Girl in Snow Read online

  A free man now, Ivan delivers winding philosophical sermons to the Spanish-speaking community that occupies plastic chairs in the one-room church on Fulcrum Street. He preaches in a clean white button-down and pressed slacks, encouraging them to further their spiritual exploration by reading, and instead of the Bible, he gives them Plato’s Symposium and speaks of emancipation.

  Believe in your own goodness, Ivan cries. Trust your own goodness. Confíe en su propia bondad.

  Ines sits in front. She sings with proud, open eyes. The old church women cook food for Ines and bring it to the house; while Russ is at work, Ines walks across town to return the empty pans. Often, Russ wonders if Ines misses that side of Broomsville, with its lopsided houses and peeling-paint cars and all those women who return her rapid-fire language. Sometimes, in her sleep, Ines mumbles in pleading Spanish. Russ keeps a pen and paper in his nightstand so he can write down words and phrases to Google in the morning.

  When Detective Williams questions Ivan in the room at the back of the station house, Ivan has none of that messiah fury. Russ briefly watches from behind glass as Detective Williams pulls every interrogation trick he knows. They question Ivan for six hours, and Ivan gives them nothing but a resounding calm that terrifies Russ, who pictures the hundreds of legal pads—Ivan’s handwritten Bible—stacked next to a twin mattress on the floor.

  I don’t know anything, he says, over and over again.

  I just found her, he says, over and over again.

  Confíe en su propia bondad.

  Russ and Ines met in summer. Colorado summers are dry—heat presses down, slow and unbearable, a curtain lowered over a blazing stage. Red dust. Chlorine. White-hot cement.

  It was Russ’s day off. Girls wore strappy dresses and walked barefoot through the park, where boys threw Frisbees and let the sun drench through their shirts.

  Russ parked his car and watched the crowds under the wide, cloudless tent of sky. He had intended to take a run up the mountain, but it was too hot, so he stopped at Main Street Park. He couldn’t go back to his house, where he’d roast in front of the television, drinking Bud Light. It was not uncommon for Russ to go his full forty-eight hours off without talking to anyone but the pimply pizza-delivery boy.

  So he had gone to the park for the push and squeal of other people, the existing fact of them. The day smelled like a sunscreen dream, and Russ meandered down the walking path, until he passed an ice-cream cart. He got in line, ordered a snow cone, and walked toward a half-empty bench.

  The snow cone melted faster than he could eat it, cherry sugar dripping from the paper cup and over his knuckles, dribbling on his khaki shorts and flowering through like little blossoms of blood.

  Here, she said.

  Ines was sitting next to him on the bench, a book open in her lap. She held out a miniature wrapped packet of tissues.

  Thank you, Russ said as he mopped himself up.

  You’re welcome, she said. She had an accent. She was shiny in the sun, the pages of her book a blinding white, and she wore a pair of denim shorts and a baggy T-shirt.

  What are you reading? Russ asked.

  She held up the cover. Love in the Time of Cholera, he read aloud, stumbling over the word “cholera” because he could not remember what it meant or how to pronounce it. She had marked all over the open page in pencil. Russ could not recall the last time he read a novel. He wasn’t sure he’d ever finished one.

  Is it good? he asked.

  Yes, she said. I read it many times in school, but this is my first time reading it in English. It’s quite different.

  How so?

  The turn of phrase, she said. That’s what you call it, right? When a sentence twists in different ways?

  Yes, Russ told her. That’s what you call it.

  Look at this, she said as she flipped through the book, then tore out a page.

  A Band-Aid–ripping sound—before Russ could protest, she had handed him the page with its raggedy edges, a single sentence underlined. He squinted to read.

  “He was still too young to know thata the heart’s memory eliminates the bad and magnifies the good, and that thanks to this artifice we manage to endure the burden of the past.”

  Nice, yes? she said.

  Very.

  He moved to give the page back—as though she could reinsert it into the book—but she waved him away. When she smiled, he wondered if Ines was flirting. He had not flirted in years.

  Keep it, she said, before lifting the book to her face and settling back into her seat, burying herself in words. Russ stuffed the page in his pocket and stood to throw away the snow-cone wrapper. He loped back toward his car, wishing she had asked him to stay, or that he had the courage to do so anyway.

  Detective Williams is nearly as old as Russ’s father, who had served as a mentor to the detective back in the sixties. Ah, Fletcher, the detective is always reminiscing. Your pops really got me my start in law enforcement, you know that? He believed in me when no one else did.

  You don’t want to be on patrol forever, right? Detective Williams often asks Russ. You want to move up eventually?

  Russ cannot imagine being a detective. He likes the quiet of his patrol car, in the soft veil of a graveyard night. The slice of headlights on paved, sleepy streets. The whir of the heater and the vast blackness surrounding him, the only one awake, the only one alive.

  Of course, Russ always says. Of course I want to move up eventually.

  After Ivan’s interrogation, Russ watches his peers file out as Detective Williams places a hand on Russ’s shoulder. Leans his weathered face close. His breath like salami.

  Pay close attention to this case, Detective Williams spits into Russ’s neck. You could learn a thing or two.

  Truth is, Russ does not want anything but what he used to have, and he wouldn’t give up his patrol job for fear of losing even the smallest memory.

  Ivan is gone before Lucinda’s family arrives. There isn’t enough room, and they cannot legally keep him—he has cooperated with patience. As Ivan leaves, he gives Russ a small salute. Russ cannot gauge its sincerity.

  They interview Lucinda’s father first. Russ observes from the other side of the one-way mirror.

  Joe Hayes sits across the conference table, facing Detective Williams and the lieutenant. His gray hair reflects the fluorescent light, thin and wan. He swipes a palm over his eyes like a rag—Mr. Hayes’s plaid button-down shirt already looks like a remnant of an earlier version of himself, a self before his daughter died. The shirt of a man who took pleasure in pouring coffee in a thermos before getting in his car to drive to work. He wears wire-rimmed glasses, which he takes off intermittently and folds in his hands, giving them something to do. Russ knows that tragedy is a thief. It will eat Mr. Hayes’s days, his months, his years alive.

  Detective Williams asks, Is there anything you know that might help us with the investigation?

  Lucinda’s father tells them about the boy last year—the boy in the yard. The boy they caught standing by their fence, the boy they told to leave and never come back. The boy they often felt, a presence lingering outside the house. But by the time the lights flicked on, the yard was empty, night after night.

  Do you know this boy’s name? Detective Williams asks.

  He was in Lucy’s class, the father tells them. Cameron Whitley. The other neighbors have seen him too, walking around late at night.

  Even the sound of Cameron’s name brings Russ places he’d rather not go. The name said aloud: Whitley. A quicksand sort of sinking. Rapid and unsalvageable.

  Lucinda’s mother twists a silver ring around her pointer finger, hands shaking so hard she can’t hold the paper cup of water they’ve placed in front of her. Her hair is the same shade of gold as both her daughters’.

  Detective Williams asks, Is there anything you know that might help us with the investigation?

  Some combination of shock and grief comes spewing out. An unintelligible moan, a short fit of hypervent
ilation. A social worker sits beside Lucinda’s mother, rubbing her back in methodical strokes.

  Russ has never felt something so strong. Category eight. The other patrol cop backs away slowly, embarrassed to be spying on such a miserable spectacle. But Russ is not embarrassed. He is fascinated, hooked, and in some incomprehensible way, jealous. That grief—so pure.

  And last, the little sister. While they interview Lex, her father slumps in the chair beside her, head bowed.

  Lex wears a rainbow-striped wool hat with a pom-pom on the top. She keeps her ski gloves on, tenting the fabric away from each finger, pinky to thumb.

  I love my sister, Lex says, eyes wide and wet. She does normal high-school things, I think. She spends a lot of time in her room and texting on her cell phone. I don’t have a cell phone yet, but I’ll get one when I turn fourteen, like Lucy—

  Lex’s voice cracks, and her father stands up.

  That’s enough.

  Detective Williams thanks them and ushers them out, wringing his hands like they’ve gone numb in the cold.

  We’ve got nothing, he mutters to Russ, absent.

  Russ gets home late.

  Ines is in the chair next to the fireplace, legs crossed beneath her. There is a switch next to the mantel that would ignite the gas flame, but in three married years neither Russ nor Ines has ever flipped it on.

  Ines’s pale nails maneuver her knitting needles—they clack against one another, the only sound in the big house. A tangled braid hangs across her left breast. Usually when Russ comes home, Ines is at the computer in the corner of the living room, smiling to herself as she reads an e-mail from one of her sisters, laughing out loud as she types back in Spanish written with no accents on Russ’s English-language keyboard.

  Russ and Ines live in a permanent bachelor pad. The living room is bleak, with outdated beige carpet, a couch, a chipped coffee table, and too much unfilled space. The furniture is from before they were married. The only thing Ines has put up for decoration hangs by the front door: a framed photo of family members standing in a garden, a tangle of happy arms. Out the window, the mountains are toy peaks—frosted white, minuscule.

  Russ throws his jacket over the shoulder of the couch.

  Hi.

  Hi, Ines says, knitting.

  Do we have any beer? he asks.

  Check the fridge, she says, and Russ realizes that Ivan has not called his sister, that Ines has not switched on the television today.

  Russ finds half a can of Bud Light in the refrigerator door. He downs it quickly, but the carbonation is long gone and it is watered down, yeasty. Usually, Russ would ask how tutoring went, but today is Wednesday, and the kids get Wednesdays off. Any other day, Russ would ask about Ines’s favorite student, the girl who tells funny stories and can’t pick up a word of Spanish. Any other day, Ines would talk animatedly, repeating teenage gossip in an exaggerated fake American accent, like an annoying teenager at the mall. Oh my gaaaad, she says.

  Russ wishes he could speak to Ines in Spanish. Maybe then, she’d look up from her knitting. He can remember a bit of the mandatory conversational Spanish class he took at the police academy, and he bought a Rosetta Stone when Googling proved fruitless. But his high-school transcripts made it clear that Russ was no scholar. He memorizes word after word—la mesa, el coche; ocho, nueve, diez—but by the next day, it’s like Spanish has a completely different alphabet.

  Ines’s favorite student has a name that sounds like old-time television. Russ had recognized it first thing this morning: Lucinda. Russ does not tell Ines about her brother, found at the scene of another crime. He prefers her just like this—knitting.

  Cameron

  Things Cameron Didn’t Like to Remember:

  1. Dad’s scalp. How his hair thinned at the front, creeping back toward the crown of his skull, a gradual reveal of pink.

  2. The bones of the finger. The distal, intermediate, and proximal phalanges, and how Lucinda’s were especially long. Especially thin.

  3. The second-grade talent show—the only time Cameron ever performed onstage.

  Cameron had practiced for weeks. He’d plunked away at the piano in the den, perfecting “Für Elise.” But at the talent show itself, in that anticipated and terrifying hour, the stage in the gymnasium felt too foreign. Cameron hated all those eyes—his hands slipped off the keys, they were so sweaty. He played five notes, the beginning trill of “Für Elise,” before the wave swelled forward and caught Cameron in its froth. He blacked out.

  The teachers said he was great. The break between the chorus and the bridge was moving, he had a natural sense of lyricism. They said he was so caught up in the music, his whole body was swaying—he had to stick with it, he had real talent. When Cameron stayed silent at dinner that night, Mom and Dad said, Cameron, what’s wrong? He didn’t know. It wasn’t Cameron up there, playing “Für Elise.” Someone else. A body uninhabited.

  Those three minutes had escaped him, in all their glory and panic.

  When Cameron came home from the Tree that evening, he lay on his bed. His toes were frozen blue in wool socks. Mom had gone back to work, even though it was against her better judgment, and did he promise he’d stay right there on the couch?

  The Tree was Cameron’s sacred and secret space.

  The Tree took on the general shape of a man, and that was why Cameron had picked this specific aspen: thick trunk, like a torso, and about six feet tall. When Cameron squinted, he could imagine the spine, vertebrae stacked on top of one another, inconsequential as a tower of blocks. He could picture the heart—the aspen had a knot of bark in its chest, with a protruding nub in the exact location of the aorta. Usually, this was where he aimed. Sometimes, when Cameron felt particularly Tangled, he aimed for both kneecaps, but this was the cruelest thing to do, and remembering it—remembering how real those legs had been in his head as he’d squeezed the trigger—guilt seeped through him, spreading and blotting through his body like ink.

  Today, Cameron had set the .22-caliber handgun on the ground like a sacrifice, the barrel resting in a patch of dirty snow. Cameron liked to think they were in Hum, all the imaginary people of the Tree, those figments of his mind to whom he’d done real hurt. And now Lucinda was there, too. He hoped in the morning, the birds would chirp their gurgling songs for her.

  Now, safely in his bedroom, Cameron’s thoughts were like the string of a forgotten yo-yo—knotted up on themselves, twisted in inconvenient patterns. The psychiatrist he had seen for a few months after everything happened with Dad had given him a safety word for times like these, times that bordered on clinical panic attacks but felt different, so specific to Cameron and the jumble of his insides. Untangle. These eight letters used to calm him—they used to scare away the blackout, which felt like fainting, though if you asked any witness, Cameron was usually conscious. Untangle. Walking around, talking to people, playing the piano or whatever he’d been doing before, just with a brain so overwhelmed it had shut off entirely. Untangle.

  Gradually, the safety word had lost its meaning. He’d overthought it, like when you stared at a word for too long and it stopped looking like a word and became an alien formation of letters with no real significance.

  Untangle wouldn’t bring Lucinda back to life, and it wouldn’t numb the badness of the Tree. He wanted to remember how charcoal faded across Lucinda’s jawline. Her symmetry on a nine-by-twelve pad of paper. Urgent. Cameron reached between his bed and the wall, where he hid the porn magazine Ronnie gave him back in December (Rayna Rae in the centerfold, with jet-black hair that barely covered her nipples).

  Reaching beneath his mattress, Cameron’s thumb brushed against something solid, caught between the bed and the wall.

  Before Cameron pulled it into the dim afternoon light, he knew exactly what he was touching. The suede was unmistakable. The elastic band held it shut, an accusation whispered in his ear before he’d even seen the thing: You have done something wrong, it said to him. You have done something very wro
ng.

  Cameron laid it out, a body on a coroner’s table. He stood over his bed, examining the strange combination of synonymous shapes: the rectangle bed frame, the rectangle sheets, the rectangle comforter, the rectangle pillow, and there, in the middle, Lucinda’s rectangle diary.

  Untangle wouldn’t explain how Lucinda’s diary had ended up in his bed. Untangle wouldn’t tell him what to do with it. Untangle wouldn’t help him remember the night of February fifteenth—last night. It wouldn’t bring her back to life.

  Twenty-three minutes passed, and Cameron could only think: he had never been so close to her.

  Cameron would not open the diary, but he knew that whatever she wrote had probably been recorded with meticulous effort. He remembered from her school notes how Lucinda’s ys and gs curled underneath the blue line. Cameron stretched the elastic to the side, thinking that he had only ever known Lucinda through windows and in gym class, smiling over her shoulder in her Jefferson High School shirt, “LUCINDA” Sharpied in block letters across the stomach.

  Cameron had taken a liking to the Hayes family—to the way they chopped their onions for dinner and rubbed their eyes in the morning. Combed their hair after a shower. Father washed the dishes; younger sister dried. Cameron refused to form an opinion about the millions of little ways they chose to move around their house; that wasn’t his job. He was only a witness.

  The purple diary was the only thing left of Lucinda. Cameron shouldn’t be the one to open it. It didn’t seem fair. So he put the diary on the top shelf of his closet, along with the Collection of the Pencil Bodies and the Collection of People Who Did Terrible Things, both manila folders hidden behind a stack of winter sweaters he had long outgrown.