The mountains are cool and angular in the distance. Russ takes the highway route—he will not pass the station. Instead, his parents’ old house, just off the shoulder of Exit 265.
He thinks of Ines and the home they have tried hesitantly to build: Of the corners of their house, where balls of dust and hair have clumped and a halfhearted vacuum refuses to reach. Of the tattered T-shirt Ines sleeps in, even after Russ bought her that silk nightgown for Christmas. When she opened the package she stroked it gently, said thank you, and put it back in the box. Russ has not seen it since. Ines, and how she eats her food without looking up, scooping each bite evenly onto her fork. Ines, and their separate worlds, lived together on the couch at night in distant but companionable silence—Russ, because he wants a body near his own; Ines, because of her brother. Both, because it is easy enough.
Russ’s hands and feet steer him forward. Past the reservoir. Up into the foothills.
The mountains are on their knees, begging him home.
Cameron
Mom was in the kitchen. Through the back window, she looked like anyone else: another neighbor picking fat leaves off a potted basil plant. Through glass, she didn’t seem so sad. Just old, and very tired.
Cameron took the usual route into his bedroom: hoisted himself from the planter beneath his window until he was holding the ledge with both hands, like someone falling off a cliff. He kicked his legs against the side of the house for traction and heaved himself through the open window frame.
He took off his muddy shoes beneath the window. Creeping down the hall in browning socks, he listened to make sure Mom was still in the kitchen. She’d turned on the radio, soft jazz, and the deep grumble of a saxophone slid through the narrow hall. Mom did not sing to herself. She did not hum.
Mom’s room was messy. Floral sheets were balled up at the foot of her bed, and mugs with hardened teabags at the bottom gathered on her nightstand, where she kept her current books: The Secret About Positive Thinking and Child Psychology and Development for Dummies. Cameron knelt next to her bed and pulled the wooden box from underneath.
The .22 was in its hiding spot. It lay in its broken lockbox, buried treasure.
Cameron picked it up, careful not to touch any dangerous parts. Mom had stored a box of Aguila copper-plated bullets in the small compartment underneath the main carriage of the box. Cameron left them there—judging by the weight of the handgun and the tension on the trigger, it was still loaded.
Cameron edged the gun carefully into the back waistband of his jeans. The .22 was safe between his pants and his boxer shorts. Metal was still cold through cotton.
Before Cameron left, he checked Mom’s bathroom. If Lucinda was ever going to come back to him, he hoped she would come back now. But the bathroom was just the bathroom, with grime gathered in the sink and the cracked yellow bar of soap lying in its plastic tray.
I don’t understand how you draw from memory, Mom had said once, as Cameron spread his art supplies across the living-room floor. He’d been working on a portrait of a dancer. How do you hold on to all the details?
Cameron had shrugged and said, I guess I can’t figure out how to lose them.
Now, Mom sat at the head of the kitchen table, late-winter light falling over her in gracious yellow rays. She hovered over a rectangular sheet of paper. One feather hand was cupped over her mouth. She’d turned the stereo off, and now she was bent over the version of Lucinda smashed on the carousel.
The painting of Hum hung right above Mom and Lucinda—a reassurance.
Cameron pulled a chair from the left side of the table, scraping it across the hardwood floor. He sat next to Mom, and together they examined the portrait of Lucinda.
Even here, Lucinda looked very beautiful. Mom thought so, too. He could tell from the way her eyes roved over black patches, places where Cameron had etched the charcoal so dark he’d pressed cavities into the skin of the real, living girl. And the white parts, where the sun from the kitchen window hit her clean paper skin, where her contours filled themselves out, where her jaw jutted out over her neck. Those staring eyes—even here, crevasse and unseeing, Lucinda was a vision. She was a brilliant combination of light and dark. Shadow and its resulting counterpart. She was luminescent.
“Cameron,” Mom said. “Tell me what this is. Please, sweetie. I need to hear it from you.”
“I’m sorry,” Cameron said to Mom, because he was. “I need to be alone in my room for a little while.”
Mom didn’t answer, only shook her head at ruined Lucinda. Her jaw was trembling, and her hands were wrapped tight around a mug of tea to stop their shaking.
Cameron didn’t like to touch, but he stretched his arm around Mom anyway. He tried to hold her up, but her sinewy arms and neck and collarbone all sank toward the table. At his touch, Mom’s eyes filled. Cameron pulled away. He didn’t want to make her cry.
He wanted to tell her good-bye and that he loved her, but instead he studied her gaunt profile. Cameron remembered how Dad used to watch her, and he tried to see the same. Mom had such graceful lines.
Cameron cupped a palm to the back of her neck, like how you were supposed to hold a baby, then left Mom at the table with her sadness.
The outer edges of Broomsville were flat and open. Run-down houses sprouted off the highway, with their beat-up trucks and collapsing barns, threadbare American flags waving to empty space. People out here lived differently: they sat on old couches and watched fuzzy television and drank homemade iced tea. The houses faded into the landscape. The people faded with them.
Cameron walked these roads to get to the base of Pine Ridge Point. Half an hour, just over a mile. His black ski jacket was layered over his sweat shirt, layered over the gun.
He climbed without thinking. He refused to look back as he scuffled up the side of the hill in his stiff dress pants, his shiny black funeral shoes sliding across the rocks. Pebbles toppled down the mountain behind him, miniature landslides.
It was only 4:45 p.m. when Cameron reached Pine Ridge Point. He’d wanted to watch the sky melt to black, but it would be an unforgiving blue for another half hour still. Cameron had that sacred feeling in his bones—a feeling you could only get at the top of a mountain, when the wind was blowing and you were alone.
If Cameron could answer Janine now, he would tell her yes, he was much happier alone than with other people. With other people, you couldn’t feel like this—like a part of the lake, spread hapless beneath you. Still as a photograph. You could only wonder how it felt to be a mountain. To stand, so sure like that.