Page 54 of Leave No Trace
Harry startled me out of my fixation. He reached out from his perch, a glint of light cupped in his hand. When I stepped closer, the light turned into a key.
‘Your dad asked me to keep an eye on the place, check the pipes and furnace and whatnot. He keeps the heat and electricity going, so nothing freezes. One year I had to put a cat over there to clean out the mice. Haven’t been by in a while. You should go.’
I didn’t want to touch that key, but I forced myself to pick it up and fold it into my hand. Lucas caught sight of me and started to come over, but I waved him off. He smiled and picked up another section of tree trunk, cleaving it in half with one swing. Apparently his shoulder was all healed.
‘I’ve never been inside without her. Even that day... I didn’t know the security code.’
‘0-6-1-2.’
The tears blurred everything into a painful, sun-washed brilliance. She’d used my birthday.
I shook my head, furiously blinking the water away. ‘It’s been twelve years, Harry. Over half my life ago.’
‘Couldn’t’ve been that long. Ten years at the most.’
‘It’s not the kind of thing you forget, your mother abandoning you.’
‘Yeah, I know you guys stopped coming for a while but then she brought you back.’
‘What?’ My vertebrae popped I snapped my head so fast. ‘What did you say?’
Harry uncrossed and recrossed his arms, rocking back, and frowning. ‘It wasn’t more than ten years since she came back here with you and that new man. I didn’t see you myself, but she came over here to borrow myMerck Manualbecause she said you were sick. Down with the flu or something.’
Every word hit me like a truck, one body blow after another. Harry kept on in his meandering drawl, completely unaware of the effect his speech was having.
‘You only stayed a little while that time and I guess you were sick so maybe you don’t remember. Caught a glimpse of her and that guy sitting on the beach together, talking over a fire. They, uh... well, I went about my business after that.’
‘They what?’ I demanded.
‘They were just hugging, seemed about as cozy as you two.’ Harry nodded at me and Lucas, then hauled himself up with cracking joints. ‘I didn’t mention anything to your dad. He’d already told me she left, and it’s not the kind of thing a man wants to hear about.’
Then he squinted into the sun and stretched. ‘Mighty nice to have help chopping wood. Guess I’ll go start some soup for dinner.’
I stood paralyzed, reeling in the harsh November sun that bounced light off every snow-covered surface between me and the cabin in the distance. All my life, no matter if I’d spent it with or without her, I’d known my mom was depressed, a woman who couldn’t seize the world around her, who shrank away from me and my dad and hardened into her shell like a slab of basalt, porous and brittle. She’d tried to kill herself when I was eight years old, for God’s sake, and I’d spent the better part of my teenage years learning a story, the narrative I built for her with Dr Mehta’s help, and it went something like this: Her depression wasn’t my fault. There was nothing I or anyone else could’ve done to help her recover. She loved me, but it wasn’t enough to battle back the chemical imbalances in her brain. And without batting an eye or lifting a finger, Harry McKinley had smashed that story into oblivion.
My mother had never come back for me.
I’d never seen her with any man besides my father and not here, not in the one place where we’d been happy together,ourplace,ourcabin in the woods,ourpaddles dipping in time through the pristine, mirrored surface of the Boundary Waters. She couldn’t have. She didn’t – because if she did, everything I’d told myself about my mother’s disappearance was a lie. It wasn’t true that no one could save her. We just hadn’t been good enough to save her.
‘Where are you going?’
I didn’t even realize I was moving until I heard Lucas’s voice behind me, farther away than it should have been, and felt the edges of a bush scraping against my side. I gripped the key, gouging it into my flesh as I crossed the uneven ground between the cabins. The driveway was cracked and strewn with snowcapped piles of leaves and needles. Cobwebs rippled against the door frame and my hand shook as I pushed the key into the lock.
‘Are you sure you’re up for this?’ His voice again, this time close to my ear, and a hand I barely registered smoothed over my shoulder. ‘How’s your stomach?’
The shriek of the alarm kept me from having to answer. I punched in the code, my birthday, the day we’d always spent here because I knew she couldn’t handle throwing me a party with friends and cake and the chattering of strange mothers at our door. Instead we drove up here as soon as school let out, going ‘Up North’ like all true Minnesotans, and we roasted the first s’mores of the summer over a birthday bonfire at the water’s edge. She only made those bonfires for me and sometimes my dad on the few days he could leave work during the busy shipping season. No one else was ever invited into this house.
With the alarm silenced, I looked around, slowly pivoting to take it in. The living area and kitchen took up the main room, with a screened-in porch opening up to the lake below. A small bedroom – my bedroom – and the bath were tucked under a stairway that led up to a loft in the rafters, where her sleeping area overlooked the first floor. Everything was the same. The same rag rug laying in front of the fireplace, the same stack ofRock & Gemmagazines on the coffee table, the same rips in the vinyl of the 1950s kitchen chairs, tucked underneath the metal soda shop table. I moved through the main floor, touching nothing, a shell-shocked investigator who’d somehow traveled back in time to search for evidence.
When I turned the light on in my old bedroom, a mouse scurried across the floor and disappeared under the twin bed. Nothing was out of place. The bed was made up with the faded daisy quilt I used to hide under with a flashlight to read stolen copies of her geology magazines, scouring them for tidbits that might impress her or something I could ask her, anything to engage her attention. She came alive when she talked about minerals and sometimes we even went on rock hunts, scouting the wilderness for days on our geology adventures. I opened the closet, pulled out drawers, and found nothing except a few rocks here and there, which – when I held them up to the light and ran a finger over the waxy surfaces – I found were all agates. Turning to go upstairs, I glanced at Lucas’s face and stopped dead.
‘What?’ I glanced at the spot where he was staring, a faded picture on the wall of a cliff and a man dangling off the edge by one hand.Believe,it said in thick black letters underneath the image. I’d never been sure what I was supposed to believe by looking at that picture. That he was strong enough to hold on? That the cliff wouldn’t crumble? Or that his grip would eventually give out, that no matter how capable he was he couldn’t hold on forever. I looked back at Lucas, who’d gone as pale as the petals of the daisies on the bedspread. ‘What is it?’
He didn’t answer. Walking to the bed, he sat down on the pillow and stared at the picture again, now directly in front of him, then he craned his head to take in every detail of the room. There wasn’t much to see and nothing to justify his sudden agitation.
‘No.’ He ejected himself off the mattress and ran to the door, leaning into the frame as his breathing became ragged.
‘Lucas, what?’ I pulled his arm and, when that had no effect, shook him as hard as I could, suddenly angry for no reason I wanted to name.
