The Snow Garden

  “What?” April finally asked, as if someone had poked her in the ribs.

  “He’s not interested.”

  “And you know this how?”

  “He doesn’t sound excited to see me again and he talks to me like I’m five.”

  “He’s not excited to see you again, or he can’t see you tomorrow? Oh!” April lifted both hands as if to shield herself. “Sorry, sis.”

  Kathryn set the phone down in the cradle.

  “How much longer are we going to do this?” April asked.

  “Hey. It’s only been a few hours. I can go another day at least.”

  She crossed the hallway. One firm knock on the door to Randall’s room, and nothing. She had spent two more hours reading in the library that evening after he had left so abruptly. She knocked again. She stepped back and bent down. No sliver of light came from beneath the door.

  Back in her room, April’s fingers were dancing over the keyboard. Kathryn felt aimless, her eyes would smart if she read anymore, and she had already opened her E-mail: “Still searching. Don’t give up hope. We’ll get you home yet. Love, Dad.” She flopped down on her mattress.

  “Did I ever tell you about my friend Sara?” April asked.

  April’s attention was fixed on her computer. “This is freshman year in high school. And it’s Dover, Massachusetts, we’re talking about, so I’m like the only remotely black girl in my entire class. So I pretty much had the act down. Teacher’s pet, my parent’s pet, everyone’s nice, agreeable, half-black girl. Then all this lesbian shit came up, and I thought, well now I have two strikes against me. There’s only so much a fourteen-year-old girl can try to make up for.”

  Kathryn lifted herself up on both elbows. If nothing else, April’s lack of cynicism held her rapt.

  “And then Sara comes along. Beautiful, but in this edgy kind of way. The kind of look that gets to everyone whether they admit it or not. You could tell the male teachers were afraid she was going to get raped, and all the female teachers were afraid she was going to enjoy it. And me, well, I knew I just had to make her my best friend. Because there was, like, this aura that surrounded her wherever she went, and I thought, If I can get inside that, then who gives a shit what I really am.”

  April closed out whatever file she’d been working on, but her hands remained on the desk beside the keyboard, her head bowed and brow furrowed.

  “Pretty soon I’m doing shit you wouldn’t believe. Just ’cause it was Sara’s idea. We start by toilet-papering this teacher’s house. Then we decide to burn a few bags of dog shit on people’s porches. Next comes getting plastered at her parents’ house every weekend. And for the big finish, shoplifting. Christ.” April let out a snort. “When I think back on some of the shit I did with her, just ’cause she was Sara . . .”

  She trailed off, finally looking up to where Kathryn lay uncertain on the bed, without any clue where April was headed with this.

  “Funny thing is, I never made a move on her. That wasn’t what I wanted from her. It was just, when I was with her, and when I had her approval, I felt protected.”

  Kathryn let a few seconds pass, if nothing more than to be polite in the wake of this rate glimpse into April’s past. “I missed it,” she finally said, as politely as she could.

  “My point is that Randall and Jesse living in the same room... Well, let’s just say it bothers me just as much as it does you.”

  “So Randall is you and Jesse is Sara?” Kathryn’s tone was sharpening faster than she could control it.

  “You don’t have to take it that literally.”

  “Then how should I take it?”

  April let out a deep breath, as if even she wasn’t sure, before she turned to face Kathryn. “Beauty does fucked-up things to gay people, Kathryn. It’s like this all-powerful wonder drug that erases that feeling of difference. These feminists and media studies people can take all their babble about body ideals and codes of aesthetics and shove it. We all know beauty when we see it. And when gay people see it they have to fight with everything they have to keep from heading straight for it and letting everything else fall away.”

  And everyone, Kathryn thought, but April had said as much.

  “Randall’s been fighting how bad he wants Jesse since the first day he got here, Kathryn. Please, I don’t think of you as my pet project or my baby sister. But that boy’s not just a free spirit. He’s untethered. And it scares me to see how hard you’re holding on to him.”

  Kathryn felt a swell of anger lacking words. April rose and left the room, and Kathryn wondered if her own voicelessness was a product of Randall’s growing silences.

  Randall pulled off the old trick of hanging back and letting a student slide his card through the reader and then grabbing the door before it shut all the way behind him. Inside Braddock Hall, Randall rushed up to the second floor, feeling like an intruder, and found the door to Tim’s suite standing open. He pushed it open and took one step into the common room, trying to feel his feet on the floor.

  Sharif and John were playing poker. A mess of textbooks and notes lay strewn around an open pizza box and its half-eaten contents. Obviously, John had set aside his hard feelings about being conned into drinking Sharif's urine out of a Nantucket Nectar bottle. Not to mention the Japanese beer drama.

  “Yeah, he’s here,” Sharif said, arranging pairs in his hand.

  John stared at Randall so intently over his hand that it looked as if someone had long ago convinced him that upon entering a room all gay men break into song and dance. Of course, it could have been that Randall’s eyes were still bloodshot and he looked like the wind had been knocked out of him, thanks to Jesse’s assault, which had left him rattled and raw.

  Tim cracked the door to his room after one knock, and Randall recognized a wary tightness around his eyes. “Did something happen?”

  “I need a beer.”

  “I’ve got work. My own work.”

  “One beer,” Randall said, holding up his finger, and Tim registered that he was coming down from the throes of near panic. Tim pulled the door all the way open. As Randall took a seat on the bed, Tim removed a Corona from the fridge and punched the cap off against his desk. Randall managed a weak thanks before he downed the first third. Tim took a seat at his desk. “If you keep hating me,” Randall declared, “we’ll never be able to do this.”

  “I don’t hate you,” Tim responded evenly. “But that doesn’t mean I think we can do this. And I don’t think you should stay, if that’s what you’re asking.”

  “Jesse’s fucking someone right now and I don’t think I’ll get any sleep at Eric’s.”

  Tim just shook his head in disbelief at Randall’s nerve.

  For several tense minutes, Randall lay on the bed, waiting for the beer to flush memories both recent and distant. Tim feigned studying. When he realized that his concentration wasn’t going to return, he let out a sigh, dropped his pencil and met Randall’s gaze. Randall returned it, trying to escape himself for one minute, trying to see what Tim saw: a home wrecker, a stupid little boy trapped in the middle of something spinning out of his control. If there was one thing Randall was still sure of it was that he had a gift for seeing himself through other people’s eyes. Before, that had helped him survive; now it was a curse, and of absolutely zero use amid murder.

  “You want another?” Tim asked, shutting his book with one hand.

  Randall handed Tim the empty bottle.

  “You know, back in Chicago, I saw guys my age dating older men all the time,” Tim began, tossing the empty bottle into the recycling tub and pulling out a fresh one. “It was always the same dynamic. Young guy, just out of the closet, new to the whole scene. Older, usually rich, father-type figure takes him under his wing. Fucks him silly. Gets rid of him once he’s twenty.” He handed Randall the bottle. “There’s nothing new about you, Randall.”

  Randall twisted his head against the pillow. “Do you think it’s possible that I might not fit into one of
your equations, Tim?”

  Tim sat down carefully, his butt resting inches from Randall’s head, but with his hands folded across his lap. “You can’t convince me that Eric Eberman, married closet case, maybe even a murderer... that a man like that could never have made you feel safe.”

  “No one’s ever made me feel safe,” Randall said to the ceiling.

  Tim let out a dismissive snort, leaning back against the headboard and staring forward. “At least you’re not trying to justify it, I guess.”

  Randall could sense the prodding reporter beneath Tim’s questions, and he steeled himself, worrying that the confrontation—could he even call it that?—with Jesse had loosened a valve that might start leaking memories.

  “What I’m about to say might sound like flattery, but it isn’t. Trust me.” Tim looked down at Randall before continuing. “When I saw you at the first GLA dance, you want to know what drew me to you?”

  “Maybe.”

  “You looked like you couldn’t care less that anyone else was in the room with you.”

  “A bunch of fags With glow sticks and straight boys wearing Dr. Seuss caps. Maybe I didn’t.”

  “No.” Tim shook his head, obviously in no mood for sarcasm. “You were magnetic because you were so indifferent. You were a challenge. So I had to talk to you.”

  “Do you regret it?”

  Tim lowered his eyes to his. 'Yes. I do.”

  I’ll be sure to sand your notch off my belt, Randall thought, and stifled a smile.

  “I just want to know if you went after Eberman for the same reason,” Tim said.

  Randall lifted himself to down more beer. “What? Because he was a challenge?”

  “Maybe. Or because he had a wife.”

  Randall lowered the bottle. “Whatever was in my head, it didn’t kill Lisa Eberman. I didn’t kill Lisa Eberman. So what I was thinking or feeling really isn’t relevant. It’s also none of your business.”

  Tim wasn’t deterred, rather he seemed encouraged by Randall’s flash of anger. “Maybe not. But you’d better decide just what you feel for this man. Because there’s a very good chance that we might ruin his life.”

  “And mine ” Randall answered.

  “Oh, come on, Randall. The scale isn’t even tipped that way and you know it. If word gets out that he was in bed with you that night, his face will be on the front of every newspaper, and you’ll probably be a blue bubble, almost as good as a rape victim.”

  “Bullshit. I’m eighteen. I’m old enough to be the whore.”

  “And his career will be ruined, or he’ll be in jail for murdering his wife,” Tim retorted. “Or are you just desperate to prove that something else happened that night? Something other than Lisa seeing the two of you in bed.”

  The casual use of her first name chilled Randall and he tensed his hands around the beer bottle.

  “Do you believe he killed her?” Tim asked.

  “Yes,” Randall answered, feeling as if the answer had been pressed out of him.

  “Do you believe that you were his motive?”

  Randall’s eyes shot to his. “Yes.”

  Tim sucked in his bottom lip, averting his eyes before he asked the next question. “Do you like being his motive?”

  For several seconds, Randall massaged the bridge of his nose between thumb and forefinger. “Part of me does, yes. The same part that loved being the one who could somehow make a forty-one-year-old man cheat on his wife of ten years. Yeah, the part of me I’m trying to make shut up loves it. Anyone would love having that kind of power.” His eyes left Tim’s, and when he spoke again, he sounded in need of breath. “But most of me wonders what Kathryn would think if she knew about any of this.”

  Tim’s eyes widened.

  “Eric showed me this picture of Lisa, and afterward I kept seeing her face every night when I tried to go to sleep. Now I see Kathryn’s face. I see what it would look like if she knew.” Randall’s eyes filled with what felt like a year’s worth of tears.

  “No one ever listened to me the way she did. No one ever thought what I had to say was so important. I wanted so badly to be who she saw when she looked at me. And I probably won’t ever be. But if I find out what really happened to Lisa Eberman, maybe I’ve done what I can. And maybe, once she finds out, I won’t have lost all of her respect. Even though I probably never deserved it in the first place.”

  Randall swabbed tears from his cheek with two quick motions of his hand. In the silence that followed, he realized his words had been meant more for Jesse than for Tim. But Tim seemed moved, the skepticism gone from his face.

  Tim took a deep breath. “I spoke to Paula Willis earlier tonight. We’re supposed to see her on Wednesday.”

  Randall brought his eyes to Tim’s, managing to blink them clear. Tim bowed his head. “I need to keep working,” he said. “Try to get some sleep.”

  Tim took a seat at the desk while Randall stripped down to his underwear and T-shirt. His scars revealed, he ventured a glance at Tim, to see him gazing stoically down at his book.

  Once in bed, Randall rolled over so that his back was to the desk lamp.

  It was a strange feeling, knowing that he had finally won Tim over by being honest to him for the first time since they had met.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  “WUHR CHESTER?” RANDALL ASKED.

  “It’s pronounced Wooster.”

  Once Atherton’s compact gathering of downtown buildings had disappeared from the rearview mirror of Tim’s Cherokee, Randall felt a tug of relief that belied the nature of their destination. Draining the last lukewarm sips from his Starbucks cup, he flipped through Tim’s notes from his first interview with Paula Willis. The dynamic between the sisters caught Randall by surprise. For some reason, he had always assumed Lisa was born into money, but apparently that wasn’t the case. In Paula’s tone there was the jealous edge of lingering sisterly competition, fading into a mild bitterness now that one sister was in the grave.

  Tim broke the silence. “When my grandmother died, it took my mother months before she could go through her things. I guess you either want to get rid of all evidence of them, or you just can’t bring yourself to start throwing their stuff away. Paula’s in my mother’s camp.” Tim flicked his eyes to Randall. “She says she hasn’t been able to touch anything in the guest bedroom. That’s where Lisa was staying.”

  “What about the police?”

  “Return to earth, please, where you and I are the only ones who think she might have been murdered. The police don’t root through the belongings of a drunk driver.”

  The Cherokee was flying past the industrial landscape of outer Boston. Once they had crossed the Massachusetts state line, the sloping hills gave way to seemingly endless car dealerships, their flag banners battered by frigid winds. Now smokestacks, crumbling and intact, were giant sequoias emerging from a landscape of warehouse roofs. Plowed, mud-stained snow lined the freeway. A bleak landscape, but for Randall a welcome reprieve from Atherton. And from the prospect of seeing Jesse, who had returned to the room the last two nights after Randall was tucked into bed, facing the wall and feigning deep sleep.

  Tim slowed the Jeep as they approached the Worcester exit, and within minutes they were traveling down streets lined with two-story, multifamily, clapboard houses, their small scraps of lawn fenced in by chain link. Preemptive Christmas lights in the few windows weren’t sufficient to give warmth to Paula Willis’ neighborhood. The few snowmen on the block weren’t being maintained with the same effort that had gone into building them, and Randall felt the eerie sensation that they were traveling into a neighborhood that had been suddenly abandoned by its residents.

  Paula Willis answered the door after one knock. Dressed in sweats, she shivered at the blast of cold air and gestured wordlessly for them to enter. Her short, reddish brown hair had a shine to it. Randall wondered if it was just a matter of time before she lost it all again to more chemo.

  “I have tea,” she said in gree
ting, leading them into the cramped living room. “Couple upstairs brought down a basket. It’s got all the regular stuff, then it has all these fruit teas. The names don’t even make sense to me.”

  She had Lisa’s angular features, but on her rounded, chubby face, they seemed more girlish and less sharp. She moved to her recliner and offered them a seat with a gesture of her arm toward the sofa. “Mrs. Willis. This is my intern, Luther.”

  Luther? Randall stifled a grimace, but this was the story they had agreed to do on the way there, despite Randall’s objection that he was about three feet taller than Tim and might appear too old to be his assistant. But Paula Willis just nodded, grunting as she yanked the footrest out of her La-Z-Boy. They shouldn’t have even bothered, Randall thought; the woman couldn’t give a shit. Randall thought her curtness was one step short of rudeness, yet he acknowledged she was a woman without the time for pleasantries and bullshit.

  “We’re going to talk about Lisa, right?” Paula asked.

  When Randall looked up, startled, he saw that Paula was winded by the walk across the room, and her question was nothing more than an attempt to keep track by a woman whose daily schedule had become bloated with medicinal tasks and doctor’s appointments.

  “If you feel up to it,” Tim said.

  “Sure.” Paula sighed.

  Tim went over some of his old queries and as Randall waited for the right moment to excuse himself, he tried not to take in the details of the room. He failed. Paula Willis and her husband had surrounded themselves with humble tokens of domesticity. Behind the La-Z-Boy, the wall was adorned only with a framed print of a sailboat tossed on a wind-whipped sea, a distinctly New England lighthouse rising in the background. The print would have seemed more at home in a room at the Ramada. Inside a ceramic, heart-shaped frame on the end table beside him, a wheelchair-bound Paula fed seagulls on a seashore. She wore a baseball cap to conceal her bald head. No wig, Randall noted, sensing the woman’s pride and-lack of pretense. So she had already lost her hair. And grown it all back.