Maya leaned her pounding head on the car window as her mom drove them home from the bus station. They passed St. Joseph’s, where her grandparents went to church, and the YMCA where she’d learned how to swim. The streets of downtown Pittsfield were lined with grand historical buildings. Former department stores. A Gilded Age theater. A marble courthouse. When Brenda was a child, teenagers would drive up and down North Street on Thursday nights—they called it cruising. Maya didn’t get it. If she saw someone doing that today, she’d assume they were selling drugs.
The car turned onto the street where she grew up. She knew this place by heart, its large houses carved up into apartments, the peeling paint, satellite dishes, patchy lawns. Even the neighbor’s Christmas decorations were familiar to her, the giant candy cane and blow-up Santa. The house she grew up in was rickety-looking clapboard, like the others. The paint was lemon yellow. A blue tarp protected the small garden out front from winter. It was the smallest on the street, but as Brenda liked to say, the house was theirs. She had bought it for the two of them when Maya was eight.
Brenda was less robust these days, and no longer an EMT but a sous chef and baker at a luxury rehab center. She’d switched careers because she was, in her words, too old to work on ambulances. She’d had back sprains, migraines, and twisted ankles. She couldn’t bear to see another person die. Her arms were skinnier, her torso wider, and her dark blond curls were turning gray, but Maya liked to think her mom seemed happier. Or at least more relaxed.
Cold slush seeped through the soles of Maya’s sneakers as she got out of the car. It was noon on a winter Sunday, the street quiet, the day overcast. The gray in her mom’s hair seemed more pronounced in this light. Or maybe Maya had been away for longer than she thought.
She rarely came home these days, and knew this hurt her mom, but the truth was that Maya still harbored resentment about the past. To admit this, though, would be to concede that some part of her still believed that Frank had murdered Aubrey—which Maya could never admit to her mom. Brenda would only panic, think her daughter was going the way of Aunt Lisa, and get on the phone with Dr. Barry.
“Can’t wait to see what you think of the room,” Brenda said now as she sat on the low bench beside the door to take off her boots. “You’ll be the first to sleep in the new bed.”
“You got rid of my bed?”
Her mom snorted. “Your bed? When’s the last time you slept in it?”
The question hung heavy with guilt.
“The new bed’s a pillow-top,” her mom said.
Sliding out of her sneakers and coat, Maya went to see the “new room,” which was her old bedroom converted into an Airbnb rental. Her mom seemed more at ease since leaving her old job, but she’d also taken a pay cut and wouldn’t be able to retire for years.
Opening the door, Maya hardly recognized the room that had been hers between eight and eighteen. It was a shrine to Berkshires tourism, the vacationers her mom was hoping to attract. Instead of Pan’s Labyrinth and Tender Wallpaper posters, the walls held framed Norman Rockwell prints and photographs of Pittsfield in its heyday, when classic cars decked out in chrome rolled down a happening North Street. A lamp on the desk gave off a burnished glow, and the red-and-gold curtains evoked fall foliage.
Maya hoped for her mom’s sake that the tourists would come. But Pittsfield wasn’t quite the destination that Stockbridge was, or Lenox, or any number of other small towns in the Berkshires. Every few years or so, a magazine would include it on a list of up-and-coming cities or write that it was making a comeback, and Brenda wanted so much for this to be true, for her hometown to be the place it had seemed to her as a child. But as far as Maya could tell, that had yet to happen.
“Well? What do you think?”
“Looks great,” Maya said. But there was something unsettling about seeing her old, familiar room filled with unfamiliar furniture. The bed was new, the dresser, the small flat-screen TV. The only thing her mom had kept was the nightstand. “Try the bed,” her mom said, pointing to the bare mattress.
Maya sat down and let herself fall back, sinking. “Soft.”
“Sheets are in the dryer. I’ll go get them.”
Staring at the ceiling, Maya recognized the view—this hadn’t changed. The water stain above her bed was as familiar as a birthmark. Alone now, she turned onto her side and saw that her mom had peeled off the stickers that Maya had stuck to the nightstand when she was little. Her old sticker collection. Traces of it still clung to the wood. She leaned closer, peered over the edge of the bed, and saw part of a sticker that hadn’t quite come off. A band sticker, black with purple lettering. Tender Wallpaper had been Aubrey’s favorite band; she and Maya had seen them in concert the night before she died.
This sticker had come with the tickets Maya bought for that concert, and the sight of it brought back the night (dancing with her eyes closed, Aubrey beside her) but also the next day (Aubrey collapsing on the stoop).
Maya heard footsteps.
Her mom knew at once something was wrong—Maya could see it on her face as she walked in with an armload of sheets: the worry of a mother for her child. Maya’s instinct was to tell her everything, to lay it all down at her feet, unburden herself of the fear and guilt that weighed on her.
But Maya couldn’t risk sounding like Aunt Lisa. Not when she needed to be taken seriously. She did, however, have to explain the tears on her face, so she came clean about her other problem: “I’ve been taking Klonopin every night for sleep, and last week I ran out. I’ve hardly slept at all since.”
The worry deepened on her mom’s face. Before Frank, Maya had talked to her mom about everything. They made up the bed together as she spoke, fitting the sheets onto the mattress and topping them with blankets. There was such comfort in returning to the way things used to be. Before she had habits to hide.
“How much were you taking?”
“Two or three milligrams a night . . . and usually another half during the day.”
Maya’s mom looked disappointed but not surprised. “Dr. Barry never prescribed you that much, did he?”
Maya shook her head. When her mom walked over, she thought it was to hug her. But it was to check Maya’s pulse. “Do you know how dangerous it is to quit cold turkey?”
“That’s why I’m here.” Not the whole truth, but at least factual.
Her mom peered deeply into her eyes. Checking her pupils.
Maya leaned away. “Pretty sure I’m through the worst of it, though. I just need to ride it out, get some sleep.” That was the main thing, really—she hadn’t slept for more than a few hours in days, and she really could have used that hug, or any other comforting gesture. But instead Maya felt, as she had in other times of distress, that her mom, in her worry, was treating her like a patient.
She pressed her palm to her daughter’s temple. “At least you don’t have a fever, but tell me if you start to feel worse.”
“I—”
“Or start seeing flashing lights. Or hear anything that’s not there.”
“Okay, but—”
“Or notice any unusual smells.”
“Fine.”
Already, Maya regretted saying as much as she had. Her mom would clearly keep an eye on her now, which would make it even harder to do what she had to do, but there seemed to be no walking it back. Now her mom was looking at her with the vigilance of a retired paramedic who had never really made it off the ambulance.