She remembered this now. Frank built his cabin to get away from his father.
She picked up her phone. Adding “Williams College” to her search for “Oren Bellamy” didn’t turn up anything, but eventually she found references to two journal articles he’d published in the 1980s. One article was titled “Observable Personality Traits Associated with High Absorption Scores on the TAS,” but when Maya clicked on the article, it had been taken down.
The other article he’d published had also been taken down, but back issues of the journal were available in print through the website. The journal was called Experimental Neuropsychology, and its website hadn’t been updated in over a decade. Maya got her debit card and purchased Volume 17, October 1983, the issue Dr. Bellamy’s article appeared in, typing her credit card info into a beige website that looked almost vintage.
So Oren had been a psychologist, and either Williams College had erased all connection with him or he’d never really taught there.
She searched for “Dr. Oren Bellamy,” “psychologist,” and, glancing over her list, threw in the word “clients,” and there he was. Dr. Oren Bellamy, PhD, CHT. Not just his name but his face, a close-up of him in a plaid blazer, smiling at his desk with a bookshelf behind him. In the picture, he looked to be in his fifties, younger than when she’d met him.
The site was for a place called Clear Horizons Wellness Center. The website looked current, if not very professional. The design was shoddy, the font garish, and the logo—an orange sun on a blue horizon—looked like clip art. It was hard to tell exactly what kind of services the center offered.
Reading the “About” section didn’t help much. Dr. Oren Bellamy’s “proprietary therapeutic method” apparently had a 100 percent success rate when it came to curing a long list of “life-crippling ailments” such as addiction, phobias, anxiety, and depression, as well as facilitating weight loss, smoking cessation, and “moving past grief.”
Several clients testified: “It isn’t too much to say that Clear Horizons saved my life.”—Carol M. “Finally, something that works!”—Mike R. “I never thought I could get over losing my sister, but then I met Dr. Hart!”—Susan P.
The final testimonial was a video. Maya clicked on it, and an elderly man began to speak. He sat in what looked like a therapist’s office, in front of a window looking out on a forest. Serene music played in the background. “When my Diane died,” he said, “I thought I might as well die too. Figured what was the point?” The man smiled, his eyes dreamy and unfocused. Maya felt her blood curdle. “I wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t for Dr. Hart,” the man said. “Dr. Hart helped me go on living.”
Nothing else on the website helped clarify the identity of Dr. Hart—though Maya had her suspicions—or the nature of the treatment being offered. All she learned was that Dr. Oren Bellamy’s proprietary therapeutic method continued to be practiced at—and only at—Clear Horizons Wellness Center. Insurance was not accepted.
Maya read all of every page on the site, not sure what she hoped to find, but she kept looking. On the “About” page, she studied the initials after Oren’s name and realized that she didn’t know what CHT stood for. She Googled it, and the first thing that came up was “Certified Hand Therapist.”
Hand therapist? Could that be right?
She added “psychology.”
What happened next caused Maya to question if maybe something was wrong with her phone. A glitch in the screen. There was a certain phrase that appeared among her search results—two or three words, a professional title—that she couldn’t make out.
“Certified . . . therapist.”
She couldn’t read the middle portion. Her eyes didn’t seem to grasp it, like the letters kept slipping out from beneath her vision. No matter how she held her screen and regardless of what she clicked on, she couldn’t read what came before “therapist.”
Maya’s vision had stumbled over words now and again in recent years, but it was rare enough that she would chalk it up to tired eyes and move on.
But now it was obvious that it was just one very specific word—or part of a word—that she couldn’t read. She got out of bed, turned on the lights, and looked around. There was nothing wrong with her vision as far as she could tell. No dark spots or blurriness. Yet when she looked again at her phone, the problem remained. “Certified . . . therapist.” It was like an optical illusion. Something was blocking her from seeing it. She felt sick. Nothing about this felt possible. Maybe she really was crazy.
She sank down onto the edge of the bed. Held her head in her hands. Then she had an idea and got back on her phone.
She created an online document. Copied “Certified . . . therapist” and pasted it into the document.
She selected the “Read Aloud” option.
What she heard turned her blood to ice. The middle of the word sounded garbled. She couldn’t hear it any more than she could read it on her screen. “Certified *#@^-therapist.” The warping was subtle—she might not have noticed had she only heard it once—but it kept happening. “Certified *#@^-therapist.” Maya’s heart raced. She slowed down the reading speed. Held the phone to her ear and closed her eyes and listened over and over and over and over. She listened until she heard. And a black sun dawned in her chest.
Oren Bellamy had been a certified hypnotherapist.
THIRTY-TWO
Maya still hasn’t told Aubrey about the lost time.
She’s less sure of herself by the hour, and it’s not like she can point to any injury, or say for sure that it wasn’t her fault, so she didn’t mention Frank after the Tender Wallpaper concert last night or before they went back to Maya’s house and went to sleep.
But then she’d dreamed of the cabin. Not much happened in the dream—Frank sat across from her, the table set with bowls—yet terror had shrieked through the air and she couldn’t move, couldn’t open her mouth to let out the scream in her throat. The dream was so upsetting that, for the second morning in a row, she wasn’t able to fall back asleep afterward.
She walks quietly to the kitchen. Her mom and Aubrey are still asleep. The window above the sink has been left open. The room is cool with morning. She pours herself a glass of orange juice and tries to shake off the dread of her dream, but then sees the number flashing on the cordless phone. Eight. Eight missed calls, and she knows who they’re from. The call log confirms it—Frank’s been calling her all morning.
The murky fear she’s been holding at bay comes flooding back. It occurs to her that she has no idea who Frank really is.
“You’re up early.”
Maya startles.
Her mom sweeps into the living room in a cotton nightgown with roses on it, her blond curls a messy halo around her head. “Didn’t mean to scare you.”
Maya puts a finger to her lips. “Aubrey’s asleep.”
“She’s here?” Her mom seems rested after a full night’s sleep, a luxury in her line of work. She goes from room to room, opening curtains, filling the house with light.