The April Tree

by Judith Arnold

“Shut up,” Elyse said.

  “No, that’s okay,” Becky jumped in. She didn’t want Florie and Elyse at each other’s throats. “If there’s a memorial service, that’s . . . I don’t know. A good thing, maybe?”

  “What’s good about it?” Elyse lamented. “April’s dead!”

  “Well, nothing we do is going to make her come back to life,” Becky pointed out.

  Florie and Elyse both started crying.

  Becky drank some bourbon. What was wrong with her? Why couldn’t she cry? She was bleeding inside, pain oozing through a gaping hole in her heart. It hurt worse than anything she’d ever known. But she couldn’t cry.

  “I was thinking,” she said, wondering if Elyse and Florie could hear through their sobs. “Maybe we could have our own memorial.”

  “What?” Elyse sniffled and jammed a tissue to her nose.

  “I keep thinking about the tree.”

  “What tree?” Florie asked.

  Becky sighed. What she wanted to say seemed elusive to her, scurrying in all directions when she tried to lasso the notion. But if Elyse and Florie were going to cry, Becky ought to be allowed to ramble and grope. “The tree April died under.”

  “She wasn’t dead out there,” Elyse insisted. “You saw the medics. They were working on her, doing all that stuff to her. They were trying to save her life.”

  “She was already dead,” Becky said bluntly.

  “You don’t know that.”

  “I do.” She couldn’t explain how she knew, or why. She just knew it was the truth. “April died under that tree. I was watching.”

  “You’re crazy,” Elyse said.

  “No, she’s not.” Florie apparently saw an ally in Becky.

  Becky sighed again. “I am crazy,” she said, hoping to prevent an argument between Elyse and Florie. “But I do remember the tree. It was a beautiful tree. Tall and healthy.”

  “What’s your point?” Elyse asked impatiently.

  “Well . . . I mean, Florie’s mother is handing out this bull about how God loved April so much he wanted her with him, and April’s parents are planning something at First Parish. None of that is what April would have done.”

  They were both staring at her. Neither was crying.

  “I don’t understand,” Elyse said. “You’re saying April would have done something for her own memorial?”

  Becky’s brain ached from the effort of trying to sort itself out. She was smart; she was logical. She excelled at fathoming things, making sense of them, arranging them so they fell into place. Math was her forte. She was soaring through pre-calc, and she was only a sophomore.

  Wheatley High School didn’t offer a course in death and memorials, though. If it did, maybe she would ace it. Maybe she would flunk it. Maybe death wasn’t supposed to be logical and mathematical.

  She took another drink, then passed the bottle around. The back of her mouth felt warm and slightly numb when she swallowed. So did her chest. “All I’m saying is, if I died, I wouldn’t want a memorial in a church.”

  “Of course not. You’re Jewish—half, anyway,” Elyse said.

  “I’d want something alive. Like flowers growing out of my ashes. Don’t you think April would want that?”

  “Who said anything about flowers growing out of her ashes?” Elyse asked.

  Florie added, “My mother said she was going to be cremated. She didn’t say she was going to be put in a flower pot.”

  “All right, all right.” Becky waited until the bottle had orbited back to her and took another drink. “Forget about the flowers. I’m thinking about the tree. That’s where our memorial ought to be.”

  “The beautiful, tall, healthy tree,” Elyse said dubiously.

  “It was a red maple. Think about it. It was the last real place April ever was, the last thing she knew.” Becky wondered if she sounded drunk. Could three or four sips of bourbon intoxicate her? Was she making any sense at all? “I don’t consider the ambulance real,” she explained. “Under that tree was the last place where she was actually April. A red maple with budding leaves. You see what I’m saying?”

  “You think she stopped being April when she was in the ambulance?” Florie asked. Becky couldn’t decide whether Florie sounded retarded, or Florie was asking stupid questions because she thought Becky sounded retarded.

  It didn’t matter. Fortified by bourbon, Becky knew the truth. “April was alive under that tree, and then she died. That was where it happened. That was where we lost her.” She took one more sip, then stood the bottle on her desk and smiled. “That’s where we have to do something,” she said. “That’s where April is.”

  Chapter Three

  FLORIE WANTED to stay home on Monday, but her mother wouldn’t let her. “You aren’t ill,” her mother pointed out. “You aren’t incapacitated. You’ll have to go. Skipping school without a legitimate excuse is against the law.”

  Florie thought being in mourning ought to count as a legitimate excuse.

  Her mother disagreed. “Go,” she said. “It will cheer you up.”

  School never cheered Florie up. Two years in Wheatley, and she was still an outsider, invisible, untouchable. If it weren’t for April, no one would have talked to Florie at all.

  But she went to school because staying home was not an option, and because she couldn’t bring herself to slip away from the bus stop and disappear someplace where she wouldn’t be found. She lacked the nerve to break rules like that. Rules existed for a reason. Obeying them was what kept the world functioning.

  As it turned out, attending school turned out to be not such a bad idea, after all. Florie wasn’t invisible Monday. She actually existed.

  When the principal’s voice crackled through the speaker a few minutes after the first bell, announcing that there had been a death in the Wheatley High School community and asking teachers and students to observe a moment of silence in remembrance of April Walden, everyone in Florie’s homeroom turned to stare at her. She doubted any of them had ever noticed her enough to know she and April had been friends, but somehow they must have heard that Florie was connected to April’s death. As the news had throbbed through the town’s texts and telephones over the weekend, as it had hummed along the town’s pews and around the town’s supermarkets and restaurants, Florie’s name must have come up in connection with the event.

  She didn’t like the idea that April had to die for people to pay attention to Florie. She would have been willing to remain invisible forever, if only April hadn’t run into the path of that car. But maybe this was April’s parting gift: to transform Florie Closter into a genuine human being in the eyes of her schoolmates.

  All day long, people approached her in classrooms and corridors. “I heard you were with her when it happened,” they would say. “Wow.”

  Florie refused to dramatize the incident or her part in it. She was still tormented with guilt that her clumsiness had caused it. Nor would she turn the tragedy into grist for the school’s gossip mill. With all the dignity she could muster, she would say, “April was my closest friend.” Then her voice would start to quiver—she couldn’t help it—and her eyes would well up with tears, and the kids around her would actually look sympathetic, as if her pain was as real to them as she suddenly was.

  Throughout the day, when people weren’t coming over to her and commenting on how awful April’s death was, Florie found her mind straying. She’d sat in church yesterday, wondering whether God had let April die because he loved her or because he hated her—or maybe because he hated the people who loved her. Maybe he hated Becky and Elyse and Florie. Maybe he’d been in a vindictive mood, stealing April from them as some sort of punishment. Or maybe it had been an oversight on his part, a simple mistake. Was God allowed to make mistakes?

  In American History, she found herself thinking abo
ut her parents’ church: plain, chaste New England Methodist, a place that offered none of the answers she needed. In biology, she found herself thinking about the minister’s sermon, how God’s ways were and would always be a mystery, how you had to trust God because sometimes trust was all you had to go on, and if you didn’t trust God, you were left with nothing. In German, she found herself thinking about the tree.

  They’d met at the tree yesterday after church—although, as it turned out, Florie was the only one who had gone to church. Becky never went, being the child of hippie-intellectual-atheists or whatever her parents were; Florie wasn’t sure, and Becky seemed deliberately vague about the whole thing. Elyse was Catholic, but she’d refused to go to church Sunday morning, not even to pray for April’s soul. She’d told her parents she had a headache, but she’d told Becky and Florie she’d skipped church because she couldn’t stomach the thought of sitting for an hour in a dreary, stuffy, waxy-smelling building with everyone gawking at her. Unlike Florie, Elyse was used to being noticed, so used to it she resented it.

  That was probably because she was beautiful. Half the people noticing her were wishing they could have her, and the other half were wishing they could be her. Florie would hate to be stared at that way, not that she ever was.

  So at one o’clock Sunday afternoon, she and Elyse and Becky had met at the tree. Florie had biked to the site. She didn’t know how the others had gotten there, and she hadn’t asked. She’d just been grateful that they felt she was as much a part of the whole situation as they were.

  “One thing,” Elyse had said. “I don’t want one of those white crosses planted here. You know how people are always sticking white crosses where there’s been an accident? And then people put candles and flowers around them, and teddy bears? I hate that.”

  “Why?” Florie had asked. She liked the idea of roadside memorials. She thought the flowers proved that the person who died had been beloved, and the candles reminded passersby that the victim’s spirit still burned, illuminating the world even in the darkness of sorrow. And the teddy bears were sweet. They always made Florie’s eyes tear up. They were a reminder that innocence could coexist with the bitterest of experiences.

  “Actually,” Becky had said, “I think the state passed a law against roadside memorials.”

  Florie had been astounded. “Why would they do that?”

  “Too distracting. Too morbid. I don’t remember.” Becky’s pale skin had taken on a pink tinge. Probably from the day before, when they’d been playing tennis. An hour in the sun was enough to flush her complexion.

  At the tree Sunday afternoon, she’d been wearing jeans that were a bit baggy—but she was skinny and everything always seemed kind of baggy on her—and a T-shirt with a picture of Einstein across the front. Florie didn’t think Einstein was appropriate for this occasion, but she figured that Becky had chosen the shirt for comfort. It was one of her favorite shirts, she’d confessed in the past. She thought old Alfie was kind of cute in a geeky way.

  “I don’t think we need a religious shrine here,” Becky had said. “This town is crawling with churches, if anyone wants to do the shrine thing. Elyse, you can light a votive candle at your church, right? My father found a mourning candle for me, too. It’s enclosed in a glass and it burns for seven days while you sit shiva. Not that I’m doing that. I guess my father was just trying to help.”

  “Candles are witchy,” Elyse had said. “April wasn’t really a candle kind of person.”

  “I know.” Becky had stared up into the arching limbs of the tree. Leaf buds had tipped the branches in little sprouts of maroon. “April was more of a tree person than a candle person.”

  “Maybe we could plant some flowers at the base of the tree,” Elyse had suggested.

  “Hmm.” Becky had circled the tree, her sneakers silent on the mossy, mulchy ground. “The thing is, someone might own this tree. This could be private property. The tennis courts are all the way down the hill. I don’t know where the park actually ends, but this could be private property.”

  Florie had grown impatient. This whole tree thing had been Becky’s idea, yet she hadn’t known what to do about it, how to turn it into something meaningful, something honoring April. Everything anyone else had suggested, Becky had shot down. She was incredibly smart, scary-smart. But she didn’t know everything.

  Florie had chosen not to point this out yesterday. She hadn’t dared. Just to be included, to be allowed to stand under the tree with Elyse and Becky, had been a privilege. If she antagonized them, they would stop including her, and she’d be left to deal with April’s death alone. She didn’t think she could bear that.

  “It’s the tree itself, maybe.” Becky had seemed to be thinking out loud. She’d peered up into the branches again, squinting through her round, gold-rimmed eyeglasses as if searching for a bird on a high perch among the leaf buds. Or maybe she’d been looking at the sky filtered through the tree, little dabs of Sunday blue outlined by the branches, almost like a mosaic. “Maybe that’s it—it’s just the tree. That’s the whole thing.”

  Florie had glanced briefly at Elyse. She’d looked as confused as Florie felt, which had made her feel a little better. She’d hoped Elyse would have the guts to ask Becky to elaborate. Elyse could do that without risking her status as Becky’s friend.

  Elyse had said nothing, saddling Florie with the task of questioning Becky. “What do you mean, just the tree?” she’d asked carefully.

  “The tree is alive,” Becky had said. “It’s something alive and growing, right where April died. This tree is connected to her. So we have to treasure the tree.”

  “Worship it, maybe,” Elyse had added. Florie cringed inwardly. Apparently Elyse had understood what Becky was talking about. Florie had been all alone in her confusion.

  Becky had nodded. “We could come here, you know, when we want to think about her.”

  “Why do we have to come here to think about her?” Florie had asked. She’d known she sounded like an idiot, but she’d been desperate to comprehend what Becky was talking about. “Can’t we think about April when we’re other places? I can’t stop thinking about her, and it doesn’t matter where I am.”

  Elyse had given her a withering look, but Becky’s expression had been gentle. Her cheeks were the roundest part of her, Florie had realized. Becky was thin, her hair was as straight as uncooked spaghetti, but her cheeks were round and rosy. When she smiled, her face looked soft.

  “April is everywhere,” she’d agreed. “We can tune into her everywhere. But sometimes it helps to have a touchstone, you know? It’s like churches, I think—I mean, God is everywhere, if you believe that kind of thing, but people still go to church because it’s an actual place where they can get in touch with God. That’s the thing about candles, too. You burn them, and they trigger something inside you. You see what I’m saying?”

  “That this tree should be a trigger.”

  “A place to be with April.” Becky had nodded and turned back to the tree, scrutinizing the weave of branches above their heads, the textured gray bark, the trunk spreading gracefully into its roots. “It’s where we lost April. It’s where we’ll always be able to find her.”

  “Better than a white cross and a teddy bear,” Elyse had murmured, reaching out and pressing her hand to the trunk. Her rings had glinted where the sunlight caught silver.

  “We could come here to talk to her,” Becky had continued. “She’ll hear us here, because this is the special place.” She’d lowered herself to sit under the tree, leaned back against the trunk, and closed her eyes. “I feel closer to her here.”

  Florie had wished she could feel closer to April there, too. She’d wished she could touch April, know her, find her. If not for April, Florie’s life would have been worthless. April’s friendship had been the best thing Florie had known in Wheatley, maybe in her entire life,
and now April was gone, and Florie honestly didn’t see how sitting under a tree and closing her eyes was going to make anything better.

  Elyse had sat beside Becky and leaned against the tree. Florie had watched them, envy flaring hot inside her. They looked more at peace than she felt, more content. Closer to April.

  It wouldn’t work. Florie would never find April, especially not under a tree. But she’d lowered herself onto the ground on Becky’s other side, leaned back, closed her eyes, and prayed to God that she would someday understand the things Becky and Elyse did, be where they were, know what they knew. She’d prayed with all her heart that April would reach down through the tree’s branches, that she would ride its sap down the trunk to where Florie’s shoulders rested, and she would explain to Florie how to fit herself into the world.

  Chapter Four

  ELYSE’S MOTHER wasn’t home. Just as well. If she were home, she would say, “How was school?” and Elyse would have to answer, “It sucked, Mom, how do you think it was? It was totally shitty, and now, if you don’t mind, I’d like to curl up in a ball in my room and pretend the world isn’t out there, okay?”

  But since her mother wasn’t home, Elyse didn’t have to have that conversation. Katie wasn’t home either, which was good because she was a pain in the ass. Elyse had been a much better person at age eleven, she was sure. She’d never whined, never made a pest of herself, never acted as if she thought she was the center of the universe. She’d known, maybe from the day she was born, that she wasn’t the center of this universe or any other. Somebody ought to break the news to Katie that she wasn’t, either. If Elyse’s parents didn’t do it soon, Elyse would.

  She could do anything she wanted right now, even be bitchy to her sister. Elyse was entitled. She’d been given a wide berth. Nobody dared to cross her because of what she’d been through, what she was still going through, all the pain and grief of losing April.

  Maybe that was why Elyse’s mother wasn’t home—she didn’t want to cross Elyse while Elyse had permission to behave badly. Maybe she and her mother could figure out a way to avoid each other for the next few years, and then she would leave for college or something else, something dramatic and romantic and exciting, something that was the exact opposite of her parents’ phony little Wheatley existence.