Girl in Snow(18)

“Where was I?” Cameron said.

“I was hoping you could tell me that,” Mom said.

“I don’t remember,” Cameron told her, and this was the truth.

“You can’t have forgotten,” she said. “It was only last night.”

“I don’t remember anything,” Cameron said, and he couldn’t tell from Mom’s face—which was the most scared and pitying he’d ever seen—whether she believed him.

Mom’s nose was dripping, a small river above her mouth, but she did not move to wipe it. She picked up Cameron’s sticky hand and interlaced her feathery fingers with his. Cameron was embarrassed because he was too old for things like this, but he liked the feeling too much to let go. It was like someone had pressed a shaky bow to a violin string and played one long, vibrating note through his ribcage and through hers. They were both very still.

Cameron had not consciously let himself cry in nearly three years, because he was afraid of the floodgate: once he started, he’d never be able to stop. So instead of crying, Cameron let the sadness spread across the inside of his throat, let it melt into his glands, burning thick. He and Mom were both hunched over, they were numb on the drying concrete outside the beige house, they were clinging to one another so tight their palms were sore. This sort of grief was unbearable, but it was nice to share it with someone, even if it made his neck impossibly heavy.



Cameron had considered keeping his Collections in Dad’s closet instead, because Mom would never go inside. It was down the hall, outside their bedroom. The closet smelled like Dad: worn leather, the pages of the morning newspaper. Dad’s closet was the place Cameron went when he was most Tangled—since Dad left, Cameron had gone into his closet only twice, when the missing felt too big. He’d stood among scratchy shirts and pants folded on hangers, wondering how it felt to put on these clothes every day, how it felt to be someone bad.

The Collection of People Who Did Terrible Things was a manila folder. On principle, Dad belonged in there, even though Cameron felt so morbid sticking him in with Andrea Yates.

Everything started with Andrea Yates. You hear about that woman from Texas who killed her own kids? someone said in class. Drowned them all in the bathtub. Thought she was saving them from the devil.

Cameron had looked it up on the family computer. He printed everything he could find: news articles, blog forums, family photos. He simply wanted to know how such a love had been chronicled, to possess it somehow, if only to feel sad for the dead kids and sad for the husband and even sad for Andrea Yates. Even though it made him nauseous, looking at all the terrible things this woman had done, he wanted every detail. He wanted to know what the kids ate for breakfast that day, what they were wearing, and how the husband felt when he found all their tiny bodies laid out on the king-sized bed. If the kids had shampoo in their mouths, if it bubbled between their baby teeth, if they tried to scream but only gurgled. If Andrea Yates did something so awful for love. If you could count a love like that—five gangly bodies, soaked in murky water that leaked through to the mattress. One was an infant, he read. He wondered how a love like that drowned. Or worse, how it dried.

So the Collection of People Who Did Terrible Things began with Andrea Yates, and once he started looking at all that, the rest of the collection came quickly and with the same burning curiosity. Next was the sorority-house murderer from the South. Then, Jack the Ripper. And in the back of the folder, Dad.

With the Collection of People Who Did Terrible Things spread out on the floor, Cameron started to feel Tangled. He pulled the eraser from his pocket and kneaded it against his palm until it was pancake flat. His thoughts were like cartoon hummingbirds, making circles around his head, pecking at his earlobes, nudging his shoulders. They wouldn’t leave him be. Usually, he was thankful for their company, but Lucinda’s diary was in his closet, and she was dead, and here Cameron was, sitting on the floor with Dad and Andrea Yates.

Cameron popped the screen out of his bedroom window and let the February air lick his cheeks.



The neighborhood was dim with shock. Snow, mostly gone. Lucinda died last night, and shadows seemed longer. Headlights were blinding. Cameron observed from his invisible places.

The Hansens were watching television. Their faces sagged, blue light flickering against their gooey skin.

Mr. Thornton sat alone in the living-room armchair, baby Ollie’s toys scattered across the rug. Usually he would walk the dog around this time of night, pulling the bright-blue retractable leash from a hook by the door. When Mr. Thornton clipped the leash onto the dog’s collar, Cameron always started walking home; he did not like to share the shadowed street’s refuge. But tonight, the dog was sleeping by Mr. Thornton’s feet. He’d left one light on—the stained-glass lamp in the far corner of the living room. It threw his details into silhouette: the ridge of his suit jacket, still pressed. The folds of his ironed shirt. The tie, hanging around his neck like an abandoned noose.

Once, the school counselor asked Cameron if he was happier on his own than with other people. This was a dumb question. Other people were not trying desperately to stay Untangled, they were not thinking about their Collections and the complexities of the bodies within, or about Lucinda Hayes and the individual strands of her hair with little glands at the tips, secreting waxy oil. They were not picturing Rayna Rae’s hipbones in the centerfold, or the flat space between those hipbones, like the clean inside of a marble sink. Even when Cameron was with other people, he was alone, and this made him feel both cosmically lucky and useless to the world.