The House in the Pines(59)

She doesn’t see the edges of the bridge as she runs out onto it.

“Stop!”

She ignores him. The road is gravelly and wet. Alarm bells clang in her chest, and something tells her to slow down as she nears the middle of the bridge, but she ignores her intuition in her desire to get away from him. She hears his footsteps close behind over the sound of rushing water.

“Look out!” he shouts.

The flashlight flares on at her back, revealing the crumbled section of bridge just ahead—the sheer drop she was about to race over.

Maya shrieks, pinwheels her arms. She staggers back from the edge directly into Frank’s embrace. “Shh . . .” he whispers, holding her close. “You’re okay now, just relax. There’s nothing to be afraid of.”

But Maya won’t believe him twice. She squirms her way out of his arms and is about to dash across the narrow length of collapsed bridge when he turns off his father’s light.

The darkness is complete.

The wind picks up, and the rain. What started as fitful showers earlier has swelled to a deluge, the kind of rain you’d have to shout to be heard over. Without the flashlight, the edges of the road disappear into darkness, and if she were to walk across that narrow stretch right now, every step would either bring her closer to safety, to the car, her mom, her home, or down into an angry river, no longer the placid stream it had seemed to her before.

So she lowers herself to the ground and feels her way across. She runs her palms along the edges, broken concrete rough beneath her hands and knees. She knows how easily she could fall and she’s never been a good swimmer, not that it would matter if she landed headfirst on a boulder.

She moves carefully but quickly as he’s still behind her—she can tell he’s speaking but does her best not to hear, listening only to the rain pelting the bridge and the river, turning the dirt beneath her to mud. Eventually the strip of road she’s on widens again. She’s on her feet in an instant, unable to see much, but all she has to do is stay on this road and it will lead her back to her car.

She breaks into a run and he follows—she hears his heavy steps—not slowing even as the road plunges back into the forest.

But then she hears the jingling keys at her back.

Her heart drops. Her feet slow and Frank moves closer until she can feel the heat of his body pressing in. “You forgot these,” he says into her ear.

She doesn’t turn. She thinks she could outrun him—but that won’t matter, will it, if Frank has her car keys.

“Give them to me.” She speaks forcefully, but the rain makes her sound small.

“Of course,” he says, mildly indignant.

She holds out her hand for the bulky key chain, weighted down with her mom’s many keys—house, car, work locker, garden shed—and mini-flashlight, but this isn’t what Frank drops into her waiting palm.

The only key he gives her is his own.





THIRTY-ONE




Maya’s tears melted holes in the moon-blue snow as she walked back from the abandoned bridge to her mom’s car. She thought of the last time she had passed this way, Frank’s arm around her shoulders while she tried to figure out what they were doing in the rain. She remembered looking back, unable to see the bridge or summon any memory of it or how she’d crossed it, the leafy road branching into darkness.

Frank had tried to make her think she was the one acting strangely, that he was just walking her to her car as requested, but she ran from him as soon as she had her bearings, sure that he’d done something to her, planning to tell her mom when she got home.

But then—tell her mom what exactly?

Brenda had been working that night, and Maya, soaked to the core, drained and fuzzy-headed after her time at the cabin, decided to sleep on the situation and do her best to explain in the morning. But the self-doubt was there when she woke, like a seed he’d planted, growing in her overnight, a vagueness to her understanding of what had happened.

Now Maya cried for the version of herself so willing to question her own experience. Of course Frank did something to her! He had convinced her of a place that didn’t exist and somehow made her believe that she’d been there. He’d fucked with her head. The tears returned the feeling to her face, though the rest of her stayed numb, snow melting through her shoes as she crept back across the blank lawn of the house that had belonged to Frank’s dad. It seemed obvious now who lived here these days.

Because where else would Frank sleep? How could he find shelter beneath a roof existing only in his head? The light in the window was no longer on, and as she got into her car, she pictured him sleeping in his childhood room at his father’s house, defenseless, alone, as vulnerable in this moment as she was at seventeen.

She imagined standing over him with a knife.



* * *



— Maya chased the word for what Frank had done to her the way that a dog chased its tail, in dizzying circles, the answer so near yet still that maddening last inch away. She held the steering wheel with both hands and tapped her brakes at every bend. She had to be careful on these roads this time of year, exhausted as she was.

The flood of memories had left her spent, ready to collapse, and yet she knew that when she did lie down, she wouldn’t sleep. Such was the cruelty of benzodiazepine withdrawal. The pint of gin she bought on the way home was purely medicinal. She needed to think, but her thoughts kept snarling into tangles she couldn’t unravel, and she figured it must be that she was sleep-deprived.