Page 64 of Leave No Trace
No answer from the main room.
He walked back to where she sat at the kitchen table, hands in her lap and an empty juice glass in front of her with a wine ring at the bottom. It was nine in the morning. ‘A scale. Do you haveone?’
She shook her head.
‘Fine. Whatever. It doesn’t matter.’ He screwed open the bottle and shook out three pills, then went in to wake Lucas, who was weak and disoriented. Josiah fed him the medicine and made him drink as much water as he could before he fell asleep again. Sitting on the edge of the bed, petting Lucas’s hair, watching him breathe, Josiah felt like the climber hanging one-handed on the edge of the cliff in the picture on the wall. Lucas was all he had. Lucas was the only thing that mattered. And if he lost his grip on his son, if Heather Price turned up dead and they found a way to blame him for it, there would be no end to his fall.
He’d already had the worst moment of his life, goddamnit.
After a while, when Lucas’s breathing seemed to even out, he went into the main room again. Jane hadn’t moved from the table. He sighed and sat in the other kitchen chair.
‘I’m sorry. I got detained by the police.’
She stared at the empty juice glass as if he hadn’t spoken, as if he wasn’t even there. He looked around, found the wine on the counter, and picked up the dusty bottle that still felt full. ‘More?’
Shaking her head, she reached out for the cup and rotated it slowly.
‘It’s a good source of manganese. Red wine. Prevents rust and corrosion. An essential trace mineral, but too much of it will kill you.’ Her words were jerky, like the thoughts had been pulled at random from dark corners of a disused wardrobe.
‘Aren’t you going to ask what the police wanted with me?’
She got up and went to the sink. ‘I thought you’d left him. I didn’t think you were coming back.’
‘That’s my son in there. How could I abandon him?’
Rinsing out the glass, she carefully set it next to the sink, bottom up, and watched the drips collect and pool underneath the rim, trapped. ‘Maybe you thought he’d be better off without you.’
‘He needs me.’ Josiah got up and paced to the bedroom doorway, staring at the smooth curves and planes of his son’s face, the traces of Sarah in his nose and jaw, the miraculous rise and fall of the quilt over his narrow chest. ‘Almost as much as I need him.’
He retrieved the gas station bag from the bed and paced back to the kitchen, where Jane still leaned into the counter and stared out the window, motionless. He wanted to be outraged that she would even suggest he’d abandoned Lucas, but the fact was he had. He’dleft his son for twenty-four hours and if the police had charged him, it would have been even longer; Lucas could have been stuck with this ghostlike woman indefinitely. And Heather Price was still missing. He sighed, not at all sure about what he had to ask next.
‘I don’t want to take Lucas back to our place right now. Can we stay here a little longer?’ He pulled out the half-dead flower and offered her its drooping petals encased in plastic.
She looked past it, into the bag of medicine and melting Popsicles, and told him he could sleep on the couch.
Lucas slept most of the day, only rousing when Josiah made him drink fluids and he didn’t seem very coherent even then. He needed help to get to the bathroom and fell exhausted into bed afterward, saying his body hurt everywhere. When the fever hit he threw the covers off the bed, only to shrink into a ball and shake uncontrollably from the wave of chills that followed. Josiah kept watch as shadows stretched over the walls, and the only sign of life outside of the bedroom was an occasional rustle that could have been either Jane or a mouse.
After dusk, though, she built a fire at the edge of the lake and he debated leaving her alone, but the hiss and burn of the logs called him, Lucas was sleeping soundly, and the low ceiling of the small room had begun to feel suffocating. She didn’t comment when he joined her and sat silently for a while, soaking in the early spring night that hadn’t yet given rise to summer’s legions of mosquitos. Soon Josiah found himself talking, at first just trying to explain the police situation and Heather Price, but gradually he told her more and more. He told her about shoving Heather, about giving her the money and hoping it would make her go away. He hadn’t cared how and he still didn’t, wondering aloud how someone could be missing when nobody missed her. Jane listened without reaction. There was something about the way she looked at him, without pity or blame, without lust or dismissal; he might have been speaking to the Boundary Waters itself. He told her about Sarah, about the drifting, all the national parks and wildernesses he and Lucas had seen, and she let him talk, commenting little except to agree that most roofs were ugly, to the very last one people put over their heads.
‘I want to be buried out there somewhere.’ She stared into the black horizon of trees across the water. ‘To leech into the soil or return to silt at the bottom of a lake. I don’t want to end up in a box.’
‘How about burning? Cremation?’ He poked the fire with a stick, sending a torrent of sparks into the air.
‘I’ve been pollution already. I’d rather be useful, for once.’
Then slowly she began talking. She told him the history of the BWCA, all the way back to the volcanic rifts and crushing glaciers, and it felt like she was telling him her own story, just as he’d shared his. When he’d asked her name yesterday, she’d faltered and the word seemed foreign on her tongue, but now, describing Ely greenstone and its 2.6 billion–year journey she had an almost desperate confidence, as if she needed to pass on some vital knowledge. She talked about what humans took from the Boundary Waters, from the Knife Lake siltstone ten thousand years ago to the sulfide deposits the mining companies now hunted for their nickel and copper, and she bent further and further forward as she spoke, as though the minerals were being carved from her own core. He’d never met anyone like her. Her inaccessibility didn’t repel. Her sad beauty didn’t attract. But the longer they sat and added more logs to the fire, the less he worried about Heather Price and the world outside. Here, they becamein. Everything else wasout.
When she started to shiver, he moved their log bench closer to the fire and for a while she rested her head on his shoulder. No one had done that, drawn that simple comfort from him, since Sarah had died and he absorbed the long-forgotten feeling, the scent and weight of a woman’s head seeking rest. He let his arm drift to the curve of her side, and they sat like that watching flames lick the sky and the lake shimmer in the firelight. At one point he felt a drip of something and saw the front of his jacket was streaked wet. Sarah hadn’t been a teary woman. He didn’t have any practice comforting one, but he did what felt natural and pressed a kiss into her hair. She accepted it with no response, just like she ignored the cracking branch in the distance that must have signaled some creature finding passage through the night. Josiah looked, but saw only shadows and moonlit wood smoke from the neighboring cabin. Later, after the moon disappeared below the tree line, he broke their strange peace by asking about her daughter again. Everything in her stiffened and, standing abruptly, she left the fire and walked into the house. He watched her go with the uncomfortable thought that the girl was dead. Sighing, he went to get a bucket of lake water and put out the fire, but before he could douse it Jane returned, cradling something in her hands.
‘Do you know what this is?’
He stared at it, wondering if it was a trick question. ‘A rock?’
An echo of a smile crossed her face. Then she turned it to a different angle, illuminating a striped pattern that looked like ripples in a pond. ‘It’s a fortification agate. See how the banding looks like the walls of a fort?’
She kept shifting it in her hands, smoothing her fingers over the stripes and then running them along a rough edge that ended at a point and pressing against it, like she was trying to draw blood.
‘Agates are born inside the hollows of basalt and they’re stronger than everything around them. They survived the glaciers while the basalt was pulverized. When I found this I was only a sophomore in college, but I knew it meant I was going to have Maya, and she would become everything I’m not.’
