The House in the Pines(14)

The bus wound deeper into the woods. She suspected that Frank had tried to contact her over the years, but as with almost everything else about him, it was impossible to know for sure. She never once answered a phone number she didn’t recognize, never opened an email from someone she didn’t know, yet to this day, when she entered her name into Google, the first suggested search result to pop up was “Maya Edwards + Aubrey West.”

Hot air rushed from the vents. Still unable to find anything on Frank, she looked up Cristina Lewis. Like Frank, Cristina wasn’t on social media, and her name was common: Maya waded through pages of Google results before finding the right Cristina Lewis on a list of artists who had done residencies at MASS MoCA.

She clicked on her name and was brought to her site. The design was minimalist, a light blue page with one of Cristina’s paintings taking up a third. Maya held the phone close to her face. The painting was of a vast white desert beneath an empty sky. An alien planet, a place without life, cracks running through its parched surface, but the painting’s title—Bonneville Salt Flats—suggested that it was, in fact, planet Earth.

There was no denying Cristina’s talent. The cold, spare beauty of her work. It was all about the light, the way it speared down from a sun that wasn’t in the painting. Cristina’s name appeared, all lowercase, at the bottom of the website, along with her email address. Nothing else to click on.

Maya ran a reverse image search on the painting and found a public Facebook page dedicated to Cristina’s memory and to “keeping her art alive by sharing it with the world.” The group had eleven members, but the only one who’d posted was the administrator, a man named Steven Lang.

His profile picture showed a heavyset bald man in his thirties. Standing beside him on a snowy hiking trail was Cristina. She was a foot shorter than he was and looked even smaller in her puffy yellow coat. Anyone might mistake her for Maya at this distance.

Unlike Maya, Steven didn’t seem at all concerned about online privacy. She quickly learned that he had worked with Cristina at the Berkshire Museum, though she couldn’t tell what he did there. She tracked down his email address within minutes.

Hi, you don’t know me, but my name’s Maya and I saw the video of Cristina. I’m so sorry for your loss . . . I’m trying to get some info on the guy she was with when it happened, Frank Bellamy. Wondering if we could chat sometime? She hit send, then settled back into her seat and waited. She closed her eyes, hoping to fall asleep, but soon gave up and stared at the bare, frosted trees rushing by.





SEVEN




Maya, on her knees in the backyard, gasps for breath, overcome by hilarity. The sky screams blue. The air tastes like grass. She can’t recall what is funny, which is, in itself, uproarious, and she can’t stop, and it’s terrifying, but when Aubrey says the word—the one that has them rolling in the grass—the fear goes away.

“Cha—cha—” Aubrey can’t get it out. Tears river her face.

Laughter flares from Maya’s throat. “Oh my god,” she says, “oh my god, oh my—”

“Chort—”

“Stop!” Maya shrieks. “Stop!” She slaps the hard earth.

“Chortle!!”

And they collapse.

How long have they been laughing? A minute? An hour? A year? “Chortle!” Maya shrieks. “I can’t believe it, I can’t believe . . .” She can’t believe what? “I can’t believe that’s a word.”

“Me neither,” Aubrey says. “I can’t believe . . .” She trails off, not laughing anymore, and Maya raises her damp head from her forearm, peers out from the unkempt curtain of her hair to see Aubrey petting the grass. Stroking it like a fine fur coat. “It’s so soft,” she says.

Maya rolls onto her back and snuggles in. She sweeps her limbs in a slow-motion snow angel and feels every blade of grass that brushes her skin. “I can’t believe any of it,” she says. She wears her usual cutoffs and an oversized zebra-print button-down from Goodwill that she’d thought would be fun for today. “The sky,” she says. “The sky!” Her sunglasses, oversized and rhinestone-studded, are also from Goodwill, and it’s a good thing she’s wearing them, because her pupils are enormous and the sun is sending out waves. She sees them rippling across the sky, and it reminds her of a long-ago science lesson. “Do you remember,” she asks, “what Mr. Murphy said about the sun and electromagnetic waves?”

“Not really.”

“Me neither,” Maya says, even though she does. “But now . . . I feel like I get it. You know?” She turns her head to look at Aubrey, and Aubrey stares back from behind her own shades, aviators with dark green lenses. They often shop at Goodwill together.

“You do?”

“Yeah,” Maya says. “It’s like space is made of water, just one big ocean, and the sun is a pebble tossed onto its surface . . . It sends out ripples in the water.” She raises her arms, wriggles her fingers, and feels the ripples.

“Wow . . .” Aubrey says. “Sage really came through this time, huh?”

Maya giggles, recalling the last time they got acid from the aging hippie cashier who works at Big Y, where Aubrey works as a bagger. Sage, with his graying, patchouli-scented ponytail, is in love with Aubrey, so the acid’s always free, but the last batch had been so weak, they’d wondered if it was as fake as his name. “This shit,” Maya says, “is definitely real.”