She lay faceup, eyes open and blank, crusted vomit spilled over her face, chest, and hair. On the nightstand next to the bed were the three extra packages of Tylenol he’d bought at the gas station, all empty.
He stared in shock for what felt like an hour before the reality sunk in. He was alone in the woods with a dead woman, not two days after being implicated in the disappearance of another woman. They couldn’t blame him for this, could they? But he’d bought the Tylenol. His fingerprints were all over the house. Looking around the room, he even found a gun on the floor under the bed, like she’d been afraid for her life. Jesus Christ. He didn’t risk touching the gun but went on a frantic search of the rest of the cabin for the missing wine bottle and found it discarded in the trash outside, with remnants of crushed up medicine clinging to the sides. He’d touched that, too, the morning he’d been released from jail. Swearing, he kicked the garbage can, beating the thing again and again until he stopped hearing Sergeant Coombe’s voice in his head. One day you’re going to give me a reason.
Not today. Goddamnit, why couldn’t she have waited to kill herself until they were gone? Panting, he walked away from the garbage and looked up, above the tips of the trees into the star-studded sky. His breathing settled down as he stared into the endless night, and then he realized what she wanted him to do. What she’d been asking him when he was too stupid to know it.
Nothing in this world is free, his foster mother had said, and this was the price of their sanctuary.
He lined the car trunk with garbage bags, went back inside and wrapped her body in the soiled sheets, hauled it out over one shoulder, and drove to a place he thought she would have liked. A place under the stars where the rocks were soft and some – he was surprised that he even noticed – shone in the moonlight.
‘I can tell you where she is.’ Josiah’s voice, ragged and halting, sounded like it was gutting him. For the last half hour, he’d talked without stopping, eating handfuls of snow when his mouth got too dry, closing his eyes when a shudder of pain wracked him, driven to continue by something that had no connection to the gun wavering at his chest.
I’d been ready to pull the trigger, waiting for whatever bullshit he’d invented: excuses, reasons, pleas for sympathy. I had an answer for all of that and I wanted it so badly. I wanted a bad guy to shoot. I was prepared to trade everything for the purity of that rage, even Lucas – beautiful, loving Lucas – but when Josiah repeated her words exactly, as if he’d spent ten years memorizing their last conversation, even vengeance was stripped away from me.
Birthing agates. The same thing she’d written to me before she first tried to kill herself.
‘She’s not far from the cabin. It’s just beyond—’
‘No.’ I jerked the gun at him. ‘I don’t want to know.’
He nodded once. Snow had settled on his shoulders and legs, slowly burying him while it skittered away from me as I rocked uncontrollably back and forth, like a screaming baby someone was trying frantically to shush. We faced each other, the gun shaking between us, while I tried to grasp the reality of my mother’s death.
After a long pause, he took another handful of snow and said, so low I almost didn’t hear it. ‘Go ahead.’
‘What?’
‘I’d like to be buried here, like her.’ His eyes moved past me, into the shadows. ‘In the Boundary Waters.’
A branch cracked uphill from us and Lucas shouted my name.
‘It’s okay.’ Josiah looked up at his son and forced his skeleton face into a smile. ‘I wanted to hang on long enough to see you again. To tell you some things about your mother’ – he glanced at me – ‘both your mothers, but I’ve told Maya now. She knows. And now she’s doing this for me.’
Lucas dropped to his knees and crawled down the embankment. ‘No! Give me the gun, Maya. Don’t do this. Don’t you take my father away.’
Tears poured down my face as I looked from Blackthorn to Blackthorn, both beseeching me, one for life, the other for death, each asking for their own impossible ends. I wavered, and the gun fell a fraction of an inch. Josiah’s eyes burned as bright as his son’s as he made himself lean forward.
‘She loved you, Maya. As much as I love Lucas. I think that’s why she left.’
I broke then, dropping the gun, and fell sobbing onto the frozen, snow-covered rocks.
29
Two years later
What makes someone crazy?
It’s not a word we’re supposed to use. Everything is a disorder, a diagnosis and a treatment plan for some abstract label that’s supposed to provide meaning to the hell some of us live every day. Like knowing you’re obsessive compulsive will make your hands stop bleeding from being washed too many times. I know it’s not right, but there’s something addictive about the word. It’s visceral. It draws a line and says if you cross this, you’re out of the game. You can’t be held accountable for the mixed-up chemicals and imbalances in your head. They’ll put you -somewhere – a home, a hospital, a prison – and you can stare at yourself, or yourselves, while most of the world is happy to let you rot.
My mother couldn’t bear the weight of her life and committed suicide.
Josiah Blackthorn was afraid of ceilings and escaped into the wilderness.
Lucas raged against a society he didn’t know or want to understand.
I saw my mother in a rock and she told me to cave someone’s skull in.
Pick the crazy person. Draw the line. See, it’s easy until someone hands you the pen.
The truth is that the people on this side, the so-called sane people, don’t have it any better. Feel like crap? Too bad. Not enough money? Don’t eat. No one to love you? Boo hoo. On this side of the line you’re responsible for everything. One remark can get you fired. One bad day can destroy your life.
I’d walked both sides of the sanity line and when I was prosecuted for the crimes of kidnapping and assault, along with the laundry list of other charges, I was found competent to stand trial. I took responsibility for my bad day and prepared to pay for it with seven years of my life. At the sentencing hearing, reporters from all over the country crowded into the St. Louis County courthouse, overwhelming the bailiffs and irritating the judge. The media listened, impatient, as one by one people got up to testify. The victims had their say – Nurse Valerie soaked up the attention, the orderly I’d kicked in the throat described his injuries – but it was the main victim who everyone came to hear. Lucas took the stand with extreme discomfort. He avoided looking out into the observation area and spoke directly to the judge, telling her in carefully picked words the essentials of what happened, a trail of facts scrubbed of all depth of meaning. He’d tried to escape Congdon a number of times to return to his father. He’d formed an attachment to me, asking me to help him leave, and one night I did. We’d traveled to the Boundary Waters and found Josiah, who was gravely sick but still alive. At the end of his monotone statement, he paused and made himself turn to the sea of faces.
‘I don’t understand it here and I’m not stupid; I’m not a savage. My father and I were happy in the Boundary Waters. The only thing we wanted was to be left alone. Maya Stark gave up everything to reunite us.’ He stopped, swallowed, and faltered on the last words. ‘More even’ – he wouldn’t look at me – ‘than she thought she had.’