In his memory, Lucinda stood at the Thorntons’ kitchen sink.
From Cameron’s spot behind the oak tree, Lucinda was framed in the oval pane. She watched her own reflection as she washed dishes, baby Ollie crawling across the kitchen floor, sucking a plastic block, while the old gray dog gnawed a slobbery toy in the corner. Lucinda wore a tight athletic shirt: her ribs curved out like a pair of wings sewn tactfully to a caterpillar’s body. Once, Cameron read that no two butterfly wings were the same, and this made him want to feel Lucinda’s unique contours.
The thought made Cameron hard against the zipper of his jeans. He reached down to adjust his erection, and his hand brushed against the lowest branch of the oak tree—the tree made a tinkling sound so loud, Cameron’s stomach burst with shock.
A set of wind chimes dangled from the branch he’d hit. They clanged together, deafening. Cameron tried to grab them, to drown out the song with his skin, but it was too late.
Lucinda pushed aside the red cherry-print curtain above the kitchen sink. She cupped her hands to the window and peered into the darkness. Cameron held so still. He imagined his bones were melting, then hardening again, that he was a figurine made of misshapen glass.
Lucinda’s face disappeared from the window, and Cameron counted to six before the sliding glass door suctioned open. Lucinda stepped barefoot onto the back porch, an hourglass silhouette with arms crossed tight against her torso.
“Hello?” she called.
Cameron shrank behind the oak tree, wishing he could sink right into the whittled bark. The metal wind chimes were cold in his hand, kissing one another noiselessly. Television chattered, numb in the background, as the light from the living room illuminated Lucinda’s form.
The space between Cameron and Lucinda was tense and palpable, a rope held taut. They could have walked it with bare feet. They didn’t. Instead, Lucinda turned and padded inside, suctioning the door shut behind her.
The crickets rubbed their legs together, screeching and yelling in their acoustic cricket language.
The Hayes family was holding a reception.
Cameron stood on the street and watched the pulsing crowd of black-clad bodies mulling around the Hayeses’ home. They pulled tinfoil off casserole dishes, wiping leaky eyes. He couldn’t see Lucinda’s family from the sidewalk; he guessed they were at the center of the crowd, wringing their hands, wishing to be alone with themselves but too afraid of the quiet to ask. Cameron wondered who would clean their house after everyone was done stomping through. An aunt, maybe, or a dependable cousin would vacuum around the Hayeses’ feet, sucking up the mud and slush the chattering mourners had dragged in.
There was a police car parked in front of the house, and a tall, straight-backed figure sat inside, watching people come and go. Cameron deliberated briefly, then walked up the driveway.
He did not know what he was looking for inside Lucinda’s house, but her smashed charcoal face was etched into the foreground of Cameron’s vision. He needed evidence, proof that he had not imagined her.
When Cameron slipped inside, the crowd was so thick that no one glanced his way. He had never been in Lucinda’s house in daylight. People ate noodles with plastic forks and the place smelled vaguely of tuna. By the bathroom, two women were talking about Lucinda’s parents.
“They’re in the living room, yes. They’re talking, but not much.”
Cameron recognized no one; for the first time, he was relieved to be in a crowd so big. Before anyone picked him out—before someone from school caught sight of him and started whispering—Cameron slipped into the side hallway and climbed the stairs, leaving the chaos behind.
There was a pressing quiet upstairs in the Hayeses’ house, a purposeful and intrusive emptiness that settled on the green shag carpet and the ridges of the photo frames. Suffocating. Usually, Cameron liked silence, but this was unbearable compared to the noise downstairs. Malicious.
Cameron wanted to examine this untouched part of the house, to document it in ways he had not from the outside. It hit him—sweet, explosive—that Lucinda had breathed the air trapped upstairs, and it was getting recycled into his own lungs, sacred air that wouldn’t exist after the Hayes family had opened the doors and windows enough times.
When he reached Lucinda’s bedroom door, he pushed it open fast, to ensure he wouldn’t turn back.
In the white light of 3:39 p.m., Lucinda’s bedroom was just a room. Four lavender walls and beige carpet with a coffee stain near the vent. Tracks ran up and down the carpet where the housekeeper had pushed a vacuum. Lucinda’s computer was gone, and there was a perfect frame of dust where its torso used to sit.
Someone else had made her bed. Lucinda never fluffed her pillows—no, she always left the indentations from sleep, where the weight of her head had cast its skull mark.
The porcelain ballerina balanced on the edge of her dresser.
Cameron had seen the ballerina up close only once, when Lucinda had unzipped her backpack in the hall by her locker—the ballerina had been in the front pocket, inexplicably accompanying Lucinda to school. Cameron’s proportional estimates had proven accurate: the figurine was no bigger than his hand. Her left leg made a triangle of empty space in conjunction with the right, held at a perfect ninety degrees, as she balanced on the tip of a porcelain slipper.
Now, Lucinda’s ballerina was light in Cameron’s hand.
The bed could have been anyone’s, her desk could have been anyone’s, her dresser could have been anyone’s. The pens sat, bored, in a cup on the nightstand. Cameron clutched the ballerina, desperate for something that was distinctly Lucinda’s. He was a continent, standing in this anonymous bedroom. He was a continent and Lucinda was a sailboat, circling, circling. He could not move; he could only watch her pull further away.
He needed more.
Lucinda’s closet door was open. There was her favorite pair of jeans, the ones she wore with flat shoes, accentuating bluebird ankles. An old pink shirt with the word “LOVE” embossed across the front. The dress she’d worn to last year’s Halloween party. Green velvet.
Cameron ran his fingers along Lucinda’s velvet dress—it was liquid, running down his knuckles and over his hands, so familiar he swore he could taste her. Salt. Chemical perfume across her clavicle. Bitter on his tongue.
He slipped the dress off its hanger. Pressed his mouth to the fabric.
The Hayeses’ upstairs bathroom was shiny and neat. Cameron draped Lucinda’s dress over the rim of the bathtub.