He stopped my mouth with a kiss. I didn’t have a lot of experience with kissing, and none where the kiss softened you, inhaled you, twisting into your fingers and toes and making you forget, for a mindless second, that you had a seeping hole in your side. Maybe I could’ve been more clinical, felt it less, if he’d been like every other guy, steeped in all their insecurities and sexual myths about what a kiss did or didn’t mean, but Lucas possessed none of that crap. He moved slowly and artlessly, cupping my shoulders like I was a snow sculpture come to life and might break apart if he wasn’t careful.
I wove my fingers through his hair and pulled, anchoring him to me as we explored, pulses thrumming, beating faster and harder against each other in a race neither of us knew how to finish. Then I made the mistake of stretching, bowing my body to get a fraction closer, and broke away in a sharp gasp of pain.
‘Are you okay?’ Eyes dilated, breath unsteady, he watched me clutch my stomach.
‘This is my ow.’ I breathed through clenched teeth.
He laughed once and hovered anxiously, waiting until my breathing returned to normal before easing me back against the cushions. We stared at each other, inches apart, until the drugs smoothed everything over and I forgot about my stomach again.
‘What will they do if they find you?’ he asked.
I added up the charges. Grand theft auto, B&E, identity theft, kidnapping, and assault. ‘Jail. Probably prison. That’ll be a change of pace.’
He shook his head. ‘No. You’re coming with me.’ Then he touched my cheek, frowning. ‘I’m not losing you now. I’m not going to trade you for him.’
‘I’ll be a liability. I’ll slow you down.’ My eyes drifted closed and I struggled to blink them back open.
‘Get stronger.’ He murmured and before I could respond, the sound of tires on gravel cut through the front yard. Lucas jumped up and checked the window, relaxing as he saw who it was. ‘Harry.’ Then, glancing down at his new cargo pants and clearing his throat, ‘I’ll be back in a minute.’
I grinned as he retreated down the hall.
For lunch Harry fried walleye and I was able to walk to the kitchen without too much trouble and eat at the table. The two of them talked fishing through the whole meal, swapping stories and techniques, and Lucas asked a hundred questions about licenses, regulations, and enforcement. By the time we were washing the dishes, we’d gotten a full retrospective of the DNR, the evolution of sport fishing in the Boundary Waters, and the fight against a new copper mine some of the locals had convinced Harry to join. Harry was working through a list of invasive species when Lucas glanced at me as he wiped and stacked the plates. In some other world this could be our life. A warm room at the edge of the woods, chipped plates, laughter, the call of the wind in the eaves. It flared in his eyes, too, longing for a homecoming we’d never have. After everything was cleared and cleaned, I retreated back to the couch, feeling heavy and listless, and fell into an instant, dreamless sleep.
When I woke up, I was curled into a sweaty ball. No one else was in the living room and the house was quiet.
‘Lucas?’
No answer.
Carefully, I stretched my arms and legs and sat up. A jar of ibuprofen lay next to the couch and I ignored it, examining my abdomen instead. Harry’s stitches were neat and even, reminiscent of the cross-stitch that hung on the wall. A stain of blood still coated the skin around the wound, but it was dried and dark – no bright red to speak of – and when I got up to go to the bathroom the raw pain had dulled to a nagging throb. With slow movements and deep breaths, I was good as new.
I splashed some water on my face and found a rag to do a quick hospital-style sponge bath. I had clean clothes in the car if I’d felt motivated enough to attempt the trip. Instead I traded my bloody shirt for Lucas’s hospital scrubs and crept through the house, peeking in doors, looking for any sign of life.
‘Harry?’
Harry’s house wasn’t big. It was a single-story rambler with a few small bedrooms clustered on one side and a living room and kitchen on the other. I found a door that led to a pitch-black basement, but I didn’t feel like pushing my luck on the stairs.
‘You guys down there?’
Then I heard it – a cracking, punching noise from outside the cabin. I crossed to the kitchen window, searching for the source, then hurried back into the living room and pulled on my boots and coat to head into the blinding sunshine. Harry’s classic Chevy was parked next to Butch’s car in the driveway and everything from the trees to the steps were covered in a thin veil of snow. A sign posted at the end of the driveway said the same thing I’d seen in town: Friends of the Boundary Waters. Everything was bright white and silent until suddenly the punch of noise came again, louder now, echoing off the snow-covered branches. I ran along the siding, each step becoming more painful as the hacked-up muscles in my side took the impact, and rounded the edge of the garage, wincing and panicked.
Harry sat on a tree stump, arms crossed, face into the sun, as Lucas chopped firewood. Neither of them noticed me.
I heaved out a sigh and checked the tree coverage between them and the road, gauging the distance and speed of any potential cars. If someone wasn’t looking for an escaped mental health patient, they’d drive right by without a sidelong glance and Lucas, whether by design or accident, was facing away from the street. He looked more comfortable than I’d ever seen him, swinging the axe expertly, easily breaking logs with one or two swings and stacking them into a fast-growing pile of firewood. He’d probably performed the chore a thousand times. As the landscape settled into me and the pain quit snarling, my attention drifted to a log building obscured by pine trees in the distance. The cabin. My mother’s cabin.
I could only see the snow-covered roof and part of one wall, the logs dark and worn by countless winters. Sometimes birds had built nests under the eaves, defying gravity, weaving them from forest floor debris, and as a girl I’d crept up and listened day after day, waiting for the morning when I heard those first weak cheeps.
‘Here.’
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 my Merck Manual because 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.