Frank pulls his knees to his chest, folding in on himself. He speaks so quietly that she doesn’t hear and must move closer so that she is standing right over him. He looks small from here. Helpless.
“What did you say?” she asks. Her voice is gentle.
“I said it was real to me. Back when I was ten, that night I was lost. I thought I was going to die alone in the woods, and I know it sounds crazy, but the cabin . . . it saved me. I needed it to be here for me. And it was.
“I pictured it so clearly, down to the littlest detail, and when I closed my eyes, it was like I was there. Like I was home. A safer, more loving home than the one I had left. A place without my dad. I came back a lot after that, days and nights when I had to escape. This is where I would come, the truest home I ever knew. I would sit here, just like I am tonight, and picture the door of my cabin. I really had to see it before I could go inside. The color of the pine, the brass knob. I had to feel the doorknob in my hand, but if I could do that, then I could turn it, and everything would be waiting for me on the other side. Home. Something good on the stove, a fire in the fireplace. The big, cozy couch.”
Maya nods. She can easily picture what he’s describing—she has before, and she allows herself to now.
There is sorrow in knowing it’s not real, but what’s even sadder is understanding how he had made it seem that way. The reason the cabin seemed real to her was that Frank has spent hours and hours building it in his head. Here in this clearing. Alone. He knows every floorboard and cabinet as if he had hammered it into place himself; he knows all the whorls in the pine. He knows it so well that when he speaks of the place, as he speaks of it now, it comes to life. The warmth of the fire. The smell of it. She doesn’t know why he’s telling her this now that she knows it’s not real. Yet it relaxes her to hear it. She understands. She doesn’t fault him for anything he’s done. Everyone needs somewhere to return to.
She has lost track of what he was saying, and now he falls silent.
She hears what sounds like a door slam shut at her back. A sound that makes no sense out here and yet is unmistakable—a creak of hinges followed by the low clap of a door landing in its frame—directly behind her. Something tells her not to turn around, but she does anyway. She has to know. She turns slowly back to see Frank standing behind her.
Just inside the front door—the wind must have blown it shut.
Her mouth hangs open as she takes in his handiwork. He was too modest about the cabin. It’s perfect. Fingers interlaced with her own, he gives her the grand tour, and Maya can’t stop smiling. Then comes the tantalizingly fragrant soup that she never tastes because the sudden reminder of her father’s book threatens to shatter the illusion.
And Frank doesn’t want to let her go. Frank thinks she should move in with him.
He tells her to relax, eat her soup, and when she doesn’t, he sets his spoon loudly on the table. Gets down on one knee like he’s about to ask for her hand in marriage, but there’s rage boiling in his eyes, and instead of a ring, he puts something slightly larger in her hand. She feels its metal teeth against her palm and looks down to see the key to the cabin. And for the briefest of moments, she’s confused.
Why would Maya need a key to a cabin she’s already inside?
But as soon as she thinks it, the thought slips away, and what happens over the following few minutes will lie buried beneath the lowest cellar floor of her head for seven years.
* * *
— She relaxes.
Her breath slows.
And her heart. It feels so good to be here. She sinks deeper, slouching in her seat at the table.
“Good,” Frank says. “Good.” He gets up off his knee and smiles down on her. “You’re feeling better now,” he says. “Calmer.”
She feels better now. Calmer.
“Maybe you’d like to sit by the fire?” The way he says it, it doesn’t sound like a question. “Get comfortable,” he says. “Relax your tired legs.”
Maya would like nothing more than to sit before the fire, get comfortable, and relax her tired legs.
“You feel safe here,” he says.
Her body gives a sluggish jerk as something cold and wet strikes the back of her neck. She frowns.
“You feel safe here,” he says again.
A second cold drop hits her knee. The bracing liquid trails down her bare calf, and Maya focuses on it. The tingling sensation moving toward her ankle. Then another drop and another—her shoulder, forehead, wrist—leading her back to herself. The rain cuts through Frank’s voice just enough for her to understand that she needs to run.
He stands. “Come with me.”
She doesn’t intend to obey, but （oh god） that is what she does. She rises from her place at the table as if her legs and feet belong to someone else. She can’t stop them from following as he leads her closer to the fire, orange light flickering on his face. She smells the sweetly burning wood.
Look into the light, she thinks she hears him say, or maybe it’s the stream, the watery hush of it lulling her closer and deeper until the fire is all she can see. And taste. And feel. And it feels like coming in from the cold, like suddenly catching everything she’s ever chased. Confidence. Approval. Love. The light feels like contentment, like the sun on her face, and smells like melting snow. It sings like bells. You’re safe now, says the stream. You’re home. And that’s just how it feels, like coming home. But she knows. Even as she craves the fire’s warmth, the flames shimmering red, orange, blue, and gold, a part of her knows that home isn’t the right word for this place.
Like in the story. Like Pixán, taken in by imposters, gazing up into the mist, Maya knows her true home is elsewhere.
“You . . .” she whispers, although her intent is to shout it.
A raindrop on her cheek!
Every part of her wants to dissolve into the light. But she tears her gaze away to glare at Frank. “You tricked me.”
“Relax,” he says. But he doesn’t sound so confident now.
She shakes her head, anger rising, threatening to break through whatever spell he’s cast. “What did you do to me?”
“Listen to me, Maya, you need to calm down—”
“I know,” she says.
And just like that, the roughly hewn logs that make up the wall at his back begin to look even more rustic. They start to look like trees. Weeds sprout up between the floorboards, and it isn’t the roof she sees above her now but the endless abyss of the night sky, and it’s like looking down to find yourself suddenly at the edge of the Grand Canyon. A great, swirling terror. Overwhelming vastness.
“Maya,” he pleads.
She looks at his face. He’d been talking to her, has been all along, while she was busy looking at the sky, or the wall, or the fire, or the soup.
But Maya doesn’t have to listen. She knows this now. Frank begs her with his eyes not to say it, but this only sweetens the words on her tongue. “There is no cabin,” she says, and as if on cue, what’s left of it dissolves and the ceiling returns to sky and the floor to earth.
A loss of orientation as she tries to run. Her legs won’t work, or she has forgotten how to use them. With what’s left of her strength, she tries to lurch ahead, but the lower half of her body feels bound in an awkward position.