17
Modern science says: ‘The sun is the past, the earth is
the present, the moon is the future.’ From an incandescent mass we have originated, and into a frozen mass we shall turn. Merciless is the law of nature, and rapidly and
irresistibly we are drawn to our doom.
– Nikola Tesla
Josiah
Damaged people recognized their own. Josiah could smell it on Heather Price as she led him and Lucas through the vacant apartment.
‘The ad said it was furnished.’ He opened a few cupboards and glanced in the fridge, where a brown ring stained one of the empty shelves. A folding table and two chairs sat under the bare bulb in the dining room, coated in a fine layer of dust.
‘There’s a bed.’ Lucas, already far ahead of the adults, reported from one of the bedrooms.
‘Partially furnished.’ Heather held her elbows and walked to the couch in the living room. ‘You’re not going to find that in Ely at this price. Trust me.’
She pivoted and gave him another once-over without any attempt to disguise what she was doing, her gaze settling somewhere near his wallet. Her hair was limp and tangled, falling almost to her waist, and any luster it might have possessed had leached out a long time ago. Her skin looked brittle, her movements jerky, and it seemed like all the life in her had been sucked into those too-bright reptilian eyes. For someone who’d moved as many times as he had, Josiah had seen plenty of landlords and no matter what the exterior looked like they all spoke the same language.
‘Two hundred and fifty a month? I can give you the first and last month today.’
She backed into the shadows, unblinking. ‘I told you the first month is free.’
‘Dad, the toilet sounds like a frog. Come listen!’ Lucas called from another room.
He glanced at the trampled carpet, the yellowing walls, and the hook in the corner of the ceiling where someone had maybe tried to hang a plant once, as if a tiny gasp of green could make any improvement to the place.
‘Nothing’s free. You can put it toward a damage deposit if you want.’
That made her blink and after a fraction of a pause she reached a hand out of the shadows. He didn’t want to, but he shook it.
Over the next few weeks, he and Lucas settled into the duplex and bought their usual necessities – sheets, toilet paper, bleach – lots of bleach – and also found a secondhand canoe that they stored in the living room. Lucas did his homework every night in the belly of the boat, balancing his worksheets and library books on the thwarts and afterward he wrote and illustrated stories about their adventures, which always ended with treasure and ice cream. Josiah taped all his stories to the walls, next to maps of places they’d been, places they were planning to go, and some places they could only imagine.
They did everything together – cooking, grocery shopping, spending afternoons at the library to surf the Internet and read back issues of National Geographic. He refused to leave him with strangers. The entire concept of exchanging money for childcare hinted too much of his own childhood and then there was the other problem; when Lucas was out of sight, a quiet panic began building in Josiah’s chest. When Josiah had to work evenings, his boss let Lucas hang out in the office. He got up at least once a night to watch the hypnotic rise and fall of his son’s chest and sometimes when he woke up, Lucas’s frame was illuminated in his own doorway, checking on him, too. When he was younger he asked questions from those shadowy doorways. ‘What was Mom’s favorite holiday?’ ‘Did she like cats or dogs better?’ By the time they moved to Ely, though, Lucas just blinked sleep-swollen eyes and turned around, heading back to burrow into his bed. Josiah worried about his son’s lack of friends. He knew what it was like to grow up alone, but every time he mentioned it Lucas scoffed. ‘I’m not alone. I’ve got you, Dad.’ And for the rest of the day he would stand a little closer, talk a little more, showing Josiah with every word and action that there was nothing missing. Together they formed their own discrete ecosystem.
Within their first month in Ely, it became obvious Heather Price was part of no such community. No visitors came in or out of her side of the duplex. She never spent time outside and when Josiah found a citation for yard maintenance in their mailbox, he had to knock on her door for a solid minute before she answered and then she tumbled into an incoherent speech about mayors and her work schedule and neighbors who were trying to repossess her house. Josiah left her mid-rant and found a broken lawn mower in the garage, showed Lucas how to take it apart and fix it, and then mowed the tiny lawn every week until the snow came. Heather watched him from her window, her seemingly lidless eyes following his every move. Lucas studied her in his turn and, like a budding naturalist, called out his observations from their living room window. ‘It’s Work Heather today’ or other days ‘Ugh, Home Heather’ and the two were easy to differentiate. Work Heather had wet hair pulled back into a ponytail and white lab coats frayed at the edges; she stumbled down the street toward some job that required breath mints and hastily applied lipstick. Home Heather, the one they’d seen during the duplex tour, rarely went anywhere and when they did run into her outside it felt somehow calculated. She fawned over Lucas, who at nine years old was long past the age when boys wanted to be fawned over, petting his hair and telling him bizarre facts about his classmates as Lucas jerked out of her spindle-armed reach.
Then, as winter set in, the price of her free rent started coming due. She began asking for money early each month, knocking on their door at two in the morning when they both worked the next day, always with a reason ready – the utility company was screwing her over or she’d gotten scammed by a credit card collector. When that didn’t work she started offering up her body, not like a barter so much as something she wanted to be rid of. Josiah stopped answering the door. He listened to the knocking while lying in bed, staring at the water stains spreading over the bedroom ceiling like an insidious cancer.
In a perfect world Josiah would have helped her, invited her into his life and tried to show her she was worth something, but in reality he just wanted her to stay as far away as possible from him and his son. At the very least they should’ve moved, they should’ve packed up and found some other place in Ely or even Babbitt, which was only twenty minutes down the road, but two hundred and fifty a month was dirt cheap. He was saving more than ever, stockpiling money for all the things Lucas might someday need – casts for broken bones, his first car, college tuition, or maybe a trip around the world. He might actually be able to see the Amazon or the Nile, all the rivers he pretended to navigate from the carpet-grounded canoe in their living room. So they stayed. He shot down Heather’s advances, installed a chain lock on their door, and put the cash in her mailbox on the first of every month. It didn’t take someone with his police record to smell the trouble reeking from the holes in her arms. He itched to move on, counting down the days until Lucas finished third grade, and in the meantime they found sanctuary in the Boundary Waters.
Camping most weekends and on school holidays, they explored the giant wilderness where civilization was strictly prohibited. No motorized boats. No cans. No bottles. Any stain of human habitation had to be scrubbed when you left. It was the guiding principle, the bedrock rule for entering the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness, a place that changed even the language people used to describe it. When passing other paddlers, everyone asked the same questions. ‘When did you come in?’ ‘When do you go out?’ The paradigm shift was subtle, but complete. This world where bear and moose still roamed, where loons cried like melancholy ghosts and the Milky Way raged overhead in a storm of shadows and stars, this place was the pulse, the center, the inside, and everything else, the stuff people built their lives on, was merely the out.
They camped from the end of summer through the fall, and in the winter Josiah bought his first auger and they taught themselves how to ice fish. Robert Anderson, the man who’d sold them their canoe and the auger, helped them map out some of the best spots to tap the labyrinths of underwater boulders and find the elusive winter fish. They experimented with snow packed tents, heaters, and chimney positions, testing the limits of snowshoes and sleds. Sometimes entire days passed during which they’d hardly spoken a word, bundled up in their hoods and scarves, but they worked together with an implicit understanding, shifting positions on the sled with a touch on the shoulder, signaling a firewood expedition with just a nod to a shrinking pile of kindling. Lucas seemed wise beyond his years and Josiah watched, awestruck, as he grew stronger by the day. Subzero temperatures didn’t faze him. He paced his strides to Josiah’s, reaching his legs longer and farther, and then giggled – transformed into a nine-year-old boy again – when he fell over into a pile of fresh powder. The kids at his school played sports and video games, and when Josiah asked if he wanted to get a Wii, Lucas shook his head and frowned. ‘Why would I want to sit around and pretend to do things when we really do them?’ It wasn’t a question either Blackthorn could answer.
On the first day of Lucas’s spring break, they packed for a weeklong trip and set out on the freshly thawed Fall Lake but had to turn around when Josiah remembered he’d been in such a hurry to leave he’d forgotten their tent. Laughing, they drove back to town and Josiah told Lucas to stay in the truck while he jogged inside the duplex only to find Heather trying to break into the safe where he stored all his cash.
‘What the fuck?’
She panicked and bolted for the door. Grabbing her, he dragged her out of the bedroom and threw her into the wall in the hallway. She bounced off it, unfazed by the pain or maybe too far gone to even feel it. Her eyes were bloodshot and the corner of her mouth was cracked and scabbed over. She screamed and swore at him, accusing him of withholding rent, of stealing from her, and threatened to call the police. He pushed her back into the wall, and right as he heard the satisfying crack of her head against the plaster, there was another noise, this time from behind him.
‘Dad?’
He whipped around and saw Lucas wavering in the front door. His eyes were wider than Josiah had ever seen them, but his narrow shoulders tensed and shifted, squaring up, ready to come to his father’s aid.
‘Get back in the car.’
Lucas hesitated, his hands creeping into trembling fists at his sides, before Josiah barked the order again and he jerked backward, running to the truck that was still idling in the driveway.
‘It’s just a few bucks.’ Heather’s voice was broken, panting. ‘Just a loan. I gave you a free month’s rent, remember? You owe me. I’ll pay you back on Tuesday, as soon as I get my next check.’ Then with barely a pause for air, ‘I took you in with no questions, no applications, or background checks, and everyone knows you’re a goddamn felon. Get your hands off me. I’m calling the police.’
He gave her one last bone-crunching push into the wall and walked back to the safe, emptying the whole thing in front of her, stuffing thousands of dollars in a bag with the tent just so she could smell the ink before tossing two hundred-dollar bills at her face.
‘There’s our first month’s rent, minus lawn mowing fees. Go put that in your fucking arm.’ He didn’t know how much heroin cost, but two hundred dollars had to be enough to keep her high and out of his house for the rest of the week. Dragging her across the living room to the patio door, where Lucas wouldn’t be able to see them, he shoved her out onto the concrete. ‘When we get back from this trip, we’re moving out.’
Then she raged about the lease and taking him to court, hitting him with the wadded-up bills clutched in her fist until he swatted her off and she fell into a heap on the filthy remains of last winter’s snow. Neither of them saw the neighbors frozen in their kitchen window, one holding a coffee cup suspended halfway to his mouth and the other bent over the sink as the unexpected altercation spilled into their weekday breakfast routine. Josiah wouldn’t find that out until seventy-two hours later when the police interrogated him, telling him he was the last person to see Heather Price alive.