Page 55 of Leave No Trace
His eyes bounced around the cabin, unable to settle, and he lifted his hands to squeeze his head, heaving air in and out, manifesting all the signs of a panic attack. I tried to pull his arms down and get him to look at me when he began chanting and shaking violently. One unbroken ‘Nononononononono.’
‘Lucas!’
‘It was here.’ He broke away, lunging back into the great room and pacing the edges like a caged animal.
‘What are you talking about? What was here?’
‘I was.’ He stopped dead, lifting his shocked face to mine.
We stared at each other across the room as I tried to make sense of the words, but what he was saying was impossible. A delusion. When I moved toward him, he jerked back, ducking away.
‘I don’t understand.’
‘My father and I – we were here. This is where I was sick. That guy hanging off the cliff in the picture. I remember it.’ He swung an arm toward my bedroom before his eye caught on a dust-covered picture frame orphaned on a corner table. Grabbing it, he wiped the dirt off and stared at the unsmiling woman and girl. My dad had taken the photo, not fifty feet from where we were standing. ‘She told me the cliff was made out of salt and I couldn’t stop thinking about it. A mountain of salt.’
A dawning horror began to clench my body, gripping me, choking me. I couldn’t feel my feet. The fish we’d eaten for lunch began moving in my stomach, threatening to swim back up my throat. I stepped closer, until the woman in the picture snapped sickeningly into place.
‘Basalt,’ I whispered. ‘The cliff was made out of basalt.’
Tears spilled down his cheeks as he looked at me.
‘It wasn’t Heather Price’s body.’
25
Ididn’t rememberfalling to the floor or clawing at the sudden burst of pain in my abdomen. One minute Lucas was across the room, the next he was prying my fingers off my side, his face too close, the breaking glass of the picture frame still echoing against the walls of the cabin.
He knelt in front of me, pleading, sucking all the oxygen from the air. It was too much. I pushed him off and scrambled as far away as I could, wedging my body into a corner of the kitchen and holding a hand in the air – a warning. Still kneeling, the entire story poured out of him, all the thoughts and feelings I’d been so patiently working to get him to reveal and to which now I could barely force myself to listen.
When Lucas had been brought to Congdon and met me, he said, he began fighting a war with his memories. I’d reminded him of the woman who’d nursed him when he was so sick as a child, the pale lady with long brown hair who questioned him about his symptoms while reading a little book. The same little book, I realized, my mother had borrowed from Harry. The Merck medical manual. She’d laid cool rags on his forehead and told him about the salt cliff, she’d stared at him from the end of the bed and didn’t reply when he asked for his father, making him squeeze his eyes shut and wait for her to leave. One night, after he’d begun to feel better, he’d heard noises on the stairs and crouched behind the door as his father carried a body outside. The car engine started, headlights flashed across the living room – this living room – and he never saw the woman again. Ten years later, when he barely remembered what she looked like, I’d walked into his isolation room.
He didn’t make the connection immediately, not until I brought the minerals and began explaining them, forcing his mind back to the bedrock of his life in the Boundary Waters, the reason for their disappearance. That’s when it clicked, when the horrible connection was forged.I know you.Every time he saw me after that was torture. He felt drawn to me, compelled to confess and find out who I was, yet afraid at the same time, trusting nothing and no one in the place that had stolen his every freedom. He began to think Congdon knew about the body and they’d deliberately planted me to get him to hand over his father. Ward two had no shortage of paranoia, and some of it had worked its way into his mind as the strange noises kept him awake every night, never knowing what thenext day would bring. It culminated on the day I took him into the grounds, when he thought I was tricking him into betraying the only person he loved.
It wasn’t until he woke up in the hospital and saw the picture of Heather Price that he questioned his own memories. He’d been so sick when it happened, hallucinating about bugs in the sky. Mountains of salt. Maybe he’d hallucinated more than he’d thought – and layered on top of the doubt was certainty, a bone-deep certainty that he’d known the woman in that picture on his hospital table, he’d seen his dad fighting with her. And whoever she was, she wasn’t me. He was overcome with the need to find me, away from the eyes and ears of Congdon, and when he did the details I gave him about Heather’s death made sense – the timing, the overdose – in a way that made him believe.
‘That’s why I went to your house when I escaped from the hospital.’ He inched closer and I jerked back, knocking my head into the cupboard. His face contorted and he sat down, keeping his distance as he explained looking through my house that night for anything he might recognize, even trying to find the mountain of salt picture he’d thought he’d seen. It became obvious he’d never been to my house before and he convinced himself that I looked like someone who’d only been a figment of his fevered imagination. That’s when he told me what he’d witnessed. That’s when he asked for my help finding his father.
The words rolled over my head, landing in some distant part of the cabin. I heard the tremor in his voice, the rush of air as the explanations tumbled out, one on top of the other, as if any of it could change what my brain was still working to grasp. Harry’s story had shocked me enough. To think about my mother here, with another man and child, was already as much revelation as I could handle. I’d been reeling from the idea that my mother had replaced me, that she’d found happiness with a new family.
She hadn’t adopted a new family and run away to a better life.
A new family had murdered her and escaped into the wilderness.
That’s why her rocks stopped coming. It wasn’t because I was inadequate or worthless. She hadn’t forgotten me or moved on. She was dead. She was dead and so was the insane dream that someday I would see her again, that she would find her way back to us and we could start over. I’d imagined her walking into the bathroom I’d remodeled and seeing how I’d made it into the Boundary Waters, how it would be a place she could thrive and she’d never again have to feel like the soft rock crushed beneath the weight of overpowering forces.
My mother was dead.
‘I didn’t know you had this cabin. How could I know?’ As if he didn’t understand the world had stuttered to a halt, that nothing he could possibly say would matter now. He was babbling, creeping toward me again, his face etched in a bald, unbearable need for sympathy.Hewantedmysympathy.
I pushed myself off the kitchen floor and ran toward the front door.
‘Wait!’ Lucas caught me before I could escape and we fought in a silent struggle of hands and arms, his grasping, mine trying to wrench themselves free.
‘You let him take her.’ I threw blind elbows and heels behind me, thrashing against his grip. ‘You let him get away with it.’
‘Maya. Please. Stop.’ He grunted as I landed a blow to his gut, but the jab doubled me over, too, reverberating back into my muscles and setting fire to the stitches in my side. We fell into the counter like one creature, tangled beyond separation in our rage and grief and pain. I clutched the bandage that had become slippery against my skin and tried to control the sobs that began heaving through my chest, because if I let them out I didn’t know if they would ever stop.
‘Lucas—’ I choked out, but a flash of movement through the kitchen window killed any other words in my throat. A car turned off the highway and pulled through the trees into the driveway. A police cruiser.
