‘This is Duluth.’ I pointed out Congdon’s location on the summit of the hill, overlooking the entire city, then showed him some of the main areas and landmarks. After watching my finger trace roads and parks for a while, he asked where I lived, so I pointed to my neighborhood and talked about it. To my surprise, he started asking questions. How long had I lived in Duluth? Could I see the water from my house? Did I like watching the ships? Did I live alone? He processed everything I said before asking the next thing, and the next thing, and by the time I looked at my watch the entire hour had almost elapsed.
My heart kicked up as I reached into the bag for the other map and carefully unfolded it over the top of Duluth. This map was a wash of blues and greens, charting over a million acres that stretched along the Canadian border for almost a hundred and fifty miles. The lakes squiggled over the page, pouring into each other in rapids and waterfalls, creating endless waterways dotted with islands and hugged by fat peninsulas. The land was a sea of pine, fir, and spruce towering over the water, an evergreen empire built on less than one foot of topsoil before their roots hit solid granite. I knew those shorelines and shadows, could hear the loons calling each other, and feel the razor gaze of the eagles soaring overhead. No matter how long you stayed away, the Boundary Waters never left you.
Lucas recognized it immediately, I could tell, but instead of leaning closer and engaging as he’d done with Duluth, he braced himself against the back of the chair.
‘It’s your turn.’ I spread the map out, trying to make my voice as smooth as the paper. ‘Tell me about your home.’
He was frozen for a moment, then he sprung out of his chair and began pacing along the back wall, his shoulders tensed, hands fisted. My mind raced, wanting the answers only he knew but afraid to push him too far and risk an episode that would keep him locked in isolation. I took a deep breath and spoke as calmly as I could.
‘How long did you live in the Boundary Waters?’ I parroted his question to me back at him.
He spun away and started tracing the wall, as if searching for fault lines. I waited, holding my breath. Then, just when I thought he’d gone nonverbal again, he spoke.
‘Ten years.’
Two words, and they opened up a hundred questions in my mind. How did he know it was that long? Did someone tell him when he’d arrived at Congdon or had he used some kind of calendar? Maybe he’d counted, winter by bone shuddering winter. Ignoring the impulse to press further, I moved to the next question he’d asked me.
‘Could you see the water from your home?’
He turned and, registering my small smile, caught on to the game we were playing. I waited, while he decided how he was going to handle round two. After a flickering glance at the map, he nodded.
Which lake? I wanted to know. There were hundreds, water in every direction; water was the highway of the Boundary Waters. But again, I repressed the bubbling questions.
‘Did you like watching the canoes?’
Another nod, and this one didn’t surprise me. Some of the reporters had speculated on whether he’d been lost, painting melodramatic pictures of a boy trapped in the wilderness, desperate and alone, and maybe it could have been true for the space of one winter when campers were few and far between. In the summer, though, someone was always paddling quietly through the pristine woods. For a boy with the endurance to survive, help would have been easy to find. He hadn’t reached out – he hadn’t been lost. The Bigfoot stories, the wild man in the woods, were probably born of glimpses of Lucas skirting the edges of the campsites, watching the parade of humans from a comfortable distance.
Then, the question we both knew was coming next.
‘Did you live alone?’
I stood up and moved around the table, closing the distance between us. Lucas backed into the wall and something dark flashed across his face.
‘Ten years ago your father, Josiah Blackthorn, took you camping in the Boundary Waters. You were nine years old. He was thirty-six. No one saw either of you again. Your campsite was found ravaged by what looked like a large predator, maybe a bear, and even though you’ve both been on the missing persons list all this time, everyone assumed you were dead.’
I thought of the photo they kept posting on the news, a half-lit shot of the dark-haired man and boy sitting on a dock. As a boy, Lucas had been slender and bright-eyed, leaning into his father’s side and grinning at the camera while the man stared past the lens toward the lake. The picture had been taken at a park in Iowa, three months before they disappeared.
‘Do you remember your father?’
He let out a gunshot of a laugh, void of any humor, and his jaw trembled. There were memories – vicious, raging memories.
‘How long was he with you? When did you last see him?’
He locked his eyes on mine, exhaled unsteadily and spoke.
‘Fifteen days ago.’
I took another step forward, my mouth dropping open.
‘You’ve been together all these years? He’s alive?’
His head dropped and his voice came low and clipped. ‘I don’t know.’
‘Where is he?’
‘Why are you asking?’ His arms flew up, shoving me away, and I stumbled into the table before catching my balance.
Agitation. Focused aggression. Instead of trying to calm him and de-escalate the situation, I put my finger on the wound and pressed. ‘If he’s sick or hurt, he needs help.’
‘Like you’re helping me?’ He raged, pacing the perimeter again, but I put myself in his path, blocking his way. He tried to push me aside but I grabbed his hand, not really holding it so much as arm wrestling in midair. We struggled for a minute. When he finally gave up, he jerked back against the wall and glared at me. I lowered our hands, keeping an awkward grip around his knuckles.
‘I promised I’d help get you out, didn’t I?’
He shook his head and stared at the locked door, his eyes filling with tears that he furiously blinked away. ‘Not that way. I’m not turning him over, not even if I have to rot in here.’
‘Turn him over?’ I repeated, my mind scrambling to catch up.
He pulled his hand free and scrubbed at his face. I watched his chest rise and fall as he worked to bury the emotion. When he finally spoke, it was with a horrible, quiet certainty.
‘No one can help us. That’s why we disappeared.’
6
Karp Lykov was a man who had to disappear. In 1936, he lived in a remote village in Siberia and was working in the fields when a Communist patrol shot his brother at his side. The Bolshevik government had made it their mission to systematically eradicate religion from the country, seizing church property, harassing believers, reeducating children, and executing priests and the devout like the Lykovs. In the wake of his brother’s murder, Karp gathered his wife and children and fled to the only place the Communists couldn’t follow: the taiga, three million square miles of unforgiving wilderness. They lived for over forty years in total isolation, using only a few pots, a spinning wheel, and a loom for tools. The family built their log cabin by hand and planted crops on a mountainside, surviving famine and endless winters without any contact with the outside world, that is, until 1978 when a group of prospecting geologists happened upon them.
By that time Russia had changed. Instead of ordering executions, the government sent religious people to mental hospitals and diagnosed them with ‘philosophical intoxication.’ Psychiatry had become a political weapon, but one that couldn’t touch the Lykovs. They refused to leave their wilderness home. They accepted few gifts from the geologists and those only grudgingly, as though the pleasures of salt, forks, and paper were inherently sinful. Ultimately it wasn’t the spices or tools that struck the Lykovs down, but a series of illnesses due to their harsh existence. One by one, the entire family died in the 1980s except the youngest daughter, Agafia. Concerned, the geologists tried to convince her to return to civilization with them, but she refused. Standing sentinel near her family’s graves, she urged the geologists to leave and waved them on when they hesitated.
In her seventies now, Agafia Lykov still lives in the taiga, the place where she was born and where someday she’s determined herself to die.