Girl in Snow Page 11

  Cameron imagined himself holding a gun, pressing his index finger to the cool metal trigger.

  Untangle.

  He imagined himself holding a gun, pressing his index finger to the cool metal trigger, pressing the barrel to the back of Lucinda’s shiny yellow hair.

  Untangle.

  He imagined himself holding a gun, .22, pressing his index finger to the cool metal of the trigger, pressing the barrel to the back of Lucinda’s shiny yellow hair; No, she was saying, please don’t, and a whack. He imagined himself looking down at Lucinda on the carousel—his own dirty sneakers, the left shoelace was untied—looking back at her contorted form, watching blood ooze from the gash on her head like a sick sort of halo.

  Lucinda first asked Cameron for help on a sunny Saturday, a whole year and a half ago. Last August. The neighborhood was roped off with orange traffic cones—people set up food stands on their driveways. The incoming eighth-grade girls wore bikini tops and denim shorts. The boys walked around shirtless, tan from a summer of chlorine and SPF 15.

  Cameron wore his baggy sweat shirt. Take that thing off, Mom told him as she scooped a piece of banana bread onto Mr. Thornton’s plate. Baby Ollie, newborn then, slept in a car seat by Mr. Thornton’s feet. Mom had microwaved the banana bread so the neighbors would think it was fresh. You must be boiling.

  Cameron trudged to his bedroom and changed into a plain white undershirt. It made his arms look like two sets of disjointed bones poking from oversized sleeves. No matter how Cameron twisted in the mirror, he was a mess of angles—jutting elbows and corners that didn’t look natural. Like one of those paper skeletons teachers hung in classrooms around Halloween.

  Something crashed down the hall. It sounded like broken glass.

  When Cameron followed the sound to Mom’s bedroom—to the back, Mom’s marble bathroom—Lucinda Hayes stood in front of the vanity. A smashed perfume bottle lay on the floor, and the smell of Mom on a good night leaked down the cracks in the tile.

  Lucinda wore a yellow bikini top and a pair of ripped denim shorts. White strings dangled from the pockets’ seams. Tiny, translucent hairs spread up toward her belly button, and then, the flat expanse of her stomach: it stretched before Cameron, a boundless plain. The tan line on the soft inner skin of her breasts, where another swimsuit had protected her from the sun—it was two shades whiter, naked and goose-bumped. The plastic straps of the bikini top created red tracks that traveled across her collarbone and over her shoulders.

  “I’m so sorry,” Lucinda said in the bathroom, standing over the broken perfume bottle. “I didn’t mean to break it. I was just looking.”

  “It’s okay,” Cameron said, pulling Mom’s bath towel off the hook next to the shower curtain. He kneeled down to collect the bits of broken glass in his cupped palm. Lucinda watched from her spot next to the toilet.

  Cameron knew Lucinda was pretty, but he’d never seen her squint like this. She squinted at him and she did not seem annoyed or disgusted. She squinted at him like she would squint at anyone else, and this in combination with the small smile that folded across her mouth made Cameron very certain: she was kind. So while Cameron desperately wanted to know why Lucinda was in his mother’s bathroom, he would not ask. Later, when Cameron stood on Lucinda’s lawn and watched her through the window, he would think: no reason at all. Fate. The world had simply pushed Lucinda toward him.

  “So?” Lucinda said.

  “I—I’m sorry?”

  “Do you want me to buy you a new one? Or your mom, I guess?”

  “No,” Cameron said. “It’s fine.”

  Lucinda pulled aside the curtain at the bathroom window and peered out, rubbing her hands together nervously, a fruit fly. Her fingers were tan and tapered, thin, but not too bony.

  “Can I stay here for a minute?” she said.

  “Sure.”

  Cameron was conscious of his skeleton body’s every bone. He wished he were handsome, so he wouldn’t need to fill this pause.

  “Do you ever wonder?” Lucinda said. “What actually goes on in all these houses?”

  “Yeah,” Cameron said.

  Lucinda shook her head—maybe she thought Cameron was weird, or the kind of kid who would bring a gun to school like Beth had said, but he couldn’t tell, and he didn’t want to know anyway.

  “Believe me, I wonder all the time,” she said.

  A sliver of crystal had lodged itself in Cameron’s left pointer finger, but he didn’t care. The bikini top clung to Lucinda’s ribcage. He wanted to document her in charcoal, if only to save the specifics: blond hair stuck to her neck with sweat, lashes curled over eyelids. It started in Cameron’s sternum and blossomed there, a fondness that split open and gushed out. This gentle wave.

  Lucinda opened the curtain. Closed it again. She ran a hand through her hair and let her head fall back onto the crux of her spine.

  She began to tremble.

  Cameron hadn’t seen many people cry. Only Mom, and probably a girl at school once or twice. But he rarely caught the start of it—the build, the peak, the inevitable quake of a sob.

  “Are you okay?” Cameron asked. He didn’t understand how they’d gotten from the window to a moment where she was crying, but when Lucinda lifted her head to the mirror—Cameron standing behind her like a ghost that accidentally came back to life—he knew.

  Lucinda’s eyes were a forest, and she was calling from its depths, asking for help.

  “I’m sorry,” she said, peeking out the window again. She shook her head, a memory cleared, and adjusted her bikini top. Fresh skin. “About the perfume bottle, I mean.”

  When she pushed past him, Cameron caught a whiff of Mom’s perfume in her hair. Lucinda had dabbed it on her wrists, or maybe her collarbone. Gold and gardenias.

  Only in Cameron’s smallest moments could he admit that this day in Mom’s bathroom was the first, and last, time they’d spoken. That the rest of their conversations took place through fleeting glances—in gym class, when Lucinda ran laps twenty feet ahead of him, glancing back every few minutes to make sure Cameron was still there. She would pant onto his neck, even from twenty, fifty feet away, both of their legs burning, lungs screaming for them to stop. He could tell from the way she turned away, red-faced and shy, that he had whispered to her. It was a bizarre sort of conversation Lucinda and Cameron had, but it thrummed and it throbbed.

  Cameron found the gun one summer when Mom was at work. He’d been hunting around the house for new exhibits to add to his Collection of Photos—pictures of Mom before Cameron was born, when her ballerina neck was still long and graceful.

  The gun was under Mom’s bed, in a polished oak box with a latch that didn’t lock. Cameron’s head turned hot and swollen.

  He didn’t touch it. He didn’t dare.

  He tried to forget.

  When Mom left for work the next morning, Cameron wrapped the gun in a cotton T-shirt and shoved it to the bottom of his backpack. He hiked to the field behind Ronnie’s house—a vast, open space with wheatgrass that grew too high and mosquitoes that swarmed in clouds.

  When Cameron was sure no one had followed, he set his backpack on a log. The Rockies were fresh and bitter. He unrolled the T-shirt and examined all the foreign parts—the sight, the barrel, the grip, the cylinder. He’d looked it all up online, fascinated by how the thing worked.

  The Tree had the general proportions of a man. Six feet of bare bark, then the extending branches, a billion arms swaying to a beat Cameron could not hear. There was a hole in the trunk. A bird nest. They rustled about in there, hopping on tiny legs across a bed of twigs. The gun was heavy and unnatural in his hand.

  Cameron squinted an eye, like they did in the movies. He didn’t look like an actor, one toothpick arm raised to point at the chest of the tree. No, he looked like his small self, standing alone at the edge of a forest with a gun he didn’t know how to use, listening to the pecking of beaks against wood and wind against grass and his own bones trying to understand
themselves inside his awful skin.

  He closed his eyes and shot. In Cameron’s head, the Tree was living, breathing, a fully grown man. The noise cracked against the sky, and Cameron’s whole body tingled with the force of the bullet’s expulsion.

  He shot again. And again. Three bullets lodged in the left armpit of the Tree. The birds flew out in a frenzy, all desperate wings and frantic squawking.

  They flapped up through the branches, feathered bodies growing smaller, surrendering to open air. Cameron imagined how stupid he must look from the birds’ perspective—a lanky boy in an oversized sweat shirt, cupping a .22 in wavering hands. The weight of what he’d done hit in waves of self-disgust. Cameron was so scared. Just that year, his hands had grown bigger than Mom’s. The knuckles were dry. The lines on his palm mapped out a road he could not read. They looked like someone else’s hands. Like Dad’s.

  Cameron wrapped the gun in the T-shirt again. He sat in the dirt with the bundle in his lap and listened to the field around, because that was all he could bear to do.

  The iron sizzled in the next room over as Mom glided it across Cameron’s dress shirt. When Mom shifted her weight, her ankles popped and cracked, a Morse code message he couldn’t understand. Possibly the talus, possibly the subtalar joint. It was the saddest sound Cameron had ever heard.

  Lucinda stared up at Cameron from the floor, all terrible angles and inaccurate shading. A beg. Cameron wanted to cry, but he didn’t know how, so he pressed his cheek right up to the picture of the unidentifiable girl on the floor, thinking there was nothing worse than loving someone and mixing up their earlobes with someone else’s.

  Russ

  Russ can’t sleep. Ines is in the guest room and twice, Russ shudders awake: we’ve got a body. He throws the covers off and goes to the kitchen in his boxer shorts. Russ leans over the sink with his weight in his elbows. He had hoped to see the moon—to stare at the moon and ask it something—but instead he sees the clouds. Outside has lost its snowy touch. All drudgery. The white has melted in patches and a base layer of mud pokes out beneath, visible through the glaze of the night.

  Russ tugs on a pair of pants and backs the car out of the driveway. Ambles with headlights off toward Fulcrum Street.

  Ivan rents an upstairs bedroom in a house where two elderly women have begun the slow process of dying. Ivan buys their groceries and cooks their meals. At night, he spoons medicine into their quivering mouths.

  Two in the morning and Russ parks outside, lights off.

  Ivan is standing at the old women’s kitchen window, behind a set of frilly drapes pulled partially open. His hands are in his pockets—baggy black sweat pants—and his shape is illuminated by the overhead kitchen lights. He stands very still. Straight and tall.

  At first, Russ thinks Ivan is staring at his own reflection, examining himself. But from the street, he can see Ivan’s view out the window: it points directly into the living room of Ivan’s backyard neighbors, where an elderly couple has fallen asleep in the glow of the forgotten television, hands clasped together on the couch.

  Ivan stands in the kitchen, watching them sleep, and Russ sits in his car, watching Ivan. Russ wonders if maybe Ivan too—so strong, so sure of himself—feels like a millisecond in the middle of an infinite, stretching night. Puny, fleeting. Lost to the dark.

  Ines took Russ to church. Just once. They’d already been married a year, and Ines had suddenly asked him to join. Okay, he said, and he dug out his old scratchy brown suit. Delighted and surprised by her desire to share.

  Ivan was delivering the sermon.

  Ivan’s Sunday speeches had changed the churchgoing community. Ivan’s religion diverted from the devout Catholicism that many of the community members had known in their home countries. It took the basic principles they knew, but allowed more. Greater. Deeper. A combination of philosophy and religion, a devotion that had no strict boundaries, yet no less intensity, a formal introduction into American philosophy, all under the discerning gaze of God. Ines explained that Ivan had become a symbol, a beacon of hope: You can change. You can educate yourself, you can ask questions. You do not have to be a stranger inside your body, even in this cruel country.

  So Russ went. They sat in the second row of plastic chairs: the church was a converted trailer, just a long box with cheap carpet, folding chairs, and a simple wooden cross. Russ fanned himself while Ines made her rounds, hugging all the stooped old women, guiding them gently over to Russ for introductions. Hóla, Russ knows to say. Cómo está usted?

  Russ knew how to greet in the formal. During long nights on duty, he’d listen to the British accent on his Rosetta Stone. How are you? Cómo está? Muy bien, gracias. Very well, thank you.

  When the service started, Ines shut her eyes and sang all the songs by heart. Between, she glanced sideways at Russ, nervous and expectant. Squeezed his hand. Russ sang along without really making any sound, and the few times Ines opened her eyes, Russ tried to look exultant. They talked about divine love and divine providence, and when Russ had sweated entirely through his suit—later, he’d have to peel the fabric off his thighs—Ivan took the podium.

  We are here today to talk about the nature of evil, Ivan said, first in Spanish, then in English. How might we distinguish evil from God’s inherent goodness?

  At the altar, Ivan gestured with oversized hands, and Russ recognized the desperation in his gaze. Ivan was not a man seized by the fervor of religion. Ivan was a man who had written a sermon on a sheet of notebook paper, memorized it, practiced in front of the mirror. Timed to perfection, the whole thing, down to the gospel smile and the feverish “Amen.” Every tilt of the head, every impassioned squeeze of the eyelids, every time Ivan clapped his hands together in praise—all of it, a show. Beautifully performed.

  Afterwards, Russ joined the snaking line to speak to his brother-in-law.

  My brother, Ivan said to Russ when they reached the front. Did you enjoy the service?

  Very much, Russ said.

  I hope you’ll come back soon, Ivan said. God is ready to hear of your sins.

  To entertain each other, Russ and Lee played never-ending games of gin rummy on the middle console, using Lee’s old, tattered deck. Between shifts, they watched movies in the break room at the station house, sprawled on the stained, fraying futon. Lee’s favorite movie was Pulp Fiction. 1994. Cameron young, just starting school, and Cynthia had been all over Lee about taking on more responsibility around the house. I should just become a hit man, Lee said. Put all this training to good use. He’d pat his gun affectionately. But despite all their talk, neither Russ nor Lee had ever used their guns. As long as Russ knew him, Lee never shot a single living thing.

  It wasn’t for lack of trying. Days off, they donned Russ’s father’s hunting gear, gifted to Russ for his twenty-seventh birthday; Russ had managed to utter a halfhearted thank-you. Russ’s father had been trying to teach him to hunt since he was seven years old, but Russ could never do it, could never pull the trigger at the right moment. Could never want to. Still, he’d gone with his father, at least twice every summer. The sergeant never spoke on the car ride home.

  With Lee, it was different. They would traipse into the woods at the base of the foothills, a designated hunting area, clothed in camouflage and orange neon. Russ had never understood this combination—one color meant to conceal, the other meant to alert, layered on top of one another. They’d change in the backseat of the car so Cynthia didn’t suspect (she was wary of guns, especially for recreational use). Once, Lee fell out of the backseat and into the unpaved parking lot, trying to get his legs through pant holes without flashing the entire highway. It wasn’t lying to Cynthia, not really, since they never actually hunted a single thing. It was more about the ordeal—the walk through the woods with their guns strapped awkwardly to camouflage pants, listening for the rustle of animals in bushes and hearing only themselves, that panting, aging breath.

  They’d stop at this rock for lunch. Hasty, white-bread sandw
iches.

  Once, Lee laid flat against it, breathing hard. You ever think how old you’re getting? he asked.

  Sure, Russ said.

  Sometimes I think it’s going to be the end of me, Lee said. Time. It’s going to be the end of all of us, isn’t it?

  Russ remembers the swell of air around them, how the wind picked up and announced itself in every branch of every tree. A warning. It whipped a plastic sandwich bag out of sight, and when Lee bounded after it, Russ almost called out: Don’t go! That time, Lee came back. He crumpled the bag in his pocket and they stomped around in the woods until it was time to go home, or Cynthia would worry.

  Back in the one-room church, Ivan stared right through him. Those glassy eyes. Unsettling smile. Ivan pulled him close for a threat of a handshake. At that moment, Russ was certain that Ivan—and maybe Jesus himself—knew every one of his shameful sinner’s secrets.

  Russ slips into the house just before sunrise. At some point, Ines climbed back into their bed. Russ kisses the crown of her head and changes quickly into a pair of athletic pants. Plain white sweat shirt. A hat, to keep his ears warm. He laces his shoes quietly by the door and sneaks back out into the rising morning.

  It’s five o’clock when Russ starts down Pine Ridge Drive. The morning is brisk and frosty, but most of the snow has melted, and Russ can hear his own footsteps, slapping methodically on the pavement. He passes sleeping neighbors; Russ has lived here for years, but in this neighborhood, he is the Cop, and no one gets too close. He jogs past Lee’s house—Cynthia and Cameron’s now—without slowing. When Russ runs, theirs is like any other house on any other block. A small victory.