Girl in Snow Page 21

  She leaves the container open next to my bed.

  Old clothes, from seventh and eighth grade. Outdated bell-bottomed jeans, the occasional stuffed animal. I dig through the junk—I don’t want to remember this time in my life, or really, any time in my life.

  And then, at the bottom of the box: the third sign from Lucinda Hayes.

  The Token.

  It’s a small gift box, from a cheap pair of department-store earrings. Pearly pink, lined with foam. When I pull the box out, I refuse to cry. Don’t, don’t, don’t.

  The shell feels exactly how it used to, curled gracefully in my palm. The shell Zap gave me so many years ago, the one that lived under my pillow, with memorized ridges and folds, which I’d touch just to remember: One day, we’ll go away together. One day, we’ll get out of here. One day. It is smaller in my hand now, and only slightly less beautiful. This afternoon, the shell is just a shell from a beach in France. A doll’s ear. Whispered promise, lost to the wind.

  The Token.

  You’re supposed to act after three signs. You have to. A third sign is a last chance.

  On my bike, Broomsville isn’t so limiting, or constrictive. Just a corner of the world, with whitewashed people and fuming mountains. The houses race backwards, a suburban conveyer belt, until I’ve reached the highway that winds up into the foothills.

  I remember all those playdates with Lex and Lucinda. Lucinda was never cruel to me—just indifferent. And who am I to hate someone for not giving a shit? As Broomsville rushes past, I recall shy smiles and vague offers of lemonade, Lucinda handing me the remote so I could pick the last half hour of television before Ma came to retrieve us. Small things that did not count as friendship, but had to count for something.

  And I remember what Cameron said, about places you go when you’re feeling locked inside yourself, and I go there—not for me, or Zap, or even Cameron. For her. This stupid, perfect girl with the inexplicable misfortune of being dead. I go because I am alive, and she is not, and there must be some cosmic reason for this.

  It’s this cliff, up in the mountains. It’s very calm.

  Russ

  When Russ comes home from the station, Ines is standing at the refrigerator. The rusty door hangs open, the only light in the house. The page from Love in the Time of Cholera is still trapped beneath a magnet, faded, with curling edges. From behind, Ines could be anyone. Her hair hangs in a sheet down her back.

  Russ had left in the middle of interrogating the art teacher—no explanation. A frantic need to get out from beneath the station lights.

  Ines? Russ asks now, soft.

  When Ines turns around, tears bubble in her lashes. Something is terribly wrong. She looks very sad to Russ, who holds his car keys too tight in his fist. The kitchen, all shadows.

  What’s wrong? he asks.

  Russ, she says, a quake. There’s something I need to tell you.

  Ines slumps against the refrigerator door, next to a crusty bottle of mustard and a liter of flat Pepsi. Russ, she says again, this time an apology, a word she has knitted, soft, just for him. Behind her, a solitary bell pepper wilts in the vegetable drawer.

  They’d started meeting months ago, at the Hilton Ranch hotel bar, to talk about Ivan. Marco had just started his program at the community college, and he knew all about tuition loans and applications—maybe this was the next step for Ivan. He could put all his philosophy to practical use. Marco suggested social work.

  It just happened from there, Ines tells Russ. I am sorry.

  Russ gathers his keys, wallet, jacket. Before he leaves, he asks his wife one thing.

  Do you love him?

  Though Russ knows the answer. Maybe instead, he should have asked—Do you love me? But Ines is weeping into her hands now.

  Do you love Marco? Russ repeats, one hand on the door.

  A stranger asked me that just last night, Ines says. I did not know until then, but yes, I think so. I think I do.

  Russ took Ines up to the cliff in the mountains. Lee’s birthday, five years after he left.

  They got out of the car on that winding forest road, and Ines was shivering, so Russ gave her his police jacket. They made the hike hand in hand. When they got to the top, Ines gasped. Russ had almost forgotten the beauty of the place, the reservoir spreading beneath the cliff, glassy and sanguine. The city on the other side, unimpressive clusters of beige homes.

  It’s beautiful, Ines said.

  I know, Russ said. This used to be my favorite spot.

  Used to be? Ines said.

  Russ nodded, left it at that. He wrapped his arms around his wife’s waist and breathed in her familiar scent. Top of the scalp. Ines, so warm against his torso, fleshy and malleable. It was late afternoon; the sun pierced the sky like an open sore. It hadn’t rained in over a month, and the reservoir was slowly ebbing to a cracked, dry crater.

  Russ tried not to think of Lee, as Ines kissed his neck. But the memory of this place. He laid Ines down on a flat stretch of dusty earth and lowered himself on top of her. She laughed, pinned beneath him. Right here? Out in the open?

  Only if you want to, Russ said, and he traced the side of her cheek with a hangnail thumb.

  I want to, she told him.

  Russ gave a part of himself to the woman in the dirt, the same lactic muscle that had loved and snapped before. She took that fragile, aching thing. Kissed it lightly. When Russ came, he cried. Collapsed on top of her. Ines held his face in both hands and sucked the tears from the corners of his eyes.

  They never spoke of it again, and they never went back to the cliff. Ines didn’t ask what had cracked Russ open. She had made her move in this long game they played, this strategic withholding of crucial information. Russ was thankful she had not asked, that she had left that vast black-hole distance between them. Secrets remained secrets. Wife remained wife. Someday, he would tell her, Russ vowed, as they shuffled back down the mountain, sticky and bleary and stunned. He thought of that night, in California. Tell me about the people you’ve loved. Someday, Russ would, and when he brought her back up to the cliff in the mountains, it would just be the two of them—Ines and Russ and the wind over the lake. No ghosts.

  The night Lee fled, he did not go straight from the car dealership to the highway. No, Lee pulled into Russ’s driveway, hat yanked low on his forehead. Green T-shirt, cargo shorts. Flip-flops.

  They stood in the front hall of Russ’s house. This was before Ines, of course; Russ had not cleaned the kitchen in months, and the mice chattered through the walls and cupboards.

  Where will you go? Russ asked, when the silence had crept between them and placed one clammy hand on each of their throats. No air.

  West, Lee said. Does it matter?

  It did not matter.

  Take care of my boy, will you? Lee said.

  Okay, Russ told him. Okay.

  There was nothing else to say. A hug would have been unbearable, a handshake too distant, so Lee just shrugged at Russ.

  All right, then, Lee said.

  And he was gone.

  Only when Lee’s car had groaned out of the driveway and Russ’s house was its filthy self again—then, Russ wanted to ask. How could you do it? It wasn’t a question of whether Lee had committed the crime. No, he wanted to ask: How could you do this to me?

  He wanted to know how Lee had hidden such devastating darkness, how he had allowed that darkness to briefly escape its chains. How, in this newly shifted world, Russ could understand the nature of violence. Because Lee’s specific violence—futile and needless—was something Russ could not possibly forgive.

  Now, Russ does the only thing that will calm him: he gets in his squad car. Revs the engine, which sputters in the cold. Changes the radio to the local FM station, where the news reports about the investigation—substantial leads, still no arrest.

  Russ’s phone rings four times in a row. His pager buzzes on the dashboard. Russ should go back to the station house, but instead he turns onto the road that will
take him to the mountains.

  It is Ivan Russ thinks about now, Ivan and his sermon on evil. If evil does not exist, how do you explain that broken little dove on the playground carousel—how do you explain Lee Whitley?

  The mountains are cool and angular in the distance. Russ takes the highway route—he will not pass the station. Instead, his parents’ old house, just off the shoulder of Exit 265.

  He thinks of Ines and the home they have tried hesitantly to build: Of the corners of their house, where balls of dust and hair have clumped and a halfhearted vacuum refuses to reach. Of the tattered T-shirt Ines sleeps in, even after Russ bought her that silk nightgown for Christmas. When she opened the package she stroked it gently, said thank you, and put it back in the box. Russ has not seen it since. Ines, and how she eats her food without looking up, scooping each bite evenly onto her fork. Ines, and their separate worlds, lived together on the couch at night in distant but companionable silence—Russ, because he wants a body near his own; Ines, because of her brother. Both, because it is easy enough.

  Russ’s hands and feet steer him forward. Past the reservoir. Up into the foothills.

  The mountains are on their knees, begging him home.

  Cameron

  Mom was in the kitchen. Through the back window, she looked like anyone else: another neighbor picking fat leaves off a potted basil plant. Through glass, she didn’t seem so sad. Just old, and very tired.

  Cameron took the usual route into his bedroom: hoisted himself from the planter beneath his window until he was holding the ledge with both hands, like someone falling off a cliff. He kicked his legs against the side of the house for traction and heaved himself through the open window frame.

  He took off his muddy shoes beneath the window. Creeping down the hall in browning socks, he listened to make sure Mom was still in the kitchen. She’d turned on the radio, soft jazz, and the deep grumble of a saxophone slid through the narrow hall. Mom did not sing to herself. She did not hum.

  Mom’s room was messy. Floral sheets were balled up at the foot of her bed, and mugs with hardened teabags at the bottom gathered on her nightstand, where she kept her current books: The Secret About Positive Thinking and Child Psychology and Development for Dummies. Cameron knelt next to her bed and pulled the wooden box from underneath.

  The .22 was in its hiding spot. It lay in its broken lockbox, buried treasure.

  Cameron picked it up, careful not to touch any dangerous parts. Mom had stored a box of Aguila copper-plated bullets in the small compartment underneath the main carriage of the box. Cameron left them there—judging by the weight of the handgun and the tension on the trigger, it was still loaded.

  Cameron edged the gun carefully into the back waistband of his jeans. The .22 was safe between his pants and his boxer shorts. Metal was still cold through cotton.

  Before Cameron left, he checked Mom’s bathroom. If Lucinda was ever going to come back to him, he hoped she would come back now. But the bathroom was just the bathroom, with grime gathered in the sink and the cracked yellow bar of soap lying in its plastic tray.

  I don’t understand how you draw from memory, Mom had said once, as Cameron spread his art supplies across the living-room floor. He’d been working on a portrait of a dancer. How do you hold on to all the details?

  Cameron had shrugged and said, I guess I can’t figure out how to lose them.

  Now, Mom sat at the head of the kitchen table, late-winter light falling over her in gracious yellow rays. She hovered over a rectangular sheet of paper. One feather hand was cupped over her mouth. She’d turned the stereo off, and now she was bent over the version of Lucinda smashed on the carousel.

  The painting of Hum hung right above Mom and Lucinda—a reassurance.

  Cameron pulled a chair from the left side of the table, scraping it across the hardwood floor. He sat next to Mom, and together they examined the portrait of Lucinda.

  Even here, Lucinda looked very beautiful. Mom thought so, too. He could tell from the way her eyes roved over black patches, places where Cameron had etched the charcoal so dark he’d pressed cavities into the skin of the real, living girl. And the white parts, where the sun from the kitchen window hit her clean paper skin, where her contours filled themselves out, where her jaw jutted out over her neck. Those staring eyes—even here, crevasse and unseeing, Lucinda was a vision. She was a brilliant combination of light and dark. Shadow and its resulting counterpart. She was luminescent.

  “Cameron,” Mom said. “Tell me what this is. Please, sweetie. I need to hear it from you.”

  “I’m sorry,” Cameron said to Mom, because he was. “I need to be alone in my room for a little while.”

  Mom didn’t answer, only shook her head at ruined Lucinda. Her jaw was trembling, and her hands were wrapped tight around a mug of tea to stop their shaking.

  Cameron didn’t like to touch, but he stretched his arm around Mom anyway. He tried to hold her up, but her sinewy arms and neck and collarbone all sank toward the table. At his touch, Mom’s eyes filled. Cameron pulled away. He didn’t want to make her cry.

  He wanted to tell her good-bye and that he loved her, but instead he studied her gaunt profile. Cameron remembered how Dad used to watch her, and he tried to see the same. Mom had such graceful lines.

  Cameron cupped a palm to the back of her neck, like how you were supposed to hold a baby, then left Mom at the table with her sadness.

  The outer edges of Broomsville were flat and open. Run-down houses sprouted off the highway, with their beat-up trucks and collapsing barns, threadbare American flags waving to empty space. People out here lived differently: they sat on old couches and watched fuzzy television and drank homemade iced tea. The houses faded into the landscape. The people faded with them.

  Cameron walked these roads to get to the base of Pine Ridge Point. Half an hour, just over a mile. His black ski jacket was layered over his sweat shirt, layered over the gun.

  He climbed without thinking. He refused to look back as he scuffled up the side of the hill in his stiff dress pants, his shiny black funeral shoes sliding across the rocks. Pebbles toppled down the mountain behind him, miniature landslides.

  It was only 4:45 p.m. when Cameron reached Pine Ridge Point. He’d wanted to watch the sky melt to black, but it would be an unforgiving blue for another half hour still. Cameron had that sacred feeling in his bones—a feeling you could only get at the top of a mountain, when the wind was blowing and you were alone.

  If Cameron could answer Janine now, he would tell her yes, he was much happier alone than with other people. With other people, you couldn’t feel like this—like a part of the lake, spread hapless beneath you. Still as a photograph. You could only wonder how it felt to be a mountain. To stand, so sure like that.

  In the other direction, red roofs were speckled white with dandruff snow. That was Broomsville: a set of Monopoly pieces placed carefully in clusters around the sprawling plains. And beyond that: more plains. And beyond that: the horizon. And beyond that: he didn’t know. The ocean, somewhere. More people. He thought of Dad, but not for long.

  Cameron staggered, panting, to the edge of the cliff. The drop was only twenty feet—below that, landing after landing that led down to the water. Cameron sat on a small rock, near where the land turned into air, and pulled the porcelain ballerina from his pocket. She had survived the climb. Pristine. He balanced the ballerina in his palm, which was covered in red soil, and he thought about how somewhere out there, beyond this festering town, other people had killed. He wondered what they killed for. Compulsion, maybe. Or like in the movies: people killed for sex, or for money.

  Cameron was relieved to think that if, indeed, he had killed—it had been for a monstrous love.

  Two days before she died, Lucinda loved him in the yard.

  He’d been a Statue only twenty minutes when she slid open her bedroom window and popped out the screen.

  Cameron had always believed you could sense when things were over. I
nside you. In the air around you. Now, the streetlights were humming, and Cameron had the distinct notion that after this moment, he would exist in a different era.

  Lucinda lifted her right hand and held it there, a solemn wave. Her lips curled up, into a smile meant only for him.

  Cameron had never felt so full. They were connected, they were undeniable.

  She was a bird, perched and curious. He stretched his arm out. He waited.

  Pine Ridge Point was like the middle of your favorite song—between the bridge and the chorus, where you held your breath and waited for the inevitable boom of music to take you away. Wind rustled through

  the branches of the pine trees, soft hands on sharp needles. Everything converged in a rattle, a combination of consonant melodies, a series of songs for Lucinda.

  Cameron could hear all the words she would not say. The shoulders she would not touch. The strawberries she would not eat. The number of times a day she would not blink. The glasses of lemonade she would not drink, the white nail polish she would not spread across her fingernails, the millions of shades of reds and oranges and pinks she would not see, tucking themselves quietly into bed behind the mountains.

  Things Cameron Asked Himself:

  How do you explain the badness inside you?

  White flame sun in his pupils, Cameron pulled the .22 from his waistband. He swore if he lived through this day, he would not say another word to another human for the rest of his life, not even if that word was “sorry.”

  Jade

  Kids at school refer to the cliff in passing. It’s a revered make-out spot—the cliffs are tall, but not dangerously so. It overlooks the reservoir, and at night the moon hangs over the water like a single burning bulb. Last year, I came up here with Jimmy Kessler. His mouth was a suction cup, and he tasted like sour milk. When I got home, I took a long shower—the water ran cold as Ma pounded on the door.