Girl in Snow(35)

When she pushed past him, Cameron caught a whiff of Mom’s perfume in her hair. Lucinda had dabbed it on her wrists, or maybe her collarbone. Gold and gardenias.

Only in Cameron’s smallest moments could he admit that this day in Mom’s bathroom was the first, and last, time they’d spoken. That the rest of their conversations took place through fleeting glances—in gym class, when Lucinda ran laps twenty feet ahead of him, glancing back every few minutes to make sure Cameron was still there. She would pant onto his neck, even from twenty, fifty feet away, both of their legs burning, lungs screaming for them to stop. He could tell from the way she turned away, red-faced and shy, that he had whispered to her. It was a bizarre sort of conversation Lucinda and Cameron had, but it thrummed and it throbbed.



Cameron found the gun one summer when Mom was at work. He’d been hunting around the house for new exhibits to add to his Collection of Photos—pictures of Mom before Cameron was born, when her ballerina neck was still long and graceful.

The gun was under Mom’s bed, in a polished oak box with a latch that didn’t lock. Cameron’s head turned hot and swollen.

He didn’t touch it. He didn’t dare.

He tried to forget.

When Mom left for work the next morning, Cameron wrapped the gun in a cotton T-shirt and shoved it to the bottom of his backpack. He hiked to the field behind Ronnie’s house—a vast, open space with wheatgrass that grew too high and mosquitoes that swarmed in clouds.

When Cameron was sure no one had followed, he set his backpack on a log. The Rockies were fresh and bitter. He unrolled the T-shirt and examined all the foreign parts—the sight, the barrel, the grip, the cylinder. He’d looked it all up online, fascinated by how the thing worked.

The Tree had the general proportions of a man. Six feet of bare bark, then the extending branches, a billion arms swaying to a beat Cameron could not hear. There was a hole in the trunk. A bird nest. They rustled about in there, hopping on tiny legs across a bed of twigs. The gun was heavy and unnatural in his hand.

Cameron squinted an eye, like they did in the movies. He didn’t look like an actor, one toothpick arm raised to point at the chest of the tree. No, he looked like his small self, standing alone at the edge of a forest with a gun he didn’t know how to use, listening to the pecking of beaks against wood and wind against grass and his own bones trying to understand themselves inside his awful skin.

He closed his eyes and shot. In Cameron’s head, the Tree was living, breathing, a fully grown man. The noise cracked against the sky, and Cameron’s whole body tingled with the force of the bullet’s expulsion.

He shot again. And again. Three bullets lodged in the left armpit of the Tree. The birds flew out in a frenzy, all desperate wings and frantic squawking.

They flapped up through the branches, feathered bodies growing smaller, surrendering to open air. Cameron imagined how stupid he must look from the birds’ perspective—a lanky boy in an oversized sweat shirt, cupping a .22 in wavering hands. The weight of what he’d done hit in waves of self-disgust. Cameron was so scared. Just that year, his hands had grown bigger than Mom’s. The knuckles were dry. The lines on his palm mapped out a road he could not read. They looked like someone else’s hands. Like Dad’s.

Cameron wrapped the gun in the T-shirt again. He sat in the dirt with the bundle in his lap and listened to the field around, because that was all he could bear to do.



The iron sizzled in the next room over as Mom glided it across Cameron’s dress shirt. When Mom shifted her weight, her ankles popped and cracked, a Morse code message he couldn’t understand. Possibly the talus, possibly the subtalar joint. It was the saddest sound Cameron had ever heard.

Lucinda stared up at Cameron from the floor, all terrible angles and inaccurate shading. A beg. Cameron wanted to cry, but he didn’t know how, so he pressed his cheek right up to the picture of the unidentifiable girl on the floor, thinking there was nothing worse than loving someone and mixing up their earlobes with someone else’s.





Russ





Russ can’t sleep. Ines is in the guest room and twice, Russ shudders awake: we’ve got a body. He throws the covers off and goes to the kitchen in his boxer shorts. Russ leans over the sink with his weight in his elbows. He had hoped to see the moon—to stare at the moon and ask it something—but instead he sees the clouds. Outside has lost its snowy touch. All drudgery. The white has melted in patches and a base layer of mud pokes out beneath, visible through the glaze of the night.

Russ tugs on a pair of pants and backs the car out of the driveway. Ambles with headlights off toward Fulcrum Street.

Ivan rents an upstairs bedroom in a house where two elderly women have begun the slow process of dying. Ivan buys their groceries and cooks their meals. At night, he spoons medicine into their quivering mouths.

Two in the morning and Russ parks outside, lights off.

Ivan is standing at the old women’s kitchen window, behind a set of frilly drapes pulled partially open. His hands are in his pockets—baggy black sweat pants—and his shape is illuminated by the overhead kitchen lights. He stands very still. Straight and tall.

At first, Russ thinks Ivan is staring at his own reflection, examining himself. But from the street, he can see Ivan’s view out the window: it points directly into the living room of Ivan’s backyard neighbors, where an elderly couple has fallen asleep in the glow of the forgotten television, hands clasped together on the couch.