The House in the Pines(15)

“What shit?” her mom asks.

Maya’s fingers freeze mid-wriggle. She squeezes her eyes shut as if this will make her invisible.

“You want to tell me what’s going on here?”

Her mom’s going to kill her for this. But only if she knows. Maya lowers her hands, straightens her zebra shirt, and sits up, pieces of grass in her hair. She smiles as casually as possible. “Hi, Mom!”

Her mom stands two feet away, at the edge of the garden. No telling how long she’s been there.

Brenda isn’t usually so imposing—even though she is large, almost a foot taller than her petite daughter, and brawny—but right now she looks like an angry sun-god, arms crossed at her chest, the flyaway curls around her face like golden flames. She’s in her EMT uniform: a white shirt, navy pants, black sneakers. Her penciled eyebrows highlight the displeasure on her face, the narrowing of her blue eyes.

“I . . . thought you were at work,” Maya says.

“I was. But now I’m home—and this is what I find? A mess in the kitchen? TV so loud I can hear it from outside? And is that The Dark Crystal you’re watching?” Her mom knows them both so well.

“Hi, Brenda,” Aubrey says in a too-high voice.

“Hi, Aubrey.”

Aubrey wilts at the tone.

“What did you two take? Hm?” Brenda looks from one to the other, then back again.

Maya feels her trip tanking and tries not to panic. “LSD,” she says, knowing it is useless to hide.

Brenda shakes her head. “Get inside, both of you.”

The walk through the yard, past the garden, and up three steps to the kitchen is its own ordeal. The ground feels spongy and quicksand-like. “Wait!” her mom says as she and Aubrey track dirt through the kitchen. She hands them each a damp dish towel, glaring at their feet.

They bumble their way to the floor. They’d been watching The Dark Crystal when Aubrey had a yen to be in nature, so they’d crawled around the garden awhile before coming undone because she said chortle.

Maya wipes the dirt from her toes, her heels, the hollows of her ankles.

“Are you going to tell my stepdad?” Aubrey asks.

Brenda sits down at the table. “I don’t know,” she says. She sounds tired.

That’s when Maya notices the bandage on her mother’s hand. “What happened?”

“Just a few stitches,” her mom says. “Don’t worry about it.”

But Maya worries. Her mom’s job is scary—the flashing lights, screaming sirens, and screaming people. It scares Maya even when she’s not tripping—now she stares at the white bandage.

“Please don’t tell Darren,” Aubrey says, crying.

Maya cries too. She loves her mom, doesn’t want her to be in pain.

“Okay, you two, settle down,” Brenda says. She says it kindly, holding up her hand to prove it’s okay, and not freaking out the way other parents might, because she can handle this. She sees all kinds of things at work—bad trips, actual overdoses, stab wounds. “How long ago did you take it?” she asks calmly.

Maya and Aubrey share a look. How long ago indeed? Six hours? Seven?

Brenda sighs. “What time did you take it?”

“This morning?” Aubrey says. “Like, maybe at eleven?”

Brenda glances at the clock on the microwave. 1:32 p.m. “Looks like we’ve got a ways to go . . .”



* * *



—

They watch The Dark Crystal from the beginning, all three of them, Maya and her mom on the couch, Aubrey draped across the love seat. A fan in the corner circulates a cool breeze through the living room that is also the wind through the jungles of Thra. Maya understands that she’s in trouble, that her mom is only waiting for her to come down before delivering whatever stern talk and punishment she has in store, but for now, everything is perfect. Maya is here, but she is also in the movie, feeling the kind of wonder she’d felt watching it as a young child, before there was a difference between reality and magic.

Like how people at church must feel when contemplating Eden—a longing for a time before anyone knew they were naked, when conversations with God were the norm. Maya yearns for that time in her own life, not out of some need to escape reality—reality is fine—but simply because she was born that way. Born to yearn, as some people are, for more magical times. This is her fourth acid trip, so she knows about the sadness of coming down, the sense of God having vacated the garden. And Aubrey takes it even harder than she does.

Aubrey looks glum as Maya’s mom drives her home that evening, even though Brenda had agreed not to say anything about the acid. No one says anything as they pull up in front of Aubrey’s duplex.

Silver Lake glitters just beyond, obsidian in the dusk. Aubrey lives even closer to the lake. If she’s being honest, this is why Maya had wanted to take the acid at her own house rather than at Aubrey’s. The truth is that Maya is slightly afraid of the lake. She’d never admit this to anyone because to do so would be to sound like Aunt Lisa.

(Though if she could speak freely, Maya would point to local legends about the lake changing colors at night and steam rising from its surface in winter. She would say that the lake really is polluted, and who knows the extent of what PCBs can do to a person?)