She knew the cake would be delicious. Deeply chocolatey, topped with pecans. It would be beautiful on the cake stand she had bought for this purpose. She wanted to impress Dan’s mom, an acclaimed photojournalist. The cake had to be perfect, and it would be because Maya had learned to bake from her mom, Brenda Edwards, who had learned from her own mother, and so on, a line of women who’d been stress-baking for years before anyone coined the term.
Growing up, Brenda had a sister named Lisa whose behavior had prompted the baking of many desserts. As children, the two were best friends or they were enemies, depending on how Lisa was feeling. She had a way of warping her surroundings to fit whatever mood she was in. She could turn a boring shopping trip into an adventure, or a trip to the beach into a hellish ordeal.
Wherever Lisa went, doors were slammed and voices were raised. The only constants in her life were her parents, her three brothers, and Brenda, and out of all of them, Brenda was the one who knew her best. The one who would blame herself most for what happened.
Lisa was fifteen when she began to suspect that breezes off a nearby lake were blowing in through her bedroom window and poisoning her with toxic fumes. Brenda, who was two years younger, believed her at first. And to be fair, Silver Lake, which was less than two blocks from the house, had been notoriously contaminated for over a century. A cotton factory in the 1800s was the first to pollute its water, followed by a hat factory and two oil spills. In 1923, the surface of the lake broke out in flames—and that was all before GE dumped PCBs into it.
Lisa’s suspicions didn’t come out of nowhere, but over the next few weeks, they spiraled into obsession, the first of many obsessions she’d have in her life. She stopped bathing, convinced that the lake’s noxious waters had seeped into their water tank. She wore a gas mask everywhere she went, even though her parents begged her not to. She had fought with them all her life, but as time went on, the fights got worse. She told her parents and siblings that they would all die unless they moved to a different house.
By the time she was sixteen, it seemed obvious that the problem wasn’t Silver Lake. Something was wrong with Lisa, but no one would name it. This was back when few people talked about mental illness, not to mention that Lisa’s parents—Maya’s grandparents—were experts at avoidance. The only place either spoke openly was in the darkness of a confessional booth at church.
Lisa never got the help she needed, and instead evened herself out with vodka and pot and eventually speed. The rest of the family put up with her until she was eighteen, at which point she moved to California with a much older man.
She was dead at twenty-one.
Maya was too young to have met her, yet even in death, her aunt Lisa was a major presence. A cautionary tale. One whose guilt followed Brenda around. So when her daughter, at the age of seventeen, started saying things that didn’t make sense, Brenda called a psychiatrist. Then she forced Maya to take the antipsychotics Dr. Barry prescribed, and to this day, Maya hadn’t fully forgiven her.
She hadn’t seen her mom in over a year, but Maya thought about her every time she baked. It was her mom who taught her to be precise. Precision took focus. Brenda’s careful cups of flour had distracted her from her sister’s screaming and suicide threats. She taught her daughter how to pour her attention into the batter, and this was what Maya did now. She turned the mixer on high, sent her ingredients swirling, and stirred in three yolks. She beat down the images bubbling back up.
Dan hadn’t believed her, but she didn’t want to resent him. She’d rather rewind to before she saw the video—to yesterday—when finally, after almost seven years, she’d lulled herself into thinking that maybe her mom was right: maybe Maya was just like Aunt Lisa, unable to see beyond her own delusions. The unwell mind, Dr. Barry had said, is rarely capable of recognizing its own illness. The words had comforted Maya over the years, because if she was delusional, then she wasn’t in danger; Frank hadn’t really killed Aubrey.
The video had shattered that comfort, and Maya was right back to being seventeen, the only witness to a murder. The difference was that now she understood there was nothing she could do about it. She knew better than to go to the police—she’d tried that. She had tried telling Dan. What else could she do?
Sliding the cake pans into the oven, she got started on the frosting, toasting pecans and simmering milk. She folded in shredded coconut, tasted it, and, for once, didn’t enjoy another heaping spoonful. With the frosting done, she had nothing to concentrate on until the cake came out of the oven.
She went back to the freezer. She’d been so good lately, so moderate, and now here she was, not even noon, pouring her second shot of the day. But then, wasn’t this kind of an emergency? That video would have been a crisis under any circumstance. When she was strung out and sleep-deprived, it was intolerable.
And then there was dinner with Dan’s parents.
Maya burned her hand taking the pans out of the oven. She ran the burn under water and didn’t mind the sting. It brought her back into her body. She counted her breaths. Told herself it wasn’t worth it to dwell on the video, or on Frank. Especially not as she was going through withdrawal.
“God, it smells amazing in here,” Dan said as he stepped in from the cold. His eyes landed on her hands beneath the water. “Did you burn yourself?”
“Not too bad.”
He looked concerned but didn’t say anything as he knelt to untie his shoelaces. He must have been tired of asking if she was okay.
“How’s the studying going?” she asked.
“It’s going,” he said, but his tone was pained. He was a major procrastinator, cramming weeks of studying into his last three days before finals. He spent the day with his books while Maya tidied the bedroom and watered the plants. She and Dan were planning to get a dog, which meant they needed to get rid of their firestick plant and its toxic sap. She snapped a picture of the three-foot-tall succulent with its orange- and crimson-tipped stems, then sent it around to a few friends to see who wanted it.
She also sent a picture to her aunt Carolina, whose love of plants had inspired Maya’s own. Tía Carolina lived in Guatemala City and Maya had met her only once, but they had kept in touch over the years. She was Maya’s only connection these days to the country her father was from.
She tried to read afterward, but soon gave up and went for a walk to avoid pacing around the apartment. She paced instead through her neighborhood, past other buildings like the one she and Dan lived in, with metal fire escapes zagging up the walls, and brick town houses with concrete stoops. She took Commonwealth Avenue all the way to Boston University, where she had gone to college, passing convenience stores and a shawarma café she used to frequent, then continuing on to the icy Charles River. With every step alongside the river, joggers and cyclists speeding by, she tried not to think of Frank.
When she got home, it was almost time to go, and Dan was stressed. He’d agreed to this visit with his parents weeks ago, not anticipating how much studying he would leave until the last minute. Maya poured herself a teacup of gin and drank it in the shower. She’d banished Frank from her thoughts before and could do it again. She would not think of him, nor Aubrey, nor Cristina.
She rarely wore makeup, but tonight she wore concealer like a mask. She wore her nicest sweater, cream-colored cashmere, with brown corduroys and low-heeled boots. She covered her cake with the stand’s bell-shaped glass cover, threw some clothes and a toothbrush in her backpack, and stood waiting by the door while Dan looked for his keys.
“Found them,” he said, rushing in with mismatched socks.
Dan drove. Each of them was lost in their own worries as they left the city for the state’s forested interior. Amherst was two hours to the west. Maya’s hometown of Pittsfield was just an hour beyond that, but the two towns felt very different. Pittsfield had once been a bustling metropolis, but those days had ended before Maya was born. The city had never really recovered from losing GE in the ’70s and ’80s.
Amherst, on the other hand, bustled with young people from the five colleges in the area. Even with the students gone for winter, its downtown seemed livelier than downtown Pittsfield. There were no empty storefronts. Young families and professors walked in and out of coffee shops and farm-to-table restaurants. The independent movie theater advertised a movie Maya had never heard of.
The house Dan grew up in was large and contemporary-looking, with sharp angles and floor-to-ceiling windows shaded by hedges. There was more snow here than in Boston, draping the lawn with a thin white sheet. Dan’s father came to the door as they got out of the car.
Carl, a heavier and blonder version of Dan, was a fifth grade teacher and locally famous poet. Apparently, his students loved him, and Maya could see why. He shared Dan’s openness and warmth. His smile was enormous as he greeted his only child. He shook Maya’s hand, then led them through the high-ceilinged foyer to the kitchen. “What can I get you to drink? We’re having daiquiris, Greta’s favorite, but there’s also wine and sparkling water.”
“A daiquiri sounds great,” Dan said as he hid the cake at the back of the fridge.
“I’ll have one too,” said Maya. “Thanks.” She was doing her best to seem happy and relaxed as her withdrawal amplified the buried anxiety in her gut along with the usual anxiety of wanting to impress Dan’s parents. It wasn’t just that she loved their son, but that they appeared to have everything she dreamed of for herself. They were comfortable and successful in their fields. They were paid to think. They exuded contentment.
She began to relax the moment Carl handed her a drink. She knew from her doomscrolling that alcohol and Klonopin acted on many of the same brain receptors, which explained why they felt so alike. She exhaled. Tried not to drink too fast. The house was warm and smelled like rosemary, garlic, and roasted meat. The furniture was eclectic. The art on the walls was from around the world: framed photographs likely taken by Greta in what looked like Morocco, a mosaic of tiles, several masks.
Greta came downstairs in a silk tunic and linen pants. Tall and elegant, she held herself like someone who did a lot of yoga. She was older than Maya’s mom by at least a decade, her loose curls more silver than black, but she seemed less tired. “Danny,” Greta said, kissing her son’s cheek, then hugging him tight. Maya rose to greet her, and Greta kissed her cheek too. She smelled like rose water. “Thank you for coming.”
“Happy birthday,” Maya said.
Dinner was roasted leg of lamb with rosemary, salad, and fingerling potatoes. Maya sat beside Dan at the table and cringed when Greta sat across from her. Greta was sharp and absorbed the world with her eyes. Maya shrank from her gaze.
She was grateful when Carl opened a bottle of pinot noir. All she had eaten was a small plate of leftover spaghetti and a taste of frosting, so Maya really felt the wine, especially after the daiquiri. The alcohol loosened the vise around her head. It softened the edges of her thoughts, and she almost felt normal as the conversation settled into an easy dynamic with Greta at the helm. They talked about an upcoming eclipse she planned to photograph, and eclipses in general, and Maya couldn’t think of anything to say, so she listened, and was actually relieved when Greta turned to her to ask, out of the blue, if she’d read Isabel Allende.
Here was something Maya could talk about, which she hoped Dan’s parents would take as evidence that she was well-read, rather than as a given. Tonight was going better than expected. This was, in fact, the best she’d felt in days, so the moment Maya saw someone else refill their wineglass, she did the same. And her laughter grew genuine instead of nervous as Carl told a funny story about Dan’s fourth Halloween.
Dan had wanted to be a pumpkin that year, a costume that his parents couldn’t find in any store, so Carl had made him one.
“And to be fair,” Greta said, “it was a good costume! Very creative.”
“She’s being nice,” Carl said. “The wire frame collapsed halfway through trick-or-treating and everyone thought he was a carrot!”
Maya and Greta laughed. Dan had heard this one before. He seemed tense, she thought, like he was thinking about finals. Or maybe something else was bothering him.
Maybe she was tipsier than she thought.
Outside the wind picked up. The windows rattled in their frames.
“It’s a good thing you’re spending the night,” Greta said. “Sounds like a storm is coming.”
A hush fell and Maya looked down at her plate. Most of the food was still there. She speared a piece of lamb with her fork.
“The birdhouse,” Carl said suddenly.
Maya looked up, confused, to see them all staring out the window at her back, apprehensive. Her scalp tingled as she turned to look, and as she did (her head too heavy, moving way too fast), she understood her mistake.
That last drink had been a terrible idea. Maya hadn’t realized how drunk she was until she was in motion, and now the full force of two glasses of pinot noir, the rum daiquiri, and a teacup and two shots of gin hit her like a tsunami. Her eyes struggled to focus on what everyone was looking at. The birdhouse. The wind had blown it off its branch, and now the tiny house rested in a tangle of twigs that had broken its fall. But the wind was going strong, the twigs shaking, and any second the birdhouse, with its carefully crafted windows and gabled roof, would fall and smash open on the frozen ground.
Maya felt like she was inside of it. The room tilted. The floor swayed and she curled her fingers around the edges of her seat to keep from falling.
“I’ll go see if I can save it,” Carl said.
He left, and then it was just her, Dan, and Greta with her excavating eyes. Two very smart people who could probably tell by her weaving that she had the spins.
“Hey,” Dan said softly. “You doing all right?”
Maya nodded, looking down at her plate. She could feel him beside her and Greta across from her, watching. (Judging.) Maya couldn’t look up. Nausea surged from her stomach through her chest to her throat.
“Can I get you a glass of water?” Greta asked without warmth.
Maya shook her head. She needed to get to the bathroom. “I’ll be right back,” she said as she got up. The thought of vomiting in front of Greta at her birthday dinner was so horrible that Maya broke into a clumsy run and was almost out of the room when her gag reflex kicked in and her mouth flooded.
She covered her mouth, but some of it seeped from between her fingers and splatted on the floor. No one said anything as she hurried away down the hall. The bathroom was at the bottom of the stairs. Closing the door behind her, Maya sank to her knees and heaved. It was all coming up. The wine, the lamb, the frosting, everything she wanted to keep down. Aubrey’s body falling on the steps. Cristina pitching forward on her face. Frank looking up into the camera. Their motions synced in Maya’s mind as she threw up. She had hidden Aubrey’s murder in a box inside her head, but Frank was still out there killing. Even as the wine burned its way back up her throat, Maya had never felt so sober.
She gargled cold water, then stood paralyzed at the sink, too mortified to return to the table. Her clammy face stared back at her, shivering as sweat poured from her body—different from the sweat of exercise. Thicker. Cold. The mirror confirmed that there would be no more pretending she was okay.