The Snow Garden

by Christopher Rice

  “What do you want?” she asked, anger meeting fear in her voice.

  “I want to know why you hold yourself responsible for Jono’s death.”

  She shook her head slightly, not as defiantly as she had intended to, and looked to the shuttered windows as she heard Eric rustling pages.

  “This young man set about getting your friends addicted to cocaine so that he could infect them with HIV. Unless that, of course, is just an assumption on your part.”

  “It isn’t. He told me.”

  “But he spared you. On purpose. In here”—he held up the essay as evidence—“you detail that he was insistent about contraception with you. In fact, you say that at times you thought he was being overcautious. Condoms even for oral sex, you wrote.”

  “I know what I wrote,” she said tightly.

  Eric paused, and she summoned up nerve. “Did Mitchell give this to you?” she asked.

  “Mitchell never saw this.” He saw how puzzled she was and added, “Yes, I stole it from the mailbox. Because I would not stand back and watch Mitchell pry his way into another person’s pain in the name of acquiring another adherent.”

  Struck by his seeming sincerity, Kathryn sat down on the sofa at the end farthest from his chair. Eric rested his chin in one hand, his elbow propped on the chair’s arm. “Why did he spare you? You don’t say.”

  Her father had told her that some day she would have to talk about it to someone. Her psychotherapy had been a failure, her resistance manifesting itself in a thousand criticisms of her psychologist’s techniques, all cavils that simply allowed her to keep the lock on her pain in place. She had been too afraid to discuss it with the people she considered her friends, because the telling of it might reveal the depth of her anger or, even worse, give those she loved a dismissible explanation for all of her attitudes and fears. With Mitchell, she had come close to revealing almost every detail to a man who was only using her secrets to seduce her into sexual sobriety. Maybe Eric Eberman, his life ripped out from under him and seemingly free of judgment, was the only listener she had left.

  “Jono wasn’t afraid to die.” She felt as if a knife blade has just been removed from her throat. “He was afraid of being alone. Whenever we were together, it was rarely just the two of us. He always made sure we traveled in a pack, if we were going to dinner or if we were going out. He was always the leader. When he found out he was sick, his biggest fear was being alone with his disease. Deep down, I believe that he wanted to infect most of our circle of friends so that he wouldn’t be . . . alone.”

  “You just surmise this?”

  “No,” she answered without a pause. “He told me as much the day lie died.”

  Somehow, she had stumbled several steps forward into the most disturbing part of the story, the part she had only sketched in her essay. “In his world, I was supposed to be the one who would take care of him. That’s why he spared me.”

  “And the ones he infected on purpose?”

  “He told me they had to pay. That he had sold them pure joy in bags and vials, unlike any they had ever known. He called them rats. Because if you put a cocaine drip into a rat’s cage, the rat will kill itself rather than stop drinking from it. His rats, he said, had to pay by sharing his fate.”

  “How was it his fate? It’s treatable.”

  “Not if you never take your medicine. Not if you spend every weekend living like it’s your last. Living like you’re not sick. If he had ever stopped to take a pill around me, if I had ever found any medicines in his bathroom, then I would have known. I never did. HIV may not be a death sentence. For Jono, it was. Why live at all when you have to live like you’ve always got one broken leg? He Said that to me once.”

  Eric sat still, seeming to absorb this, and as she stared down at her clasped hands, she realized that despite what she had told Lauren Raines earlier that day, maybe Jono had taught her a more important lesson. Back then, if she had loved anything about him the most, it was his indefatigable courage and confidence. She’d envied it and aspired to it before realizing it had been nothing more than armor Jono had placed over the soft tissue of his disease; he lived life at a peerlessly fast pace because it helped him run full tilt from a death he thought was always right at his heels.

  Bullshit, she thought, Bullshit, she said to his ghost. You always ran because you thought the other leg would break at any moment.

  It was Jono who had led her to despise Jesse Lowry so much, a man who had been so bold as to follow no laws or rules.

  And it was Jono who had led her to love Randall so much. Because Randall seemed to have Jono’s same fearlessness, tempered by a sincere love for her that Jono had lacked. Randall had the same enviable self-confidence but—she had thought—no disease or secret lurking behind it.

  When Eric spoke, his voice was respectful of the thoughts he knew were running through her head. “And when Jono was exposed, he chose to take his own life. Yet the last line of your essay is—”

  , “I wonder what solace I can take in knowing I was responsible for his death.” Kathryn was unable to keep the quaver from her voice, blinking back tears only to force them down her cheeks. She swabbed them with the back of her hand.

  “I couldn’t find him. The day the article ran was the first time I ever knew how many others there had been. I even went so far as to call his mother and she didn’t know where he was. Hours later, he called me. He was at his apartment and ... he said he had the gun in his hand and he was going to do it. And I said, ‘Go ahead.’ And he did.”

  “Kathryn, surely you don’t think that just because—”

  “He bled to death.” She met his Eric’s eyes for the first time since she had sat down. “I heard the gunshot and I hung up and I didn’t call anyone. His mother went to his apartment and found him three hours later. The kickback from the gun had knocked his aim off. The police said he’d aimed for his heart and the bullet ended up in his throat.”

  Eric’s eyes had widened slightly, not with exaggerated sympathy, or disgust, just simple recognition of what she had been through, an acknowledgment of what had plagued her.

  “He bled to death. And I didn’t call anyone.”

  Her final words left her feeling empty, the way she had felt when she finished the essay, even though these final details hadn’t made it onto paper. They said nothing, listening to the steady hiss of the gas fireplace and the occasional scrape of branches against the house.

  “A man I used to live with once told me that the truth lurks in everything we don’t say,” Eric said, more to himself than her. “Or everything we don’t write. For a long time, I believed him. But I know he’s wrong now. Our silences contain only what we fear the truth to be. What you didn’t write was that you killed Jono. And that’s not true. He killed himself.”

  Eric pushed himself out of the chair and disappeared into the dark dining room. When he returned, he set a glass of white wine in front of Kathryn.

  “Courtesy of Mitchell Seaver,” he said.

  Jolted, she looked up, seeing Lauren grinding some kind of medication with a mortar and pestle. Eric returned to his chair before he saw that Kathryn hadn’t touched the glass. “Don’t worry. That didn’t come from the bottles they drank from tonight.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “I mean you can drink it. There’s nothing in it except wine.”

  He was gently challenging her, so she picked up the glass and took a tiny sip, anticipating the sting of something other than alcohol. Nothing.

  “What do they do at that house?”

  “Tonight, they’re holding what Mitchell, calls a purging. Once a week the members gather to satisfy their most base physical desires in hopes of cleansing their bodies of carnal temptation, in the name of accessing a more superior intellectual terrain in the morning. In other words, Mitchell has gathered all five of his pledges together. He’s plied them with wine tainted with some tranquilizer or painkillers pilfered from my wife’s medicine cabinet. And
now he’s encouraging them to copulate like animals.”

  “Why does he drug the wine?”

  “He claims it’s to lower their inhibitions. Open up the senses for a brief, controlled period. He’s experimented with different combinations. Trying to find just the right amount.”

  Kathryn saw Lauren again; the dark circles under her eyes, the pallor of her skin and obvious weight loss. “He’s getting them addicted.”

  Eric’s eyes met hers with surprise and it took him a second to swallow this idea. “That would make sense, wouldn’t it?” he finally said, defeat in his voice,

  “Why . . .” she trailed off.

  “Because I believed him. I had spent years suppressing what I really wanted, and I was intoxicated by the idea that sexual desire could be expunged from our bodies. I wanted him to succeed, to find a way.”

  “And he didn’t?”

  “No. He’s no different from the scores of college students before him who have all tried to imagine their own utopia. Somewhere along the way, they become convinced that their own fears should dictate how everyone around them lives, and their vision ends up being little more than an excuse to try to destroy those who refuse to agree with them.”

  “You thought I was going tonight, didn’t you?”

  Eric nodded. “And tonight, Mitchell didn’t pick the drug.”

  Her hands tightened around the stem of her wine glass, and when Eric noticed that she had gone rigid, he rose from the chair and crossed to the dining table, where he picked up a half-empty bottle of some liquor.

  “What did you ...” Her voice caught in her throat. ‘You poisoned .. “Nothing fatal,” Eric answered. “Just a little something to let them know that... I know.” The last two words brought a bitter laugh out of him.

  “Know what?”

  Eric set the bottle down and turned to face her. “Mitchell murdered my wife when she found out what he was doing in that house.”

  Kathryn went cold. Mitchell murdered. “How do you know?”

  “Your good friend Randall figured it out for me.”

  At the mention of his name, Kathryn couldn’t suppress a tremor of pain. She took a slug of wine.

  “He mentioned you often.”

  “Please,” Kathryn protested.

  “I know he lied about where he came from. But I suspect that you and I might know different halves of him. I thought we might be able to put them together. Make some sense of who he was.”

  “He’s gone.”

  “I guessed,” Eric said. “But I know where he went.”

  Before Kathryn could react, Eric bent down over the coffee table in front of her. He pulled a thick magazine from a stack of alumni newsletters and began flipping through the pages. He set it in front of her, splayed open. She bent over and saw color photographs of what looked like a massive but sterile penthouse with sweeping views of downtown Manhattan.

  Baffled, she looked at Eric for an explanation.

  “If Randall had come to me weeks ago with the fact that my wife had been poisoned, I could have figured out who had done it in a second. But he didn't. He couldn’t. Because someone else had already convinced him I was a murderer.”

  “Someone’s late!” Pamela cried out to him.

  Her foot slid off the top step, but she caught the banister just in time. Behind her, the windows of the Chi Kap house were shadowed by drunken partygoers. Her eyes were drifting lazily as she righted herself, several locks of blonde hair threaded by sweat across her forehead.

  “Have you been dancing?” he asked, mounting the steps and putting his arm around her waist. He glanced back at the house. To his relief, the front porch was empty. Ahead of them, Fraternity Green was blanketed in a darkness deepened by a fine sheen of late snow.

  “Well, after an hour I just said ... fuck it.. . and I danced alone, but not for long. Please.” She squeezed his hand hard at her waist, almost twisted the wrist. “Tell me it makes you jealous.”

  “It does. Come on. Let’s go home.”

  “No. Let’s go to your place.”

  “No. No . ..”

  She pulled herself free from his grip and stumbled backward off the sidewalk and onto the ice-patched lawn. “I asked around about him.”

  “Michael?”

  “Have you heard of the Catch House? Down by the wharf. He goes there, Eric —”

  “He’s moving out.”

  She straightened herself up, struggling for some dignity, whipping at her stray hairs with the back of a hand, but only managing to plaster them vertically across her forehead. Later, he would try to find the right words to describe her laugh, because it was her laugh that caused everything that followed.

  It was a short laugh, satisfied, one that lifted her shoulders, and it was followed by a slight nod. It was both knowing and dismissive. It said that no matter what she had suspected, she had never truly believed that another man could possibly be a genuine opponent in her fight for Eric’s affection. The abruptness of it tugged at some lingering attachment Eric held to the separate realm of passion he and Michael had managed to create at 231 Slope Street.

  That was how it ended. With one woman’s knowing smirk, a pat on the hand, and a mild compliment for returning to real life, where two men were never supposed to find the magnetic rightness he believed he had found with Michael. Instead, he was meant to walk hand in hand with her, a woman just tall enough to fit her head on his shoulder, for his entire life.

  “The scarf, Pamela. I need it.”

  ‘You gave it to me.”

  “I made a mistake.”

  “What mistake ...” She frowned, trying to wriggle into reason from her smug alcohol haze.

  “When I bought it from the store—”

  She backed away, both hands protectively going to the scarf at her neck. “What store?”

  “It wasn’t mine to give you.” He didn’t rush her, but it only took him a few steps to close the distance between them, and his hand was reaching for her neck when she batted it away with one of her own.

  “How stupid do you think I am?”

  “Pamela, you’re being ridiculous. Come on—”

  “Ridiculous? I’ll tell you what’s ridiculous. All my friends in there telling me that I’m your beard. Do you know what a beard is? Because I didn’t. I had to ask.”

  She backed away and he was afraid her feet would slip out from under her on the icy grass.

  “I made a mistake.” His voice sounded pathetic and weak. Pamela’s face fell with more pain than anger, and for one brief second, he thought they might resolve this amicably, find a quiet resolution, two articulate people muffling the betrayal between them.

  “If that faggot wants his scarf back, I’ll give it to him!”

  She turned and ran.

  “She vanished.” Eric stared down into the fire.

  Inverness Creek. Kathryn had seen it only once, when she and Randall had tried their snowy shortcut through the Elms. Floating patches of ice and pools of black water. And a five-foot drop from the top of the bank to the water below. Randall had stopped her from sliding down. She had noticed how captivated Randall had been by the steep drop at their feet. And when she had recounted what April had told her about Pamela Milford, Randall had responded with, “Maybe she drowned.”

  Eric continued, “All I could hear was running water, so I followed • the sound. When I got there, she had landed facedown on the ice. The creek was entirely frozen over and one of her legs... it was bent. Not , just broken. Bent at an angle that looked . .. impossible. By the time I made it down to the edge of the ice I could tell she was unconscious. And then I saw the toe of one of her boots had punched through the ice and the water was coming up in a thin geyser around her foot.

  “That’s when I realized how thin the ice was. I tried to get to her anyway, but I had barely taken my first step when the ice rose and fell. And I knew if I put any more weight on it, it would break and she would get sucked under and I wouldn’t be able to get to h
er. So I left.”

  Eric turned from the fireplace and locked eyes with her. Somehow, over the time it had taken to tell the entire story of him and Michael Price, she had become his judge and jury.

  “I went to get help. I thought if the ice didn’t give way when she hit it, then maybe I had time to go back and get somebody. And I did. I went back to the party. I could barely speak, I was in a panic, but I found some guys and I told them Pamela had run into the Elms. And they came with me. And we got to the creek and I even pointed to where she was but.. . she was gone.”

  “The ice broke?”

  “It didn’t just break. In her place, there was a hole twice the size of her body.”

  Kathryn shivered. “Michael?”

  Eric just looked at the flames. “I told myself I was wrong. That Michael didn’t have anything to do with it. And I told the police that she just got away from me. But when they finally found her body, the scarf was gone.”

  Everything in Kathryn wanted to dig her heels in, to stop them for continuing in the direction Eric had headed in. “It could have drifted away.”

  But Eric turned into the dining room and returned with a red, moth-eaten scarf. He extended it to her, and she took it. The cashmere fibers, once soft, had frayed and coarsened with age.

  “He left it for me.”

  Fearing it was the incorrect answer, Kathryn said, “Michael.”

  “Randall,” Eric corrected her.

  Eric returned to his chair, and she stared down at the scarf. Part of her brain had yearned to fill in the picture of Randall Stone left incomplete by his sudden departure. But never, after all she had discovered, would she have guessed that the real nature of his arrival at Atherton had such a diabolical purpose. The explanation she had craved couldn't be swallowed without pain

  “His real name is Benjamin Collins. He’s from Texas,” she said finally, lifting her eyes from the scarf. “When he was young, there was an accident.”