The House in the Pines(41)

She had realized this about a year after Aubrey died. Maya had been home for a few days, heavily medicated and trying to move on with her life, when she decided to take the book down from the shelf. A panicky feeling had risen her chest the moment she began to read her own handwritten translation. She had felt like she was choking. And something told her that if she kept going, if she revisited this story with its buried meaning, it would unlock truths she couldn’t bear to know.

So she had returned it to the shelf.

But Cristina’s painting had reminded her. Like her father’s book, she felt sure, it held the key to Frank’s secret.

And the key went to a door inside her head. The harder she searched for Frank, the more people she questioned, the more obvious it was that Maya was never going to find the answer outside of herself. It was locked within her, hidden in those hours she had lost. Dr. Barry would have said that she was teetering on the edge of psychosis, but Maya felt for the first time since she saw the video that she was getting somewhere. She rose from her bed and went to the bookshelf, reached for the old manila envelope—but grasped only air.

She remembered this wasn’t her room anymore. She must have forgotten in the dark. She turned on the lights and realized she had no idea where the book was now. She searched the closet, the desk, the empty drawers of her old nightstand. She had taken off her clothes earlier because they were sweaty, but now she pulled them back on, shimmying into her damp leggings and long-sleeved shirt. She checked every shelf in the living room. She knew her mom wouldn’t have gotten rid of her father’s book.

Unless—what if she’d accidentally donated it to Goodwill?

Her mom had asked her to come home to take what she wanted before her old room became an Airbnb rental. But Maya hadn’t come. She’d put it off for weeks, then months, before Brenda announced that she was taking everything to Goodwill, and Maya, still so merrily medicated at the time, hadn’t cared. “No,” she whispered now. “No, no, no . . .” She remembered her grandfather’s face as he handed her the book. The precious ink. Her father’s words. She walked back and forth a few times, running her hands through her hair.

Then she thought of the basement. Maybe her mom had been bluffing about Goodwill; maybe all she’d wanted was for her daughter to come home. Maya hurried downstairs, walking lightly so she wouldn’t wake her mom.

The basement had scared her as a child. It was colder than the rest of the house, and musty. A long room that got darker the farther back you went. First there were the washer and dryer and a dresser that served as a folding table. Then a shelf lined with kitchen gadgets and the remains of DIY projects. A jar of marbles. Cans of paint, an ice cream machine. Beyond that, boxes of books, but not the one she was looking for. She went deeper. Waded through clothes in bins. Please be here, please be here. Crawling now, she opened a crate and found a tea set furred by dust. Another crate held the games she’d played. Sorry! Battleship. Clue. It was all here—her mom had saved everything. A wave of gratitude swelled in Maya’s chest. She found her father’s book in a box with other stories she had loved, the ones on her old shelf.

She took it upstairs and began to read.





TWENTY-THREE




I? forgot I was the son of kings.

This was the title of her father’s book. Maya had written it in English on the first page of the marbled notebook that held her translation. The notebook had been tucked into the manila envelope along with his forty-seven pages.

She was glad to have her translation, as she didn’t have it in her to wade through the Spanish right now. Translating it had been a major endeavor for her at seventeen, difficult at first, but then it had gotten easier as she got the hang of it, or maybe she was just so immersed in the story unfolding in her hands that hours had passed like minutes. She’d worked on it at the library every day for almost two weeks and had been working on the very last page the day she met Frank.

She’d worked meticulously, searching for clues as to where the plot was headed. This had been the greatest mystery of her life then—and it was a mystery to her still. Holding the notebook in her hands brought back the old questions. Does Héctor remember that he’s really Pixán? Does Pixán collect his inheritance? Does he ever make it home again? Is he reunited with his parents?

I forgot I was the son of kings.

Something clicked as she ran her eyes over the title.

The title!

Maybe she had needed to step away from the book for seven years in order to see the most obvious clue, the one typed on its very first page. She had been so focused on the story when she was younger, on the incomplete plot and what it meant, that she had forgotten about the poetry of its title. Her aunt had said it was a line from a very old poem Jairo had loved. Why hadn’t Maya thought of this sooner? Her father had loved poetry—surely whatever poem he’d quoted would provide some clue as to what his novel was about. What it meant. What it was he’d been trying to say.

Her bed had become a nest, blankets, pillows, and pages heaped all around. She rifled through it for the phone and found it wedged between the headboard and mattress. She typed the title, in quotes, into her search bar.

The poem popped right up—it had its own Wikipedia page. And it wasn’t exactly a poem, as it turned out, at least not as Maya understood it, but a hymn. “The Hymn of the Pearl.” Carolina hadn’t been kidding when she said it was old. It was ancient, its author unknown. According to Wikipedia, the hymn appeared in the apocryphal Acts of Thomas, which Maya understood to have something to do with the Bible.