He didn’t sound as overjoyed or relieved as she felt. “I’m sure you’re killing it,” she said weakly.
“Listen, sorry I didn’t text you back.”
Her chest tightened. “That’s okay, I know you have a lot going on.”
He said nothing.
She didn’t breathe. Maybe if neither of them spoke, the conversation would end, and they could go back to the way things were.
“What’s going on with you, Maya?”
She wanted to tell him what she’d remembered tonight—she’d been carrying it too long on her own. But to tell him now would be to risk coming across as she had seven years ago, as though she were suggesting that Frank had cast some sort of spell on her, made her see things that weren’t there.
It remained true that what he’d done felt like magic.
“See?” Dan said. “You don’t want to tell me, do you?”
“Please,” she said, her voice filling with tears. “I do, it’s just that—”
“Right,” he said flatly. “I’m sure you have your reasons, and look, I respect that. But honestly, this isn’t what I signed up for. I don’t want the kind of relationship where we feel like we have to hide things from—”
“I’m going through Klonopin withdrawal.”
“I’m sorry, what?”
She’d been looking for the right time to tell him, always at some future point, but the moment had never come, and though the word for what Frank had done to her stayed mired in a strange, foggy soup, the rest of what was going on in her mind felt surprisingly clear as the words fell from her lips.
“Jesus,” Dan said when she was done. “I don’t get it. Why would you hide all that from me?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “It didn’t seem important when we met, so I didn’t mention it, and then I . . . kept not mentioning it until it started to feel weird. Like, why had I waited so long?”
Dan sighed.
“I wish we could talk about this in person,” she said, wanting to hold him, but glad he couldn’t see her this way.
“So that’s why you got sick at my parents’ house.”
“Yes.”
He fell quiet again.
“I’m so sorry . . .”
“I could have helped you through it.”
“The thing is I was lying to myself too. I didn’t want to be taking Wendy’s pills anymore. I knew they were clouding my thinking, making me forgetful. I knew they were dangerous to mix with alcohol, but I’ve been doing that pretty much every night for years. And I didn’t want that reality to be true, so I pretended it wasn’t.”
“Oh, Maya . . .”
“I’m sorry.”
“You’ve been drinking tonight, haven’t you?”
The disappointment in his voice stung. Of course he could hear the four shots of gin she’d just downed. She thought of explaining that she needed it to sleep but felt lucid enough to see that this was a poor excuse. “Yes,” she whispered.
This time he was silent for so long that she had time to consider the two paths he might take. Seeing as how she obviously needed help, he might, on the one hand, choose to stand by her no matter what, help her through this.
Or he could say that it was all too much, that she was too much, throw up his hands, and walk away.
“You have a problem,” he said slowly. “What are you going to do about it?”
Her tears were messy now, her nose running down her face, but her chest filled with gratitude because there was kindness in his voice. “I’ll get help,” she said. “I will. As soon as I get back to Boston.”
“What kind of help?”
“I don’t know, a psychiatrist? Or a therapist. Some kind of doctor.”
“I have an uncle in AA. I think that’s what you should do.”
“But I’m not an alcoholic,” she said, instinctively defensive.
“Really? You got drunk at my mom’s birthday the other night. Now here you are again.”
She couldn’t argue with that.
“And all this week . . . Of course I knew something was wrong. And you—you hid it from me. You’ve been taking pills behind my back, making yourself sick with how much you’ve been drinking. You’re hurting yourself, Maya. You can’t hide it anymore.”
Maya curled into a ball, drawing her knees to her chest.
“And anyway,” he said, “those programs aren’t just for alcoholics. They have them for all kinds of addicts.”
The word made her wince. The first step of a journey Maya had no interest in taking. She didn’t want to go to meetings, or find God, and when she thought about being sober all the time, she wasn’t sure life would be worth living. She felt an urge to remind Dan that it was a doctor who had written her first Klonopin prescription—that this was his fault. Or that, until the last few days, she had cut back dramatically on her drinking. Or that she could—she would—straighten herself out on her own, no need for anything as dramatic as an Anonymous program.
But instead, she said, “Okay. I’ll go.”
* * *
— The problem with the word addict was that it meant you were supposed to do something about it, as if Maya didn’t have enough to deal with. But she had told Dan that she would, so after lying in the dark awhile, no longer tired, she searched for AA meetings on her phone. She found a chapter not far from their apartment in Boston and texted Dan to let him know. He wrote back with a heart, and she replied with ten, and told herself that she would go to meetings if it would make him happy. She would do a lot for him.
Even if she wasn’t ready to admit she was an addict. She was physically dependent on medication. Wasn’t there a difference?
The night was long, and she was acutely aware of the gin left in the bottle on her nightstand. She poured it down the kitchen sink. This wasn’t going to be easy, but it was for the best. She had to stay sharp. She sat at the antique writing desk in her old room with the pen and flowery notepad her mom had left out for future guests and began to list what she had learned tonight, starting with what Steven had told her at Patrick’s.
1. Cristina was planning to move into Frank’s cabin. A chilling thought now that Maya knew the place didn’t exist.
2. He has clients of some sort. She shuddered to think of what services he might provide. She’d look into this.
3. His dad was a professor at Williams. She still knew almost nothing about Frank’s dad other than his name, which was Oren. She had searched for him online seven years ago but not found anything and given up after Dr. Barry convinced her to drop it. She hadn’t thought much about Oren Bellamy since.
4. Oren . . . She recalled the apparent glee he took, the night she met him, in directing her to a cabin that he’d have known wasn’t real.
Then hadn’t Frank told her something about him in the clearing? Maya’s brow creased. Her grasp of these newly recovered memories was tenuous, even more imperfect than might be expected of a night seven years ago. Yet somehow writing it down helped her think, helped pull the sunken past back up to the surface. Oren . . . she wrote, was the reason Frank built the cabin.