Girl in Snow Page 17

  I’d seen movies. I’d watched people kiss. I knew how it was supposed to work, kissing, but it always seemed so unnatural to me: pressing parts of your two bodies together, feeling someone else’s wetness against yours. Zap’s mouth was very close to mine, and for the first time, the reality was palpable. Someone else’s teeth were so close, someone else’s tongue. I wanted it. His lips were full, in the dim light of the overhead lamp that filtered through the sheets. Our bodies were cast in this creamy glow, thick with some surging emotion I didn’t recognize.

  He felt it, too. When I think about what I’ve lost, it’s not the end I drift back to. Instead, this: Zap’s neck stretching closer to mine, the hollow space above his collarbone, and the seam of his red T-shirt nearly brushing the tip of my chin. He wanted it, too.

  Zap sat up, so fast that the top of his head caught the sheet and it engulfed him like a hood. He was a ghost. A corner of the fort fell, leaving us gasping, feeling much older than we were supposed to.

  I went home. We didn’t speak for another two weeks. For a few months, our friendship went on as it had, but by the time summer came around, he stopped calling entirely. That’s how it goes. People change, they grow up, I understand. But sometimes it’s like I can still feel the heat of him, can still feel our young stupid hands reaching for one another, shaking with some sort of bewildered love.

  Cameron

  Cameron had lied. He had read Lucinda’s diary, one page, before he gave it to Mr. O.

  January 11th:

  What is a window for

  Except to watch

  Through glass, sometimes

  I can feel u

  U terrify me

  He couldn’t read any more.

  Lucinda had doodled five-pointed stars across the top of the page, but they were not careful—they were messy, ink smeared in the corners. Also, she dotted her “i”s with bubbly circles.

  U terrify me. Cameron could not look at the words, could not think of glass, could not allow this thing to exist anywhere but with him. So he ripped the page from the diary and tucked it where he’d found it in the first place: the crack between his bed and the wall, where it fell to the dust. He tried desperately to forget.

  Her handwriting was not elegant; it did not swirl. Lucinda’s words didn’t dance the way he’d hoped. They didn’t dance at all.

  Mom’s van pulled out of the Maplewood Memorial parking lot, and Cameron rolled down his window, even though the dashboard display read twenty-six degrees. The day should not have felt like this: so bright and unabashed, like it wasn’t even sorry. The dry trees flicked by in blurs of naked brown, like they’d peeled off their layers and were learning how to breathe again. This was so unfair.

  The quiet calm of the car was oppressive, interrupted only by Mom’s crying. It was not the sort of crying you could hide. Cameron wanted to comfort her, but she was crying for Mr. O, and this was all Cameron’s fault.

  They inched forward. Cameron knew what was happening in all the other cars: Mr. O, parents were saying to each other, Mr. O, the art teacher from Jefferson High; remember him from parent-teacher conferences? Kids were sitting wide-eyed in the backseat, hoping this would get them out of homework.

  When they pulled up to the house, Mom turned to Cameron.

  “Go inside,” she said.

  Her eyes were small and red. She pulled a coffee-shop napkin from the cup holder and used it to wipe her nose.

  “Where are you going?”

  “I’m going down to the station. Cameron, I want you to go in the house. Do not leave until I’m home, don’t answer the door, don’t speak to anyone. Do you understand?”

  “Yes,” Cameron said as he slid his legs over the seat and onto solid ground.

  “Cam?” Mom said before he could shut the door.

  “Yes?”

  “I know how you felt.”

  “What?”

  “About Lucinda. I saw your drawings.”

  “Mom, I didn’t—”

  “I know you loved her, is what I’m trying to say. I know you loved her in your own Cameron way.”

  Mom’s bony hands grasped the steering wheel.

  “When I get home,” she said, “I need you to tell me everything. I know it’s hard, and you must miss her terribly, but sweetie, I need to know what you have done.”

  Mom motioned for him to shut the door, and before Cameron could tell her that he loved her and he wished she wouldn’t be so hard on herself, the van was bumping out of the driveway and around the corner. Cameron let those words fall off him like snakeskin, rearranging themselves as they hit the ground: What have you done?

  Cameron had been in Dad’s closet twice before—both times after Dad had gone, when Cameron had been so Tangled he had lost all sense of time, curled up on cream carpet.

  1. When Beth said Cameron was the kind of kid who would bring a gun to school, he came home and opened the chest under Mom’s bed. He stared at the .22 handgun, wondering: Was it possible to lose control of your own body? Could your hands do things your head didn’t want?

  2. When he read that book on Mom’s shelf, about the man who killed someone while looking directly into the sun. Albert Camus, The Stranger. Cameron dreamed of ultraviolet rays burning straight through his pupils.

  Now, Cameron did not turn on any lights. Even though it was daytime, the windows in the living room faced south, and the house was gloomy. He slipped off his shoes by the front door, and locked it so he would hear Mom coming home. Carefully, Cameron padded toward the den.

  When Dad left, everyone said Mom should get rid of his stuff. Instead, she’d left it encased in a tomb down the hall from her bedroom.

  Cameron creaked open the door to the closet and all Dad’s smells gushed out. Whiskey. Aftershave. He liked Dad’s leather shoes, with tissue paper balled up in the toes to keep their shape. He liked how Dad’s two fancy suits stood, rigid on hangers. He liked the belts that hung from hooks on the door, the different shades of brown, black, and suede. Even though Cameron hated all these things in theory, he was so Tangled that their familiarity was comforting. He turned on the overhead light, stepped inside, and shut the door behind him.

  The relief was immediate. Here, he would not think about Mr. O, chained to the bar in the room where they held bad guys. He would not think about Mom, standing by the coffee machine at the station house, pleading with Russ Fletcher to let him go; he didn’t do anything wrong. Here, it was just Cameron and Dad, playing the quiet games they always did.

  Dad had kept his police uniform in the back corner of the closet when he took it home for washing. It had a set of shelves all to itself, even though it belonged to the Broomsville Police Department and had lived there most of the time—one for the pants, one for the belt, and a rack for the jacket, which he hung before he ironed it on the laundry-room table. These shelves had been empty since the arrest, when the chief took Dad’s uniform away for good. Cameron pushed aside a rack of windbreakers and ran a hand along the cold wood. On top of the shelf, where Dad used to keep his badge, Cameron’s hand ran over a folded sheet of paper.

  Cameron picked it up. It was not dusty. He held it to the light.

  Even in the fog of the closet, he recognized the corners of the paper; they were serrated, made special for extra absorbency. It was a sheet of watercolor paper. Strathmore, eleven by fifteen inches. It had come from the pad beneath Cameron’s bed, the pad filled with Lucinda’s eyes and the sweet strands of her hair, done in charcoal so thin it could have been pencil.

  Cameron sat, criss-cross-applesauce, on the carpet and unfolded the piece of paper.

  Immediately, he wished he hadn’t. He wished he hadn’t come into Dad’s closet, he wished he didn’t live in this house, on this block, in this state with pointed mountains. He wished he had never seen Lucinda Hayes, that he had never loved her the way he did: with X-ray eyes and such an uncontrollable heart.

  They came for Dad on a Monday.

  Mom wore pink-striped pajama p
ants. Cameron remembered it from below. He looked up at Dad, whose own friends were clinking him into handcuffs and saying things like Why, Lee? You didn’t leave us any choice. And Russ Fletcher—who used to come over for dinner and laugh so loud at everything Dad said—cowered in the corner. Cameron didn’t watch the rest. Instead, he looked past the chaos from his spot at the kitchen table, at the painting Mom had hung above the window.

  Later, he would learn the painting was a Van Gogh. He would learn that the version in the kitchen was a re-creation, digital paint on plastic canvas. The painting was called A Lane Near Arles, and it was done in 1888, the same year Van Gogh chopped off his ear. Cameron liked this fact, because even though Van Gogh must have been Tangled while he was painting, the piece was very calm. Van Gogh had spent December of 1888 in an insane asylum, and Cameron liked to think A Lane Near Arles was the view from Van Gogh’s window as he tried to feel okay in his head.

  The last Cameron saw of Dad: thin fingers clasped behind his back next to the kitchen sink, held in place by shiny metal handcuffs. Cameron knew these fingers—they clutched cigars on the back porch, they shook out the newspaper in the morning, they pulled navy uniform buttons through fraying loops. They tucked Cameron’s racecar blanket over his little body before lights out. The smell of Johnson and Johnson, these fingers combing through wispy hair in the bathtub, these fingers gripping baseball bats, See, swing from the right like this. Eye on the ball. Those hands, resting in Dad’s lap as they spent lullaby nights together in the living room, that companionable introversion. His father’s fingers were interlaced within the restraints of the handcuffs, twisted back, palms facing out like some shameful plea.

  Mom yelled. Officers yelled. Cameron sat at his dinner spot at the kitchen table and studied the painting. A Lane Near Arles. There was a yellow house next to a giant orange tree, on a winding road lined with Valencias. It was like a dream. He could live in this house, where things were not sad, where Mom didn’t plead in her unsure voice—Please, Russ, tell me what’s going on. Cameron felt like he’d been here before, to this house on this road, so pacified in the sun. Grandma Mary was there, he liked to think, along with all the good people who had once been in the world and had gone: they all found these smooth brushstrokes, this yellow calm.

  The sirens outside screamed, red and blue into dusk.

  They took Dad away.

  When Mom came back into the kitchen, she didn’t speak. She stirred the pot of mac and cheese on the stove with a metal spoon, her back bent like a branch. Water boiled.

  Outside the window, a Calliope hummingbird stopped at the feeder Cameron had made from a water bottle. It was male—Cameron knew from the burnt-red feathers on its neck. They’d learned about hummingbirds in school; the Calliope was the smallest bird in North America, rare for Colorado. It flitted around, quick and light, like nothing bad had ever happened. At the bottom of one fact sheet Cameron read was a footnote: The hummingbird is the creature that opens the heart.

  Of that night, he would remember the painting above the window, the calm yellow house where he could get some rest, and the creature lapping sugar water from a branch in the yard. He would remember Mom, weight in her elbows, hunched over the stove, trying not to sob, and he would think: This quiet place, this place I will take the ones I love?

  I will call it Hum.

  The day Dad actually left—after the arraignment, and the trial, and the not guilty—the walls started breathing.

  It began in the kitchen. Cameron checked the stove, but the knob was twisted to “Off,” and the teapot sat idly on the fake marble countertop. Cameron checked the fluorescents above the sink; he flicked them on, off, on, and off again. Nothing. He unplugged the refrigerator. The whir of the machine stopped, but he could still hear it: a barely discernible intake of breath.

  Dad was a heavy nose-breather in sleep. Cameron used to lie awake between scratchy hotel sheets—on mountain trips, at weddings, the night before his grandmother’s funeral—listening to oxygen fight its bitter way through his father’s nose hairs.

  Cameron knew Mom would be angry if the milk went bad, so he plugged the refrigerator back in and stood in his browning socks in the middle of the kitchen.

  At first, it came from behind, and then from the hallway, and then from the direction of the living room, and Cameron felt so stupid spinning in circles, trying to catch something that didn’t want to be caught.

  He pictured Mom waking up at four in the afternoon to the sound of Dad’s breath. Sleeping pills and crusty bowls would greet her from the nightstand. She would imagine his big, awful arms around her. She would miss him. Cameron could not bear the thought of Mom missing him.

  “Stop.” He said it with all the authority his child voice could muster.

  But the walls did not listen. They only stood there, being walls, ignoring his little-boy pleas.

  Dad’s hammer was exactly where he’d left it: hanging from a nail in the garage, lodged between Cameron’s old tricycle and Mom’s dusty skis. Cameron pulled the hammer from the wall and stomped back into the kitchen.

  The house was filled with the physical remnants of Dad. Crumpled socks in the laundry hamper, sweaty bottles of beer lining the door of the refrigerator. And, of course, his breath. Cameron was sure he was standing in Dad’s lung cavity, the walls were his filthy ribcage, and oxygen was moving up through his windpipe, past his nasal cavity, and into the air of a house, a family, a life he did not deserve.

  Someday, Cameron’s windpipe and his nasal cavity and his lungs would be as big as Dad’s. They’d be shaped the same.

  “I hope they put him away. I hope he does his time,” Mom had said, on the morning of the arraignment. Her voice had been shaky, a frog. “He deserves it, Cameron. Someday, I promise you’ll understand.”

  Cameron didn’t know which wall the sound was coming from, but he figured it didn’t make much of a difference. He started swinging.

  He swung and he swung until he could not hear anything but crumbling drywall and Mom’s panicked voice—let’s put the hammer down, good, yes, we’ll get you into pajamas, you’re tired, sweetie, we’ll deal with this in the morning, it’s okay, it’s okay. And, of course, the blank indifference of a house with holes he had created.

  The first friend Cameron hurt was the sixth-grade class pet. A sparrow, named Pauly. It had started as “Polly,” but two weeks after Mrs. Macintosh rescued it from the parking lot outside the playground, the vet pronounced it male. Pauly was a tufty, fuzzy brown. His wings were clipped, so they could let him out of his cage when the classroom door was shut.

  Pauly would perch on Cameron’s outstretched arm, like he couldn’t tell the difference between Cameron’s skin and the plastic tree Mrs. Macintosh bought at the pet store. This was three years after Dad left, and Mrs. Macintosh told Mom that Pauly was a good outlet for Cameron, that a pet at home might help with his anxiety. Cameron didn’t want one.

  In the spring, Mrs. Macintosh took the sixth-grade class—Pauly included—on a camping trip in the mountains.

  For two nights and three days they stayed in tents, spread across one of the most popular campgrounds in the Rockies. Mrs. Macintosh showed them how to tell the habits of native animals based on scat. That’s the scientific term for shit, Ronnie said. The class rode horses and watched birds with binoculars. Cameron liked bird-watching best; he learned about the different species native to Colorado. Their habitats. He drew anatomical diagrams over the blue lines of his spiral notebook and cartoons of house sparrows perched in aspen trees.

  On the last night of the camping trip, the teachers packed the bus for the three-hour morning drive, and the parent chaperones went to bed. Mr. Howard, the teacher on duty, was asleep in front of the campfire. Come out on my signal, Ronnie had said earlier. Tom has a bottle of whiskey.

  At Ronnie’s signal, Cameron unzipped the tent and slipped out. He was curious how the rest of the kids broke rules, and how this looked different from Cameron’s own nighttime rebellion
.

  Ronnie was waiting at the edge of the woods. Hushed laughter blossomed from a dense cluster of trees, and when Ronnie saw Cameron, he waved and disappeared into the woods.

  “Shut up,” Tom was saying from the trees, and Cameron followed the sound of his voice, shining Dad’s heavy metal flashlight across the walking path. “Are you trying to get us caught?”

  The sixth-grade class sat in a circle. Girls on one side, boys on the other. Cameron joined the boys’ side, slightly outside the perimeter of their shoulders, between Ronnie and Brady Callahan. He was surprised at how easily he blended in, how his legs folded underneath him. Sitting on the forest floor, he almost looked like everyone else.

  Tom had set the bottle of whiskey in the middle of the circle—the same whiskey Dad used to drink late at night in the living-room armchair.

  Tom swigged straight from the mouth of the bottle and passed it to Brady, who took a swig, coughed, and passed it to Beth. Soon, Ronnie was clutching the bottle; in the dim moonlight Cameron saw Ronnie sniff the rim of the bottle, discreet, before lifting the neck of it to his chapped lips. He swallowed. Sputtered, and passed it to Cameron.

  The moment the liquid touched his tongue, Cameron knew he was going to vomit. The taste was so familiar—it had been in the air all those mornings, as Cameron dressed for school, dried and sticky against the rim of Dad’s glass in the sink.

  He didn’t have time to stand up, to turn around, or to direct the spew away from his body. He threw up in his lap, all over his jeans, one hand cupping his own vomit and the other still holding the bottle of whiskey.

  The girls squealed. Everyone else started to laugh. Even Ronnie joined in. Cameron could sit in their circles. He could whisper so he didn’t wake the teachers. But he couldn’t laugh like that.

  Cameron stood up, dropping the bottle, and stumbled away.

  “Where you going, faggot?” Tom hissed, a distant voice on Cameron’s heels. “I thought you were used to swallowing.”