Girl in Snow Page 12

  Russ considers: someone out there knows what happened to Lucinda Hayes. It’s likely that he passed the killer’s house just moments ago, that he is passing it now, that the killer snores into a cotton pillowcase while Russ runs right by. Russ thinks of Cameron’s old bedroom, with its twin bed and sky-blue walls, and he wonders about genetics. About the inevitability of your own heritage, of badness passed down reluctantly from father to son.

  Around him, the mourning neighborhood is sound asleep. The sun is bald and orange on the horizon, and when Russ gets to the edge of the suburb, he picks up speed.

  Soon, he is at the base of the mountains, his heart rate is at least 140, and the peaks tower over him like wild, hungry beasts. It is this moment in which Russ understands himself best. In which he could easily say, My name is Russ Fletcher, I am a man living a certain sort of life, and I am happy. This gasping moment is free of obligation, of expectation and that bruised yellow past. It is only Russ and his beating man’s heart, Russ and the cloud of his breath as it unfurls white in the cold morning, Russ and the burn, burn of his legs. The needle-prick attention of his mind, as it focuses on blazing extremities. Running, Russ is okay. Running, he moves forward.

  Day

  Three

  FRIDAY

  FEBRUARY 18, 2005

  Jade

  We are on a beach. Sun glares bright from all sides. Lucinda and I lie flat on our backs, bellies cast toward the sky. We are bundled in winter clothes: me in my army parka, Lucinda in her yellow down jacket and sparkly tights. A seagull screams.

  Lucinda is speaking, but the wind and waves are too loud. Horizontal, she is very beautiful. Angelic—I see what they mean. We lie like lovers sharing a pillow, but her seashell mouth is opening and closing, opening and closing, her chest is heaving, tears are falling sideways over the bridge of her sloping nose. I can’t hear you! I try to say, but my mouth is stuck shut. Shoulders glued to the ground. I can’t hear you! She’s screaming now, but no sound comes out, arms wild as they reach for me. Lucinda begs and cries and pleads and all of it is lost in the ocean’s seaweed jumble.

  Five in the morning. I wake up shaking. Outside, it’s still night, the world suppressed.

  The book is beneath my dresser, a magnetic force. I keep it there so Amy doesn’t find it. She’d tell Ma, who’d probably check me into rehab or Jesus camp.

  When half an hour goes by and the lumps of clothes start to look like faces and small animals, I flick on the nightstand light and lug the book onto my mattress. I navigate by feel to Chapter Two: “Signs from the Dead.”

  “When you receive a sign from the dead, you must ask: What is the deceased trying to tell me? Is there anything I can do to ease their transition into the spirit world? When the deceased communicate with the living, they are bestowing a task: you must seek out their unfinished business.”

  I slam the book shut. Pad to the bathroom with my hands as guides and start the shower running cold. I step in with my pajama shirt still on and try to rinse the dream away from my vulnerable unconscious.

  Only here, in the shower, with my clothes still on—only here will I let myself remember the day of the ritual. The Thorntons’ driveway, Lucinda in her flip-flops, how I waited until Ma and Terry were settled in front of the TV. I snuck up to my room, desperate with the realization that the Thorntons had been calling me less, that soon they’d stop entirely and I’d have to get another job, all because of Lucinda and the perfect gold braid down her back. I imagined that hundred dollars clamped in Lucinda’s fist, her face all dimples and eyelashes.

  I assembled everything in my room. You’re supposed to be comfortable when you perform a ritual—a lot of people do it naked. But I refuse to be naked. Ever. So I put on an old swimsuit, a faded, stretched Hawaiian-print one-piece.

  First, I covered a spatula with brown construction paper. The wand. Next, I constructed the altar, sloppy and quick, using a few tealight candles from the dollar store—the kind that don’t burn for more than twenty minutes.

  In the middle of the altar, I propped up my favorite photo: Zap and me on the first day of second grade. We’re standing on his front porch, squinting into the sun, and Zap has one pudgy hand raised above his brow. Now, we both have coiffed Sharpie moustaches drawn expertly beneath our noses.

  I like this photo because we don’t look happy. We’re both frozen in motion, stuck there. Years later, from the floor of my bedroom, it’s like Zap will move his hand from his face to hike up his backpack straps, and I will yell at Ma about how I hate having my picture taken. This photo is the middle of something. I can always pick it up and dip a toe back in, testing the temperature of my own memory.

  I carefully followed the rest of the steps. The pentacle necklace, which I bought at a garage sale, went in the middle of the altar. I sprinkled salt from the kitchen table shaker (a ceramic cow). Clockwise, three times. Repeat with the thyme from Ma’s spice cabinet. I arranged the candles an inch apart and sprinkled “holy water” from a Dixie cup.

  They don’t tell you what to do once the circle is made.

  So I sat cross-legged in the middle of the carpet, candles flickering around me, hoping I had remembered to lock my bedroom door. Manufactured TV laughter echoed up the stairs, and faint pop music pulsed from Amy’s room. I tried to meditate on one thought, and I tried to make that thought something useful. I wanted to pray that I’d be nicer to people, that this year wouldn’t suck as much dick as the last. But I got lost in the circles of my own head and ended up where I always did: thinking about that night with Zap and Lucinda, trying to forget her sweet dough hands.

  That’s how it happened, I guess. In that sweaty circle, I prayed to some unspecified force that Lucinda Hayes would simply disappear.

  I wanted her gone.

  Even though I’d gotten this all from a book, and there’s no such thing as real-life death spells, and I never believed it would work, I didn’t, I swear I didn’t—when I opened my eyes, it was there. Fear. Singular and inexplicable.

  I didn’t properly disassemble the circle. I jumped out instead, childishly scared, and flicked on my bedroom lights. The scene looked almost casual in the glow of the overhead lamp. As I blew out the candles, wax dripped into herbs and everything seeped into the carpet, thyme and salt and hot wax all tangled in singed plastic fibers. I kicked down the altar. Shoved everything into a black garbage bag, which I stuck under my bed and immediately tried to forget.

  This sick sinking overcame me, like I’d proven to myself what Zap had already said: You are a disposable girl. Temporary. A mess of skin and lard over thinning, brittle bones.

  Two hours after the dream, I’m eating cornflakes cross-legged on the couch, listening to Ma and Amy fight about Amy’s eye makeup. Just a little darker on the top lids, Ma is saying, and Amy’s saying, Do you want me to look like a slut? Mornings like these, I’m thankful that I am not Amy. Amy is Ma’s Barbie doll, a mannequin for Ma’s regret about her worry lines and all those cigarettes she smokes.

  Miracle is, no matter how Ma dresses me, I’ll never look how she wants.

  In fact, she has never even tried.

  It has been like this for as long as I can remember: Ma sipping wine from three o’clock onwards. Me and Amy tiptoeing around upstairs, daring to come close only when Ma calls for us, a predator luring in her prey.

  When we were little, it was only me. Now, reliably, it’s only me. But when Amy was in the second grade, she gained weight—the usual little-girl pudge around the middle. And for those few years, it was her, too.

  It was always worse after we’d been at Lex and Lucinda’s house. The place turned Ma into a raging, spitting monster: the Hayes girls and their golden hair, the Hayes girls and their Popsicle-stick thighs, the Hayes girls and the Lysol house they inhabited, with hospital corners and dimness settings for the dining-room chandelier. Ma would pick us up, chatting amiably with Missy Hayes in the front hall as we tied our shoes. She’d bring us home—back to the kitchen floor covered in
Saltine crumbs from her own midnight snack, to the triangles of hardened microwaveable pizza, to the half-full glasses of wine she’d left on the counter for days, rotting sticky. Ma would look down at us, her flabby little offspring, the both of us round and bucktoothed—even Amy, with her pretty red hair.

  Ma would pour herself an afternoon glass, stewing and fuming while Amy and I huddled upstairs, awaiting the shrill screech of her call. Girls! she’d finally yell. Get down here!

  One Saturday, Lex Hayes won the third-grade gymnastics tournament. The judges released the scores, and Lucinda clapped and hollered while Mrs. Hayes filmed, both of them teary when Lex came down from the podium with a heavy plastic medal around her neck. They were so proud. Amy and Lex jumped around and hugged, like winning a third-grade gymnastics tournament was equivalent to an Olympic gold.

  When Ma called up the stairs that day, Amy was tense under the blankets in my bed, still wearing her expensive, rhinestoned leotard, hair pulled into a rock-solid hairspray bun. Clumpy mascara lashes. Girls! Ma shrieked.

  “Stay,” I told Amy, and I locked the door behind me before easing down the stairs, a doomed boxer walking into the ring.

  “Where’s your sister?” Ma asked. She’d polished off half the bottle of Barefoot Chardonnay, and she swirled the stem of the wineglass along the grainy faux-marble counter.

  “Upstairs,” I said.

  “Go get her.”

  “She’s tired.”

  When Ma stood up, I took a few criminal steps backwards. Instinct. Of course Ma noticed: she wasn’t quick, but she was strong, and since I’d locked Amy in my bedroom, there was nowhere to go. Amy’s door didn’t shut all the way, and the bathroom didn’t have a lock. So when Ma said, Stop right there, I did.

  She sidled right up to me, wineglass in hand. Dragged one long plastic nail down my cheek, so hard she’d leave a scratch that would stay all night but disappear by morning. Ma pinched my chin between her thumb and her finger like a vet inspecting a sick dog’s teeth.

  “Lost,” she murmured, breath foul and reeking. “You’re a lost cause.”

  Ma swigged and gulped. Drained the glass.

  “Your sister, though. Your sister, with that pretty red hair. Get her down here.”

  “No,” I said, as I closed my eyes—

  Ma socked me in the stomach so hard I doubled over, her fist a freight train. As I gasped, winded, Ma pushed past me and started up the stairs.

  I don’t remember the next part. Only the aftermath: somehow, with the air knocked from my insides, I jolted after Ma up the stairs, hooked my hands onto her shirt, and yanked her backwards.

  The wineglass went down first. It rolled down each carpeted step in slow motion, shattering at the foot of the stairs. A slice of glass embedded itself between my heel and the floor, but I did not have time to feel pain—only to jump aside as Ma came tumbling past me.

  She looked like a rag doll, a small, shrieking bundle of thrift-store designer clothes, as she flipped, neck over head over waist over legs, all the way down the stairs.

  “Stay!” I screamed to Amy, who had come running at the sound. She stood at the edge of the landing, sparkly leotard tucked up against her right butt cheek in a wedgie. “Stay right there.”

  But Amy didn’t need to be cautious, or afraid: Ma was lying seven steps down, with a bruised collarbone and a broken wrist, looking up at me with shocked and furious eyes. Like I was the devil incarnate. And for the first time, I wondered if maybe I was—if maybe this was the only worldly gift I’d been given.

  Now, Amy stomps in on high heels and turns on the TV. She sits in the armchair across from me and gnaws on a Pop-Tart. Crumbs of frosting stick in her lip gloss.

  “The investigation continues as the sweep of the crime scene wraps up,” a shiny reporter says. “In a statement from the Broomsville police chief, we’ve learned they have substantial leads. He revealed nothing further.”

  A photo of Lucinda appears. The same photo they’ve been showing since she died—the yearbook picture.

  “Change it,” I say.

  “No,” Amy whines.

  I grab the remote, flick one channel up.

  People hanging from rafters. A documentary about the Salem witch trials. It’s February 1692, and more than two hundred people have been accused of practicing the Devil’s magic.

  Two more channels up, a Spanish-language soap opera. One busty woman screams at another.

  “You killed her!” she shrieks. “You killed her!”

  I click the TV off. A dusty quiet.

  “What the hell?” Amy says. “I wanted to watch that.”

  I don’t even bother bringing my backpack. I stomp out of the house and slam the front door behind me.

  It’s clear I’ve been called upon to finish Lucinda Hayes’s business. Maybe this is punishment for the ritual, or maybe it’s because I’ve seen what I have. But there’s only one person who might know what happened to her. Cameron. And I know a place where honesty comes easy.

  The sun is cold today, the wind a whip. I tilt my head to the sky and give Lucinda Hayes a double-handed middle finger.

  Cameron

  Cameron buttoned his funeral shirt in the bathroom mirror. He tried not to be afraid, but he did not like crowds, especially not crowds of kids from school, and especially not when they would all watch him.

  They’d gotten three hang-up phone calls last night. One caller growled, in a whisper, If the police don’t get you, Cameron Whitley, I will. Mr. O had called twice, but when Mom knocked on Cameron’s door he had pretended to be asleep. He would not talk to Mr. O about the diary. There was nothing to be said. Mom and Mr. O murmured to each other over the phone, but Cameron couldn’t catch Mom’s side of the conversation.

  Cameron wet a comb and ran it through his hair. He looked like Dad did in the mornings—when Dad got out of the shower and brewed coffee with a towel around his waist, his hair all mussed and bristly.

  It was like this:

  Cameron and Dad loved all the same things. They liked sunsets at Pine Ridge Point, they ate breakfast before they brushed their teeth. Mini-Wheats and orange juice. They both watched Mom practice ballet, sitting together behind the banister on the basement stairs: Mom was the most graceful thing in the world.

  For most of Cameron’s childhood, Cameron and Dad would retreat to the living room after dinner. No TV. Cameron would draw in the sketchpad on his lap, and Dad would sip whiskey in the armchair, appreciative. Silence was their practiced language, and these nights—as Mom did the dishes, or the laundry, or read a book in bed—Cameron and Dad were the same. Father, son. A thick tree trunk and its rustling little leaves.

  After Dad left for good, Cameron wondered where his own muted wanting would find its breaking point.

  The girl from the principal’s office was waiting in front of Cameron’s house.

  She wore a white summer dress—the kind you’d buy in the kids’ section of a department store—and a camouflage army jacket. Her legs were bare, though it was barely thirty degrees.

  “Remember me?” she said. “Jade. Like the rock.”

  “Yeah.” Cameron squinted. “What are you doing here?”

  “We’re ditching this morning.”

  “Why?”

  Cameron had never ditched school.

  “A sign from the dead,” she said. “Come on. We only have a half day anyway.”

  Jefferson High was bussing the ninth-grade class to Maplewood Memorial as soon as the eleven forty-five lunch period began. Mom had looked concerned when Cameron left the house—Are you sure you want to go to school today? You could stay home. We could go to the service together, she’d said. I’m fine, Cameron had told her, I want to go to school, and he’d zipped up his jacket.

  Now, Jade was standing in Cameron’s driveway. It took effort not to stare at her chest, which bulged from the seams of her white dress and merged with the acne sprinkled across her collar. She’d painted the skin above her eyes a powdery blue, and
it smudged across her temples, down her cheeks. A small chin faded into her neck. Chapped lips. A bruise snaked from her thigh to her knee in an unnatural purple triangle, like a watercolor mountain done by someone who had never seen a mountain.

  “I should go to school,” Cameron said.

  “You don’t want to do that. Let’s just say, you should probably listen to me.”

  Cameron tried to understand what she meant.

  “I know, Cameron.”

  “You know what?”

  “I know,” she said, and with an ominous raise of her eyebrows—a threat—she turned in the direction of Willow Square and marched ahead. Cameron could not let her go, not without even a sliver of answer. It occurred to him that this had been Jade’s intention, but still, he followed.

  Cameron stumbled along behind Jade, passing all the closed boutiques and the pub where Mom bought craft beer. The Willow Square fountain was turned off for the winter, a drained sink. No one had been assigned the job of taking down the Christmas lights strung across the square, and as February progressed they burned out one by one.

  He followed until Jade finally stopped—Cameron’s mouth was dry from walking, and he was trying hard not to panic about the facts of the situation. Lucinda was dead, and Cameron was not in school, and soon he would have to go to her memorial service. He would have to sit and watch everyone grieve, alone with his own missing.

  They had stopped at a building next to an ice-cream shop. The place was derelict, a giant fluorescent cross resurrected where a drugstore logo should have been.

  “Is this a church?” Cameron asked.

  Cameron’s family used to go to church. He would sit between Mom and Dad and wonder how long he could hold his breath without dying. The world record for breath-holding was twenty-two minutes, but Cameron never came close. And anyway, they stopped going to church after everything with Dad because Mom couldn’t sit there and hear about sin.