The Venus Fix

Friday Seven days remaining
Fifty-Six

It had taken Amanda’s parents forever to leave. First her father was late getting home from the office. Then they’d had a fight about some bill for a new couch that he said cost as much as some people’s monthly rent, and her mother said there was nothing for him to worry about because she was using her money to pay for the redecorating.

Amanda tuned them out. They always argued about money. She didn’t understand how they could stand to go over the same thing all the time. Her mother shopped too much. Her father got annoyed. Why didn’t one of them change? Why did her father even care? Her mother was a really successful designer. He was a high-powered businessman. What did the cost of a couch really matter to either of them? So what if the apartment never looked the same for more than two years. At least her room never changed. She’d got her father on her side and he’d convinced her mother to let her keep it the way she wanted. Her sanctuary, her father had called it.

But there were no sanctuaries. That was an adult fantasy about what being seventeen was like. How could he have forgotten what it was like? He was only forty-four. When did you forget?

She wouldn’t. She’d hold on to it. She’d remember how it was all a gray landscape. A dreary, endless day that was complicated with feelings that didn’t go away and work she had to do for her classes that hardly ever interested her.

Except for her art classes. She wished she could just take art classes and nothing else. Art and photography and film. She loved the way you could sit down in a theater and relax your shoulders and your neck and your hips and let the chair hold you and let the darkness be the door between what was real and what was more interesting than real.

She made movies with a digital camera and edited them on her computer. Short ones. They were her private diaries. Images that meant something only to her. Simone had acted in a lot of them. There was only one movie she’d shown anyone else. And that had been the worst mistake she’d ever made, no matter what Dr. Snow had said about secrets. It should have stayed a secret forever.

Amanda wrapped her long black scarf around her neck as they walked to the corner. It was so cold out. She had a hole in the thumb of her glove and felt the freezing air stinging that one spot of skin. It was snowing, of course, but only lightly.

“What if you’re wrong?” Timothy asked as they crossed Park Avenue.

“I’m not.”

“But we’ll get in so much trouble. And we’re already in trouble. At least, Hugh and Barry and I are.”

“This is more important.” Amanda’s words came out in a puff of white air. She watched them disappear.

They walked another block in silence and came to a huge snowdrift on the corner.

“Can you fucking believe this snow?” He climbed up over the messy pile that was crusted with ice. She followed in his path, using the footprints he had made.

“It’s snowed every day for more than two weeks.” Amanda’s scarf had come undone and she wrapped it around her neck again as they trudged on. It was a cashmere scarf her mother had given to her last year. She never took it off anymore. Not because she was always cold-well, she was pretty much always cold-but because with her neck swathed she felt protected. Sometimes she’d pull it up and hide her mouth and chin in its soft folds. If she could have hidden her whole face, she would have. As it was, she wore long bangs that partially covered her forehead and eyebrows, and she’d recently started wearing lightly tinted glasses she’d found in her mother’s drawer. They had stupid gold C’s on the edges but she’d gotten black paint and covered over them. Her mother hadn’t noticed. As if. She hardly noticed anything Amanda did.

They continued west on Seventy-seventh Street until they got to Fifth Avenue, and then they walked two blocks north and entered Central Park.

It was only 8:00 p.m. and there were still people heading home from work, or taking their dogs out for a run. There were also some couples, arm in arm, who just seemed to be strolling.

“Weird, huh. Why are these people out?” Timothy asked. “It’s so cold.”

She looked around. There was a full moon and the snow was still falling. Everything was dusted white and sparkling. It looked like a dream. Someone else’s dream.

The deeper they walked into the park the fewer people there were. After a few minutes it was all quiet, and she could hear their boots crunching on the path. They went west and north. Neither of them hesitated about what direction to take. This was their playground; they’d grown up in the park. They’d been walked here in baby carriages, played in the sandboxes as toddlers, spent afternoons visiting the zoo. Their schools had brought them here for ice skating in winter and softball in spring. Once they were old enough, they’d come on their own to escape from their parents, sitting on the hills or the edges of ponds and fountains, disappearing with their friends into smoky hazes.

“I’ve never been here this late,” Amanda said.

Timothy shrugged. “There’re lights everywhere.”

“People still get murdered in the park, though. It’s always in the news when it happens.”

Timothy nodded. “But they’re alone. We’re not.”

A few more steps brought them to the crest of the hill. The pond where kids and hobbyists sailed toy boats was frozen over. The fresh coating of crystalline white on all the trees and benches shimmered. The sky looked like velvet, Amanda thought, suddenly remembering a dress that she’d had when she was eight or nine years old.

“Amanda, c’mon. Let’s get the damn thing and get outta here.”

“So, you’re nervous.” She smiled. It felt strange to smile on this mission.

“No, just cold.”

“I’m nervous, though. One of them is still alive.”

Even with the thick gloves they both wore, she felt it when he took her hand. She’d given three guys blowjobs, but this was the first time a boy had ever done that.

An oversize bronze Hans Christian Andersen held a book in his lap as he read one of his own fairy tales. Tonight his head was dusted white and the pages of the book were hidden under inches of snow.

As kids, she and her friends had sat at his feet while their teacher read them story after story, each with a happy ending.

She and Timothy approached the statue.

Hans sat on a bronze platform atop a large pedestal made of tightly fitted limestone blocks. Or, at least, they seemed tightly fitted, but there was a crack in between the third and the fourth blocks on the right side. Timothy had found it when he was a kid and his second grade class was here racing toy boats. He grew tired of hanging over the edge of the pond watching the stupid toys whizzing across the water, and he’d wandered off on his own.

“Timothy?”

Amanda was staring at him, her eyes wide, her cheeks red from the cold. Most of the time, when he looked at her, he forgot about the movie. She looked like any other girl to him. Most of the time.

He pulled his army knife out of his pocket, extracted the nail file, and inserted it into the crevice. He felt a connection and moved the file forward. The edge of a transparent CD case became visible. He reached for it and pulled it out.

Timothy held it flat in his hand and Amanda stared down at it, noticing how the moon was reflected in its surface, full and round and silvery. At that moment, it didn’t look lethal at all.