The House in the Pines(57)

He hangs his head.

“You’ve got to be kidding.”

“I’m sorry,” he says again.

But it’s like Dorothy pulling back the curtain to reveal a man pretending to be a wizard. “You really . . . really didn’t need to do that,” she says. “I was totally into you.”

She hadn’t meant to use the past tense, but they both register it. The wind picks up, churning through leaves, and when he speaks again, Frank’s voice is so low that Maya has to step closer to hear him. Now she stands at the edge of his sleeping bag, looking down into his sorrowful eyes.

“It’s just that you’re going away to BU,” he says. “I didn’t want you to think of me as some townie with nothing going on. I’m twenty years old and live at home with my dad.”

“I never thought of you that way,” she says.

But now she doesn’t know what to think. She rushed here tonight on fumes of jealousy and infatuation, needing to know why he was with Aubrey, but seeing him now—barefoot and alone in the woods—the spell has been broken. He might have lied about the cabin to impress her, but that doesn’t explain why he’s here now. It doesn’t explain the sleeping bag, the shoes left by an imaginary door.

“Are you okay? How long have you been out here?”

“Not long,” he mutters, looking away.

“And why . . .”

He takes a deep, shaky breath. “Because I feel safe here.”

“Safe? From what?”

“From my dad.”

Maya thinks back to Frank’s reference to troubles at home when he was young. “Did he do something?”

Frank exhales sharply. It could be a sigh of grief, or a scoff—he’s looking down now, so it’s impossible to know. “He’s done a lot of things. To me . . . to my mom . . . and total strangers. It’s the reason my mom took me away from him when I was twelve. He’s dangerous.”

Maya glances back over her shoulder as if his father might have followed her here. She knows now, as she should have before, that Frank might be lying. But then, his father had made her nervous. “Why are you staying with him, then?” she asks. “If he’s dangerous, you should go to the police.”

Frank shakes his head. “They wouldn’t understand. My dad’s never laid a finger on anyone. He hurts people in other ways. He’s manipulative. Controlling. He used to be a psychology professor, but then he got into some trouble and lost his job, his psychology license, everything. He was ruined. He took it out on me and my mom.”

“I’m sorry to hear that, Frank . . .” But now she senses him gliding past the situation at hand, the strangeness of it, and she tries to reel him back. She won’t get sucked into another of his stories. “I still don’t get what you’re doing out here,” she says.

Frank pulls his knees to his chest, folding in on himself. He speaks so quietly that she doesn’t hear and must move closer so that she is standing right over him. He looks small from here. Helpless.

“What did you say?” she asks. Her voice is gentle.

“I said it was real to me. Back when I was ten, that night I was lost. I thought I was going to die alone in the woods, and I know it sounds crazy, but the cabin . . . it saved me. I needed it to be here for me. And it was.

“I pictured it so clearly, down to the littlest detail, and when I closed my eyes, it was like I was there. Like I was home. A safer, more loving home than the one I had left. A place without my dad. I came back a lot after that, days and nights when I had to escape. This is where I would come, the truest home I ever knew. I would sit here, just like I am tonight, and picture the door of my cabin. I really had to see it before I could go inside. The color of the pine, the brass knob. I had to feel the doorknob in my hand, but if I could do that, then I could turn it, and everything would be waiting for me on the other side. Home. Something good on the stove, a fire in the fireplace. The big, cozy couch.”

Maya nods. She can easily picture what he’s describing—she has before, and she allows herself to now.

There is sorrow in knowing it’s not real, but what’s even sadder is understanding how he had made it seem that way. The reason the cabin seemed real to her was that Frank has spent hours and hours building it in his head. Here in this clearing. Alone. He knows every floorboard and cabinet as if he had hammered it into place himself; he knows all the whorls in the pine. He knows it so well that when he speaks of the place, as he speaks of it now, it comes to life. The warmth of the fire. The smell of it. She doesn’t know why he’s telling her this now that she knows it’s not real. Yet it relaxes her to hear it. She understands. She doesn’t fault him for anything he’s done. Everyone needs somewhere to return to.

She has lost track of what he was saying, and now he falls silent.

She hears what sounds like a door slam shut at her back. A sound that makes no sense out here and yet is unmistakable—a creak of hinges followed by the low clap of a door landing in its frame—directly behind her. Something tells her not to turn around, but she does anyway. She has to know. She turns slowly back to see Frank standing behind her.

Just inside the front door—the wind must have blown it shut.

Her mouth hangs open as she takes in his handiwork. He was too modest about the cabin. It’s perfect. Fingers interlaced with her own, he gives her the grand tour, and Maya can’t stop smiling. Then comes the tantalizingly fragrant soup that she never tastes because the sudden reminder of her father’s book threatens to shatter the illusion.