Maya giggles as the high rolls in on her, tugging up the corners of her lips. “Have you never seen it?”
“I have. Still think it’s amazing, though.”
She feels delightfully floaty as they make their way down the short path from the parking lot to Balance Rock. It’s eerie how the van-sized boulder balances so precariously on a much smaller stone. The sculptural quality suggests a human touch—some ancient, Stonehenge-like altar—but the arrangement is natural, a boulder left behind by a retreating glacier in the last ice age. Hiking trails wind through the surrounding woods, but for now Maya and Frank have the place to themselves. She feels like sitting, so she finds herself a spot on a smooth, wide stone and Frank sits beside her.
“So,” he says. “What’s your story?”
The question feels leading—in a good way—and makes her regret what she has to tell him: “I’m moving to Boston in a few weeks.”
He looks disappointed. “I figured you were in college,” he says.
“This will be my first year. What about you?”
“I was about to start at the University of Portland when I found out my dad was sick.”
“Wow,” Maya says, shaking her head. “That was good of you to stay.”
“I knew I’d regret it if I didn’t.”
This time she doesn’t stop herself from laying a hand on his arm.
Frank turns to look at her, his gaze soft and open. He’s going to kiss her, she’s sure of it. All the blood rushes to her face and the moment swells with terror and excitement—but then, just as she leans in to meet him halfway, Frank says: “Anyway, I like it here. I met you here, didn’t I?”
Maya freezes. She smiles through her mortification.
“I like working at the library,” he continues. “It’s nice to be around all those books.”
“I can imagine,” she says weakly.
“And there’s something else, something I’ve been working on.” His eyes twinkle. “You’re one of the first people I’ve told.”
Maya feels a little more confident. His excitement about whatever he’s going to tell her is contagious.
“I’m building a cabin,” he says.
“A cabin? Where?”
“In the woods behind my dad’s house. Out by the state park.”
He tells her that he has always wanted to be an architect. Even as a child he had drawn houses with colored pencils and imagined living inside of them, houses with fire poles instead of stairs and indoor Slip ’n Slide corridors.
Maya smiles.
He tells her that as he got older, he loved to read about famous architects like Buckminster Fuller. Like Maya, Frank has spent a lot of time reading, he says. It’s amazing how alike we are, she thinks. She notices that they are sitting the same way, with their legs outstretched on the rock, their right ankles crossed over the left. When she notices this, Maya changes her position, embarrassed, as if she had copied him, even though she didn’t. Not on purpose anyway. She’s really feeling the weed now and has lost track of what Frank is saying—something about his dad.
There’s no telling, he says, how much time his dad has left—could be a week, a month, or a year—so Frank has decided to stick around. Rather than go away to study architecture, he’ll stay here, take care of his dad, and build his own cabin. He says he’s already started. He’s laid the foundation, poured the concrete. Because what better way to learn to build homes than to build one with your own hands?
“Wow,” Maya says, stoned.
She does her best to follow along as Frank tells her about the cabin, but her short-term memory isn’t working, and she keeps forgetting what he just said. Even so, she gets the gist, his words conjuring images, vivid, if disconnected: a small cabin in a clearing in the woods. The curved glass of its skylight. A stone fireplace. He even shows her the key to the place, holding it up in the light of the moon, which has risen as they’ve sat talking. The key to his cabin looks heavier than the others on the ring, and there’s a sharpness to the cut of its teeth. Maybe it’s just that she’s high, but Maya can see the place through Frank’s lovingly detailed telling, the deep honey color of its pine floors, the forested view through its generous windows. She can hear the stream that runs out back.
* * *
— Maya wishes she had a mint as she enters her house. She waits for Frank, who’s just dropped her off, to drive away before she goes inside. She doesn’t want her mom asking questions. She opens the door quietly.
The living room is empty and dark. Closing the door behind her, Maya slides out of her flip-flops and tiptoes down the hall. She’s almost to her room when she notices how quiet the house is.
“Mom?”
In the kitchen, she finds a note from her mother, scrawled in her big, messy hand.
Call me when you get in.
Maya flips open her cell phone. She hasn’t checked it in hours. Four missed calls from her mom.
“Where are you?” her mom says as soon as she picks up. Her voice is low and restrained, and Maya can hear the other EMTs sitting close by, huddled together in the back of an ambulance.
“Home,” Maya says.
“You knew I had a shift tonight. I was hoping to see you before I left.”
Maya remembers her mother mentioning this, but doesn’t see what the problem is. “But your shift isn’t until eleven, right?”
Her mom is about to say something when ambulance chatter erupts in the background. “Shit,” Brenda says. “We’ll talk about this later, okay?”
“But—”
On her mom’s end, a siren starts to wail.
“Love you,” her mom says. “Don’t stay up too late.”
“Love you too.”
She hangs up, and Maya registers the time on her phone. 12:02. It doesn’t make sense. She met Frank at seven. Did she really just spend five hours with Frank at Balance Rock?
SIXTEEN
Maya walked headlong into the icy wind sweeping down North Street. Her face was numb beneath layers of makeup. She hadn’t fallen back asleep after the phone call, whoever it was from, and now it was ten a.m., but she still wasn’t tired. She felt, if anything, too awake, like she had to keep moving. She was sleep-deprived and wired yet somehow more clearheaded than she’d felt in years, and her mom’s suggestion that she’d imagined last night’s ringing only deepened Maya’s certainty that someone—Frank—had called.
Passing St. Joseph’s, she entered the downtown area and found it decked out for the holidays. Wreaths hung in the windows of shops and restaurants, and the giant Christmas tree was up at Park Square, covered in lights. The street was mostly empty, the cold wind blowing. She pulled up the collar of her coat.
She hadn’t told anyone about the hours she lost that night at Balance Rock. Not at first. At the time, she had chalked it up to the weed; Frank had said it was his father’s special stash. Between that and the deep connection she’d felt, it seemed reasonable enough to Maya that she’d simply lost track of time, and wasn’t that just how all the love songs said it would be? Like losing yourself completely? It’s not like she had ever been in love before. Two of the three boys she’d made out with were friends of guys who were after Aubrey. Guys who happened to be there.