‘What? I’m comfortable with my masculinity. I can say it.’
I stared at the North Shore, the pine, spruce, and birch trees that began here and stretched hundreds of miles to the north and west, into the Superior National Forest, the Boundary Waters, and beyond. Josiah was out there somewhere, maybe suffering, maybe a murderer like me, maybe just a father, freezing and alone. An hour ago I’d had a plan that would have given him back his son. Now all three of our futures were in jeopardy.
As soon as we docked, I followed the van with Lucas, Dr Mehta, and Bryce back up the hill and stood outside Dr Mehta’s office for a good part of the morning. Wherever she was, she was either too busy or still too nauseous to look at me. When one of my sessions came up on my calendar I went and conducted it, counting each minute as closely as I counted speech errors in the oral reading passage, waiting for someone to seize my badge and toss me out of the building. Nothing happened. Afterward I raced back downstairs, feeling as unstable as Dr Mehta had on the deck of the boat. Up wasn’t up. Down wasn’t down. Before I reached the administrative area, I ran into her in the main corridor and she started talking as soon as she saw me coming.
‘I spoke to the Forest Service this morning. They’ll continue their search without Congdon’s involvement.’ She didn’t slow down or even glance in my direction.
‘How? You said yourself they’ve turned up nothing. Without Lucas, we have no path to Josiah.’
She stared at the floor tiles ahead of us. ‘I know that, Maya, but he had a serious violent incident on the boat today. I can’t approve Lucas to leave the facility. Josiah Blackthorn has spent ten winters in the wilderness. All we can do now is believe that, if the Forest Service can’t locate him, he can make it eleven.’
I didn’t believe it. The odds of two healthy men surviving a brutal Minnesota winter were incredible enough. One sick man, by himself, had no chance. Cursing Bryce, cursing myself, I cast around desperately for some way to salvage all the work I’d done. There had to be a way to find Josiah.
‘Maybe,’ I shook my head, the words hopeless even before I’d spoken them, ‘I could get Lucas to point them in the right direction. Narrow down the range. I can ask him.’
‘You won’t be speaking to Lucas Blackthorn again.’
Even though I’d expected it, my frame jerked like I’d crashed into a wall. We’d reached the administrative offices and Dr Mehta held the door open to hers, waving me inside. I glanced at two clerks by the copy machine – both staring at the papers in their hands and trying to pretend they weren’t eavesdropping – and woodenly walked into the office. She shut the door behind us.
‘It’s not what you think.’
‘I blame myself more than anyone else.’ She sat heavily in her chair and propped her elbows on the desk, rubbing her temples. ‘To place such responsibility on your shoulders, against your will, and with little prior clinical experience . . .’ She trailed off.
‘I did everything you said.’ I could feel my face flushing, my fists clenching. ‘I reached him. I’ve been acclimating him, preparing him to enter the world. He doesn’t hide from group environments anymore. He can handle noise, stress; he independently initiates relaxation techniques.’
‘You’ll no longer have access to ward two. All your patients in that ward are being redistributed.’
I should have been relieved that I still had a job, but all I could think about was Big George. The Grinch. I was losing them all because of one stupid mistake. Because for once in my adult life I’d wanted to be close to someone, and this was the result.
‘I screwed up, okay? I admit it. I care more for him than I should because I know what he’s going through.’ I smacked a hand over my heart, ready to dig it out and show it to her if it would change her mind. ‘You have no idea. You don’t know what it’s like to lose a parent.’
‘Really?’ She folded her hands and carefully laid them on the desk in front of her. Suddenly the whine of the copy machine outside became the loudest noise in the room. I shrank back, unsure of the depth of the water I’d just splashed into. Dr Mehta smoothed her face, a masterful veiling of muscle and skin, and looked directly into my eyes.
‘I’m sure you know India is a very traditional culture. In Bollywood, it’s rare to even see a man and woman kiss onscreen. Can you guess, Maya, how most Indians feel about homosexuality?’
I shook my head, even though the last ten seconds gave me a pretty good idea. Then Dr Mehta told me, in carefully modulated tones, a past she’d never shared before. Growing up in Mumbai, she’d been exposed to a deep-seated prejudice against gay culture. Same-sex relations were a crime, committed by people with a ‘genetic flaw’ according to her father, and she’d accepted his opinion with a daughter’s deference. She had no idea that when her parents sent her to school in the United States for a Western education, she would meet her future wife. Conflicted and ashamed, she’d kept their love hidden for four years, until her parents announced at graduation that they’d arranged a marriage for her back in India. She had to choose between going home and obeying her family’s wishes or telling them the truth. When she chose honesty, they cut all ties. They refused to meet her girlfriend and stopped answering her phone calls. In the twenty years since her confession they hadn’t spoken to her once, not even when she fulfilled her father’s dream of seeing one of his children become a doctor.
The longer she talked, the more callous I felt. How had I never wondered about Dr Mehta’s family before now? She’d been my therapist, my boss, my mentor, and friend. If my mother was the shadow of my life, Dr Mehta was the light. I ached for her even as I wanted to hide from her unrelenting, quiet gaze.
‘There are many ways to lose one’s parents, Maya,’ she said. ‘In my personal and professional experience, it seems to happen in the manner we least expect. I didn’t know my family wasn’t able to put their daughter before their culture. You could never have known your mother would abandon you when you were ten years old, and I doubt Lucas Blackthorn could have predicted the chain of events that began when he broke into that outfitter’s store.’
I leaned in, letting her see straight into me. No anger this time. All emotion carefully banked.
‘I promised I would help him. Please. Let me keep that promise.’
There was a split second where I thought she might change her mind, until she sighed and her eyes filled. ‘I’m so sorry. I’ll be acting as Lucas’s therapist going forward and you can consider this a disciplinary warning in your employee file. If you’d like to talk about any of this, in a session or simply off the record, I’m here.’
I pushed myself up and walked out of her office, feeling all the purpose I’d had over the last few weeks draining out of me, taking every good thing with it. When I got to the door, I paused, and some monster inside me roiled up, teeth gnashing.
‘I’m sorry, too. And on the record? You just killed Josiah Blackthorn.’
Jasper was sniffing through the dead grass in the yard when I came home and he immediately ran to the gate, tail wagging, and looked hopefully toward the end of the street. I ran my hands over his rough coat and told him to wait a second, running inside to grab his leash, but Dad called my name from the kitchen.
‘Please don’t.’ I paced to the doorway. ‘It’s none of your business.’
‘You made it my business when you brought him on my boat.’ He pointed at the refrigerator, still plastered with all the disappeared families. ‘You made it my business when you brought him into our house.’