Mara sighs, long and slow against my ear. “I can’t speak to every person you knew, dear, but as far as I know, the only girl you hung around with was Kyla Kelley. Of course, I was very busy when you were a child. How am I supposed to know who you spent your time with?”
In the pause stretching out between us, I almost chuckle. Why did I bother asking her at all? Mara was never the type of mother to take an interest in her daughter’s acquaintances. Or even her whereabouts.
“You seem very agitated,” Mara says. “Have you been taking your meds?”
“Yes, I—” I have a brief moment of alarm where I can’t remember if I packed my pills this morning, but then I pick up my purse from the passenger seat, hear them rattling inside.
“Yes,” I repeat. “My doctor put me on a new prescription, though. My old one wasn’t working.”
Mara chuckles. “Sounds like this one’s not doing too great, either.”
I’m about to shrug the comment aside, but then I stop. Could that be what this is, a side effect of my change in medication? Is my brain just mixing its signals, firing off incorrect messages as it adjusts to the new chemicals? My panic softens at the thought. In a few moments, my breath comes more gently. Because, if I’m honest, my brain has always done this. It’s the reason I went on medication in the first place. I’m always leaping from ordinary sights to sinister assumptions. I see a construction worker descending through a manhole and I’m sure there’ll be an explosion that traps him underground. I see a woman pedaling in the bike lane and I’m positive a bus will hit her.
Eric says I’m an unreliable narrator, especially when it comes to my own life. I get a mosquito bite, and I’m convinced I have West Nile. I cough two times and I’m certain it’s bronchitis. I spiral. I get stuck in all the wrong grooves. I see something as innocent as a father pulling his daughter toward safety, and I flash to a disembodied arm snatching a girl away.
“So is it my turn now?” Mara asks. “Can I get to the reason I called?”
“Uh, yeah. Sure. Sorry.”
I check my mirrors and pull back onto the road. I don’t see Astrid anywhere.
“Ted tells me you’re headed there to help him pack,” Mara says. “Because apparently he’s become a cliché overnight. Moving to Florida… How conventional.”
She groans, and in the background, I hear someone announce that a Bikram yoga class will start in ten minutes.
“Are you on one of your cruises?” I ask.
Mara’s been obsessed with spiritual cruises for years. She and Ted separated when I was in high school, and ever since, she’s been tetherless. Where once she couldn’t stand leaving her studio for more than a few hours at a time, now she hops from ship to ship, living off a steady diet of qigong exercises, psychic readings, and daily Reiki.
“Yes, I have my yoga soon, so I have to hurry this along,” Mara says. “I need you to do me a favor.”
“Okay…”
“As it turns out, Ted’s being a bit of a copycat with his move. My spiritual adviser has been urging me to make a move myself. Find a different studio space. ‘A steadier place to land,’ she calls it. And when I told Ted about my decision last week, he called me back two hours later to announce he was selling the house.”
“Wow,” I say. “So you won’t be following Ted to Florida then?”
“Me in Florida?” Mara’s laughter thunders in my ear. “Never.”
“Yeah, I can’t really picture you there,” I concede. “Or Ted, for that matter. But I guess I assumed you’d set up shop wherever he goes.”
Separated but never actually divorced, Ted and Mara still share a house, though in the last decade, I’ve only seen Mara there a handful of times. She mostly uses it as her home base between cruises, spending a few nights on a cot in her studio before setting sail again. But Ted insisted on the phone last week that she would “find her own way” once he sold the property. I guess he was right.
“Our living arrangement has long been a measure of convenience,” she says. “And now Ted is insisting that you pack up my studio right away. He’s annoyed with me, I think, for being the first of us to make a permanent change. My spiritual adviser says his pride must be bruised, so he needs to act as if he doesn’t care—hence, selling the house, emptying out my studio. So do me a favor and don’t let him touch my art. He knows he’s not allowed in there, but maybe he thinks the rules have changed because we’re moving. But no. They haven’t. He’ll only bungle the whole thing up. You’re much more careful than he is, so pack up the pottery and prints, won’t you, dear? Leave the Break Room for me, though. I’ll have to figure out what to do with all that. Who knows—maybe I’ll leave it as is. Drive up the value of the house.”
As she laughs, I picture her Break Room, the place in her studio where the cracks in her marriage first started to show. It was named for the broken pieces of pottery Mara glued to the ground. I wonder if the floor still looks too sharp to walk on. If my feet would come away with cuts like they did when I was young.
“Anyway, can you do that, dear? I’d say it could wait until I’m back—our ship docks at the end of the week—but you know how Ted is when he gets something in his head. He was actually nagging me to fly home from our next stop. I swear, that man…”
“Yes, that’s fine. I’ll take care of it.”
“Oh, that’s lovely, thank you. And remember… gallery pieces… because the… has to go on top of… but I think there are extras.”
“Mara? You’re breaking up. I’m getting too close to the house.”
“… hear me… the gallery pieces? You have to—”
The line goes dead, and I’m not surprised. The cell reception in Cedar has always been terrible. The only tower that reaches us isn’t even in town; it’s across the border in Duxbury. This is just one way that going back to Cedar always feels like going back in time. In Boston, no one I know has a landline, but here, it’s still a necessity.
I want to think about Astrid, reconcile the vividness of those reaching hands, that flash of an arm around her waist, with the tricks I’ve learned my anxiety plays. I want to return to Mara’s quip about my meds, let it keep convincing me that the dream is just a dream. The wrong synapses firing. But I’m nearly to Ted’s house now. I pass the antiques store with the metal pig out front, the fire department with its sign for a spaghetti dinner. I pass the llama farm and feel the familiar catch of breath in my throat. The woods are just ahead. If I walked straight into them, I could walk for fifteen miles. Never pass another person or house. Get lost, maybe. Never find my way out.
These woods have always rattled me. They darken the road, obstructing the sun with their trees. They make my stomach churn, and even now, I feel a swirl of nausea. Once, when I was thirteen, I asked Ted as we drove by them, “Did someone die in there?”
He looked at me. His eyes held something eerie in them. “You feel it?” he asked.
“Feel what?”
“Here. Let’s stop for a minute. I’ll tell you the story.”