Girl in Snow Page 10

  This is how it feels to be a stutter.

  You’re walking down the street and the night hasn’t settled yet. It doesn’t know what it wants to be. You’ve lived on this street your entire life. Your family hates you because you’re an asshole. You genuinely enjoy being an asshole. This is why you have no friends except the homeless guy who lives behind the library.

  People like Howie push you too deep into yourself. You sink this way often, and there are things you can do to temporarily soothe your mind: turn on new music, cut your bangs in the bathtub, pick at old scabs. But you’ll still itch. You itch, constantly, because even when you think you might be happy, these truths bubble up to prove you wrong. You’re fat. You’re angry. In a different world, you could be blond or kind or friendly, or all of the above. When you slept you could look like a porcelain doll. But this is not a different world, this is your world, and you have to find a way to deal with such irony.

  You walk past the Hayeses’, the Thorntons’, the Hansens’. The night is clear. The neighborhood smells clean. The rum churns, hot against your ribs. Dashboard Confessional is blasting in your headphones, and you’re wishing you could live inside the aching lyrics, inside the guitar’s shriek, that violent voice box.

  You want to know what Cameron sees when he walks down this street under the forgiving cover of night. What he finds so fascinating. You want to know how he can stand in one spot for so long, with the explicit knowledge that his wanting will never be returned. How he stands with his wanting on the lawn for hours, and how he retreats home with it, unable to stash it away.

  Your tiny consolation: Magic can’t be real. This can’t be your fault.

  Your feet are so heavy on pavement, you take up too much space.

  You want to hear the ocean, because you never have before.

  Russ

  Though it has been six years now, the particulars of Broomsville still remind Russ of Lee Whitley. The cigar shop on Main Street where they bought Fat Boys to smoke on the porch. The park, where they took Cameron on weekends, Cynthia pushing the stroller while Russ and Lee lugged a cooler of beer and hamburger meat. They spent time with Cynthia, of course, but more often it was just the two of them—even when their shifts didn’t overlap, Russ and Lee often joined one another on duty. A tagalong, unpaid backup reinforcement. Both thankful for the easy company.

  Nowhere holds more memories than the cliff, but Dixie’s Tavern takes a close second place. The sticky tables. The broken jukebox in the corner, hills of ash in browning glass trays. The stink of the place, like old fermentation—things left to decay.

  Tonight, Russ slides onto a stool at the edge of the bar. He folds his coat and gloves in a ball in his lap.

  What can I get you? Tommy asks.

  Tommy has worked at Dixie’s Tavern for nineteen years—Russ used to come with his friends in high school. Tommy, just a few years out of high school himself then, would serve them mixed drinks he later told Russ were half water. Russ and his friends would stay out until two, three o’clock in the morning, exhilarated. They’d drive home late, mildly intoxicated, their heads hanging out the window like lazy dogs—whooping to the gas stations and the oil rigs, whooping to the wide pastures and the mountains, remote and distant in the night.

  I’ll take a double whiskey, Russ says.

  Ivan lingers by the pool table, alone. On the corner is a bottle of decaffeinated green tea, its label advertising peace and serenity. Tommy charges Ivan two dollars a game, and Ivan brings his own chalked pool cue. He spends hours this way, maneuvering polished wood across the fake green lawn of a table.

  You gonna play your brother-in-law? Tommy asks.

  Not tonight, Russ says. He downs his drink and places the glass on the table for a refill.

  You want another? Tommy asks. The neon sign behind Tommy’s head reads “BEER” in capital letters. Russ should have a beer instead, but the idea of all that liquid sloshing around in his stomach just makes him angry, so he orders another double.

  The third drink tastes like less than the second, and the fourth just tastes like the inside of Russ’s mouth, chemical and numb.

  The first September they were married, Russ came home to foreign smells in the kitchen. Ines danced in socks to Lupillo Rivera playing on the computer in the corner of the room. Something was frying on the stove, and something else was boiling. Ines had hung red, white, and green streamers in the hallway.

  Mexican Independence Day, she said. We are celebrating this year. Guadalajara has the biggest celebration in the country, did you know?

  Okay, Russ said. He retreated to the living room, where he watched a rerun of Law & Order until she finished cooking.

  Ines had set the table with colorful paper napkins. A ceramic dish steamed in the middle. Birria de borrego, she told him. That’s spiced lamb, and queso fundido on the right. When Russ took a bite, it burned the top of his mouth. Everything was too spicy.

  Good? she asked.

  Yeah, he said.

  Back home they’d have fireworks, she told him.

  Cool, Russ said, and he eyed the NASCAR race on the TV in the living room, whose volume was turned all the way up.

  Ines carefully watched his plate, which had gone mostly untouched. She rubbed a spot on her neck and looked up at the ceiling, the expression on her face like a cracked windshield. For the rest of the meal, she didn’t look him in the eye. She smacked Russ’s hand away when he tried to help with dishes. When Ines had finished cleaning, she came to Russ in the den.

  Ines switched off the television and stood in front of it. Fire in her eyes. Russ had never seen Ines angry—he was almost afraid. She came at him quickly, and he did not put his arms up in defense because he wasn’t sure if she would kiss him or hit him.

  The latter: she slapped him across the face. A sting. Russ’s cheek burned where her palm had struck.

  After that night, Ines never cooked Mexican food for him again. Russ would come home late from work to the smells of rice and spiced meat, but Ines always hid the evidence, ingredients for a grilled-cheese sandwich laid out on the counter beside an empty plate. Punishment. Russ thinks about this night often—if he had handled it correctly, asked questions, shown even one morsel of honest interest, how different their marriage could have looked. Instead, Ines cradles these things to her chest—recipes, stories, songs, memories—unwilling to share with Russ. Stupid American man.

  Ines’s anger is there, in the white bread on the counter. Russ wonders where this anger goes when he is not around. He wonders what else she conquers.

  A few weeks before Ivan got out of prison, Ines looked up from the breakfast table. A rare Saturday morning off duty—eggs and bacon. Ines read a novel while Russ skimmed the newspaper.

  He gets out soon, she said to Russ.

  Who?

  Ivan. He gets out in two weeks.

  Oh, Russ said, though he had been dreading the date for months. Ines watched him, expectant.

  I’ll make sure the right people know, Russ said.

  Ines smiled and picked up the book again.

  Ivan had overstayed his visa a year and a half by the time he’d gotten to prison. Now, it was three and a half. Russ wasn’t clear on the procedure for checking papers—for deportation after prison—but he knew Immigration and Customs Enforcement was strict about narcotics. Russ’s father had been close with an officer who made the move from patrol to agency with ICE, and Russ had spoken with this man briefly at department barbecues. Anyway, everyone loved Russ’s father. That Monday, Russ found the right office, knocked on the right door.

  Hey, he’d said to the stranger hunched at the desk. I need to ask for a favor.

  Within ten minutes, Ivan had not been granted citizenship or a green card or even an application—only a promise that he wouldn’t be checked for any of these things upon his release. When he told Ines that night, she flung her arms around him and they danced together, hips pressed to hips in a sway that felt genuinely joyous, if not like r
omance.

  The night Ivan got out of prison, Ines threw a dinner party. She blew up balloons and tied them to the mailbox. She hung a homemade poster in the front hall: “WELCOME HOME, IVAN!”

  Russ grilled steak on the back patio while Ines, Ivan, and Marco gathered in the kitchen, laughing over one, two, then three beers. Marco had visited Ivan weekly, delivering books like Machiavelli’s The Prince and Leopoldo Zea’s The Latin-American Mind. Marco had studied hard and taken out loans, and now he was in school to become a physician’s assistant.

  By the time the steak had browned at the edges, all three were drunk and arguing happily in machine-gun Spanish. Russ dumped his beer in a potted tomato plant. Through the window, Ines glowed in the light of her brother, home at last.

  When the food was ready, they gathered around the linen-set table, and Russ held Ivan’s hand for grace.

  You’re all great dinner company compared to the inmates, Ivan said, as he cut a civilized bite of steak. Though, I will say, I had a lot of time to think. I learned a lot from the other inmates, bad company as they were. I learned a lot about evil.

  Russ swallowed.

  I learned that evil does not exist, Ivan continued. There are only different ways people try to be good. Very few people in this world do things with evil as the intention.

  So, Russ said to Ivan, you’re saying you dealt narcotics in an effort to be good?

  The words just came out, in the voice of the men he’d worked with for years, that hypermasculine tone Russ could adopt without trying or thinking. Ines’s back straightened. She and Marco exchanged a look. A hideous pause.

  I didn’t mean it like that, Russ tried, but Ivan had pushed his plate away.

  Ivan lifted his beer to his lips and downed it in one chug, a trickle running down his chin. This was the last drink Russ would ever see him touch.

  Here is what I am saying, Ivan said. I don’t believe in evil, not the way you and your cop friends define it. You are an ignorant bunch of middle-class schoolboys, and it is terrifying that you exist in the hundreds, the thousands, all refusing to turn around and see the world for what it is. You’re so busy chasing us outsiders, you never stop to look behind you and realize that half the people you’re putting away are better people than you, with far less evil intentions. I don’t think you’re a bad man, Officer Russell Fletcher, and that’s what bothers me most about you. You’re just another one of the power-tripping minions, and somehow, I’ve let a fucking puppet like you marry my sister.

  Ivan stood, and the table wobbled. The vase of flowers Ines had bought earlier toppled, and muckish green water leaked across the tablecloth.

  We should go, Marco said. Thank you for dinner, Russ.

  It wasn’t Ivan’s anger that scared Russ as Marco pulled a stumbling, drunken Ivan out the door by the wrist. Not even the hulking size of the man. It was those words, the ease and surety of Ivan’s proclamation: You are a puppet. You are everything that is wrong.

  You’re not scared of him, are you? Ines asked, in bed that night. She’d cried in the shower, and Russ had pretended not to hear. Her eucalyptus hair spread wet across Russ’s chest as Ines drew circles on his shoulder with her pointer finger.

  No, I’m not, Russ said, and he pulled her close.

  Ivan never apologized, though he has not tasted a single drink since. Despite this reformation, Russ knows that Ivan is dangerous—who could be unafraid of a man who does not believe in evil?

  Now, at the bar, Ivan’s arms stretch the length of the pool cue, his starchy shirt tight. He bites his lip in concentration.

  Russ slaps a twenty on the table and stands. He sways. Steps forward.

  Finally coming over to say hello? Ivan says. Too polite. The heat of him on Russ’s mouth: Warm breath. Gold tooth.

  Tell me what you did, Russ says.

  I told your friends and I’ll tell you again, Ivan says. I don’t know anything about that poor girl.

  I asked you a question, Russ says. What the fuck did you do?

  The words slur as they leave Russ’s mouth. Ivan smiles in a pitying way. Russ could hit him.

  Russ, Ivan says. Come on, my brother. Take a look at yourself.

  Russ deflates. Looks at himself: a very small man. The entire room spins, a playground carousel.

  Now, late at night. Ines is passed out in the guest room, a paper cup of microwaveable noodles topped on the nightstand. She sleeps with her hands clasped below her cheekbone. Above her is the one photograph Russ bought from the drugstore, a landscape, a feeble attempt to make the room look more alive for when his parents stopped by. The mountains look very small on the wall, Ines a slumbering giant beneath.

  She stirs only when Russ moves to shut the door.

  Russ? she whispers, a little girl waking in the night.

  Her makeup has dried beneath her eyes. The television in the corner is playing the news.

  The detective came by, Ines says. He asked me questions. He was with the lieutenant. I hoped you would be here. I answered all of their questions and I sent them away.

  I’m sorry, Russ says, whiskey-full and dizzy. I had to run an errand. Did they ask about me?

  No, Ines says. But they asked about my tutoring with Lucinda. And about Ivan. How could you think my brother killed her? Russ, how?

  I don’t know what I think, Russ says as the alcohol creeps back up his throat.

  Ivan is good, Ines says, and she starts to cry. My brother is good.

  Ines sits up, hair flattened on one side from the pillow. She rubs her face. Adjusts the strap of her tank top, which has fallen down her arm. She pulls her knees to her chest and stares past Russ, even though there is nothing behind him but the chilly upstairs hallway. The linen has left a crease across Ines’s cheek.

  Once, Russ stopped by after school. He stood outside the room where Ines tutored and watched her through the rectangular window. Ines and Lucinda bent over a textbook. When Ines laughed, she looked so full and round—this turned Russ on. He imagined another man standing here, another man watching his wife through the window and wishing he could have her. Lee. Yeah, Lee. Russ went into the men’s restroom, where someone had carved a swastika into the stall door with a pen, and jacked off into the toilet.

  Standing in the guest room, Russ becomes aware of his own stench, the slow, sludgy fade of his drunk. He smells like Ivan’s cologne, the kind you buy from the back of a pickup truck in a department-store parking lot.

  Come to bed, Russ says.

  When he goes to rouse Ines, she flinches, her doughy arm tense at his touch. Russ leaves her there, cursing his job and how old and how dumb he’s gotten.

  As Russ brushes his teeth, he watches himself in the mirror. His skin doubles at the chin. Small, watery eyes. He has worn his moustache the same way for sixteen years, since someone told him it made him look intimidating. Tonight, the moustache feels like an affront to his face. Intrusive. Everything sags. He sucks the water from the plastic bristles of his toothbrush and shuts off the lights.

  Cameron

  Cameron had one real friend in the whole world—Ronnie didn’t count. No, his only true friend was the night janitor at the elementary school.

  When Cameron played his game of Statue Nights, he wandered down cemetery streets. Quiet, like this small town was an island in the middle of an unchartable ocean.

  Cameron liked the way the janitor slouched in his jumpsuit beneath the streetlamp, on the back left side of the school. The janitor smoked a cigarette every hour, on the hour. It must be nice, Cameron thought, to know that comfort was waiting for you—you just had to live through so many more minutes.

  They had a secret language, Cameron and the night janitor.

  Nights when Cameron felt good, he would nod once from the other side of Elm Street. The janitor always nodded back. On nights when he felt Tangled, Cameron would not nod—he would only stand there, so heavy inside himself. This was enough for the janitor, who would remove his foot from the school’s exterior, where
he leaned like a cool kid from an old movie. The janitor would shake out his long, hulking limbs. He’d shrug, as if to say: So?

  These nights, Cameron felt less alone, even if your one true friend couldn’t really be made across a yawning midnight street.

  Cameron started with the underside of her jaw.

  This was the darkest part of Lucinda’s face. The underside of the jaw blending into the neck blending into the collarbone blending into the chest—a continuous spectrum. The light in his bedroom was bad. A frigid dusk. A fly, somehow alive in the cold, slapped its little body across the ceiling. Buzz and thud and buzz and thud. Cameron couldn’t concentrate.

  The memorial service was tomorrow, and Mom was ironing his dress shirt in the laundry room. She’d bought the stupid thing for a seventh-grade choir concert, and Cameron had worn it to every formal occasion since. The sleeves were too short. The buttons barely closed around his wrists, and the fabric scratched his skin. But it didn’t matter—the service tomorrow was just a memorial. It was at Maplewood Memorial Chapel and Funeral Home, but Lucinda’s body wouldn’t be there. Her body was probably in a morgue, on a metal table in the basement of some hospital, and people were probably peering down at her over surgical masks.

  Cameron started again with her chin. It was too wide, but that was okay, because if you drew someone’s chin too wide, it could still look like them. He moved up toward her lips. His hand was quaking, and his hand never quaked. The edge looked wrong. Once Cameron had looked at it wrong, he realized with a horrifying lurch that he would never look at it right again, because it was on that table now. Her jaw and her lips were there, peeling off their bones, decomposing—unless, maybe, they used some sort of preservation fluid.

  Untangle.

  He was trying to draw her cheekbones, but these were not right either, and he couldn’t remember where her freckles went, so he counted them—one, two, three, four—but they were in all the wrong places and she was beginning to look cross-eyed and he couldn’t place the corners of her easy eyes or the peaks of her mountain cheeks and when he pictured her face, he could see only the unpainted wall of Jade’s skin. When he looked down, the picture he had drawn was not Lucinda and it was not Jade, and February fifteenth had happened, somehow. For all of them.