Girl in Snow Page 20

  The thought made Cameron hard against the zipper of his jeans. He reached down to adjust his erection, and his hand brushed against the lowest branch of the oak tree—the tree made a tinkling sound so loud, Cameron’s stomach burst with shock.

  A set of wind chimes dangled from the branch he’d hit. They clanged together, deafening. Cameron tried to grab them, to drown out the song with his skin, but it was too late.

  Lucinda pushed aside the red cherry-print curtain above the kitchen sink. She cupped her hands to the window and peered into the darkness. Cameron held so still. He imagined his bones were melting, then hardening again, that he was a figurine made of misshapen glass.

  Lucinda’s face disappeared from the window, and Cameron counted to six before the sliding glass door suctioned open. Lucinda stepped barefoot onto the back porch, an hourglass silhouette with arms crossed tight against her torso.

  “Hello?” she called.

  Cameron shrank behind the oak tree, wishing he could sink right into the whittled bark. The metal wind chimes were cold in his hand, kissing one another noiselessly. Television chattered, numb in the background, as the light from the living room illuminated Lucinda’s form.

  The space between Cameron and Lucinda was tense and palpable, a rope held taut. They could have walked it with bare feet. They didn’t. Instead, Lucinda turned and padded inside, suctioning the door shut behind her.

  The crickets rubbed their legs together, screeching and yelling in their acoustic cricket language.

  The Hayes family was holding a reception.

  Cameron stood on the street and watched the pulsing crowd of black-clad bodies mulling around the Hayeses’ home. They pulled tinfoil off casserole dishes, wiping leaky eyes. He couldn’t see Lucinda’s family from the sidewalk; he guessed they were at the center of the crowd, wringing their hands, wishing to be alone with themselves but too afraid of the quiet to ask. Cameron wondered who would clean their house after everyone was done stomping through. An aunt, maybe, or a dependable cousin would vacuum around the Hayeses’ feet, sucking up the mud and slush the chattering mourners had dragged in.

  There was a police car parked in front of the house, and a tall, straight-backed figure sat inside, watching people come and go. Cameron deliberated briefly, then walked up the driveway.

  He did not know what he was looking for inside Lucinda’s house, but her smashed charcoal face was etched into the foreground of Cameron’s vision. He needed evidence, proof that he had not imagined her.

  When Cameron slipped inside, the crowd was so thick that no one glanced his way. He had never been in Lucinda’s house in daylight. People ate noodles with plastic forks and the place smelled vaguely of tuna. By the bathroom, two women were talking about Lucinda’s parents.

  “They’re in the living room, yes. They’re talking, but not much.”

  Cameron recognized no one; for the first time, he was relieved to be in a crowd so big. Before anyone picked him out—before someone from school caught sight of him and started whispering—Cameron slipped into the side hallway and climbed the stairs, leaving the chaos behind.

  There was a pressing quiet upstairs in the Hayeses’ house, a purposeful and intrusive emptiness that settled on the green shag carpet and the ridges of the photo frames. Suffocating. Usually, Cameron liked silence, but this was unbearable compared to the noise downstairs. Malicious.

  Cameron wanted to examine this untouched part of the house, to document it in ways he had not from the outside. It hit him—sweet, explosive—that Lucinda had breathed the air trapped upstairs, and it was getting recycled into his own lungs, sacred air that wouldn’t exist after the Hayes family had opened the doors and windows enough times.

  When he reached Lucinda’s bedroom door, he pushed it open fast, to ensure he wouldn’t turn back.

  In the white light of 3:39 p.m., Lucinda’s bedroom was just a room. Four lavender walls and beige carpet with a coffee stain near the vent. Tracks ran up and down the carpet where the housekeeper had pushed a vacuum. Lucinda’s computer was gone, and there was a perfect frame of dust where its torso used to sit.

  Someone else had made her bed. Lucinda never fluffed her pillows—no, she always left the indentations from sleep, where the weight of her head had cast its skull mark.

  The porcelain ballerina balanced on the edge of her dresser.

  Cameron had seen the ballerina up close only once, when Lucinda had unzipped her backpack in the hall by her locker—the ballerina had been in the front pocket, inexplicably accompanying Lucinda to school. Cameron’s proportional estimates had proven accurate: the figurine was no bigger than his hand. Her left leg made a triangle of empty space in conjunction with the right, held at a perfect ninety degrees, as she balanced on the tip of a porcelain slipper.

  Now, Lucinda’s ballerina was light in Cameron’s hand.

  The bed could have been anyone’s, her desk could have been anyone’s, her dresser could have been anyone’s. The pens sat, bored, in a cup on the nightstand. Cameron clutched the ballerina, desperate for something that was distinctly Lucinda’s. He was a continent, standing in this anonymous bedroom. He was a continent and Lucinda was a sailboat, circling, circling. He could not move; he could only watch her pull further away.

  He needed more.

  Lucinda’s closet door was open. There was her favorite pair of jeans, the ones she wore with flat shoes, accentuating bluebird ankles. An old pink shirt with the word “LOVE” embossed across the front. The dress she’d worn to last year’s Halloween party. Green velvet.

  Cameron ran his fingers along Lucinda’s velvet dress—it was liquid, running down his knuckles and over his hands, so familiar he swore he could taste her. Salt. Chemical perfume across her clavicle. Bitter on his tongue.

  He slipped the dress off its hanger. Pressed his mouth to the fabric.

  The Hayeses’ upstairs bathroom was shiny and neat. Cameron draped Lucinda’s dress over the rim of the bathtub.

  White lace drapes failed to keep out the day—it tore through them, heedless. The shower curtain had a girlish striped pattern, and the toilet-seat cover was made of fuzzy pink yarn. Two toothbrushes with white film crusted down their necks leaned against the rim of a plastic cup, and the voices downstairs came up through the floor, muffled, a distant murmur.

  In the mirror, Cameron looked hollow. The three naked bulbs that lined the ceiling made his face pale white, with thick, sagging shadows, like a sick person from a movie. His hair stuck up in a thousand funny places, and a leaf clung to the collar of his button-down shirt. Maple. He plucked it off and dropped it in the sink, where it sat, morose with all its veins.

  Cameron snaked his belt out of its loops and dropped it on the bath mat. He unbuttoned his shirt—bits of skin revealed themselves like secrets. Someday his chest would have hair like Dad’s, but now it was white and smooth and bare, nipples interrupting like unexpected punctuation.

  His shirt puddled on the floor. Cameron slid out of his dress pants, bunching each pant leg around his ankles, then wriggling clumsily out of them.

  He examined himself: Cameron was a boy in a pair of plain white boxers from the drugstore, the kind that came three pairs in a bag. He was a human body. Just that. What went on inside was irrelevant. He didn’t hate himself. He only investigated a body with all its anatomical parts, all the related bits and pieces, a body that knew what felt good and what felt bad.

  Lucinda’s green velvet dress had a zipper in the back and a tag across the seam. Eighty percent cotton. XS. Machine washable.

  She had worn the dress to last year’s Halloween party. Cameron hadn’t been invited, but he knew from the photos plastered to Beth’s locker that Lucinda and her friends had dressed up as the seven deadly sins. Seven girls with heart-shaped faces smiled into the camera, crouching, a line of paper dolls with stick-straight hair and vodka eyes. Lucinda had gone as envy.

  Cameron eased his feet in first. He reveled in the parting velvet, how it let him inside. Surroun
ded him. Slippery. His shoulders were broader than Lucinda’s—when he pulled the dress up past his chest, a rip tore down the side. The dress wouldn’t fit over his arms. The sleeves were too tight and the shoulders bunched, then settled around his elbows.

  The dress was a green horizon line across Cameron’s chest.

  Shooting heat. A plunge. The same heat as when he looked at Rayna Rae’s centerfold, or when Nicole Hartley sat so close to him in science class that her silky brown hair stroked the back of his hand as they wrote in lab notebooks. Cameron was set ablaze. Set to explode.

  He gripped the edge of the sink so tight the rim left ruler marks in his palms. His reflection in the mirror pulsed in and out. In. Out. He was so dizzy. He sat on the knitted toilet-seat cover and pressed his nose into his forearm—he smelled like Lucinda’s musty vanilla closet.

  Cameron was very worried he would vomit. He peeled the dress off and kicked it into a puddle on the floor, stumbling panicked into his own pants, belt, shirt. The ballerina figurine sat poised on the counter, witness to the whole scene.

  He needed to leave.

  Shoving the ballerina in his pocket, Cameron considered the dress, lying crumpled and torn on the tile—it felt wrong to put it back in Lucinda’s closet, so he stuffed it under the bathroom sink, folding it morbidly over a damp, rusty pipe.

  The angles in the Hayeses’ house were all wrong. The stairs were too steep. The upstairs was drenched in that oppressive emptiness, the downstairs bustling with the show that went along with it.

  He yearned for sunlight, for a space that did not belong to his desolate love.

  Cameron’s Collection of Statue Nights had documented a lot of afternoons, evenings, and nights, but he only saw Lucinda touch herself once.

  Cameron knew this night was different from the others in his Collection of Statue Nights when Lucinda pressed an ear to her bedroom door. She murmured into the phone. She wore a baggy gray T-shirt and a pair of cotton shorts with small blue flowers embroidered across the seams, like the tiny blossoms that sprouted between sidewalk cracks.

  Lucinda climbed onto her bed. She lay on her back and bent her knees, tapping bare feet against the comforter, laughing and shaking her head no to the person on the line. After four minutes and twelve seconds, Lucinda reached her hand into the seam of her pajama shorts.

  She pulled the shorts halfway down; Cameron could see the V of her hips, where they melted into the hill of her pelvic bone. He couldn’t tell which underwear she wore, but the insides were lacy black. A small patch of shocking dark hair sprouted from beneath her stretching palm.

  Cameron tried to look at something else, anything else, as Lucinda started to explore, slowly at first, hand twisting in tender circles. But in the entirety of the neighborhood, Lucinda was the only light and the only motion.

  Lucinda’s hand moved in circles. Her back arched. She was starting a fire somewhere he could not see, a flicker of blue heat that rumbled up. Her long, thin toes were flexed, her legs spread butterfly against the bed. Cameron wondered, at what point do two people stop being two people—when do you become one entity, one conjoined thing that pulses together? When do you become one motion, building to reach, furthering, furthering? He didn’t know the answer, but he wanted to be that with Lucinda as she bent toward the warmth of her own fingers, her lungs expanding and contracting, the back of her head pressing hard into the pillow, dainty neck so stripped and vulnerable. If Cameron could have asked Lucinda anything in the world right then, it would not be who she was talking to, or why she did this for the voice on the other end of the line.

  He would ask: Where does that bring you, my girl—can I hold you by the neck, be a part of this creature thing?

  In his entire life, Cameron had done only one landscape painting, and that was Pine Ridge Point.

  Everything above looked bigger from Pine Ridge Point, and everything below looked smaller, and Cameron thought this was how the world should have been shaped all along. Good things always came from above. For this reason, he could not imagine a better place to go when it was time for things to end. There was a place like this in Hum, he was sure, and he’d spend all his evenings there, watching the sun bow and retreat. Lucinda would sit next to him in her favorite purple skirt, blooming full.

  Look, Cameron would say. Don’t you see how weightless we are?

  Jade

  “How’d it go?” Ma says as I kick off my boots at the front door. “You look terrible.”

  In my bedroom, I move aside a mountain of dirty clothes and flop into the ball of blanket stuffed between the mattress and the wall. I lie like this. Time hovers over me, unsure of itself.

  “Hey.”

  Amy stands outside my door. She has changed into a plain flannel shirt—she looks younger than I’ve seen her in years. She’s taken off all her funeral makeup, and for once, you can see her freckles. Her orange hair is pulled into a sloppy bun, and she pads across my carpet, feet bare. When we were kids, I used to read Amy a book before bed; she’d climb into my bed in her pilled Little Mermaid nightgown, sucking her thumb as she tucked herself under my arm. Amy almost looks like this now, with the eyeliner gone, hair knotted at the base of her neck.

  “Go away,” I tell her. “Did I say you could come in here?”

  Amy ignores me. She sits on the foot of my bed, crossing her legs beneath her.

  “I’m sad,” she says.

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

  A Screenplay by Jade Dixon-Burns

  INT. CELLY’S BEDROOM—DAY

  Sister sits on the edge of Celly’s bed, her back against the headboard.

  SISTER

  I’m sad.

  CELLY

  (fed up)

  Jesus.

  SISTER

  What?

  CELLY

  You think sadness is something you can hide behind. I’m tired of it.

  Sister’s eyes well.

  CELLY (CONT’D)

  It’s not just you. It’s everyone. Everyone’s grief. You can’t truly grieve over someone you didn’t understand, Sister. None of you can. And I won’t. So please, don’t ask me to.

  “I’m sad,” Amy says.

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Come on. You’re not sorry.”

  “Fine. I’m not.”

  She glances at the dead moth in my windowsill—it’s been there for months, and every day it gets lighter in color as the sun turns it slowly to dust.

  “Do you think he did it?” she asks. “The art teacher? You had him in school. You know him.”

  “I don’t know, Amy. Why are you asking me all these questions?”

  “Just looking for the truth.”

  “Fuck the truth.”

  “You don’t get it, do you? You can’t just say ‘fuck the truth’ and sit there like you don’t care. Lucinda was murdered. That’s a huge thing.”

  “I guess.”

  “So that’s why the truth is important. And why I’m sad.”

  For the smallest second, I want to tell her about Zap. I want to unload the past two years on Amy, the pretty sister, the one with the light step, the one with friends, the sister free of violent outbursts due to insecurity. I want her to carry some of the weight, to help me hold up my own miserable head. But Amy and I aren’t like that anymore.

  She picks at a cuticle.

  I reach for the stereo on my nightstand and turn on “Death by Escalator.” This does it. Amy gives me her classic glare, and over the deafening drums and screaming vocals, she glides out of my bedroom. The music is so loud I can’t tell if she slams the door.

  I am very alone.

  I pull open one curtain.

  Usually when I watch Lucinda’s window, it’s with a combination of fascination, hatred, and jealousy. Today is different. There’s guilt, of course, but more than that. Three days ago Lucinda was brushing her hair in front of the mirror and untangling the laces of her ballet shoes, and now her body is being processed in
the basement of the Broomsville County Hospital. I think how lonely it must be down there, and I wonder if, wherever Lucinda is now, she can feel how much everyone loves her.

  Pulling the curtain wide, I watch the reception going on below. People mill around the main floor of the Hayeses’ house, and upstairs, Lex lies alone on her bed. The door is shut and a striped towel is stuffed beneath the frame. She has an arm over her eyes. Next door to Lex’s, Lucinda’s room should be empty, but it isn’t. A figure slides clumsily into view.

  I know the wrinkled collar of his shirt. And the way he walks—cautious and hunched, like he doesn’t think he deserves to be standing.

  The clock reads 3:41 p.m. Before I can question why Cameron is in Lucinda’s bedroom instead of downstairs—or why he’s gone to this reception at all—he disappears into the part of Lucinda’s room I can’t see from my window. He doesn’t reappear until ten minutes later, when I see him fast-walking down the driveway, sweat-shirt hood pulled over his forehead, arms crossed like he’s holding something heavy.

  Sadness washes over me for the first time since all this started. I think of Zap and his grown, foreign shoulders, of Mr. O locked in a holding cell, of Lucinda sneaking out her bedroom window late that night. And finally, of Cameron. How he waited—he calculated that full minute before sprinting after her in the night. I think he loved her, he really did.

  Everyone’s looking for the truth. I’m so afraid I’ll have to pry open its grave.

  “Jade.” Ma comes into my room moments later, as I’m picking the polish off my nails. It comes off in chunks of shining, glittering black. “We’re giving to the church garage sale to raise funds for Lucinda’s family.”

  She holds a giant plastic container filled with my old stuff, dug up from the depths of the basement.

  “Now?” I say.

  “Now,” she says. “We’ll bring it all over tonight. Last chance for anything you want to keep.”