Girl in Snow(64)

There was a police car parked in front of the house, and a tall, straight-backed figure sat inside, watching people come and go. Cameron deliberated briefly, then walked up the driveway.

He did not know what he was looking for inside Lucinda’s house, but her smashed charcoal face was etched into the foreground of Cameron’s vision. He needed evidence, proof that he had not imagined her.

When Cameron slipped inside, the crowd was so thick that no one glanced his way. He had never been in Lucinda’s house in daylight. People ate noodles with plastic forks and the place smelled vaguely of tuna. By the bathroom, two women were talking about Lucinda’s parents.

“They’re in the living room, yes. They’re talking, but not much.”

Cameron recognized no one; for the first time, he was relieved to be in a crowd so big. Before anyone picked him out—before someone from school caught sight of him and started whispering—Cameron slipped into the side hallway and climbed the stairs, leaving the chaos behind.

There was a pressing quiet upstairs in the Hayeses’ house, a purposeful and intrusive emptiness that settled on the green shag carpet and the ridges of the photo frames. Suffocating. Usually, Cameron liked silence, but this was unbearable compared to the noise downstairs. Malicious.

Cameron wanted to examine this untouched part of the house, to document it in ways he had not from the outside. It hit him—sweet, explosive—that Lucinda had breathed the air trapped upstairs, and it was getting recycled into his own lungs, sacred air that wouldn’t exist after the Hayes family had opened the doors and windows enough times.

When he reached Lucinda’s bedroom door, he pushed it open fast, to ensure he wouldn’t turn back.

In the white light of 3:39 p.m., Lucinda’s bedroom was just a room. Four lavender walls and beige carpet with a coffee stain near the vent. Tracks ran up and down the carpet where the housekeeper had pushed a vacuum. Lucinda’s computer was gone, and there was a perfect frame of dust where its torso used to sit.

Someone else had made her bed. Lucinda never fluffed her pillows—no, she always left the indentations from sleep, where the weight of her head had cast its skull mark.



The porcelain ballerina balanced on the edge of her dresser.

Cameron had seen the ballerina up close only once, when Lucinda had unzipped her backpack in the hall by her locker—the ballerina had been in the front pocket, inexplicably accompanying Lucinda to school. Cameron’s proportional estimates had proven accurate: the figurine was no bigger than his hand. Her left leg made a triangle of empty space in conjunction with the right, held at a perfect ninety degrees, as she balanced on the tip of a porcelain slipper.

Now, Lucinda’s ballerina was light in Cameron’s hand.

The bed could have been anyone’s, her desk could have been anyone’s, her dresser could have been anyone’s. The pens sat, bored, in a cup on the nightstand. Cameron clutched the ballerina, desperate for something that was distinctly Lucinda’s. He was a continent, standing in this anonymous bedroom. He was a continent and Lucinda was a sailboat, circling, circling. He could not move; he could only watch her pull further away.

He needed more.

Lucinda’s closet door was open. There was her favorite pair of jeans, the ones she wore with flat shoes, accentuating bluebird ankles. An old pink shirt with the word “LOVE” embossed across the front. The dress she’d worn to last year’s Halloween party. Green velvet.

Cameron ran his fingers along Lucinda’s velvet dress—it was liquid, running down his knuckles and over his hands, so familiar he swore he could taste her. Salt. Chemical perfume across her clavicle. Bitter on his tongue.

He slipped the dress off its hanger. Pressed his mouth to the fabric.



The Hayeses’ upstairs bathroom was shiny and neat. Cameron draped Lucinda’s dress over the rim of the bathtub.

White lace drapes failed to keep out the day—it tore through them, heedless. The shower curtain had a girlish striped pattern, and the toilet-seat cover was made of fuzzy pink yarn. Two toothbrushes with white film crusted down their necks leaned against the rim of a plastic cup, and the voices downstairs came up through the floor, muffled, a distant murmur.

In the mirror, Cameron looked hollow. The three naked bulbs that lined the ceiling made his face pale white, with thick, sagging shadows, like a sick person from a movie. His hair stuck up in a thousand funny places, and a leaf clung to the collar of his button-down shirt. Maple. He plucked it off and dropped it in the sink, where it sat, morose with all its veins.

Cameron snaked his belt out of its loops and dropped it on the bath mat. He unbuttoned his shirt—bits of skin revealed themselves like secrets. Someday his chest would have hair like Dad’s, but now it was white and smooth and bare, nipples interrupting like unexpected punctuation.

His shirt puddled on the floor. Cameron slid out of his dress pants, bunching each pant leg around his ankles, then wriggling clumsily out of them.

He examined himself: Cameron was a boy in a pair of plain white boxers from the drugstore, the kind that came three pairs in a bag. He was a human body. Just that. What went on inside was irrelevant. He didn’t hate himself. He only investigated a body with all its anatomical parts, all the related bits and pieces, a body that knew what felt good and what felt bad.

Lucinda’s green velvet dress had a zipper in the back and a tag across the seam. Eighty percent cotton. XS. Machine washable.