Girl in Snow(9)

There was this feeling Broomsville gave you, with all its short, pastel buildings and open spaces. It was voted number five on CNN’s Top Ten Friendliest Places to Raise a Family, and no one was surprised. Broomsville was an overgrown cul-de-sac of square lawns, browned from the Colorado droughts. It was not the sort of place for white picket fences, but Broomsville had good public schools, with after-school programs you could join if you didn’t have money. The average family lived in a beige house just like Cameron’s, with two floors and three bedrooms and windows that faced the Front Range of the Rocky Mountains. People drove mountain cars, pickup trucks or Outbacks or Trailblazers, with bumper stickers that yelled, “BUSH CHENEY ’04!”

And above, the mountains. Always watching.

Colorado air was so crisp, it stung your nostrils. Once, Mom’s friend from college visited from Florida, and on the first day she passed out from altitude sickness. They called an ambulance and everything. The EMTs stuck plastic tubes in her nose to help her breathe. They took off her shirt and her bra to better reach her lungs, and her naked breasts flopped to the sides on the living-room floor. Cameron tried not to stare.

After a day or two she was fine, and they went on short hikes in the foothills—the small, rolling mountains that formed the base of the Rockies. Colorado had this specific smell in summer, like pine needles recovering from a miserable winter and hot, red dirt sliding down steep mountainsides.

You could see Pine Ridge Point from the Tree, and that was partially why Cameron had picked that specific aspen. You could lean against the smooth white bark and look up at the hill that enclosed Pine Ridge Point, where Dad first took him when he was six years old.

The sun was setting. There were plenty of natural phenomena that went unrecognized (snowflakes kissing a windowsill, fingernails dug into the skin of a tangerine), but Cameron could see why people made such a big deal of sunsets. The sunset at Pine Ridge Point always made Cameron feel so disastrously human, caged inside his own susceptible self.

Pine Ridge Point was a cliff suspended over a reservoir at a perfect ninety-degree angle. The reservoir had no waves. It waited, still and complacent, a pool of blood spreading away from a wound.

On the other side of the cliff—the side that didn’t face the water—sat the town of Broomsville, all quaint boxy houses and lawns with clicking sprinklers, starkly different from the chaos of the Rockies. You could see Cameron’s street, a minuscule Pine Ridge Drive, and everything else converging to this plateau. From the horizon of Pine Ridge Point, Broomsville looked like a cardboard town filled with paper people. Cameron’s hands could rearrange it however he pleased.

He often daydreamed about bringing Lucinda to Pine Ridge Point.

Look, he’d say. Don’t you see how weightless we are?



“Hello, Cameron.”

The social worker’s hair was slicked back into a wet bun. Her eyes were tunnels. Her smile was hard.

“Hi.”

“My name is Janine. Do you remember me?” She sat with a notebook in her lap, legs crossed, jiggling one of her clogs.

“Yeah.”

“This is a voluntary school-conducted interview, okay? We’re just checking in with our kids. You’re free to leave at any time. You’re free to abstain from answering anything that makes you uncomfortable. Do you understand and consent to continue?”

Once, when Cameron was flipping through a cookbook in the kitchen, he found a poem tucked inside. Lord Byron. Mom did this sometimes—put fragments of poems in unexpected places. Cameron took the Byron poem to his bedroom and taped it to the inside of his closet door. Mom had transcribed it onto notebook paper in her scratchy handwriting, with a pen that exploded in bursts of ink.

“Yes.”

“Okay. Cameron, why don’t you tell me about your relationship with Lucinda Hayes?”

(She walks in beauty, like the night

Of cloudless climes and starry skies;)

“Cameron?”

(And all that’s best of dark and bright

Meet in her aspect and her eyes)

“That’s all right. Let’s start with an easier question,” Janine said. “Where were you last night, February fifteenth?”

“At home,” Cameron said.

“Was anyone with you?”

“My mom was there.”

In truth, Cameron couldn’t remember February fifteenth. Last night. At home; my mom was there seemed like a simple and believable answer. He had somehow lost this night—it had slipped casually into all the Statue Nights in his Collection. It scared him to lose time like this, though he was no stranger to the concept. If Cameron could get every moment of his life tattooed on his body, he would, just to prove they had all happened.

“Cameron.” Janine paused, so stern in her turtleneck. He wished she would stop saying his name like that. She leaned across Principal Barnes’s desk, breathing coffee too close to Cameron’s face. “How would you describe your relationship with Lucinda Hayes?”

(One shade the more, one ray the less,

had half impaired the nameless grace)

Cameron often worried the beating of his heart would overpower the small space it occupied. Mom used to say his heart was too big for his chest—she meant it as a compliment, but Cameron started to imagine his heart swelled so big it clogged up his airways. He could feel it now, growing and shrinking, growing and shrinking. He was sure this would kill him one day.