“What the hell is wrong with her?” Brenda’s voice was clear and loud. “No, you settle down . . . Yes, Mom. I hear you.” Maya sounded normal again. The recording ended a few seconds later.
Diaz looked at her notes. Her brown eyes crinkled at the edges in a way that was thoughtful, even as it was impossible to tell what she was thinking. “You said you had a beer there,” she said. “Did you have anything else to drink?”
Maya sank. Here we go again. “I had some gin. Maybe two shots, but that was earlier. I wasn’t drunk at the bar.”
“Do you take any medications?”
Maya sank lower. She knew how this looked. Paranoia was a symptom of benzo withdrawal. She couldn’t look at either of them. “I used to take Klonopin, but I quit.”
“How recently?” Diaz asked.
“Last week.”
The detective wrote this in her notes. Then she sat back, tapped her pen absently on the pad.
Maya wasn’t hurt or angry at realizing that Diaz might not believe her. She was too exhausted for that. She wouldn’t argue this time. If no one believed her, she would happily swallow whatever pills Dr. Barry prescribed—the more, the better.
While Diaz tapped her pen, Maya imagined spending the rest of her life hiding from Frank. Changing her name. Moving out of state. She pictured herself telling Dan why it was no longer safe for him to live with her. She imagined the pain she would feel, but at least she would be medicated. She’d have to be.
“I’d like a copy of that recording,” the detective finally said.
Maya looked up. Blinked back tears. “Of course.”
“I’ve been in this job twenty years. Never heard anything like that.” She shook her head. “I don’t know what to make of it, not yet. But I’ll clear up the sound, see what else I hear. And I’ll look into that business you mentioned, Clear Horizons. I’d also like to have you talk to someone, a psychologist, about that med you were on. Get an assessment.”
“No problem,” Maya said, starting to feel hopeful. Diaz seemed to take her seriously. She asked a few more questions, then walked Maya and her mom back to the empty lobby of the police station. It was almost two a.m. and the station was quiet. A tray of Christmas-tree-shaped cookies sat on the front desk. “Let me know if he tries to get in touch with you,” Diaz said.
“I will,” Maya said. “Thank you.”
A ray of warmth cut through Diaz’s neutrality. “I’m sorry for what you’ve been through,” she said.
* * *
—
Brenda started the car, blasted the heat, and blew on her fingers, waiting for the fog on the windshield to clear. She was still in her pajamas, having run out as soon as she saw Maya’s note. She had always done her best to protect her daughter; Maya knew this. Brenda was just afraid of the wrong things. She’d thought that she was helping when she found Dr. Barry and set up Maya’s first appointment with him, and then when she brought home the meds he prescribed.
But tonight, she had saved her daughter’s life. Even if she didn’t know it—even if all she thought she’d done was interrupt a conversation—Maya knew and she was grateful. She was alive.
“I’ll take a sick day tomorrow,” her mom said. “You shouldn’t be alone.”
“I’m doing all right.”
This time Maya more or less meant it. It could have been relief, or the fact that she’d been awake for so long, or the hot air rushing from the vents, that made her feel as if she could finally sink into the kind of sleep that had evaded her since she quit Klonopin. The sleep of a baby in a car seat. She blinked, and the next thing she knew they were home.
She didn’t notice until they were inside that her mom was crying, tears dripping from her chin onto her boots as she knelt to take them off. Maya rarely saw her cry and found it alarming. “What is it?” she asked.
“I should’ve believed you.”
Maya sank onto the couch. She hadn’t cried at the police station, but she cried now. They both did. They cried, then hugged, then laughed at themselves. Her mom draped a quilt around her shoulders and looked at her with such love and sorrow that Maya almost wanted to comfort her. Because her mom was Frank’s victim too. Nothing hurt her more than seeing her daughter in pain.
“I don’t blame you,” Maya said. “The things I said didn’t make sense . . .” She had talked of magic tricks. Of spells.
“I could have tried harder to understand. And even if I couldn’t—I could have accepted that he . . .” A wave of anger threatened to burst from her mom’s mouth. “He hurt you. I couldn’t bear the thought of someone hurting you. The thought that I . . .” She’d never looked so broken. “I failed to protect you.”
“You saved my life, Mom.”
A shadow crossed Brenda’s eyes as this sank in. To believe her daughter meant believing that Frank had killed Aubrey and that he had almost killed Maya. It meant believing that he still could.
THIRTY-SIX
I’m not writing you a prescription for Klonopin,” said the doctor at the urgent care center.
“I’m not asking you to,” Maya said. She’d just finished explaining why she was here, and now the doctor had his arms crossed over his chest. He looked down at her sternly, as if he’d caught her trying to steal his wallet. She wanted to say that she wouldn’t have gone back on Klonopin if he paid her, but as she had no regular doctor, and no insurance, she bit back her indignation. She needed the man’s care. “I was hoping there was something else I could try? Something to help me sleep?”
The doctor wrote her a prescription for mirtazapine, an antidepressant that he said should make her drowsy.
Dan was relieved to hear that she’d seen a doctor, and Maya was relieved to hear he’d missed her. “Hasn’t felt like home without you,” he said to her on the phone. They made plans for him to pick her up the day after Christmas.
She’d start back at work on the twenty-seventh and was almost looking forward to it, the normalcy, the plants, even the customers, some of whom she’d grown friendly with over the years. Her boss had been understanding about the missed days, and the weight she’d dropped would lend credence to her story of having had the flu.
She slept for twelve hours straight that night in her old room on the new bed. The urgent care doctor had been right about the mirtazapine. It knocked her out like a frying pan to the skull. Her dreams were vivid, but as usual, she didn’t remember them upon waking, and all she was left with was the muscle memory of fear. A tight jaw. Weary legs as if she’d been running. It was noon when she woke, and she was drooling on her pillow. She hauled herself out of bed.
Walking downstairs, she noticed for the first time how nicely her mom had decorated the small fir tree in the corner of the living room. Maya recognized all the shiny baubles and homemade ornaments. The plastic angel. A tiny snowman she’d made out of clay when she was eight. Growing up, she and her mom had always decorated the tree together, but as Maya hadn’t come home for the past few years, the tradition had fallen by the wayside. She told herself it wasn’t too late to start again.