When Russ met Hilary Jameson, he was embarrassed for Cynthia. Cynthia: supple thighs and aging curves, a mane of wild gray hair she never thought about. And then there was Hilary, with perky breasts and a clean-shaved pussy, which Russ imagined she spread with her fingers like a porn star.
Russ hates to think about Lee now, because he should have known that night, as he kicked bits of jagged green glass into an empty planter at the edge of the porch. He should have paid more attention to the way Lee cowered as the bottle hit the house, as if his own hand had not just thrown it. A prophecy.
After that night on the porch, Lee became two people at once. One: a man with a family and an entry-level job in law enforcement. Lee supplemented this colossal disappointment with Hilary Jameson, hurried and messy, in the car on the side of the road. Two: a man with a friend who would do anything to protect him, blindly and without question. Two: a man capable of hurting someone. Two: No one’s hero.
Despite all this, Russ so gravely misses him.
Every Tuesday night, Ines goes to Bible study. She comes home late, so gloomy she’ll hardly speak. You shouldn’t think so much about sin, Russ advises. It’ll tear you up for no reason at all.
Thursdays, she’s better. Thursdays, Ines kisses the crook of Russ’s neck when his alarm goes off in the morning. Get up, sleepyhead. By Friday, Ines melts back into herself. Quiet Ines is inevitable. Ines, his solemn wife, unreadable as the walls of their perpetually unfinished home.
Russ doesn’t ask Ines about her life in Guadalajara, and she doesn’t offer it up. She had followed Ivan to Broomsville a year after he’d come, because Mamá had urged and Ivan told her it was good here. America was fine, all fine. He didn’t tell Ines about the drugs—an occasional break from his under-the-table work at the church, basic tasks for some extra cash—until she arrived, alone, with a copy of Lorca’s Canciones tucked in her pocket and a bundle of handwritten letters from the rest of the family. An emissary.
Russ didn’t ask for these things, and he doesn’t want any more. He cannot picture this Ines, and it seems she doesn’t want him to. Russ’s Ines lives in Broomsville, Colorado. His Ines knits so intensively she’s filled the upstairs linen closet with lumpy blankets and sweaters and socks. Russ does not need to know about exotic fruits or the inimitable temperature of a Mexico sun—the unspoken world of old Ines, a woman not forgotten, only folded and stored away. Russ and Ines are all right like this. They are skating.
The day Russ realized Ines was unhappy, he went to the run-down mall on the outskirts of town. Bought her a diamond necklace he couldn’t afford.
Russ almost begged her then—Tell me about home. Tell me how you got here. All the stories Russ had heard through work about the border—none of them specifically belonging to Ines, whose journey he had never heard. A plane, a train, a car, a bus? He wanted to ask her why, why would she leave what she’d known? Perhaps it was her brother. The amount of time Ines spent worrying about Ivan made Russ think that maybe, yes—it was Ivan, the reason she’d been imprisoned in this country. In this house.
But Russ knew what happened when you bared your insides to someone else. He had been there—maybe was still there—in the squad car with Lee, sharing the things that thrashed and squirmed. Unprotected. He wouldn’t make that mistake again. So Russ gave Ines the necklace and said, I want to make you happy; I’ll keep trying. Ines clasped the diamond around her neck. Smiled.
She did not look like someone who needed saving. So sturdy. A building with locked doors. I love you, she told him, but her voice sounded too high-pitched and very far away, like she’d yelled it from some unreachable height.
On a Saturday in October, just weeks before her tourist visa ran out, Russ and Ines married. They took the squad car to town hall. Russ turned on the sirens because it made Ines laugh; she pressed her face to the window and watched cars pull to the side. Russ imagined that Ines felt American then, and maybe she’d write home to Guadalajara and tell her family how lucky she was, and how happy, because sometimes all it took to be lucky and happy was the easy matter of driving faster than everyone else.
Ines wore a white sundress, but it was a cold October so she zipped one of Russ’s sweat shirts over it. The sweat shirt had holes in the sleeves where Ines had poked her thumbs.
They filled out the paperwork at the clerk’s desk, and when she stood next to Russ, Ines looked like a little girl, or one of the high-school students she tutored. Pink on her lips, a white flower in her hair. They signed the papers. Ines leaned over, kissed Russ on the cheek. Her smile. Not dazzling, but rare.
The party was in the park where they’d met, just a few months earlier. They spread boxes of pizza beneath a metal awning in the wind. Detective Williams showed up, and so did the rest of the patrol guys—all but Lee, gone four years by then. They brought beer and laughed like men, debating whether Bush would send troops to Iraq. Ivan sent a letter from prison, with a drawing of a bouquet of lilies, the only one to give a semblance of a gift.
In the park, everyone toasted to Russ and Ines. To a long and happy life together. Detective Williams nudged Russ in the ribs and said, You better make her happy tonight.
Is this how it’s supposed to feel? Russ asked himself, but he refused to linger on an answer. He knew, that windy day in the grass, that his love with Ines did not quiver, not on either side. They had taken the vows you were supposed to take, and that was love, or some subset of it. So he drank champagne and watched the leaves rush toward winter. When everyone chanted Kiss, kiss, kiss, they did. Ines was sour from the brut. Russ held Ines’s waist for the camera, thinking how later they would have sex and Ines would climb on top of him, as she’d been doing since their trip to San Diego. Hands clamped tight around his neck. She would roll away when he had finished and say good night, and just like that, they would be married. He would love her, as best he could.
On his wedding night, Russ thought of Lee Whitley in the way you think of someone dead. Fondly, too fondly, until absence takes this fondness and multiplies it, stretching until it becomes something invasive. Until it swallows you whole.
Cameron
Cameron stood outside Maplewood Memorial and wondered how many bodies it held that did not belong to Lucinda. How many blue, unbending thumbs. How many jellied hearts.
“Come on,” Jade said, and she pulled him forward by the elbow, her palm sweaty from the walk across town. In the parking lot, Cameron’s classmates were solemn as they stepped off the school bus. They moved in parasitic groups, crying in clumps, the girls tugging at black dresses, at their hair. There was only one bus—most parents had kept their children home and were now walking with hands on shoulders across the parking lot. Cameron counted three police cars.
“See you later,” Jade said, with an inappropriately exaggerated wink. She bolted ahead, toward the big glass doors.
Cameron joined the clusters of his classmates, feeling like he’d crash-landed in some faraway and lonesome place.