The April Tree

by Judith Arnold

  “I killed her,” Mark said.

  “Carelessness killed her. She killed herself. Bad timing killed her. You believe in God?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “He’s got his reasons for doing things, my wife always says. God has his reasons.”

  “For letting a fifteen-year-old girl die?”

  “It’s not up to us to know his reasons. If he cut us in on his thoughts, then where would the mystery be?”

  “Do we really need the mystery?”

  “It makes life interesting.” Romano dropped his butt onto the ground and snubbed it with his toe. Mark put out his cigarette, too. “Listen to me, Mark: don’t stick around here. Go back to Boston, get a summer job there. Put some miles between you and this. By September, you’ll be ready to return to school, and this’ll all be just a memory of a bad thing that you were unfortunate enough to get caught in the middle of. That’s all it is.”

  That wasn’t all it was. But Mark wanted to hug Romano for saying it, and for smiling, and for giving him a cigarette. He wanted to hug Romano for not thinking Mark was as unforgivable as he knew he was.

  They each had another cigarette, but they didn’t need to talk anymore. Everything worth saying had been said. Mark stared at the tree and smelled the rich, loamy scent of the soil beneath the grass, its fragrance more acute in contrast to the cigarette smoke. The sky had been just as blue last Saturday, the air just as clean and sweet. Some things continued, some didn’t. Some people chose their deaths, some didn’t.

  He and Romano might have been there a half hour. Maybe longer. It felt like forever to Mark, and less than an instant. When Romano said, “I’ll drive you home now,” Mark nodded.

  They got back into the cruiser. Romano started the engine and steered off the shoulder. Near the bottom of the hill, a solitary figure was walking along the side of the road. A girl, thin and blond, her bony shoulders perpendicular to her neck, her legs skinny beneath a short black skirt. Her hair ruler-straight, her eyes circled in gold-rimmed glasses. Romano drove slowly past her. Mark continued to watch her in the side mirror beyond his window.

  She reached the tree, bent over, and lifted the butts he and Romano had left there. Then she straightened and stared after them, and he felt her eyes as sharp as daggers once more, impaling him.

  Chapter Seven

  A COP! LITTERING! Becky wondered whether she ought to make a citizen’s arrest.

  She was too tired. Too worn out. After sitting in First Parish for an hour, listening to everyone sobbing and sniffling all around her while she herself suffered a pain so deep tears seemed irrelevant, she was not going to kick up a fuss about a couple of assholes, one of whom just happened to be an officer of the law, tossing their butts.

  She pulled an unused tissue from her pocket—she’d brought it in case, for some strange reason, she’d started crying at the church—and wrapped the butts in it before stuffing them into her pocket. Then she lowered herself to sit at the base of the tree, adjusting her position until her rear end was comfortable and she could lean back against the trunk. Above her the leaves looked like a perforated fabric, sifting threads of sunshine through their mesh.

  An hour, she thought. A full, long hour she’d sat on one of the pine pews at First Parish. The patch of hard earth at the base of April’s tree was more comfortable, despite the lumps of rock and root. And Unitarian-Universalist—was that even a religion? It was all so loose, so amorphous, so whatever. “God loves you, even if you don’t believe in him. We love you because we’re a fellowship, a community. One big, happy brotherhood-sisterhood. When you sneeze, we’ll say, ‘Bless you,’ not ‘God bless you,’ just in case you’re an atheist. Lots of our parishioners are. No big deal.”

  Come on, Becky thought. If you’re going to be a religion, be one.

  Maybe she would have enjoyed the memorial service more if it had been more religious. A Catholic priest would have assured the mourners that April’s soul was in heaven. That might have been a consolation—if Becky believed in heaven, which she didn’t. A Jewish service would have been in Hebrew, so the words would have been meaningless to her. She would have been able to substitute her own meanings to the chanted syllables. Even a regular Protestant service, like at Florie’s church, would have included God and the afterlife and a few other familiar touchstones.

  Not that Becky believed. But it would be more comforting to not believe in something than to not believe in nothing.

  She rested her head against the tree’s textured bark and closed her eyes. “April died in May,” she whispered, smiling at the pun. “April, April, died in May. She was here, and then she went away. Here last week but gone today.”

  She wondered how the rhyme would sound translated into Hebrew. Or Latin. The only foreign language she knew was Spanish, and she was not pleased when she laboriously translated the poem in her mind: Abril, murio en mayo. Ella estaba aqui, ye luega ella se fue. Aqui la semana pasada, pero hoy ha ido. No rhyme, no rhythm. Maybe she should have signed up for French instead of Spanish.

  She knew intuitively that French wouldn’t work, either. She needed to invent a new language. Something that could translate the illogical into the logical, the way math translated a numerical formula into a curve on a graph. She needed a formula to translate April’s death into a shape she could recognize and understand.

  A breeze rippled the air. Above her the leaves shifted, causing the sunlight to dance in dots of white where it reached the ground.

  A ritual. A language and a ritual, and this day, this week, this unfathomable loss would all make sense.

  April, April died in May, she mouthed.

  Her throat was dry, and the midday heat felt like starched cloth on her skin, arid and abrasive. She should walk home and drink some water, or iced tea, or apple juice. Or brandy, if her father was offering.

  But she couldn’t leave the tree until she figured something out.

  Ritual and language. That was what people went to church for, wasn’t it? Even the Unitarian Church, which hedged its bets. They might be nebulous about the specifics of their faith, but they offered ritual—sitting on pews, reading, singing. And language—sermons about how we all need love more than ever, and we must trust in the community to get us through such unspeakable sorrow.

  Becky needed her own rituals, her own language. April’s death demanded it.

  She traced the rise of the tree’s root, like a thick varicose vein bulging against the earth’s skin. Where it rose high enough to break through the dirt, she poked with her finger until she’d dug a small hollow under the root.

  “Here I bury the sacred butts,” she murmured, pulling the discarded cigarette butts from her pocket and stuffing them into the hole. They were symbols of death, signifiers that fate could discard a real, live, wonderful girl as easily as assholes discarded their cigarette stubs. Once Becky had buried them, they would exist forever in this tiny hole beneath the tree’s root.

  Unless they biodegraded, in which case they’d rejoin the earth like April’s ashes.

  One way or another, they were here. A part of this—this thing Becky was doing.

  April, April died in May.

  She murmured the words as she patted dirt around the cigarette butts, covering the hole.

  April, April died in May.

  The words struck Becky as more meaningful than any of the inanities the minister had uttered at First Parish, all that crap about love, love, love. The congregation might as well have started singing Beatles songs. Say love enough times and it loses its meaning. Say it enough times and the word itself starts sounding strange and curt and silly.

  April, April died in May. Becky’s own prayer. Blunt. Factual. Honest. Leaving no escape, no comfort. Becky would choose truth over comfort, any day.

  Chapter Eight

  ELYSE HAD noticed him
after the memorial service, when she and Becky and Florie were standing on the front porch of the church. Pristine white clapboard, with long shutter-trimmed windows and a towering spire topped with a brass weather vane rather than a cross, First Parish was a historical building. A shingle nailed beside the front door said “1698.” Amazing that a structure built that long ago could still be standing when Wheatley’s high school had to be torn down and replaced at the ripe old age of fifty-two.

  Back in 1698, no one cared about wheelchair access. But the high school had to be brought into compliance, which meant constructing ramps and elevators and disabled-access water fountains and toilets even though, from the day the new high school opened, Elyse’s first day as a freshman, the only people in wheelchairs who’d ever been inside the building were that football player who blew out his knee last year, and Nick Frisone, who’d played a crippled guy in the drama club production of The Real Inspector Hound during the school’s one-act festival this past March.

  Old things lasted. New things didn’t. Elyse’s father was always whining about this and that falling apart in the Fabiano house, which had been built in the seventies. It needed a new roof. The plumbing was shot. The driveway was buckling. He’d spotted some seepage in one corner of the basement.

  Elyse’s mother didn’t seem to notice these problems with the house. Or if she did, she didn’t care. She was too busy doing whatever the hell she did to pay attention to the fact that the downstairs bathroom door always stuck and the grouting in the tile floor of the laundry room was vanishing, one powdering sliver at a time. Nowadays, Elyse’s mother hardly ever did laundry, anyway. Elyse and Katie got stuck doing it.

  Elyse supposed the First Parish church had had its roof replaced and its leaky faucets repaired more than once in its multiple centuries of existence. At St. Joseph’s, the Catholic church her family belonged to, they were always passing the baskets around an extra time to raise money for repairs—although given how fat Father Stefan was getting, Elyse suspected a lot of those crumpled dollar bills in the baskets were being spent on the priest’s ice-cream binges—but church buildings seemed more permanent than the high school or her house. More solid. Even if you wanted them to disappear, they never would.

  First Parish sat on a grassy rise, so the front steps offered an expansive view of the lawn, with its border of limp, faded daffodils, and the two streets that intersected just beyond the dying flowers. From her vantage, Elyse had viewed the swarms of people who’d exited the building ahead of Becky, Florie, and her. Rather than climbing into their cars and driving away, they’d milled around on the sloping grass, chatting as if this was a social occasion.

  She had recognized some of the adults, but mostly she’d been checking out the kids, her classmates who had come because April had been one of them. She’d spotted the second-soprano girls—April and Becky sang second soprano in the glee club, Florie first soprano, and Elyse alto, so they got to know the other girls in their separate groups pretty well. A couple of kids from biology had waved at Elyse, and she’d acknowledged them with a small, discreet flutter of her fingertips rather than a full-blown wave because, unlike them, she did not believe this was a social occasion.

  Then, amid a group of boys, she’d spotted Tommy Crawford.

  Anger had flared inside her, and she’d done her best to squelch it. It wasn’t Tommy’s fault that April had had an unrequited crush on him, was it? It wasn’t his fault that April had wasted so many hours sighing over him—“Did you ever look at his eyes, I mean, really look at them?”—and as far as he was concerned, April had been no more alive a year ago as she was now.

  But it was his fault that he’d been at the memorial service. Why had he shown up? Had he succumbed to peer pressure? Had he been looking for a party? Hoping to hook up with one of the second-soprano girls?

  At least he hadn’t been wearing ratty jeans and a hoodie or something equally inappropriate. He and the boys he’d been standing with—she’d recognized Taylor Nissenko and Brian Sobel, the others had looked familiar but she couldn’t recall their names—had all worn khakis and collared shirts. A couple of them had held baseball-style caps in their hands, but out of respect for the occasion they hadn’t been wearing them.

  Still, they hadn’t belonged at the service. And though she had no right, she’d resented the hell out of Tommy just for existing.

  Florie’s parents, who had come to the service but sat near the back of the church, leaving the pews closer to the front of the church for April’s friends and schoolmates, had appeared on the brick walk at the base of the steps leading up to the church’s front doors.

  “Do you need a lift home, girls?” Florie’s mother had asked.

  Of course Elyse had. Her parents had known April since second grade, but they hadn’t come to the memorial service. Her father had insisted on attending Mass that morning; he’d said one church service per Sunday was enough for him, and he’d promised to say a prayer for April while he was at St. Joe’s. She’d supposed her mother and Katie had accompanied him there. Becky’s parents hadn’t come to First Parish, either. They probably didn’t understand the concept behind a memorial service, because they were atheists and also kind of flaky.

  “Thank you,” Elyse had said to Florie’s mother. “I’d appreciate a ride.”

  Becky had declined, saying she wanted to walk. She lived about a mile from the church, but she was big on walking, and Elyse knew Becky well enough to understand that she’d needed time alone after the service. She didn’t process grief the way other people did. She didn’t cry. Elyse had cried a bit during the service. Florie had sobbed so incessantly, Elyse had half expected to see a puddle under their pew by the time the minister had finished her eulogy. But Becky had sat dry-eyed through the entire thing, shedding not a single tear as one of April’s brothers read a poem by Emily Dickinson and the other told a story about the time the family had gone camping. He’d been afraid of the dark and the forest noises, and April had sat up all night in the tent beside him, keeping her flashlight on, so he could fall asleep. Such a typical April thing to do.

  Hearing that anecdote had caused Florie to blubber. She’d continued to keen as the minister, a stout woman with very short hair who seemed kind of dykey to Elyse, had read the lyrics of a Bob Dylan song called “Death is Not the End.” The lyrics had been beautiful, and Elyse had been moved, but honestly, Florie’s histrionics had been embarrassing.

  Elyse didn’t think about Tommy Crawford again until she saw him outside the cafeteria Monday around noon, as she was heading down the hall from her math class to grab some food. Not lunch, exactly. She rarely ate much during the day. A piece of fruit, a salad, maybe a bag of veggie-chips. The caf food didn’t taste good enough to waste calories on.

  He was hanging with the same group she’d seen him with at the memorial—Brian, Taylor, those guys. They were fairly well situated in the school’s complex social hierarchy. Second-tier jocks—not football players, who were the top tier, or the swimming and gymnastics athletes, who were near the bottom of the varsity caste system, but baseball, soccer, cool-ish sports that required talent and fitness yet didn’t inflate athlete egos.

  Elyse, April, and Becky weren’t jock groupies. They were a little too intelligent, or feminist, or something. In the biosphere that was Wheatley High School, they swam in a completely different pond than the jocks.

  Elyse and April used to argue about Tommy’s alleged appeal. He had a bland, clean-cut Irish-Waspy look: light-brown hair, wide-set eyes, a modest nose, a rounded chin. Elyse would look at him and think: nice. Nice did nothing for her, sex-appeal-wise.

  She had no idea if Tommy’s personality was nice. Nice personalities didn’t do much for her, either. She liked guys who looked dangerous, who were dark and angular and rough-hewn. Bad boys you could picture straddling a motorcycle. Brilliant guys who didn’t give a flying fuck about school but got A’s becau
se they were dazzlingly smart and it all came naturally to them. Guys who could chug hard liquor and never get drunk.

  Not that she knew anyone like that personally, but that was the kind of boy she dreamed about. A few schoolmates looked the part, but Elyse could only imagine what they were like, how edgy their souls were, whether their eyes were haunted by secrets or merely shadowed because they didn’t get enough sleep or smoked too much weed before coming to school.

  Tommy Crawford’s eyes, the eyes April had rhapsodized about, had no shadows. They were a clear hazel, fringed with short lashes. Why April had been so worked up over them, Elyse couldn’t guess.

  Either because Tommy meant nothing to her or because she wasn’t easily intimidated, she marched over to him, waited until Brian stopped talking and all five boys in their little bubble of testosterone turned to stare at her, and said, “What were you doing at April’s memorial yesterday?”

  “April Walden?” he asked.

  “How many Aprils do you know who had a memorial service yesterday?”

  He blinked. No, his eyes were nothing special. They were oddly flat, like panes of glass. After shooting a perplexed glance at his buddies, he turned and took a few steps down the hall, his head tilted in a halfhearted invitation for Elyse to join him. They halted in front of a monitor mounted to the wall that glowed with school announcements in bright blue lettering on a milky background: Debate Team Practice—3:15. Prom tickets still on sale at the main office. Looking for a summer job? Start your search in the guidance office.

  Elyse dragged her gaze from the monitor to Tommy’s square, open face. Okay, yeah, he was cute in a nice way. She’d forgive April for having been infatuated with him.

  Tears washed across Elyse’s vision as she thought about April, her infatuation, her dreamy voice when she would murmur, “Walden-Crawford. I think hyphenating our names when we get married would work, don’t you?” and then burst into giggles because a part of her—the intelligent part—knew that was just a silly fantasy. Elyse thrust out her chin, as if the angle of her head would allow her lower lids to form an effective dam, holding the tears in.