I didn’t remember falling to the floor or clawing at the sudden burst of pain in my abdomen. One minute Lucas was across the room, the next he was prying my fingers off my side, his face too close, the breaking glass of the picture frame still echoing against the walls of the cabin.
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.
‘There’s two of them. They’re following our tracks back to Harry’s house.’
I still couldn’t move. Lucas watched from the shadows, eyes trained on the neighboring property.
‘It doesn’t look like Harry’s answering his door. They’re walking around his house, too.’ A pause. Waiting. ‘Now they’re back in the driveway. They’re looking at the cars. One of them is wiping snow off the back of ours.’
‘They’re running the license plate.’ I covered my face, trying to steady my breath. If Butch hadn’t come home and reported his car missing yet, there wouldn’t be an immediate link. We might have a few hours, a day tops, before they put the pieces together and got a warrant. They’d find me, arrest me, and send me where I’d been heading before Congdon had stepped in all those years ago and postponed the inevitable. At least my mother would never know. She’d never have to witness what her daughter had become.
‘They’re coming back now. One of them is on the phone.’
I wiped my leaking eyes, fighting for control. Lucas, fixated on the threat outside, kept narrating the policemen’s progress in a low whisper. One was taking a photo. The other came back to a ground floor window and tried peering inside again. Turning away from the bouncing flashlight beam, I caught a glimpse of something under the bed, an object that – in one swift moment – wiped every tremor from my body and left behind a piercing calm.
The police car’s engine fired to life in the driveway on the other side of the house.
‘Go check, make sure they’re both leaving together.’
Lucas obeyed without question, creeping silently across the carpet and down the stairs. As soon as his head disappeared below the floor of the loft, I reached underneath the bed and pulled out the gun.
We hurried back to Harry’s house, this time pulling pine branches behind us to obliterate our tracks. Lucas kept a cautious distance from me. We’d spoken little since the cops left and then only logistics: when it was safe to come out, how long we’d have until they’d be back, our next steps. The magnitude of what just happened in the cabin haunted his every look, but the police hunt snapped us back to the present danger.
‘Maybe you’re right. Maybe I should go alone,’ he said as we made our way through the trees.
‘I’m coming.’
‘But you’re still hur—’
‘I’m coming.’ Gaze forward, I felt the weight of the gun bumping my hip with every step, the missing gun from the boathouse, the one I’d desperately been searching for the day I’d come here with Derek and Rex. I finally found it. My mind raced with reasons it had been moved, and every version circled back to the same basic motivation; she’d felt scared and wanted to protect herself. A decade later, the gun lay unused under her bed and her body was rotting wherever Josiah Blackthorn had dumped it.
As we approached the house Harry appeared in the woods coming up from the lake, carrying strings of charred, brown fish. He waved them at us. ‘How’s about some smoked trout chowder?’
‘The police were here, Harry.’ I glanced down the hill, gauging the distance of his fish house to the main cabin. It was possible he hadn’t heard them, especially since they’d walked over instead of driving.
He didn’t comment on it, didn’t even seem interested that the police had been here. Instead he pulled open the cabin door and let it thwack against the siding. ‘Come on, you can chop some onions.’
The pain started getting the better of me as we helped Harry prepare dinner, so I changed the bandage and took half a pill. I didn’t want to be foggy or jeopardize the absolute clarity the gun had given me, but I also couldn’t be crumpled in pain on the couch while Lucas disappeared into the wilderness, either. He might suspect enough to never emerge again.
I peeked around the blanket hanging over the front window every ninety seconds and stopped cold whenever I heard an engine in the distance.
‘We go tonight, after Harry’s asleep,’ I murmured as we set the table, my attention deliberately focused on laying spoons one by one at each chair.
Lucas paused, holding chipped mugs of water. He wanted me to look at him, to let him in, but I couldn’t. Finally, after I took the water out of his hands and finished the place settings, he whispered. ‘I don’t know where we are, in relation to him.’
That turned out to be no problem. Harry was happy to produce a tattered old Boundary Waters map as we ate chowder, pointing out his favorite fishing spots. Lucas studied our location and let his eyes move over the terrain, jumping from lake to lake, finding our route. He nodded almost imperceptibly after handing it back, while I stirred the congealing contents of my bowl. The food was good, but I had no appetite, no interest in anything besides the comfort of metal against my ankle. The gun, which I’d transferred to my boot in the bathroom, had absorbed so much body heat that now it was warming me.
After dinner, we moved to the couch – Harry relaxing on one side while Lucas and I sat rigidly on the other. Harry flipped the TV on and we watched a reality show that I absorbed absolutely nothing from, instead watching the clock with obsessive focus, and waiting for Harry to get tired. As soon as the show ended, the local news came on.
My entire body jumped as Lucas’s face filled the screen.
‘Still no word tonight in the missing persons case of Lucas Blackthorn. Blackthorn, who was rescued from the Boundary Waters after being presumed dead for the last ten years, was kidnapped from Congdon Psychiatric Facility where he had been recuperating since his now famous return to society.
‘Authorities believe this woman’ – my Congdon badge picture flashed on the screen, complete with extra spiky maroon hair and deadpan eyes – ‘is responsible for removing the patient in the middle of the night, injuring a guard and destroying some hospital property in the process.’
The screen flipped to the news anchor, but both our pictures hovered over her shoulder, refusing to fade away. ‘A substantial reward is being offered for any information that can lead to Lucas Blackthorn’s recovery. Please call this number at the bottom of the screen or contact your local authorities.’
They moved to the next story, which was the weather. They always opened with the weather. Why hadn’t they opened with the freaking weather? I could have reacted then – made Harry change the station before it was too late.
I felt Lucas looking at me, but my eyes were glued to Harry. He’d sat motionless through the whole thing, legs sprawled, fingers linked across his flannel shirt. Another story passed, then another. I kept waiting for him to say something, but he was like a statue – Hermit in Repose – and no hint of what he was thinking crossed his face. At the first commercial break, Harry finally broke his position and sat up tall, reaching his arms toward the ceiling in an exaggerated stretch. Was I crazy or was he refusing to make eye contact with us?
‘Well, I’m to bed.’
‘Harry—’ I started, not knowing what should come next.
He stood up and nodded vaguely toward us as we sat frozen on the couch, waiting for him to make a move.
‘Get some rest, Maya. You need your energy.’
I couldn’t tell if he was offering to protect us or trying to get out of the room so he could make that call, the call that would send us tumbling into the bowels of the world, Lucas back to the Congdon and me to prison.
‘Harry, it’s not what it looks like.’
He chuckled, flipping the TV off. To hear us better from his room? ‘Looks like a couple of nervous kids in trouble. I could have told you that when you staggered in here yesterday. Rest up, okay?’
And then he was gone, shuffling to his bedroom at the end of the hall. He shut the door, but his light stayed on.
I turned to Lucas, who looked as unsure as I felt. ‘We have to go. Now.’