Maya had been drinking since five p.m., the tea in her mug replaced with orange juice and the cheap gin she’d bought on her way home from the museum. Four hours later, the pint was nearly empty, and she felt calmer, but not drunk, as she should have. Any other time she would have been sloppy by now, but it was as if her body wouldn’t allow it, as if her every cell intended to stay vigilant.
The smell of chili seeped through the walls. Roasted cumin and garlic, sizzling beef. This was one of Brenda’s best dishes, but Maya hadn’t had any. She understood that she was being cruel, but her mom had questioned her sanity again.
It wouldn’t have bothered her so much if she wasn’t tempted to succumb to her mom’s fears. If she just agreed that she was crazy, Maya would be given the kind of meds that would make her sleep for twelve hours straight. She added more gin to her mug. She was sitting in the dark, cross-legged on top of the bed with her phone in one hand. Hours of searching for information on Ruby Garza hadn’t turned up anything new. And even if it had—if Maya could link a third dead woman to Frank—she still wouldn’t know how he did it.
And in the meantime, Dan hadn’t texted back.
He had been tagged on Instagram by someone with the handle nina_borealis. He was sitting in a booth at Silhouette Lounge, drinking what was probably a rum and Coke across from his law school friend Sean and Sean’s girlfriend, Ellie. The three sat close together, presumably with Nina, who’d taken the picture. A quick search had revealed Nina to be a pretty Filipina architect who enjoyed traveling.
Maya had never been insecure in her relationship with Dan, but he’d never ignored her texts before. Was Nina single? Flirtatious?
Maya reminded herself that she had no reason to mistrust Dan—while he had every reason to mistrust her. He must have known she was hiding something, must have sensed it, and this was probably why he hadn’t texted back. Dan cared about the truth. Being secretive was so much worse than if she’d told him about the Klonopin, which he wouldn’t have judged her for anyway. Half the people they knew were on medication for anxiety, depression, or something else. As the night dragged on and he didn’t text back, the possibility of losing him began to feel real.
The thought made her chest cave in. She’d been in such a bad place when they met, drifting through her days, forgetting most nights, and it was Dan who’d cut through that fog. He was her Orpheus who never looked back, helping her return to the land of the living. He made it a place she wanted to be. He was the kind of person who refused to buy jarred tomato sauce because homemade was so much better, and he enjoyed making it. They’d cooked together almost every night since Maya moved in, and now there was nowhere she’d rather be than at his side, chopping herbs and listening to music and tasting everything more than she needed to because it was all so good.
If only she could rewind to a week before she saw the video. They’d put on a reggaeton playlist and had a dance party in the kitchen while a pot of minestrone simmered on the stove. Dan loved dancing almost as much as she did.
Now she pictured herself cooking alone.
None of the apartments she’d had since moving out of her mom’s house had felt like home because Maya hadn’t tried to make them feel that way. But living with Dan was different. She wished he was beside her in bed but was glad he couldn’t see her drinking gin alone in the dark.
A text came in. This time it was from Steven.
She’d asked him if he had a picture of Cristina’s final painting, the one he’d said was different from her other work. Maybe the painting would offer some glimpse into the mind of the woman who had chosen to have Frank’s key tattooed on her arm.
Steven had agreed to take a picture of it when he got home and text it to her. Now here it was, and the painting was indeed different from the work on Cristina’s website. Bonneville Salt Flats had been striking for its alien beauty, the vast emptiness of land and sky, its cold, crystalline light.
The new painting was warm. It was of the main room in Frank’s cabin. An open floor plan with the kitchen on one side and the living room on the other, with its overstuffed couch, shaggy rug, and tall stone fireplace. Everything was painted in photorealistic detail except for the fire. There was something about its glow, a heightened quality to the light. Shot through with orange, pink, and gold, more beautiful than natural light. More beautiful, Maya thought, than the light in Cristina’s salt flats painting—but opposite in its effect. This painting was full of what her earlier work lacked. Contentment. Well-being. The feeling of warmth on your face. This must be how she’d felt there.
Like the misty village in Maya’s father’s book, Pixán’s true home, the cabin in Cristina’s painting seemed both real and magic.
Dr. Barry would have labeled her thoughts apophenia—the false belief that unrelated things are somehow connected. The delusion behind many a conspiracy theory, he’d explained.
If you look closely enough at anything, patterns will emerge.
But Dr. Barry had always talked more than he listened. What did he know? The painting reminded her of the story because her father and Cristina were describing the same place: the perfect home.
Maya laid her phone facedown on the bed. The painting disturbed her. She cradled her head in her hands. There was a reason she hadn’t seen her father’s book in years. A reason she rarely thought of it and had never mentioned it to Dan, but she’d never articulated that reason to herself. She had instead taken pills and drunk too much to forget. The only way to live with what happened, she had found, was to act as though it hadn’t—but this took work. She had to studiously avoid anything that might remind her of Aubrey’s death.
And that included her father’s book. It hadn’t been a conscious decision but one of many underlying beliefs that steered her behavior. The book was too upsetting. Maya had left it behind when she went away for college, tucked it away in its manila envelope on her bookshelf. But now that years had passed since she thought of it, and many days since she took her last Klonopin, it was plain that her father’s story reminded her too much of the lie she’d been telling herself.
She had realized this about a year after Aubrey died. Maya had been home for a few days, heavily medicated and trying to move on with her life, when she decided to take the book down from the shelf. A panicky feeling had risen her chest the moment she began to read her own handwritten translation. She had felt like she was choking. And something told her that if she kept going, if she revisited this story with its buried meaning, it would unlock truths she couldn’t bear to know.
So she had returned it to the shelf.
But Cristina’s painting had reminded her. Like her father’s book, she felt sure, it held the key to Frank’s secret.
And the key went to a door inside her head. The harder she searched for Frank, the more people she questioned, the more obvious it was that Maya was never going to find the answer outside of herself. It was locked within her, hidden in those hours she had lost. Dr. Barry would have said that she was teetering on the edge of psychosis, but Maya felt for the first time since she saw the video that she was getting somewhere. She rose from her bed and went to the bookshelf, reached for the old manila envelope—but grasped only air.
She remembered this wasn’t her room anymore. She must have forgotten in the dark. She turned on the lights and realized she had no idea where the book was now. She searched the closet, the desk, the empty drawers of her old nightstand. She had taken off her clothes earlier because they were sweaty, but now she pulled them back on, shimmying into her damp leggings and long-sleeved shirt. She checked every shelf in the living room. She knew her mom wouldn’t have gotten rid of her father’s book.
Unless—what if she’d accidentally donated it to Goodwill?
Her mom had asked her to come home to take what she wanted before her old room became an Airbnb rental. But Maya hadn’t come. She’d put it off for weeks, then months, before Brenda announced that she was taking everything to Goodwill, and Maya, still so merrily medicated at the time, hadn’t cared. “No,” she whispered now. “No, no, no . . .” She remembered her grandfather’s face as he handed her the book. The precious ink. Her father’s words. She walked back and forth a few times, running her hands through her hair.
Then she thought of the basement. Maybe her mom had been bluffing about Goodwill; maybe all she’d wanted was for her daughter to come home. Maya hurried downstairs, walking lightly so she wouldn’t wake her mom.
The basement had scared her as a child. It was colder than the rest of the house, and musty. A long room that got darker the farther back you went. First there were the washer and dryer and a dresser that served as a folding table. Then a shelf lined with kitchen gadgets and the remains of DIY projects. A jar of marbles. Cans of paint, an ice cream machine. Beyond that, boxes of books, but not the one she was looking for. She went deeper. Waded through clothes in bins. Please be here, please be here. Crawling now, she opened a crate and found a tea set furred by dust. Another crate held the games she’d played. Sorry! Battleship. Clue. It was all here—her mom had saved everything. A wave of gratitude swelled in Maya’s chest. She found her father’s book in a box with other stories she had loved, the ones on her old shelf.
She took it upstairs and began to read.