Girl in Snow(34)

Untangle.

He imagined himself holding a gun, .22, pressing his index finger to the cool metal of the trigger, pressing the barrel to the back of Lucinda’s shiny yellow hair; No, she was saying, please don’t, and a whack. He imagined himself looking down at Lucinda on the carousel—his own dirty sneakers, the left shoelace was untied—looking back at her contorted form, watching blood ooze from the gash on her head like a sick sort of halo.



Lucinda first asked Cameron for help on a sunny Saturday, a whole year and a half ago. Last August. The neighborhood was roped off with orange traffic cones—people set up food stands on their driveways. The incoming eighth-grade girls wore bikini tops and denim shorts. The boys walked around shirtless, tan from a summer of chlorine and SPF 15.

Cameron wore his baggy sweat shirt. Take that thing off, Mom told him as she scooped a piece of banana bread onto Mr. Thornton’s plate. Baby Ollie, newborn then, slept in a car seat by Mr. Thornton’s feet. Mom had microwaved the banana bread so the neighbors would think it was fresh. You must be boiling.

Cameron trudged to his bedroom and changed into a plain white undershirt. It made his arms look like two sets of disjointed bones poking from oversized sleeves. No matter how Cameron twisted in the mirror, he was a mess of angles—jutting elbows and corners that didn’t look natural. Like one of those paper skeletons teachers hung in classrooms around Halloween.

Something crashed down the hall. It sounded like broken glass.

When Cameron followed the sound to Mom’s bedroom—to the back, Mom’s marble bathroom—Lucinda Hayes stood in front of the vanity. A smashed perfume bottle lay on the floor, and the smell of Mom on a good night leaked down the cracks in the tile.

Lucinda wore a yellow bikini top and a pair of ripped denim shorts. White strings dangled from the pockets’ seams. Tiny, translucent hairs spread up toward her belly button, and then, the flat expanse of her stomach: it stretched before Cameron, a boundless plain. The tan line on the soft inner skin of her breasts, where another swimsuit had protected her from the sun—it was two shades whiter, naked and goose-bumped. The plastic straps of the bikini top created red tracks that traveled across her collarbone and over her shoulders.

“I’m so sorry,” Lucinda said in the bathroom, standing over the broken perfume bottle. “I didn’t mean to break it. I was just looking.”

“It’s okay,” Cameron said, pulling Mom’s bath towel off the hook next to the shower curtain. He kneeled down to collect the bits of broken glass in his cupped palm. Lucinda watched from her spot next to the toilet.

Cameron knew Lucinda was pretty, but he’d never seen her squint like this. She squinted at him and she did not seem annoyed or disgusted. She squinted at him like she would squint at anyone else, and this in combination with the small smile that folded across her mouth made Cameron very certain: she was kind. So while Cameron desperately wanted to know why Lucinda was in his mother’s bathroom, he would not ask. Later, when Cameron stood on Lucinda’s lawn and watched her through the window, he would think: no reason at all. Fate. The world had simply pushed Lucinda toward him.

“So?” Lucinda said.

“I—I’m sorry?”

“Do you want me to buy you a new one? Or your mom, I guess?”

“No,” Cameron said. “It’s fine.”

Lucinda pulled aside the curtain at the bathroom window and peered out, rubbing her hands together nervously, a fruit fly. Her fingers were tan and tapered, thin, but not too bony.

“Can I stay here for a minute?” she said.

“Sure.”

Cameron was conscious of his skeleton body’s every bone. He wished he were handsome, so he wouldn’t need to fill this pause.

“Do you ever wonder?” Lucinda said. “What actually goes on in all these houses?”

“Yeah,” Cameron said.

Lucinda shook her head—maybe she thought Cameron was weird, or the kind of kid who would bring a gun to school like Beth had said, but he couldn’t tell, and he didn’t want to know anyway.

“Believe me, I wonder all the time,” she said.

A sliver of crystal had lodged itself in Cameron’s left pointer finger, but he didn’t care. The bikini top clung to Lucinda’s ribcage. He wanted to document her in charcoal, if only to save the specifics: blond hair stuck to her neck with sweat, lashes curled over eyelids. It started in Cameron’s sternum and blossomed there, a fondness that split open and gushed out. This gentle wave.

Lucinda opened the curtain. Closed it again. She ran a hand through her hair and let her head fall back onto the crux of her spine.

She began to tremble.

Cameron hadn’t seen many people cry. Only Mom, and probably a girl at school once or twice. But he rarely caught the start of it—the build, the peak, the inevitable quake of a sob.

“Are you okay?” Cameron asked. He didn’t understand how they’d gotten from the window to a moment where she was crying, but when Lucinda lifted her head to the mirror—Cameron standing behind her like a ghost that accidentally came back to life—he knew.

Lucinda’s eyes were a forest, and she was calling from its depths, asking for help.

“I’m sorry,” she said, peeking out the window again. She shook her head, a memory cleared, and adjusted her bikini top. Fresh skin. “About the perfume bottle, I mean.”