Girl in Snow Read online

Once, during those first weeks, Mr. Thornton came home drunk. I could tell he was wasted from how he whistled under his breath, off pitch and unnervingly cheery. I was in the living room with Ollie when he came in, tie hanging open, the first three buttons of his shirt undone. He sang to himself in the doorway, eyes closed, arms held to support an invisible girl in an invisible waltz while Puddles ran excited circles around his legs.

  Ollie cried. Loud. Every day. Eve got sicker and sicker, until she was gone, for the most part, just a locked door at the end of the upstairs hall.

  A few days after the waltz, the figurine disappeared.

  I didn’t think anything of it.

  Now, the signs from the dead. Not signs at all. Just the world, turning as it does.

  “Cameron,” I say, careful to keep my voice even. “I don’t think you’re someone bad.”

  Lying flat in his palm like a peace offering or a cold fish: the gun. A few more words of explanation: I saw, Cameron said. He hit her, and then she was so still.

  One motion, exaggeratedly slow—I slide my hand over the gun. When Cameron looks at me, it feels like surrender: he does not protest. The gun is heavier than I expect, metal warm from where it has kissed his skin.

  “Come on,” I say, thinking of the inconspicuous times Mr. Thornton had asked Lucinda to babysit instead of me. “Let’s get you home.”

  It’s like all those nights with Ma. Her purple wine teeth, the chill of the wall behind me, the endless wait for the blow to come. Sometimes it comes, sometimes it doesn’t—but in those moments of wait, there is always fear. Fear and I do such a familiar dance. Even tonight. But now, I help Cameron stand up and I do not feel like my usual self, cowered in a corner, waiting for the punch or the slap or the shove to take away the scared. No; I am taller. I am the one who holds.

  Ma’s bruises spread across my legs, and I poke them, bare in the cold.

  Pain. Bearable.

  We stumble down the melting mountain. Cameron can hardly walk: he smells like musty soil and urine. It’s soaked through his pants and down his leg. I hold the gun, Cameron leaning against me.

  We are an accident. Strangers. Both at fault, in theory. In actuality, the irony makes my hands tremble. Cameron doesn’t notice. He’s breathing fast, a panting dog, and his hair is stuck to his forehead. His breath is stale—I turn away.

  It’s almost funny: you think you matter to someone. They’re the center of your universe, the sun you revolve around. You’d give anything for their details. You inch closer, closer, with tentative steps. You can walk as far as you want, but it won’t matter. You’re not even on their map.

  We are not the killers. We are silly kids. Casualties.

  Russ

  Russ stretches out of the car. He has been here too long, at the base of the cliff, forehead on the steering wheel, counting heartbeats. His legs are sore from sitting; when he climbs out, feeling returns to his thighs. Pocketing his keys, Russ slams the door and raises his arms above his head. The pull of muscle wakes him. The evening is so cold—he should have brought his gloves, maybe a hat. A semi truck rumbles past, and Russ coughs in the exhaust.

  The sun has just begun to set. The color: snowy tangerine.

  Russ scuffles up the hill. He’d like to see that view—the lake, ghostly serene, and the pinprick Broomsville lights lapping at his back. But Russ has not climbed this mountain in a very long time, and after a few yards he is panting. He wishes he had brought some water; freezing air aches in his throat. He can see his own labored breath.

  A sound. Voices.

  Russ is only halfway up when two figures appear at the top. One limps, the other supports. A boy and a girl—young. Hey! Russ calls, but neither of them answers.

  The boy wears a hoodie. His slacks are wet around the crotch. The girl holds a gun.

  When she sees Russ, the girl waves him forward. He scrambles to meet them on the incline, hands raised in a practiced surrender. Don’t shoot. The girl holds the gun by her side, almost a foot from her body, fist clenched around the barrel in a clear effort to avoid the trigger.

  Their faces sharpen: for a second, Russ sees Lee. Lee, those woman hands, the way he’d suck beer from the neck of a bottle and sweat clumped in beads that ran down the back of his scarlet-burned neck. Before Russ can consider that Lee has finally come back for him, the boy comes closer. Cameron, of course. A dark patch on his jeans—he is half comatose.

  The girl gives Russ the gun, and Russ nimbly empties the bullets into his pocket. No one speaks.

  Russ picks up Cameron like a daughter who has fallen asleep in the car. The boy is not heavy, but he is wet with his own urine, which leaks through the sleeves of Russ’s coat and onto the strong arms beneath as they take baby steps down the mountain.

  It wasn’t him, the girl says. Jade. Her hands are clasped in her lap as they wind down the foothills, past the stadium and the crumbling gas station. The polish on her fingers is picked at, a frame of black around each nail. A dark smear of marker slashes across her inner wrist. Cameron, in the back with Jade’s bike, stares out the window. Russ thought about putting the tarp from the trunk beneath Cameron’s soaking pants, but humiliation was not the game.

  Did you hear me? the girl says. Cameron didn’t kill Lucinda. It was her neighbor.

  I believe you, Russ says.

  As they near the station, he flips open his cell phone. Russ’s hands remember the number. Old choreography.

  Cynthia? he says when she picks up. I have him. He’s okay.

  When it’s over—when they’ve gotten the story from Cameron, who speaks in a shuddering voice, with tears racing brakeless down his cheeks—Cynthia comes to Russ by the drinking fountain.

  Russ, she says, battle-beaten beneath fluorescent lights. Thank you for bringing him home.

  Russ steps forward, wraps himself around her. Cynthia’s smell—lavender and lemongrass. After so many years.

  They stand this way for minutes, absorbing one another’s twin sadnesses, and Russ wishes with all his might that it were possible to go back to that day in the garden, to put his hands around Cynthia’s sun-sweating face and help her pull every single plant from the ground.

  Russ stays late for the paperwork while Detective Williams handles the neighbor and the chief handles the news vans. After a round of congratulations, everyone else has gone home. Russ is exhausted—he wanders into the break room for a cup of gritty coffee.

  The break room looks exactly like it did seventeen years ago. Russ imagines Lee sitting across from him at the folding card table, holding a hand of aces and smiling, fake innocent. Lee would put down his cards—they’d both burst into booming laughter. Come on, Lee would say. Rematch. I know you can do better than that. Russ would shake his head, joking angry. In his chest, a flight of springtime geese moving back north for the summer. Flapping home.

  Tonight, the memory feels less like a stab wound and more like a memory. Distant and unchangeable. A sighing reprieve. Russ stands at the gurgling coffee machine and thanks the years between then and now, a road the length of the country that separates Russ and that young fool self.

  Jade

  Everything happens for a reason, Mrs. Arnaud used to say. Zap told her this was stupid. That phrase gets you nowhere, he would say. It’s a logical fallacy. It’s like believing in the tooth fairy, simply to make you feel secure in your own existence. Sayings like these are safety blankets, he used to say. They’re pretexts.

  I partially disagree. I don’t think everything happens for a reason. Some things do, of course. There’s a reason Lucinda died. I don’t know it, and neither does Cameron. This is an impossible consolation.

  While we wait for Cameron’s mom at the police station, the receptionist gives him a clean pair of scrub pants. He comes out of the bathroom, too dazed to be embarrassed, and sits next to me on a chilly bench in the police department’s waiting room.

  Cameron’s sadness is a palpable thing, radiating from his curved spine, from the shadows beneath his
baggy hood.

  I take his hand, lacing my fingers between his. Cold sweat. We don’t speak. When Cameron’s mom comes bursting in, harried and tear-streaked, Cameron’s hand unclasps from mine, and it feels like waking from a long night of satisfying sleep. A parting that I recognize—for the first time since Lucinda died—as a sort of grief.

  Ma picks me up at the station.

  I’m waiting outside with my bike. She doesn’t say anything, just loads the bike into the trunk of the car, exerting more physical effort than I’ve seen from her in years. She slams the back door. Claps the slushy grime off her hands. Cars rush past the station and we stand in their tail wind, irreconcilable figures trying to ignore the nightfall breeze. Ma doesn’t have a jacket.

  “Officer Fletcher called,” she said. “You were with the Whitley boy, huh?”

  “Yeah.”

  “You should have talked to me first. I would have driven you here.”

  “No, you wouldn’t have.”

  “Don’t take that tone with me.”

  I’m about to tell her to fuck off when she steps forward, and then we’re hugging. I can’t remember the last time Ma and I touched like this. She smells like old cigarette smoke and orange Tic Tacs. I wrap my arms around her—plastic bra straps dig into her back, creating rolls I could grab in my fists.

  It’s over quickly. I walk to the side of the car, where Amy sits in the back; she’s saved me the passenger’s seat. When I slide in, Amy rolls her eyes and taps her long nails on the door’s inner handle. She tries to crane her neck to see into the police station without looking too interested.

  “I’ll tell you later,” I say to Amy. Tonight, we will curl up beneath my comforter and I will recount the story. I will tell her about Zap, the ritual, the gun, and the sunset sky. Amy will listen, twirling that red hair around her fingers. When I’m finished, she’ll press her chest against my back and we will lie there, our separate heartaches shaped different but wearing matching clothes.

  After I called Ma to pick me up, Officer Fletcher pulled me aside and said: You should know—you’re the hero of this story.

  Once Ma goes to bed, I sneak out the back door.

  Terry has assumed his usual position on the couch. They’ve been playing the same things on the news, over and over again. One of the victim’s neighbors, not yet identified, is now in custody as a prime suspect. Sources say the victim was engaged in an illicit relationship with an older neighbor. They zoom the camera in on Lieutenant Gonzalez, who coughs into his uniform sleeve and says things like: We’re doing everything in our power to bring justice to the Hayes family. Police cars have crowded the street in front of the Thorntons’ house. The neighbors across from us have gathered in their driveway, pajama-clad and curious, gossiping by the mailbox as lights flash red and blue across their faces.

  I sneak out of the neighborhood in the opposite direction. First, I go to see Howie.

  His stench dissipates in the winter. In the summer, pools of urine soak in the heat, and fermented clothes stick to his unwashed skin. But February—it’s not so bad. Howie is slumped against his usual wall, atop a mangy blanket. His face is badly sunburned, turned a glossy, cracked red. His right hand is splayed out, palm facing up: even in sleep, Howie knows how to ask for help.

  “Howie?” I say, not loud enough to wake him. “It’s me. It’s Celly.”

  I crouch down, wrapping my army parka close to keep out the wind.

  “I gotta tell you something,” I say, though it’s useless. He can’t hear me.

  “My name is Jade Dixon-Burns.”

  A line of ants crawls across the concrete, marching organized, one by one, somehow alive in the cold. I smash an ant with the thumb of my knitted glove, then regret it, rubbing its guts off with a crumpled sheet of newspaper.

  “I’m seventeen years old. I’m not moving to Paris. Also, I’m not in love. You should know that—I’m really not in love.”

  Howie doesn’t answer. Just lies there, unconscious, stuck in the stupor of last night’s whiskey.

  I thought maybe I’d feel lighter, or like a better person. In reality, I am only myself.

  I walk slow all the way home, taking the long way through the field behind my house, which has become a wall of night. I’m wearing fleece sweat pants and an old pair of insulated snow boots. Mittens with holes in both thumbs. It’s bitter out.

  When I get to the middle of the field, I feel very old.

  This place used to feel so much bigger. Endless, really. When Zap and I came here to watch the sky, it was like gazing at the edge of the world. Now, you can see the twinkling of the houses on the other side of the field, boring people living their boring lives. Although I’m not sure what to make of this darkness, it certainly is not infinite.

  Cameron

  After Cameron was home and showered, wearing clean sweat pants, he thought of sitting in front of Dad’s friends. The only relief had come when Russ Fletcher asked: Cameron, you watched her every night. How did you miss the signs of this? How did you miss an entire illicit relationship?

  The only explanation: Lucinda had hidden it until she couldn’t anymore. She’d known Cameron was there, counting his own exhales on the lawn. In that notion, he found just an ounce of comfort. U terrify me. She had written of windows, of glass—and not necessarily of Cameron.

  Cameron thought of last August. Of Lucinda standing in Mom’s bathroom, dabbing Mom’s gardenia perfume onto her wrists, Mr. Thornton’s animal laugh echoing from the driveway.

  Russ

  When Russ gets home from the longest day, he does not expect to find Ines. She is knitting in bed, eyes puffed and pink.

  At first, he is angry. Then, only tired. Russ sits next to her and the mattress sinks.

  Are you okay? Ines asks.

  I lied to you, too, Russ says.

  When? Ines asks.

  That day in California, Russ says. When I told you I had never loved someone before.

  Ines throws her legs from beneath the comforters and pulls a pack of cigarettes from the nightstand. Russ has never seen Ines smoke. They lean out the bedroom window, and she lights one for each of them. Ines in her nightshirt, Russ in his starchy, pressed police uniform.

  It started seventeen years ago, he tells her, and from there, he is racing. He tells Ines all the things he has never spoken of, pinkies on pinkies and how a gesture so small could feel so explosive. By the time they get to Cameron, hours have passed, and they’re both slumped against the wall beneath the bedroom window.

  Ines does not speak for a while. Russ wonders if she is angry. If maybe she has always been angry, and this he has mistaken for passivity, complacency. No way to know. Russ has always been the one with the badge, the one with the gun. Her only weapon: silence.

  Come on, Ines says. I think we need some air.

  She pulls him into the bathroom. Opens the window and wriggles the screen from its frame, gesturing with the pack of cigarettes. Russ realizes, pathetic, that he has never been on his own roof.

  They sit on the shingles. The bedroom comforter keeps them warm. Ines tells Russ her own stories: how she got to America. A drive by herself in a used Camry she would later sell to one of Ivan’s friends, and a border-control officer who glared and waved her through. She tells him again how Ivan had never been a criminal back home, but he couldn’t find a job here after his own tourist visa had run up, and he needed money to keep working with the church. Ivan had just begun when Russ and his friends busted the house on Fulcrum Street.

  She tells him what she has spent her days doing, these past few married years. Skyping home, planning a trip back, arguing with Ivan and petitioning for his citizenship, this man who loved the country that had imprisoned him, who had brilliant ideas about how he would fix it. She would stay for the church, she’d promised Ivan. They were helping people. They were trying to find the money for a better space, and they already had donations from the parents of the children she tutored. There is a new church opening where a
Rite Aid used to be, and Ines has been campaigning for the funding to share the space with the owners. Ines has already told Marco all of these things—he has listened. Listened, inquired further, listened, empathized, listened, known her.

  Do you hate me? Russ asks her.

  A little bit, Ines tells him. But maybe you should hate me, too.

  I guess.

  I will be leaving, she tells Russ. You understand?

  I know, he says.

  Did you truly think that Ivan did this? Did you truly think he could have killed Lucinda?

  Probably not, Russ says.

  I like to think you never believed it, Ines says. You made him a monster.

  Probably, Russ repeats.

  They smoke the whole pack of cigarettes as the sun rises up from the plains, washing everything in glow and gold. From the roof, Russ can see all the way to the end of the cul-de-sac, where housing developments turn to open fields. Though he knows that Ines will leave, and that this will needle its own pointed hurt, he takes Ines’s small hand and rests it on his abdomen, beneath his shirt, which stinks of the day. She does not protest. The reassurance of palm skin—gentle, a salve—right where a rotting secret used to be buried.

  Russ wakes at three in the afternoon. Ines is long gone—she did not come to bed with him.

  When Russ goes downstairs for coffee, he finds her everywhere. Yarn: a trail of Ines. Up the stairs, across the front hall, a tangled pile covering the dining-room table like moss. Ines, in colors like fuchsia and mustard and forest green. Russ goes from room to room, opening all the blinds in the house to better see.

  Years of carefully stitched Ines, undone and shapeless, one last act of defiance. She has unraveled it all, the whole closet of hand-knitted sweaters, blankets, hats, socks. In this sense, at least, Russ knows his wife—this is her mercy, and her revenge.