Girl in Snow(74)

Russ scuffles up the hill. He’d like to see that view—the lake, ghostly serene, and the pinprick Broomsville lights lapping at his back. But Russ has not climbed this mountain in a very long time, and after a few yards he is panting. He wishes he had brought some water; freezing air aches in his throat. He can see his own labored breath.

A sound. Voices.

Russ is only halfway up when two figures appear at the top. One limps, the other supports. A boy and a girl—young. Hey! Russ calls, but neither of them answers.

The boy wears a hoodie. His slacks are wet around the crotch. The girl holds a gun.

When she sees Russ, the girl waves him forward. He scrambles to meet them on the incline, hands raised in a practiced surrender. Don’t shoot. The girl holds the gun by her side, almost a foot from her body, fist clenched around the barrel in a clear effort to avoid the trigger.

Their faces sharpen: for a second, Russ sees Lee. Lee, those woman hands, the way he’d suck beer from the neck of a bottle and sweat clumped in beads that ran down the back of his scarlet-burned neck. Before Russ can consider that Lee has finally come back for him, the boy comes closer. Cameron, of course. A dark patch on his jeans—he is half comatose.

The girl gives Russ the gun, and Russ nimbly empties the bullets into his pocket. No one speaks.

Russ picks up Cameron like a daughter who has fallen asleep in the car. The boy is not heavy, but he is wet with his own urine, which leaks through the sleeves of Russ’s coat and onto the strong arms beneath as they take baby steps down the mountain.



It wasn’t him, the girl says. Jade. Her hands are clasped in her lap as they wind down the foothills, past the stadium and the crumbling gas station. The polish on her fingers is picked at, a frame of black around each nail. A dark smear of marker slashes across her inner wrist. Cameron, in the back with Jade’s bike, stares out the window. Russ thought about putting the tarp from the trunk beneath Cameron’s soaking pants, but humiliation was not the game.

Did you hear me? the girl says. Cameron didn’t kill Lucinda. It was her neighbor.

I believe you, Russ says.

As they near the station, he flips open his cell phone. Russ’s hands remember the number. Old choreography.

Cynthia? he says when she picks up. I have him. He’s okay.



When it’s over—when they’ve gotten the story from Cameron, who speaks in a shuddering voice, with tears racing brakeless down his cheeks—Cynthia comes to Russ by the drinking fountain.

Russ, she says, battle-beaten beneath fluorescent lights. Thank you for bringing him home.

Russ steps forward, wraps himself around her. Cynthia’s smell—lavender and lemongrass. After so many years.

They stand this way for minutes, absorbing one another’s twin sadnesses, and Russ wishes with all his might that it were possible to go back to that day in the garden, to put his hands around Cynthia’s sun-sweating face and help her pull every single plant from the ground.



Russ stays late for the paperwork while Detective Williams handles the neighbor and the chief handles the news vans. After a round of congratulations, everyone else has gone home. Russ is exhausted—he wanders into the break room for a cup of gritty coffee.

The break room looks exactly like it did seventeen years ago. Russ imagines Lee sitting across from him at the folding card table, holding a hand of aces and smiling, fake innocent. Lee would put down his cards—they’d both burst into booming laughter. Come on, Lee would say. Rematch. I know you can do better than that. Russ would shake his head, joking angry. In his chest, a flight of springtime geese moving back north for the summer. Flapping home.

Tonight, the memory feels less like a stab wound and more like a memory. Distant and unchangeable. A sighing reprieve. Russ stands at the gurgling coffee machine and thanks the years between then and now, a road the length of the country that separates Russ and that young fool self.





Jade





Everything happens for a reason, Mrs. Arnaud used to say. Zap told her this was stupid. That phrase gets you nowhere, he would say. It’s a logical fallacy. It’s like believing in the tooth fairy, simply to make you feel secure in your own existence. Sayings like these are safety blankets, he used to say. They’re pretexts.

I partially disagree. I don’t think everything happens for a reason. Some things do, of course. There’s a reason Lucinda died. I don’t know it, and neither does Cameron. This is an impossible consolation.



While we wait for Cameron’s mom at the police station, the receptionist gives him a clean pair of scrub pants. He comes out of the bathroom, too dazed to be embarrassed, and sits next to me on a chilly bench in the police department’s waiting room.

Cameron’s sadness is a palpable thing, radiating from his curved spine, from the shadows beneath his baggy hood.

I take his hand, lacing my fingers between his. Cold sweat. We don’t speak. When Cameron’s mom comes bursting in, harried and tear-streaked, Cameron’s hand unclasps from mine, and it feels like waking from a long night of satisfying sleep. A parting that I recognize—for the first time since Lucinda died—as a sort of grief.



Ma picks me up at the station.

I’m waiting outside with my bike. She doesn’t say anything, just loads the bike into the trunk of the car, exerting more physical effort than I’ve seen from her in years. She slams the back door. Claps the slushy grime off her hands. Cars rush past the station and we stand in their tail wind, irreconcilable figures trying to ignore the nightfall breeze. Ma doesn’t have a jacket.