I lied to you, too, Russ says.
When? Ines asks.
That day in California, Russ says. When I told you I had never loved someone before.
Ines throws her legs from beneath the comforters and pulls a pack of cigarettes from the nightstand. Russ has never seen Ines smoke. They lean out the bedroom window, and she lights one for each of them. Ines in her nightshirt, Russ in his starchy, pressed police uniform.
It started seventeen years ago, he tells her, and from there, he is racing. He tells Ines all the things he has never spoken of, pinkies on pinkies and how a gesture so small could feel so explosive. By the time they get to Cameron, hours have passed, and they’re both slumped against the wall beneath the bedroom window.
Ines does not speak for a while. Russ wonders if she is angry. If maybe she has always been angry, and this he has mistaken for passivity, complacency. No way to know. Russ has always been the one with the badge, the one with the gun. Her only weapon: silence.
Come on, Ines says. I think we need some air.
She pulls him into the bathroom. Opens the window and wriggles the screen from its frame, gesturing with the pack of cigarettes. Russ realizes, pathetic, that he has never been on his own roof.
They sit on the shingles. The bedroom comforter keeps them warm. Ines tells Russ her own stories: how she got to America. A drive by herself in a used Camry she would later sell to one of Ivan’s friends, and a border-control officer who glared and waved her through. She tells him again how Ivan had never been a criminal back home, but he couldn’t find a job here after his own tourist visa had run up, and he needed money to keep working with the church. Ivan had just begun when Russ and his friends busted the house on Fulcrum Street.
She tells him what she has spent her days doing, these past few married years. Skyping home, planning a trip back, arguing with Ivan and petitioning for his citizenship, this man who loved the country that had imprisoned him, who had brilliant ideas about how he would fix it. She would stay for the church, she’d promised Ivan. They were helping people. They were trying to find the money for a better space, and they already had donations from the parents of the children she tutored. There is a new church opening where a Rite Aid used to be, and Ines has been campaigning for the funding to share the space with the owners. Ines has already told Marco all of these things—he has listened. Listened, inquired further, listened, empathized, listened, known her.
Do you hate me? Russ asks her.
A little bit, Ines tells him. But maybe you should hate me, too.
I guess.
I will be leaving, she tells Russ. You understand?
I know, he says.
Did you truly think that Ivan did this? Did you truly think he could have killed Lucinda?
Probably not, Russ says.
I like to think you never believed it, Ines says. You made him a monster.
Probably, Russ repeats.
They smoke the whole pack of cigarettes as the sun rises up from the plains, washing everything in glow and gold. From the roof, Russ can see all the way to the end of the cul-de-sac, where housing developments turn to open fields. Though he knows that Ines will leave, and that this will needle its own pointed hurt, he takes Ines’s small hand and rests it on his abdomen, beneath his shirt, which stinks of the day. She does not protest. The reassurance of palm skin—gentle, a salve—right where a rotting secret used to be buried.
Russ wakes at three in the afternoon. Ines is long gone—she did not come to bed with him.
When Russ goes downstairs for coffee, he finds her everywhere. Yarn: a trail of Ines. Up the stairs, across the front hall, a tangled pile covering the dining-room table like moss. Ines, in colors like fuchsia and mustard and forest green. Russ goes from room to room, opening all the blinds in the house to better see.
Years of carefully stitched Ines, undone and shapeless, one last act of defiance. She has unraveled it all, the whole closet of hand-knitted sweaters, blankets, hats, socks. In this sense, at least, Russ knows his wife—this is her mercy, and her revenge.
Weeks
Later
Jade
I see Zap in the cafeteria.
He nearly runs me over as I’m carrying my brown-paper lunch bag to the courtyard doors. He mumbles, Sorry, ashamed. I say, It’s okay. Zap isn’t wearing his glasses. He’s nearly blind without them—he must have gotten contacts. His face looks much smaller in their absence. Naked. He wears a soccer jersey with his name printed in all caps across the shoulders.
WHAT YOU WANT TO SAY BUT CAN’T WITHOUT BEING A DICK
A Screenplay by Jade Dixon-Burns
INT. HIGH-SCHOOL CAFETERIA—DAY
CELLY
I’m sorry. For what happened.
(beat)
After the funeral.
BOY
It’s okay.
CELLY
Just tell me one thing. Did you ever know me?
BOY
Of course. Of course I did.
CELLY
Then how did we get here?
Boy runs his fingers through his hair. Thinks.
BOY
We grew into different things.
Celly bows her head. Acceptance. Boy gives a small wave and lopes away.
“Wait,” I say, because Zap is already hurrying away.
“I’m sorry,” I say to his back. “For what happened after the funeral. At your house.”
“It’s okay,” he says over his shoulder. “They caught the real guy.”
“I know.”
We both nod, two people stuck in different places at the same time.
“See you around,” he says. He lifts his chin at me, in the way boys do when they’re trying to look casual. This makes me laugh, but he can’t see because he’s already gone, absorbed into the group of sports kids standing by the windows.
There are a million types of love in the world. I think of that night, in the bathroom, how Zap’s thumb wandered tender over bruises. How do you classify that sort of love—young, fleeting? I keep trying to distill the difference between friendship and love—in an effort to figure out how you can lose both at once—but maybe it doesn’t matter.
It was love. It was there. It was enough.
I leave my brown bag on a ledge by the courtyard and push through the lunchtime clusters toward the music wing.
The practice room smells like brass and linoleum. You could shout in here, and it would echo. The drums are lined up against the wall, the piano exposed ivory in the center of the room.
Zap’s trombone case is lined up with all the other trombone cases. A label near the bell reads “ARNAUD.”
The seashell is jagged in my pocket.
I take it out, hold it up to the light. It is pearly and transparent. Fossil. I leave the seashell in the nook where Zap keeps folded sheets of music. The shell rests against a tattered page, so seemingly insignificant. Offshore.
As I let the door bang shut behind me, I try to ask myself how I feel. This is stupid, I know. Emotions shouldn’t have names. I’m tired of bothering with them.
Mostly, I feel uncaged.
“She left us something,” Aunt Nellie says, when I walk into the Hilton Ranch one night.