Over huevos rancheros and cinnamon-spiced café de olla, they talked about everything, but what Maya remembered most was learning that Dan, like her, had read a children’s version of The Iliad as a child, and been obsessed with Greek mythology ever since.
Maybe it was the intimacy of being with someone who loved the same stories. Or maybe it was that, in talking about such stories, they were really talking about themselves. It had been years since Maya had spoken to anyone of the central trauma of her life, and while she certainly hadn’t spoken of it then, she found a certain comfort in Dan’s tenderness toward Cassandra, the woman cursed to utter a truth no one would believe.
It wasn’t until their third or fourth date that Maya realized he hardly drank—had, at most, two drinks at a party—and didn’t use drugs. This meant that their first conversation had not, in fact, been cocaine-fueled, at least not on Dan’s part, which felt significant.
It also meant that he was utterly lucid around her, unlike most of the men she had dated, who, in retrospect, had been more like drinking buddies. The thought of all that sober attention on her was nerve-racking, but over time—over brunches and dinner tables, long talks and increasingly cozy silences—Maya found herself wanting to be lucid around him too, so as not to miss out on their time together. Their bike rides along the Charles River. The Iron Chef marathons on the couch. The messy, elaborate meals cooked together in his kitchen.
Spending all that time sober hadn’t been easy for Maya at first. Sometimes, out of nowhere, memories like long-sleeping leviathans would stir, threatening to rise up and swallow her whole. Aubrey collapsing on the ground. The dark glitter of Frank’s eyes. The terror of knowing that none of Maya’s efforts to stay under the radar would mean anything if he decided he wanted to find her.
This wasn’t all that haunted Maya these days. After nearly a decade of constant inebriation, she found that she had forgotten how to handle day-to-day struggles, like going to the RMV or winding down for bed at a reasonable hour. It felt strange, when frustrated, not to get drunk.
Sometimes she caught herself snapping at Dan for no reason and hating herself for it. Afraid of pushing him away, she did her best to hide her anxiety, the air itself suddenly raw and jagged, and never mentioned the cold sweats that woke her at dawn, or the insomnia that kept her from sleeping in the first place. But eventually all that subsided, helped along by the Klonopin she took in place of the vodka or gin she normally would have used to knock herself out.
She took Klonopin during the day sometimes too, in upward-creeping doses as her tolerance grew. What mattered to Maya was that the old dread wasn’t nearly as pervasive as she’d feared. Most of the time, her thoughts left her alone, or maybe it was just that enough time had passed. She ate well and exercised, rarely having more than a single drink per night （along with a few pills from the aspirin bottle, which she kept in her purse so that Dan would never accidentally take one, thinking it was aspirin）。
And these days, when Maya thought of Aubrey or of Frank, or dreamed that she was back at the cabin, she comforted herself with the words of Dr. Barry, who had assured Maya that there was nothing she could have done for Aubrey. Nothing that anyone could have done. No one whose fault it was. Not even Frank.
This was what Maya told herself every time the phone rang and she didn’t recognize the number, or she heard footsteps behind on her a dark street. But how could two women drop dead for no apparent reason while talking to the same man?
THREE
So, what exactly am I looking at here?” Dan had his glasses on but seemed bewildered by the video on Maya’s computer, and the situation in general. He’d woken at seven to find her pacing the living room, and now, rather than explain herself, she was showing him a video.
“Frank Bellamy,” she said as, on her screen, the couple entered the diner.
“Who?”
She and Dan had gone over their respective dating histories early on, but Maya hadn’t told him about Frank. She had tried to force him from her mind, along with the rest of that summer, the summer she either witnessed the murder of her best friend or lost her mind completely. “I met him after high school,” she said. “We sort of dated.” The relationship had lasted all of three weeks, ending the day Aubrey died—or, more accurately, changing that day into something else, a fear that warped every aspect of Maya’s life.
Dan raised an eyebrow and smiled sideways at her. “What is this, cyberstalking? Should I be jealous?”
“Just watch.” She wanted his unbiased eye. Dan was sailing through law school, as he was good at picking up on details that others might miss and understanding how they fit into a story.
“Tell me if you notice anything . . . off about Frank,” she said.
Dan’s smile faded as he took in her expression. He turned back to the video, settling back on their couch while Maya perched beside him, bare legs tucked beneath her. She couldn’t believe she was showing him this video.
She wanted, on the one hand, to forget Frank, as she had all but managed to do until a few hours ago. She wanted to reassure herself that she was imagining things, seeing connections where there were none. It would have been easy to have hidden the video, not just from Dan but from herself as well, and gone on acting like her biggest problem was running out of Klonopin.
But then Maya thought of the dead woman’s face, not so different from her own, only younger and probably more innocent. How improbable that both she and Aubrey, seven years apart, would drop dead in Frank’s presence. She had to imagine, or at least hope, that Dan would find it suspicious.
“She looks like you,” he said.
There was no denying Frank had a type.
“Bit of a rambler,” he said.
“He was a real storyteller . . .”
The woman on-screen pitched forward. “What the hell?” Dan watched Frank shake the woman by the shoulders, shouting without sound. “Wait,” Dan said. “She’s not . . .”
“Yes!” Maya hugged herself, squeezed the ends of her sleeves in her fists. “I looked her up. Cristina Lewis. She was twenty-two.”
“I don’t get it. What happened?”
Maya slowly shook her head. “I don’t know. But I think he . . .” She almost couldn’t say it after so long; she’d buried the words deep. “I think he did it.”
Dan’s eyes went wide. “Did what? Killed her?”
She nodded.
“How?”
“I don’t know.”
He waited for her to go on. She swallowed. “Do you remember when I told you about my friend Aubrey?”
“Of course. The one who died.” He spoke gently, knowing this was hard for her.
Maya had told him about Aubrey, and that she was dead, but she hadn’t answered the one question everyone has upon learning someone’s died: How did it happen? Maya hadn’t wanted to talk about it then, but now she had to. “Aubrey died,” she said, “just like Cristina. She just . . . tipped over. I saw it happen.”
The incredulity on Dan’s face was encouraging. “What did the medical examiner say?”
“There’s this term for when they can’t figure out what killed a person. Sudden unexplained death. It’s extremely rare and almost always happens when the person is asleep. They just never wake up.”