Girl in Snow Page 18

  Cameron let the forest hold him. He left Dad’s flashlight in his pocket, where it sank like a stone, and imagined he could melt into the pools of darkness between each solitary tree. Maybe there, wrapped in night, he wouldn’t have to be the kid with jeans covered in stomach acid and whiskey. He should have turned on his flashlight, because the forest was pitch black, but he didn’t want to see anything. He wandered along, vision blurry and salty, stumbling over roots that protruded from the ground like the limbs of the dead.

  So alone. He was so alone. Cameron found a spot on the forest floor and curled up there, trying not to think about Dad and how huge he must have been, hitting that girl over and over again with his sweaty Dad hands. And then Cameron was stumbling back to the campsite, where everyone had gone to sleep; he didn’t know what time it was; he didn’t know whether hours had passed and, if so, how many. He could see everyone’s tents, like a little village in the moonlight. Next to Mrs. Macintosh’s tent, Pauly’s cage.

  For a while, Cameron stood beside Pauly’s cage. Pauly slept, nestled into his own neck. Usually, Pauly made Cameron feel peaceful, but he could not fathom peace tonight.

  Mom had always told Cameron it was important for a man to be gentle. Anger was unfamiliar to him. He picked up a stone from the ground near his shoe and squeezed it so hard its edges were sharp against the bones in his hands. He felt no better.

  Quietly, Cameron unlatched Pauly’s cage. Pauly’s eyes opened. Like Cameron had done so many times before, he stuck his arm inside, making sure to keep his fingers as still as possible, marble Statue fingers. He waited. Cicadas sang their unflinching songs.

  Pauly shifted his weight. Hopped lightly onto Cameron’s outstretched arm.

  It occurred to Cameron that Pauly’s body was just like all the others in the world: the same stupid things kept him alive. Connected bones and muscle and tissue, and blood running through it all. These things were inconsequential—ephemeral, transitory, so easy to take.

  Something collapsed inside Cameron. He was cupping Pauly’s quivering back with his right hand; he was thinking how nauseating this world was. Pauly’s wings were flapping now, he could sense something was wrong, but Cameron held them close to the bird’s fragile frame. Cameron was filled with something that felt too old for his body—it built and built and built, it was deeper than a sadness or a rage, it was a hunger and he could not rid himself of that bubble, that thrash. In one easy motion, Cameron curled his left hand over Pauly’s chaotic beak and his right across Pauly’s neck. He twisted, just once.

  Later, Cameron would read a statistic saying that suburban house cats killed 3.7 billion birds a year, and he would feel a little better. He would read about sparrows, members of the passerine bird family. They didn’t need much food to survive. Then, he would Google How many sparrows exist in the world, and he wouldn’t find an answer, only that there were billions, too many to count. He would find a Bible quote. Matthew 10:31: Even the very hairs of your head are numbered. So don’t be afraid: you are worth more than many sparrows. He would dig out Dad’s copy of The Map of Human Anatomy and he would read about a different inch of the human body every night.

  Mrs. Macintosh made the announcement the next day, as they were disassembling their tents. Sometime in the night, Pauly escaped, she said. He’s back in his natural habitat now.

  Cameron remembered only fragments of the rest of this night. How the sun peeked nervously over the tips of the mountains, then cracked over the earth like an egg, running yellow over dewy morning. He remembered digging a shallow grave at the edge of the forest, just out of sight of the campground, while the other kids huddled in their sleeping bags. He remembered Pauly’s spine, thin as a toothpick, snapping between his fingers, oily feathers warm against his unfurled palm, and the distinct feeling of lightness that followed—like he had rid his own body and Pauly’s of the sickness that plagued the forest.

  In the drawing at the back of Dad’s closet, Lucinda’s eyes were open.

  She stared up at the ceiling, eyes like an abandoned home. Angry black slashes cut across her cheeks. Her hair was matted—charcoal had been ground violently into the paper, knotting her usually sleek hair in clumps. She was not smiling. Her neck was out of line with itself, like a horror movie. The background was black, pools of powder charcoal spread around her angelic, deformed head. In the top right corner, Cameron could make out a small, rigid bump. The carousel’s platform.

  Two smudged wings jutted from the outer corners of her lashes. Those smiling eyes—it was Cameron’s thumbprint. His signature.

  For the first time in three and a half years, Cameron started to cry. The tears were hot on his cheeks. They dripped onto the portrait, creating lakes where there had been only paper. Cameron could only do such realistic portraits of things he had seen, and Lucinda dead on the carousel was one of them.

  Russ

  Ronnie Weinberg had given them Lucinda’s diary.

  I saw my art teacher with it, Ronnie had said.

  Your art teacher?

  Mr. O, Ronnie said. He teaches at Jefferson High.

  Can you tell me exactly what you saw?

  The diary was wrapped in a sweat shirt, and he carried it out to the parking lot. He put it in the glove compartment of his car.

  You’re sure? Russ asked, though he’d slid behind the receptionist’s desk and one hand was already dialing the lieutenant.

  The art teacher drove a dented Honda Civic. Detective Williams had wrenched open the door in the Maplewood Memorial parking lot. He would later claim the glove compartment was open already—they could see the purple suede book, lying in a sea of technical manuals and spare change.

  They zipped the evidence tight in a plastic bag. Pulled off their latex gloves, clapping powder from their hands, which Detective Williams streaked across the thigh of his black pants.

  Upon later examination—the diary was only half full, with little girl poems scrawled uselessly across each page. It told them nothing. But toward the end, a ragged edge: one page had been ripped out. They’d searched the car carefully. Found nothing.

  They brought the art teacher in anyway. Took him back to the station house, where news vans waited, hungry and insistent. Russ refused each flash, staring into the recesses of the bright white lights, and thought: he had made two promises. One to his wife, and one to a ghost. He’d promised both he would protect the people they loved most. Russ thought of Cameron, how he’d pushed him on the swings at the very same playground Lucinda had been found on—that child gaze, alarmingly old. Russ knew, if it came to it, which suspect he’d relinquish to the greedy hands of the police: Ivan. He refuses to think too hard about why.

  Now they have the art teacher in the same seat Ivan occupied yesterday. A sterile conference room. Various acquaintances of Lucinda’s shuffle in and out of the station house, each bearing useless information. Outside, news vans speculate.

  Can you explain the notes we found in your car? the detective asks the art teacher.

  The girls in my sixth-period class, the teacher says. They think it’s funny to pass notes about me. I think it’s inappropriate. I confiscated them.

  One note reads, and I quote—Do you think he’d paint me like one of his French girls? Can you explain this, sir?

  I told you. It’s this group of girls. Beth DeCasio and her friends. Kaylee, Ana. They think it’s funny. I don’t.

  Okay. So—was Lucinda Hayes friends with these girls?

  Yes.

  Is it possible she could have participated in these games?

  Yes, I suppose so.

  Did she ever hint at an inappropriate relationship with you?

  No.

  Are you sure?

  I mean, it could have been any of them. I don’t know.

  So you’re saying: Lucinda could have written these suggestive notes, which you then took and kept in your car along with her diary, which just happens to be missing a page?

  I didn’t know the diary was missing a page
. I was bringing it here. And about the notes, I don’t know, okay? I don’t know.

  You expect us to believe that?

  I don’t know anything.

  When Lee’s trial began to take shape, during the intricate volley of he-saids and she-saids—before they’d known that Hilary would refuse to testify, before Russ could fathom that his friend would simply pick up and leave—Russ confronted Lee.

  Lee had gotten out on bail. Mostly, he stayed in the house with the curtains drawn shut. Outside, Lee was a pariah. A criminal. Dangerous. He was all these things inside too, but Cynthia’s form of cruelty was different from the points and stares the population of Broomsville showered on him as they ushered their children out of sight. Cynthia was cruel in the only way she knew how. Disregard.

  Amidst the confusion of the trial, Cynthia took a part-time job at the craft store downtown. She could be seen through the window from the coffee shop across the street, picking through bins of beads, searching for crippling deformities—tumors bulging from smooth glass surfaces, bubbles in the center of gold-flecked orbs. She could be seen in the park for hours in the afternoon, pushing Cameron on the swings, his little hands frozen red, nose runny, in desperate need of a hot bath. She could be seen everywhere but her own home, where a monster took residence in her bed, beneath the quilt her grandmother had sewn by hand in a pattern Russ could dictate from memory. The force was under strict orders not to visit Lee.

  Russ rang their doorbell like any other visitor. He had sat in the car outside for twenty-five minutes, hands in his lap, trying so hard to remember. All those lazy afternoons on the cliff, meals on that checkered tablecloth, never-ending games of gin rummy. How can you let all that go, even in the face of such incriminating evidence? You can’t. You can’t.

  Lee opened the door, wide. Not surprised to see Russ, sheepish on the porch. Russ followed him inside, and they sat in the cluttered living room. Russ perched—dainty, like a woman—on the arm of the leather chair.

  His heart, a patter. A gallop. A roar.

  Please, Lee said, from the other side of the room. You’re my best friend, Russ. You have to help me. The evidence has to go. They’re trying to use the type of soil on her shoes to convict me. Please, for Cynthia. For Cameron. You have to help.

  Lee walked right up to Russ. Came closer, closer. That gallop—that roar—Russ could kill this man. His oldest and dearest. But Russ kept still as Lee put one warm palm to Russ’s stubbly cheek. Cupped it there.

  Protecting, always protecting.

  Russ went in after hours. Late in the evening. It wasn’t hard to get into the evidence room, one of the Broomsville Police Department’s many failings. Russ knew the password from watching the receptionist type it in, and she kept the swipe key in a safe beneath her desk, which remained consistently unlocked.

  It didn’t take Russ long to find the box. He pulled only the essentials: The bloodied blouse. (Plaid, silver buttons.) The pair of cheap cotton panties. (Unstained, but catalogued anyway.) Two high-heeled boots. (Both covered in the soft soil that caked the plains surrounding the stretch of highway Lee had patrolled, alone, on the night in question.)

  Russ drove around aimlessly, evidence of Hilary Jameson’s assault shoved in his trunk like a body. Broomsville was so small that night, as Russ wound through suburban streets. All the houses were the same; new developments from the same contractor. Year after year. In the dusk, the peaks of the houses were miniature mountains. Russ drove in circles for hours until, finally, he stopped behind the public library.

  He left the car running. Pulled the clothes from their evidence bags and shoved them to the bottom of a dirty trash can by the light of a moth-clouded streetlamp. As he left the incriminating evidence to the bottom of the public garbage can, Russ thought mostly of Cynthia and Cameron. It didn’t seem fair, how loving someone made their precious things your precious things, too.

  On the drive back to his hollow house on his snoozing white street, Russ remembered the security cameras at the police station. When the evidence was discovered missing, two weeks later, Russ took a sick day. He huddled beneath the throw blanket on his living-room sofa, sure they’d come for him the way they came for Lee. Rattling handcuffs. But no. If Lieutenant Gonzalez had watched the security tapes, he never said a thing.

  Now Russ stands by the coffee machine. In the conference room, the art teacher’s head is in his hands.

  Intimidation before interrogation, Detective Williams tells Russ, though Russ can see through this forced conviction: Detective Williams has no faith in the art teacher’s guilt. The man has been cooperative, if shaky, and he has an alibi—a weekly night class for painting students. He hadn’t swiped out of the Broomsville Community College art studio until after eleven o’clock the night Lucinda died, and stoplight cameras showed him headed straight home.

  I found the diary in my classroom, the teacher tells them, and it sounds like the truth. Lucinda must have left it there. I took it to my car, to bring in after the funeral.

  Detective Williams pounds the table when he asks questions. Scare tactics. Russ is used to cold weather—he has lived through thirty-six Colorado winters now—but looking at the teacher on the other side of the mirrored glass, Russ is chilled to the bone.

  Fletcher, someone says. Fletcher. You okay?

  Russ stumbles backward.

  Fletcher? Where are you going?

  Everything ended the night before Hilary Jameson was assaulted. Russ will think of this night every day for the rest of his life, and when he does, he will feel a shocking combination of regret and yearning.

  Patrol was slow. Russ and Lee sipped black coffee. They’d been doing this lately—joining one another voluntarily for the overnight shifts, the ultimate insomniac pairing. This night, they idled in the car beneath the shadow of the cliff, both too tired and dazed to make the climb up for sunrise, though this had been the original plan, the only reason Russ had come along for Lee’s graveyard shift. The houses around them slept, peaceful and stagnant. Russ and Lee kept awake with a game of Would You Rather.

  Would You Rather: hear one song for the rest of your life—“Eye of the Tiger” or “Bohemian Rhapsody”?

  Would You Rather: have sex with your cousin in secret, or never have sex with your cousin but everyone thinks you did?

  Would You Rather: have sex with Detective Williams or the lieutenant?

  What the hell? Russ asked.

  If you had to choose one, Lee said. Life or death.

  Death, Russ said, and they both laughed.

  This is a dumb game, Lee said.

  It is, it’s really dumb, Russ said.

  So they sat. Neither turned on the radio. July—trees danced in a casual breeze. Russ’s uniform pits were damp, so he rolled down the passenger’s-side window. Night had folded itself over the world, a blanket.

  Lee shifted in the driver’s seat, rested his right hand on the middle console where they kept cigarettes and condoms and cinnamon gum. Russ’s hand, also on the console, had been fidgeting with a Styrofoam cup. Digging half-moons with his nails into the white. When the cup dropped to the floor by Russ’s dirty work boots, his hand stayed.

  Russ and Lee had had ten years’ worth of conversations sitting in these two nylon seats. Now, frenzied July wind streamed in, the same mountain air dipping from Russ’s mouth and into Lee’s. Vice versa. He and Lee had had hundreds, thousands of conversations in the car, but perhaps none as important as this.

  Whatever Russ had known about himself before this night—it shifted inside him, rearranged itself, rose up to choke him. He could have rolled up the window, he could have turned on the radio, he could have used the hand on the console to take a sip of cold coffee. He did none of these things.

  Instead, Russ left his hand. As it was—bare inches from Lee’s hand on the middle console. They both stared through the glass windshield at the rolling dawn landscape, so conscious of their traitor heartbeats, their own Judas fingers.

  He can’t
remember who was at fault. Who leaped those two inches of space.

  Butterfly: skin. Lee’s thin pinky finger curled over Russ’s pinky finger. Smallest digit on smallest digit. And that unfamiliar desire, blazing and determined, the desire to curl more than pinkies—whole selves—to curl bodies around bodies. The desire to eat someone whole. Smell, taste, swallow. Fill. It was paralyzing and perfect, crippling in its singularity. Here is what I have been alive for all this time, Russ thought. This touch.

  They sat this way, rigid in squeaky seats, pretending to count smeared insect carcasses on the windshield while instead counting seconds as they passed. Pinkies on pinkies, children making a promise they would never keep.

  Minutes. Twelve, thirteen. All shaking insides.

  Then, the call: a Toyota pickup speeding down I-25. Twenty over the limit. Lee tore his hand away, Russ revved up the engine, and they drove away from that unremarkable spot. When the shift was over, the sun rose over the mountains, bleeding an inky orange across the sky. Neither man could look at the other.

  And the next night, Hilary Jameson. Four broken ribs in a ditch on the side of the highway.

  Russ knows nothing of love. The lethal grip of it: a stillborn blue.

  Jade

  The Arnauds have repainted their house. It’s a pastel yellow now. They also redid the garden in front—a stone path leads up to the porch, where two hand-carved rocking chairs sit next to a rustic wooden table. I bet Mrs. Arnaud spent hours poring over the Pottery Barn catalogue at their sunny kitchen counter. Cette couleur? she probably asked Mr. Arnaud, and he probably kissed her forehead, slow like he used to. I bet the Arnauds speak in quiet French before bed, Mrs. Arnaud in a clean silk nightgown, hair falling natural in her face.

  Chunks of half-melted snow litter everything. I take the new path up to the door, but I hesitate before ringing the bell. Nostalgia stops me.