Between Here and April

by Deborah Copaken Kogan

  “I’m hungry.”

  “Me, too,” said Lily.

  “Have another pretzel.”

  “I want a Twinkie,” said April.

  “So have a Twinkie,” said Adele. So what if they spoiled their appetites tonight? What would it matter? A smile overcame her. “Have two.”

  “Really?”

  “Really.”

  “Me, too?” said Lily. “Can I have two Twinkies, too?”

  “Have three,” said Adele. “Go ahead. Dig right in.”

  She caught a shadowed glimpse of her daughters in the rearview mirror, staring at one another with a mixture of puzzlement and elation. Then, with a shrug at their good fortune, they ripped open the box of Twinkies and started devouring them one by one, sucking out the sweet cream with tongues and little fingers, emitting groans of delight after every bite. “Oh my god,” Lily said, pointing at her little sister and giggling. “Your mouth has whipped cream all over it.”

  “Look at yours!” April squealed.

  “Let me see,” said Adele. She stopped the car, shifted into park, and turned around to look at her children. “Oh, April Noreen,” she said, seeing the sorry state of her daughter’s face, “you win. You definitely win the messiest child award. Followed in a close second by Miss Lily Ann Cassidy. Here . . .” She reached out her hand. April squeezed it with delight. “No, silly,” she said, smiling. “I don’t want one of those. I want one of those.” She pointed to the box of Twinkies. “Give me one.”

  She removed the Twinkie from its plastic wrap and took a slow, luxurious bite into its creamy center before shifting back into drive. Oh, it was good. So good. The spongy softness of the cake, the smooth sweetness of the filling, all melting together, filling her mouth with, with, well, if not happiness itself, then with some close facsimile thereof.

  Then, wiping her hands clean on the hem of her dress, she pressed on the gas and drove deeper into the woods.

  10.

  This was the best day ever, thought April. She woke up in a motel with an ice machine, her tooth fell out, she ate three Twinkies at once, and now she was going camping overnight in the woods with her mother! She couldn’t wait to get back home to tell Lizzie.

  11.

  “Here, drink,” said Adele. She held out a shaking spoonful of cough syrup. They were all three crouched together in the backseat of the station wagon—or the back-back, as the girls liked to call it—with the middle seat collapsed for added room. Adele had spread out blankets and pillows and given each daughter a pair of pajamas to change into, as well as a free pass on the brushing of teeth. She could have made a show out of crawling over the front seat, fishing the thermos, toothpaste, and toothbrushes out of the suitcase, making the girls spit out the back window, but why bother? If nothing else, the last few moments of their lives should be free from all things specious and obligatory.

  “But I don’t have a cough,” said April.

  Amnesty from fraud, however, was another story. “Just drink it,” said Adele, trying to steady her hand. “It’ll . . .” The chorus from that new song on the radio came into her head. Lily had wanted to tape it, planting herself in front of the clock radio, faithfully tuned to WPGC, for three afternoons in a row. That’s okay, April had said, on the evening of the third day, when Lily was bemoaning her bad luck. It’s a silly song anyway. There’s no such thing as killing someone softly. Is there, Mommy? Adele, who was busy loading the dishwasher, pretended she hadn’t heard. Is there, Mommy? she repeated, adding, I mean, you can’t kill someone softly, right? Because if you kill them, then they’re dead. At which point Adele dropped a handful of knives into the silverware caddy with a loud clang and said, Do your homework, you two, right now, putting an end to the conversation. “It will make you have good dreams,” she now said.

  “Cough syrup makes you have good dreams?”

  “Of course.”

  “Is that a white lie?”

  No, thought Adele. It’s a black one. “Just drink it, okay? I don’t have all day.”

  “Okay,” said April. And she opened her mouth wide.

  12.

  April’s eyes felt so heavy. But she didn’t want to go to sleep yet. There were activities they could still be doing, important logistics still to consider. “Are you sure the tooth fairy will find us here?” she asked her mother.

  “Of course she will, sweetheart. Now close your eyes. Look at Lily. See? She’s already fast asleep.”

  Oh, no. Her mother was crying again. Just from watching Lily sleep. And she was still bleeding from down there. April knew, because of her stealth mission into the motel bathroom, where the evidence in the trash can was piling high. Her mother pretended this was normal, but April knew it was a white lie. And the tooth fairy would definitely not find her here, in the middle of the woods. Sometimes white lies were annoying. People wanted to know the truth. Even if it hurt.

  Maybe this wasn’t turning out to be the best day ever. And not only because of the tooth fairy. Her mother was acting even weirder than usual. Not making them brush their teeth. Giving them cough syrup when neither of them had coughs. Not calling Daddy for two days. Hugging her and Lily too tight and asking them strange questions. Of course she would love her forever, no matter what. Why would she even ask such a silly question?

  This wasn’t how she’d imagined camping. Where were the s’mores? The tent? “Can we make s’mores?” she asked.

  “Yes. Tomorrow. We’ll buy everything we need at the store,” said her mother.

  “Promise?”

  “I promise.”

  She removed from her coat pocket the tooth she’d carefully wrapped in rest-stop toilet paper and placed it under her pillow, which was actually a guest pillow, not her own. “I want to go home,” she said, or perhaps whispered, or maybe she just thought it. Her eyelids felt heavy. So heavy.

  13.

  It took more than an hour after the girls had fallen asleep for Adele to finally work up the courage to wipe her eyes with the collar of her housedress and crawl over to the front seat of the station wagon. She’d watched them sleep, their little chests moving in and out, in and out, their eyes darting around under their eyelids, which reminded her, a bit too intensely, of the subcutaneous movement of a fetus.

  Now, however, her resolve returned, she rummaged inside the half-opened suitcase for her supplies, locating almost everything she needed by feel. She unzipped the suitcase completely and then turned on a flashlight to find the duct tape, shining its beam through the gaps between her suddenly translucent red fingers and onto the loosely packed clothes. Ah, there it is, she thought, retrieving the tape from under a shirt.

  She stepped out of the car into the brisk air and shut the door gently behind her. The ground was still moist from the previous night’s rain, and as she walked the short distance from the front of the car to the rear, her flip-flops sank into the bog. She envied the trees their roots and hard sheaths, their inert grace and self-reliance. She did not believe in reincarnation or even in God, but she thought that if she ever were to come back to life, if such a thing were actually possible, it would be nice to do so as a tree. That way she could just exist, tall and impassive, without ever uttering another word.

  Because that was the problem, really, wasn’t it, with being human? You couldn’t just be, couldn’t just stand, couldn’t just live and exist without dragging your feet through the mud. You had to communicate, congregate, collaborate, cohabitate. You had to corroborate. Copulate. You had to co-this, co-that, co-bloody-everything, and if you weren’t co-operating you were operating without the co, which was a declaration less of independence than of relativity. You could only really exist in relation to others. No matter what she did, Adele would always be her mother’s daughter. Her daughters’ mother. People clung to you, like burrs.

  Even her planned escape, that most solitude of acts, would create as many new ties as it would sever. No longer her husband’s wife, she would become his late wife; in addition to her childr
en’s mother, their murderer. But while the former had little to no effect on her determination, the latter ripped at her, made her reconsider several times over the past two years, until finally she had to leave, with or without them. But wasn’t death better than desertion? The question was one of compassion. The deserted know they’ve been left. The dead do not. People would understand this. Hadn’t her job as a nurse always taught her to alleviate pain, to mitigate suffering? The rules of triage were both simple and brutal: save those who can make it, leave the hopeless to die. Her husband would be fine without her. Her daughters would not.

  Crouching low behind the car now, gripping the flashlight between her thighs and pointing it up under the chassis, she attached the vacuum hose to the end of the tailpipe, wrapping several long pieces of duct tape around the seal. It had to be tight, with no possibility of a leak. The delivery system might be primitive, but it could not be inefficient. She knew, from having treated several close calls of carbon monoxide poisoning, both accidental and intentional, that you didn’t want to do such a thing halfway. The inhaled fumes could take up to three hours to generate enough carboxyhemoglobin in the bloodstream to permanently inhibit the transport of oxygen. Once the levels were high enough, the oxygen low enough, the body simply stopped. Without pain. Without suffering. Without violence. All because carbon, the building block of life, could also be the instrument of its demise. Like a mother, thought Adele. Like me.

  The end of the hose in place, she stood up, unrolled the back window a hand’s length, and began covering the gap with plastic sheeting. The noise of the billowing plastic seemed to rouse April, causing Adele to suddenly freeze, but the girl was only switching positions in her sleep, her hand still clutched to the tooth under her pillow. Adele gulped and continued taping the edges of the plastic to the car, pulling the surface taut. When she was sure every edge was tightly sealed, every square inch of that gap between window and frame covered, she punctured a small hole into the surface of the plastic with a twig and twisted the other end of the hose into this tiny aperture, like a screw into an anchor.

  She stepped back from her creation to admire it.

  She walked back around the car, this time in the direction of the driver’s seat, and snuck in quietly. The seat felt cold against her thighs. Winter would be coming soon. All that snow, all that ice. Like clockwork every year. How was it that most people scraping a windshield on a frigid dawn could find solace in the anticipation of spring? She’d tried to be like those people. She tried, she really did. When Lily was born, Shep had wanted to call her Joan, but Adele demurred. No, she said, no names of martyrs. Martyrs die. Flowers live. She willed herself to face the sun, to have faith in the promise of renewal.

  But then came April. And then, instead of spring, more darkness. And then the ice returned, once again.

  She reached into her pocket and removed her keys, noticing their heft and coldness and cragginess of edge as she stared out into the darkness beyond the windshield. If you exist, God, then send me a sign! she pleaded, her tears once again flowing freely. A reason not to stick this key in that hole.

  14.

  In the distance, too far to be detected without headlights, a doe and her two fawns crossed in front of the car, their gait synchronized and full of grace, like ballerinas on tiptoe. Had Adele seen them, had her headlights actually been turned on that night, she might have woken the girls to show them. Look, she would have whispered. Look at those deer! Lily would have rubbed her eyes and begged to get out of the car. April would have started spouting everything she’d learned about mammals from school. How mammals are warm blooded and furry. How they feed their babies milk from their own bodies. Then Lily might have even insisted, feeling the boldness of her eight years, despite the late hour and the darkness beyond, Let’s go find them! And April, tracker of imaginary animals, who believed in the depths of her soul that all troubles could be forgotten before sleep, who fancied herself just as wise and as brave as her big sister, would say, Yes, let’s! Let’s go follow the deer. They might have even put on their Keds then, over footed pajamas, ignoring Adele’s protestations that it was time to go to bed, time to close their eyes. Then they would have pushed open the back door of that blue Plymouth Fury, ripping hose and plastic sheeting from their fragile moorings.

  15.

  Adele held the car keys in her hands and waited. One minute passed. Then two. She could hear the ticking of her watch, felt the coursing of blood in her chest. She strained her eyes to try to see, but nothing stirred in the darkness beyond.

  She slipped the key into the ignition with a soft click. She was about to turn it when she remembered the unsealed letter she’d composed earlier that morning. She’d woken up two hours before the girls to give herself the proper time and space to say everything she wanted to say in it, to finally describe, once and for all, the blackness inside, but when she actually sat down with the blank sheets of motel stationery and a pen, only the most absurd clichés popped out. I can’t go on. I feel like I’m drowning. I’m living in a kind of hell. After throwing out several aborted attempts, seeing that the girls had started to stir, she finally settled on a simple admission of guilt. If she couldn’t say what she wanted to say, at least she could say what she needed to say. The last thing she wanted was for someone else, after she was gone, to get blamed for her death for lack of evidence.

  She pulled the envelope out of her purse, the note out of the envelope and read it:

  October 22, 1972

  Dear Shep,

  This is not your fault. It’s mine. You know what I’ve been living through these past few years. You’ve seen it up close, even if you haven’t really understood it, but I would hope you could understand why such a life would be untenable for me and for our children. I’m sorry for taking them with me, I really am, but I’m sure you’ll come to realize, as I have, that this was the only way. Do not hate me for what I’ve done.

  Love,

  Adele

  Pathetic! she thought, reading it over. Totally insufficient and devoid of answers. Her toes curled inward. Her shoulders tensed. But what else could she write? Some things were beyond words.

  Her chest heaved. She leaned over the steering wheel and held on tight, sobbing silently into her arms so as not to wake the girls. God, she thought, please forgive me.

  With a brisk flick of the wrist, she turned the key clockwise in the ignition and stepped firmly on the gas. The fumes burst in, acrid and foul. She revved the engine twice more, then floored it a third for good measure. Nauseated and growing dizzy more rapidly than she’d expected, she quickly hoisted herself over the headrest and fell into the backseat, where she lay down between her slumbering children, her knees tucked up underneath her. Finally, she thought. The big sleep. In her mounting confusion, she suddenly remembered the tooth under April’s pillow and panicked. She fumbled in her pocket for a quarter, but by the time she had it in hand, it had already slipped through her fingers.

  “Did you get the s’mores?” April said, struggling to open her eyes. She reached for her mother’s hand.

  Exhaust filled the car.

  CHAPTER 22

  MARK SHOWED UP early Sunday evening. I’d passed out on the couch as the sunlight began to fade, my papers scattered around me, the fire I’d lit and stoked continually for the past thirty-six hours reduced to a gray pile of smoldering ash. The girls were making snow angels outside when he arrived, the sound of their giggles mixing in with the crunch and whir of his car wheels on the frozen driveway.

  I heard the car door slam. Daisy’s muffled voice shouting, “Daddy, you’re here!”

  Tess shouting, “Shh! Mommy’s working.”

  I put on my boots and stepped outside. The dusk-kissed sky was now filling with the stars, the storm having finally come and gone, leaving two feet of snow and a thick coating of sleet in its wake. Shoveling it by hand would be hard, I thought, but not impossible.

  Mark was hanging back ten yards or so, standing tentatively
in front of the car he must have rented that morning, staring down at the ground and kicking away at a patch of ice with the tip of his left snow boot. “Business or pleasure?” I imagined the woman behind the Hertz counter asking him. I wondered how he answered.

  “Did you finish, Mommy?” said Daisy, when she saw me emerge.

  “Nope.” I kissed her on the nose. “But I think I got off to a good start.”

  “That’s good.”

  “Are there any Pop-Tarts in the house?” said Tess. “Daisy said last time we were here Astrid gave her Pop-Tarts.”

  “As a matter of fact, I think I saw a box of them in the pantry. Do you want to go inside and check?”

  The girls eyed one another conspiratorially: the verboten pastry, stuffed with preservatives and refined sugar, offered without even the minutest of moral struggles; to what do we owe this great pleasure? “Yes!” said Daisy, running toward the house, not waiting for me to change my mind.

  Mark was still standing back, still kicking away at the ice, clearing a hole until he’d finally hit dirt. “I wasn’t sure if . . .” he started to say. “You said in your note you—”

  I walked toward him to bridge the distance between us. “I said in my note not to come find me.”

  “I wasn’t sure if you meant it.”

  “I did.”

  I saw the pain creeping into his expression. His jaw growing stiff. He didn’t want me to have meant it. “Do you still?”

  I grabbed his hands in mine, rubbed the back of his jagged knuckles with my thumbs, and sighed. “I don’t know. I need some time to mull it over.”

  He clenched his mouth before attempting a slight smile. “Are we talking like a few minutes here or more like a week, because it’s freezing out here and I’ve got to pee.”

  I smiled, despite myself. Then I invited him inside.

  IT WOULD TAKE a couple of years, in fact, to come up with a proper answer to Mark’s question, but by then much about our lives would have already changed. I would lease a small office up in Harlem, where I would go during working hours to write. Some of these days would be difficult, most of them would be lonely, but they were mine, they paid the rent, and I looked forward to them. I would try to remember which Friday of the month to bring in cupcakes, but sometimes I’d forget, and I no longer mistook either outcome as proof or indictment of my competency to mother. The girls loved me, I loved them, and with each new batch of cupcakes baked the needs and boundaries of our relationship changed anyway. Motherhood was not something one could plan. It just happened, candle by candle.