of the Ho Vans next to the others, my refrigerator transforming into a giant milk carton of the missing, and then stood back, squinting my eyes, letting the lines between them blur. The Lykovs and the Ho Vans were driven into the wilderness by tragedy and murder, by the ugliness of worlds they might not have survived. Something galvanized them, something they couldn’t fight or ignore.
What had galvanized Josiah? He wasn’t fleeing from religious persecution or escaping a war, but something made his son shake with fear ten years later.I won’t turn him over.I needed him to talk to me, to trust me, to tell me something more substantial than how disgusting the food was today. I was done being his breezy friend.
Agafia. Lang. Lucas. I stared at their pictures on the fridge, the children of world-abandoning decisions. They hadn’t chosen to disappear, yet they stayed. They’d remained in the wilderness for reasons beyond fear, beyond danger, because something in their environment fed them. Most children grew up hungering to see more of the world, but they had been satiated.
And just like that, I knew what to do.
Congdon wasn’t only a building; the facility boasted sprawling grounds enclosed by a ten-foot wrought-iron, spiked fence. The entrance and parking lot took up the west side, the flower and vegetable therapy gardens were shriveled with their last gourd vines in the south, and the north and east sides boasted wooded, leaf-covered trails. Grass crunched under our feet as Bryce and I walked Lucas around the building, dressed in an oversized hooded coat. I glanced at the fence every few seconds and didn’t breathe easier until we reached the evergreen cover of Congdon’s own private forest.
‘Wait here. Keep an eye out,’ I told Bryce, who shrugged and dropped onto a bench, pulling out his phone.
I led Lucas through the trees, winding our way back to a corridor of evergreens where it was darker and colder. Outside the grove the trees looked like they grew straight into the air but from within they loomed toward an invisible center point, blocking out the sun and dimming even the memory of brilliance. There were no paths in here, only layers of wet needles that infused the air with pungent decay. None of the patients who had grounds privileges came here on their walks; it was too quiet, too confined.
I stopped when the shadows engulfed us, when I couldn’t see anything beyond the trees. The sounds of traffic and a distant airplane still intruded, but at least we were hidden from any of the protesters who might be prowling the edges of the property. It was the closest thing to the Boundary Waters I could give him.
He walked a few paces further, reaching a hand out to brush a low hanging branch. Then he squatted down, both feet planted firmly in the needles, and closed his eyes. His chest rose and fell, and no one in yoga class had ever looked more at one with their universe.
‘Thank you.’ The words were barely audible.
I sat cross-legged nearby and picked up a pine cone, rolling it back and forth in my hands, waiting for him to breathe his fill. Long minutes passed, but I wasn’t impatient. He wasn’t the only one who found solace in the shadows.
Eventually he moved, exploring the dank oasis – needles, dead branches, the hard-packed ground – and then crept over to examine me, as if I was a castoff of the trees, too. He pulled on a few strands of my hair and frowned, asking what color it was supposed to be.
