Girl in Snow(69)

The painting of Hum hung right above Mom and Lucinda—a reassurance.

Cameron pulled a chair from the left side of the table, scraping it across the hardwood floor. He sat next to Mom, and together they examined the portrait of Lucinda.

Even here, Lucinda looked very beautiful. Mom thought so, too. He could tell from the way her eyes roved over black patches, places where Cameron had etched the charcoal so dark he’d pressed cavities into the skin of the real, living girl. And the white parts, where the sun from the kitchen window hit her clean paper skin, where her contours filled themselves out, where her jaw jutted out over her neck. Those staring eyes—even here, crevasse and unseeing, Lucinda was a vision. She was a brilliant combination of light and dark. Shadow and its resulting counterpart. She was luminescent.

“Cameron,” Mom said. “Tell me what this is. Please, sweetie. I need to hear it from you.”

“I’m sorry,” Cameron said to Mom, because he was. “I need to be alone in my room for a little while.”

Mom didn’t answer, only shook her head at ruined Lucinda. Her jaw was trembling, and her hands were wrapped tight around a mug of tea to stop their shaking.

Cameron didn’t like to touch, but he stretched his arm around Mom anyway. He tried to hold her up, but her sinewy arms and neck and collarbone all sank toward the table. At his touch, Mom’s eyes filled. Cameron pulled away. He didn’t want to make her cry.

He wanted to tell her good-bye and that he loved her, but instead he studied her gaunt profile. Cameron remembered how Dad used to watch her, and he tried to see the same. Mom had such graceful lines.

Cameron cupped a palm to the back of her neck, like how you were supposed to hold a baby, then left Mom at the table with her sadness.



The outer edges of Broomsville were flat and open. Run-down houses sprouted off the highway, with their beat-up trucks and collapsing barns, threadbare American flags waving to empty space. People out here lived differently: they sat on old couches and watched fuzzy television and drank homemade iced tea. The houses faded into the landscape. The people faded with them.

Cameron walked these roads to get to the base of Pine Ridge Point. Half an hour, just over a mile. His black ski jacket was layered over his sweat shirt, layered over the gun.

He climbed without thinking. He refused to look back as he scuffled up the side of the hill in his stiff dress pants, his shiny black funeral shoes sliding across the rocks. Pebbles toppled down the mountain behind him, miniature landslides.

It was only 4:45 p.m. when Cameron reached Pine Ridge Point. He’d wanted to watch the sky melt to black, but it would be an unforgiving blue for another half hour still. Cameron had that sacred feeling in his bones—a feeling you could only get at the top of a mountain, when the wind was blowing and you were alone.

If Cameron could answer Janine now, he would tell her yes, he was much happier alone than with other people. With other people, you couldn’t feel like this—like a part of the lake, spread hapless beneath you. Still as a photograph. You could only wonder how it felt to be a mountain. To stand, so sure like that.

In the other direction, red roofs were speckled white with dandruff snow. That was Broomsville: a set of Monopoly pieces placed carefully in clusters around the sprawling plains. And beyond that: more plains. And beyond that: the horizon. And beyond that: he didn’t know. The ocean, somewhere. More people. He thought of Dad, but not for long.

Cameron staggered, panting, to the edge of the cliff. The drop was only twenty feet—below that, landing after landing that led down to the water. Cameron sat on a small rock, near where the land turned into air, and pulled the porcelain ballerina from his pocket. She had survived the climb. Pristine. He balanced the ballerina in his palm, which was covered in red soil, and he thought about how somewhere out there, beyond this festering town, other people had killed. He wondered what they killed for. Compulsion, maybe. Or like in the movies: people killed for sex, or for money.

Cameron was relieved to think that if, indeed, he had killed—it had been for a monstrous love.



Two days before she died, Lucinda loved him in the yard.

He’d been a Statue only twenty minutes when she slid open her bedroom window and popped out the screen.

Cameron had always believed you could sense when things were over. Inside you. In the air around you. Now, the streetlights were humming, and Cameron had the distinct notion that after this moment, he would exist in a different era.

Lucinda lifted her right hand and held it there, a solemn wave. Her lips curled up, into a smile meant only for him.

Cameron had never felt so full. They were connected, they were undeniable.

She was a bird, perched and curious. He stretched his arm out. He waited.



Pine Ridge Point was like the middle of your favorite song—between the bridge and the chorus, where you held your breath and waited for the inevitable boom of music to take you away. Wind rustled through

the branches of the pine trees, soft hands on sharp needles. Everything converged in a rattle, a combination of consonant melodies, a series of songs for Lucinda.

Cameron could hear all the words she would not say. The shoulders she would not touch. The strawberries she would not eat. The number of times a day she would not blink. The glasses of lemonade she would not drink, the white nail polish she would not spread across her fingernails, the millions of shades of reds and oranges and pinks she would not see, tucking themselves quietly into bed behind the mountains.