The Snow Garden

by Christopher Rice

  Kathryn considered this as she examined the carpet. “Do you have this woman’s phone number?” she finally asked.

  Philip got up from her bed and disappeared into the hallway. He returned and handed her a piece of paper, then left. Heidi Morse. Kathryn read the number as she crossed to her old desk. Eight one eight was an area code she didn’t recognize. She opened the desk drawer and pulled out The Chronicle article from the pages of an old notebook.

  BAY AREA DRUG DEALER INFECTS TEN WOMEN WITH HIV

  She set Heidi Morse’s phone number on top and closed the drawer on them both.

  “Is this turkey?”

  Marion looked at her younger sister’s husband as if he had just hawked a loogie onto the dinner table. “Duck.”

  Kathryn watched her uncle shovel a forkful of creamed spinach into his mouth. “Did you shoot it yourself?” he asked, between chews, then guffawed.

  “I don’t shoot things,” Marion told him, sinking back into her chair after fifteen exhausting minutes of sawing meat from the bird.

  As a little girl, Kathryn had suffered from a powerful crush on Dale, her aunt’s husband. A former Stanford linebacker turned corporate real estate agent, he had first earned her adoration by deeming her worthy of learning the intricacies of that time-honored backyard game that males around the country treat with a reverence that only adds to its allure: catch. By the time she turned fifteen, sexual experimentation with her boyfriends had added a creepy dimension to her previously innocent crush, and she had set about snuffing it out. Now Kathryn saw her uncle for what he was, a blowhard who laughed at his own bad jokes.

  Next to her, Kathryn’s Aunt Linda had barely said a word since they had sat down to eat, but whenever her husband’s mouth opened, her head snapped to attention as if she expected a shotgun to go off. Linda’s career had always been her excuse for not having children. Kathryn guessed the real reason was that Dale would be their father.

  The meal had gotten off to a start with a discussion of Linda’s good friends, victims of the dot-com fallout who had just been forced to sell their two-million-dollar home for seven hundred thousand. Then the conversation had bottomed out into silences punctuated by long looks at Kathryn from every side of the table.

  “Someone just ask me how school is so we can get it out of the way,” Kathryn said.

  “How’s school?” Dale asked, with the bravado of a third grader shouting out the right answer. '

  “Great!”

  “Have you picked a major yet?” Linda asked, her eyes on her plate in front of her. v

  “Animal husbandry,” Kathryn answered.

  Philip laughed into his napkin.

  “We’ve decided to leave Kathryn alone on that front,” Marion spoke up. “I’m sure she’ll steer clear of whatever we suggest, so we’re actually improving our chances by keeping quiet and hoping she doesn’t pick something preposterous.” Marion’s note of wry humor had deteriorated steadily as she spoke.

  “It’s been months since someone’s talked about me like I’m not in the room,” Kathryn remarked to a forkful of duck she didn’t have the stomach for. She ate it anyway.

  “I read an article oh Atherton the other day. Well, skimmed it really,” Linda said. “I didn't know Michael Price went there.”

  Kathryn groaned. Linda continued, “The guy’s like one of the most popular architects in the world and he’s done three projects for Atherton at half off. He must have loved the place.”

  “I thought you said you skimmed it,” Dale said.

  “Well, I just picked it up in the waiting room .. .” Linda trailed off.

  “The waiting room of what?” Marion asked in her best big-sister voice.

  “The doctor.”

  “She missed her period,” Dale added.

  Linda set her fork down on the edge of her plate. “Out of all the adults we know, Dale, do you think any of them would say ‘period’ at the dinner table?”

  Dale shrugged at Philip as if to say, There she goes again.

  “I’m not pregnant,” Linda added, returning to her meal.

  “Either way’s fine with me.”

  “Noted, Dale.”

  Philip cleared his throat. “The duck's great, honey.”

  “Thanks,” Marion responded distantly. “I hope our daughter eats some.”

  Kathryn stabbed at a piece of duck the size of her hand and bit it in half. Linda shook with silent laughter. “Cigarettes are an appetite suppressant,” Marion said.

  “Cigarettes?” Dale asked incredulously. He shook his head at

  Kathryn, clicking his tongue against the roof of his mouth. “I thought Atherton was a smart school.”

  When she leveled her gaze on her uncle, Kathryn was reminded of how, growing up, she had often tried to move objects with her mind. There were, after all, only five feet between Dale’s chair and the plate glass window, and from there a thirty-foot drop down the hillside.

  “It could be worse, I guess,” Marion mumbled.

  Kathryn felt her father bristle. Even Linda, the expert at ignoring her own husband, shifted in her seat uncomfortably. Dale was, of course, clueless. Marion attacked her duck with renewed vigor, feigning ignorance of the reverberations her flippant comment stirred in the others.

  When she met her mother’s stony eyes across the table, Kathryn felt removed from it, spun into a private place inhabited only by her mother, a place where the woman could finally ask the question that was hardening her face: How could you have been so stupid?

  Maybe it would take a few more years before Marion would ask herself what lessons she had neglected to teach her daughter, what she could have done to keep her from a man like Jono, or at least wise her up to what he really was. But for now, Kathryn saw that Marion’s attitude had not changed in almost six months. Kathryn could bathe in her pain and betrayal all she wanted, but Marion considered her daughter’s self-pity to be a useless distraction from the more pressing question. How could you have let yourself come so close to death?

  “Excuse me,” Kathryn whispered as she rose from her chair.

  Halfway to the stairs, Kathryn looked over her shoulder. Philip’s eyes had followed her out of the room, but her mother had braced her forehead on her palm while Dale sympathetically held her other hand. .

  The sight of Marion accepting solace from a relative she despised was enough to tighten Kathryn’s chest With anger. But the scene also forced her to reassess her real reason for not wanting to return home. At Atherton, she had enjoyed being something more than the survivor of a tragedy narrowly averted by a stroke of good luck that her own mother suspected she might not have deserved.

  In her desk drawer, she found her old address book, the one she had left behind in hope that once she was swept up in her new life at Atherton, she would never have cause to call any of the numbers in it. She could think of only one person in San Francisco who wouldn’t treat her like a near miss.

  Pier 39 was clogged with a jungle of late-afternoon tourists. Kathryn was early, so she walked slowly amid the din of shutter-clicks and the voices of parents urging their children out of one last gift shop. The Friday afternoon sunlight parted the clouds over the bay, revealing patches of blue that would soon be lost to night. Increasingly cold gusts of wind off the water hinted at the impending dusk.

  She found an empty bench in front of a kite shop and took a seat, puffing on a Camel as she watched a group of Asian tourists have their pictures taken with a blonde, blue-eyed little boy who to them was an exotic, Aryan wonder. His mother stood close by, her fixed smile nervous and wary.

  When they were little girls, Kerry’s father, Ernest, had begrudgingly taken them to the pier every Saturday afternoon, all the while grumbling about the mini-conglomerate of tourist traps that made up a false city within a real one. She and Kerry usually managed to lose Ernest to an empty bench and a copy of the Guardian while they made their way down the pier to an old dress shop buried at the end. There they would nominate choices for
their wedding gowns under the supervision of the elderly proprietor, who was thrilled to have two females in her store who hadn’t yet lost their taste for marriage. Kathryn wondered if the shop was still there.

  “Justice Parker?”

  Trying not to seem startled, Kathryn turned and got up from the bench at the sound of a nickname she hadn’t been called in almost a year. Kerry looked well—she acknowledged how freighted that phrase was even as she thought it. Her longtime friend resembled a 1950s Hollywood starlet on a photo shoot in the wilds of Africa. A barrette lifted her bangs off her forehead, and two flaps of platinum blonde hair fell to both shoulders. Her smile brightened her green eyes and widened to turn them into slits above her baby fat cheeks (“pouty,” Kerry would have called them). Her alabaster skin was unblemished and without pallor. But her safari jacket was loose fitting and her cargo pants sagged around the knees. Kathryn guessed the outfit had a dual purpose; it concealed curves she no longer wanted to advertise as well as the fanny pack on her waist, containing what Kathryn knew to be her regimen of protease inhibitors.

  They kept standing several feet apart, with tourists weaving around them; Kerry smiling warmly and expectantly, and Kathryn so stricken by Kerry’s evident health she wasn’t conscious of the emotions her face betrayed. “Sorry,” Kerry finally said. “I know you used to hate that nickname, but the whole drive here I was thinking about that time you walked out on Mr. Connors in the middle of history.”

  “Didn’t he tell me to shut up?”

  “ ’Cause you were totally mouthing off to him.”

  “Probably because he was going to test us on shit we hadn’t covered.”

  “See? Justice Parker!” Kerry gestured to Kathryn with one hand that swept the length of her body, indicating that some things never change, even though she was examining her old best friend as if they hadn’t seen each other in twenty years.

  Kathryn was surprised by the lump in her throat. Kerry closed the distance between them. Kathryn prepared herself for a hug that might mist her vision, but instead Kerry just tugged one of her hands. “Let’s walk. Keep warm.”

  They started down the pier, slowly, as if each was afraid of knocking the other off balance.

  “The number your mom gave me. I didn’t recognize it.”

  “I moved,” Kerry said with a faint, satisfied smile. “I got an apartment in the Richmond. It’s closer to school.”

  “San Francisco State?”

  “The one and only.”

  “You’re not taking any of your dad’s classes, are you?”

  “Are you kidding? No. But it’s tough going around campus as Ernest Slater’s daughter. People think I’m going to kick their ass if they don’t use the recycling bins.”

  After several years working as a freelance journalist, during which time his pieces were slashed to death by editors reminding him that the sixties were over, Kerry’s father had returned to academic life as a professor of environmental ethics, and had once again taken up the task of turning young minds against every new real estate development from the Presidio to Palo Alto.

  “Remember the aquarium they were going to put in here?” Kerry asked.

  “Right. Those plastic tubes under the bay that people were going to walk through.”

  “And my dad got so pissed. Like the bay needs any more crap put in it.”

  They were almost to the end of the pier, where gift shops gave way to a few restaurants, the sun-streaked bay visible through their windows. Kathryn guessed that if the pier didn’t end, they would have kept walking. It was easier than standing face to face.

  “How’s Atherton?”

  “Great,” Kathryn answered flatly.

  Kerry would still know Kathryn well enough to know that she was bullshitting. But Kerry didn’t press, and as they slowed their steps, their absence of conversation bloomed like fog between them.

  “The other girls and I... we meet,” Kerry finally began. “Actually, we’re meeting tonight, if you want to come. If you hadn’t called me, I was going to call you,” she explained before she trailed off, staring down at her feet as she kicked the toe of one duck boot with the other.

  “Other girls?” Kathryn asked tightly.

  “Heather comes sometimes. And Callie. Do you remember hep1 She was Peter’s girlfriend.”

  When Kerry finally met Kathryn’s eyes, Kathryn realized the warmth of Kerry’s greeting and the ease with which she had started the conversation arose from her sense of camaraderie. Shared victimhood.

  “I’m negative,” Kathryn told her as gently as she could.

  For a brief second, Kathryn saw the sting of her words in Kerry’s eyes. Kerry managed to harden her ever-youthful face into an adult mask of resolve. She was nodding slightly to display her approval of this news.

  “It was stupid of me anyway. Asking you to hang out with all the girls Jono was cheating on you with. I just thought...”

  “It’s okay,” Kathryn said untruthfully, touching Kerry’s shoulder weakly before letting her arm fall to her side. Kathryn looked back at the long route they had taken because it was easier than taking in the sight of Kerry, who was unable to hide the fact that this news had devastated her.

  “You know about the window period?” Kerry asked.

  “Six months.”

  “Well, that’s like worst-case scenario. Usually, it’s more like three.”

  “Kerry,” Kathryn said. “Did the TV people Call you?”

  Kerry grunted. “TV people? What movie is that from?”

  Kathryn said nothing.

  “Poltergeist,” Kerry answered herself with a smile, saw Kathryn didn’t wear one and bowed her head. ‘Yeah. They did.”

  “And?”

  “They’re paying,” Kerry said flatly. “I could use the money. I’ve got my parents paying my rent. And I’m on my father’s health plan still. It makes me uncomfortable.”

  “How much?”

  “Not a fortune, but I could use it for transition money while I try to get a night job.”

  Kerry’s intention was obvious, to make herself as small a burden on her family as possible, in case illness made her an unavoidable one. “What about you?” she asked.

  “I have the woman’s number....”

  “Heidi?”

  Bothered by the use of the producer’s first name, Kathryn faltered. ‘Yeah. Her. What do they want?”

  “A story. And I’m sure they’re going to ask the same question everyone’s asked.”

  Puzzled, Kathryn met Kerry’s eyes again.

  “Did he do it on purpose?” Kerry said.

  Kathryn held her gaze for as long as she could before bracing her arms across her chest in a tardy attempt to suppress a shiver.

  “Maxine’s is still here,” Kerry finally remarked, gesturing over Kathryn’s shoulder with her chin.

  “Really?”

  “Yeah. Maxine is long gone, but the store’s still right down there.” Kerry pointed to the old vintage clothing store they had visited as children. “Want to check it out?”

  Kathryn just nodded and followed Kerry to the entrance. She and Kerry separated as if they were strangers who had passed through the front door at the same time.

  The woman behind the counter couldn’t have been much older than they. She didn’t look up from her magazine as they hesitantly entered. The store was smaller and more cramped than Kathryn remembered. Classical music droned from hidden speakers; burgundy carpeting muffled their footfalls. The lamps resting on top of the overloaded racks were of every style that could be considered remotely antique. The place looked randomly put together, its stabs at elegance obvious and uncoordinated. The dresses swelling the racks weren’t the fairy-tale gowns they had been to two seven-year-old girls.

  Kerry was standing in front of a mannequin outfitted in a flowing taffeta gown that spilled off the platform, almost reaching the carpet. A plait of gold beads tapered from the breast down to the waist; patches of white indicated where a few had been s
tripped away by time or abuse. They caught the amber lamplight and sun slanting through the windows. Kerry fingered the hem of the dress in one hand, her lips slightly pursed and a furrow creasing the bridge of her nose.

  Kathryn was struck by the weary resignation with which Kerry regarded the thing of beauty, one fistful of it held in her hand. Kerry’s eyes traveled up the length of the dress. Her stooped posture beneath the baggy clothes made her seem like an old maid regarding a costume she could have donned in her youth.

  Kathryn had to remind herself that disease had not added years to Kerry. If it had brought wisdom, that was only because it brought the prospect of death to her youth. It flattened the eagerness from her voice. Her eyes, still their startling shade of green, seemed to see less.

  Kerry released the fistful of taffeta and backed up several steps, as if to take in the entire dress one last time, like a painting she was about to depart from in a museum.

  Kathryn tried to pinpoint the expression on Kerry’s face: she seemed wary and suspicious of the happiness the dress suggested. At eighteen, her expectations had become liabilities. When Kathryn’s vision started to fog over with tears, she turned and left the store, the entry bells jarring in her wake.

  Kathryn shuffled down a concrete extension of the pier that jutted like a finger into the bay. The winds assaulted her, bringing with them the sharp odor of salt water and the stench of sea death. She had won her battle against the first threat of tears by the time she heard Kerry’s footsteps on the concrete behind her. Kerry took up a post right beside her, and they both stared out at the sun’s last light falling on Alcatraz and the green humpback of Angel Island.

  “Why’d you call me, Kathryn?"

  Kathryn couldn’t tell Kerry that one look from her mother across the dinner table had her feeling like a freak in her own home, that for some reason she had craved Kerry’s companionship because Kerry had known Jono better than she had allowed her parents to.