Cameron would not open the diary, but he knew that whatever she wrote had probably been recorded with meticulous effort. He remembered from her school notes how Lucinda’s ys and gs curled underneath the blue line. Cameron stretched the elastic to the side, thinking that he had only ever known Lucinda through windows and in gym class, smiling over her shoulder in her Jefferson High School shirt, “LUCINDA” Sharpied in block letters across the stomach.
Cameron had taken a liking to the Hayes family—to the way they chopped their onions for dinner and rubbed their eyes in the morning. Combed their hair after a shower. Father washed the dishes; younger sister dried. Cameron refused to form an opinion about the millions of little ways they chose to move around their house; that wasn’t his job. He was only a witness.
The purple diary was the only thing left of Lucinda. Cameron shouldn’t be the one to open it. It didn’t seem fair. So he put the diary on the top shelf of his closet, along with the Collection of the Pencil Bodies and the Collection of People Who Did Terrible Things, both manila folders hidden behind a stack of winter sweaters he had long outgrown.
Cameron had lots of different Collections, all hidden on the top shelf of his closet. The Collection of Pencil Bodies, the Collection of Pens, the Collection of Photos from When Mom Was Young. The only one hidden in his head was the Collection of Statue Nights—this was his favorite Collection, because it was full of Lucinda.
Cameron didn’t hide the diary because he was afraid of getting caught.
He simply didn’t want to ruin her.
Mom was always tired after work. Her days were long, because she spent them arguing with bored old women about the price of yarn and cutting fabric against the special measuring tape at the craft store.
Tonight, the refrigerator door whooshed open and closed. The silverware drawer rattled the forks and the knives. Cameron listened until Mom knocked softly on his bedroom door.
“Why are you on the floor?” Mom said, creaking it open.
She held a plastic plate of apples cut into smiley faces, with a glob of organic peanut butter scraped onto the rim.
“I made you a snack,” Mom said. “Come outside. You look like you need some air.”
Cameron put on his coat and hat and followed Mom to the driveway. They sat on the drying porch steps. Mom’s jacket was pastel purple. She’d worn it every winter as long as Cameron could remember, and her hat was a striped department-store beanie. It didn’t look very warm.
“I know this has been a hard day,” Mom said.
She bit into an apple slice. Cameron loved to watch people eat fruit. Peaches, especially, looked like kisses. Sloppy and sticky.
“I need to talk to you,” Mom said. “About last night. When Lucinda”—she tilted her face up to the sky and closed her eyes, like when she had a headache—“when Lucinda was killed. Remember how Principal Barnes pulled me aside when I came to pick you up today?”
“Yes.”
“He asked if you were home last night. I told him you were. The police asked us to go in to the station, but I wanted to talk to you first.
“Cameron, honey, look at me,” she said. “You weren’t home last night.”
Cameron tried to take her words and form them into a shape he could better understand: You weren’t home. If he wasn’t home, and Lucinda was dead—Mom would never lie.
“I was home,” Cameron said.
“I was so afraid of this,” Mom said. She pressed her fingers to the bridge of her nose. “I heard a noise from your room. You weren’t there, but the window was open. I know you’ve done this before—walking around at night. I chose not to worry.”
Cameron coughed, because it felt like the logical thing to do.
“Mom, I was home.”
“Sweetie.”
He couldn’t look at Mom, because he could tell from the way her head was bowed that she was crying. He’d dragged her out to the driveway and made her say those horrible words—You weren’t home; you weren’t. Cameron felt the beginning of Tangled coming on. His head could barely hold itself up; his insides were swollen and angry. The perimeters of his vision were a dusk, his breath like cement in his chest. He pressed the heel of his hand so hard into the sidewalk that the tiny bits of gravel lodged themselves in his skin, sending stinging lines of pain through his whole arm, and he felt a little better.
“Where was I?” Cameron said.
“I was hoping you could tell me that,” Mom said.
“I don’t remember,” Cameron told her, and this was the truth.
“You can’t have forgotten,” she said. “It was only last night.”
“I don’t remember anything,” Cameron said, and he couldn’t tell from Mom’s face—which was the most scared and pitying he’d ever seen—whether she believed him.
Mom’s nose was dripping, a small river above her mouth, but she did not move to wipe it. She picked up Cameron’s sticky hand and interlaced her feathery fingers with his. Cameron was embarrassed because he was too old for things like this, but he liked the feeling too much to let go. It was like someone had pressed a shaky bow to a violin string and played one long, vibrating note through his ribcage and through hers. They were both very still.
Cameron had not consciously let himself cry in nearly three years, because he was afraid of the floodgate: once he started, he’d never be able to stop. So instead of crying, Cameron let the sadness spread across the inside of his throat, let it melt into his glands, burning thick. He and Mom were both hunched over, they were numb on the drying concrete outside the beige house, they were clinging to one another so tight their palms were sore. This sort of grief was unbearable, but it was nice to share it with someone, even if it made his neck impossibly heavy.
Cameron had considered keeping his Collections in Dad’s closet instead, because Mom would never go inside. It was down the hall, outside their bedroom. The closet smelled like Dad: worn leather, the pages of the morning newspaper. Dad’s closet was the place Cameron went when he was most Tangled—since Dad left, Cameron had gone into his closet only twice, when the missing felt too big. He’d stood among scratchy shirts and pants folded on hangers, wondering how it felt to put on these clothes every day, how it felt to be someone bad.
The Collection of People Who Did Terrible Things was a manila folder. On principle, Dad belonged in there, even though Cameron felt so morbid sticking him in with Andrea Yates.