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.
She was relieved to find, when she got home, that her mom hadn’t woken in the two hours or so since Maya had taken the car without permission. She poured herself a glass of orange juice for the vitamin C, then added about half the gin to help her sleep. She brought the drink to bed with her, quickly drank it, then sank into the pillowy mattress. Her hands and feet tingled as her blood thawed, and before long, she began to pass out.
She was tempted to ignore her phone when it rang, let it go to voicemail, let the gin pull her under, but then it occurred to her that she hadn’t called her job this morning to tell them she was still sick. If that was her boss on the phone, Maya had to answer—she couldn’t afford, on top of everything else, to get fired. Her hand shot out from beneath the blankets.
When she saw the caller ID, the relief hit her as hard as the gin. “Dan!” she gushed.
“Hey . . .”
“How—how are you?”
“All right, I guess. Halfway through exams.”
He didn’t sound as overjoyed or relieved as she felt. “I’m sure you’re killing it,” she said weakly.
“Listen, sorry I didn’t text you back.”
Her chest tightened. “That’s okay, I know you have a lot going on.”
He said nothing.
She didn’t breathe. Maybe if neither of them spoke, the conversation would end, and they could go back to the way things were.
“What’s going on with you, Maya?”
She wanted to tell him what she’d remembered tonight—she’d been carrying it too long on her own. But to tell him now would be to risk coming across as she had seven years ago, as though she were suggesting that Frank had cast some sort of spell on her, made her see things that weren’t there.
It remained true that what he’d done felt like magic.
“See?” Dan said. “You don’t want to tell me, do you?”
“Please,” she said, her voice filling with tears. “I do, it’s just that—”
“Right,” he said flatly. “I’m sure you have your reasons, and look, I respect that. But honestly, this isn’t what I signed up for. I don’t want the kind of relationship where we feel like we have to hide things from—”
“I’m going through Klonopin withdrawal.”
“I’m sorry, what?”
She’d been looking for the right time to tell him, always at some future point, but the moment had never come, and though the word for what Frank had done to her stayed mired in a strange, foggy soup, the rest of what was going on in her mind felt surprisingly clear as the words fell from her lips.
“Jesus,” Dan said when she was done. “I don’t get it. Why would you hide all that from me?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “It didn’t seem important when we met, so I didn’t mention it, and then I . . . kept not mentioning it until it started to feel weird. Like, why had I waited so long?”
Dan sighed.
“I wish we could talk about this in person,” she said, wanting to hold him, but glad he couldn’t see her this way.
“So that’s why you got sick at my parents’ house.”
“Yes.”
He fell quiet again.
“I’m so sorry . . .”
“I could have helped you through it.”
“The thing is I was lying to myself too. I didn’t want to be taking Wendy’s pills anymore. I knew they were clouding my thinking, making me forgetful. I knew they were dangerous to mix with alcohol, but I’ve been doing that pretty much every night for years. And I didn’t want that reality to be true, so I pretended it wasn’t.”
“Oh, Maya . . .”
“I’m sorry.”
“You’ve been drinking tonight, haven’t you?”
The disappointment in his voice stung. Of course he could hear the four shots of gin she’d just downed. She thought of explaining that she needed it to sleep but felt lucid enough to see that this was a poor excuse. “Yes,” she whispered.
This time he was silent for so long that she had time to consider the two paths he might take. Seeing as how she obviously needed help, he might, on the one hand, choose to stand by her no matter what, help her through this.
Or he could say that it was all too much, that she was too much, throw up his hands, and walk away.
“You have a problem,” he said slowly. “What are you going to do about it?”
Her tears were messy now, her nose running down her face, but her chest filled with gratitude because there was kindness in his voice. “I’ll get help,” she said. “I will. As soon as I get back to Boston.”
“What kind of help?”
“I don’t know, a psychiatrist? Or a therapist. Some kind of doctor.”
“I have an uncle in AA. I think that’s what you should do.”
“But I’m not an alcoholic,” she said, instinctively defensive.
“Really? You got drunk at my mom’s birthday the other night. Now here you are again.”
She couldn’t argue with that.
“And all this week . . . Of course I knew something was wrong. And you—you hid it from me. You’ve been taking pills behind my back, making yourself sick with how much you’ve been drinking. You’re hurting yourself, Maya. You can’t hide it anymore.”
Maya curled into a ball, drawing her knees to her chest.
“And anyway,” he said, “those programs aren’t just for alcoholics. They have them for all kinds of addicts.”
The word made her wince. The first step of a journey Maya had no interest in taking. She didn’t want to go to meetings, or find God, and when she thought about being sober all the time, she wasn’t sure life would be worth living. She felt an urge to remind Dan that it was a doctor who had written her first Klonopin prescription—that this was his fault. Or that, until the last few days, she had cut back dramatically on her drinking. Or that she could—she would—straighten herself out on her own, no need for anything as dramatic as an Anonymous program.
But instead, she said, “Okay. I’ll go.”
The problem with the word addict was that it meant you were supposed to do something about it, as if Maya didn’t have enough to deal with. But she had told Dan that she would, so after lying in the dark awhile, no longer tired, she searched for AA meetings on her phone. She found a chapter not far from their apartment in Boston and texted Dan to let him know. He wrote back with a heart, and she replied with ten, and told herself that she would go to meetings if it would make him happy. She would do a lot for him.
Even if she wasn’t ready to admit she was an addict. She was physically dependent on medication. Wasn’t there a difference?
The night was long, and she was acutely aware of the gin left in the bottle on her nightstand. She poured it down the kitchen sink. This wasn’t going to be easy, but it was for the best. She had to stay sharp. She sat at the antique writing desk in her old room with the pen and flowery notepad her mom had left out for future guests and began to list what she had learned tonight, starting with what Steven had told her at Patrick’s.
1. Cristina was planning to move into Frank’s cabin. A chilling thought now that Maya knew the place didn’t exist.
2. He has clients of some sort. She shuddered to think of what services he might provide. She’d look into this.
3. His dad was a professor at Williams. She still knew almost nothing about Frank’s dad other than his name, which was Oren. She had searched for him online seven years ago but not found anything and given up after Dr. Barry convinced her to drop it. She hadn’t thought much about Oren Bellamy since.
4. Oren . . . She recalled the apparent glee he took, the night she met him, in directing her to a cabin that he’d have known wasn’t real.
Then hadn’t Frank told her something about him in the clearing? Maya’s brow creased. Her grasp of these newly recovered memories was tenuous, even more imperfect than might be expected of a night seven years ago. Yet somehow writing it down helped her think, helped pull the sunken past back up to the surface. Oren . . . she wrote, was the reason Frank built the cabin.
She remembered this now. Frank built his cabin to get away from his father.
She picked up her phone. Adding “Williams College” to her search for “Oren Bellamy” didn’t turn up anything, but eventually she found references to two journal articles he’d published in the 1980s. One article was titled “Observable Personality Traits Associated with High Absorption Scores on the TAS,” but when Maya clicked on the article, it had been taken down.
The other article he’d published had also been taken down, but back issues of the journal were available in print through the website. The journal was called Experimental Neuropsychology, and its website hadn’t been updated in over a decade. Maya got her debit card and purchased Volume 17, October 1983, the issue Dr. Bellamy’s article appeared in, typing her credit card info into a beige website that looked almost vintage.
So Oren had been a psychologist, and either Williams College had erased all connection with him or he’d never really taught there.
She searched for “Dr. Oren Bellamy,” “psychologist,” and, glancing over her list, threw in the word “clients,” and there he was. Dr. Oren Bellamy, PhD, CHT. Not just his name but his face, a close-up of him in a plaid blazer, smiling at his desk with a bookshelf behind him. In the picture, he looked to be in his fifties, younger than when she’d met him.
The site was for a place called Clear Horizons Wellness Center. The website looked current, if not very professional. The design was shoddy, the font garish, and the logo—an orange sun on a blue horizon—looked like clip art. It was hard to tell exactly what kind of services the center offered.
Reading the “About” section didn’t help much. Dr. Oren Bellamy’s “proprietary therapeutic method” apparently had a 100 percent success rate when it came to curing a long list of “life-crippling ailments” such as addiction, phobias, anxiety, and depression, as well as facilitating weight loss, smoking cessation, and “moving past grief.”
Several clients testified: “It isn’t too much to say that Clear Horizons saved my life.”—Carol M. “Finally, something that works!”—Mike R. “I never thought I could get over losing my sister, but then I met Dr. Hart!”—Susan P.
The final testimonial was a video. Maya clicked on it, and an elderly man began to speak. He sat in what looked like a therapist’s office, in front of a window looking out on a forest. Serene music played in the background. “When my Diane died,” he said, “I thought I might as well die too. Figured what was the point?” The man smiled, his eyes dreamy and unfocused. Maya felt her blood curdle. “I wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t for Dr. Hart,” the man said. “Dr. Hart helped me go on living.”
Nothing else on the website helped clarify the identity of Dr. Hart—though Maya had her suspicions—or the nature of the treatment being offered. All she learned was that Dr. Oren Bellamy’s proprietary therapeutic method continued to be practiced at—and only at—Clear Horizons Wellness Center. Insurance was not accepted.
Maya read all of every page on the site, not sure what she hoped to find, but she kept looking. On the “About” page, she studied the initials after Oren’s name and realized that she didn’t know what CHT stood for. She Googled it, and the first thing that came up was “Certified Hand Therapist.”
Hand therapist? Could that be right?
She added “psychology.”
What happened next caused Maya to question if maybe something was wrong with her phone. A glitch in the screen. There was a certain phrase that appeared among her search results—two or three words, a professional title—that she couldn’t make out.
“Certified . . . therapist.”
She couldn’t read the middle portion. Her eyes didn’t seem to grasp it, like the letters kept slipping out from beneath her vision. No matter how she held her screen and regardless of what she clicked on, she couldn’t read what came before “therapist.”
Maya’s vision had stumbled over words now and again in recent years, but it was rare enough that she would chalk it up to tired eyes and move on.
But now it was obvious that it was just one very specific word—or part of a word—that she couldn’t read. She got out of bed, turned on the lights, and looked around. There was nothing wrong with her vision as far as she could tell. No dark spots or blurriness. Yet when she looked again at her phone, the problem remained. “Certified . . . therapist.” It was like an optical illusion. Something was blocking her from seeing it. She felt sick. Nothing about this felt possible. Maybe she really was crazy.
She sank down onto the edge of the bed. Held her head in her hands. Then she had an idea and got back on her phone.
She created an online document. Copied “Certified . . . therapist” and pasted it into the document.
She selected the “Read Aloud” option.
What she heard turned her blood to ice. The middle of the word sounded garbled. She couldn’t hear it any more than she could read it on her screen. “Certified *#@^-therapist.” The warping was subtle—she might not have noticed had she only heard it once—but it kept happening. “Certified *#@^-therapist.” Maya’s heart raced. She slowed down the reading speed. Held the phone to her ear and closed her eyes and listened over and over and over and over. She listened until she heard. And a black sun dawned in her chest.
Oren Bellamy had been a certified hypnotherapist.