The Snow Garden by Rice Christopher

Author:Rice, Christopher [Rice, Christopher]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2014-02-14T00:00:00+00:00

She would call Kerry when she was ready. But being ready meant summoning the willingness to bridge the gap between the present and the last time she had seen Kerry, seven months earlier.

Kerry’s mother had called her because Kathryn was the only one she could think of with the power to lure Kerry out of her bedroom. Driving her mother’s Lincoln Navigator along Castro Street, Kathryn was buoyed by the thought of being the one who could exonerate Kerry, free the girl of her guilt and draw her back into the land of the living. Kathryn didn’t doubt that Kerry still felt guilty about her coked-up driving, so it was only natural that her apology was next in line behind Jono’s. Kathryn had forced him to endure four unreturned phone calls, after which he had driven to her house after midnight, angled his Mustang uphill toward her house on Sea Cliff Drive, and persistently flashed his headlights on her bedroom window. And even after she had snuck out and met him in the street, she’d forced him to exhaust every possible plea. Jono had to call himself stupid, thoughtless, and a liar before she slid into the passenger seat and asked him point-blank if he was dealing.

“You think I would do something so stupid as deal the shit? Do you think I would do anything to ruin what you and I have?” he’d told her desperately, breathlessly, with a fear she needed to see.

With Jono humbled and her authority over him affirmed, Kathryn accepted his apology.

Now it was Kerry’s turn to get down on her knees.

Brightly painted Victorians flanked the hillside on Kerry’s street. When she and Kerry were younger, the paint jobs on most of them were peeling because the houses’ owners were either dead or dying. But things were better now in Kerry’s neighborhood, and Kathryn sure felt better, holding fast to her power to grant forgiveness as she ascended the steep set of steps to Kerry’s front door.

Inside, Navajo art decorated the walls. For Kathryn, Kerry’s house was a place of refuge from the sterility of Sea Cliff and her stucco house overlooking the ocean. Kerry’s parents were former members of the hippie generation that had spread out over San Francisco and found various teaching positions. They allowed dinnertime conversation her own parents would never sanction. They treated Kathryn as if she were a bud in danger of being strangled by the vines of her parents’ trappings of upper-middle-class wealth.

Debbie, Kerry’s mother, led Kathryn upstairs, her head bowed, the exertions of spending three days trying to get Kerry to come out of her room slowing her steps. Kathryn felt like the doctor in hold of a miracle cure, on her way to the patient for whom everyone had lost hope.

“Hon, Kathryn’s here. Open up, okay?”

No sound from the other side of the door. Debbie tried the knob. It wasn’t locked. She pushed the door open and let Kathryn do the rest.

Kerry’s room was a mess. Three days’ worth of dirty laundry littered the floor.

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