Girl in Snow(33)

I’m sorry, Russ says, whiskey-full and dizzy. I had to run an errand. Did they ask about me?

No, Ines says. But they asked about my tutoring with Lucinda. And about Ivan. How could you think my brother killed her? Russ, how?

I don’t know what I think, Russ says as the alcohol creeps back up his throat.

Ivan is good, Ines says, and she starts to cry. My brother is good.

Ines sits up, hair flattened on one side from the pillow. She rubs her face. Adjusts the strap of her tank top, which has fallen down her arm. She pulls her knees to her chest and stares past Russ, even though there is nothing behind him but the chilly upstairs hallway. The linen has left a crease across Ines’s cheek.

Once, Russ stopped by after school. He stood outside the room where Ines tutored and watched her through the rectangular window. Ines and Lucinda bent over a textbook. When Ines laughed, she looked so full and round—this turned Russ on. He imagined another man standing here, another man watching his wife through the window and wishing he could have her. Lee. Yeah, Lee. Russ went into the men’s restroom, where someone had carved a swastika into the stall door with a pen, and jacked off into the toilet.

Standing in the guest room, Russ becomes aware of his own stench, the slow, sludgy fade of his drunk. He smells like Ivan’s cologne, the kind you buy from the back of a pickup truck in a department-store parking lot.

Come to bed, Russ says.

When he goes to rouse Ines, she flinches, her doughy arm tense at his touch. Russ leaves her there, cursing his job and how old and how dumb he’s gotten.

As Russ brushes his teeth, he watches himself in the mirror. His skin doubles at the chin. Small, watery eyes. He has worn his moustache the same way for sixteen years, since someone told him it made him look intimidating. Tonight, the moustache feels like an affront to his face. Intrusive. Everything sags. He sucks the water from the plastic bristles of his toothbrush and shuts off the lights.





Cameron





Cameron had one real friend in the whole world—Ronnie didn’t count. No, his only true friend was the night janitor at the elementary school.

When Cameron played his game of Statue Nights, he wandered down cemetery streets. Quiet, like this small town was an island in the middle of an unchartable ocean.

Cameron liked the way the janitor slouched in his jumpsuit beneath the streetlamp, on the back left side of the school. The janitor smoked a cigarette every hour, on the hour. It must be nice, Cameron thought, to know that comfort was waiting for you—you just had to live through so many more minutes.

They had a secret language, Cameron and the night janitor.

Nights when Cameron felt good, he would nod once from the other side of Elm Street. The janitor always nodded back. On nights when he felt Tangled, Cameron would not nod—he would only stand there, so heavy inside himself. This was enough for the janitor, who would remove his foot from the school’s exterior, where he leaned like a cool kid from an old movie. The janitor would shake out his long, hulking limbs. He’d shrug, as if to say: So?

These nights, Cameron felt less alone, even if your one true friend couldn’t really be made across a yawning midnight street.



Cameron started with the underside of her jaw.

This was the darkest part of Lucinda’s face. The underside of the jaw blending into the neck blending into the collarbone blending into the chest—a continuous spectrum. The light in his bedroom was bad. A frigid dusk. A fly, somehow alive in the cold, slapped its little body across the ceiling. Buzz and thud and buzz and thud. Cameron couldn’t concentrate.

The memorial service was tomorrow, and Mom was ironing his dress shirt in the laundry room. She’d bought the stupid thing for a seventh-grade choir concert, and Cameron had worn it to every formal occasion since. The sleeves were too short. The buttons barely closed around his wrists, and the fabric scratched his skin. But it didn’t matter—the service tomorrow was just a memorial. It was at Maplewood Memorial Chapel and Funeral Home, but Lucinda’s body wouldn’t be there. Her body was probably in a morgue, on a metal table in the basement of some hospital, and people were probably peering down at her over surgical masks.

Cameron started again with her chin. It was too wide, but that was okay, because if you drew someone’s chin too wide, it could still look like them. He moved up toward her lips. His hand was quaking, and his hand never quaked. The edge looked wrong. Once Cameron had looked at it wrong, he realized with a horrifying lurch that he would never look at it right again, because it was on that table now. Her jaw and her lips were there, peeling off their bones, decomposing—unless, maybe, they used some sort of preservation fluid.

Untangle.

He was trying to draw her cheekbones, but these were not right either, and he couldn’t remember where her freckles went, so he counted them—one, two, three, four—but they were in all the wrong places and she was beginning to look cross-eyed and he couldn’t place the corners of her easy eyes or the peaks of her mountain cheeks and when he pictured her face, he could see only the unpainted wall of Jade’s skin. When he looked down, the picture he had drawn was not Lucinda and it was not Jade, and February fifteenth had happened, somehow. For all of them.

Cameron imagined himself holding a gun, pressing his index finger to the cool metal trigger.

Untangle.

He imagined himself holding a gun, pressing his index finger to the cool metal trigger, pressing the barrel to the back of Lucinda’s shiny yellow hair.