The House in the Pines(40)

It wouldn’t have bothered her so much if she wasn’t tempted to succumb to her mom’s fears. If she just agreed that she was crazy, Maya would be given the kind of meds that would make her sleep for twelve hours straight. She added more gin to her mug. She was sitting in the dark, cross-legged on top of the bed with her phone in one hand. Hours of searching for information on Ruby Garza hadn’t turned up anything new. And even if it had—if Maya could link a third dead woman to Frank—she still wouldn’t know how he did it.

And in the meantime, Dan hadn’t texted back.

He had been tagged on Instagram by someone with the handle nina_borealis. He was sitting in a booth at Silhouette Lounge, drinking what was probably a rum and Coke across from his law school friend Sean and Sean’s girlfriend, Ellie. The three sat close together, presumably with Nina, who’d taken the picture. A quick search had revealed Nina to be a pretty Filipina architect who enjoyed traveling.

Maya had never been insecure in her relationship with Dan, but he’d never ignored her texts before. Was Nina single? Flirtatious?

Maya reminded herself that she had no reason to mistrust Dan—while he had every reason to mistrust her. He must have known she was hiding something, must have sensed it, and this was probably why he hadn’t texted back. Dan cared about the truth. Being secretive was so much worse than if she’d told him about the Klonopin, which he wouldn’t have judged her for anyway. Half the people they knew were on medication for anxiety, depression, or something else. As the night dragged on and he didn’t text back, the possibility of losing him began to feel real.

The thought made her chest cave in. She’d been in such a bad place when they met, drifting through her days, forgetting most nights, and it was Dan who’d cut through that fog. He was her Orpheus who never looked back, helping her return to the land of the living. He made it a place she wanted to be. He was the kind of person who refused to buy jarred tomato sauce because homemade was so much better, and he enjoyed making it. They’d cooked together almost every night since Maya moved in, and now there was nowhere she’d rather be than at his side, chopping herbs and listening to music and tasting everything more than she needed to because it was all so good.

If only she could rewind to a week before she saw the video. They’d put on a reggaeton playlist and had a dance party in the kitchen while a pot of minestrone simmered on the stove. Dan loved dancing almost as much as she did.

Now she pictured herself cooking alone.

None of the apartments she’d had since moving out of her mom’s house had felt like home because Maya hadn’t tried to make them feel that way. But living with Dan was different. She wished he was beside her in bed but was glad he couldn’t see her drinking gin alone in the dark.

A text came in. This time it was from Steven.

She’d asked him if he had a picture of Cristina’s final painting, the one he’d said was different from her other work. Maybe the painting would offer some glimpse into the mind of the woman who had chosen to have Frank’s key tattooed on her arm.

Steven had agreed to take a picture of it when he got home and text it to her. Now here it was, and the painting was indeed different from the work on Cristina’s website. Bonneville Salt Flats had been striking for its alien beauty, the vast emptiness of land and sky, its cold, crystalline light.

The new painting was warm. It was of the main room in Frank’s cabin. An open floor plan with the kitchen on one side and the living room on the other, with its overstuffed couch, shaggy rug, and tall stone fireplace. Everything was painted in photorealistic detail except for the fire. There was something about its glow, a heightened quality to the light. Shot through with orange, pink, and gold, more beautiful than natural light. More beautiful, Maya thought, than the light in Cristina’s salt flats painting—but opposite in its effect. This painting was full of what her earlier work lacked. Contentment. Well-being. The feeling of warmth on your face. This must be how she’d felt there.

Like the misty village in Maya’s father’s book, Pixán’s true home, the cabin in Cristina’s painting seemed both real and magic.

Dr. Barry would have labeled her thoughts apophenia—the false belief that unrelated things are somehow connected. The delusion behind many a conspiracy theory, he’d explained.

If you look closely enough at anything, patterns will emerge.

But Dr. Barry had always talked more than he listened. What did he know? The painting reminded her of the story because her father and Cristina were describing the same place: the perfect home.

Maya laid her phone facedown on the bed. The painting disturbed her. She cradled her head in her hands. There was a reason she hadn’t seen her father’s book in years. A reason she rarely thought of it and had never mentioned it to Dan, but she’d never articulated that reason to herself. She had instead taken pills and drunk too much to forget. The only way to live with what happened, she had found, was to act as though it hadn’t—but this took work. She had to studiously avoid anything that might remind her of Aubrey’s death.

And that included her father’s book. It hadn’t been a conscious decision but one of many underlying beliefs that steered her behavior. The book was too upsetting. Maya had left it behind when she went away for college, tucked it away in its manila envelope on her bookshelf. But now that years had passed since she thought of it, and many days since she took her last Klonopin, it was plain that her father’s story reminded her too much of the lie she’d been telling herself.