Now, the ex-boyfriend is here. He is one of the few high-school students they’ve successfully reached. Most parents have refused voluntary questioning at the sight of Detective Williams’s wide-brimmed hat on their doorstep. My baby did nothing wrong! I’d like to talk to my lawyer first. The kids they did speak with knew little about Lucinda beyond her place at the top of the social ladder. Detective Williams had gone from house to house last night like a political campaigner but given up on most.
The ex-boyfriend has come in voluntarily, escorted by his foreign, leggy mother. The kid looks like your typical high-school piece of shit, Russ thinks. He has swagger like a soccer player—too cool for football. His wide shoulders aren’t quite sturdy yet, still growing, and he flicks a swoop of brown hair back every few minutes with a spastic jerk of his head.
Edouard Arnaud, the lieutenant says, coming up behind Russ at the coffee machine. I mean, the victim seems like a nice enough girl, but could she have picked a douchier boyfriend?
Ex-boyfriend, Russ corrects. They broke up months ago.
Russ watches the boy. Edouard Arnaud looks smaller than he should—flattened by the situation. He waits in the reception area with his mother, who holds his hand. The teenager grasps hard, fingers laced through fingers. Lifeboat. Russ cannot remember the last time he gripped someone that tightly.
They’d go to this cliff, Russ and Lee, to nap between shifts. Ten years before Lee’s arrest. It was a fake cliff—Russ liked that about it. It looked more dangerous than it was, stretching out over the manmade reservoir, terrifying until you looked over the edge and saw that it only dropped to another plateau. That was how things went, wasn’t it? A series of plateaus. You just kept sliding down, safe, safe, safe. But eventually you’d hit the water.
Lee would stretch across the back, and Russ would recline in the passenger’s seat with his feet on the dashboard. They’d patrol assigned streets, sipping black coffee. Lee’s thin, feminine fingers tapped rhythms against the steering wheel.
In Russ’s memories, Lee’s face is always slightly blurred, like when you wake up from a dream with only the vague essence of someone. Lee was unassuming. The long, pointed nose. Pasty skin, covered in acne, though Lee was older than Russ—by the time Russ met him, Lee was already married to Cynthia, twenty-six to Russ’s twenty-one.
This was before Ines, of course. They made a habit of recounting Russ’s one-night stands. These were usually girls from the surrounding towns that branched off the highway beneath the shadow of the mountains, who came down to Broomsville for a night out at Dixie’s Tavern. Back then, Russ drank beer, beer, beer, because he so intimately understood the creeping heaviness of a beer drunk as its lethargic inebriation poked at the edges of your consciousness. The next day, hidden behind a Styrofoam cup, Russ would tell Lee about the night. What about her nipples? Lee would ask, thirsty for detail. Brown or pink?
Usually, fabrication. Often, Russ would make up some story just to see Lee’s smile curl around those crooked teeth, an affirmation, aging Russ. Pink, Russ said, with little hairs around the edges, and Lee laughed so hard the coffee came out his nose. Fuck! He wrung out his hands, dripping with scalding coffee, and Russ had to grab the wheel, steering them down I-25 in a hungover stupor while Lee wiped his lap with a wad of Dunkin’ Donuts napkins.
Lee was sensitive; he’d get worked up about the smallest, unpredictable things. Once, a drunk driver called him a faggot, and Lee rammed the guy’s head into his own car window so hard the glass splintered.
They rarely talked about Cynthia. Back then, Russ didn’t think he’d ever get married, or even fall in love, because what was the point? He didn’t want to be Lee. Stuck in a deteriorating life, saying your wife’s name like you’ve coughed up phlegm and you’re glancing around, panicked, for somewhere to spit it out.
Lee did spit her out, eventually. It was like he spit her out, then looked at the lump of her, that slimy but inconsequential mess he’d made. Only after everything had fallen apart would Russ wonder about their marriage in the years before he’d come along, the magnet urge that had driven Lee and Cynthia to bed together, to the altar.
After his arrest, Lee bought a used car with cash and took off straight from the dealership, past the foothills, over the snow-capped mountains, and across the state, maybe on to somewhere warmer. Good-bye to no one. And then, it was over: ten years of companionship, of sunrises at their favorite spot in the mountains.
A series of plateaus. You keep sliding down, and eventually, you hit the water. You look around at the black and endless expanse, and you swim, because you’ve known no other landscape. You’re sure that on the other side of the reservoir there’s another mountain waiting, with other cliffs. Russ hopes Lee is on one of them, stretched lazily across some new back seat, ball cap pulled down to block out the early, peeking sun.
While Detective Williams interviews the ex-boyfriend, the news vans multiply—the local channels that span across the Front Range and even a van from CNN. A reporter with glossy hair speaks reverently into a microphone.
They’ve already gotten hundreds of calls from terrified neighbors and overbearing parents: We have to make sure our children are safe! One anonymous phone call from a man with a drawling redneck accent, claiming conspiracy, the same conspiracy that had overtaken Denver International Airport. New-Age Nazi-ism, he said—a fresh holocaust coming for anyone who doesn’t love God, a concentration camp beneath Terminal B. Lucinda was a warning, he said, just the locusts or the frogs. Afterwards, the officers had laughed together at the man’s expense, but not with their usual fervor. This time, uneasy.
Detective Williams went to the Whitleys’ house last night, too. Cameron was already asleep, and Cynthia had refused to wake him up. There had been no hope for that one from the start.
Come back when you have a warrant, she’d said. Or at least probable cause.
They have neither of those things, for anyone. The news vans pull up and spike their antennas. The television in the corner threatens them all with images of themselves, their own building, their own shiny bald heads as they walk in and out of it. No comment, no comment.
Russ and Ines met again a few weeks after that summer day in the park.
It was a narcotics call. The Broomsville police had been chasing these guys for months. They were notorious, Ivan’s friends: they dealt in shelled-out houses, places so far beyond repair that no desperate Broomsville real estate agent would go near.
This was the north side of town, where tiny, peeling structures housed sardine-packed families. Broken grills and sun-faded plastic chairs littered lawns. Mexico City, Russ’s cop friends called it, snickering from air-conditioned cars. Russ laughed along, vaguely recognizing his own participation in this active coward’s ignorance. Of course, he knew there was more to this neighborhood, so different from the manicured suburbs, but he did not know the shape of these differences, how they tasted, how they felt.