The April Tree

by Judith Arnold

  “Are you okay? Do you need to see a doctor?”

  Elyse almost laughed. Her mother’s slap had been so lame.

  Becky remained solemn, though. “Should we call the police?”

  “God, no. It’s okay. I’m here.”

  “You can stay as long as you want. We’ve got the guest room, or I can set up the inflatable mattress here. I’ll work it out with my parents. Whatever you want.”

  “Maybe just a couple of days,” Elyse said, already thinking of the stuff she’d left at home that she might need. And other concerns. Like: how long would her parents pay for her cell phone if she stayed away? How long would they keep her on their health insurance? What about driving lessons? And Katie’s birthday. Elyse had bought Katie a birthday present—a pair of dangly earrings with genuine freshwater pearls—even though Katie was a twit. Elyse would have to go home to give them to Katie. “When I go back, things will be different. My mother knows she can’t touch me again. She hit me, but I think she’s scared of me now. Which is good.” One more sip, and she screwed the cap on the bottle. “Don’t tell Florie, okay?”

  “It’s not my situation to tell,” Becky said.

  “Florie is just so . . . I don’t know. She acts as if she doesn’t believe shit happens in the world. And then, when it does happen, it’s like she’s blindsided. Like she’s incredulous. That’s a good word, incredulous.”

  Becky nodded.

  “The thing with the tree . . . It just seems so much more real to me than praying for April’s soul in church. I tried that, and it didn’t feel right.”

  “You mean the memorial service at First Parish?”

  Elyse shook her head. “St. Joseph’s. I went there last Sunday. The first Mass I’ve been to in months. The place is just so oppressive. All that incense, and the echoing acoustics, and the stained-glass windows of Jesus in pain. How can you possibly feel uplifted after looking at stained-glass windows of a guy being tortured? It’s so depressing.”

  “Maybe you were depressed because April’s dead.”

  “Well, I don’t need a church that’s only going to make me feel worse.” She sighed. “I’d rather think of April’s soul living in a tree than prancing around in the sky somewhere, so far away from us.” She stared at the wall facing the bed, the pale striped wallpaper, the antique-looking desk with a sleek laptop perched on top of it, the screen dark in sleep mode. “Catholics are so into virginity. And all I keep thinking is that April died a virgin, and that sucks. I don’t want to die a virgin.”

  “Then don’t chase any tennis balls into the road,” Becky said dryly.

  “You never know. You never know when a car is going to appear out of nowhere and take you out,” Elyse argued. “We could die tomorrow.”

  “Yikes,” Becky muttered. “I guess we’d better go out and get laid right away.”

  “I’m serious.”

  Becky eyed her dubiously. You’re not going to die tomorrow,” she said. “You don’t have to race out and get laid.”

  “None of us knows when we’re going to die,” Elyse argued. “April didn’t know she was going to die that afternoon.”

  “And if she did, do you think she would have wasted a minute contemplating her virginity?”

  “Maybe.” Elyse had certainly contemplated it—April’s and her own. “You know that old saying about living every day as if it’s your last.”

  “If today was my last day,” Becky declared, “I would not want to spend it looking for a guy to do me.”

  “Yeah, well that’s you.” Elyse shrugged. “How would you want to spend it?”

  “I don’t know.” Becky mulled over the question. “Working through Fermat’s Last Theorem.”

  “Uh-huh.” Elyse didn’t even know what that was. “I would spend it getting laid. In honor of April, if nothing else.”

  “You want to get laid? Do yourself a favor and use a condom, just in case you don’t die tomorrow. A pregnancy would really screw up your life.”

  “I’d get an abortion,” Elyse said. “Even Catholics do that.”

  Becky shook her head and laughed. “You are nuts.”

  “I’m not the one who wants to die thinking about Fermat’s Whatever. You’re more nuts than I am.” They reached simultaneously for the bottle and grinned when their hands collided. Elyse gestured “after you” with her hand, and Becky unscrewed the cap and took a sip before passing the bottle over.

  Why not get drunk? Elyse thought. April had died not only without ever having had sex but without ever having gotten hammered. Elyse vowed to stay alive at least until she’d experienced both.

  Chapter Fifteen

  FLORIE FELT GUILTY. Maybe because she was in church. Church seemed like an appropriate venue for guilt.

  But it wasn’t the standard religious guilt she was experiencing. Methodists didn’t indulge in guilt the way Catholics or Jews did. Methodists prayed, sang hymns, listened to homilies, and at least theoretically left church at the end of the service feeling mildly chastened but generally uplifted.

  Her guilt wasn’t a reaction to anything the minister said. It wasn’t inspired by the bland environment—beige walls, dark wood pews with thin brown cushions padding the seats, worn red carpeting along the aisles, bouquets of cosmos and freesia flanking the pulpit, and a huge wooden cross behind the altar—just the cross itself, without the dead body of Jesus hanging from it. No, this guilt arose from that thing she’d done at the tree on Baker’s Hill Road with Elyse and Becky. That thing she’d done with them several times now. That ceremony.

  Worshiping that way, under a tree, reciting their own words . . . It seemed not quite wrong, but not quite right, either. It was sacrilegious. Pagan. As if she were ignoring God, his prayers, her church.

  And the worst part was, she didn’t get it. She didn’t know why she and Becky and Elyse did what they did, why they said what they said, why they had to touch the tree and Becky had to light that candle with the Jewish star on it, and everything had to rhyme with May, and . . . why. It didn’t make sense. It didn’t speak to her soul in any way she could comprehend. Yet she was so grateful to Becky and Elyse for including her in their ritual that she was willing to do it again and again, just to be with them. Just to be a part of it.

  The organist cued the next hymn, striking a few chords that filled the chapel with a nasal resonance. Florie flipped through the hymnal, eager for the distraction of a song. Next to her, Andrew sat still and serene, his posture perfect and his hymnal open in his hands. He was home from college for the summer. With an internship lined up at an accounting firm in Boston, his life was as tidy and organized as his appearance. His tie was neat and centered against the bulging bone in his neck. His hair, as wavy as hers, was short and stylish, not lumpy and ugly. He didn’t have to thumb frantically through the hymnal to locate the correct page, and when the congregation began to sing, his voice blended right in.

  We are tossed and driven on the restless sea of time;

  Somber skies and howling tempests oft succeed a bright sunshine;

  In that land of perfect day, when the mists are rolled away,

  We will understand it better by and by.

  Florie moved her lips, felt her breath pass between her vocal cords and wondered how this was supposed to make more sense than April, April died in May.

  By and by, when the morning comes,When the saints of God are gathered home,We’ll tell the story how we’ve overcome,For we’ll understand it better by and by.

  She hadn’t overcome anything. She didn’t understand anything. She couldn’t remember when her life was bright sunshine. Her head ached from the weight of somber skies and the noise of howling tempests.

  Florie’s parents sat on the other side of Andrew, belting out the hymn. They were so happy he was home from college, their firstborn, his first yea
r away. He brought them so much more joy than she did. Everything came easily to him. He had a social life at college. A summer job. He never had to worry about gaining weight. He never dropped tennis balls and watched his friends die chasing them into the road.

  She bet he’d be able to make sense of Becky’s tree rite. He probably understood what death was like, how what had been could suddenly no longer be. She was sure he believed in heaven, and if he lost a friend, he would be able to sleep comfortably at night knowing that his friend was lounging on a cloud, plucking the strings of a harp, wearing wings glossy like mother-of-pearl and a halo shimmering as if studded with diamonds.

  Things made sense to him. They added up. No wonder he wanted to be an accountant.

  We’ll understand it better by and by.

  Florie sang the hymn along with the congregation and prayed, prayed as hard and as deep as she could, that by and by she would understand it.

  Eventually the service ended and her family left the church, squinting and blinking like moles in the bright Sunday morning outside. Just beyond the front steps, parishioners gravitated to Andrew. He was hardly even a part of Wheatley—he’d lived in the town only a year before leaving for college—yet everyone wanted to greet him, to ask how his first year at Vanderbilt had been, how he liked living among all those Southerners.

  Andrew chatted affably with them, smiled with practiced bashfulness at a few girls who flirted with him, and all in all acted as if he himself had handed out communion. Florie, who attended Wheatley High School, and sang in the chorus, and took piano lessons from Mrs. Griffin on Hobart Street, and attended church here every week, was more or less ignored. Was she invisible? Or was she being shunned because people could sense that she’d been chanting poetry about April and planting grass seeds beneath the tree on Baker’s Hill Road while a Jewish candle burned?

  Or did they want to avoid her because it was her clumsiness that had caused April to die?

  She hated Andrew. She hated the world. She hated Becky and Elyse because they got things that she didn’t get. She hated feeling so unmoored, so afraid. So alone.

  She hated living her life on the verge of tears. She hated T. S. Eliot, she hated The Waste Land, and she hated the fact that she had to write an essay about the poem for English class tomorrow. She’d jotted some notes yesterday, but honestly, she had no idea what the poem was trying to say. And every time she read the first line—“April is the cruelest month”—she started to cry.

  It took forever for her parents to extricate Andrew from his adoring fans. As the three of them strolled ahead of Florie to the car in the parking lot, she caught glimpses of her parents’ proud smiles. They never smiled that way about her.

  Andrew took up too much space in the backseat. Not that he was big, but he’d been away at college for the past nine months, and she’d grown used to having the whole seat to herself. Sitting in the back with him, her father behind the wheel and her mother gossiping blithely about people from church, made Florie feel five years old again. When they were young, Andrew would plot ways to torment her while their father drove in silence and their mother babbled, both parents unaware that Andrew was repeatedly poking Florie’s arm with his index finger or licking a cough drop and then sticking it into her hair and pretending it was an accident. She never tattled on him, because tattling always backfired.

  There was nothing to tattle about now. He wasn’t poking her or gluing cough drops to her hair. He was simply sitting beside her, his left leg extended into her space, his crisp aftershave filling the air so she was forced to breathe him in.

  She wanted to text Becky, but using her cell phone in the car with her family would not go over well. Andrew would read her text over her shoulder and report the messages to her parents. Her father would lecture her on how rude it was to text in the company of others, as if being stuck in a car with her family was a social occasion. Her mother would comment that texting so soon after leaving church might undermine her spiritual reflection. As if listening to her mother gossip was spiritual.

  Florie turned to stare out the window. Beyond the glass, Wheatley rushed by, a blur of houses and trees and parked cars glistening in the sunlight. Each of those houses cradled a life, she thought. Each one contained at least one person. Did those people feel as isolated as she did? As confused? As afraid of what death actually meant, as filled with dread by the concept of no longer being?

  She was the first one out of the car once her father pulled into the driveway. She took a moment to savor the smell of the outdoor air, warm with the fragrance of mulch and lawns, a huge improvement over Andrew’s aftershave.

  As soon as her father unlocked the front door of the house, she raced inside and up the stairs, eager to change out of her dress—lots of girls wore pants to church, some even wore jeans, but her mother made her wear a dress to show respect for God and the minister—and into shorts and a polo shirt. Enclosed in her bedroom, she flopped onto the bed and sent Becky a text about needing help with The Waste Land.

  A few minutes after she sent her text, her cell buzzed. She kept it on vibrate most of the time to draw less attention to the fact that she got so few calls. Flipping the phone open, she said, “Hello?”

  “Hey,” Becky greeted her. “What’s up?”

  “This stupid essay we have to write? About The Waste Land?” Florie heard hairline cracks in her voice. Just saying the poem’s title caused a sob to crowd her throat. “I don’t know what the poem means. I don’t know what to write. I don’t want to fail English—”

  “You’re not going to fail English,” Becky said. As if sensing Florie’s doubt, she added, “It’s too close to the end of the school year. You’ve been doing fine all semester, right? Schenk isn’t going to fail you. He’s probably not even going to read our essays.”

  “He’ll read them,” Florie argued, trying not to whine. “He’ll read them and flunk me. I don’t know what to do. I wrote all these notes . . . ” She crossed to her desk, wishing it was neater. If she were one of those compulsively tidy girls whose papers and notebooks sat in perfectly aligned stacks on her desk, and her pencils had even points, and she remembered to throw away pens when they ran out of ink, instead of tossing them on her desk and forgetting they were dry until she grabbed one to scribble a note and it wouldn’t write, maybe she would be happier. Or at least less fearful.

  “What do you think the poem is about?” Becky asked.

  “I don’t know. Death?” These days, everything seemed to be about death to her.

  “Death,” Becky confirmed. “That’s what it’s about.”

  Florie’s heart thudded a frantic rhythm. “I can’t do this. I can’t write an essay about death.”

  “It’s just a poem, Florie. Okay?”

  Florie swallowed. She couldn’t bear to have her best friend in Wheatley grow impatient with her. She swallowed again when she heard another voice in the background: Elyse. Her best friend’s best friend. “What does she want?” Elyse was asking.

  Her words directed away from the phone, Becky informed Elyse, “She needs help with The Waste Land.” To Florie she said, “The first part is titled ‘Burial of the Dead.’ It’s about how the seasons wax and wane, right? Things flower and then they die. That’s why April is the cruelest month—because things are coming to life and then they’re going to die.”

  Florie flopped into the chair by her desk, grabbed a pen that fortunately had some ink in it, and jotted notes on a wrinkled notice reminding students to settle their late-book accounts with the library before the end of the school year.

  “Okay, so the first section is about death,” Becky said. “The second section is about sex.”

  “It is?” Why hadn’t Florie been able to figure that out? Probably because she’d never even kissed a guy. She had a textbook knowledge of sex, but the poetry of it escaped her.

  �
�And the lack of fertility. Just go through the poem line by line. You’ll see it. All these people being betrayed by their bodies. Everything that’s supposed to bring life brings death instead.”

  “So . . . what’s the last part? That shantih, shantih, shantih stuff.”

  “The peace that passeth understanding,” Becky said.

  “Is that death, too?” Could death be peace? It certainly passeth understanding.

  “Maybe,” Becky said after a minute.

  “Maybe not?”

  “If you think it means death, that’s what you should write. Schenk will love it.”

  Florie sighed. If only she had Becky’s confidence. If only she had her brilliance. “How do we know that death means peace?”

  “Well, we’re alive, so we don’t know,” Becky pointed out logically. “But when someone dies, people say ‘Requiescat in pace,’ right? Rest in peace.”

  “What if death is exhausting? What if your body gets peace and your soul has to, I don’t know, run laps every day? Or do math puzzles?”

  “If my soul gets to do math puzzles after I die,” Becky said with a laugh, “I’ll know I’m in heaven.”

  Florie forced herself to laugh, too. “I’ll know I’m in heaven if I never have to write a stupid English essay again,” she said. “Thanks, Becky. I appreciate the help.”

  “No problem. I’ll see you tomorrow.”

  Florie said good-bye and folded her phone shut. She wanted a smart phone, with a touch screen and a hundred apps. She wanted a smart brain that could figure things out. She wanted faith that God would never let death be an end, a nothingness. She wanted the wisdom to know April was still conscious in some way, and aware of how much her friends loved and missed her. The thought of April just not being, of her having slipped into never, was too . . .

  Cruel. T. S. Eliot might like to write about cruelty, but Florie couldn’t believe God would be that cruel. She couldn’t let herself believe that.