* * *
—
They watch The Dark Crystal from the beginning, all three of them, Maya and her mom on the couch, Aubrey draped across the love seat. A fan in the corner circulates a cool breeze through the living room that is also the wind through the jungles of Thra. Maya understands that she’s in trouble, that her mom is only waiting for her to come down before delivering whatever stern talk and punishment she has in store, but for now, everything is perfect. Maya is here, but she is also in the movie, feeling the kind of wonder she’d felt watching it as a young child, before there was a difference between reality and magic.
Like how people at church must feel when contemplating Eden—a longing for a time before anyone knew they were naked, when conversations with God were the norm. Maya yearns for that time in her own life, not out of some need to escape reality—reality is fine—but simply because she was born that way. Born to yearn, as some people are, for more magical times. This is her fourth acid trip, so she knows about the sadness of coming down, the sense of God having vacated the garden. And Aubrey takes it even harder than she does.
Aubrey looks glum as Maya’s mom drives her home that evening, even though Brenda had agreed not to say anything about the acid. No one says anything as they pull up in front of Aubrey’s duplex.
Silver Lake glitters just beyond, obsidian in the dusk. Aubrey lives even closer to the lake. If she’s being honest, this is why Maya had wanted to take the acid at her own house rather than at Aubrey’s. The truth is that Maya is slightly afraid of the lake. She’d never admit this to anyone because to do so would be to sound like Aunt Lisa.
（Though if she could speak freely, Maya would point to local legends about the lake changing colors at night and steam rising from its surface in winter. She would say that the lake really is polluted, and who knows the extent of what PCBs can do to a person?）
“Thanks for the ride,” Aubrey says as she gets out of the car.
“This ever happens again, I’m telling your parents.”
On the drive home, Maya asks how long she is grounded for.
Her mom doesn’t answer for a while. She’s changed from her EMT uniform into a T-shirt, cotton shorts, and sandals, but still wears the white bandage on her hand. Now Maya knows that she cut herself on shredded metal while extracting a young man from a car wreck.
Maya expects her mom to be angry, but instead she just seems sad. “I don’t want to ground you,” she says. “You’ll be out of here in less than three months anyway, doing whatever you want. I just wish . . . I wish you could see what I see. On the ambulance, I mean. You’d understand how easily, how quickly, everything can go wrong.”
“I know, Mom. I’ll be careful. It’s not like we were driving.”
Her mom pulls into the driveway, cuts the engine, and turns to her. “You know there’s more to it than that. You could end up like—”
“Let me guess. Aunt Lisa?”
“It’s in your genes. You’re susceptible—why can’t you see that? A drug like LSD could trigger something—an episode.”
Maya sighs theatrically. Why can’t her mom see that a single acid trip is nothing compared to Lisa’s heavy meth use and obvious drinking problem? Maya will be attending BU on a full scholarship. She is smart enough to understand two things at once—both that her aunt suffered from delusions and that Silver Lake is, to some extent, toxic. But her mother seems intent on seeing the world in black and white, so all Maya says is, “Okay, I’m sorry. I’ll be more careful from now on.”
EIGHT
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.