Now, Cameron did not turn on any lights. Even though it was daytime, the windows in the living room faced south, and the house was gloomy. He slipped off his shoes by the front door, and locked it so he would hear Mom coming home. Carefully, Cameron padded toward the den.
When Dad left, everyone said Mom should get rid of his stuff. Instead, she’d left it encased in a tomb down the hall from her bedroom.
Cameron creaked open the door to the closet and all Dad’s smells gushed out. Whiskey. Aftershave. He liked Dad’s leather shoes, with tissue paper balled up in the toes to keep their shape. He liked how Dad’s two fancy suits stood, rigid on hangers. He liked the belts that hung from hooks on the door, the different shades of brown, black, and suede. Even though Cameron hated all these things in theory, he was so Tangled that their familiarity was comforting. He turned on the overhead light, stepped inside, and shut the door behind him.
The relief was immediate. Here, he would not think about Mr. O, chained to the bar in the room where they held bad guys. He would not think about Mom, standing by the coffee machine at the station house, pleading with Russ Fletcher to let him go; he didn’t do anything wrong. Here, it was just Cameron and Dad, playing the quiet games they always did.
Dad had kept his police uniform in the back corner of the closet when he took it home for washing. It had a set of shelves all to itself, even though it belonged to the Broomsville Police Department and had lived there most of the time—one for the pants, one for the belt, and a rack for the jacket, which he hung before he ironed it on the laundry-room table. These shelves had been empty since the arrest, when the chief took Dad’s uniform away for good. Cameron pushed aside a rack of windbreakers and ran a hand along the cold wood. On top of the shelf, where Dad used to keep his badge, Cameron’s hand ran over a folded sheet of paper.
Cameron picked it up. It was not dusty. He held it to the light.
Even in the fog of the closet, he recognized the corners of the paper; they were serrated, made special for extra absorbency. It was a sheet of watercolor paper. Strathmore, eleven by fifteen inches. It had come from the pad beneath Cameron’s bed, the pad filled with Lucinda’s eyes and the sweet strands of her hair, done in charcoal so thin it could have been pencil.
Cameron sat, criss-cross-applesauce, on the carpet and unfolded the piece of paper.
Immediately, he wished he hadn’t. He wished he hadn’t come into Dad’s closet, he wished he didn’t live in this house, on this block, in this state with pointed mountains. He wished he had never seen Lucinda Hayes, that he had never loved her the way he did: with X-ray eyes and such an uncontrollable heart.
They came for Dad on a Monday.
Mom wore pink-striped pajama pants. Cameron remembered it from below. He looked up at Dad, whose own friends were clinking him into handcuffs and saying things like Why, Lee? You didn’t leave us any choice. And Russ Fletcher—who used to come over for dinner and laugh so loud at everything Dad said—cowered in the corner. Cameron didn’t watch the rest. Instead, he looked past the chaos from his spot at the kitchen table, at the painting Mom had hung above the window.
Later, he would learn the painting was a Van Gogh. He would learn that the version in the kitchen was a re-creation, digital paint on plastic canvas. The painting was called A Lane Near Arles, and it was done in 1888, the same year Van Gogh chopped off his ear. Cameron liked this fact, because even though Van Gogh must have been Tangled while he was painting, the piece was very calm. Van Gogh had spent December of 1888 in an insane asylum, and Cameron liked to think A Lane Near Arles was the view from Van Gogh’s window as he tried to feel okay in his head.
The last Cameron saw of Dad: thin fingers clasped behind his back next to the kitchen sink, held in place by shiny metal handcuffs. Cameron knew these fingers—they clutched cigars on the back porch, they shook out the newspaper in the morning, they pulled navy uniform buttons through fraying loops. They tucked Cameron’s racecar blanket over his little body before lights out. The smell of Johnson and Johnson, these fingers combing through wispy hair in the bathtub, these fingers gripping baseball bats, See, swing from the right like this. Eye on the ball. Those hands, resting in Dad’s lap as they spent lullaby nights together in the living room, that companionable introversion. His father’s fingers were interlaced within the restraints of the handcuffs, twisted back, palms facing out like some shameful plea.
Mom yelled. Officers yelled. Cameron sat at his dinner spot at the kitchen table and studied the painting. A Lane Near Arles. There was a yellow house next to a giant orange tree, on a winding road lined with Valencias. It was like a dream. He could live in this house, where things were not sad, where Mom didn’t plead in her unsure voice—Please, Russ, tell me what’s going on. Cameron felt like he’d been here before, to this house on this road, so pacified in the sun. Grandma Mary was there, he liked to think, along with all the good people who had once been in the world and had gone: they all found these smooth brushstrokes, this yellow calm.
The sirens outside screamed, red and blue into dusk.
They took Dad away.
When Mom came back into the kitchen, she didn’t speak. She stirred the pot of mac and cheese on the stove with a metal spoon, her back bent like a branch. Water boiled.
Outside the window, a Calliope hummingbird stopped at the feeder Cameron had made from a water bottle. It was male—Cameron knew from the burnt-red feathers on its neck. They’d learned about hummingbirds in school; the Calliope was the smallest bird in North America, rare for Colorado. It flitted around, quick and light, like nothing bad had ever happened. At the bottom of one fact sheet Cameron read was a footnote: The hummingbird is the creature that opens the heart.
Of that night, he would remember the painting above the window, the calm yellow house where he could get some rest, and the creature lapping sugar water from a branch in the yard. He would remember Mom, weight in her elbows, hunched over the stove, trying not to sob, and he would think: This quiet place, this place I will take the ones I love?
I will call it Hum.
The day Dad actually left—after the arraignment, and the trial, and the not guilty—the walls started breathing.
It began in the kitchen. Cameron checked the stove, but the knob was twisted to “Off,” and the teapot sat idly on the fake marble countertop. Cameron checked the fluorescents above the sink; he flicked them on, off, on, and off again. Nothing. He unplugged the refrigerator. The whir of the machine stopped, but he could still hear it: a barely discernible intake of breath.
Dad was a heavy nose-breather in sleep. Cameron used to lie awake between scratchy hotel sheets—on mountain trips, at weddings, the night before his grandmother’s funeral—listening to oxygen fight its bitter way through his father’s nose hairs.