Girl in Snow Read online

  “Hey,” I said. “You seen Emma?”

  “Emma?” Zap asked. He folded the rag into the bell of his instrument. My heart, a tambourine.

  “Yeah,” I said.

  “Emma Kazinsky? Nah. She doesn’t have class here.”

  “Oh.” I held the book up like an answer. It didn’t matter. Zap clipped his sheet music into a binder and picked up his trombone case by the handle, making for the door on the other side of the room. I sat timidly on the edge of a piano bench, the book limp next to my leg. The practice room smelled like brass and polish.

  “How’ve you been?” I asked. The words came out too fast.

  “Fine. You?”

  It was so stupid, this half-formed plan I’d concocted.

  “I heard what happened,” I said.

  Zap already had one hand on the door, twenty feet away from me.

  “I just wanted to make sure you’re okay,” I said.

  He tilted his head to the side and squinted a little. He did this when he was angry and trying not to show it.

  “Thanks,” he said.

  He pushed open the door.

  “Have a good one,” Zap said, like a host at a restaurant.

  The bell of his trombone case banged against the wall as he left.

  Don’t you remember! I wanted to call after him. Don’t you remember before we were old! The practice room was massive, empty but for the drums lined up against the wall, covered in tarps to keep the dust away. I ran my fingers over the ivory piano keys—too filled with shame, explosive and familiar, to make any sort of noise.

  We went to Hangman’s on a dare. The summer before high school started. Louis Travelli had called Zap a pussy, so he had to go, had to light three candles and say some chant. I knew he didn’t want to do it alone. I was better than Zap at things like this: horror movies, going places we weren’t supposed to.

  Hangman’s Hut is only half a house. The right side is burned down—a mess of fallen rafters and bare concrete beams. The house was built in the early 1900s. The Hangman family probably lived there during the 1930s. They based this estimate on the bones: the entire family’s bones are now in the downtown science museum, where you can look at replicas in a special room if you ask.

  I went in first, but only to prove I was brave. Zap glanced over his shoulder and hiked up his backpack straps. He wore a blue shirt that read “I LOVE BACON.” I told him it was dumb, it wasn’t even funny, but secretly I liked the way it made his brown skin look even darker. Already, the girls at school liked him. He had such light-blue eyes. His eyes looked French; I always thought so, even though French isn’t really a way to look.

  “God, this is creepy,” Zap said from the splintered doorway of Hangman’s Hut. He kicked aside a pile of crumpled brown leaves. They’d fallen from the tree in the yard and blown into the house through the nonexistent roof.

  “Come on,” I said. “Don’t be a pussy.”

  “My mom says that’s a derogatory word,” he said.

  “Are you telling me not to say it?”

  “No. I don’t give a shit.”

  “Don’t say ‘shit.’ ”

  He smiled, this huge grin. Zap’s teeth overlap each other in the front, leaving a hole the shape of a sesame seed. Everyone’s always telling him he’s got something between his teeth.

  “Come on,” I said.

  He followed me hesitantly into the ruins. We walked beneath collapsing beams, until we were in the remnants of a kitchen. Broken bits of china lay in the rubble, so small you could only make out a fraction of a blue floral design. A flash of gold enamel. We ventured farther, the September sky unfolding above us. The corners of the room were filled with crushed beer cans and cigarette butts. Sun-faded bags of potato chips.

  “So where’d they die?” Zap asked.

  “The part of the house that burned down,” I said. “Idiot.”

  Zap crossed his legs and sat in the middle of the floor, opening his backpack and pulling out the candles.

  “You know, you’re pretty funny, Jay,” he said. I sat across from him, and we lined the candles up in a straight line. “Like, you act all mean and brave, marching in here like you don’t even care, when I know that’s not how you actually are.”

  “Shut up,” I said.

  “See what I mean?” he said. “Lucky I know you so well, or I would probably hate you.”

  He chuckled. I tried to laugh along, but something had stuck behind my throat. Lodged there. Expanded.

  Zap used a stick to draw a penis in the dirt, complete with hanging balls. We both cracked up, and the tension fizzled away. Bright afternoon light poured down on us. Dry Colorado wind rippled. We were too childish to be starting high school, but we had no desire to deal with the fact.

  This was around the time Zap started noticing everything with Ma: the bruises blossoming across my thighs, the cracked lips. The way my hands trembled constantly, searching for something to grasp. Zap had started watching me carefully, thinking I didn’t notice. I tried to tell him that I always provoked her, and this was just how things went. My fault; it was always my fault. I didn’t need pity. Still, he watched me like you’d watch a wild animal.

  “We should have come here at night,” Zap said.

  “For the stars?”

  “Nah, the moon. It’s a waning gibbous tonight. A little vertical development in the clouds.”

  “What the fuck does that mean?” I said.

  “It’s supposed to be a nice night. We could see a lot, way out here.”

  “Do you talk to everyone like that?” I asked. “Like, ‘vertical development’?”

  “No,” he said. “Just you.”

  “Why?”

  “Because you’re a freak, too,” he said. “One day we’ll move away together, me and you. We’ll find a colony of more freaks and we’ll never come back to this town. New York, maybe. We’ll go to New York.”

  And that was it. I don’t remember the rest of the afternoon. We set up the candles and read the chant and nothing happened. We crushed a bunch of beer cans. Lit a pile of leaves on fire. I remember the rest in bits and pieces—how the smoke twirled up into that incessant Colorado blue.

  But I can tell you that this was one of the best days of my life. There’s no one reason. It was just so free. I could exist in that house with Zap, no matter how haunted. I could be as rude as I wanted, as angry as I wanted, and he could be geeky, and it was all fine because we knew each other, we wanted to spend our days with each other. We were boundless, radiating.

  A constellation, taking form.

  Russ

  Of Lee Whitley’s defining traits, Russ remembers his eyebrows most accurately. Arched little worms, resting prudently on the ridge of Lee’s forehead. Manicured. Russ asked Lee about this once—Do you pluck every morning? There’s not a single stray—and Lee didn’t speak to him for hours. They drove in muted hostility, so tense that Russ went home and took three shots of tequila just to rid himself of the abandonment. Those eyebrows, sharp and careful.

  Day two: they bring in the ex-boyfriend.

  Lucinda Hayes broke her neck. Cracked it on the edge of the carousel. At first, Russ wondered—is it possible she just went for a walk, slipped, and fell? But Detective Williams pointed to the gory close-up of the girl’s face, whitish blue and smeared crimson. A bruised gash spread pulpy across her temple, the source of the trickling blood. Lucinda Hayes was smacked with something, Detective Williams said, probably something small and hard, like a brick or a rock. Honestly, it looks like she just landed wrong: if it weren’t for the edge of the carousel after the force of the blow, which broke her neck on impact, she might have walked away with a few stitches and a nasty bruise.

  The snow covered up any footprints, the snow washed away any fingerprints. No sign of the murder weapon, or Lucinda’s cell phone.

  Now, the ex-boyfriend is here. He is one of the few high-school students they’ve successfully reached. Most parents have refused voluntary questio
ning at the sight of Detective Williams’s wide-brimmed hat on their doorstep. My baby did nothing wrong! I’d like to talk to my lawyer first. The kids they did speak with knew little about Lucinda beyond her place at the top of the social ladder. Detective Williams had gone from house to house last night like a political campaigner but given up on most.

  The ex-boyfriend has come in voluntarily, escorted by his foreign, leggy mother. The kid looks like your typical high-school piece of shit, Russ thinks. He has swagger like a soccer player—too cool for football. His wide shoulders aren’t quite sturdy yet, still growing, and he flicks a swoop of brown hair back every few minutes with a spastic jerk of his head.

  Edouard Arnaud, the lieutenant says, coming up behind Russ at the coffee machine. I mean, the victim seems like a nice enough girl, but could she have picked a douchier boyfriend?

  Ex-boyfriend, Russ corrects. They broke up months ago.

  Russ watches the boy. Edouard Arnaud looks smaller than he should—flattened by the situation. He waits in the reception area with his mother, who holds his hand. The teenager grasps hard, fingers laced through fingers. Lifeboat. Russ cannot remember the last time he gripped someone that tightly.

  They’d go to this cliff, Russ and Lee, to nap between shifts. Ten years before Lee’s arrest. It was a fake cliff—Russ liked that about it. It looked more dangerous than it was, stretching out over the manmade reservoir, terrifying until you looked over the edge and saw that it only dropped to another plateau. That was how things went, wasn’t it? A series of plateaus. You just kept sliding down, safe, safe, safe. But eventually you’d hit the water.

  Lee would stretch across the back, and Russ would recline in the passenger’s seat with his feet on the dashboard. They’d patrol assigned streets, sipping black coffee. Lee’s thin, feminine fingers tapped rhythms against the steering wheel.

  In Russ’s memories, Lee’s face is always slightly blurred, like when you wake up from a dream with only the vague essence of someone. Lee was unassuming. The long, pointed nose. Pasty skin, covered in acne, though Lee was older than Russ—by the time Russ met him, Lee was already married to Cynthia, twenty-six to Russ’s twenty-one.

  This was before Ines, of course. They made a habit of recounting Russ’s one-night stands. These were usually girls from the surrounding towns that branched off the highway beneath the shadow of the mountains, who came down to Broomsville for a night out at Dixie’s Tavern. Back then, Russ drank beer, beer, beer, because he so intimately understood the creeping heaviness of a beer drunk as its lethargic inebriation poked at the edges of your consciousness. The next day, hidden behind a Styrofoam cup, Russ would tell Lee about the night. What about her nipples? Lee would ask, thirsty for detail. Brown or pink?

  Usually, fabrication. Often, Russ would make up some story just to see Lee’s smile curl around those crooked teeth, an affirmation, aging Russ. Pink, Russ said, with little hairs around the edges, and Lee laughed so hard the coffee came out his nose. Fuck! He wrung out his hands, dripping with scalding coffee, and Russ had to grab the wheel, steering them down I-25 in a hungover stupor while Lee wiped his lap with a wad of Dunkin’ Donuts napkins.

  Lee was sensitive; he’d get worked up about the smallest, unpredictable things. Once, a drunk driver called him a faggot, and Lee rammed the guy’s head into his own car window so hard the glass splintered.

  They rarely talked about Cynthia. Back then, Russ didn’t think he’d ever get married, or even fall in love, because what was the point? He didn’t want to be Lee. Stuck in a deteriorating life, saying your wife’s name like you’ve coughed up phlegm and you’re glancing around, panicked, for somewhere to spit it out.

  Lee did spit her out, eventually. It was like he spit her out, then looked at the lump of her, that slimy but inconsequential mess he’d made. Only after everything had fallen apart would Russ wonder about their marriage in the years before he’d come along, the magnet urge that had driven Lee and Cynthia to bed together, to the altar.

  After his arrest, Lee bought a used car with cash and took off straight from the dealership, past the foothills, over the snow-capped mountains, and across the state, maybe on to somewhere warmer. Good-bye to no one. And then, it was over: ten years of companionship, of sunrises at their favorite spot in the mountains.

  A series of plateaus. You keep sliding down, and eventually, you hit the water. You look around at the black and endless expanse, and you swim, because you’ve known no other landscape. You’re sure that on the other side of the reservoir there’s another mountain waiting, with other cliffs. Russ hopes Lee is on one of them, stretched lazily across some new back seat, ball cap pulled down to block out the early, peeking sun.

  While Detective Williams interviews the ex-boyfriend, the news vans multiply—the local channels that span across the Front Range and even a van from CNN. A reporter with glossy hair speaks reverently into a microphone.

  They’ve already gotten hundreds of calls from terrified neighbors and overbearing parents: We have to make sure our children are safe! One anonymous phone call from a man with a drawling redneck accent, claiming conspiracy, the same conspiracy that had overtaken Denver International Airport. New-Age Nazi-ism, he said—a fresh holocaust coming for anyone who doesn’t love God, a concentration camp beneath Terminal B. Lucinda was a warning, he said, just the locusts or the frogs. Afterwards, the officers had laughed together at the man’s expense, but not with their usual fervor. This time, uneasy.

  Detective Williams went to the Whitleys’ house last night, too. Cameron was already asleep, and Cynthia had refused to wake him up. There had been no hope for that one from the start.

  Come back when you have a warrant, she’d said. Or at least probable cause.

  They have neither of those things, for anyone. The news vans pull up and spike their antennas. The television in the corner threatens them all with images of themselves, their own building, their own shiny bald heads as they walk in and out of it. No comment, no comment.

  Russ and Ines met again a few weeks after that summer day in the park.

  It was a narcotics call. The Broomsville police had been chasing these guys for months. They were notorious, Ivan’s friends: they dealt in shelled-out houses, places so far beyond repair that no desperate Broomsville real estate agent would go near.

  This was the north side of town, where tiny, peeling structures housed sardine-packed families. Broken grills and sun-faded plastic chairs littered lawns. Mexico City, Russ’s cop friends called it, snickering from air-conditioned cars. Russ laughed along, vaguely recognizing his own participation in this active coward’s ignorance. Of course, he knew there was more to this neighborhood, so different from the manicured suburbs, but he did not know the shape of these differences, how they tasted, how they felt.

  Russ had followed the squad into a building on Fulcrum Street. Outside, families were grilling meat and drinking Pacifico. Children ran through the sprinklers, shrieking in Spanish.

  Ivan’s friends wore Walmart shoes with low-sagging shorts, tattoos crawling up their necks like skin disease. But Ivan himself was clean-shaven and straight-backed in a blue linen shirt. Marco, the only man Ivan was personally close to, had a tattoo scrawled beneath his chin that read “DAHLIA,” the name like an all-caps slit in his throat. Though Marco had never been formally involved with the drug ring, the squad still parked outside his house sometimes to keep watch.

  In all his years as a police officer, Russ had arrested only a handful of people. He was always shocked and a bit disgusted by the satisfaction: a surging release as the metal pieces found their places. That clink. He’d memorized the Mirandas as a child, playing with a toy cop car on the back porch, his father watching from behind the sliding glass door. Russ had a lisp as a kid. You have the wight to wemain siwent.

  After Ivan and his friends had been tackled and shoved violently into cars, the lieutenant sent Russ back into the house to collect the Junk. The house was dilapidated, the roof nearly caved in. Uncooke
d pasta spilled across the grimy kitchen counter. It smelled like rotting fruit.

  There were two bedrooms. The first held only a mattress, half covered with stained navy sheets. The closets were empty. So were the vents. The second room didn’t have a bed, just a rocking chair by the window. It was missing three slats in the frame. And in the rocking chair: Ines.

  She wore a pair of basketball shorts and a men’s tank top. Her hair was stuck to her cheeks; the room was stifling and covered in peeling wallpaper. An old, ailing floral print. She didn’t see Russ. Not at first. She had her elbows on the windowsill, chin cupped in her palm, watching, paralyzed, as they drove her brother away.

  Ines looked up at the sound of Russ, her face round and greasy, a splotchy red with panic. And in her eyes, recognition: man from park. Márquez. The heart’s memory eliminates the bad and magnifies the good.

  Only later, when Ines had made her statement—she didn’t know anything about the drugs in that house, where she had been living only a few weeks, having just arrived to visit her brother, with a valid Border Crossing Card and B-2 tourist visa—when the social worker had given her a new shirt (a black T-shirt from the gas station, with Colorado’s flag emblazoned next to a proud American eagle, because Ines’s suitcase was being processed as evidence), after Russ had driven her to the station, just the two of them in the car, and as she watched Broomsville flick by in blurs of summer green, Ines had said, I didn’t know police could be nice, and Russ said, They usually aren’t, but it doesn’t matter; are you thirsty? He bought two cans of Coke at a 7-Eleven. When Ines unbraided her hair beneath the bright station-house lights and unleashed it in clumps that reeked of smoke—then, Ines looked beautiful. Like the girl he’d met in the park, sun-glazed, with a hint of flirt. They sipped their Cokes in the stifling car and Russ decided: he would invite her home. She wouldn’t have to go back to that house, covered in Junk. No funny business, he promised. Funny business. Ines would tease him, always.