The game of Statue Nights began with the Hansens, next door. Cameron would stand on the curb outside their house for hours, watching them eat microwaved food and argue. Mrs. Hansen would put her hair in curlers like a woman in a 1950s sitcom, and Mr. Hansen would walk around in his boxers, skin sagging and drooping in a way Michelangelo would have appreciated. You could see Mr. Hansen’s bones. They left all the lights on; it was impossible to avoid looking. The human eye was naturally attracted to light—a fact Cameron had read about the retina in The Map of Human Anatomy.
That first summer, Cameron made his way slowly down Pine Ridge Drive. If he stood perfectly still, he wouldn’t be seen. Cameron documented the tiny things: Mrs. Hansen kept Mr. Hansen on a strict diet, but he stored chocolate bars in the Crock-Pot next to the refrigerator.
Next door to the Hansens, Cameron once watched the Thorntons have sex on their kitchen table after the baby fell asleep. It looked violent and out of control at first, like fighting dogs thrashing around, then close and rhythmic—a rocking boat. After, Mr. Thornton hovered on top of his wife, kissed her forehead slow. Some nights the wife stayed up late, bouncing their crying baby around the living room while her husband took the limping little dog for ten o’clock walks, ushering Cameron home with his stranger presence on the street.
As he waited to be questioned, Cameron pulled his favorite kneaded eraser from his pocket and molded it into different shapes. Mr. O had given it to him for when he needed to Untangle, which was often. He tried to mold it into a perfect square against the surface of his thigh.
Cameron had started watching Lucinda around the same time Mr. O’s class started a unit on figure drawing. He started seeing mountains in people’s cheekbones and spider legs in people’s eyelashes and translating these into different shades of black, white, and gray. He loved the way Lucinda’s face curled and rolled.
When Cameron watched Lucinda, he played this game of Statue Nights. He liked to imagine that he was one of Michelangelo’s figures, frozen on paper, etched in one position for all of eternity. But at some point he’d hear his own heartbeat or an inevitable exhale. One of these certainties would break the silence, and he’d be forced to recognize that no matter how still he stood, he did, in fact, exist.
He never knew how much time passed, but the whole point of Statue Nights was that it didn’t matter.
On February 11, 2004, almost exactly a year ago, Lucinda’s father opened the sliding back door. I know you’re there, his voice boomed across the empty lawn. I know you don’t mean harm. But you need to leave. If you come back, I will call the police. Cameron had run home, to the other end of Pine Ridge Drive, and huddled underneath his covers with Dad’s tattered copy of The Map of Human Anatomy. He memorized the functions of the human kidney, because he imagined that somewhere near the kidney was where the body stored that hollowed feeling: guilt.
He hoped the police wouldn’t ask about that night in Lucinda’s yard. Cameron was awful at lying, and he couldn’t tell them the truth—that he found people fascinating when they thought no one was watching. He couldn’t tell them about the sincerity of life through windows—that he hated himself for it, but he couldn’t stop. He didn’t want to.
There was this feeling Broomsville gave you, with all its short, pastel buildings and open spaces. It was voted number five on CNN’s Top Ten Friendliest Places to Raise a Family, and no one was surprised. Broomsville was an overgrown cul-de-sac of square lawns, browned from the Colorado droughts. It was not the sort of place for white picket fences, but Broomsville had good public schools, with after-school programs you could join if you didn’t have money. The average family lived in a beige house just like Cameron’s, with two floors and three bedrooms and windows that faced the Front Range of the Rocky Mountains. People drove mountain cars, pickup trucks or Outbacks or Trailblazers, with bumper stickers that yelled, “BUSH CHENEY ’04!”
And above, the mountains. Always watching.
Colorado air was so crisp, it stung your nostrils. Once, Mom’s friend from college visited from Florida, and on the first day she passed out from altitude sickness. They called an ambulance and everything. The EMTs stuck plastic tubes in her nose to help her breathe. They took off her shirt and her bra to better reach her lungs, and her naked breasts flopped to the sides on the living-room floor. Cameron tried not to stare.
After a day or two she was fine, and they went on short hikes in the foothills—the small, rolling mountains that formed the base of the Rockies. Colorado had this specific smell in summer, like pine needles recovering from a miserable winter and hot, red dirt sliding down steep mountainsides.
You could see Pine Ridge Point from the Tree, and that was partially why Cameron had picked that specific aspen. You could lean against the smooth white bark and look up at the hill that enclosed Pine Ridge Point, where Dad first took him when he was six years old.
The sun was setting. There were plenty of natural phenomena that went unrecognized (snowflakes kissing a windowsill, fingernails dug into the skin of a tangerine), but Cameron could see why people made such a big deal of sunsets. The sunset at Pine Ridge Point always made Cameron feel so disastrously human, caged inside his own susceptible self.
Pine Ridge Point was a cliff suspended over a reservoir at a perfect ninety-degree angle. The reservoir had no waves. It waited, still and complacent, a pool of blood spreading away from a wound.
On the other side of the cliff—the side that didn’t face the water—sat the town of Broomsville, all quaint boxy houses and lawns with clicking sprinklers, starkly different from the chaos of the Rockies. You could see Cameron’s street, a minuscule Pine Ridge Drive, and everything else converging to this plateau. From the horizon of Pine Ridge Point, Broomsville looked like a cardboard town filled with paper people. Cameron’s hands could rearrange it however he pleased.
He often daydreamed about bringing Lucinda to Pine Ridge Point.
Look, he’d say. Don’t you see how weightless we are?
“Hello, Cameron.”
The social worker’s hair was slicked back into a wet bun. Her eyes were tunnels. Her smile was hard.
“Hi.”
“My name is Janine. Do you remember me?” She sat with a notebook in her lap, legs crossed, jiggling one of her clogs.
“Yeah.”
“This is a voluntary school-conducted interview, okay? We’re just checking in with our kids. You’re free to leave at any time. You’re free to abstain from answering anything that makes you uncomfortable. Do you understand and consent to continue?”
Once, when Cameron was flipping through a cookbook in the kitchen, he found a poem tucked inside. Lord Byron. Mom did this sometimes—put fragments of poems in unexpected places. Cameron took the Byron poem to his bedroom and taped it to the inside of his closet door. Mom had transcribed it onto notebook paper in her scratchy handwriting, with a pen that exploded in bursts of ink.
“Yes.”
“Okay. Cameron, why don’t you tell me about your relationship with Lucinda Hayes?”
(She walks in beauty, like the night
Of cloudless climes and starry skies;)
“Cameron?”
(And all that’s best of dark and bright
Meet in her aspect and her eyes)