It wasn’t just that Maya hadn’t seen or heard the word hypnosis in years. She hadn’t thought it either, or considered what the word meant. The induction of a trancelike, highly suggestible state. It was as if the very concept had been deleted from her mind. But now that she’d managed to hear part of it—hypno—the rest of the word came back to her along with its meaning. And then it seemed obvious.
Frank had hypnotized her, not just once but repeatedly, then hidden the memories from her inside her own head. Looking back, Maya felt like she’d been circling this a long time, but it was as if the very idea had been garbled, and finally she’d grasped it. Now, as she read about hypnotism online, she learned of new research emerging from the field of neuroscience, new developments in the understanding of how what happens in the mind can have real effects in the body.
When she came to an article on posthypnotic suggestion, she felt dizzy. She rearranged the comforter around her shoulders. She’d been too hot, so she had taken off her clothes, but was then too cold, so she’d wrapped herself in blankets. Her long hair clung to her sweat-damp back.
Suggestions made during hypnosis, she read, could affect the patient’s behavior in their normal life. The hypnotist could tell a person who wanted to quit smoking, for example, that their next cigarette would taste like the worst thing they’d ever eaten. For some people, this worked—a suggestion made under hypnosis, it seemed, had the power to alter their perception later on.
Could this be why Maya’s eyes had seemed to skip over the word hypnosis and why her ears couldn’t seem to hear it? Had Frank implanted a posthypnotic suggestion in her mind designed to keep her from figuring out what he’d done? She could almost feel it there, alien, invasive. A seed that had sprouted its pale tendrils through her brain.
Maya dropped her phone to the bed. She couldn’t stand to look at it anymore.
She wanted to scrub out the inside of her skull, could almost feel his words worming through her. She had a word now for what he had done to her.
But could hypnosis kill people? Was that possible? Even with all the recent scientific research she’d found online, the word made her think of stage tricks, a man in a suit making hammy volunteers quack like ducks. It made her think of the magic shows Aubrey had loved, which Maya had always found cheesy. But this clearly wasn’t the type of hypnosis Frank’s father had practiced. Steven had said he taught at Williams College, and if this was true, the college, along with both journals that had published his research, had erased all signs of having been affiliated with Oren Bellamy.
Yet—according to the Clear Horizons website—he had singlehandedly developed a “proprietary therapeutic method” for treating patients, one with a “100 percent success rate.” Frank had said his father was brilliant yet dangerous, that he had hurt people but not physically. Now Maya thought she understood. Oren didn’t have to touch anyone to hurt them. He did it with words, just like his son. Frank learned from his father.
Maya had to tell someone. She would tell her mom. Dan. The police. She turned on the light, got back into her sweatpants and shirt.
Her mom didn’t wake as Maya peeked her head through the door of her bedroom. She slept on her back, mouth open, blankets pulled up to her shoulders. The clock read 9:17. Maya paused here.
Claiming Frank had hypnotized her would make her sound as delusional as she had seven years ago. It’s like he has some kind of power. No one had believed her then, and no one would now, not even her mom, unless she had proof.
She crept back to her room, thoughts tumbling. She turned off the lights, then turned them on again. She rocked back and forth on the bed, hugged herself. It wasn’t enough to point out that Frank’s dad was a hypnotherapist. She had to prove that Frank was too, and that the hypnotism they had practiced was somehow deadly. She began to cry. It was like a caged animal had been released from her chest. The truth that wouldn’t let her sleep, that had lurked just beyond her grasp for the past seven years, was finally out in the open.
Either that or she’d lost her mind again.
The only person who knew for sure was Frank.
Steven had told her she could find him at the Whistling Pig most nights. The bar was less than a mile away. She downloaded a voice memo app on her phone. Tested it out, talking at different volumes with the phone tucked into her waistband, covered by her shirt, then beside her, hidden in her purse. The sound was best when she kept it in her purse. She found the cream-colored cashmere sweater she had worn to dinner with Dan’s parents stuffed in her backpack; this would look better than the faded T-shirt she had on. She would pretend like she just so happened to be in town and decided to have a drink at the Whistling Pig. She would act like she was happy to see him.
Like it had never occurred to her that Frank might have killed her friend, or that it was him calling her on the landline the other night, perhaps worried that she was starting to remember. She went to the bathroom for more of her mom’s cover-up, but the mirror told her there was only so much she could do. Her eyes were sunken, her lips bloodless and chapped.
Maya looked unwell, but she felt stronger than she had in years. She finally had the words for what happened to her. Frank had hypnotized her, planted his suggestions, then made her forget, causing her to think she’d blacked out. She might never know exactly what he told her during that time, but now she felt sure that her nearly instant infatuation with him, her blindness to the warning signs that had been so apparent to Aubrey, were all part of his programming. He’d cultivated in her the perfect companion for himself to dwell in the cabin in his head.
Or tried to, anyway. Though he appeared to have succeeded with Cristina, who, after all, would never leave him, never hurt him or let him down. Maya splashed cold water on her face, clenched her teeth to keep them from chattering. She appeared broken down and weak, even more vulnerable that she must have when he lured her in at the library.
But she wasn’t.
This time her vulnerability would be a trap. She must have been an easy target for him then, hanging on his every word. Now she knew better. She wouldn’t get sucked into one of his stories.
She wrote her mom a note on the back of an envelope. Mom—if you find this, it means I need help. I’m at the Whistling Pig. She placed the note on top of the alarm clock in her room, then set the alarm for midnight.
She slid a chef’s knife from its block in the kitchen. She wrapped the gleaming blade in a dish towel and put it in her purse.
She closed the door quietly on her way out.
The Whistling Pig was on the ground floor of the old Berkshire Life Insurance Company, a stately gray building from the 1800s. The bar was tucked between a restaurant and a copy shop. She’d walked so that her mom would have the car if Maya needed rescuing. She paused to catch her breath before reaching for the heavy red door.
The bar was narrow and smelled like IPA. Weezer played on the speakers. Three men looked up from their table as she entered. The men were about her age, Irish-looking, guys she might have gone to high school with. The only other customer was a ruddy man in his forties, sitting alone at the bar.
A chalkboard menu listed microbrews and a few small-batch whiskeys. “Hi there,” said the bartender, a local adopter of the man-bun.
“I’ll have the lager,” she said. The cheapest thing on the menu. She hadn’t been to work in over a week, had rent coming up, and couldn’t really afford this beer she didn’t plan to drink, but didn’t want to stand out any more than she already did as the only woman here. She gave the bartender her debit card.
The man sitting at the bar stared at her. He looked drunk, a defiant gleam in his unfocused eyes. Maya ignored him.
“Leave it open?”
“No, thanks.”
She took her pint to a table at the back and sat facing the door so she would see anyone who walked in. She tore the napkin around her beer to pieces as the drunk man at the bar continued to stare at her. She pretended not to notice. She looked at the names and quotes patrons had chalked onto the walls, the pile of board games on offer. The cozy, shabby-chic décor.
She looked down at the pictures shellacked to the table beneath her elbows and saw they were all of half-naked women. Women in lingerie, in bikinis; women cut out of magazines. Close-ups of body parts, airbrushed, shaved. Faces covered by the bodies of other women. Maya stared at it a moment, then looked up to see the man at the bar laughing at her.
A smile played across the bartender’s lips.
Maya could see why Frank liked this place. He must fit right in.
Her eyes flicked to the door as it swung open. A man in a dark, hooded jacket, his face in shadow. He nodded at the bartender, and the bartender nodded back, started pouring him a beer.
The hooded man sat at the bar, exchanged nods with the guy who’d laughed at her. The hooded man was Frank’s size, but his posture was wrong. This man was bent over, weary-looking, but he straightened a little as soon as he had a beer in his hand. He lowered his hood.
It was him.
Frank looked tired. Leaner. Old. Older than he should have—seeing him now, it was obvious to her that he’d lied about his age. He’d told Maya he was twenty, but the math didn’t work: this hollow-eyed, salt-and-pepper man was easily in his forties. No wonder he hadn’t wanted to meet her mom.
Maya had come here unsure if she could face him, afraid she’d lose her nerve if he actually showed up, but now that she saw him, a red-hot surge of anger rose and she thought of the knife in her purse. She thought of sinking it into his neck. This pathetic little man had ruined her life.
She reached into her purse. Hit the record button on her phone, then set her purse on the edge of the table.
She approached the bar. “Frank? Is that you?”
His eyes went wide as he turned and saw her. His face fell. This time he would have no story prepared.
“Wow!” She smiled. “It is you.”
“Maya! Good to see you. What are you doing here?”
“I’m in town for Christmas, felt like going out for a drink. Hey, want to join me?”
He stared at her. “You’re here alone?”
She nodded, then watched him read her, the seven years added to her face, the bags beneath her eyes, the pallor. She probably looked as haggard as he did.
“Sure,” he said.
Frank followed Maya to her table.
They sat across from each other. “Cheers,” she said.
“Been a long time.”
They clinked glasses, then fell silent, as if out of respect. The last time they saw each other was the day Aubrey died. In some ways Maya had never moved on from that day, stuck in her thick, foggy fear, but seeing him now, she understood that, in other ways, she’d become a different person. She was an adult, capable of seeing through the loser sitting across from her, desperate for love and thinking he needed to trick people in order to get it.
“You come here often?” she asked.
“Every once in a while.” He shrugged. “Where you visiting from?”
“Boston. I stayed after college.”
“Good for you.”
“Boston’s not all it’s cracked up to be,” she said. “And actually . . .” She let her expression grow pained. “The truth is I don’t live there anymore. I recently left my fiancé. We were living together, he kept the apartment, so . . . yeah. That’s the real reason I’m here. I’m staying with my mom.” She smiled sadly.
Frank softened. “I’m sorry to hear that. Why did you leave him?”
“Long story . . . But tell me about you. How have you been?”
Frank sipped his beer. “I’m in the same boat, believe it or not. Just got out of a long-term relationship.”
“Really? Wow, sorry to hear it.” She felt him studying her, but she gave nothing away. “What happened?”
“Long story.” A smile tugged at the edges of his lips.
“Must be going around,” she joked.
Frank laughed like someone whose girlfriend hadn’t just died, and for a moment looked like his old self again. Magnetic, fun. He took her in with his eyes. “Hard to believe it’s been seven years.”
“I know.” She bowed her head. “I’ve thought about that day so many times . . .”
“Me too.”
“Really?”
“Of course,” he said. “I watched a girl die that day. Didn’t know her like you did, of course, but still. Can’t help but wonder if there’s some way I could’ve helped her.”
Maya’s eyes shone with emotion as she leaned across the table. She wasn’t a teenager anymore. “Oh, Frank . . . I thought you might blame yourself. After what I said—”
“You asked me what I did to her.” He sounded wounded, as if he was the one who’d been hurt. “It’s like you thought I . . .”
“I was wrong. I know that now.” She touched the fingers wrapped around his beer. “I was scared when I said that, I wasn’t thinking straight.”
He moved his hand closer.
“I’ve been wanting to say sorry for a long time,” she said.
“Thank you. That means a lot.”
She smiled.
He settled back in his seat and she did the same. He appeared to believe her. To relax. Maya tried to relax too, but adrenaline surged through her veins and her heart beat like a war drum. Another Weezer song came on.
“What do you do these days?” she asked.
He took a long drink of beer. “What do I do?”
“You know, for work.”
“I help people.”
“Wish I could say the same,” she said, “but I just work at a garden center. Customer service.”
“Are you still writing?”
She shook her head.
“Why not?”
“I don’t know. Lazy, I guess.”
“You should get back to it. I bet you’re good.”
She smiled. “How would you know?”
“You have a good imagination.” He held up his glass. Drank. It was almost empty.
Maya took a small sip. She needed to stay in control, but it would look suspicious if she didn’t at least try her beer. “Speaking of helping people,” she said, filling her voice with warmth. “Your father . . . I remember you were taking care of him. Is he . . .”
“Dead.”
“Oh, Frank . . . I’m so sorry to hear that . . .”
He didn’t seem too broken up about it. “It was his time.”
“I only met him that once,” she said, “the night I visited you at your cabin, but I remember thinking he seemed like a nice person.”
A snarl curled the edges of Frank’s lips, pretending to be a smile.
Maya pushed on. “What was it that he did again?”
Frank’s expression grew steely. “What did he do?”
“Yeah, like, his job. Did you say he was a professor?”
He clenched his jaw. “You want to know about my dad.”
“Yeah, I mean . . . just curious.” A drop of sweat trickled down her ribs. She caught movement in the corner of her eye but held on to his gaze.
“Well, if you must know,” he said, “my father was a psychology professor and a researcher. A brilliant man. Taught me everything I know.”
“Wow, that’s . . . wonderful.”
His eyes burned. “Nothing wonderful about it.” He spoke calmly, but anger simmered beneath the words. “My dad never meant to teach me anything.”
Maya tilted her head. She glanced toward the movement at the edge of her vision and saw that it was his hand on the table, resting atop the collage of body parts. He was holding something small, turning it over and over in his right palm, like a magician about to do a coin trick.
The key—it had to be. She purposefully didn’t look. The key to Frank’s cabin was a blind spot—she still didn’t know how, or if, it tied into his method. “So how did you learn?” she asked.
“The hard way. From the inside out.”
His words confused her, his hand kept turning in the corner of her vision, but Maya didn’t allow herself to be distracted. “What do you mean by that—from the inside out?”
“I was his test subject.”
She swallowed. Every instinct told her to leave.
“He developed a method,” Frank said, “a system of cues, most of them subperceptual.”
The smile he gave her then was one that she recognized, the smile that did her in at seventeen. There was danger just beneath its surface.
“These cues,” he said, “would induce a sort of trance in certain vulnerable personality types. The type to get lost in a book or a show on TV . . . the kind of person who needs to know how the story ends. Who’s capable of blocking out everything else until they have the answer.” His smile turned sad. “People like me.”
Her skin crawled.
“My dad never told me what he was doing,” he said, “but I figured it out. I was ten when it started. He’d be talking to me, and the next thing I knew it was hours later and I’d be watching TV or eating dinner. And I saw the same thing happen to my mom. She’d always been so sharp, so bright, but around that time she started acting confused and weirdly passive. She stopped leaving the house or doing anything at all other than what my dad told her to do. Then one day I noticed him whispering in her ear. Talking and talking to her while she stared at the wall . . .”
His hand on the table began to move faster, as if he were growing agitated.
“I started breaking into his study at night,” he said. “I’d go through his notes, read everything. I started to understand what my father was doing to me. His method. Over time, I learned how to do it too. It was the only way I could defend myself.”
It couldn’t be good, Maya thought, that he was telling her this. But she didn’t stop him.
“I was better at it than he was,” Frank said, as a smile crept into his voice. “More intuitive, much more subtle . . . When I used it on him, my dad was completely helpless against his own method.”
Suddenly his churning hand went still. He unfurled his pale fingers, and Maya knew what she would see when she looked down. She knew, but she’d come too far to turn back, and she too was the type who needed to know how the story ended.
Her every nerve had been taut as piano wire since the moment she walked into the bar—and since before then too. Ever since she ran out of her pills. But at the sight of Frank’s key, her whole body relaxed, a delicious warmth spreading through her, a feeling not unlike a high dose of Klonopin. The coziness. A heaviness of limbs. The sense that everything was going to be okay, regardless of the evidence before her eyes.
“I won,” he said.
She almost laughed. She almost cried. But she lacked the conviction to do either. She stared at the key, its sharp teeth, and knew she was in danger but couldn’t bring herself to care. The bar had gone quiet, and the table beneath Frank’s hand had changed. Instead of body parts, she saw pine.
The only parts of herself she could lift were her eyes. She looked up.
She was in the cabin. There was the tall stone fireplace. The cathedral ceiling. The rustic wooden walls. Instead of stale beer, she smelled fire, and instead of Weezer, she heard the sound of the stream.
Frank sat across from her with the door at his back. “Talk now if you’d like,” he said.
A voice deep inside of her screamed, but it was Frank who her mouth obeyed. “You . . .” Even her tongue felt heavy. Even her thoughts. “You hypnotized me.”
He looked almost proud of her.
She thought of the knife in her purse. But her purse wasn’t on the table anymore. Had he taken it? (Or had he taken her? And if so, where?) The voice inside of her screamed, but her mouth watered at whatever Frank had cooking on the stove. She smelled garlic. Fresh herbs. Cooked meat.
“Good for you for figuring it out,” he said. “You remind me of myself.”
“You . . . killed them.”
He raised an eyebrow at the word them. “It was either him or me.”
Maya realized he was talking about his father. Frank had killed him too. Her mouth hung open. Her jaw felt loose. And this felt good to her, like a long exhale, like the relief she’d been craving ever since being forced off Klonopin—or rather since starting on it in the first place. Ever since watching Frank kill her best friend, this tempting exhale, this heavenly unwinding, was all she had wanted. But now she fought against it as hard as she could. “Aubrey,” she managed to say.
His smile fell. “You think I wanted to kill her? I didn’t. But she figured it out. Can you believe it? I made the mistake of recommending a book to her about a famous mesmerist, and she made the jump to hypnosis. Pieced it together at the last minute. Aubrey was smart, I’ll give her that. I only did what I had to.”
“And Ruby?”
Frank looked as if she’d slapped him. “Don’t talk about her. You don’t know shit about Ruby.”
Maya hoped her phone, wherever it was, was catching all this. “Cristina,” she said.
“So you did see the video.” His lips curled into a snarl.
“I talked to Steven.”
“Fuck that guy. He didn’t know her like I did.”
“She wrote him a letter before she died.”
The snarl fell as a flash of worry crossed his face. “A letter?”
“She . . . told him everything.”
Frank’s face grew uncertain. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
Maya tried to stand, but her limbs felt made of concrete. She wasn’t going anywhere; his control over her was complete.
He leaned in closer. “Tell me what the letter said.”
She intended to evade, to drag this out. Keep him guessing.
Instead, to her horror, the truth marched obediently from her lips. She was an observer in her own body. “Cristina told Steven she was sorry for being a bad friend. She said she was moving in with you, into your cabin. He said it sounded like she was saying goodbye.”
Frank relaxed. He sat back, and Maya did the same. They’d been sitting in the same position the whole time, but only now did she realize it.
“That should tell you everything you need to know,” he said.
“She . . .” The answer came to her easily in this state of mind. “She knew she was going to die.”
“It’s what she wanted. I’d brought her to my cabin many times, and like you, she figured it out. She knew exactly what this place was.” His voice was raw with love, though it wasn’t clear if his love was for Cristina or his cabin. Or himself. “I only gave her what she wanted,” he said.
Maya felt like she was sinking, her bones melting into the seat, the seat melting into the earth.
“She never wanted to go back to the real world. She’d spent her whole life trying to escape it. First it was through her painting—she taught herself when she was a kid. Said when she painted, the canvas would turn into an escape hatch. Come to think of it,” he said, as if he’d just thought of it, “she kind of reminded me of you in that way. The way you would disappear into your father’s book.”
“Leave him out of this.”
Frank acted as if she hadn’t spoken, which made Maya wonder if she really had or if she’d only thought it.
“Then she discovered drugs,” he said. “And getting high was an easier escape. More fun. Or so I’m told . . .” There was that smile again, the one that made her feel like they were in on the giddiest joke together, but now she knew this had never been the case. The joke had always been on her. She might have laughed if she wasn’t struggling to hold her head up.
“The problem,” he said, “is that you always have to come down. That was the part Cristina couldn’t handle. Her heart. Her head. She felt everything too much—this is what that asshole Steven didn’t understand. Cristina was always going to be looking for an escape, right up until the ultimate one. She was never at home in the world. Begged me not to make her go back to it, every single time, so I told her to prove it to me. Prove she wanted to stay here forever.” He leaned across the table. “And she did.” He ran a finger down the inside of Maya’s wrist. “She tattooed the key to this place . . . right . . . here. She did it to herself, right in front of me.”
“I don’t believe you,” Maya said. But a part of her did.
“It was her idea to die on camera at the diner,” he said, “so that the world would see I never laid a hand on her. Because she knew how important my work is, how much my patients need me. I guide them back to the homes they carry inside. I help them build that space from the ground up.”
She recognized these as words from the Clear Horizons website and understood that Dr. Hart was indeed Frank. She thought of the testimonials on his website and felt a flicker of hope—plenty of people had survived Frank’s “treatment.” They even said it helped them.
“Cristina knew this,” he went on. “She didn’t want me to get in trouble. Look, I don’t have to tell you this, and I definitely don’t owe Steven any explanation. But you should know that what happened at the diner was her final wish. I only gave her what she wanted.”
Maya’s head tipped forward, and she lacked the energy to haul it back up. “Please,” she whispered. Her voice sounded far away. “I won’t tell anyone, I promise.”
“It’s too late. You never should have come here tonight.”
“Can’t you make me forget?”
“Some part of you would always remember.” His voice was thick with regret. “I know that better than anyone.”
She sank further. Frank was right: he had won. But he was wrong if he thought she was just like Cristina. Maya might have shared Cristina’s affinity for imaginary worlds and, yes, for getting high, and maybe it was true they both had been looking for an escape. But if there was one thing Maya knew—even if it had taken her until this moment to figure it out—it was that her home was with Dan and her mom and everyone she had, or ever would, love. Home would never be another world, some perfect cabin in the clouds, and Maya only hoped that if she ever made it back to where she belonged, she’d remember this.
“You’ve been suffering,” he said. “You know you have, I can see it. You’re tired of fighting.”
She was tired of fighting. She felt her body slowing down.
“Close your eyes.”
Her eyes fluttered shut.
“Listen,” he said.
And she heard. The crackling fire. Babbling stream. The sound of water over stones. And beneath that sound, she heard something else, a sound she hadn’t noticed before. Almost like a woodpecker pecking at a tree, but faster, and there was something unnatural about its cadence. In her usual state of mind, Maya would have known the sound at once, even if her age meant she knew it mostly from movies. But now it perplexed her, distracting her from the buried voice within. Drowning it out.
“Look,” Frank said.
His word was her command. Her eyes opened. Her chin lifted. He was smiling at her, and it was as if the past seven years had never happened. He looked handsome again, and full of life, suffused with that beautiful light that she’d only ever seen in his cabin, and in Cristina’s final painting.
The door at his back was open now, and moonlight spilled through the crack. The sound was coming from outside. Something drew her to it, a longing she could neither explain nor act upon in her current state.
“Go on,” he said kindly.
Her heaviness lifted and Maya rose from her seat. She felt like she was floating as she moved toward the door, passing Frank, who stayed seated at the table. She left him behind. The moonlight beaconed, prismatic, alive. She wasn’t afraid as she reached for the door to the cabin. The sound grew louder.
The wooden porch creaked beneath her feet as she stepped into moonlight. The snow was gone, the surrounding forest lush with leaves. A summery breeze rustled by. She saw two rocking chairs made of the same gnarled pine as the rest of the cabin. A man sat in one of them, a typewriter balanced on his knees.
Pecking away with his fingers.
Maya hadn’t known that it was possible to miss someone you’d never met, but now she felt the full weight of having missed her father all her life. It was as if that weight had been lifted. She walked slowly toward him. She recognized his face from the few pictures she had and because of how it resembled her own. The high cheekbones and dark almond-shaped eyes. The creases at their edges and the gray at his temples made him look about the age he would have been had he lived.
She reached out her hand, half expecting it to go right through him, but it didn’t. His shoulder was solid. He looked up at her. Squinted as if trying to place her.
Then his face crowded with wonder, joy, and grief.
His hands shook as he set down his typewriter and stood to give her a hug.
Maya’s legs threatened to give out, but her father’s arms were there to support her. He was only a few inches taller than she was. She rested her tired head on his shoulder and cried on his sleeve. His skin smelled of soap and ink.
“Mija,” he said.
“Dad . . .”
“Bienvenido a casa.”
A low sob escaped her lips. She wondered if she was dead.
“Sit,” he said, gesturing to one of the rocking chairs.
And it was only one word.
Sit.
A simple command, but it hit her like a brick. Her real father would have had an accent. His sit wouldn’t rhyme with pit. It was only one word, a glitch in the illusion, but it was enough to let her know that this was Frank she was talking to. Frank who was speaking to her in the voice of her father. Frank who was once more manipulating her. And this angered her enough to reel back from his voice, from those words putting images in her head, words that had surrounded her, snuck in. Slithered through her being. She turned and staggered off the porch. Away from the cabin. Away from him.
She ran toward the dark forest, but her legs moved as if through water, and the trees seemed to get farther away—Maya—with every step, so she crouched low—Maya!—like an animal and hurried ahead on hands and toes—Maya?!—the way she only ever had in dreams.
What the hell is wrong with her?
The voice fought its way through the darkness.
No, you settle down, it said. What the hell is going on here? The voice was familiar. Maya, come on. Let’s go.
Her mom!
Her mom was at the bar.
Maya gasped. She blinked a few times, then looked up to see her mom standing at the table, hands on her hips. Everyone at the Whistling Pig—the bartender, the drunk man, the three men sitting by the door—was looking at them. The sour smell of beer filled her nose. A jam band seeped from the speakers.
Her mom looked angry and afraid. “Are you listening to me?”
Maya let out a shaky breath.
Frank, across from her, was fuming. He glared at her.
“Hello?” said her mom.
“Yes, Mom. I hear you.”
“Get up. We’re leaving.”
Maya touched her face. It was dry, yet she felt like she’d been crying. She felt like a sponge that had been wrung out. Suddenly much lighter. Lighter even though she knew she should be afraid. Frank had done it to her again. She knew this, even if she couldn’t remember.
She rose lightly to her feet, slung her purse over her shoulder, and threw Frank a withering yet curious look as she followed her mom out the door.