The girls didn’t talk in class for the rest of the day, and Mr. O helped Cameron pack up his things and move to the closet office, where the sound of the ninth-grade class was muffled through a thick aluminum door.
“Tell me if they bother you again,” Mr. O said.
Before he left Cameron to that delectable solitude, Mr. O stopped with his hand on the doorknob. Someone laughed, loud, but Cameron doubted it was Beth.
“Oh, and tell your mother I say hello.”
For the rest of the semester, Cameron drew and erased and drew again in peace.
People Cameron did not expect to see at Lucinda’s funeral:
1. The night janitor. He sat with a veiled woman in a back pew, wearing an itchy-looking suit. As people walked past, they glared and whispered. Rumors had spread about the man who found the body.
When the janitor noticed Cameron watching, his eyes were strong but friendly. Cameron’s stomach rolled, and he turned around fast. Mom was saying something he couldn’t hear—the familiarity of the janitor’s gaze made Cameron dizzy. Curious and faint. He dared himself to turn around again; he would do it after ten seconds, nine, then three, two, one.
The janitor was smiling at Cameron, coy, one hand lifted into a barely perceptible wave.
Cameron had never tried to recreate Hum. That would cheapen it—he’d never be able to make the strokes look so organic. The pastel trunk of the Valencia orange tree. The green-shuttered windows. The road that barely brushed the side of the canvas: you knew that road was long, but you couldn’t see how long, and the sight of it disappearing into a minuscule point had been branded in Cameron’s mind like a pinky promise.
Hum was beautiful in all its physicality, but the best part was the house. You couldn’t quite tell where the back of the house ended, and the lines were just blurry enough that you couldn’t count the windows.
Cameron looked around at all the crying people, how they bent and how they broke, and he thought, I am sorry for your loss. He did not feel it himself, their grief, because he knew where Lucinda had gone, and the air there was easier.
Cameron could not remember the night Lucinda died, but he hoped that whoever had sent Lucinda to Hum had done it with the best of intentions. He tried to be happy for her, that beautiful girl.
So he did not grieve because he missed her (though he missed her, he really missed her). He grieved because she would not contribute to the balance of things—at least, not in the space he occupied. Whether or not she had loved him before, she would not love him now, in that careful, tender way of hers, and he was overcome with the loss. There was one less person in his corner of the world, one less person to see the colors of snowy afternoons on Pine Ridge Point. All that foggy gray.
Cameron was in Lucinda’s bedroom once. Over a year ago, near the beginning of his Collection of Statue Nights. Cameron had pushed this night so deep inside him he was never sure if it had actually happened. Sometimes he was ashamed, and sometimes it scared him, so he remembered this night only in his quietest moments.
He had gone into Mom’s closet for a pair of nail clippers and come across Dad’s shoes. Beat-up leather loafers. He imagined Dad standing in them, lanky and self-assured. The shoes repulsed him. He remembered Dad, sitting on the edge of the bed. Dad, pulling on his socks and slipping his feet into them. Dad, thundering down the stairs. Kissing the top of Cameron’s head, and Mom’s cheek. I won’t be home tonight. Mom, putting a bowl of chicken nuggets with ketchup in front of Cameron at the kitchen table. Daddy will be back soon.
Cameron had climbed out the window and sprinted to Lucinda’s house.
On this night, Cameron felt so horribly inside himself—swimming in his own DNA. Half of him was Dad: he couldn’t escape it. He could only hope he’d inherited Dad’s good half, the parts that liked baseball and sang opera in the shower and went on long runs early in the morning.
It was late. The Hayeses had gone to bed, both Lex’s and Lucinda’s rooms enveloped in dark. Cameron could see straight into Lucinda’s window—the ball of her sleeping form, breathing steadily beneath her comforter. The splay of her yellow hair on the pillow.
He unlaced his shoes on the bottom step of the back porch. The wood was wet, ice frozen in patches across the deck. He considered it. Stepped outside of himself and analyzed. He hated what he saw: a scrawny teenage boy standing barefoot outside a snowy back door, innocent but enamored. Cameron didn’t stop himself. He couldn’t.
The glass door slid open, squeaking as he shut it behind him. The Hayeses’ kitchen was dim but familiar, all shadows and their resulting geometries.
Cameron took the stairs one at a time, waiting a full thirty seconds between each. Toe, ball, heel. Pause. Toe, ball, heel. Pause. He imagined that he was a fish breathing water, because he assumed that was much more fluid than a human breathing air. It took him eight minutes to get to the top of the stairs, but when he did, Lucinda’s bedroom door was cracked open.
From the other side of the door came the swell and sway of her breathing, a delicate rhythm that reminded him with such peaceful clarity that he was alive. I am, I am, I am, she told him with this inhale and exhale and inhale and exhale. I am alive, and so are you, and isn’t this a paralyzing thing?
Cameron inched the door open.
Lucinda’s bedroom smelled like vanilla perfume and sleep. A good dream. She was an infant, swaddled in her quilt—checkered violet, with cream-colored lace around the edges.
In sleep, Lucinda was flawless and clean, a lump of breathing blankets—he did not dare to touch her because she was so precise and so tender. He wanted to cup the curve of her, to feel all of her lines, to press his tongue to the sweet spot between her neck and collarbone. He wanted to merge them together with sweat. He wanted to be the air that escaped effortlessly from her lungs, the swatch of quilt clenched in her fist, he wanted to crawl into a corner of her and live there where no one could find him.
He hoped that everyone could feel a love like this, at least once in their lives. Every single person deserved it. He pictured all the families in all the houses down the block, the red-shingled roofs spanning out toward the mountains, all the people in this sad little town, the good ones, the bad ones, the lonely ones: he wished he could give them this.
He became another one of Lucinda’s bedposts, solid and erect.
Cameron did not know how much time passed, but he did not leave until the sky was flushed pink, the color of her cheeks in the early morning—the symmetry of the two made him so sure that this was okay, that what he did was okay, that their love was complex, but God, wasn’t it exquisite?
Jade