Now that was a half an hour well spent.’
As Officer Keisha Miller and I badged out, most of the eyes in ward two followed our every move. The normal fights over the TV had stopped, hands twitched, and several heads had sunk behind the protective barrier of the couches.
‘It wasn’t my idea.’ I’d advised Dr Mehta that Lucas wouldn’t talk to the police, but pressure from the Duluth PD and the US Forest Service had become intense, so we agreed to facilitate ‘an interview’ with Lucas. Officer Miller, our liaison police officer, had asked question after question while Lucas clenched his fists and stared out the window. ‘He’s not ready to talk to the
authorities.’
I inched her toward the stairs as she methodically folded up the Boundary Waters maps and shook her head. ‘Got a giant F U plastered to his forehead, if you ask me.’
‘He’s a forensic mental health patient.’ Three more of them were peering through the door of the ward, tracking the receding flash of the officer’s tie clip and badge.
‘I just recorded thirty minutes of me talking to a wall. The chief said they’re desperate for leads and what am I going to give him? The most I’ve done today is chase two groupies off the property.’
‘They got inside the gate?’
‘Don’t ask me how. Both of them were carrying “Free Lucas Blackthorn” signs, which is the first time I’ve seen that. We’ve gone from interest to protest and now I’m clocking more time cruising the perimeter of this place than actually inside it.’ Officer Miller’s shoes echoed in the stairwell as we descended to the first floor. Next to her, my tread was almost silent. We badged into the main hall and toward the front entrance, where shards of sunlight sliced the walls.
‘I need a favor.’
‘There were more of them this morning.’ She nodded past the doors into the parking lot and beyond. ‘He wants out and they want in.’
‘I’m trying to piece together the Blackthorns’ last days before they disappeared and I need to find a copy of a police report. Josiah Blackthorn was arrested, no charges filed, in northern Minnesota.’
She paused near the security desk, putting her hat on. ‘That’d be public record. You know how to fill out forms, right?’
‘It’s urgent. And there might be a related case, but I don’t know the details. I wouldn’t know what to request.’
The men in ward two had exhibited acute stress response symptoms at the sight of Officer Miller’s uniform. Paleness. Dilated pupils. Shaking. I kept my hands still and waited while she looked me up and down. ‘You’re his speech therapist. Your job is just to help him talk, right?’
‘Maybe it’ll give us something to talk about.’
After a beat she nodded, slipped her sunglasses on, and told me to email her the details of the arrest.
Officer Miller and I had gone through the Congdon orientation together along with a roomful of other new hires and volunteers, back when I’d first started as an orderly and she was rotating in as our liaison to the Duluth police force. For two full days we watched outdated videos and reviewed policies while she compulsively checked her phone like she was praying for a domestic disturbance to save her from the PowerPoint. I assumed she’d drawn the short straw for this gig until the end of the orientation, when Dr Mehta joined us and invited the group to share any experiences that had compelled us to work at Congdon. A moment of silence suffocated the room before, one by one, everyone started telling their stories. Someone had a bipolar friend. Another person’s father was diagnosed with an antisocial personality disorder. One of the volunteers suffered from bulimia for most of her childhood until realizing she needed help. Every person in the room spoke up except the two of us, but then – after the tissues had been passed and all the bolstering smiles began to fade – Officer Miller cleared her throat.
‘I had a brother who was off, always low, never wanted to get help, never even wanted anyone to look at him. But I saw him. I saw him right up to the first morning of his junior year when he slit his wrists in the bathtub.’ Her eyes shimmered with deep pools of tears. I’d never seen an eye hold on to that much water, refusing to let it go.
That was my cue. I should have reached out for Officer Miller’s hand or touched her forearm and told them how every night when my mother tucked me into bed I could see fault lines of pain cracking through her body, how the tighter I hugged her the more she crumbled away, as if the density of my love was too much to withstand, until one night she broke completely. She left a note on my nightstand, went to the bathroom, and ate two bottles of aspirin.
Everyone at Congdon had a story. Some of us had more than one.
‘I used to be a patient here,’ I murmured and picked at a chipped spot on the table until human resources started handing out badges and explaining the building’s layers of security.
What makes someone disappear?
After my mom’s suicide attempt, we all tried to pretend things were fine. Mom cleaned the house and lingered in the shadows outside my school, waiting to walk me home. She showed me how to make grilled cheese and ramen noodles and how to tell the difference between gabbro and basalt. We built a rock garden in a corner of the yard and I memorized every mineral, their Mohs scale hardness, whether they were igneous, sedimentary, or metamorphic, knowledge that seemed more vital than anything I was learning at school. Dad spent hours analyzing the composition of the lake bed, the shoals, all the underwater hazards that had wrecked countless ships like the Bannockburn. Maybe he thought it was something they could share, the intersection of rock and water, but we both saw how her eyes drifted off the map to places we couldn’t follow.
During Dad’s busy season in the summer, she took me up to her family cabin near the Boundary Waters, just her and me, and that’s where she seemed the strongest. We paddled through lake after lake, silent amid the towering pines that surrounded us like a cathedral, our feet baptized on the shores of every portage. When we returned to Duluth in the fall everything seemed dirtier, harder. She stopped waiting for me after school. Then one day she accepted a job conducting a copper study on the Iron Range – Minnesota’s mining belt that had once turned Duluth into a boomtown – packed a bag and left us a note saying she might not be back. Two months later she quit the job and began sending me rocks in the mail: a hunk of granite at the first snowfall, a nugget of amethyst for spring, carefully polished agates gleaming like birthday candles. I kept a rock and mineral field guide by my bed and studied them, trying to interpret whether a white hue meant purity or sorrow. Could I dissect her state of mind from an intricate banding pattern? There were never any return addresses on the boxes and the postmarks came from further and further away – North Dakota, Wyoming. I tried googling the towns, searching for her in newspaper photos and company directories, but the rocks were the only evidence she existed until one day even they stopped coming. She disappeared without a physical or digital trace. It was a gradual abandonment, like inching slowly into deeper, more frigid water until the bottom gives way. Was that better than Officer Miller’s brother, two swift cuts and a last cascade spilled neatly into the tub’s drain? They were both gone, leaving no path for anyone to follow.
If Josiah had left a path, I was going to find it.
While I waited for Officer Miller to find the arrest records, I began hunting, looking for other families who’d turned away from society. There had to be a precedent, a pattern. As the gales started battering the house, I curled up with my laptop and searched. The first and most famous case was the Lykov family of Siberia, and after I read everything I could find about them I discovered another story, this time in a different generation on a new tilt of the globe.
Ho Van Thanh had lived a quiet life until the Vietnam War spilled into his village and he watched his family die in an explosion. Some accounts said a mine blew up, others that the village came under siege by American bombers, and even the identity of the family members who died varied depending on who was telling the story, but they all agreed on what happened next. Thanh scooped up his infant son, Lang, and fled into the jungle. Eventually the war ended and life got back to normal, but Ho Van Thanh never returned. He raised Lang in a handmade treehouse where they ate corn and fruit. They caught animals in traps, made their clothes from tree bark, and every time the nearby villages grew and expanded, Thanh led his son further into the jungle, retreating almost to the top of a mountain in order to stay hidden from the world outside.
Forty years passed and Lang became the caregiver as Thanh aged and sickened. They didn’t know the war had ever ended until nearby villagers heard rumors of the men in the jungle and made contact with them. When Thanh’s condition became known, a team of people were sent to ‘rescue’ them. Thanh was forcibly carried off the mountain and Lang met the world for the first time, wide-eyed and silent. Both father and son fell into a clinical depression in the months that followed and all the viruses Lang had never encountered made him as sick as his father. It took them a year to recover and eventually they moved to a small house near their jungle. Lang adjusted to life in the village, but Thanh never did. His main ambition at eighty-seven years old was to return to the wilderness. When a reporter asked to see the place they’d lived for so many decades, Lang also jumped at the opportunity to go back and set off into the jungle without a second’s pause.
I found other stories – Timothy ‘the Grizzly Man’ Treadwell, Christopher McCandless of Alaska, and Christopher Knight, the Maine woods hermit, all loners who saw the open land as more pure and untainted by human civilization – but the Lykovs and Ho Vans were different. They were families, people bonded by love. The sacrifices they made were for each other.
I taped up pictures of the Ho Vans next to the others, my refrigerator transforming into a giant milk carton of the missing, and then stood back, squinting my eyes, letting the lines between them blur. The Lykovs and the Ho Vans were driven into the wilderness by tragedy and murder, by the ugliness of worlds they might not have survived. Something galvanized them, something they couldn’t fight or ignore.
What had galvanized Josiah? He wasn’t fleeing from religious persecution or escaping a war, but something made his son shake with fear ten years later. I won’t turn him over. I needed him to talk to me, to trust me, to tell me something more substantial than how disgusting the food was today. I was done being his breezy friend.
Agafia. Lang. Lucas. I stared at their pictures on the fridge, the children of world-abandoning decisions. They hadn’t chosen to disappear, yet they stayed. They’d remained in the wilderness for reasons beyond fear, beyond danger, because something in their environment fed them. Most children grew up hungering to see more of the world, but they had been satiated.
And just like that, I knew what to do.
Congdon wasn’t only a building; the facility boasted sprawling grounds enclosed by a ten-foot wrought-iron, spiked fence. The entrance and parking lot took up the west side, the flower and vegetable therapy gardens were shriveled with their last gourd vines in the south, and the north and east sides boasted wooded, leaf-covered trails. Grass crunched under our feet as Bryce and I walked Lucas around the building, dressed in an oversized hooded coat. I glanced at the fence every few seconds and didn’t breathe easier until we reached the evergreen cover of Congdon’s own private forest.
‘Wait here. Keep an eye out,’ I told Bryce, who shrugged and dropped onto a bench, pulling out his phone.
I led Lucas through the trees, winding our way back to a corridor of evergreens where it was darker and colder. Outside the grove the trees looked like they grew straight into the air but from within they loomed toward an invisible center point, blocking out the sun and dimming even the memory of brilliance. There were no paths in here, only layers of wet needles that infused the air with pungent decay. None of the patients who had grounds privileges came here on their walks; it was too quiet, too confined.
I stopped when the shadows engulfed us, when I couldn’t see anything beyond the trees. The sounds of traffic and a distant airplane still intruded, but at least we were hidden from any of the protesters who might be prowling the edges of the property. It was the closest thing to the Boundary Waters I could give him.
He walked a few paces further, reaching a hand out to brush a low hanging branch. Then he squatted down, both feet planted firmly in the needles, and closed his eyes. His chest rose and fell, and no one in yoga class had ever looked more at one with their universe.
‘Thank you.’ The words were barely audible.
I sat cross-legged nearby and picked up a pine cone, rolling it back and forth in my hands, waiting for him to breathe his fill. Long minutes passed, but I wasn’t impatient. He wasn’t the only one who found solace in the shadows.
Eventually he moved, exploring the dank oasis – needles, dead branches, the hard-packed ground – and then crept over to examine me, as if I was a castoff of the trees, too. He pulled on a few strands of my hair and frowned, asking what color it was supposed to be.
‘Brown.’
His eyes narrowed and then a ghost of a smile played over his face. ‘That’s ten points.’
The Grinch had been teaching him Scrabble.
‘Only if you don’t land on a bonus tile.’ I kept my hands loose in my lap. ‘And you should really start stacking your words. Do you know what “oe” is?’
He shook his head.
‘The Scrabble dictionary calls it a westerly wind. You have no chance without oe.’
He grinned, but the smile died as soon as he looked at my hair again. ‘Was it ever long?’
‘Yes.’
He drew back, as if long, brown hair frightened him. As I stared at his head, trying to figure out what was churning inside, he reached out again and picked up one of my hands, turning it over and tracing the lines of purple veins like a map he’d finally gotten permission to inspect. I let him, remaining silent until he began pressing on the pad of my thumb and watching the skin turn white before the blood flooded back into the tissue.
‘We talked last week about your father.’
No reaction, except an increase of pressure on my thumb.
‘You said no one could help you and that’s why you disap-
peared.’
Again, nothing. His head stayed stubbornly down.
‘Lucas.’ I tugged on my trapped hand. ‘What did you need help for?’
The pressure on my thumb was almost bruising now. He squeezed bone and tendon together as the red rushed in and out underneath the skin.
‘You don’t know?’ he asked my hand.
I wrenched it out of his grip, pulling him forward so he had to catch himself before landing in my lap, his face inches from mine. His pupils were almost completely dilated, his breath unsteady.
‘I wouldn’t ask you if I did.’
He drew back and began inching away, but I followed, not allowing him the avoidance. As we edged over the beds of needles, his back started to tremble.
‘I don’t know what to believe. It could be a trap. Look at you.’ He shoved a handful of dead needles in my direction. ‘I thought you were her and that’s why they sent you. To trick me into talking. But she’s not you because you’re fine. You’re right here and you’re fine and she wasn’t. She wasn’t fine.’
He backed up all the way to the base of a pine, pressing himself against the trunk and burying his head in his arms. I crept underneath the sharp branches, heart pounding.
‘Who, Lucas? Who are you talking about?’
He raised his head. ‘Santa’s bag. She was draped over his shoulder, all wrapped up like a bag of toys.’
‘Who?’
Lucas stared into the branches with unfocused eyes and a tremor rocked him back and forth before he swallowed and said in a plain, low voice.
‘The body.’
I saw it in a flash, a woman’s lifeless form thrown over a shoulder, her long brown hair swinging toward the ground. Obstruction of justice and an escape from the world, to a place where justice didn’t exist.
‘Lucas, tell me about her. Did you know who she was?’ I grabbed his arm and the contact yanked him from his memories and sent him reeling back, hitting his head against the pine.
‘I don’t know where she is.’
‘Lucas.’ I made my voice as calm as possible, inching closer. ‘Stay with me here. It’s okay. I’m the last person in the world who would—’
Without warning he pulled my feet out from underneath me. My spine hit the ground and a rock grazed my head. The white noise of crunching needles made me roll over to see Lucas sprinting out of the trees.
Shouting for Bryce, I scrambled through the underbrush. When I broke into the clearing near the fence Lucas had already climbed three fourths of the way to the top.
‘Don’t do this, Lucas!’ I jumped for his leg, but he kicked me off and I stumbled back. ‘This isn’t the way.’
He chanted as he climbed, hoisting one foot in between the spikes, and it was only when he turned back to look at me that I caught what he was saying.
‘I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m sorry.’
‘Don’t. Be. Sorry.’ I grunted as I hauled myself up an iron post and locked a hand over his trailing ankle. ‘Be. Better.’
He tried to lift his body over the spikes, but I let go of the bar with my other hand and wrapped both around his foot. If he was going to escape, he’d have to haul me out with him.
A bang sounded right behind my head. I couldn’t look. ‘Bryce?’ More scrambling, scraping, a heavy breath, and just as Lucas pulled me up another foot, hoisting his torso over the top of the spikes with a Herculean effort, an arm shoved its way over my body and connected with Lucas’s shin. I don’t remember the actual contact. I saw the arm, thick and blotchy, and something clutched in the hand. A round black device, like a flashlight, but I knew it wasn’t a flashlight. Before I could let go of Lucas’s ankle, the current hit me and an overpowering clicking noise pounded the walls of my brain. Everything seized. My body turned into one solid contraction – muscles, tendons, and nerves all fused together. I was frozen, glued to Lucas’s foot except there was no foot, there wasn’t anything except a giant master power switch that had been flipped on inside my body and the relentless click, click, clicks that shot lightning from my head. An eternity passed before someone turned off the switch and all my muscles gave out.
The dull smack of the ground was a relief. I lay on the dead leaves with my legs twisted underneath me as my senses blinked back into focus, brain foggy but blissfully quiet. Someone ran through the leaves, crunching a frantic trail away from me and a voice began shouting in the distance. I rolled over and forced my arms, which felt like I’d been carrying my weight in granite, to brace me up. When I looked toward the fence, I saw what the yelling was for.
Lucas’s body lay on the sidewalk through the bars and a spreading line of red snaked out from underneath his skull.