The House in the Pines(58)

And Frank doesn’t want to let her go. Frank thinks she should move in with him.

He tells her to relax, eat her soup, and when she doesn’t, he sets his spoon loudly on the table. Gets down on one knee like he’s about to ask for her hand in marriage, but there’s rage boiling in his eyes, and instead of a ring, he puts something slightly larger in her hand. She feels its metal teeth against her palm and looks down to see the key to the cabin. And for the briefest of moments, she’s confused.

Why would Maya need a key to a cabin she’s already inside?

But as soon as she thinks it, the thought slips away, and what happens over the following few minutes will lie buried beneath the lowest cellar floor of her head for seven years.



* * *



— She relaxes.

Her breath slows.

And her heart. It feels so good to be here. She sinks deeper, slouching in her seat at the table.

“Good,” Frank says. “Good.” He gets up off his knee and smiles down on her. “You’re feeling better now,” he says. “Calmer.”

She feels better now. Calmer.

“Maybe you’d like to sit by the fire?” The way he says it, it doesn’t sound like a question. “Get comfortable,” he says. “Relax your tired legs.”

Maya would like nothing more than to sit before the fire, get comfortable, and relax her tired legs.

“You feel safe here,” he says.

Her body gives a sluggish jerk as something cold and wet strikes the back of her neck. She frowns.

“You feel safe here,” he says again.

A second cold drop hits her knee. The bracing liquid trails down her bare calf, and Maya focuses on it. The tingling sensation moving toward her ankle. Then another drop and another—her shoulder, forehead, wrist—leading her back to herself. The rain cuts through Frank’s voice just enough for her to understand that she needs to run.

He stands. “Come with me.”

She doesn’t intend to obey, but (oh god) that is what she does. She rises from her place at the table as if her legs and feet belong to someone else. She can’t stop them from following as he leads her closer to the fire, orange light flickering on his face. She smells the sweetly burning wood.

Look into the light, she thinks she hears him say, or maybe it’s the stream, the watery hush of it lulling her closer and deeper until the fire is all she can see. And taste. And feel. And it feels like coming in from the cold, like suddenly catching everything she’s ever chased. Confidence. Approval. Love. The light feels like contentment, like the sun on her face, and smells like melting snow. It sings like bells. You’re safe now, says the stream. You’re home. And that’s just how it feels, like coming home. But she knows. Even as she craves the fire’s warmth, the flames shimmering red, orange, blue, and gold, a part of her knows that home isn’t the right word for this place.

Like in the story. Like Pixán, taken in by imposters, gazing up into the mist, Maya knows her true home is elsewhere.

“You . . .” she whispers, although her intent is to shout it.

A raindrop on her cheek!

Every part of her wants to dissolve into the light. But she tears her gaze away to glare at Frank. “You tricked me.”

“Relax,” he says. But he doesn’t sound so confident now.

She shakes her head, anger rising, threatening to break through whatever spell he’s cast. “What did you do to me?”

“Listen to me, Maya, you need to calm down—”

“I know,” she says.

And just like that, the roughly hewn logs that make up the wall at his back begin to look even more rustic. They start to look like trees. Weeds sprout up between the floorboards, and it isn’t the roof she sees above her now but the endless abyss of the night sky, and it’s like looking down to find yourself suddenly at the edge of the Grand Canyon. A great, swirling terror. Overwhelming vastness.

“Maya,” he pleads.

She looks at his face. He’d been talking to her, has been all along, while she was busy looking at the sky, or the wall, or the fire, or the soup.

But Maya doesn’t have to listen. She knows this now. Frank begs her with his eyes not to say it, but this only sweetens the words on her tongue. “There is no cabin,” she says, and as if on cue, what’s left of it dissolves and the ceiling returns to sky and the floor to earth.

A loss of orientation as she tries to run. Her legs won’t work, or she has forgotten how to use them. With what’s left of her strength, she tries to lurch ahead, but the lower half of her body feels bound in an awkward position.

The problem reveals itself as soon as she looks down. The problem is Maya isn’t actually standing in front of the fireplace but sitting in the dark, in the rain. No wonder she can’t take off running—her legs are crossed.

She and Frank are sitting on his sleeping bag in the feeble glow of his battery-powered lamp, getting soaked. All her limbs are asleep, and she’s clumsy as she pushes herself to her feet, the sleeping bag slick beneath her hands.

“Maya, wait—”

A head rush darkens her vision, but she pushes through it, nearly tripping on the uneaten orange Frank had been peeling when she arrived. She steps off the foundation onto wet earth, breaking into a run. Clouds cover the moon now. She’s forgotten the flashlight and can only see a few feet ahead of her as she plunges through the trees outside the clearing.