Girl in Snow Read online

  I pull out the bologna sandwich Ma packed and turn up the volume in my headphones. I’ve long been obsessed with the Crucibles’ first album, from 1986. It’s smash punk, not quite screamo. But today, “Death by Escalator” makes me think of Lucinda’s tan little body draped over the edge of the carousel. How I imagine it: her shiny nails drag in the dirt, blood is matted in her hair, her lips are frosty blue—

  I yank the headphones out. I try to breathe normally, but I can’t remember how normal feels. A bouncy blond girl from the freshman student council approaches Danny Hartfeld with a piece of paper. He nods. Signs.

  She starts toward me. With the headphones away from my ears, “Death by Escalator” is just static noise. The bass, the drums, all of it: gone. Lost in this distant, screaming buzz.

  “Hi,” the girl says to me, enthusiastic. She holds out a manila envelope and a neon-purple Sharpie. “We’re sending a card to the family of Lucinda Hayes. Sign to show your support?”

  “No thanks,” I say.

  “Are you sure?” she says. “Just your name?”

  “No thanks,” I say. I glare until she turns away.

  I’ve only seen photos of New York City at sunset. Waning honey light paints the buildings, a golden wash. Skyscraper lights flicker on one by one—pinprick samples of every sort of life possible beyond this one.

  It’s Lucinda Hayes’s fault that I have two jobs: babysitting for the Thorntons and housekeeping at the Hilton Ranch.

  People leave traces of themselves in hotel rooms. Crumpled tissues, earplugs covered in sticky wax, the occasional condom. Last month, I found a digital camera. Last week, a love letter.

  Querida, querida,

  You are an ocean, and I dream only of salt. When I wake, you are sand in the cracks between my teeth.

  —Madly

  They come in every Tuesday. Madly comes at six thirty, Querida follows at seven. I think they’re in their late twenties, but who knows. Ma says love takes years off a woman’s skin.

  Every Tuesday, they check into a room—Aunt Nellie gives Madly a swipe key, smacking her gum and smiling conspiratorially. He waits in the fake-leather armchair by the window until Querida shows up, her battered purse slung over one shoulder. Querida is pretty in the way of a woman who does not try to be pretty. She wears no makeup; some lumpy knitted hat, and her T-shirts are too tight (but this seems like an accident). It’s how she smiles—shy at first, as she compulsively twists a lock of long black hair. You can practically see her heart jumping out of her chest.

  They walk to the elevator, shy. Madly lifts her chin carefully, with one finger, and Querida blushes scarlet. They talk at a safe distance—like they’re afraid they’ll burst into flame.

  The night Lucinda died, Aunt Nellie and I shook our heads from the reception desk until the elevator doors dinged shut. Aunt Nellie turned to me, like she had suddenly remembered I was there.

  “Jade, are we paying you to stand here and gossip?”

  It wasn’t gossip because we hadn’t said anything, but I gathered my cleaning cart anyway. I’d spent the previous two hours constructing a pyramid out of toilet-paper rolls, and now I had to be careful crossing doorframes. The pyramid was wavering, precarious. I trundled the cart past the housekeeping supply closet and into the staff elevator, where I caught a glimpse of myself in the mirrored doors as they closed.

  I was the furthest thing from a woman in love. Drowning in the folds of my maintenance polo, bleach-stained apron pulled too tight across my waist. My hair wrestled its way out of a ponytail, and makeup pooled beneath my eyes.

  Every Tuesday, I push my cart into the room that shares a wall with Querida and Madly’s and I hold my breath until I go half blind. I never hear a thing. I can only imagine how they sound, all gasping whispers, the careful hush of skin on skin. The night Lucinda died, I stood in a room that had already been cleaned and wondered how it would feel to be touched like that. Eager and desperate.

  Ma’s shrink says I suffer from a debilitating lack of direction. Most of the time, this doesn’t feel as bad as it sounds. But sometimes, I’ll wake in the middle of the night, terrified for no reason. Once, I dreamed of The Birth of Venus and I woke up crying because of her marble skin. The hillside curve of her. I took a sip of water from a plastic cup, even though it had been sitting on my nightstand for days.

  Querida, querida, I thought, and this made things better.

  I like hotel rooms. Humans are disgusting, every single one of them. Even Querida. After I found the love letter in Room 304, I pulled a clump of black hair the size of a roach from the shower drain.

  When I come home from school three hours early, Ma isn’t supposed to be there. She volunteers on Wednesdays at the animal rescue down the street so she can call herself a nurse at book club.

  “What are you doing here?” I ask.

  The oven clock reads 12:47 p.m. Ma sits with her legs propped up on the kitchen table, reading HGTV Magazine. Cigarette smoke uncurls in the early-afternoon light, spiraling above her dyed chestnut hair like DNA.

  “Personal day,” she says. “It’s all so sad. Did you come home because of the news?”

  Ma stubs the cigarette out on a marble coaster and leaves the butt there, ringed in greasy red lipstick.

  “News?”

  “People have been calling all morning. They think they already have the fucker who did this.”

  “Who was it?”

  “You know that boy down the street? Cameron Whitley? His dad was Lee Whitley, that rogue cop from a few years back.”

  She smiles. Ma loves being the one with this information. I’m disgusted by her faded lipstick, curled over yellow cigarette teeth. She wears a revealing silk bathrobe with soup dribbled down the front, patterned with Japanese cranes, the outline of her sagging breasts clear beneath thin fabric. Often, I’m certain that Ma is the worst person in the world. Other times, I pity her.

  “Oh,” she says. “Chris Thornton called. He knows it’s last minute, but I told him you have the night off from the hotel. Can you babysit tonight?”

  “No.”

  “I already told him you would. He sounded rushed; you could go over now.”

  “I don’t want to.”

  “That’s not an answer.”

  “Fuck off, Ma.”

  “Nice work—you’re grounded. And you’re going to babysit. That man’s wife is very sick; you know better than anyone. I don’t know how I raised such a selfish brat.”

  “Takes one to know one.”

  “Go.”

  Chris Thornton comes to the door in a T-shirt and jeans. I’ve only ever seen him wearing a suit and tie (he works a fancy job in downtown Denver). His wife, Eve, isn’t home—she’s usually at the hospital, or in Longmont with her parents, or locked upstairs with the curtains shut. About a year and a half ago, right after the baby was born, Eve Thornton was diagnosed with something serious. Cancer, I think, though people always whisper when they talk about it.

  “Thanks so much for doing this, Jade,” Mr. Thornton says, and he gestures at the back door, toward the playground. “Ollie’s daytime sitter canceled, and I haven’t gotten any work done.”

  He hands Ollie—short for Olivia—over casually, like a jug of water, and mumbles about putting her to bed at seven; he’ll be back later. He slings a gym bag over his shoulder and rushes to shut the door.

  Ollie is not a pretty baby. Her face is a soft tomato, red and wrinkled like a newborn alien’s, even though she is nearly eighteen months old now. When Chris Thornton’s car is safely out of the driveway, I carry the baby upstairs, where the hall is still stacked with half-unpacked boxes from their move here two years ago. Puddles, their gray, loping terrier, nips at my heels all the way up the stairs. Puddles’s eyebrows are so long she can barely see, and she’s probably older than me. I can’t imagine why you’d name a dog Puddles—especially a dog as depressing as this one. I sit in the rocking chair by the nursery window, and Ollie cries, bucking and squirming and mumbli
ng. She toddles around the room, while Puddles stays folded at my feet. The window is cracked open; biting fresh air streams through the screen, blowing the baby-pink curtains into the room like a skirt.

  Across the Thorntons’ lawn, over the fence, and past an ancient oak tree, the playground sits like it always has. Now, three police officers stand by the carousel.

  Zap and I used to sit in the center of that carousel. I’d wrap my legs around the red-painted pole and flatten my back against the bumpy metal surface. We’d start slow. Zap’s sneakers would slap against mulch and the sky would swirl, a ceiling fan of blue and white. When we gained enough speed, Zap would jump on beside me—he didn’t like to lie down. He would lean against the middle bar, his scarecrow arms stretched out to the sides, captain of his own spinning ship.

  Ollie peers up at me with a saliva-slick jumbo Lego in her hand, finally calm. Her brown eyes bulge, wet and cowlike, feather eyelashes protruding from their lids.

  Go on, I think. Tell them how awful I am.

  She opens her gummy mouth and lets out another screech.

  Around the time everything started to fall apart with Zap—over a year ago—I found a book called Modern Witchcraft: A Guide for Mortals. It’s based in the history of pagan witchcraft, compiled by a group of reputable researchers. Now, I can’t set foot in the Broomsville Public Library because the book has racked up hundreds of dollars in overdue fines. I don’t have any intention of returning it.

  It happened in May. Lucinda was the whole reason I had to take the hotel job, the reason the Thorntons stopped calling me to babysit. This was almost a year after everything went to shit—and still, I spent my nights combing through childhood photos, drawing Sharpie moustaches on me and Zap so I wouldn’t get so sad. It was useless, I know. You can’t change people. You can’t stop them from growing. You can’t make them look how they used to: like a gangly kid with bottle-thick glasses and an idiotic bowl cut.

  The week I checked out the book, I was supposed to babysit. A ten-hour shift, and Eve Thornton was going to pay me a hundred dollars—she rarely coordinated babysitting, but she would be out of the hospital for a few days and could use the extra hands. I was happy to spend a Saturday out of the house, where Ma was on a tirade about the electricity bill. That morning, she’d shattered a plate against the mantel.

  While I was walking to the Thorntons’, the family cell phone Ma lets me use for work buzzed. A text message from Eve Thornton: “NVRMND. DOUBLE BKED. U DONT NEED 2 COME 2DAY. THX.”

  As I turned to leave, I crossed Lucinda coming up the Thorntons’ driveway. She smiled as we passed each other, all straight teeth. Lucinda had one dimple, on the left side of her face. Even when her smile was fake, it dotted her cheek. A button. Of course the Thorntons preferred Lucinda Hayes—she probably knew how to put Ollie to sleep without a fit. I bet she was certified in CPR.

  “Hey,” she said, the way you talk to an old acquaintance you know you should remember but don’t.

  The air she floated through smelled like strawberry shampoo. I rounded the corner, stomach rolling like I’d eaten something bad. It was like that night all over again, like I was standing in that narrow hallway, listening to fireworks pop over the lake and letting Lucinda Hayes take everything from me.

  Later that night, I set the whole thing up, just like it said in “The Art of the Ritual,” the sixth chapter of Modern Witchcraft: A Guide for Mortals. Step by step. The candles, the herbs, the altar.

  I don’t regret the ritual, not even now that Lucinda is actually dead.

  I wished her away.

  Mr. Thornton pays me in cash, a fat wad with two extra twenties thick at the heart of it. This is probably accidental—the only thing I’ve done tonight is put Ollie to sleep and eat the raw cookie dough from his refrigerator. I couldn’t find the leash to walk Puddles, so I carried her to the corner of the back fence and stood guard while she peed, ready to scoop her up if she tried to make a break for it. I leave before Mr. Thornton notices the overpayment.

  When I get home, the house is quiet. 10:19 p.m.

  Usually after babysitting I’d go to see Howie—the homeless guy who lives behind the library. But tonight, I’m too curious. I change into a pair of men’s boxer shorts and a clean Crucibles T-shirt. Roll my plastic desk chair to the window. I turn off the lights and use my pink lighter to ignite the chamomile candle on the nightstand. Ma says it’s a fire hazard because my room is so cluttered. I’m not allowed to light candles until I get rid of all the useless junk, but I’m terrible at knowing what’s irrelevant.

  I pull a CD from the middle of my stack, which wavers at the foot of my bed. They’re homemade mixes, burned to fit different moods—this one is titled Night Walks, which is scrawled messily across its matte-finish face. The track list: Misfits, Green Day, Bad Religion, the Crucibles, and Blink-182. “Letters to God” by Box Car Racer comes on, and when the nasally singer starts to whine, I allow myself just a twinge of satisfaction.

  I sit at my window like always, but I know Cameron won’t come tonight. The hood of his sweat shirt always gives him away, distinguishing him from the shadows—the white drawstring across his chest is illuminated in the moonlight. Lucinda’s back lawn slopes upward from where her house sits at the bottom of the small suburban hill; from where Cameron stands by the fence we can both see into her bedroom.

  It’s been almost twenty-four hours since Lucinda Hayes disappeared and tonight, the grass is still. A police car idles with its lights off, whirring sneakily by the side of the house. The Hayeses are in their living room, but from my desk chair, looking down across the short alley of grass between our houses, their faces are visible only in passing. They have relatives visiting already—grandparents, aunts, uncles—who shuffle in and out of the kitchen with steaming cups of tea and food that no one touches. A steady rotation. Lex sits on the floor with her back against the legs of the couch; she looks like her younger self, like Amy’s twin princess-sister in their game of pretend. Except now, she is wearing a pair of rhinestone-spattered jeans and crying quietly as their grandmother braids her hair.

  I search for the white of Cameron’s sneakers and instead I find the roots of the bushes that line the back fence, ropes uncoiling across a midnight lawn. For an ignorant moment, I’m afraid I’ll get sucked into that endless dusk.

  Lucinda is gone. Cameron will have no one to watch. No one to make his hands shake. No one to think about before he falls asleep, as he watches the cracks in the ceiling or counts Orion’s elbows.

  How Zap used to look at me:

  With eyes open wide, like someone surprised by a camera. Often quickly. In passing. In longer moments, which stretched beyond their appropriate span. What? one of us would say. What do you mean, ‘what’?

  Nothing.

  You’re looking at me funny.

  I’m not.

  What are you thinking?

  Did you know Mars takes six hundred eighty-six days to orbit the sun?

  That’s not really what you’re thinking.

  Prove it.

  Shut up.

  Russ

  Russ and two other officers are told to knock on every door on the block. They start with the houses lining the playground, the houses with fences that overlook the carousel.

  Did you hear anything last night?

  They speak to Greg and Rhonda Hansen, the older couple doing calisthenics together in the living room. They speak to Lucinda’s ballet instructor, who insists on serving tepid tea. They speak to Chris Thornton, who struggles to keep a squirming toddler on his hip. They speak to Kelly Dixon-Burns, who wears a silk bathrobe and looks Russ too long in the eye as she takes a hefty pull of her cigarette, and to Sherry DeCasio, who sobs the moment they say Lucinda’s name. In this case—as with the Weinberg family, the Sanchez family, and anyone else who has children at Jefferson High—Russ asks: Can we come back after school? We’d love to have a word with your child. Most nod solemnly.

  When Russ gets back to the police depa
rtment it is late afternoon, and he does not expect to see the boy.

  Cameron’s middle-school yearbook photo hangs on a bulletin board where they’ve already tacked up the faces of early suspects. He looks strikingly like his father. No one comments on this. No one mentions Lee at all.

  But those hazel eyes: a snake writhes in Russ’s gut. Nostalgia, a dagger.

  The entire Broomsville Police Department has been summoned to the main conference room to be briefed on the case. If anyone remembers that Russ is related to the janitor, Ivan—another suspect pinned to the bulletin board—they don’t say anything. Maybe they’ve forgotten about Russ’s brother-in-law. More likely, they don’t care.

  The case is already making national news, the chief tells the room of officers and sergeants and receptionists. You are not to make any comments to the media.

  A short list of suspect individuals:

  Ivan Santos, the janitor who found the body.

  Edouard Arnaud, the victim’s ex-boyfriend.

  The parents—Joe and Missy Hayes.

  Howard Morrie, the homeless guy squatting in the park behind the library.

  Cameron Whitley, the stalker boy from down the street.

  Russ went to visit Ivan in prison—only once. No warning. Ivan, six foot two, was gargantuan on the other side of the metal table in the visitor’s room. Russell, Ivan had greeted him, with a firm handshake, sliding comfortably into his chair. My brother.

  In prison, Ivan fought no one, made no friends. Instead, he read books: Latin American philosophers, combined with texts from a fresh-

  man liberal-arts syllabus Ines found online. These were the sort of books Russ couldn’t get through if he tried. Plato’s Symposium, Foucault’s unintelligible French lectures about power. José Martí, Juan Montalvo, Leopoldo Zea, and the writings of Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz, whom Russ Googled and found to be the first Latin American feminist writer. Ivan copied the entirety of the New Testament onto legal pads, which Ines purchased and mailed in bulk. In the end, the only evidence of Ivan’s time in the slammer was this homemade New Age–Christian religion, an impressive combination of scholarly philosophy, Catholicism, and motivational speaking. And one sloppy jailhouse tattoo—a bleeding Virgin of Guadalupe on Ivan’s right wrist, a bouquet of four-petaled flowers drooping by her side.