The Snow Garden

  She heard the door crack open, and saw April’s eyes widen with a flicker of shock before she quickly bowed her head. Kathryn spun around to see Jesse holding the door open several inches, just enough to reveal that he was wearing only a pair of white briefs. Her eyes shot down his half-naked body, the dunes of his chest and abdomen, but she stopped herself before she hit the bulge in his crotch. Oddly enough, he seemed the most exposed because he wasn’t wearing his baseball cap, and she was surprised to see that his tousled black hair had a slight curl to it.

  “Is the dorm on fire?” Jesse asked.

  “Is he here?”

  Jesse nodded.

  “That’s our cue,” April mumbled behind her, and Kathryn heard their footsteps departing over the carpet.

  “How is he?” When her palm braced the door, Kathryn was shocked to feel Jesse holding it firmly in place with one hand curled around its edge. He had never prevented her from entering' the room. She let her arm falter to her side.

  “Where have you been?” Jesse asked.

  “At the dance. With him.”

  “He got back over an hour ago.”

  “Are you going to let me in or not?”

  Jesse shrugged and sighed, stepping away from the door without bothering to open it any further.

  Randall lay cocooned in his comforter, curled into the fetal position with his back to her. She sat down on the edge of the bed and brought a hand to his forehead. His breaths were slow and even and his temperature seemed normal. “Tim says he got sick,” she said to Jesse, who didn’t respond. Kathryn risked a glance at him. He sat perched on the edge of his bed, his eyes locked on Randall. Kathryn began to withdraw her arm. “Was he here when you got back or did you ...” Her elbow disturbed the comforter, which slid off of Randall’s shoulder, revealing his bare chest. She picked it up and pulled it back, stopping when she knew she should have seen the waistband of Randall’s underwear. Instead she saw just naked flesh and hip bone.

  “He was pretty drunk,” Jesse finally said.

  “He didn’t have time to get drunk. He left after only twenty minutes.” She saw she had curled the comforter into one of her fists.

  Jesse was giving her nothing—just like Tim, who hadn’t offered to help search for Randall if it meant leaving the dance. And if they were giving it another shot, why had Randall gone to the dance with her instead of Tim, who was already there with his entourage when they showed up? Questions swirled in her head, none of which Jesse could answer, so she smoothed the comforter back over Randall’s shoulder.

  “It looks like you took pretty good care of him, Jesse.” She rose from the bed.

  “I’m his roommate. That’s my job.”

  That same suggestive, teasing tone, which he’d manage to delete from their conversation three days earlier, now returned to his voice. It stopped her halfway to the door. He had his old smug smile on his face. “Can I ask you something, Jesse?”

  “Always.”

  “How would you get rid of him when you’re done?”

  Jesse narrowed his eyes on her, as if the implication of her words were written in tiny letters across her forehead.

  “Never mind the fact that he’s not as stupid as the little girls you always bring through here. But he’s your roommate. It’s not like you could just not call him back.”

  “I’m not even sure what you’re accusing me of.”

  “I’m not accusing you of anything. But I’ve always known that you can’t resist anyone who worships you enough. I’m just asking you to think twice about this one.”

  She managed to shut the door behind her without slamming it.

  Kathryn realized that it all boiled down to small omissions, little things Randall hadn’t told her. But after she left his room, she realized that being confronted with secrets of any kind returned her to the night on China Beach when Jono’s secret scattered to the rocks at the mouth of the Pacific. She tried to sleep and instead found herself in a speeding car. Kerry was gunning the Miata out of the China Beach parking lot. After only a few weekends spent with Jono and his friends, the Kerry who had once been wary and suspicions of college kids now worshiped them as one would a patron saint.

  “Are you sure we should just leave him there?” Kerry asked, her voice tense.

  “He’ll get a ride with Peter.”

  They were approaching the edge of Golden Gate Park, on their way to the late-night party at Kerry’s house in Noe Valley, which had been vacated by her parents for the weekend. Kathryn could hear the Miata’s tiny engine protesting as Kerry kicked at the gas and hiccupped across two lanes of traffic. “Damn, how’d he piss you off so much?” Kerry asked.

  “We were out on the rocks and he started pawing me and—”

  “Oh, and you so hate it when he paws you, right?”

  “Can I finish, please?”

  Kerry shook her head, once, twice, each time faster. There was something wrong with the way her head kept jerking on her neck, almost like a plastic, windup doll. Then, with one palm on the steering wheel, Kerry brought a hand to her nose, swabbing at her nostrils and then raking her fingers back through her hair. Kathryn wondered if she was trying to plaster her bangs with her snot.

  “So he’s acting like an idiot and then he drops his jacket into the surf and I can’t find him ...”

  “His jacket? He lost his jacket?” Kerry’s voice ratcheted upward in alarm. She glanced fiercely at Kathryn, not seeing what Kathryn saw—the car was barreling toward a stoplight at fifty miles an hour.

  “Kerry!”

  Kerry slammed on the brakes and Kathryn’s arm went out, her hand smacking into the glove compartment. Stunned, Kathryn lifted her head to see the stoplight had gone green, but Kerry still had her foot on the brake and the car was halted in moving traffic.

  “We need to go back, Kathryn!”

  Kerry twisted against her seat belt, and in the wan green halo of the stoplight, she saw that Kerry’s eyes were wild, her pupils dilated. “What’s wrong with you?” she demanded.

  “Nothing. We just can’t leave him back there. I mean, without his jacket. He’s probably freezing his ass off.”

  “He got a ride with Peter. I’m sure! Kerry, the light’s green!”

  “No, seriously, Kathryn. We need to go back and get him.”

  “Kerry!”

  But before Kathryn could protest further, the Miata lurched left and Kerry tore out in a wide, stomach-wringing U-turn across the intersection. In disbelief, Kathryn heard the sound of peeling rubber beneath the car’s shuddering wheels, and when they almost collided with the curb, Kerry let out a cry that was more infuriated than afraid.

  Kerry, brow furrowed slightly in concentration, gazed fixedly ahead, got into her lane and accelerated. Once again, her hand swabbed at her nose.

  “Pull over,” Kathryn said.

  “Chill, Kathryn, it’ll only take a—”

  “Pull over!”

  Kerry let out an annoyed grunt and the Miata bounced to the curb. Once the car came to a stop, Kerry released the steering wheel, threw up her hands, and stared at her friend as if she had sprouted devil’s horns.

  “What are you on?” Kathryn asked.

  “Excuse me?”

  “You’re high on something. Not drunk. Not stoned. You’re fucking high.”

  She saw protest flicker and then fade in Kerry’s eyes before her face became a tight mask of indignation. “Like you don’t know,” she muttered.

  “Don’t know what?” Kathryn barked. Afraid that Kerry’s foot would hit the gas again, she curled her fingers around the door handle, ready to make a quick escape.

  “He’s your boyfriend,. Kathryn. Shouldn’t you know?” Kerry saw the confusion on her face and added, “Please! You’ve seen his apartment? You think he paid for all the stuff with work-study?”

  Kathryn’s hand slipped off the door handle. The questions hit her rapid fire. How did Jono, the bartender and struggling college student, . afford the matrix of electronic
s equipment in his apartment? Did she ever really believe the story about how he had a friend who got it for him wholesale? A friend she had never met? Where did he go after the sudden phone calls and abrupt departures from his apartment, when he assured her that he was not going to see another girl, and that he would be back in time to drive her home from Berkeley to Sea Cliff before her curfew? Suddenly all the unanswered questions, which had in the beginning given her boyfriend his enigmatic appeal and sense of mystery, solidified into the obvious conclusion; she should have figured it out during the many nights she’d spent alone in his apartment, waiting for him to come back.

  “He had it in his jacket, didn’t he?”

  Kerry sighed. “It’s not that big a deal.”

  Kathryn slumped against the passenger seat, feeling as if the wind had been pummeled out of her.

  “Kathryn, if you’re going to be his girlfriend, you need to grow up a little bit.”

  “Grow up? You’re so fucking high you almost got us killed, and you want me to grow up!”

  “Yeah. And you’re really bad at playing dumb,” Kerry said, all sobriety now.

  Once she got out of the car at her house, after a ten-minute ride in abashed silence, Kathryn slammed the car door as hard as she could, because dumb didn’t even come close to describing how she felt.

  Floating somewhere between sleep and waking, Randall was afraid to turn over for fear that any change in position would further twist his gnarled stomach. After several minutes of indecision, he managed to roll onto his back, and where he did he realized he was naked, He saw Jesse sitting cross-legged on the foot of his bed. His legs, the etchings of his past he carried with him always, had been laid bare before Jesse’s eyes.

  He groped for memory and saw only Tim Mathis staring at him as he held him by both shoulders, and then a mad jump cut of flickering lights on the dance floor. “What time is it?” he asked groggily.

  “Almost six.”

  “What happened?”

  “I found you out front. You were passed out.”

  Alarm snapped Randall totally awake, and he tried to sit up. The comforter tumbled down his bare chest. He managed to catch it in his burned hand. Jesse hadn’t moved. “Why am I naked?” Randall asked, taking a breath between each word.

  “You were out of it. Kind of awake but totally incoherent. Not like I haven’t had experience with that kind of thing . . . But anyway, you kept saying you were burning up. I opened the window and that wasn’t good enough so I — ”

  “Where’s my jacket?’

  Gray light teased the edges of the window shade, and Randall could make out Jesse moving to his closet, dressed in only his underwear. He reached in and pulled Randall’s leather jacket from a hanger. “It needs to be cleaned,” Jesse said, displaying the spill of caked vomit down one of the flaps.

  Randall jerked one hand impatiently, and Jesse handed the jacket to him. He felt for the hard lump of the flask in the inside pocket, and, to his relief, found it. Jesse stood over the bed, watching intently as Randall removed the flask and uncapped it. It was more than half full.

  “You must have hit the scotch pretty hard,” Jesse said.

  No, I didn’t, Randall thought. I’ve hit a lot of goddamn things pretty hard, and never fallen so fast.

  “Jesse, did I...” He couldn’t finish and let out a frustrated sigh.

  “What?” Jesse asked, a smile in his voice.

  “I didn’t... try anything, did I?” He brought one hand to his aching forehead.

  Jesse spoke, mouth inches from his ear. “No you didn’t. And I was very hurt.” Jesse tousled Randall’s hair before crossing to his side of the room.

  Randall tried to prop himself up on both his elbows and his stomach yowled. He landed on the pillows with a groan. Three deep breaths and the cramping in his abdomen abated. This was not a hangover. This was something worse. Had the scotch truly been rancid? Could scotch even go bad? He had no idea.

  Something else had been in the scotch.

  He froze, eyes on the ceiling. The realization quickened his pulse, flushing his veins, sending blood to his brain and clarifying his thoughts.

  Jesse’s voice startled him. ‘Your hand looks like your legs. Only newer.”

  Randall let his eyes fall to Jesse, who was leaning against the edge of the window. “Different,” was all Randall could manage.

  “I figured.” Jesse seemed to lose interest in the subject, his eyes narrowing on the crack between the shade and the window. “Remember the phone call last Friday?”

  Randall grunted no.

  “The one you asked about.”

  “Yeah?”

  “It wasn’t my Father. It was his lawyer.”

  “Jesse, I didn’t mean to .. . piss you off about it.”

  “Yes, you did,” Jesse retorted calmly. “My dad’s a pretty good addict, if there is such a thing. I mean, I remember him showing up at school functions, acting all the gentleman, when I knew he’d sucked down a few lines in the limo on the way there. Well, a few weeks ago he kind of lost control. He was having some big party at the house and he and a few guests ended up in the neighbor’s pool. Considering this is the third time this year Dad’s got the two pools confused, the neighbors decided to file a trespassing charge. I’m sure it didn’t help that he refused to get out of their hot tub even when the police showed up.”

  Pale light around the shade had brightened into a beam that sliced across Jesse’s chest.

  “Anyway. He’s looking at twenty-eight days.”

  “Prison.”

  “No. Rehab.”

  “That sucks,” Randall said, his voice wary. “So you’re not going home for the break?”

  “I was never going home for the break,” Jesse said, his eyes on Randall’s.

  Quickly Jesse lifted the shade. Even the pale light of dawn forced Randall to squint, and at first he didn’t see the flakes tumbling past the window, which seemed to hold Jesse in sudden thrall. "People like snow because they think it unifies everything,” Jesse said in a low voice. “They think it draws all these disparate elements into one landscape. Like how a layer of white over everything draws your attention to things you didn’t notice before. The telephone pole, the wires overhead, the rooftops.” Jesse paused, his eyes glazed and distant as they stared through the glass at the silent snowfall. “Bullshit,” he whispered. “Too much of it is suffocating. It robs each thing of what it really is.”

  Randall realized he had been gazing at Jesse for longer than he usually allowed himself to, for fear of feeling that familiar hot flicker of panic that told him looking too long would make him want too much. But given what Jesse had just shared, it would be too rude just to curl up into a ball. For the first time, Randall felt Jesse’s solitude like a crushing weight; here he was at Atherton, friendless and having run across country to escape the nightmare of his only living parent. But the longer he watched Jesse gaze out the window, the more Randall could feel Jesse’s hunger for his companionship. It was too loaded an invitation for Randall to accept.

  “Well.” Jesse broke the silence, turning to his bed. “Since you don’t look like you’re about to choke on your own vomit, I’m going to get some sleep, okay?” He slid beneath his comforter and rolled to face the wall.

  Randall couldn’t say anything in response. He couldn’t tell Jesse that he knew his solitude, knew the damage that resulted from turning yourself into an orphan.

  He reached down and shoved the flask under his bed.

  In the driveway, Eric’s Camry sat alone in a bed of deepening shadow as late Saturday afternoon turned into an evening of darkening pewter sky. Randall’s hangover slowed his steps, even though he was invigorated by a strange blend of purpose and fear. By the time he reached the front steps, he had managed to convince himself that the bottle hadn’t been poisoned and that his mind was running wild with guilt-fueled fantasies. He’d skipped dinner the night before. Could drinking on an empty stomach drop you to your knees?


  With one hand on the banister he realized there was still only one way to quiet the racket of accusing voices in his head. Get the bottle.

  He’d taken several steps when he heard the unmistakable sound of voices raised in argument in the living room, and while he couldn’t make out the words, Randall could hear Eric arguing, and another male voice trying to trump his volume.

  Randall squeezed himself between the Camry and the side wall of the house, moving slowly toward the gate to the backyard, illuminated by the bright halo of a security light. At first, instinct had driven him into the alley. He hadn’t called to say he was coming over, maybe hoping to catch Eric off guard, but that meant running the risk of being seen. Now, as he listened to footsteps and saw a shadow pass over the wall of the neighboring house, curiosity led him to eavesdrop.

  Eric and his guest moved into the kitchen.

  Randall shut his eyes, hoping it would help him concentrate on the muffled voices inside. The sudden song of water through pipes told him Eric was standing at the sink beneath the window. “How many times do I have to ask to be kept in the dark?” The other voice gave an inaudible response, and when Eric spoke again, he had obviously turned from the sink because he was harder to hear. “I don’t see why it’s so important to you . . .” Nothing, and then Eric again. “Just a look? That’s all? Even when you know you don’t have my approval?”

  They left the kitchen and the conversation was lost within the house. Next, Randall heard footsteps plodding down the front hallway. When he heard the front door open, he held himself flat against the side wall.

  Mitchell Seaver strode past the entrance to the driveway, tossing his head back and brushing his bangs off his forehead before he disappeared. Randall moved swiftly down the driveway and caught a glimpse of Mitchell a block away before he made a sudden right, heading away from campus.

  Randall managed to wait almost a minute before mounting the front steps.

  Eric threw the front door open with such force that Randall guessed he had been expecting Mitchell to return. “Did you call first?” he asked.