Girl in Snow(54)

Cameron





Cameron had lied. He had read Lucinda’s diary, one page, before he gave it to Mr. O.

January 11th:

What is a window for

Except to watch

Through glass, sometimes

I can feel u

U terrify me

He couldn’t read any more.

Lucinda had doodled five-pointed stars across the top of the page, but they were not careful—they were messy, ink smeared in the corners. Also, she dotted her “i”s with bubbly circles.

U terrify me. Cameron could not look at the words, could not think of glass, could not allow this thing to exist anywhere but with him. So he ripped the page from the diary and tucked it where he’d found it in the first place: the crack between his bed and the wall, where it fell to the dust. He tried desperately to forget.

Her handwriting was not elegant; it did not swirl. Lucinda’s words didn’t dance the way he’d hoped. They didn’t dance at all.



Mom’s van pulled out of the Maplewood Memorial parking lot, and Cameron rolled down his window, even though the dashboard display read twenty-six degrees. The day should not have felt like this: so bright and unabashed, like it wasn’t even sorry. The dry trees flicked by in blurs of naked brown, like they’d peeled off their layers and were learning how to breathe again. This was so unfair.

The quiet calm of the car was oppressive, interrupted only by Mom’s crying. It was not the sort of crying you could hide. Cameron wanted to comfort her, but she was crying for Mr. O, and this was all Cameron’s fault.

They inched forward. Cameron knew what was happening in all the other cars: Mr. O, parents were saying to each other, Mr. O, the art teacher from Jefferson High; remember him from parent-teacher conferences? Kids were sitting wide-eyed in the backseat, hoping this would get them out of homework.

When they pulled up to the house, Mom turned to Cameron.

“Go inside,” she said.

Her eyes were small and red. She pulled a coffee-shop napkin from the cup holder and used it to wipe her nose.

“Where are you going?”

“I’m going down to the station. Cameron, I want you to go in the house. Do not leave until I’m home, don’t answer the door, don’t speak to anyone. Do you understand?”

“Yes,” Cameron said as he slid his legs over the seat and onto solid ground.

“Cam?” Mom said before he could shut the door.

“Yes?”

“I know how you felt.”

“What?”

“About Lucinda. I saw your drawings.”

“Mom, I didn’t—”

“I know you loved her, is what I’m trying to say. I know you loved her in your own Cameron way.”

Mom’s bony hands grasped the steering wheel.

“When I get home,” she said, “I need you to tell me everything. I know it’s hard, and you must miss her terribly, but sweetie, I need to know what you have done.”

Mom motioned for him to shut the door, and before Cameron could tell her that he loved her and he wished she wouldn’t be so hard on herself, the van was bumping out of the driveway and around the corner. Cameron let those words fall off him like snakeskin, rearranging themselves as they hit the ground: What have you done?



Cameron had been in Dad’s closet twice before—both times after Dad had gone, when Cameron had been so Tangled he had lost all sense of time, curled up on cream carpet.

1. When Beth said Cameron was the kind of kid who would bring a gun to school, he came home and opened the chest under Mom’s bed. He stared at the .22 handgun, wondering: Was it possible to lose control of your own body? Could your hands do things your head didn’t want?

2. When he read that book on Mom’s shelf, about the man who killed someone while looking directly into the sun. Albert Camus, The Stranger. Cameron dreamed of ultraviolet rays burning straight through his pupils.

Now, Cameron did not turn on any lights. Even though it was daytime, the windows in the living room faced south, and the house was gloomy. He slipped off his shoes by the front door, and locked it so he would hear Mom coming home. Carefully, Cameron padded toward the den.

When Dad left, everyone said Mom should get rid of his stuff. Instead, she’d left it encased in a tomb down the hall from her bedroom.

Cameron creaked open the door to the closet and all Dad’s smells gushed out. Whiskey. Aftershave. He liked Dad’s leather shoes, with tissue paper balled up in the toes to keep their shape. He liked how Dad’s two fancy suits stood, rigid on hangers. He liked the belts that hung from hooks on the door, the different shades of brown, black, and suede. Even though Cameron hated all these things in theory, he was so Tangled that their familiarity was comforting. He turned on the overhead light, stepped inside, and shut the door behind him.

The relief was immediate. Here, he would not think about Mr. O, chained to the bar in the room where they held bad guys. He would not think about Mom, standing by the coffee machine at the station house, pleading with Russ Fletcher to let him go; he didn’t do anything wrong. Here, it was just Cameron and Dad, playing the quiet games they always did.

Dad had kept his police uniform in the back corner of the closet when he took it home for washing. It had a set of shelves all to itself, even though it belonged to the Broomsville Police Department and had lived there most of the time—one for the pants, one for the belt, and a rack for the jacket, which he hung before he ironed it on the laundry-room table. These shelves had been empty since the arrest, when the chief took Dad’s uniform away for good. Cameron pushed aside a rack of windbreakers and ran a hand along the cold wood. On top of the shelf, where Dad used to keep his badge, Cameron’s hand ran over a folded sheet of paper.