Girl in Snow(44)
She did not look like someone who needed saving. So sturdy. A building with locked doors. I love you, she told him, but her voice sounded too high-pitched and very far away, like she’d yelled it from some unreachable height.
On a Saturday in October, just weeks before her tourist visa ran out, Russ and Ines married. They took the squad car to town hall. Russ turned on the sirens because it made Ines laugh; she pressed her face to the window and watched cars pull to the side. Russ imagined that Ines felt American then, and maybe she’d write home to Guadalajara and tell her family how lucky she was, and how happy, because sometimes all it took to be lucky and happy was the easy matter of driving faster than everyone else.
Ines wore a white sundress, but it was a cold October so she zipped one of Russ’s sweat shirts over it. The sweat shirt had holes in the sleeves where Ines had poked her thumbs.
They filled out the paperwork at the clerk’s desk, and when she stood next to Russ, Ines looked like a little girl, or one of the high-school students she tutored. Pink on her lips, a white flower in her hair. They signed the papers. Ines leaned over, kissed Russ on the cheek. Her smile. Not dazzling, but rare.
The party was in the park where they’d met, just a few months earlier. They spread boxes of pizza beneath a metal awning in the wind. Detective Williams showed up, and so did the rest of the patrol guys—all but Lee, gone four years by then. They brought beer and laughed like men, debating whether Bush would send troops to Iraq. Ivan sent a letter from prison, with a drawing of a bouquet of lilies, the only one to give a semblance of a gift.
In the park, everyone toasted to Russ and Ines. To a long and happy life together. Detective Williams nudged Russ in the ribs and said, You better make her happy tonight.
Is this how it’s supposed to feel? Russ asked himself, but he refused to linger on an answer. He knew, that windy day in the grass, that his love with Ines did not quiver, not on either side. They had taken the vows you were supposed to take, and that was love, or some subset of it. So he drank champagne and watched the leaves rush toward winter. When everyone chanted Kiss, kiss, kiss, they did. Ines was sour from the brut. Russ held Ines’s waist for the camera, thinking how later they would have sex and Ines would climb on top of him, as she’d been doing since their trip to San Diego. Hands clamped tight around his neck. She would roll away when he had finished and say good night, and just like that, they would be married. He would love her, as best he could.
On his wedding night, Russ thought of Lee Whitley in the way you think of someone dead. Fondly, too fondly, until absence takes this fondness and multiplies it, stretching until it becomes something invasive. Until it swallows you whole.
Cameron
Cameron stood outside Maplewood Memorial and wondered how many bodies it held that did not belong to Lucinda. How many blue, unbending thumbs. How many jellied hearts.
“Come on,” Jade said, and she pulled him forward by the elbow, her palm sweaty from the walk across town. In the parking lot, Cameron’s classmates were solemn as they stepped off the school bus. They moved in parasitic groups, crying in clumps, the girls tugging at black dresses, at their hair. There was only one bus—most parents had kept their children home and were now walking with hands on shoulders across the parking lot. Cameron counted three police cars.
“See you later,” Jade said, with an inappropriately exaggerated wink. She bolted ahead, toward the big glass doors.
Cameron joined the clusters of his classmates, feeling like he’d crash-landed in some faraway and lonesome place.
Things People Said at Lucinda’s Funeral:
“You look great. I mean, terrible circumstances, but did you do something with your hair?”
“A bit early to be having the memorial, isn’t it? Just a few days. I think the family wanted to get it over with.”
“That photo is beautiful. Such a pretty girl.”
“And the little sister, it’s so sad. She’s only in the seventh grade. Having to go through something like this at such a young age—I can’t even imagine.”
“They’re saying it was someone in the neighborhood, no motive yet—”
“Timmy Williams is all over the case; I heard they’ve got a new suspect—the ex-boyfriend, what’s his name, the Arnauds’ kid? They let him go.”
“Broke her neck—heard she died immediately. At least she didn’t suffer, you know?”
“I’m glad to hear business is going well. I knew the new lease would bring in more customers; you picked that perfect location right on Willow Square.”
The funeral was a movie Cameron had not meant to see.
He took a pew in the middle of the crowd and watched the town of Broomsville file in around him. It was a spectacle, electric. The girls from school cried in circles, holding hands. Parents watched with eagle eyes, gloating at the fact of their own children’s aliveness, masks of sorrow placed expertly over their relief. A woman near the podium shrieked and keened, and there was a bubble near the corner of the room where the governor sat, his police escorts hovering along the wall.
There was so much chaos, Cameron pretended he was not there but in the yellow house on the lane, where Lucinda was very much alive—sitting on the wooden swing that hung from the Valencia orange tree. Gleaming and sunlit.