Girl in Snow Read online

  The day Russ realized Ines was unhappy, he went to the run-down mall on the outskirts of town. Bought her a diamond necklace he couldn’t afford.

  Russ almost begged her then—Tell me about home. Tell me how you got here. All the stories Russ had heard through work about the border—none of them specifically belonging to Ines, whose journey he had never heard. A plane, a train, a car, a bus? He wanted to ask her why, why would she leave what she’d known? Perhaps it was her brother. The amount of time Ines spent worrying about Ivan made Russ think that maybe, yes—it was Ivan, the reason she’d been imprisoned in this country. In this house.

  But Russ knew what happened when you bared your insides to someone else. He had been there—maybe was still there—in the squad car with Lee, sharing the things that thrashed and squirmed. Unprotected. He wouldn’t make that mistake again. So Russ gave Ines the necklace and said, I want to make you happy; I’ll keep trying. Ines clasped the diamond around her neck. Smiled.

  She did not look like someone who needed saving. So sturdy. A building with locked doors. I love you, she told him, but her voice sounded too high-pitched and very far away, like she’d yelled it from some unreachable height.

  On a Saturday in October, just weeks before her tourist visa ran out, Russ and Ines married. They took the squad car to town hall. Russ turned on the sirens because it made Ines laugh; she pressed her face to the window and watched cars pull to the side. Russ imagined that Ines felt American then, and maybe she’d write home to Guadalajara and tell her family how lucky she was, and how happy, because sometimes all it took to be lucky and happy was the easy matter of driving faster than everyone else.

  Ines wore a white sundress, but it was a cold October so she zipped one of Russ’s sweat shirts over it. The sweat shirt had holes in the sleeves where Ines had poked her thumbs.

  They filled out the paperwork at the clerk’s desk, and when she stood next to Russ, Ines looked like a little girl, or one of the high-school students she tutored. Pink on her lips, a white flower in her hair. They signed the papers. Ines leaned over, kissed Russ on the cheek. Her smile. Not dazzling, but rare.

  The party was in the park where they’d met, just a few months earlier. They spread boxes of pizza beneath a metal awning in the wind. Detective Williams showed up, and so did the rest of the patrol guys—all but Lee, gone four years by then. They brought beer and laughed like men, debating whether Bush would send troops to Iraq. Ivan sent a letter from prison, with a drawing of a bouquet of lilies, the only one to give a semblance of a gift.

  In the park, everyone toasted to Russ and Ines. To a long and happy life together. Detective Williams nudged Russ in the ribs and said, You better make her happy tonight.

  Is this how it’s supposed to feel? Russ asked himself, but he refused to linger on an answer. He knew, that windy day in the grass, that his love with Ines did not quiver, not on either side. They had taken the vows you were supposed to take, and that was love, or some subset of it. So he drank champagne and watched the leaves rush toward winter. When everyone chanted Kiss, kiss, kiss, they did. Ines was sour from the brut. Russ held Ines’s waist for the camera, thinking how later they would have sex and Ines would climb on top of him, as she’d been doing since their trip to San Diego. Hands clamped tight around his neck. She would roll away when he had finished and say good night, and just like that, they would be married. He would love her, as best he could.

  On his wedding night, Russ thought of Lee Whitley in the way you think of someone dead. Fondly, too fondly, until absence takes this fondness and multiplies it, stretching until it becomes something invasive. Until it swallows you whole.

  Cameron

  Cameron stood outside Maplewood Memorial and wondered how many bodies it held that did not belong to Lucinda. How many blue, unbending thumbs. How many jellied hearts.

  “Come on,” Jade said, and she pulled him forward by the elbow, her palm sweaty from the walk across town. In the parking lot, Cameron’s classmates were solemn as they stepped off the school bus. They moved in parasitic groups, crying in clumps, the girls tugging at black dresses, at their hair. There was only one bus—most parents had kept their children home and were now walking with hands on shoulders across the parking lot. Cameron counted three police cars.

  “See you later,” Jade said, with an inappropriately exaggerated wink. She bolted ahead, toward the big glass doors.

  Cameron joined the clusters of his classmates, feeling like he’d crash-landed in some faraway and lonesome place.

  Things People Said at Lucinda’s Funeral:

  “You look great. I mean, terrible circumstances, but did you do something with your hair?”

  “A bit early to be having the memorial, isn’t it? Just a few days. I think the family wanted to get it over with.”

  “That photo is beautiful. Such a pretty girl.”

  “And the little sister, it’s so sad. She’s only in the seventh grade. Having to go through something like this at such a young age—I can’t even imagine.”

  “They’re saying it was someone in the neighborhood, no motive yet—”

  “Timmy Williams is all over the case; I heard they’ve got a new suspect—the ex-boyfriend, what’s his name, the Arnauds’ kid? They let him go.”

  “Broke her neck—heard she died immediately. At least she didn’t suffer, you know?”

  “I’m glad to hear business is going well. I knew the new lease would bring in more customers; you picked that perfect location right on Willow Square.”

  The funeral was a movie Cameron had not meant to see.

  He took a pew in the middle of the crowd and watched the town of Broomsville file in around him. It was a spectacle, electric. The girls from school cried in circles, holding hands. Parents watched with eagle eyes, gloating at the fact of their own children’s aliveness, masks of sorrow placed expertly over their relief. A woman near the podium shrieked and keened, and there was a bubble near the corner of the room where the governor sat, his police escorts hovering along the wall.

  There was so much chaos, Cameron pretended he was not there but in the yellow house on the lane, where Lucinda was very much alive—sitting on the wooden swing that hung from the Valencia orange tree. Gleaming and sunlit.

  But for now: Funeral. Mourners. Family sad up front. A line of people snaked up the aisle to offer condolences to the Hayeses, and Lucinda’s father shook their hands, murmuring quiet thanks. Lex wore a lavender dress and kicked her knobbly legs back and forth. Lucinda’s mother stared straight ahead. She sat on her hands. No one tried to speak to her.

  Lucinda’s friends took up the next two rows of pews—Beth, Kaylee, and Ana were huddled together. The soccer girls, with thick, lean thighs, and the boys’ basketball team all stared at their laps, standing intermittently to sign the neon poster boards that lined every wall. Notes written in bubbly handwriting.

  And the flowers. There were hundreds of flowers, toppling over each other in stuffed vases around the room. Flowers were draped across people’s legs because there wasn’t space to set them down, and everything smelled like pollen and antiseptic. A poster-sized photo of Lucinda had been propped on an easel—a basket of ballet shoes sat beneath, signed with notes to Lucinda in Sharpie, like ritual offerings. One girl stroked Lucinda’s pixelated photo face, sobbing hysterically while her less aggrieved friends hovered around the periphery, solemn and teary.

  “Cameron,” Mr. O said. He slid into the pew next to Cameron, bringing the scent of cigarettes and the spearmint gum he chewed to cover it up. He peeled off his winter coat and draped it across his lap. “How are you holding up?”

  “I’m okay,” Cameron said.

  “Look,” Mr. O said. “I know you’ve been avoiding me, but we need to talk about yesterday.”

  Mr. O took Mom out dancing once, to a dingy restaurant that offered free salsa classes on Tuesdays. Mom put on a red dress—tight at the top, like a river at the bottom—and a pair of high heels. Haven’t worn these
in years. Her feet puffed out of the shoes like baking bread straining to break free from a pan. Mom’s chest was wrinkly, sun-spotted skin sagging over her breastbone and drooping under the cut of the dress where cleavage should have been. Well, look at you, Mr. O had said at the door.

  “Cameron, I’m not going to say anything to your mother, okay? I’m still thinking of a way to get it to the police without implicating either of us.” Mr. O leaned close. “But I need you to tell me how you got that diary. I read some of it and I’m going to turn it in, but before I do, I need to make sure you weren’t involved in Lucinda’s death.”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You don’t know if you were involved?”

  “I don’t know how I got the diary. And I didn’t read any of it. You have to believe me.”

  The Thorntons’ toddler was wailing in the pew behind them, shrill and unrelenting—both parents tried desperately to calm her. Cameron stared at Ronnie, sandwiched between his parents’ backs, flakes of dandruff snowing across his wiry shoulders and down his crinkly black shirt. There was a vase of orchids next to Lucinda’s photo; the petals blossomed up from a single stem, then arched back toward the ground in surrender. And the eye of the flower (the stamen, which held the ovaries and the ovule, where the pollen was produced)—looked like a human skull made of silk.

  “Cameron, please,” Mr. O said. “I need you to talk to me about this, I can’t— Hello.”

  Mom slid into the pew on the other side of Cameron. She wore her favorite black dress, the dress she wore on Christmas when she cooked salmon with orange peels and they drank sparkling grape juice from wineglasses. This made Cameron sad, because now that dress would remind them both of Lucinda’s funeral, and it really was her favorite.

  “I shouldn’t have let you go to school today,” Mom said, putting her knuckles up to Cameron’s forehead as if to check for fever. “This is a madhouse. I can’t believe I let you come here by yourself.”

  Mom pulled three copies of the Holy Bible from the bench pocket. As they flipped through the pages, Cameron thought of the term “three peas in a pod,” but remembered that wasn’t the saying, the saying was “two peas in a pod,” and this made him lonely, so he pretended to be extremely interested in Deuteronomy.

  Cameron had started working in Mr. O’s office three months earlier, when Beth DeCasio began referring to Cameron as “American Psycho.” Beth cut off a lock of her own hair and pinned it to Cameron’s easel, while Ana Sanchez and Kaylee Walker giggled at the next table over.

  That day, Mr. O walked by just as Cameron discovered the horrible thing. Mr. O picked up the lock of hair, dangled it in the air, examined it in warm art-classroom light. When he strode over to Beth’s table, the whole class hushed. Beth picked at her crimson-painted nails.

  “Does this belong to you, Ms. DeCasio?” Mr. O said.

  It was common knowledge: Beth and all her friends had crushes on Mr. O. When he leaned over the girls to critique their paintings, they blushed and crossed their arms over growing chests.

  “I think I’ll keep it,” Mr. O said. “Could make a fine addition to an experimental sculpture I’m working on. I’ll make sure Principal Barnes sees the finished product.”

  The girls didn’t talk in class for the rest of the day, and Mr. O helped Cameron pack up his things and move to the closet office, where the sound of the ninth-grade class was muffled through a thick aluminum door.

  “Tell me if they bother you again,” Mr. O said.

  Before he left Cameron to that delectable solitude, Mr. O stopped with his hand on the doorknob. Someone laughed, loud, but Cameron doubted it was Beth.

  “Oh, and tell your mother I say hello.”

  For the rest of the semester, Cameron drew and erased and drew again in peace.

  People Cameron did not expect to see at Lucinda’s funeral:

  1. The night janitor. He sat with a veiled woman in a back pew, wearing an itchy-looking suit. As people walked past, they glared and whispered. Rumors had spread about the man who found the body.

  When the janitor noticed Cameron watching, his eyes were strong but friendly. Cameron’s stomach rolled, and he turned around fast. Mom was saying something he couldn’t hear—the familiarity of the janitor’s gaze made Cameron dizzy. Curious and faint. He dared himself to turn around again; he would do it after ten seconds, nine, then three, two, one.

  The janitor was smiling at Cameron, coy, one hand lifted into a barely perceptible wave.

  Cameron had never tried to recreate Hum. That would cheapen it—he’d never be able to make the strokes look so organic. The pastel trunk of the Valencia orange tree. The green-shuttered windows. The road that barely brushed the side of the canvas: you knew that road was long, but you couldn’t see how long, and the sight of it disappearing into a minuscule point had been branded in Cameron’s mind like a pinky promise.

  Hum was beautiful in all its physicality, but the best part was the house. You couldn’t quite tell where the back of the house ended, and the lines were just blurry enough that you couldn’t count the windows.

  Cameron looked around at all the crying people, how they bent and how they broke, and he thought, I am sorry for your loss. He did not feel it himself, their grief, because he knew where Lucinda had gone, and the air there was easier.

  Cameron could not remember the night Lucinda died, but he hoped that whoever had sent Lucinda to Hum had done it with the best of intentions. He tried to be happy for her, that beautiful girl.

  So he did not grieve because he missed her (though he missed her, he really missed her). He grieved because she would not contribute to the balance of things—at least, not in the space he occupied. Whether or not she had loved him before, she would not love him now, in that careful, tender way of hers, and he was overcome with the loss. There was one less person in his corner of the world, one less person to see the colors of snowy afternoons on Pine Ridge Point. All that foggy gray.

  Cameron was in Lucinda’s bedroom once. Over a year ago, near the beginning of his Collection of Statue Nights. Cameron had pushed this night so deep inside him he was never sure if it had actually happened. Sometimes he was ashamed, and sometimes it scared him, so he remembered this night only in his quietest moments.

  He had gone into Mom’s closet for a pair of nail clippers and come across Dad’s shoes. Beat-up leather loafers. He imagined Dad standing in them, lanky and self-assured. The shoes repulsed him. He remembered Dad, sitting on the edge of the bed. Dad, pulling on his socks and slipping his feet into them. Dad, thundering down the stairs. Kissing the top of Cameron’s head, and Mom’s cheek. I won’t be home tonight. Mom, putting a bowl of chicken nuggets with ketchup in front of Cameron at the kitchen table. Daddy will be back soon.

  Cameron had climbed out the window and sprinted to Lucinda’s house.

  On this night, Cameron felt so horribly inside himself—swimming in his own DNA. Half of him was Dad: he couldn’t escape it. He could only hope he’d inherited Dad’s good half, the parts that liked baseball and sang opera in the shower and went on long runs early in the morning.

  It was late. The Hayeses had gone to bed, both Lex’s and Lucinda’s rooms enveloped in dark. Cameron could see straight into Lucinda’s window—the ball of her sleeping form, breathing steadily beneath her comforter. The splay of her yellow hair on the pillow.

  He unlaced his shoes on the bottom step of the back porch. The wood was wet, ice frozen in patches across the deck. He considered it. Stepped outside of himself and analyzed. He hated what he saw: a scrawny teenage boy standing barefoot outside a snowy back door, innocent but enamored. Cameron didn’t stop himself. He couldn’t.

  The glass door slid open, squeaking as he shut it behind him. The Hayeses’ kitchen was dim but familiar, all shadows and their resulting geometries.

  Cameron took the stairs one at a time, waiting a full thirty seconds between each. Toe, ball, heel. Pause. Toe, ball, heel. Pause. He imagined that he was a fish breathing water,
because he assumed that was much more fluid than a human breathing air. It took him eight minutes to get to the top of the stairs, but when he did, Lucinda’s bedroom door was cracked open.

  From the other side of the door came the swell and sway of her breathing, a delicate rhythm that reminded him with such peaceful clarity that he was alive. I am, I am, I am, she told him with this inhale and exhale and inhale and exhale. I am alive, and so are you, and isn’t this a paralyzing thing?

  Cameron inched the door open.

  Lucinda’s bedroom smelled like vanilla perfume and sleep. A good dream. She was an infant, swaddled in her quilt—checkered violet, with cream-colored lace around the edges.

  In sleep, Lucinda was flawless and clean, a lump of breathing blankets—he did not dare to touch her because she was so precise and so tender. He wanted to cup the curve of her, to feel all of her lines, to press his tongue to the sweet spot between her neck and collarbone. He wanted to merge them together with sweat. He wanted to be the air that escaped effortlessly from her lungs, the swatch of quilt clenched in her fist, he wanted to crawl into a corner of her and live there where no one could find him.

  He hoped that everyone could feel a love like this, at least once in their lives. Every single person deserved it. He pictured all the families in all the houses down the block, the red-shingled roofs spanning out toward the mountains, all the people in this sad little town, the good ones, the bad ones, the lonely ones: he wished he could give them this.

  He became another one of Lucinda’s bedposts, solid and erect.

  Cameron did not know how much time passed, but he did not leave until the sky was flushed pink, the color of her cheeks in the early morning—the symmetry of the two made him so sure that this was okay, that what he did was okay, that their love was complex, but God, wasn’t it exquisite?