The House in the Pines(6)
And with that conviction came fear. Maya was a loose end for Frank, a witness to whatever it was he had done. If he was a killer, she had every reason to be afraid, and the fact that she didn’t know how he’d done it made it worse, a dreadful uncertainty that kept her from moving on. But over time she learned not to talk about her suspicions with Dr. Barry, or anyone else for that matter. She couldn’t stand it when people looked at her like she was crazy. Satisfied that she was no longer delusional, Dr. Barry pronounced her cured, if a little anxious, and swapped out her antipsychotics for Klonopin.
It worked. The Klonopin dulled her fear and knocked her out at night.
Alcohol helped too. All through college, she was blackout drunk several nights a week. She still managed to get A’s and B’s, but that was just the easy classes she was taking, overcrowded lectures where no one knew her name and it didn’t matter if she was hungover. She kept telling herself she was having fun, and maybe she was; it was hard to remember. There were enough embarrassing pictures of her online dancing on tabletops, always a drink or a shot in hand, to suggest she was having the time of her life.
After college, she was happy to take the job at Kelly’s Garden Center. And though every now and then she would sit at her desk to write, she never made it past the first page of anything. The problem was that she no longer liked being alone with her thoughts. She had been working at the garden center and sharing an apartment with her friend Lana for over a year when she met Dan.
They met at a party, at the hour when everyone was either dancing in a sweaty clump, slurring too loudly in the kitchen, or sprawled on the host’s bed, doing coke. Maya had assumed that she and Dan were both high when they started talking while in line for the bathroom—how else to explain that they were still talking at breakfast the next morning, seated across from each other at Maya’s favorite Mexican restaurant?
Over huevos rancheros and cinnamon-spiced café de olla, they talked about everything, but what Maya remembered most was learning that Dan, like her, had read a children’s version of The Iliad as a child, and been obsessed with Greek mythology ever since.
Maybe it was the intimacy of being with someone who loved the same stories. Or maybe it was that, in talking about such stories, they were really talking about themselves. It had been years since Maya had spoken to anyone of the central trauma of her life, and while she certainly hadn’t spoken of it then, she found a certain comfort in Dan’s tenderness toward Cassandra, the woman cursed to utter a truth no one would believe.
It wasn’t until their third or fourth date that Maya realized he hardly drank—had, at most, two drinks at a party—and didn’t use drugs. This meant that their first conversation had not, in fact, been cocaine-fueled, at least not on Dan’s part, which felt significant.
It also meant that he was utterly lucid around her, unlike most of the men she had dated, who, in retrospect, had been more like drinking buddies. The thought of all that sober attention on her was nerve-racking, but over time—over brunches and dinner tables, long talks and increasingly cozy silences—Maya found herself wanting to be lucid around him too, so as not to miss out on their time together. Their bike rides along the Charles River. The Iron Chef marathons on the couch. The messy, elaborate meals cooked together in his kitchen.
Spending all that time sober hadn’t been easy for Maya at first. Sometimes, out of nowhere, memories like long-sleeping leviathans would stir, threatening to rise up and swallow her whole. Aubrey collapsing on the ground. The dark glitter of Frank’s eyes. The terror of knowing that none of Maya’s efforts to stay under the radar would mean anything if he decided he wanted to find her.
This wasn’t all that haunted Maya these days. After nearly a decade of constant inebriation, she found that she had forgotten how to handle day-to-day struggles, like going to the RMV or winding down for bed at a reasonable hour. It felt strange, when frustrated, not to get drunk.
Sometimes she caught herself snapping at Dan for no reason and hating herself for it. Afraid of pushing him away, she did her best to hide her anxiety, the air itself suddenly raw and jagged, and never mentioned the cold sweats that woke her at dawn, or the insomnia that kept her from sleeping in the first place. But eventually all that subsided, helped along by the Klonopin she took in place of the vodka or gin she normally would have used to knock herself out.
She took Klonopin during the day sometimes too, in upward-creeping doses as her tolerance grew. What mattered to Maya was that the old dread wasn’t nearly as pervasive as she’d feared. Most of the time, her thoughts left her alone, or maybe it was just that enough time had passed. She ate well and exercised, rarely having more than a single drink per night (along with a few pills from the aspirin bottle, which she kept in her purse so that Dan would never accidentally take one, thinking it was aspirin).
And these days, when Maya thought of Aubrey or of Frank, or dreamed that she was back at the cabin, she comforted herself with the words of Dr. Barry, who had assured Maya that there was nothing she could have done for Aubrey. Nothing that anyone could have done. No one whose fault it was. Not even Frank.
This was what Maya told herself every time the phone rang and she didn’t recognize the number, or she heard footsteps behind on her a dark street. But how could two women drop dead for no apparent reason while talking to the same man?
THREE