The Snow Garden

by Unknown Author

  Now she sat staring at the bag. With a deep breath she summoned her nerve and removed Jesse’s computer, along with April’s power cord, which she had taken without asking because she couldn’t bring herself to tell April what she had found. She hooked the cord into the carrel’s power outlet and popped the monitor open.

  Unlike most students she knew, Jesse had not chosen to personalize his computer’s wallpaper; icons for only the essential programs stood out against a light blue background. April had been the one to tell Kathryn how to password-protect her computer. No one had done Jesse the favor, which probably explained his bizarre choice of hiding place.

  Upon their arrival, Atherton students were assigned E-mail accounts on campus, after which they could download the Eudora E-mail program from the campus network free of charge. The program had a feature that automatically saved all sent and received messages until the user instructed it to delete them, after which it transferred them to a folder aptly named “Deleted Messages.” Jesse had now missed two full days of class and she hoped to at least find some inquiries into his absence from professors or teaching assistants. But she knew from glances at his bookshelves—before they had been cleaned out—that Jesse’s schedule consisted of mostly basic lecture courses, and the reality of the situation was that no one would notice he was missing until some adept TA figured out he hadn’t signed in for at least two or three discussion sections, which itself was hardly a rare occurrence among freshmen. But maybe she would discover some E-mail transaction documenting an official break from Atherton. Or maybe she should fess up to herself and admit that it was a morbid curiosity that had led her to power up the computer.

  At first, she had trouble with the touch-sensitive mouse; one press of her finger against the pad would send the cursor sliding across the screen. Her sweaty fingers aggravated the problem. She managed to position the cursor over the Eudora icon and clicked. A logo indicated that the computer was trying to log on to the Internet with a connection it didn’t have. A password might be required to connect, but she knew from experience that sent and received messages could be accessed without it.

  Several more maneuverings of the mouse, and she was looking at an entire record of Jesse’s E-mail activities since he had arrived at Atherton University. She felt a wave of disappointment; Jesse was not an avid correspondent. The majority of it was obvious cyber junk, the rest bearing the addresses of academic departments—none of them queries into his absence—most of them reminders of imminent paper deadlines and last-minute schedule changes. Only a small smattering of student E-mail addresses appeared—full names divided by an underscored space and followed by @Atherton.edu.

  One of those names was Lauren Raines. Kathryn shivered and clicked the file open.

  Jesse,

  Is that how you spell it? I have a cousin whose name is JessIe, so I wanted to be sure.:) Thanks so much for the feedback on my story. It meant a lot. So I hope this doesn’t sound too forward, but were you serious about dinner? Let me know.

  Lauren

  Kathryn closed it, returned to the list. Shocked to find a guy’s name—Taylor Barnes—she opened the E-mail.

  Wassup?

  I’ve been giving your “suggestion” some thought. After you mentioned it, I think I remember meeting your roommate. Tim introduced us once. (Do you know Tim? He’s really cool. Helped me out a lot.) Anyway, I’ve been thinking about your “idea” a lot and . .. .I’m totally into it. Let me know what your roommate says.

  Taylor

  Kathryn puzzled over it for a second before determining that Taylor was male, and probably the guy Jesse was having sex with on the other side of the door while Randall listened. She made a mental note of his name, considering he was probably one of the last people to have seen Jesse at Atherton.

  Finally she spotted a non-Atherton address: bcolby@wilkescolby-law.com.

  When she opened it, she was surprised by it’s length.

  J Man,

  Hope you’re doing well after the uproar of our phone conversation last night. Without rehashing it too much, I just wanted to clarify some of the details of what your father and I have managed to work out. Keep in mind, the consensus is this is a bogus charge. While it helped that your father was honest about how intoxicated he was when the police arrived, the judge handling the case is known for being media sensitive. Due to the recent spate of celebrity-related drug arrests, I think his sentence was deliberately, and unfairly, harsh.

  In lieu of facing a trespassing charge, your father will be spending the next twenty-eight days at Bright Hill, a highly reputable rehabilitation center in Pacific Palisades. Terms of his stay are that his contact with the outside world will be limited, and he won’t be allowed to leave the facility for the duration. I accompanied him yesterday evening when he checked himself in, and I can assure you he's in good spirits. He asked me to let you know that finances and the like are all in order, and he expressed regret that all of this might have distracted from your new life up at college. However— and I have to stress this—he would very much like you to visit, and he suggested Thanksgiving.

  Jesse, I might be crossing the line here, but your father’s feeling a great deal of shame right now and while I know things between the two of you can get volatile, I’ve been around you two long enough to know you guys share a pretty deep bond. I think he feels he’s failed his only son. He’s getting some real good help now, and I know your support would help him even more. There. End of sermon.

  Please feel free to call the office if you need any more information, and I wish you every success at Atherton.

  Best,

  Bill

  Had Jesse gone home to visit his father in rehab?

  She checked the date on the E-mail.

  November 17. Almost a week before he told her point-blank he had no plans to go home for Thanksgiving.

  Was Jesse called home to take care of his father’s affairs? Nothing in the E-mail indicated such a demand. The lawyer seemed a pretty smooth character. He was also a family friend, and he had highlighted the fact that the finances were all in order, encouraging Jesse to go about his new life at college.

  This shot April’s theory dead. No one made Jesse go home. Worse, whoever had cleaned out his room in a hurry and left the computer behind wasn’t a parent. His father was basically being held prisoner and his mother had died.

  Having an alcohol-addicted father shined a harsh light into who Jesse was, but that knowledge gave her nothing close to an answer. She gave up on his E-mail and went into Microsoft Word. His files were as meticulously organized as he’d kept his own desk. Each of his four courses was assigned its own folder and a quick check revealed first and second drafts of papers.

  A fifth file was titled “Journal.” A diary? Her breath caught at the thought, but when she clicked on it she was greeted with twelve files, all bearing other people’s names. It couldn’t be possible. Was this a cold chronicle of Jesse’s sexual conquests? Why else would Lauren Raines’ name be close to the top of the list? She let out a disgusted breath, feeling no triumph in having the worse things she had suspected about the guy laid out on the monitor before her.

  She opened Lauren’s file before she could lose her nerve.

  10-2 I knew Shifty Eyes was holding a clamped lid down on something that was about to burst. Today in class, she read a story about a girl who gets fucked by her uncle. How stupid does she think we are? She read it with such forced solemnity that it was obviously true, and it was also obvious that she enjoyed doing it with him. Of course there was lots of head-nodding when I talked to her about it after class. Turns out she’s an engineering major. Fitting. Designing bridges, control.

  Kathryn was quietly horrified, but what struck her above all else was the evident anger in Jesse’s words. He was riled by the idea that Lauren would try to pull one over on the class masquerading fact as fiction. She forced herself to keep reading, finding more dated entries. More brutal dissections of Lauren’s superficial behav
iors, and Jesse’s attempt to read psychological motivations into them. By the time she came to the final entry and read what Jesse had done to Lauren for the big finish, she fell against the back of the chair, her face tightening into a grimace.

  This is what Lauren wouldn’t tell? No wonder.

  She gathered her composure and browsed files bearing names of people she didn’t know-all of them Jesse’s sexual prey. Jesse took pride in getting a girl to abandon her feminist film theory analysis of Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo even as he went down on her. A lacrosse player had needed only a few beers before he was asking Jesse to call him his bitch. There were even fewer laws involved in Jesse’s games than she had imagined. But bisexual was a term she was hesitant to apply to him. Jesse used his body to force someone into exposing her, or his, innermost secrets. What better target than a closet homosexual? (But where did Randall fit in?)

  “Make sure they aren’t afraid to ask for what they want, at the same time you’re making them feel as good as you can. You’ll be shocked what you find out.” Those had been his parting woods to her after the only conversation they’d ever had alone.

  As she continued to read, she realized none of his other conquests inspired the same anger and determination as Lauren Raines. Her secret had gotten to him the most of all, and there was pure venom in what he had done and how he had described it.

  Her powers of analysis were clouded by her visceral reaction to Jesse’s conquests laid bare. Jesse’s life at Atherton was a barren, lonely place, sparsely populated by the secret sexual desires of strangers. His diary was a fitting addition to the portrait of a guy who rarely left his room, who had led a pathetic and empty existence amid throngs of freshmen embracing their new independence. How much of her own imagination had transformed Jesse into a monster?

  Of course, there was one file she hadn’t read yet. Unlike the others, it bore only a first name.

  Randall.

  These entries weren’t dated. With his roommate, Jesse didn’t seem to follow a ticking clock that wound down to an eventual bedding. The entries were also longer.

  His art history professor gives him a hard on. (Eberling? Edmund?) This is probably the first honest thing he’s said to me since we moved in together. Should I feel honored? For the first three weeks, the guy could barely look my way, afraid he’d get wood, and now he’s telling me he wants to sleep with a married guy? I wonder what the chipmunk across the hall would think if she found out.

  Weird. Last week his parents lived on Park Avenue. Last , night they moved to Soho.

  Tried to get him to talk about his parents last night. Same ol’ shit. They’re rich, they're assholes. Wah wah wah, Poor Randall! It’s like he’s rehearsed this stuff. And how many times does he have to mention his mother’s drinking? He’s never even told me her full name, but I know she’s always about to “drown in a bathtub of Glenlivet.” Cute? What novel did he steal that from? He’s just trying to get me to stop asking.

  Kathryn felt hollow. Jesse was right.

  The details of Randall’s home life did always seem woefully thin and rehearsed, and moreover, sharpened in such a way as to throw down a roadblock. She recalled their conversation in the men’s bathroom, when her flip comment about his parents’ wealth had resulted in a monologue from Randall about escaping their evil influence. He’d sidelined her inquiry about their trip to Boston with a comment about how his mother had hit the sauce when his father went out of town on business.

  Last night he was banging away at the computer. I asked him if he decided to actually start doing some work. He said he was working on something for Kathryn. I didn’t bother asking what, since I knew he wouldn’t tell me, just waited until he went to the bathroom and checked his most recently viewed files. Are these two morons writing stories to each other?

  Tonight. Found Randall passed out in front of our dorm. He’d been at one of those gay and lesbian alliance dances and was totally plastered. I had to carry him up to the room. He was babbling like he was in the midst of some kind of fever dream. Kept bitching about how hot he was. Fire this, fire that. Finally, I realized he wanted me to take his clothes off. That’s when I thought maybe the whole thing was just a big ploy... Well, shit! Fire is right. The guy’s got like second degree burns over both his legs. But I’ve got a pretty good guess where he got them.

  Drywater, Texas.

  Kathryn stopped to breathe, guarding herself as best she could before she leaned forward again toward the screen.

  Found the article today. Kathryn came up to me in the library right after and I thought about showing her. But I think I’m going to sit on this one until the time comes. What this guy has done is fucking awe-inspiring! Running away is one thing. Reinventing yourself is another. He had to have gotten some help along the way. I can only dream . . . and ask him once the time comes.

  Kathryn stared at the monitor for a second before she tried to page down.

  That was it.

  She rubbed the heel of one hand against her forehead, trying to force blood back to her brain.

  Found the article today.

  She scanned the journal folder again; it didn’t reveal anything close to an article. She closed Word and opened a full file search of the entire computer. Trying to numb herself as best as she could, she brought her fingers to the keyboard and typed “Texas” She hesitated before adding “article,” and then finally “train derailment.”

  The search turned up an .html file. She clicked on it.

  DEATH TOLL AT 40, ONE MISSING AFTER FIERY TRAIN DERAILMENT

  The headline ran above a black-and-white photograph, an aerial view of railroad tracks, flame-devoured train cars, and scorched earth. Part of the train was still intact, each car leaning more than the last before they disappeared into a blackened nightmare of metal marking the fiery eruption that had spread outward from the tracks, turning trees into spindly skeletons and reducing trailers to their charred roofs.

  Alongside this photograph was an even more striking one, shot at night from a great distance and obviously not long after the derailment. Even though it was black-and-white, fire lit up the night sky on the open Texas plain with an almost heavenly glow.

  Jesse had found an archived edition of the Dallas Morning News and this article had been on the front page on July 17, 1997.

  Melinda Cruz is still trying to find the words to describe the catastrophic derailment of the Dallas-bound Southern Union train that unleashed a burning tide of diesel fuel and propane, reduced her home to smoldering rubble and killed her neighbors. Cruz, 51, her husband, Marvin, and her two young daughters are the only surviving residents of the Valley Vista Mobile Home Park, five miles outside the small town of Credence. “We’re used to the sound of the trains going by,” Cruz said. “But that night it was just like this roar that kept getting louder and louder, and then suddenly the bedroom window just went orange.”

  A week after the accident, there is still no word from the National Transportation Safety Board on the cause of the disaster that left the Cruz family homeless and spread sorrow throughout Henrick County. Red Cross workers spent the last seven days combing through rubble and identifying the dead. Most victims were asleep in their beds when the train came off its track at a little past one in the morning. All the victims have been accounted for except for fifteen-year-old Benjamin Collins. The body of his father, William, was recovered earlier this week from the ruins of the mobile home he shared with his only son. Investigations have been careful to point out that at some locations close to the tracks, fire burned at temperatures hot enough to reduce steel to gas.

  Some locals believe that Valley Vista Mobile Home Park has been cursed from the time of its beginnings. Certainly the community of modest dwellings has been no stranger to tragedy. For years, Credence city planners refused to grant residential zoning to the tract of land the development occupies because it was located next to an unmarked intersection of highway and railroad track where eight auto fatalities had occurred. In wh
at now seems like bitter irony for Melinda Cruz and the relatives of the victims of Valley Vista, the last auto fatality—which resulted in the installation of warning lights and crossbars and in the subsequent residential zoning of the adjacent tract of land—claimed the life of Mary Anne Collins, the twenty-eight-year-old mother of the boy whose body has yet to be recovered from Valley Vista’s ruins.

  Before memory devolved into nightmare, the flames chased him through scrub. Pure fear propelled him past the trailers, their windows reflecting the advancing fire. But there was no time to stop and warn, no time to do anything other than run from the roar that was collapsing into a symphony of metal shrieking against metal. The singing of his own joints was not a result of exertion. His legs were on fire. He was fifteen again, running stupidly from the fire he carried with him.

  But in a moment of dreaming self-awareness, Randall could tell that the flames, were too high, that they chased him with nightmare speed. Now, the hushed voices conversing above him pulled him back to consciousness, along with the cold weight pressing against his forehead.

  “Did you or didn’t you see a car?”

  “No car. I pulled out of the locker and I saw the gate to the facility had been opened, but I just kept driving. We had broken in. It’s not like I was going to wait around for the fire department.”

  “A puddle of kerosene. Doesn’t sound like you guys are being tailed by a trained assassin.”

  He opened his eyes and saw Tim sitting on the bed beside him. When he saw Randall’s eyes open, he removed the wet rag and either grinned or grimaced at him, or both.

  Randall’s eyes went to the window: an unfamiliar view of sloping rooftops and the black water of the bay beyond. Overstuffed bookshelves lined the walls. Then he saw the man in the doorway, his wiry, gray hair haphazardly brushed back from a high forehead, his pinpoint eyes behind glasses over the bridge of a prominent nose. He held a steaming cup of coffee close to his chest and examined the young man lying on his bed without alarm or surprise.