Girl in Snow Page 16

  I told Cynthia I was on duty tonight, Lee said, after they’d ordered two beers with a plate of hot wings to share.

  She wouldn’t approve? Russ joked, clinking his frosty glass against Lee’s. A cloud of foam dribbled down the side and onto the sticky table.

  She’s pregnant, Lee said. No one is allowed to have fun.

  At Dixie’s Tavern, Lee wore a hooded blue sweat shirt with the Denver Broncos logo blaring off the chest, a fuming, angry horse. Lee was swallowed up by the hoodie, a men’s medium; beneath it, Russ imagined the waistband of Lee’s pants, bunched up at the hips, fabric pulled in by a thick leather belt set at its tightest notch. Lee had shaved that day, and his jaw was smooth. No stubble. Just a few pimples around his mouth and two razor-edged cuts at the chin where Lee had nicked himself. Russ imagined blood flowering through a single square of toilet paper, pressed tight to Lee’s jaw-skin.

  Lee picked a steaming-hot wing from the top of the basket and held it carefully with his pointer fingers and thumbs, like a full husked corn still on the cob. He ripped into it, pungent orange sauce gathering on his lips as he carefully pulled meat from bones with crooked teeth.

  Soon, those greasy orange fingers would be gripped in a baby’s chokehold grasp. Russ didn’t know whether to laugh or to tell Lee to wipe himself clean. He handed Lee a napkin across the table.

  Four weeks left, right? Russ said, picking up a drumstick.

  Four weeks, Lee repeated.

  You nervous? Russ asked.

  You kidding? Lee said. You try having a kid. Nervous is the wrong word—I’ve got four weeks to get my shit together.

  You’ll be fine, Russ said. He gulped at his beer, choked, coughed. Took a bone off the plate and licked it white-clean.

  That night in the shower, Russ looked down to find his hairy arms bent in the shape of a cradle, wishing for a miracle, squirming life—something of Lee’s he could nurture and grow.

  There he is, Detective Williams says, and Russ physically starts. He has forgotten his surroundings: car, parking lot, funeral.

  Detective Williams is watching the doors. Ugly, hungry gaze. All wolf.

  We got him, Detective Williams says. You ready?

  They get out of the car and Russ stays a few steps behind Detective Williams, who swaggers toward the entrance of the funeral home, so confident that Russ wonders if Detective Williams looks this way always. When he pulls on navy socks in the morning. When he’s on hold with the credit-card company. When he’s eaten too many French fries.

  Detective Williams makes his deliberate way through the crowd. The people stare and whisper, Russ trailing hesitantly behind.

  Excuse me, sir, Detective Williams says, as the crowd mutters in the sun. We’d like you to come with us to the station. We’ve got a few questions for you.

  What? Cynthia asks, panic like a sheet flung over her face. Are you arresting him?

  No arrest, ma’am. Just a few questions.

  Her gaze a spotlight.

  Russ, please, Cynthia begs, come on. This is ridiculous.

  Russ thinks of Cynthia’s feet, muscles straining in pink silk ballet shoes. The veins in her neck, Lee’s noodle arms. He steps back from the scene and that’s when he sees her: Ines, his lovely wife. She stands next to Ivan, one hand folded over her mouth. Ines is watching, but not like a foal. Instead, bystander to wreckage. Her breath curls in the cold.

  Russ is only feet away, but he has never felt further from Ines. Detective Williams has not singled out Ivan, and this should make Ines happy. Appreciative. But they could very well be strangers, Ines a disgusted witness to such injustice—a scene outside a funeral, tragedy within a tragedy.

  Once, Russ was sick with the flu, and Ines tucked him into bed and put an empty bucket on the floor just in case. She held a cool washcloth on his forehead, and when he’d closed his eyes for long enough, she began to sing. A lullaby in Spanish. He understood then, as he begged his own eyelids not to flutter: her past was a thing she doled out like dog treats, holding it close to her chest to ensure it would not be taken away.

  Detective Williams escorts the bewildered suspect to the car. Russ starts the engine. As they pull away, Russ looks at Ines one last time.

  She is no foal. She is a woman and Russ is a man, and that is all. That is all they can do.

  Russ tried to tell Cynthia about Hilary Jameson. Two months before Lee’s arrest.

  Lee had run to the gas station for another six-pack, and Cynthia was weeding in the garden. She wore a floppy straw hat and overalls. Eight-year-old Cameron sat at the patio table, coloring in a cartoon book—he had an entire box of crayons, but he used only yellow. He shaded so hard with the yellow crayon that it was just a nub, Cameron’s chubby fingers nearly touching the paper as they jammed it with wax. Why don’t you try purple? Russ suggested. Purple is a nice color. The boy didn’t answer. Only pressed the yellow crayon harder.

  In the garden by the back fence, Cynthia held a fistful of greenery.

  Come see, she said to Russ, and he carried his unsweetened iced tea over to the patch of blooming vegetables.

  We’re getting rid of the poisons, Cynthia said, as she wiped her forehead with a leather-gloved wrist.

  The poisons?

  See the roots? Cynthia tugged a small plant from the soil. When she squatted, both her knees cracked.

  I see them, Russ told her.

  There’s no science to it, Cynthia said. But I think you can tell which weeds are poisoning this garden by how deep the roots go.

  They peered into the shallow hole the plant had left. A sluggish earthworm curled around a pebble, squeezing and oozing through its subterranean home. Cynthia squinted up at Russ, her sun-sweating face so close that Russ could see fresh mint leaves caught in her teeth.

  He tried to imagine Lee and Cynthia having sex on top of Cynthia’s hand-sewn quilt. Russ’s stomach dropped, and with it a pleasurable feeling that had nothing to do with Cynthia’s proximity and everything to do with guilt. He wanted her very far away. It was a longing Russ felt, but not for Cynthia; too sharp. The sort of longing that dug into you, penetrated hard.

  See this? She held up the plant and a chunk of soil landed on the front of her overalls like a wine stain.

  The roots go deep, she said.

  Russ should have told her then. He wanted to. All the time Lee had been spending with Hilary Jameson—Cynthia thought he’d been with Russ. And what about Russ, here? Russ, who spent most nights alone in the shadows of his too-big house, drinking just to keep himself company. He should have told Cynthia, should have shared the weight of this sudden alienation.

  He tried to tell her, but what could he say: You poor woman. There’s no science to it. You are lying with the poison. Your little boy watches as you hand glasses of whiskey to that poison, three fingers thick. You’re sucking on the poison, you’re letting it inside you, you’re stroking its forehead afterwards, tender where tenderness is expected. Not deserved. You’ve given birth to its incarnation. Those roots—they’re swollen fat.

  More tea? Cynthia asked.

  Yes, Russ said. Yes, please.

  Only after she’d gone inside, leaving him in the vegetable garden beneath that valiant sun, only then did Russ mumble: Take care of yourself, okay?

  Feeble.

  Russ is a man prone to regret, and this fact has abused him in every moment since.

  Jade

  “You’ll need to come to the station with us,” the officer says. “We have a few questions for you.”

  The crowd erupts. People swarm in all directions, trying to get a better glimpse of the drama, and only when the mass shifts can I see: Cameron clings to his mother’s arm as the officers take hold of the person to his right.

  I’d recognize the sweater vest anywhere. He has a collection of four or five sweater vests that he wears throughout the school year, regardless of the season. He wears a black one now, coat folded over his arm, shoes speckled white with plaster.

  I had Mr.
O for art last year. He would always stand too close, looking over your shoulder, making comments like It’s just a paintbrush. Play around with it a little. He was one of those teachers awkwardly invested in his job, personally offended when you didn’t give a shit. The girls always fluttered and speculated—Mr. O was one of those young, attractive teachers. He dressed like a high-schooler, and he was always so friendly. There were rumors, of course, about his relationships with students, but they were always started by the meanest and stupidest girls. Did you hear what Mr. O said about Lucinda’s pottery project? “Gorgeous.” A series of giggles.

  The scene is chaos. Cameron’s mom is pleading with the officers. “Please,” she says. You can tell she’s uncomfortable with the sound. “Please, you can’t take him. Russ, come on, it’s me. You can’t just take him.”

  I catch snippets of conversation. The art teacher; he was her art teacher—Years at Jefferson, I never thought he’d—So inappropriate for a funeral, they should have waited—Wanted to make a scene, makes them look productive—

  The two police officers march Mr. O away like a trophy. He keeps his head bowed to the ground, takes each step purposefully. His hair, peppered with gray, shines white in the sun.

  Cameron’s mother hugs him close, and they both watch, horrified, as the officers lead Mr. O into a squad car.

  Sirens wail. Doors slam. People follow, and a few have their flip phones poised to take grainy photos. But most stand, dumbfounded, circling a drama that has now gone, leaving an empty, pulsing space in the middle of the crowd.

  I’ve met that police officer before—with the moustache.

  Howie used to live in Willow Square. In winter, he’d set up his sleeping bag in the drained, empty fountain and shake his cup of change at you. The city complained, and one day, when Howie and I were playing checkers on the steps of the fountain, the cops came to move him. There were two of them—one was the lieutenant, gruff and mean. Pile of dirt, he spat at Howie as he shooed me away. I retreated to a storefront as the other cop squatted down into Howie’s line of sight. “Fletcher,” his badge said. He helped Howie up by the arms, gathered Howie’s things into his shopping cart while the lieutenant filled out a report on a clipboard, grumbling with annoyance under his breath.

  As he arrests Mr. O, Officer Fletcher’s gaze is somewhere else. When I follow his line of sight, I see her: Querida. Querida, in her black veil, gripping the arm of a man who could be her brother, tears streaming down her face as she shakes her head like No, no, no.

  Querida notices me, but only for a second. She looks away quickly, panicked. But in that second, her dark eyes hold mine. So brief. Ashamed. I see myself very suddenly, too. It’s like looking into a mirror as shower fog evaporates: I am the line connecting the dots.

  It makes you wonder, doesn’t it—how it’s possible to be a secondary character in your own story.

  The sun is blinding. Cars idle in the parking lot, silent witnesses.

  “You had him last year, didn’t you, Jay?” Ma says. “For art class, what was it, pottery?”

  “Ceramics.”

  “Did he ever do anything to you?”

  “What?”

  “Did he ever touch you?”

  “God, no, Ma. That’s disgusting.”

  “He always creeped me out,” Amy chimes in. “He stays for hours after school every day, just looking at paintings and stuff.”

  “I don’t know, Amy . . . he is an art teacher.”

  “Watch it, Jade,” Ma snaps, digging through her purse for the car keys.

  People stand in small groups around the parking lot, gossiping. Everywhere I go, Mr. O’s name.

  “Jade!” someone says from behind.

  Mrs. Arnaud holds up her long black skirt, hurrying over from the other side of the parking lot. Ma has already started the car, and Amy fixes her hair in the passenger’s-side mirror.

  “Jade.” Mrs. Arnaud stops near the bumper of Ma’s Subaru. She wears her hair in black mourner’s lace like a 1940s widow, and it falls in pretty tendrils around her face. The Arnauds are technically two years younger than my parents, but it’s like they’re impervious to time, the way naturally good-looking people tend to be. They do things like running and hiking and biking. Mrs. Arnaud always looks like she’s just returned from a tropical vacation.

  Now, Mrs. Arnaud squints at me, using a tanned hand to shield her eyes from the sun.

  “It’s Edouard,” she says. When I first met the Arnauds, they both had thick French accents, but in the years since they’ve become barely detectable. “He’s a mess. He won’t speak to anyone. We don’t know what to do.”

  I wonder if she’s somehow missed the memo—if the last year has shrunk into a short blip in her mind, a speed bump in my and Zap’s friendship. If she even noticed at all.

  “I know you haven’t been over in a while,” she says. “But maybe you could stop by this afternoon? I think he’d like to see you.”

  She’s wrong, but I don’t tell her that. I nod and fight the urge to pull her close, to rest my tired head on Mrs. Arnaud’s shoulder, which I know will smell like Burberry perfume and brand-name laundry detergent.

  WHAT YOU WANT TO SAY BUT CAN’T WITHOUT BEING A DICK

  A Screenplay by Jade Dixon-Burns

  EXT. FUNERAL HOME PARKING LOT—DAY

  Celly and BOY’S MOTHER (43, glowing tan), stand side by side against the whiplash wind. Celly looks beautiful in a white summer dress.

  CELLY

  You know him. Boy. Your son.

  BOY’S MOTHER

  Yes, of course I do.

  CELLY

  Can you tell me where he’s gone?

  BOY’S MOTHER

  I just told you, he’s home.

  Celly shifts her weight from one foot to the other.

  CELLY

  That’s not what I meant.

  We weren’t friends at first. Zap had the three thirty slot for piano lessons, and I had the four o’clock. Our teacher was named Erin and she had three cats—they would sit on top of the piano during lessons, letting the sound reverberate across their furry stomachs.

  Erin always ran late, so Ma would sit in the living room and make small talk with Mrs. Arnaud. They were new to town. Ma invited them over for dinner one day after piano lessons.

  That summer, we rode bikes. Around the cul-de-sac, through the swamp on the outskirts of the neighborhood where the irrigation system had flooded a concave field. The town didn’t have the funds to clean it out. We collected sticks and pretended they were fishing rods, dunking them in slimy water. We caught toads in buckets and hid them in Amy’s room. One died in her closet. I was grounded for three weeks. We read easy novels in Zap’s backyard hammock, picking aphids off the white rope.

  I spent most of my days in Zap’s clean, well-decorated house. The Arnauds had this grandfather clock they’d brought over from France, a family heirloom—I remember thinking how cool that was. How genuine. My family would never do such a thing. Garbage, Ma would say, with a pull of her cigarette.

  Zap became obsessed with astronomy after the fifth-grade trip to the Denver Museum of Nature and Science. They had this giant planetarium, and the guide bombarded us with facts that Zap wrote down in the miniature notebook he kept in his back pocket. There are fourteen known black holes in existence, and The Big Dipper is an asterism, not a constellation, and You can’t hear a scream in outer space. He typed all these facts up on his parents’ computer, 16-point Verdana, and hung them on his bedroom wall, adding to the list every time he found something new or noteworthy. Soon, his room was covered in charts and diagrams, in pictures of astronauts in marshmallow suits bouncing across the surface of the moon. He was going to be an astronaut, he said, and even though it sucked because he’d be gone for years at a time, he promised he’d bring me back rocks from as many planets as he could, to add to my collection.

  Our parents had dinner—usually at the Arnauds’ house—while Zap and I disappeared upstairs. We played Pokém
on cards. We watched the neighbors with binoculars. They’ll get married one day, our parents used to joke.

  Ninth grade, a week before Christmas, Louis Travelli nudged Zap as we walked down the hill toward my neighborhood. Into fat girls, eh? Louis said, kicking the bottom of Zap’s backpack. Zap looked at me with this twisted face: anxiety to such an extreme, it could have been disgust. I should go home, Zap said, once Louis had gone. I have a lot of work to do tonight.

  We didn’t speak for days. It felt like when you accidentally jump into the deep end of a swimming pool: you expect concrete beneath your feet, but instead you flap, panicked, toes grazing water and water and water.

  After Christmas break, the spell lifted. He called me one Saturday. Let’s make a fort, he said. We gathered all the blankets and pillows in the house, rearranged the furniture in the living room. We pressed the couch against the wall, moved all the dining-room chairs to the front of the fireplace. We built a castle out of floral-print sheets and down comforters, lining the different rooms with Persian rugs. When it was finished, we climbed into the “master bedroom”—the largest quarter of the thing, roped off with cream-colored sheets, and we lay down side by side, gazing up at white cotton.

  “People have been talking, you know,” Zap said.

  “About what?”

  “About us. It’s getting pretty annoying. Like Louis the other day. I keep telling them there’s nothing going on, but they won’t believe me.”

  I wondered if I was going to be sick. It wasn’t a bad thing I felt then, as he folded his glasses and set them on his stomach. Zap’s elbows were filling out, gaining the muscles and contours I’d come to recognize on grown men. I watched them, his elbows, in the hazy pink light of the fort, and I thought about how you could know someone really well, know everything about them—how they tuck in their sheets, messy in the morning. How their legs bleed when they run through tall grass in summer. You can know all these things, but you’ll never know how it feels to be them: to inhabit their space, to exist in their skin, to grow into their elbows.