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 the next 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. He wanted my sympathy.
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.
I stumbled back and looked wildly around the cabin. My heart, already abused beyond repair, kicked into a sprint. Every room on the main floor had at least one window and there was no basement, which left only one place to hide. Locking the front door, I ran to the stairs and was halfway up before I remembered.
‘The picture frame. The light,’ I hissed and we flew back down. I hit the light switch off in my bedroom and Lucas shoved the broken frame under a couch as the sound of a slamming door echoed in the front yard. We rushed back up the stairs that creaked and groaned with every step, dove to the loft floor, and lay side by side on the scratchy carpet littered with mouse droppings, reining in our breath, listening.
The rap on the door sent a jerk through my entire body. Silence. Then another knock. No voices. The upstairs loft was open on three sides, with only a railing gating the platform from the rafters. If we crawled to any of the edges, we could see what was happening on the first floor. But then anyone on the first floor could see us. After a long pause, one of the living room windows rattled and a beam of light glanced off the rough beams of the ceiling. They were circling the perimeter of the cabin, looking for signs of life. Signs of us.
We listened as they worked their way along the foundation, crunching leaves underfoot, shining flashlights throughout the main level and even illuminating the headboard of the loft bed, so close that we could see the dust motes spinning in the air. At one point, when the silence stretched out and it was impossible to tell where they were or what they were doing, Lucas reached over and covered my hand.
I squeezed my eyes closed and gulped back the silent convulsions in my chest. I could feel his warmth next to me, his absolute stillness save the fingers that pressed into mine, offering what he could never articulate – not even if we had the world to ourselves and all the languages in it – and I had no choice but to twist my hand into his, gripping the very thing that had shattered me.
After another minute, we heard a branch snap in the distance. Lucas rose up and crawled silently to the tiny, second floor window to peek outside.