Check the fridge, she says, and Russ realizes that Ivan has not called his sister, that Ines has not switched on the television today.
Russ finds half a can of Bud Light in the refrigerator door. He downs it quickly, but the carbonation is long gone and it is watered down, yeasty. Usually, Russ would ask how tutoring went, but today is Wednesday, and the kids get Wednesdays off. Any other day, Russ would ask about Ines’s favorite student, the girl who tells funny stories and can’t pick up a word of Spanish. Any other day, Ines would talk animatedly, repeating teenage gossip in an exaggerated fake American accent, like an annoying teenager at the mall. Oh my gaaaad, she says.
Russ wishes he could speak to Ines in Spanish. Maybe then, she’d look up from her knitting. He can remember a bit of the mandatory conversational Spanish class he took at the police academy, and he bought a Rosetta Stone when Googling proved fruitless. But his high-school transcripts made it clear that Russ was no scholar. He memorizes word after word—la mesa, el coche; ocho, nueve, diez—but by the next day, it’s like Spanish has a completely different alphabet.
Ines’s favorite student has a name that sounds like old-time television. Russ had recognized it first thing this morning: Lucinda. Russ does not tell Ines about her brother, found at the scene of another crime. He prefers her just like this—knitting.
Cameron
Things Cameron Didn’t Like to Remember:
1. Dad’s scalp. How his hair thinned at the front, creeping back toward the crown of his skull, a gradual reveal of pink.
2. The bones of the finger. The distal, intermediate, and proximal phalanges, and how Lucinda’s were especially long. Especially thin.
3. The second-grade talent show—the only time Cameron ever performed onstage.
Cameron had practiced for weeks. He’d plunked away at the piano in the den, perfecting “Für Elise.” But at the talent show itself, in that anticipated and terrifying hour, the stage in the gymnasium felt too foreign. Cameron hated all those eyes—his hands slipped off the keys, they were so sweaty. He played five notes, the beginning trill of “Für Elise,” before the wave swelled forward and caught Cameron in its froth. He blacked out.
The teachers said he was great. The break between the chorus and the bridge was moving, he had a natural sense of lyricism. They said he was so caught up in the music, his whole body was swaying—he had to stick with it, he had real talent. When Cameron stayed silent at dinner that night, Mom and Dad said, Cameron, what’s wrong? He didn’t know. It wasn’t Cameron up there, playing “Für Elise.” Someone else. A body uninhabited.
Those three minutes had escaped him, in all their glory and panic.
When Cameron came home from the Tree that evening, he lay on his bed. His toes were frozen blue in wool socks. Mom had gone back to work, even though it was against her better judgment, and did he promise he’d stay right there on the couch?
The Tree was Cameron’s sacred and secret space.
The Tree took on the general shape of a man, and that was why Cameron had picked this specific aspen: thick trunk, like a torso, and about six feet tall. When Cameron squinted, he could imagine the spine, vertebrae stacked on top of one another, inconsequential as a tower of blocks. He could picture the heart—the aspen had a knot of bark in its chest, with a protruding nub in the exact location of the aorta. Usually, this was where he aimed. Sometimes, when Cameron felt particularly Tangled, he aimed for both kneecaps, but this was the cruelest thing to do, and remembering it—remembering how real those legs had been in his head as he’d squeezed the trigger—guilt seeped through him, spreading and blotting through his body like ink.
Today, Cameron had set the .22-caliber handgun on the ground like a sacrifice, the barrel resting in a patch of dirty snow. Cameron liked to think they were in Hum, all the imaginary people of the Tree, those figments of his mind to whom he’d done real hurt. And now Lucinda was there, too. He hoped in the morning, the birds would chirp their gurgling songs for her.
Now, safely in his bedroom, Cameron’s thoughts were like the string of a forgotten yo-yo—knotted up on themselves, twisted in inconvenient patterns. The psychiatrist he had seen for a few months after everything happened with Dad had given him a safety word for times like these, times that bordered on clinical panic attacks but felt different, so specific to Cameron and the jumble of his insides. Untangle. These eight letters used to calm him—they used to scare away the blackout, which felt like fainting, though if you asked any witness, Cameron was usually conscious. Untangle. Walking around, talking to people, playing the piano or whatever he’d been doing before, just with a brain so overwhelmed it had shut off entirely. Untangle.
Gradually, the safety word had lost its meaning. He’d overthought it, like when you stared at a word for too long and it stopped looking like a word and became an alien formation of letters with no real significance.
Untangle wouldn’t bring Lucinda back to life, and it wouldn’t numb the badness of the Tree. He wanted to remember how charcoal faded across Lucinda’s jawline. Her symmetry on a nine-by-twelve pad of paper. Urgent. Cameron reached between his bed and the wall, where he hid the porn magazine Ronnie gave him back in December (Rayna Rae in the centerfold, with jet-black hair that barely covered her nipples).
Reaching beneath his mattress, Cameron’s thumb brushed against something solid, caught between the bed and the wall.
Before Cameron pulled it into the dim afternoon light, he knew exactly what he was touching. The suede was unmistakable. The elastic band held it shut, an accusation whispered in his ear before he’d even seen the thing: You have done something wrong, it said to him. You have done something very wrong.
Cameron laid it out, a body on a coroner’s table. He stood over his bed, examining the strange combination of synonymous shapes: the rectangle bed frame, the rectangle sheets, the rectangle comforter, the rectangle pillow, and there, in the middle, Lucinda’s rectangle diary.
Untangle wouldn’t explain how Lucinda’s diary had ended up in his bed. Untangle wouldn’t tell him what to do with it. Untangle wouldn’t help him remember the night of February fifteenth—last night. It wouldn’t bring her back to life.
Twenty-three minutes passed, and Cameron could only think: he had never been so close to her.