For a short period—maybe a month—they moved the figurine to the table next to Ollie’s crib. This was around the time Eve got really sick: she spent days locked in the bedroom with curtains drawn, leaving me or Lucinda with the baby.
Once, during those first weeks, Mr. Thornton came home drunk. I could tell he was wasted from how he whistled under his breath, off pitch and unnervingly cheery. I was in the living room with Ollie when he came in, tie hanging open, the first three buttons of his shirt undone. He sang to himself in the doorway, eyes closed, arms held to support an invisible girl in an invisible waltz while Puddles ran excited circles around his legs.
Ollie cried. Loud. Every day. Eve got sicker and sicker, until she was gone, for the most part, just a locked door at the end of the upstairs hall.
A few days after the waltz, the figurine disappeared.
I didn’t think anything of it.
Now, the signs from the dead. Not signs at all. Just the world, turning as it does.
“Cameron,” I say, careful to keep my voice even. “I don’t think you’re someone bad.”
Lying flat in his palm like a peace offering or a cold fish: the gun. A few more words of explanation: I saw, Cameron said. He hit her, and then she was so still.
One motion, exaggeratedly slow—I slide my hand over the gun. When Cameron looks at me, it feels like surrender: he does not protest. The gun is heavier than I expect, metal warm from where it has kissed his skin.
“Come on,” I say, thinking of the inconspicuous times Mr. Thornton had asked Lucinda to babysit instead of me. “Let’s get you home.”
It’s like all those nights with Ma. Her purple wine teeth, the chill of the wall behind me, the endless wait for the blow to come. Sometimes it comes, sometimes it doesn’t—but in those moments of wait, there is always fear. Fear and I do such a familiar dance. Even tonight. But now, I help Cameron stand up and I do not feel like my usual self, cowered in a corner, waiting for the punch or the slap or the shove to take away the scared. No; I am taller. I am the one who holds.
Ma’s bruises spread across my legs, and I poke them, bare in the cold.
Pain. Bearable.
We stumble down the melting mountain. Cameron can hardly walk: he smells like musty soil and urine. It’s soaked through his pants and down his leg. I hold the gun, Cameron leaning against me.
We are an accident. Strangers. Both at fault, in theory. In actuality, the irony makes my hands tremble. Cameron doesn’t notice. He’s breathing fast, a panting dog, and his hair is stuck to his forehead. His breath is stale—I turn away.
It’s almost funny: you think you matter to someone. They’re the center of your universe, the sun you revolve around. You’d give anything for their details. You inch closer, closer, with tentative steps. You can walk as far as you want, but it won’t matter. You’re not even on their map.
We are not the killers. We are silly kids. Casualties.
Russ
Russ stretches out of the car. He has been here too long, at the base of the cliff, forehead on the steering wheel, counting heartbeats. His legs are sore from sitting; when he climbs out, feeling returns to his thighs. Pocketing his keys, Russ slams the door and raises his arms above his head. The pull of muscle wakes him. The evening is so cold—he should have brought his gloves, maybe a hat. A semi truck rumbles past, and Russ coughs in the exhaust.
The sun has just begun to set. The color: snowy tangerine.
Russ scuffles up the hill. He’d like to see that view—the lake, ghostly serene, and the pinprick Broomsville lights lapping at his back. But Russ has not climbed this mountain in a very long time, and after a few yards he is panting. He wishes he had brought some water; freezing air aches in his throat. He can see his own labored breath.
A sound. Voices.
Russ is only halfway up when two figures appear at the top. One limps, the other supports. A boy and a girl—young. Hey! Russ calls, but neither of them answers.
The boy wears a hoodie. His slacks are wet around the crotch. The girl holds a gun.
When she sees Russ, the girl waves him forward. He scrambles to meet them on the incline, hands raised in a practiced surrender. Don’t shoot. The girl holds the gun by her side, almost a foot from her body, fist clenched around the barrel in a clear effort to avoid the trigger.
Their faces sharpen: for a second, Russ sees Lee. Lee, those woman hands, the way he’d suck beer from the neck of a bottle and sweat clumped in beads that ran down the back of his scarlet-burned neck. Before Russ can consider that Lee has finally come back for him, the boy comes closer. Cameron, of course. A dark patch on his jeans—he is half comatose.
The girl gives Russ the gun, and Russ nimbly empties the bullets into his pocket. No one speaks.
Russ picks up Cameron like a daughter who has fallen asleep in the car. The boy is not heavy, but he is wet with his own urine, which leaks through the sleeves of Russ’s coat and onto the strong arms beneath as they take baby steps down the mountain.
It wasn’t him, the girl says. Jade. Her hands are clasped in her lap as they wind down the foothills, past the stadium and the crumbling gas station. The polish on her fingers is picked at, a frame of black around each nail. A dark smear of marker slashes across her inner wrist. Cameron, in the back with Jade’s bike, stares out the window. Russ thought about putting the tarp from the trunk beneath Cameron’s soaking pants, but humiliation was not the game.
Did you hear me? the girl says. Cameron didn’t kill Lucinda. It was her neighbor.
I believe you, Russ says.
As they near the station, he flips open his cell phone. Russ’s hands remember the number. Old choreography.
Cynthia? he says when she picks up. I have him. He’s okay.
When it’s over—when they’ve gotten the story from Cameron, who speaks in a shuddering voice, with tears racing brakeless down his cheeks—Cynthia comes to Russ by the drinking fountain.
Russ, she says, battle-beaten beneath fluorescent lights. Thank you for bringing him home.
Russ steps forward, wraps himself around her. Cynthia’s smell—lavender and lemongrass. After so many years.
They stand this way for minutes, absorbing one another’s twin sadnesses, and Russ wishes with all his might that it were possible to go back to that day in the garden, to put his hands around Cynthia’s sun-sweating face and help her pull every single plant from the ground.
Russ stays late for the paperwork while Detective Williams handles the neighbor and the chief handles the news vans. After a round of congratulations, everyone else has gone home. Russ is exhausted—he wanders into the break room for a cup of gritty coffee.