The Snow Garden (6 page)

     But it was good enough for Randall, because he nodded vigorously as he set his glass back down onto the bar with too much force.

THE WOMAN DETECTIVE STOOD ACROSS FROM ERIC AT THE POCK-
marked table, blocking the interrogation room’s single window. Her straight brown hair fell to her shoulders, in contrast to her mannish outfit. The undeniable curves of her body looked like they had been squeezed into the starched khaki trousers and white oxford shirt.

     Pat. That was her name. He wasn’t sure, but he guessed she was the one who had called to break the news. Eric sat slumped, back resting against the metal slats of the chair, feeling—and looking, he guessed—as if he had been punched between the shoulder blades.

     He had lost track of time, and he wasn’t sure how much longer the detective was going to allow this silence to continue. Did police officers take courses in how to deal with a man who had just identified the body of his wife by way of a black-and-white video monitor? When Pat asked him if he was ready to give a positive identification, he had expected to be led down a long, tiled hallway toward a set of double doors leading into the mortuary. Instead, she ushered him gently into a side room where he was greeted by the sight of Lisa’s face on a television screen. Her black hair radiated from her head in matted clumps, and it was impossible to tell whether the blue pallor of her skin was the result of near-freezing water, the tint of the screen, or death. But there had been no denying that her sharp, birdlike features were just lax enough to suggest something beyond sleep.

     The detective had touched his shoulder, squeezed gently, and then left her hand there. When he brought his hand to his mouth, it wasn’t to fight a sob, but rather to conceal its absence. Maybe because it was the first time in years he had seen his wife without a glazed sheen of panic in her eyes, or a brow intensely furrowed as she realized that her latest medication had turned the task of chopping vegetables into an almost insurmountable project. The peace that came with her death made her seem more fully realized; it conjured up images of the first woman he had ever slept with, who had plied him with champagne on New Year’s Eve, in 1984, before taking him to bed in her room. As her parents slept down the hall, that young woman had said nothing when he told her it was his first time. Instead, without pausing to laugh or express incredulity, she had guided him gently through the motions. And from then on, she had regarded him as a challenge, as someone she had to draw out. Almost ten years later, all her efforts had failed. Accusations replaced conversation. Empty silences filled the spaces once occupied by the cold comfort of their intellectual companionship.

     “When did she start seeing this therapist?” The detective finally broke the silence.

     “Two years ago,” Eric answered, trying to lift his eyes to hers. “She had been depressed for a while. During the day she could barely get out of bed, and at night she couldn’t sleep.”

     “And the therapist prescribed something?”

     A laugh escaped him before he could stop it. “I’m sorry,” he said.

     “It’s funny?”

     “It’s. . . within two weeks of her first visit, our medicine cabinet was filled with a bunch of drugs. And I could barely pronounce the names of any of them.” A
bunch of drugs.
His careless choice of words sent a shiver through him and when he met the detective’s gaze, he saw a sudden intensity to her poker face, which indicated that part of the puzzle had fallen into place for her.

     “What kind?”

     “The perfectly legal kind,” Eric answered.

     At the note of defensiveness in his voice the detective gave an abrupt nod. She crossed to the chair opposite his and took a seat. “Antidepressants?”

     “Yes. And others.”

     “What were the others for?”

     "To help her sleep. A lot of the . . . serotonin reuptake inhibitors . .. they kept her awake.”

     “How many did she take?”

     “I’m sorry?”

     “Any idea how many prescriptions your wife had? Total?”

     “I didn’t count.”

     “But enough to fill the medicine cabinet?” Eric didn’t respond.

     “Dr. Eberman, how often did your wife combine these pills with alcohol?”

     “I don’t know if she was deliberately combining them ... I know that she did take them regularly and . . . well, she drank pretty regularly. I warned her, but...” He lifted both his hands from his lap, as if to indicate it had all been out of his control. Had it? Pat Kellerman’s questions stirred others that fell outside her jurisdiction, which he knew would return each night before sleep for the rest of his life.

     Did you know your wife was a drunk?

     Of course I did.

     Did you stand back and let the medicines she craved wreak havoc on her brain? Did you say anything when one pill was magic for several months and then it turned on her, sending her back to bed at four in the afternoon, until that drug-pushing quack of a therapist would write out a prescription for a new wonder cure? Did you ever, once, try to put a stop to the cycles you knew were tearing your wife apart?

     No. Because they made her hate me less. Maybe they didn’t make her forget that I had forced her to come to Atherton, applied for a faculty position without even telling her, forced her to give up her doctorate, but she sure stopped bringing any of it up at dinner. Once she became devoted to fighting her own brain, determined to fight one pill with another until she found the perfect balance, I stopped being the enemy, and instead she took on an enemy ten times as formidable—her mind, which I had helped to warp to the point of illness.

     But the pills did more than spare me her anger. They freed me to open a door I shut years ago, with a man young enough to be my son, not to mention rid myself of a piece of property that held a plague of memory.

     “Mr. Eberman?”

     “I’m sorry....”

     “When was the last time you spoke with your wife?”

     Eric clasped and then unclasped his hands in his lap, thinking, No,
not possible.
He combed his memory for some chance encounter he had forgotten, some phone call. Something. Nothing came. Nothing beyond her parting note. She had seen, she knew, secrets that he prayed she had not told.

     “Two weeks ago.”

Fibrous clouds parted over the roof of the Eberman house, revealing patches of stars. The quiet residential streets just east of campus were a hushed counterpoint to the rowdy matrix of freshman dorms only several blocks away. Randall Stone stood just outside the halo of the streetlight across the street, studying the house from a distance for the first time. The two-story house had a broad, gently sloping roof, and an expansive front porch with fat, unadorned columns. The living-room windows were dark. While the home didn’t seem neglected, the paint was weathered without peeling, and the front yard was a dead, brown patch. The house spoke of two owners who had resigned themselves to living in it.

     Eric’s Toyota Camry sat in the driveway, parked next to the empty spot where Lisa Eberman had kept the Volvo station wagon that Eric had said she’d bought only a month before. Only now did Randall realize that it had been a strange purchase for a woman with nowhere to go except her dying sister’s house. As far as Randall knew from Eric, Lisa did little more than use the car to drive her sister to chemo and buy groceries her sister couldn’t stomach.

     These thoughts distracted him from the disturbing image of a residence turned prison. For him, coming to Atherton had been ripe with the promise of a freedom he had intensely imagined, down to the smallest detail. But sooner than he had planned, his life there had become entangled with a man who haunted the rooms of his own home. Now the house would have a ghost that fit the dictionary’s definition, and Randall wasn’t sure whether he had the courage to continue if it meant chasing Lisa Eberman from the house’s many shadows.

     Randall heard the crunch of tires on snow and turned to see headlights rounding the corner. He moved back into the cover of darkness as the Atherton police cruiser halted in front of the house. He held his breath as Eric hoisted himself out of the backseat, shutting the door weakly behind him without any parting words for the driver of the car. Once Eric had reached the front porch, Randall stepped into the streetlight’s halo, crunching snow underfoot.

     Eric turned.

     Randall waited for some small signal to summon him across the street. A sense of duty had brought him to the house, but also a desperate curiosity. Did Lisa’s death mean they were free to be together, or was Eric so crushed by guilt that this awkward stand-off across a dark street would end up being good-bye?

     He was confident he could be seen, but he couldn’t make out the expression on Eric’s face. Eric’s shadow turned and slammed the front door behind him.

It was too easy for Eric to think he could have prevented it all by not answering the front door. “Who’s there?” he had called out that evening, five weeks ago.

     Eric had cursed his word choice. “Who is it?” would have sounded much more collected. But the loud series of knocks startled him and he was standing halfway down the stairs. Early October dusk darkened the foyer, and on the other side of the door a shadow was cupping its hands against the glass pane, trying to peer inside.

     “Professor Eberman?”

     He didn’t recognize the voice, but no one called him “Professor Eberman.” His colleagues called him “Eric,” of course, and so did most of his grad students, who were the closest thing to family he had if only in that they shared the same obsessions. His undergraduates— that mass of nameless students he was forced to lecture three times a week so that the university could proffer unlimited access to tenured professors in all of its propaganda—rarely called him anything.

     “Professor Eberman.. .” There was a pleading note in the voice now and it drew Eric down the last few steps. He opened the door; as soon as he saw the boy jerk back, hands falling to his sides, he fought the urge to slam the door shut in his face. His name was Randall Stone; the only reason Eric knew this was because after spotting him in the second row on the first day of lecture, Eric went back to his office and leafed through his copy of that year’s freshman face book. A perfectly harmless, private activity, and one he had done many times in the past ten years, in order to put a name to a set of eyes, or the slope of a neck behind the collar of a sweater. With Randall, it had been the glint in his gaze as it followed Eric’s paces across the stage, the way he rested the end of his pen in the corner of his mouth, which was curled into the bud of a smile. Such a knowing, sexual look from a young man suggested experience beyond his years—experience that Eric could imagine in fantasies that quickened his pulse and prevented sleep.

     But now the boy was standing right there on his front porch, and those several minutes of tracking down his name suddenly seemed like a sin.

     “I’m really sorry to bother you but... I’m lost.”

     But he didn’t look remotely lost. There was no fear in his eyes, which Eric could tell, because he was staring at him—expectantly, Eric believed. Randall even seemed amused by the rigid way Eric held the door halfway open.

     “Can I come in for a second?”

     Christ, No. Stay in the second row of lecture where you belong.

     “Do you want something?” The question came out just the way Eric didn’t want it to, but Randall Stone obviously savored the halting sound of his voice, the fear and trepidation. Loved it like a shark smelling blood, because the boy’s lips smiled in small triumph and he moved across the threshold without asking twice. For the first time Eric noticed that the boy was wet. He glanced back out the door to see a misting rain swirling over the street. In a month it might be snow.

     And now you were supposed to be polite, to remember your age and remember who you are, his teacher, and forget how in lecture he sometimes lets his head roll back on his neck as he stretches out his arms, pulling the hem of his shirt from his jeans and revealing the flat, hairless stomach.

     “Can I get you something?” Eric asked, revising his earlier question. “Scotch?”

     Randall’s eyes met his. He stood in the living-room doorway. “I didn’t peg you as a scotch drinker.”

     “I’m not. My wife is.’’
She drinks it by the gallon and just minutes ago I called her sister to make sure she hadn’t run off the road on the way there.

     Randall removed a silver flask from the inside pocket of his jacket, accidentally or on purpose flashing the Helmut Lang label, uncapped it, and raised it to Eric in a mock toast. Eric felt hugely foolish because he was so nervous that he had just offered one of his students—a freshman—alcohol. And Randall took a slug like a man, without wincing. It was too easy to forget that this boy was eighteen. Eric moved past him into the living room, turning on lamps as he went. Light fell in stages, and when it hit the reproduction of
The Garden of Earthly Delights,
Eric heard a small gasp.

     “Bosch.”

“Yes,” Eric answered, even though Randall wasn’t asking.

     “I’ve read your book,” he said nonchalantly, his back to Eric as he stared up at the framed print above the bookcase.

     “El Jardin de las Delicias,” Randall read in surprisingly unaccented Spanish off the bottom of the print, and then looked to Eric for an explanation.

     “I bought that print at the Prado. In Madrid.”

     “I know where the Prado is,” Randall said, without sounding offended.

     “Are you familiar with Bosch? Because the last time I checked we had barely made it past the Hellenistic.” Eric crossed his arms over his chest and felt a tight smirk on his face.

     Instead of meeting the challenge head-on, Randall crossed to his reading chair and eased down into it. He let his head roll back a little and his feet slid out in front of him slowly as his expression became distant and dreamy, his voice softened by a memory he seemed to be looking for just above Eric’s shoulder. “My parents took me to Madrid when I was twelve. It was a disaster of a trip, really. They didn’t have any idea what they wanted to do once they got there, and my mother was so wrecked by jet lag that all she would do is stay in bed and order room service. And by the time we left the hotel everything would be closed for siesta. Anyway, by the fifth day I had had enough. We were staying at the Ritz so I snuck out without asking them and went across the street to the Prado. I was just wandering through the museum when I saw it by accident....”