Although now that she was on it again, there was something so off about this road—about the very idea of it. Suddenly she couldn’t believe she hadn’t thought of it sooner. How could she have been so dense at seventeen?
It was obvious—both then and now—that no one had driven on this road in years.
You’d have to walk there, Frank’s father had said.
And all at once she understood the cruelty of his smile. He really had been laughing at her. There’s no way Frank could have carried the supplies needed to build a cabin—the lumber, the stove, two sinks, every one of those chimney stones—all this way on foot.
But then Maya hadn’t been so dense back then, had she?
She had figured this out before—she remembered this now. It all came back to her the moment she saw the bridge.
THIRTY
Maya stops dead in her tracks as it comes into view, a bridge that not so much as a bicycle could safely cross. The flashlight from Frank’s dad flickers in her hand. A cool wind slithers thought the leaves, scattering the last of the day’s heat as she stands piecing it together.
A chill claws up her spine.
The bridge before her isn’t just abandoned—it’s crumbling. Lost to history, a bridge of rusted bones, turrets exposed like a giant’s rib cage. Large chunks of concrete have fallen away, leaving only a sliver of passable road in the middle.
She’s about to turn back, rattled to the core, when she notices a light on the other side of the stream. She squints. The light is larger, steadier, and more diffuse than a flashlight. She takes a few steps closer, and now she’s sure of it. There is someone over there, across the broken bridge. She assumes it must be Frank, though she can’t see him.
Every instinct tells her to leave, but she doesn’t. That same curiosity that feels almost like a compulsion has gotten stronger with every step, as if she has been drawn here tonight by some invisible string. Plus, if Frank crossed it, the bridge must be safe enough. She’s extremely careful as she makes her way across, walking as if on a tightrope when she gets to the middle portion, where the edges of the road have fallen away on either side.
The bridge here is only about three feet wide, the water below fast and black. It looks deep. She’s trembling as she arrives on the other side and passes through a last stand of trees into a clearing. She’s figured it out now, the reason Frank’s so weird about his cabin, yet what she sees takes her breath away all the same.
There is no cabin. Only the weathered concrete remains of a foundation, a wide, cracked rectangle in the middle of the clearing. This is where she finds Frank, reclined on top of a plush red sleeping bag several feet in front of where a fireplace seems to have been. He’s set up a battery-powered lamp in the spot, the orange glow she saw from the other side of the bridge a crude replica of the cozy fires that might have burned here once, back in whatever era this house actually stood.
He squints in the glare of her flashlight as she approaches but doesn’t look surprised to see her. He smiles weakly, apologetically even, not moving from his comfortable-looking position as she takes in his surroundings. The portable lamp and sleeping bag, a jug of water, his backpack, and a half-peeled orange.
He wears a flannel shirt and jeans, but no shoes. His shoes sit several yards away at the edge of the foundation, as if he had left them at the front door, like he hadn’t wanted to dirty the floors, and the thought of him playing make-believe out here, acting as if the house is real, is so absurd and sad and strange that a startled laugh rises in her throat, and she covers her mouth as if to hold it inside.
“Hey,” he says. He sounds sheepish, or tired, or both.
“Frank . . .”
“I know . . . I’m so sorry, Maya.”
But she’s too bewildered to be angry. “Why would you lie about something like this?”
He lets out a long sigh. “I guess there’s really no excuse, is there?”
Maybe not, but she still wants an answer. She stares down at him, waiting, the flashlight at her side beaming down at the cracked foundation.
“The truth,” he says, “is that I’m just some guy who lives at home and takes care of his dad. I don’t even have my own car, and my job is embarrassing. And you . . . well, you obviously could do better.”
Another shocked laugh bubbles up. “Are you saying you made up the cabin . . . to impress me?”
He hangs his head.
“You’ve got to be kidding.”
“I’m sorry,” he says again.
But it’s like Dorothy pulling back the curtain to reveal a man pretending to be a wizard. “You really . . . really didn’t need to do that,” she says. “I was totally into you.”
She hadn’t meant to use the past tense, but they both register it. The wind picks up, churning through leaves, and when he speaks again, Frank’s voice is so low that Maya has to step closer to hear him. Now she stands at the edge of his sleeping bag, looking down into his sorrowful eyes.
“It’s just that you’re going away to BU,” he says. “I didn’t want you to think of me as some townie with nothing going on. I’m twenty years old and live at home with my dad.”
“I never thought of you that way,” she says.
But now she doesn’t know what to think. She rushed here tonight on fumes of jealousy and infatuation, needing to know why he was with Aubrey, but seeing him now—barefoot and alone in the woods—the spell has been broken. He might have lied about the cabin to impress her, but that doesn’t explain why he’s here now. It doesn’t explain the sleeping bag, the shoes left by an imaginary door.
“Are you okay? How long have you been out here?”
“Not long,” he mutters, looking away.
“And why . . .”
He takes a deep, shaky breath. “Because I feel safe here.”
“Safe? From what?”
“From my dad.”
Maya thinks back to Frank’s reference to troubles at home when he was young. “Did he do something?”
Frank exhales sharply. It could be a sigh of grief, or a scoff—he’s looking down now, so it’s impossible to know. “He’s done a lot of things. To me . . . to my mom . . . and total strangers. It’s the reason my mom took me away from him when I was twelve. He’s dangerous.”
Maya glances back over her shoulder as if his father might have followed her here. She knows now, as she should have before, that Frank might be lying. But then, his father had made her nervous. “Why are you staying with him, then?” she asks. “If he’s dangerous, you should go to the police.”
Frank shakes his head. “They wouldn’t understand. My dad’s never laid a finger on anyone. He hurts people in other ways. He’s manipulative. Controlling. He used to be a psychology professor, but then he got into some trouble and lost his job, his psychology license, everything. He was ruined. He took it out on me and my mom.”
“I’m sorry to hear that, Frank . . .” But now she senses him gliding past the situation at hand, the strangeness of it, and she tries to reel him back. She won’t get sucked into another of his stories. “I still don’t get what you’re doing out here,” she says.