by Lara Parker
Two
David stepped out of the shed where he had been working on the snowmobile, and stretched his cramped muscles. He had been tinkering with the engine for hours, and he was tempted to go for a quick ride before picking Jackie up at the bus stop. The storm had dumped several feet of new snow, and he could see that it was as light as the air, held in crystalline suspension, and all the trees, benches, and walls were draped with heaps of spun sugar frosting. The garbage cans wore lopsided hats, and huge cakes of snow sat on the stone pilasters.
He jumped on the sled and pulled the start cord, pleased with the smooth sound of the engine. Beyond the drive, the drifts were perfect for carving turns, and soon he was floating over the dips and rises or flying through the trees, sending up a high curving plume of powder as the engine roared beneath his legs. After a couple of gnarly turns—leaning way over until he could brush the snow with his knee—he settled down and drove more cautiously along the path toward the highway.
Meeting Jackie at her bus after school was the highlight of David’s day, and he always caught his breath when she appeared, her blue scarf wrapped around her dark hair, her pale eyes brightening when she saw him. After a tentative “Hi” and “Hi,” they usually trudged down the path together, close enough for him to inhale her woodsy fragrance. She was often quiet and thoughtful, and sometimes he walked backward in front of her so that he could look at her while he talked to her. Today he was bringing her home on the snowmobile for the first time, and he was looking forward to her snuggled up behind him on the seat, her arms around his waist.
When he was with her, he always felt light-headed, and everything his eye fell upon he saw for the first time. A bird against the sky, the curve of a tree branch, the dew-lit web of a spider: all seemed miraculous, and he struggled to find the words to describe things to her. But it would come out, “Hey, look at that bird!” or “See the moon?”—words so inadequate they left him feeling embarrassed. Still, whenever they were together, he felt he moved in a cloud of enchantment, his whole body buzzing with happiness.
When he looked back, David always believed that his life began the day Jackie and her mom moved into the Old House. He had been curious when the moving van drove up to deposit their belongings, and he wandered over to see the progress when the workers began the restoration. Then one day he saw her walking back and forth from her mom’s car carrying lamps and rugs, small tables and chairs. It was summer, and she wore a dress that clung to her body. She had long black hair and a little bounce to her walk, and she moved with the grace of a dancer.
For a while that summer, there had been a band of hippies living in the woods by the stream below the Old House. On hot afternoons, they swam naked in the river and several times, although he had been forbidden to do so, David had gotten up the courage to spy on them.
He had seen her naked, stretched out on a flat rock in the sun, or tiptoeing through the shallow rapids, her body like a wood nymph’s, and he thought he had never seen anything so beautiful. She reminded him of Bernini’s statue of Apollo chasing Daphne through the forest. In the myth, just as Apollo caught her, Daphne was transformed into a tree, her hands and feet turning into twigs sprouting leaves where her fingers and toes had been.
He and Jackie had become friends, even though she was usually reserved when she saw him. But one night, when the moon was full and they were sitting around the campfire, a strange thing had happened. She took his hand and led him away from the group. Her eyes glowed with mischief and she held his fingers so tightly they pinched. She fed him some kind of strange-tasting drink, and then she lay down with him in a huge pile of fallen leaves. She was trembling when he kissed her, the first and only kisses of his life, and he had felt her body against his with the leaves rustling beneath them and pricking them with their stems. Just that once. And then, she had become distant again. Often when he lay in bed, he thought about that night and the memory left him aching.
After the first winter storm, his father had given him permission to play around on the snowmobile stored in the garage. Since he was finally sixteen, what he really wanted was a car, but that was not about to happen. His father felt he was still too immature, and he had made some stupid mistakes when he was younger his father wouldn’t let him forget.
The sled was an old Ski-Doo that ran a little rough and jerked when it went uphill, but it was better than walking in the deep snow. He’d been fiddling with it, trying to improve the performance, and sent off for some parts in the mail. Its rumble was supremely satisfying since he had taken off the factory muffler and replaced it with an extremely loud expansion chamber. Today, as he glided over the snow, he figured the engine was about 2 percent more powerful and maybe 50 percent louder. If he were going to be noisy, he might as well howl. Pressing on the throttle, he gunned the sled up a rise, feeling the vibration of the engine—and his body flooded with a new sense of purpose because he was thinking of the promise he had made to Jackie.
Two days earlier, he had driven the snowmobile over to the Old House in hopes of seeing her outside, and maybe taking her for a ride. That afternoon the air had tasted bitter and the day felt brief, as though gray dawn and gray dusk had merged without stopping to warm things up in the middle. There had been no wind, only the stillness in the air before it would snow, as if everything was holding its breath. The ground was crusted over, but he had still gunned the sled over the icy patches, sometimes hitting a rise and catching air. He remembered how the revving sound shattered the silence like a fire alarm announcing his presence long before he arrived, giving her time to hide herself away if she wanted to.
But almost as if she had been waiting for him, he had found her sitting on the snow-covered porch of the Old House, leaning against one of the massive columns. He had released the throttle and skidded, displaying a bit of bravado in hopes that she would look up and smile, but her pale eyes were bloodshot, and he could see she had been crying. He knew she and her mother argued a lot, and lately her mother had been furious with her over a missing painting. Her mother thought Jackie had misplaced it when they were working on the restoration of the Old House.
As soon as he had seen her, David killed the engine and climbed off the sled. He walked over, brushed the snow off the step, and sat down close to her. He could tell by the way she was picking at the rip in her jeans that she was upset. She slid her thin ballet slippers under the icy grass and he realized his breath was cloudy. It was cold, too cold for anyone to be outside for any reason other than escape.
Her dark hair was pulled into a loose bun, wisps of curls fell across her forehead, and she tugged her sweater around her and looked over at him, smiling briefly before drawing her knees to her body. Finally, he had broken the silence.
“You haven’t found it yet, have you?”
She shook her head. “I can see it,” she had said softly, “a dark place, hidden, with a dirt floor.” Then she had made an odd sound, like a puppy whimpering, and covered her face with her hands. His heart swelled with a desire to help her.
“Tell you what,” he had said, hesitant. “Maybe we should look for it in those old buildings behind Collinwood.”
She turned to him and seemed to search his eyes, her own darting back and forth as if to question him, and he added, “The workers who rebuilt the Old House carried all the stored furniture and belongings from the basement to one of those buildings. Trunks of old clothing. A piano. Boxes of law books and maritime rules, financial records from the running of the cannery, anything that didn’t burn up in the fire. It makes sense that the painting was part of that stash.” He gave her arm a gentle bump with his fist. “What do you say? Want to look around with me?”
“Okay.” She sounded doubtful, and then after a long moment she said, “I guess I should go back inside,” but she didn’t move. He had been stealing looks at her and then looking away so as not to stare. The shadows beneath her eyes were smudged mascara—she had started to wear makeup and then leave it for days without washin
g it off. They were both quiet before she asked, “Do you remember when we were studying mythology, and we tried to choose our favorite god or goddess?”
He nodded. For a while her mother had let her homeschool with him. He had always had tutors since his father thought the high school was inferior. But it had been hard for him to actually pay attention to the lessons with her there in the room.
“Didn’t we decide to be followers of Dionysus?” she said.
“Yeah. We wanted to lie around and drink wine all day.” He remembered the idea had made him dizzy with longing.
“His portrait in the book was so beautiful,” she said. “The one by Velázquez.”
“With all those seedy men.”
Jackie laughed. “Didn’t you tell me he was gay?”
“Well, he was kind of pudgy, and he always wore a crown of grape leaves.”
She smiled. “Not thorns?”
He was concentrating now on a freckle, not really a freckle, but a very small mole on her neck, a flaw that somehow made her more beautiful, and he studied the place at her temple where the fine hairs grew singly as if they had each been drawn there by the point of a pen. She looked up suddenly at a bird high in the sky, then over at him, and smiled again. “And you said that Ares was gay, too, didn’t you?”
“Doesn’t it make sense?” he said. “He was the god of war.”
She grinned and nudged his arm.
“But Aphrodite loved him, didn’t she? Remember the Botticelli we stared at for so long?”
“You mean the one where he ignores her and falls asleep?”
Jackie laughed. She was cheering up a little. “You wanted to be that boy who drove the chariot of the sun,” she said.
“Yeah.” He had found a stick and he was jamming it into the snow between his feet. “If I’d had the reins to those horses, I would have been more careful.”
“Oh, and not destroyed the whole earth with fire?” She was teasing him a little—putting him on.
He watched her lips move when she spoke, her lips that were sometimes smooth but today were chapped, and he wanted to touch their roughness with his finger.
“Did you choose a goddess?” he asked softly. He could see her again as Daphne, her white body changing into a tree, or Aphrodite rising out of the sea.
“I always come back to Persephone,” she said gravely.
He was surprised. “That’s funny. Why did you pick her?”
She shrugged. “I am my mother’s big disappointment.”
“You ate six pomegranate seeds?” he asked in mock seriousness. “And you spent six months in the Underworld?”
She looked at him with her silver-gray eyes and nodded. “I must have. I just wish I knew who he was and what he looked like.”
“Who?”
A light flashed in her eyes and she giggled. “Hades, my seducer.”
Now he wondered whether she was flirting with him. He thought of reaching for her hand, but he imagined she might snatch it back, and he had seen the dirt beneath her nails just as she thrust them between her thighs and rocked back and forth.
Then he saw her teeth were chattering, so he took off his parka and placed it clumsily around her shoulders. She seemed to welcome the warmth of his jacket.
“What’s wrong between you and your mother?” he said softly.
“Why do you ask me so many questions?”
“I don’t know. Because what you don’t say is as interesting as what you do say.”
She let out a long sigh. “Sometimes we seem like the same person, and other times we’re so different. As though we come from two different worlds.”
Still shivering a little, she reached down into the snow and cupped a little of it to her face.
“Why did you do that?”
She sighed again, then turned to show him her swollen cheek. “She slapped me.”
“Oh, Jackie.” He reached around her and pulled her to him, giving her a brotherly squeeze. But it was more than that, and he tensed a little even though she seemed willing to lay her head on his shoulder. He felt his body heat up, but he held her until she whispered, her mouth buried in his coat, “I think my mother is crazy.”
“We’ll find it, just you wait,” he said. “I’m good at finding things.” When she didn’t answer, he went on to say, “Once, when I was twelve, I found my Aunt Elizabeth’s diamond earrings. They were tiny little studs that were worth $10,000. They were a gift from her father for her sixteenth birthday, and she lost them.”
Jackie looked up at him.
“The night before, she had been sick with a cold and she had gone to bed after dinner. I made up my mind to look though the garbage.”
Jackie pulled back and watched him with thoughtful eyes.
“It was always carried to the shed behind the kitchen, so I went back there and dumped the first trash can, and then the next, pulling apart all the stuff, bottles, paper towels, leftover food. I could see them so clearly in my mind. When I found them, I was not even surprised.”
She gasped. “The diamonds were in the trash?”
“Yeah. I pulled apart this crumpled-up Kleenex, and there they were.”
She shook her head as if she found it hard to believe.
“So you see?” he said, “I have a talent. We’ll look for the painting together. And we’ll find it. I promise.”
She smiled wanly, and, unable to resist, he pushed a piece of hair back from her face. His fingertips warmed when they touched her skin. “And don’t worry about your mom. We’ll be gone from here soon. We’ll be in college. We’ll be together, away from all this.”
But she turned her face away and stared off into the distance, as if she saw something on the far horizon.
* * *
David was halfway to the bus stop when he remembered he needed keys. All the outbuildings were locked, and ever since the accident in the pool he had been forbidden to go inside. He gunned the sled around in a U-turn, spraying the fresh powder like a bow wave and sending a plume out the back. The engine was running great, but there was an ache in his throat. He dreaded dealing with Willie, who was only the caretaker but full of self-importance when it came to his position as guardian of the estate.
After driving around for ten minutes, David finally found him on the back terrace with an armload of firewood. The older man was panting from the effort, and his jacket reeked of smoke and grease.
“What you want to sneak in there for anyway?”
“Why do you care?” said David, a little exasperated. “Besides, it’s not sneaking.”
Since Willie wasn’t wearing a hat, his gray blond hair stuck out in bizarre tuffs, and a three-day beard grizzled his flushed cheeks. “There’s glass all over in there, the roof’s falling in, and there’s rats.”
David pulled his coat tighter and watched his breath come out in puffs. Willie was not in the mood to cooperate, and David experienced a familiar surge of impatience. It was the dismissive attitude everyone in the family showed toward him. No one treated him like an adult.
“Willie, I’m the master of the house. Do as I say.”
“You got permission from Mr. Roger?” Willie dropped the firewood to the pavers with a crash, and David jumped back.
“Hey! Come on!” Willie was definitely pissed off about something. “I don’t need permission. I just want to take a look.”
“What are you lookin’ for?” Willie walked over to the tool shed, and David jerked the door open in the thick snow while Willie tugged out a wheelbarrow.
“A painting.”
“A what?”
“A portrait someone did. I think it’s of Quentin. You don’t have any idea what happened to it, do you?”
Willie hesitated and stared at the ground, his mouth working as if he had a wad of tobacco in there. Then he slammed the wheelbarrow down and began to load the firewood. His movements were clumsy and for some reason he wouldn’t make eye contact.
“Have you seen it?” David asked.
&
nbsp; “No. There ain’t nothin’ like that back there. They’ve plenty of paintings inside the house hanging on the walls. All your ancestors.”
Even though he wasn’t wearing gloves, David decided to help. He gathered an armload of firewood and stacked it in the wheelbarrow beside Willie’s. In a few minutes they were working in shifts, carrying the wood and rolling it up to the back door of the kitchen. Fresh snow lay all around, but they soon trampled their path to melting scum.
“Where are the keys, Willie?” David said before he picked up a piece of snow-covered kindling. He felt a splinter slide into his palm. “Ow!”
“You keep away from them buildings.”
“Why? What’s the matter? Don’t you trust me?” He grimaced at the splinter lodged under the skin.
“It’s kinda hard to forget all the things you did when you were allowed to play there. You stay in your room, study for those tests you need to take.”
David took off his cap and beat it against his leg to knock off the snow. “Damn it, that’s not fair! Willie, I’m not that little kid everyone thought would grow up to be a criminal.”
“That’s right,” Willie said dryly. “You had everybody plenty worried. Trying to fix Mr. Roger’s brakes so he would crash his car.”
Not all this again, David thought. His hand throbbed. “Because he wanted to send me away to military school! I was ten years old!” David took a breath because he could feel himself getting frustrated. “Come on, Willie, that’s all in the past. You know I’ve changed.” He looked out at the grounds behind Collinwood and saw that the snow had fallen so thickly all the paths and low bushes had disappeared.
“Then stay away from places you’re not supposed to go.”
David could feel the angry child welling up inside him.
He decided to try a different tack. “You know, Willie, the truth is I need to make some extra money for college, and there are a lot of things abandoned that nobody wants I could sell. I could split whatever money I make with you.”
Willie looked at him warily. “You ask your dad?”
