Lucas!’
I crawled to the fence and reached through the bars to shake his arm, but he was too far away. His body was crumpled toward the street and the thick gray coat prevented me from even seeing if his chest was rising. I kept repeating his name, telling him to stay with me as I worked to pull the phone out of my jeans pocket. It seemed impossible to extract. Every muscle in my body felt weak. Just as I finally worked it free a thundering of feet sounded from the sidewalk outside the fence and two security guards and Bryce descended on Lucas’s still-as-death form.
Bryce felt his throat – ‘He’s alive!’ – and then started to push him to his back.
‘Don’t move him!’
‘I’m not!’ Bryce drew back and glanced at the security guard who paced the sidewalk and checked each direction of the street every two seconds. The other one clutched a phone to his head, muttering answers to the person on the line while he stared at the blood trailing along the sidewalk. I was on the wrong side of the fence, trapped. I wanted to run to the entrance and double back along the street, except one – I didn’t dare leave Lucas alone with these guys, and two – I honestly didn’t know if my legs worked properly yet.
‘What the hell were you thinking, tasing him ten feet off the ground? You could have killed him.’
‘What was I supposed to do?’ Bryce fired back. ‘You nearly let him escape. Awesome plan, Maya. They teach you that in therapy school?’
Arguing with morons was like kicking a boulder; your feet would bleed before you found a fissure, but anger with Bryce was the only thing keeping the terror at bay. Bloody feet were all I had.
‘I had his foot. You could’ve called security, or didn’t they teach you how to ask for help in kindergarten?’
We traded insults for another minute until one of the security guards stopped pacing and waved his arms in wild circles. An ambulance sped to a halt in front of us right as Nurse Valerie jogged down the sidewalk with two of Lucas’s fans right behind her. The medics and Valerie examined Lucas while the security guards fought to push back the fans who were arguing about the right to peaceful assembly and holding their phones up, trying to catch as much as they could on camera. I struggled to hear the medical team’s comments. Broken shoulder. Laceration near the temple. Multiple contusions. And then – making me release a giant breath I hadn’t known I was holding – pulse stable.
As they loaded Lucas into the ambulance I stood up and immediately fell into the iron bars. The tingling ache in my body raced into my left ankle, concentrating itself into a massive throb.
‘Are you okay, miss?’ A medic appeared on the other side of the fence.
‘I’m fine.’ I batted him off and took a lurching step sideways to prove it. ‘Go.’
‘She’s the other tase,’ Bryce said, like his only responsibility for this situation was standing off to the side making up bullshit words.
‘Follow us to St Mary’s,’ the medic ordered before climbing in the back and shutting the doors. The ambulance took off, lights and siren blaring.
‘You shouldn’t walk on that, Maya,’ Valerie was saying, but I’d already turned and begun limp-running to the building.
I ducked through the pines, putting as little weight on my left side as possible but every step felt like shoving my foot into a raging bonfire. Tears were streaming down my face by the time I retrieved my bag out of my locker, limped back to the parking lot, and got to my car. I fumbled the keys out, thanking God and Buddha and Henry Ford for designing cars with all the pedals on the right. As Nurse Valerie ran after me with an ACE bandage, I waved her off and gunned the car out of the lot and into the residential streets, zigzagging my way down the hill to St Mary’s hospital while my hands shook on the steering wheel. My only thought, as my phone buzzed incessantly from somewhere at the end of a long tunnel, was getting to Lucas.
A brace, four hours, and five refusals of ibuprofen later, I sat in Lucas’s hospital room waiting for him to wake up. Dr Mehta didn’t look much better than me when she arrived. She’d been presenting at a conference in Rochester when she got the call and drove straight to Duluth, only stopping to pick up her luggage at the hotel. As I filled her in with what I knew, the attending doctor stopped by to check on Lucas.
‘He’s incredibly lucky to be alive. The fall could have been fatal, but he’s going to walk away with only minor fractures to the skull and shoulder, and likely a concussion, although we had some difficulty assessing that.’
Lucas stirred behind us, clanking his handcuffs against the bars of the hospital bed and groaning softly. I watched him until he quieted back down, half listening to the two of them discuss his test results, expected recovery time, and eventual transfer back to Congdon. My phone hadn’t stopped buzzing since I’d left Congdon and I reluctantly checked the sites, already knowing what I would find.
The video was posted to the Facebook fan page, a forty-five second clip of the medics hovering over Lucas, trying to zoom in on his face, and then panning over to me laying behind the fence and Bryce hulking in the background. Three hundred people had already commented and, scrolling through the noise, I caught Bryce’s name being mentioned and at least one of the guards. Swallowing, I felt a hand touch my shoulder.
‘You’ve been here the whole time?’
The attending doctor had returned to his rounds, leaving the two of us alone next to Lucas’s bed.
‘Look at this.’ I tilted the phone. ‘It’ll be on the evening news.’
‘Yes, I was talking to the board on the way here, discussing the best way to handle the publicity.’
The sound of metal on metal came again. Even in sleep Lucas was restless. They said he was awake for the CAT scan but refused to answer any of their assessment questions about concussion symptoms, and the IV of pain medication had sent him back to la-la land before I gained access to see him.
‘I’m curious about your decision to take Lucas outside, given his case history,’ Dr Mehta asked.
I turned to the window. Only a sliver of Superior was visible above the old brick Victorians of downtown and the water looked gray, like a storm was coming in. ‘I thought he would feel more comfortable surrounded by trees instead of walls.’
‘And did he?’
‘Yes, at first. We talked about Scrabble and then he told me a bit about his childhood.’ Dr Mehta’s gaze followed me as I sat down. Her reading glasses were still balanced on the end of her nose from when she’d been looking over the chart and I felt like a specimen in a petri dish, another lab result she could trust for answers. My skin felt too tight and a sickness began contracting my stomach.
‘Did he give you any more details about his father?’
‘No,’ I lied.
‘I know you’ve had a traumatic day yourself, but can you pinpoint any correlation between your discussion and what made him attempt to escape again?’
The body. A body with long, brown hair. The sack of toys that wasn’t worth turning his father over.
I glanced at the bed and pretended to think as I searched Lucas’s face where dark bruises began to ring his eye sockets. My stomached pitched. Then I shook my head, meeting the hope and expectation in Dr Mehta’s face.
‘Nothing obvious. His childhood memories were pleasant – I guess they had a dog at one point – so unless he’s triggered by Scrabble, he must have been waiting for an opportunity. I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have attempted it.’
Dr Mehta shook her head and motioned for me to come with her. ‘It was a good instinct. I see why you tried it.’
She opened the door and held my arm to help me down the hall. Her touch, the warm, dry comfort of it, was hard to accept.
‘If you remember anything else about the session, something that may have upset him . . .’
I nodded, seeing only the bright red exit sign at the end of the hall. ‘I know what to do.’
The next morning I got a frantic text from Dad with a link to the video of Lucas, which had aired on all four local news stations and who knew how many more across the state and country. I spent fifteen minutes calming him down and telling him not to cut the Bannockburn expedition short, and I arrived late for my shift at Congdon to find Officer Miller waiting for me. She sized up the brace on my ankle, but didn’t comment on it, handing me a thick manila envelope instead.
‘That was fast.’ I unfastened it and peeked inside at the fat stack of paper.
‘I looked the stuff over to see if it might help with the search but didn’t see anything useful.’ She crossed her arms. ‘Arresting officer’s information is on the top, in case you need anything else, and don’t feed me any crap like you don’t know how to make a phone call. I checked on you, too.’
I didn’t know what to say. It was impossible to lie or play it off, but I couldn’t talk about my time in Ely, no more than I could’ve called their police station to request this case file myself. Silently, I re-clasped the envelope and hugged it to my chest.
When it became clear I wasn’t going to offer any explanations, Officer Miller sighed and straightened her hat, nodding once before leaving. ‘Happy reading.’
There was no time to go through it before my shift started. I stored the envelope in my locker and thought about nothing else during my morning sessions. Every hour dragged. I barely heard the jokes about how ‘shocking’ my ankle looked or whether I was going to be the Bride of Frankenstein for Halloween. Even one of my aphasia patients, Greta, had to throw flashcards at me to get my attention. When it was finally noon, followed by what was supposed to be an hour-long session with Lucas, I grabbed the envelope and hobbled to my car, driving to the hospital without a word to anyone.
The nurses’ station let me into Lucas’s room and gave me an update. He’d been awake all night as the nurses – accompanied by security guards – administered drips, drew blood, and checked his vitals while he watched with a ‘creepy intensity’ that made most of them hand the next round off to someone else. When I arrived he’d finally fallen asleep; he seemed to be dreaming, mumbling and shifting restlessly in bed. I helped myself to the pudding, roll, and juice on his untouched lunch tray, ignoring the meat-product that smelled identical to what we fed our patients, while pulling out the contents of the manila envelope on the other, unoccupied bed. As I chewed and read, the pieces slowly came together.
Heather Price, a twice divorced dental receptionist in Ely, was reported missing after she didn’t show up for work for two days. Her duplex was empty, but the police found clothes belonging to a man and boy in the side she rented out – my heart rate picked up – when they conducted their search. According to neighbors, she lived alone. While they were searching the home, the police encountered Josiah Blackthorn, who’d just returned from a camping trip in the Boundary Waters. When asked about Ms Price, Josiah lied. He claimed he hadn’t seen her since he’d last paid rent, a story that was disproved by two neighbors who’d witnessed them fighting. Believing he was somehow connected to the woman’s disappearance, the police arrested Josiah for obstruction of justice.
And Lucas? I flipped through pages, skimming for any mention of the boy’s location while his father was locked up, but there was nothing. A scared nine-year-old had no place in a criminal report.
Two days after the arrest Heather’s body was found. She’d died behind a house in the nearby town of Virginia and the medical examiner put her date of death within the time frame Josiah’s camping permit said he was in the Boundary Waters. Heroin was found in her body, the death was ruled an accidental overdose, and within a week the Blackthorns disappeared.
At the bottom of the pile of papers were a series of photographs, mostly shots of the corpse and the townhouse, but the last one looked like a print of an ID badge from her job. The woman smiled at the camera with gaunt cheekbones and too-white teeth, her face framed by perfectly styled, flowing brown hair.
I stared at the picture and then jumped when a nurse and the security guard strode into the room. She glanced at the empty food containers on top of my stacks of papers and raised an eyebrow as she adjusted monitors and changed the IV drip.
‘Has he woken up since you’ve been here?’ she asked.
‘No, just a lot of that.’ I motioned to his twitching hands as he unconsciously pulled against the restraints.
‘You could try talking to him, but I’d stay on that side of the room if I were you. Chocolate pudding isn’t worth an assault.’
‘Depends on the pudding.’
‘Not that pudding.’ After tucking the sheet in and recording his vitals, the two of them left me staring at Lucas’s form, wishing I could take her advice.
I needed to talk to someone and I wished – for maybe the first time since I’d been committed – that I had a friend, someone I could trust. The street kids I ran with before Congdon had all heard what happened and avoided me like the plague after I got out. I started taking college classes in high school, with no time for pep rallies or clubs, and by the time I officially started at the university I was already a sophomore. Then it was all about getting accepted into the speech pathology Master’s program, and the few friends I made there were largely study partners. We bonded over anatomy and assistive technology, and we hugged each other goodbye after graduation. Dr Mehta called my lack of social support an attachment disorder. I never really cared about it until now.
Lucas’s head lolled toward me on his pillow. A dusting of beard colored his cheeks, which looked more sunken than yesterday. His wrists were raw from unconscious fights with the handcuffs. Grabbing a bottle from a side table, I picked up his hand and carefully rubbed some lotion over the red welts, feeling his pulse thrum in time to the blips on the monitor. As I finished one side, his fingers twitched and closed over mine.
‘Lucas?’ I leaned closer. ‘Can you hear me?’
His head flopped away, but his fingers tightened.
‘I need you to wake up. Do you know the name Heather Price?’ I said it again, studying his face for any reaction. Another head jerk and a few mumbled words. Nothing I could decipher. I moved to his other wrist, trying to figure out why I was playing nursemaid to an unconscious, difficult patient who only gave me injuries and riddles. His wrists were warm, though, and for a second I tried to remember the last time I’d reached out and voluntarily touched another person outside of work. No memory came to mind. I glanced at the door to make sure we were alone before carefully closing my hand around his and drawing it to my coat.
‘I’m here, see? I’m right here, but you’ve got to wake your lazy ass up.’ Then I dropped my voice even further and admitted what I would never say to anyone conscious. The reason I was standing here with lotion-covered hands.
‘I miss talking to you.’
My time was up; I had to get back to Congdon before the afternoon sessions began. Capping the bottle, I limped over to scoop up the police papers and stuff them away, then – on an impulse – I left the picture of Heather Price on Lucas’s bedside table, writing a note on top of it in thick black marker.
Her?
– Maya
Eight hours later I pulled up to the house and forced myself to get out of the car. In my first afternoon session one of the female patients stomped on my ankle, laying me out flat and all I could think as I gasped and clutched it was that I should have known better than to wear the brace; some people looked at Achilles and only saw a heel. I used a crutch from Nurse Valerie for the rest of the day, refused the ibuprofen she tried to give me, and spent the drive home counting the number of incident reports I’d had to file in the last two weeks. My phone buzzed with an incoming call from Dr Mehta, but I let it go to voicemail and pulled up in front of the house. At least the day was over. All I had to do now was get myself from the car to my bed. No problem.
I kept up the silent pep talk as I hobbled through the gate toward the house, where Jasper barked with manic excitement. As soon as I opened the door he shot out to pee without even a sniff or a lick hello.
‘Sorry, Jazz. I know it was a long day.’ Guilt wormed its way through the pain as I waited for him to take care of business, until a voice too close to me said –
‘Long, but interesting.’
I whipped around, peering through the shadows to see Lucas standing by my front steps.