* * *
— Knowing the story behind the cabin, knowing what it means to him, makes Maya want to see it even more. She says it would be an honor to be the first to see it. She feels for the child lost in the woods, clinging to the comfort of an imaginary home, as well as for the deep, caring man beside her, afraid of getting hurt. She admires him for turning his dream into a reality and for doing it without going to college.
“Left or right?” he asks.
The question catches her off guard. She looks out the car window at the dark street rolling past. She hadn’t been paying attention, and now they’re on Grove Street, passing Stoddard Ave. “Left,” she says. They’re almost to Aubrey’s house, a destination so familiar that Maya is embarrassed to realize that she’s allowed Frank to drive several blocks past her street. Now they’ll have to turn around, but he doesn’t seem to mind. He drives as if he has nowhere else to be.
Maya does, though. She forgot to keep an eye on the time. The clock on Frank’s dash flashes 12:00, so she reaches for her backpack to check the time on her phone, only to realize that she’s forgotten it. Not just her phone, but the whole backpack containing her pajamas and toothbrush. She can’t believe how absentminded she’s been. She tries to recall if she locked the door, but now that she thinks of it, she can’t remember leaving the house or getting into Frank’s car. “Do you know what time it is?” she asks.
Frank shakes his head. “Sorry.”
“Turn here. Fourth house on the right.”
Most of the windows on the street are dark. Maya has a sinking feeling. She knows, as Frank drops her off in front of Aubrey’s duplex, that the polite thing would be for her to introduce them. But she’s pretty sure she’s late. She’ll have to apologize, and if Frank’s there, it’ll be awkward. “I’m glad you stopped by tonight,” she says.
He leans across the console to kiss her. Just a peck, but it brings back the heat of his breath. It sends a shiver through her center.
TWENTY
The last time Maya had tried to find Ruby—before Dr. Barry convinced her to stop looking—all she’d come up with were a couple of MySpace pages. But now Maya found over a dozen Rubys on social media who called Hood River, Oregon, home. She ruled out the very old and very young and was left with seven women named Ruby, any of whom could have made the mix CD for Frank.
They were almost all Hispanic, and two looked like his type: high cheekbones, straight black hair, dark eyes. Like Maya. Or maybe she was imagining it. Her sleep was broken and her dreams felt close. She messaged the seven Rubys, asking them to please contact her if they knew Frank Bellamy.
She waited.
Just two more hours until she could crack open the gin. She felt as if a strobe light was pulsing inside her skull, catching all her thoughts in strange shapes. The key with its jagged teeth. A young Frank lost in the woods, searching for help, for a door to knock on.
She heard her mom get home from work but didn’t go to greet her.
Her eyes ached from staring at her phone. “Ruby” and “Hood River” had turned up plenty of Google results: pet videos, a real estate agent, the winner of a spelling bee, an article from 1901 about a girl who’d been thrown from a buggy. Maya couldn’t narrow her search down. All she had was a first name and the town where Frank had lived with his mother after his mother divorced his father.
When she came across the obituary of an eighty-year-old woman, a dark thought crossed Maya’s mind, and she added “death” to her query. This yielded more obituaries and several articles. Hood River’s population was under eight thousand, so it wasn’t long before she found an article about a woman named Ruby Garza who’d died in a fire ten years ago. She’d been nineteen, a first-year at Columbia Gorge Community College who had recently moved into an apartment close to downtown. Ruby fell asleep without blowing out a candle beside her bed, and never woke. She was alone. Her hair was black, her eyes brown, and her face still childlike in the grainy black-and-white photo. She died less than two months before Maya met Frank at the library. Right around the time he left Hood River and moved to Pittsfield.
TWENTY-ONE
Aubrey answers the door in the oversized Tweety Bird shirt that she wears to bed, but she doesn’t look like she’s been sleeping.
“Hey, sorry about this.”
Aubrey watches Frank drive away, catching only a glimpse of his face. “No worries,” she says. But her voice is frosty, her gaze cool. “Guess he didn’t want to meet me?”
“Oh, I—” Maybe she should have introduced them after all. “Just didn’t seem like a good time.”
Aubrey leads her inside. The lights are off, the living room dark aside from the blue glow of the Law & Order rerun on TV. They walk quietly past Aubrey’s stepdad, asleep in his recliner, a beer in the cup holder. Maya is surprised he’s asleep; that Aubrey’s ten-year-old brother, Eric, isn’t sprawled on the floor playing his Game Boy; that Aubrey’s mom can’t be heard talking on the phone or doing an exercise video in the basement. This house is usually much louder than Maya’s. She feels terrible for being late.
Nothing from Aubrey as they enter her room. A Tender Wallpaper song wafts from the headphones on the bed; Maya recognizes the slow drums. A can of orange soda on the nightstand. A freshly smoked cigarette hangs in the air, but the whole house smells like cigarettes, so no one will know. Christmas lights frame the open window. Maya’s mouth hangs open when she sees the time on the alarm clock. 11:42 p.m. She’s three hours late. “Wow, I’m really sorry,” she says. “I was about to bike over here when Frank showed up at my house. He was just going to stay a few minutes, but then we started talking, and . . .”
Aubrey peers at her. “What are you on?”
“What? Nothing.”
Aubrey narrows her eyes. She sits on her bed, stops the CD on her Discman. “So what happened?”
Maya sits beside her, cross-legged. A soft wind blows in the window, cool with night. Her uneasiness recedes as she tells Aubrey about their kiss and the talk that led up to it. Maya’s wanted this for what feels like so long—but Aubrey seems unimpressed. Uninterested even. “So that’s why you’re late?” she asks. “Because you were making out with Frank?”
“No, we talked too. He told me more about his cabin.”
A smirk flicks across Aubrey’s face. “The one he’s building in his dad’s backyard?”
“Not in the backyard,” Maya says with a sliver of resentment. “His dad has property out by the state forest. The cabin’s in the woods, and Frank finished it. He’s taking me to see it tomorrow at one.”
“He’s taking you to a cabin in the woods. What is this, a horror movie?”
“You wouldn’t say that if you knew him.”
“Really?”
“Look, I said I was sorry. And I am. I should’ve been here at nine.”
Aubrey softens, but questions swim in her eyes. Maya wonders if Aubrey is jealous. She’s never thought this before, but her suspicion grows when Aubrey seems to lose interest in the topic of Frank and suggests they watch a movie, an ’80s slasher film where a man in a mask hunts teenagers.