The Snow Garden (28 page)

     April entered, pushing through the door Kathryn hadn’t bothered to shut all the way. Kathryn watched her to see if she was in the mood to manage a greeting, but she wasn’t, and she sat down in front of her desk, snapping her computer out of idle with a mouse click.

     “But after the way I went on at dinner the other night, my guess is you probably think I’m pretty close to losing it anyway,” Kathryn said in a lower voice.

     “Please.”

     “Seriously. The only thing missing was the violin I could have played for myself.” And the kiss at the end of the date, which even though she didn’t like to admit it, would have been some small confirmation that the silent magnetic pull between them that she’d felt for the entire evening hadn’t been her own fantasy, her desires outstripping her mind.

     “Well, I also have something to apologize for.”

     She transferred the phone from her shoulder to her hand as she waited.

     “I enjoyed dinner and it was rude of me not to say so.”

     Had she really gone on a date with Mr. Belvedere? “Thanks.” Her tone was dry as a bone and she could feel her patience wearing thin. “And I would like to do it again. I said that, didn’t I?”

     “Yes. You did. When?”

     Mitchell’s breathy laugh made her curse her eagerness.

     “I imagine you’re kind of swamped this week.”

     “Not really.”

     “Well...
I’m
kind of swamped this week. How about after you get back?”

     “If I get back. It’s four whole days with my parents.”

     Mitchell laughed again. Kathryn didn’t. “When are you planning on returning?” he asked.

     “Don’t know yet. No tickets, remember?”

     “Well, that kind of complicates things...”

     You’re doing a fine job of that on your own, buddy, she thought. 

     “Why don’t you give me a call when you get back?” he asked, with a note of finality that tensed her hand around the portable.

     “Sure thing.”

     “Good-bye, Kathryn.”

     “Hey!” During the ensuing silence she cursed the sharpness in her tone.

     “Still here,” he said.

     “I ran into a friend of yours. Maria?”

     “Did you?”

     “She’s dating a friend of mine.”

     “I’m sorry?”

     “Lauren Raines?”

     Mitchell answered with a laugh that sounded strangely relieved. “Lauren, yes.”

     “You know her?”

     “Absolutely.”

     “I knew her when she was straight.”

     Mitchell exhaled loudly. “It all seems to be about choices here, doesn’t it?”

     “You could say that.”

     After they said good-bye for the second time, Kathryn brought the phone in front of her and punched
end
with too much force. April shot her a glance and then returned to her E-mail. Several silent seconds passed, during which Kathryn wondered if she had frightened Mitchell off.

     “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?”