Maya still hasn’t told Aubrey about the lost time.
She’s less sure of herself by the hour, and it’s not like she can point to any injury, or say for sure that it wasn’t her fault, so she didn’t mention Frank after the Tender Wallpaper concert last night or before they went back to Maya’s house and went to sleep.
But then she’d dreamed of the cabin. Not much happened in the dream—Frank sat across from her, the table set with bowls—yet terror had shrieked through the air and she couldn’t move, couldn’t open her mouth to let out the scream in her throat. The dream was so upsetting that, for the second morning in a row, she wasn’t able to fall back asleep afterward.
She walks quietly to the kitchen. Her mom and Aubrey are still asleep. The window above the sink has been left open. The room is cool with morning. She pours herself a glass of orange juice and tries to shake off the dread of her dream, but then sees the number flashing on the cordless phone. Eight. Eight missed calls, and she knows who they’re from. The call log confirms it—Frank’s been calling her all morning.
The murky fear she’s been holding at bay comes flooding back. It occurs to her that she has no idea who Frank really is.
“You’re up early.”
Maya startles.
Her mom sweeps into the living room in a cotton nightgown with roses on it, her blond curls a messy halo around her head. “Didn’t mean to scare you.”
Maya puts a finger to her lips. “Aubrey’s asleep.”
“She’s here?” Her mom seems rested after a full night’s sleep, a luxury in her line of work. She goes from room to room, opening curtains, filling the house with light.
“Aubrey! So good to see you.”
Maya hears them in the hall. Aubrey must have been on her way to the bathroom, probably hoping to sneak back to sleep afterward, but now she’s been caught awake. “Hi, Brenda.” Aubrey’s voice is sleepy but warm. She’s spent a lot of time here over the years, including a whole month last year after her mom kicked her out of the house for sneaking a boy into her room.
Brenda makes them all French toast and serves it with local maple syrup, a splurge. The French toast is crispy on the outside and soft in the middle. The house smells like fried batter and the coffee that Maya has recently begun to join her mom in drinking with breakfast. She started largely because she wasn’t allowed to drink it when she was younger, but she liked the way it made her feel and quickly learned to love its bitter taste.
She washes dishes afterward, and Aubrey dries. They talk over running water, the smell of Palmolive. “So about Frank . . .”
“Finally!” Aubrey says. “Thought you were never going to tell me.”
Maya hadn’t wanted to dwell on it last night, but now she needs to know how afraid she should be. “You were right. Total creep.”
Aubrey would never say I told you so. She pouts sympathetically. “What’d he do?”
Maya lathers a fork as she tells Aubrey about the three times she seemed to black out around Frank. The first time, at Balance Rock, she assumed it was his dad’s medical marijuana; that stuff is known to be strong. The second time, the night she kissed Frank, she’d been so giddy that she hadn’t given the missing hours much thought.
“Hours?”
Maya, embarrassed, keeps her eyes on her soapy hands.
“But how . . . ?”
“I have no idea . . .” She waits for Aubrey to dismiss her, and when she doesn’t, Maya tells her about last night. The cabin in the woods. The missing minutes as she arrived and left. Walking in the rain with no idea how she got there. The phone calls. The fucking with her head.
“I’m going for a run,” her mom says, suddenly behind them, dressed in shorts and a shirt that reads pumpkin fever triathlon.
Aubrey nearly drops the plate she’s been drying for the past two minutes.
“Geez, you two are jumpy.” Her mom leaves the kitchen door open at her back.
Maya wouldn’t have blamed Aubrey for being skeptical. But when she manages to look at her, there’s not a shred of doubt on Aubrey’s face. No judgment. She believes Maya, and it shows; she looks afraid. More afraid than Maya herself had felt up until this moment, until she saw the fear in her brave friend’s eyes and the way she stands frozen at the sink.
“I knew it,” Aubrey says quietly. “I think he did the same to me.”
Maya stares at her.
“At Dunkin’ Donuts, right before you ran into us. I felt like something weird happened that day, but then I thought . . .” She shakes her head. “I thought I was imagining it.”
“Oh my god! Me too!”
Now they both look scared.
“It was after he set that book aside for me . . .” Aubrey seems to turn something over in her mind. “A biography about this doctor who lived in Victorian London. A mesmerist . . .”
“A what?”
“Mesmerism—it was a medical practice in the 1800s. Basically mimosas. This doctor became famous for performing it onstage. He had this patient, a servant, and he would treat her while people watched. Sort of like a magic show only instead of magic tricks, people paid to watch him minimize the poor girl, who was probably unconscious the whole time.”
Maya furrows her brow, stuck on mimosas. “I’m sorry—what?”
“Which part?”
“Mimosas?”
“Mimosas,” Aubrey says. “You know, like hippo sizzling.”
Maya almost laughs. She turns off the water, and the room is silent. “Did you say . . .”
Aubrey’s starting to look annoyed. “Seriously?”
Maya doesn’t ask her to repeat herself. It doesn’t matter anyway what book Frank lent Aubrey—she just needs to know what he did to her, what he did to them both. She shakes her head as if to clear it. “What happened at Dunkin’ Donuts?”
“We talked about magic,” Aubrey says. “He told me he practiced a little himself, sleight of hand, coin tricks, that kind of thing. As if he thought that would impress me.”
Maya’s face burns. She herself was easy to impress.
“He asked,” Aubrey says, “if I wanted to see a trick. And he really sold it to me, you know?”
Maya knew.
“He told me the trick was really old and that very few people will ever see it. Well, of course I wanted to see it. I said yes and he took this key out of his pocket and set it on the table.”
“Was the key weird? Like, did it look sharp?”
“Has he shown you the trick?”
Maya shook her head. “What did he do with it?”
“He said he was going to make it levitate. Told me to focus all my attention on it. He said I’d see the key rise off the table.”
“Did you?”
“He never got to that part. He told me all about the trick first, like how it’s never been written down and magicians have been passing it down by word of mouth for generations. Blah blah blah. I knew none of it was true. Magic tricks usually start off with a story of some kind. But his just went on and on and on . . .” A strange look comes over her face. “I kept listening, thinking something was going to happen. But it never did. The key stayed where it was, and I . . . stared at it . . . and then you walked in.”
Maya stops washing dishes. She turns off the water.
“I walked home after that,” Aubrey says, “and when I got there, I saw that I’d been at Dunkin’ Donuts for more than an hour.”
“Knock, knock,” Frank says at the screen door.
They turn, eyes wide with fear.
There’s no telling how long he’s been there. How much he’s heard.
Maya instinctively picks up a knife that had been lying by the sink. “What are you doing here?”
Frank eyes the sharp paring knife. She’s not sure why she picked it up, and it feels like overkill, but she tries to hold it with confidence.
He raises his hands in a gesture of surrender. “I only want to talk.”
“I told you I don’t want to see you.”
“I just want to clear the air about the other night.”
Aubrey, standing closer to the door, faces him through the screen. She’s an inch or two taller than he is and, unlike Maya, doesn’t seem scared. “You need to leave, Frank. Now.”
“This has nothing to do with you, Aubrey. Stay out of it.”
“Or else what?” Aubrey stares him down. “I know,” she says.
A look of fear on his face, followed quickly by fury. His voice remains calm. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“I know what you did to us.”
Maya can’t tell if she’s bluffing.
Frank lurches at her. Stops an inch from her face. “Like I said, I don’t know what you’re talking about.” The words are edged with warning.
Alarm bells sound in Maya’s chest. She wonders if Aubrey is telling the truth.
Either way, it’s clear that Frank feels threatened.
“Leave,” Maya says, “or I’ll call the police.”
“Call them,” Aubrey says.
No one moves.
Maya’s eyes dart to the phone on the kitchen wall, but someone has forgotten to return the cordless receiver to its base. She checks the living room, the knife still in her hand. She doesn’t see the phone, so she hurries upstairs for her cell. Finds it in her room, in the back pocket of the jeans she wore last night to the concert. She flips the phone open and is about to dial 9-1-1 when she pauses to ask herself if she’s really doing this.
What exactly does she plan to say? What is her emergency? A man she knows is talking to her friend at the back door? Frank isn’t armed and hasn’t done anything to threaten them. Maya takes the phone to the window and pulls back the curtain. When she presses her face to the glass and looks down, she can see Frank talking to Aubrey through the screen door. She can’t see Aubrey, who’s inside the house, but they appear to be talking calmly. Then he takes something from his pocket and holds it up for her to see.
The key.
Maya has no reason to think he’s going to hurt Aubrey, yet her body reacts as if he has taken out a gun and is holding it to her head. Maya grips the knife tighter. Backs away from the window. She needs to get Aubrey back inside. Even if she appears to be fine. Even if all Maya has to go on is a feeling—she has to try. She rushes back downstairs, but her steps slow as she enters the kitchen.
She sees them through the screen door, Aubrey and Frank. They look relaxed, side by side but not touching. The sky is blue and birds are singing. Maya’s hands hang at her side, the phone in one, the knife in the other. As she gets closer, she hears the low murmur of his voice. She can’t make out the words but detects a strange, songlike rhythm. She’s almost at the door when Aubrey tips over on her side. She makes no effort to break her fall. Her shoulder strikes the concrete, then her head.
Frank turns to her, a shocked look on his face.
The screen door slams open. Maya rushes out.
“What the fuck?!” Frank says. “What happened to her?”
Maya drops the knife and the phone and falls to her knees beside her friend. “Aubrey!? Aubrey! Wake up!”
“Does she have some kind of medical condition?”
Maya ignores him.
Aubrey’s eyes are open as Maya grabs her by the shoulders and shakes her. “Oh my god, oh my god.” Aubrey’s head lolls against the concrete, lifeless as a rag doll.
Maya looks up at Frank. “What did you do?”
Frank looks stunned. “What are you talking about? We were just talking and she—she just—” He gestures at her body on the stoop, hinged unnaturally at the waist, green eyes refusing Maya’s gaze, even as they stare at her.
“You can’t blame me for this,” Frank says, panic rising in his voice. “You can’t.”
“Aubrey! Wake up! Wake up!” Maya screams, her face wet with tears, as Frank slowly backs away.