Girl in Snow Page 13

  “Well, it used to be a Rite Aid,” Jade said. “But now it’s the Church of the Pure Heart. It’s not open until August, and they don’t work in here on Fridays. Come on.”

  Cameron stood like an idiot, anxious, wishing he had gone to school or at least stayed home with Mom, while Jade wedged her fingers between the automatic glass doors. In a matter of seconds, she had tugged open a space big enough for both of them to squeeze inside and disappeared into the dust.

  The church smelled like sawdust and peeled-up floors. They were in the entrance to an industrial-sized chapel—the ground was bare and the pews were scattered in awkward, temporary arrangements. The place had no windows, just frames where glass would someday be. Wind howled through.

  “I’m going home,” Cameron said.

  “You can’t. I still haven’t told you what I know.”

  Cameron realized, as Jade skipped down the aisle, that he wanted to run. When she sat on the altar’s steps, a pair of panties flashed, black lace hugging the pale block of Jade’s upper thigh. Cameron would not run, partly due to Jade’s knowledge of something mysterious—the things she could know were all terrifying—and partly for the simple reason that she, unlike anyone else, had looked directly at him. She had looked right at Cameron and still, she wanted him to stay.

  So he walked to where Jade sat, beneath a gigantic wooden cross propped lazily against the far wall. Cameron could still picture the drugstore that had existed here before: rows of shampoo and body wash, a clearance sale on razors and peanuts. A few empty shelves had been broken into dusty piles of wood and stacked against the wall, and the gaping room echoed, bulbless fluorescent lights a taunt from above. A price tag was stuck to his shoe: $14.99.

  “This place is so great, isn’t it?” Jade said. “It’s one of those perfectly abandoned places where you can go to think or wallow or whatever. Everyone has a place like that, right? A place where they feel like they can be anyone, say anything?”

  “Yeah,” Cameron said, brushing plaster off a small ledge to sit next to her.

  “Where is it for you?”

  “Nowhere.”

  “Come on. If you tell me that, I’ll tell you why I brought you here.”

  “Okay,” Cameron said. A pause. “It’s this cliff in the mountains. Over the reservoir. It’s very calm.”

  “All right,” Jade said. “Fine. I saw you the other night. The night Lucinda died. I can see you from my bedroom window, standing out there. Watching her. I don’t care and I’m not going to tell. But I have to ask. Why her? Of all the girls in the world, why Lucinda Hayes?”

  The beginning of Tangled enveloped Cameron—a hissing, furious cloud.

  Cameron had not chosen Lucinda. She was simply brighter than anyone else. And Cameron’s Collections—Lucinda had planted them, and they’d grown and made him better. He liked her tan body and her ski-jump nose. And Lucinda had that pull. Like she’d unraveled his intestines, tied them to her bedpost, and was tugging him back there, constantly, inch by painstaking inch.

  Lucinda kept a figurine balanced carefully on her nightstand, and Cameron had loved to watch them together. A ballerina in a purple tutu, with one leg stretched in an arabesque—a term Cameron knew from Mom. The ballerina wore a pink V-necked leotard, her blond hair pulled into a tight ceramic bun. She had pinprick red lips and was no bigger than Cameron’s hand, palm to pinky, if he flexed. Lucinda would sit with the figurine before she went to sleep, like she was daring the ballerina to move.

  Cameron loved to watch them during his Statue Nights. The little dancer stood guard over Lucinda as she slept, a toy version of the girl—graceful, slender, so controlled. The easy elegance of this pas de deux.

  “Hey,” Jade was saying. “Yo. Dude.”

  Cameron was lying on the ground. His winter coat was covered in dust and his head ached. It must have hit the floor. Jade kneeled beside him, blurry in the light of the single stained-glass window: a shepherd leading his herd up a shaggy grass hill.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “Jesus. I didn’t mean to upset you. Are you okay? Do you need, like, a hospital or something?”

  Cameron sat up, dizzy. The flat ceiling of the chapel above him did not look holy.

  “No; we have to go,” he said. “The funeral.”

  “We still have an hour,” Jade said. “Come on. Let’s get you out of here.”

  The man at Tasty’s Ice Cream eyed Jade’s bare legs and her boots, which were covered in sawdust and plaster. Cameron ordered a small mint chocolate chip cup and pulled a crumpled five from the bottom of his backpack. I got it, he told Jade, because he’d never been to ice cream with a girl before and it seemed like the right thing to do. But the total came out to $5.95, so Jade dug through the pockets of her camouflage jacket for change, which she counted in her cupped palm.

  There was a bench outside, between the ice-cream store and the church. They sat in the cold. Jade stuck out her tongue and licked the dripping sugar from her spoon. The ice cream was too sweet. Cameron put the cup down on the bench and tried not to think about it melting in his stomach.

  “Are you okay?” Jade said. “I mean, you were only out for a second. But I’m really sorry.”

  “I’m fine,” Cameron told her. “It happens sometimes.”

  “I just thought maybe that place would help you talk. Always does for me.”

  Cameron snuck a glance at Jade’s pink plastic Hello Kitty watch. Thirty minutes still. You have to go, Mom had told him last night when she’d laid his dress pants out on his desk chair. People will ask questions otherwise. And this, more than anything, filled Cameron with impossible dread.

  “Tell me about your dad,” Jade said.

  “Please,” Cameron said. “I don’t want to talk about the police.”

  “Am I being insensitive?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, I hate the police, too. Especially here. It’s fucked, the whole system. How your dad walked like that, how technically he was innocent, when everyone knew he almost killed that girl.”

  “Please,” Cameron said.

  “Do you think he did it?” Jade asked.

  “Yeah,” Cameron told her.

  “And you still love him, right?” No one had ever posed this question before, and it made Cameron’s trapped little heart want to shrink deeper in its cage.

  “I don’t know.”

  “It’s okay, you know,” Jade said. “I mean, it’s okay to love someone who does something bad. Just because you do something bad doesn’t mean you’re not a good person. Look at it this way: wouldn’t you rather be a good person who does one awful thing than a bad person who does a bunch of good ones?”

  Cameron thought of Lucinda then. How he’d twist the corner of his comforter into a lump shaped slightly like a torso and wrap his body around it. Just tight enough to feel the contours. He’d convince himself, in the soft blue of his bedroom, that the comforter was warm, and the cotton pressing against him was not his blanket. Instead, lavender pajama pants. And under those pajama pants was skin, hot, wet skin, skin that folded in all the right places, that smelled like vanilla lotion, the sort of skin you could see only when you’d knocked down some unspoken barrier. Boy—man—in each push he came closer to the yellow curls of hair he imagined spooling across the pillow like fine strands of yarn.

  Jade angled her body on the bench to face him, bare legs pointed toward the street, abdomen pudged over the waistline of her dress. Cameron felt bad for her then, sitting in her combat boots with no real battle to fight. The acne on her forehead looked on the verge of bursting, dozens of pustules clustered around her hair. A filmy line of chocolate had surrounded her mouth, like his grandma’s lipstick when she talked too much.

  He watched as Jade dragged the plastic spoon across the paper bottom of the cup. They sat like that. At 11:31, Jade said, We should go, and Cameron said, Yes, and they threw their ice-cream cups in the trash can on the curb.

  Cameron remembered when baby Ollie was born last
summer, and this was mostly why he knew he was not bad like Dad. The Thorntons had just moved to Broomsville—Mom baked a pan of ziti and said, Let’s welcome the little one to the neighborhood.

  Mom chatted with Eve Thornton at the counter while Cameron examined the baby, lying on her blanket on the living-room floor. The baby was only six days old, just a bundle of pink, with a scrunched nose and wispy hair matted to her smooth, round head, and wasn’t it crazy that everyone started out this way? Pudding hands. Blank and soft and tucked tight against themselves. Do you want to hold her? Mrs. Thornton had asked, and Cameron had said, No, that’s okay. But she looked sick, Mrs. Thornton, with a greenish-pale tint to her face and permanent droops under her eyes, like a cartoon of someone who hadn’t slept in months, so Cameron said, All right. They led him to a rocking chair beneath a painting of a sunflower.

  Cameron hadn’t wanted to hold the baby. He knew what could go wrong. He could drop her. He could shake her. He could squeeze too hard.

  He could want to hurt her.

  Hold your arms like this, Mrs. Thornton said, and Cameron cupped his palms around his elbows. They lowered the baby into his arms.

  It was then that Cameron knew he was not bad. Cameron had overheard Mom talking on the phone after Dad had gone, telling someone how Dad had never liked to hold Cameron as a baby. Never a good sign. All these years after Dad left, Cameron held baby Ollie, and the result was a small but necessary reassurance. He loved Ollie’s extremities—the tiny legs and the tiny arms. Technically, he knew Ollie’s body was similar to his own, only smaller in scale. She had baby veins and a baby liver and a baby femur and a baby cranium and even a baby heart. Baby toes that would grow and someday be shoved into socks and shoes, that would dance ballet and touch other toes beneath blankets. All these were in Cameron’s care, beating so calmly and so normally that Cameron wanted to kiss the baby—but he knew it was against the rules. So he swayed his arms instead, side to side. He knew where Ollie had come from. When two people love each other very much, Mom had said. He wanted to love someone very much, or at least well enough to make this little creature that smelled like musk and wool and baby powder. He wanted the weight in his arms.

  Tuesdays after that, Cameron watched Lucinda and Ollie Thornton as they existed together in the clear-window house. It made him both sad and excited, lonely and hungry, these two fragile anatomies through glass.

  Russ

  Russ always wanted to carry a gun because his father had carried a gun.

  A gun makes you a man, his father used to say.

  Russ has few memories from childhood. His father was a cop, and his mother was a receptionist at a doctor’s office. Now, they live in a nursing home, and Russ’s sister lives in California—she had wanted to be a painter, but became a receptionist at a doctor’s office, too. When Russ hit adulthood, his family had separated, but not in any messy, painful way. Continents shifting lethargically away from each other. No real tragedy. Russ does have a few fond memories: fishing trips in their old sedan, Russ’s sister reading a book in the back seat, mother so white and nibbling on potato chips, father focused on yellow highway lines. Russ, blank canvas of a boy. This moment, so unexpectedly golden.

  Often, Russ wonders why that particular memory stuck out above the rest: his father patting a fat police belt, Russ staring up from belly-button height.

  A gun gives you the power. A gun shows ’em who’s boss.

  Russ is standing by the water fountain near the front doors of the station house when a teenage boy walks in. The receptionist is away from her desk, so Russ stands a bit taller.

  Can I help you? Russ asks. He runs his fingers over his moustache. Russ likes how he looks when he touches his moustache. He has practiced this stroke in the mirror.

  We’re looking for the detective, the father says. The boy looks nervous—he bites his thumb, and the skin around the gnawed nail glistens. Russ had acne as a teenager, but never that bad. The boy is cystic. Craters will scab and scar across his cheeks.

  Have a seat, Russ says. I’ll see if the detective is free. What’s your name?

  Ronnie, the kid says. Ronnie Weinberg.

  What brings you here? Russ asks.

  I came to tell you about something I saw, Ronnie says, as he and his father shuffle to the plastic seats at the edge of the waiting room. Ronnie sighs, and his father pats him on the back, urging him on. And then he says: I think I know who killed Lucinda.

  Four months before the arrest, Russ and Lee sat on Lee’s front porch. Late spring. Sudden warmth had spilled over Broomsville a few days before, welcome, promising. Inside, Cameron watched cartoons while Cynthia cleaned up dinner. Boxed mashed potatoes sprinkled with Hamburger Helper.

  Lee hadn’t meant to tell Russ about having sex with Hilary Jameson. It came out after the third beer, a blurted brag.

  Where did you even meet her? Russ asked.

  The pharmacy, Lee said. She works behind the counter.

  The pharmacy downtown?

  Yeah, Lee said. We talked. You know, when I went to pick up Cynthia’s anxiety meds. Anyway, we flirted for a while. She finally slipped me her number, stapled to the bag like a prescription slip. I called her up, and we saw each other a few times, nothing serious, but then last night—

  So you’re cheating on Cynthia, Russ said.

  The words surprised them both. They watched the street like maybe it would change, reveal something remarkable about itself. Nothing happened. The rosebushes Cynthia had planted years before were still dead. There was nothing beyond the smooth white sidewalk, clean because the snow had dried and the rain would never come. And the feeling in Russ’s chest: a tight constriction, pulsing weight. Stricken.

  You’re cheating, Russ said again.

  The bottle whistled past Russ’s ear, shattering against the siding of the house. Upstairs, Cynthia’s voice. The Heineken bottle lay in shards by Russ’s work boots and Lee put an elbow over his eyes. He shielded himself, arms in a triangle around his face, like a child counting through a game of Hide and Seek.

  I’m sorry, Lee said, face still buried in the crook of his arm. Just keep it between us, okay? I trust you.

  Russ left without saying good-bye to Cynthia or Cameron. Fitting. Walking home, he wondered if it was warranted, this wretched, mammoth trust. What had he done to deserve it? Through the following months, Russ would nod uncertainly when Cynthia asked about the drinks at Dixie’s Tavern that had never happened, or the overtime shift Lee hadn’t worked. Russ felt he owed Cynthia the truth, as a human, a friend, a near part of her crumbling family. But he was enthralled by these words—I trust you—so he lied for Lee, even as Lee’s absence made Russ’s own world six shades darker. On the nights that Lee was supposedly at Russ’s house, or on a weekend fishing trip, Russ himself would sit on his couch and think, What am I, without this scheming, cheater friend of mine? The television, no consolation.

  Later, Russ met Hilary Jameson. She was Broomsville pretty. She wore tight jeans low on her hips, flared and slightly too long. The bottoms were ripped and dirty from catching beneath her shoes. Brunette. Wide-set eyes. Her hair was straight, her teeth were straight, but something was missing. Shape. Color. She had a tattoo, the first thing Russ noticed about her. Miniature blue hearts followed one another up her neck, like regretful little ducks.

  When Russ met Hilary Jameson, he was embarrassed for Cynthia. Cynthia: supple thighs and aging curves, a mane of wild gray hair she never thought about. And then there was Hilary, with perky breasts and a clean-shaved pussy, which Russ imagined she spread with her fingers like a porn star.

  Russ hates to think about Lee now, because he should have known that night, as he kicked bits of jagged green glass into an empty planter at the edge of the porch. He should have paid more attention to the way Lee cowered as the bottle hit the house, as if his own hand had not just thrown it. A prophecy.

  After that night on the porch, Lee became two people at once. One: a man with a family and an entry-leve
l job in law enforcement. Lee supplemented this colossal disappointment with Hilary Jameson, hurried and messy, in the car on the side of the road. Two: a man with a friend who would do anything to protect him, blindly and without question. Two: a man capable of hurting someone. Two: No one’s hero.

  Despite all this, Russ so gravely misses him.

  Every Tuesday night, Ines goes to Bible study. She comes home late, so gloomy she’ll hardly speak. You shouldn’t think so much about sin, Russ advises. It’ll tear you up for no reason at all.

  Thursdays, she’s better. Thursdays, Ines kisses the crook of Russ’s neck when his alarm goes off in the morning. Get up, sleepyhead. By Friday, Ines melts back into herself. Quiet Ines is inevitable. Ines, his solemn wife, unreadable as the walls of their perpetually unfinished home.

  Russ doesn’t ask Ines about her life in Guadalajara, and she doesn’t offer it up. She had followed Ivan to Broomsville a year after he’d come, because Mamá had urged and Ivan told her it was good here. America was fine, all fine. He didn’t tell Ines about the drugs—an occasional break from his under-the-table work at the church, basic tasks for some extra cash—until she arrived, alone, with a copy of Lorca’s Canciones tucked in her pocket and a bundle of handwritten letters from the rest of the family. An emissary.

  Russ didn’t ask for these things, and he doesn’t want any more. He cannot picture this Ines, and it seems she doesn’t want him to. Russ’s Ines lives in Broomsville, Colorado. His Ines knits so intensively she’s filled the upstairs linen closet with lumpy blankets and sweaters and socks. Russ does not need to know about exotic fruits or the inimitable temperature of a Mexico sun—the unspoken world of old Ines, a woman not forgotten, only folded and stored away. Russ and Ines are all right like this. They are skating.