Frank laughed like someone whose girlfriend hadn’t just died, and for a moment looked like his old self again. Magnetic, fun. He took her in with his eyes. “Hard to believe it’s been seven years.”
“I know.” She bowed her head. “I’ve thought about that day so many times . . .”
“Me too.”
“Really?”
“Of course,” he said. “I watched a girl die that day. Didn’t know her like you did, of course, but still. Can’t help but wonder if there’s some way I could’ve helped her.”
Maya’s eyes shone with emotion as she leaned across the table. She wasn’t a teenager anymore. “Oh, Frank . . . I thought you might blame yourself. After what I said—”
“You asked me what I did to her.” He sounded wounded, as if he was the one who’d been hurt. “It’s like you thought I . . .”
“I was wrong. I know that now.” She touched the fingers wrapped around his beer. “I was scared when I said that, I wasn’t thinking straight.”
He moved his hand closer.
“I’ve been wanting to say sorry for a long time,” she said.
“Thank you. That means a lot.”
She smiled.
He settled back in his seat and she did the same. He appeared to believe her. To relax. Maya tried to relax too, but adrenaline surged through her veins and her heart beat like a war drum. Another Weezer song came on.
“What do you do these days?” she asked.
He took a long drink of beer. “What do I do?”
“You know, for work.”
“I help people.”
“Wish I could say the same,” she said, “but I just work at a garden center. Customer service.”
“Are you still writing?”
She shook her head.
“Why not?”
“I don’t know. Lazy, I guess.”
“You should get back to it. I bet you’re good.”
She smiled. “How would you know?”
“You have a good imagination.” He held up his glass. Drank. It was almost empty.
Maya took a small sip. She needed to stay in control, but it would look suspicious if she didn’t at least try her beer. “Speaking of helping people,” she said, filling her voice with warmth. “Your father . . . I remember you were taking care of him. Is he . . .”
“Dead.”
“Oh, Frank . . . I’m so sorry to hear that . . .”
He didn’t seem too broken up about it. “It was his time.”
“I only met him that once,” she said, “the night I visited you at your cabin, but I remember thinking he seemed like a nice person.”
A snarl curled the edges of Frank’s lips, pretending to be a smile.
Maya pushed on. “What was it that he did again?”
Frank’s expression grew steely. “What did he do?”
“Yeah, like, his job. Did you say he was a professor?”
He clenched his jaw. “You want to know about my dad.”
“Yeah, I mean . . . just curious.” A drop of sweat trickled down her ribs. She caught movement in the corner of her eye but held on to his gaze.
“Well, if you must know,” he said, “my father was a psychology professor and a researcher. A brilliant man. Taught me everything I know.”
“Wow, that’s . . . wonderful.”
His eyes burned. “Nothing wonderful about it.” He spoke calmly, but anger simmered beneath the words. “My dad never meant to teach me anything.”
Maya tilted her head. She glanced toward the movement at the edge of her vision and saw that it was his hand on the table, resting atop the collage of body parts. He was holding something small, turning it over and over in his right palm, like a magician about to do a coin trick.
The key—it had to be. She purposefully didn’t look. The key to Frank’s cabin was a blind spot—she still didn’t know how, or if, it tied into his method. “So how did you learn?” she asked.
“The hard way. From the inside out.”
His words confused her, his hand kept turning in the corner of her vision, but Maya didn’t allow herself to be distracted. “What do you mean by that—from the inside out?”
“I was his test subject.”
She swallowed. Every instinct told her to leave.
“He developed a method,” Frank said, “a system of cues, most of them subperceptual.”
The smile he gave her then was one that she recognized, the smile that did her in at seventeen. There was danger just beneath its surface.
“These cues,” he said, “would induce a sort of trance in certain vulnerable personality types. The type to get lost in a book or a show on TV . . . the kind of person who needs to know how the story ends. Who’s capable of blocking out everything else until they have the answer.” His smile turned sad. “People like me.”
Her skin crawled.
“My dad never told me what he was doing,” he said, “but I figured it out. I was ten when it started. He’d be talking to me, and the next thing I knew it was hours later and I’d be watching TV or eating dinner. And I saw the same thing happen to my mom. She’d always been so sharp, so bright, but around that time she started acting confused and weirdly passive. She stopped leaving the house or doing anything at all other than what my dad told her to do. Then one day I noticed him whispering in her ear. Talking and talking to her while she stared at the wall . . .”
His hand on the table began to move faster, as if he were growing agitated.
“I started breaking into his study at night,” he said. “I’d go through his notes, read everything. I started to understand what my father was doing to me. His method. Over time, I learned how to do it too. It was the only way I could defend myself.”
It couldn’t be good, Maya thought, that he was telling her this. But she didn’t stop him.
“I was better at it than he was,” Frank said, as a smile crept into his voice. “More intuitive, much more subtle . . . When I used it on him, my dad was completely helpless against his own method.”
Suddenly his churning hand went still. He unfurled his pale fingers, and Maya knew what she would see when she looked down. She knew, but she’d come too far to turn back, and she too was the type who needed to know how the story ended.
Her every nerve had been taut as piano wire since the moment she walked into the bar—and since before then too. Ever since she ran out of her pills. But at the sight of Frank’s key, her whole body relaxed, a delicious warmth spreading through her, a feeling not unlike a high dose of Klonopin. The coziness. A heaviness of limbs. The sense that everything was going to be okay, regardless of the evidence before her eyes.
“I won,” he said.
She almost laughed. She almost cried. But she lacked the conviction to do either. She stared at the key, its sharp teeth, and knew she was in danger but couldn’t bring herself to care. The bar had gone quiet, and the table beneath Frank’s hand had changed. Instead of body parts, she saw pine.
The only parts of herself she could lift were her eyes. She looked up.
She was in the cabin. There was the tall stone fireplace. The cathedral ceiling. The rustic wooden walls. Instead of stale beer, she smelled fire, and instead of Weezer, she heard the sound of the stream.