The April Tree

by Judith Arnold

  She rummaged through the clutter on her desk until she found her English literature anthology. She thumbed it open to The Waste Land—unlike the hymnal at church, she didn’t have to riffle through the pages to find the right one. She’d read the poem so many times, the book automatically opened to that page.

  April is the cruelest month, she read, then located a blank sheet of paper and wrote across the top: The Waste Land as a Meditation on Death.

  Chapter Sixteen

  “I WANT A house on the beach,” Remy said as he steered his clunker of a car through the Sunday traffic on 128. “I don’t know how I could ever afford one, though. I’m not cut out for law school, or business school. Not enough talent to become a rock star. Even if my parents move on to the afterlife, they’ve got no money to leave me, and whatever they do leave I’ll have to share with Aston. So how am I gonna get a house like that?”

  Mark leaned back in the passenger seat and tried to stretch his legs. The seat didn’t move back—something broken in the mechanism—and his knees didn’t want to be bent. His whole body felt restless, cramped, tender in spots where the sun had seared his skin. “Win the lottery,” he suggested.

  “Yeah. What are the odds of that?”

  “Marry money.”

  Remy laughed. “I think I’ve got a better chance of winning the lottery.”

  The highway was clogged with cars returning from beaches as the weekend faded away. The sun hung low in the sky ahead of them. Behind his sunglasses, Mark closed his eyes against the glare. And thought about Lynnette.

  What the hell had that been about? They’d screwed, returned to the house, and acted as if nothing had happened in that musty, dusty loft above the garage. She’d drunk wine, he’d drunk beer, and the more he’d consumed, the less she’d looked like Tracy or April Walden or any woman he’d ever known. After a while, she hadn’t even looked like herself. She’d been a blank, a thin, wispy chick laughing with other guests, kibitzing over a poker game that sprang to life in the dining room at around midnight, not even saying good-night to him before he and she had wandered off in different directions, searching for places to crash.

  As he’d lain in his sleeping bag on a lumpy couch in the living room, hearing the murmurs and footsteps of other people moving around the house, mostly quiet, but every now and then erupting in the sort of laughter that comes from being shit-face stoned in the wee hours, he’d begun to wonder if he’d just dreamed Lynnette. Had she been a figment of his imagination? A fiction? An angel descended from heaven to give him a cheap thrill?

  He’d awakened on Sunday aching and hung over. The people sharing the house with him had been a blur. One girl had looked like Lynnette, until he realized her hair was too dark. Another had looked like her, too, except she was too tall. He’d grabbed a towel and stalked through the long, stringy grass to the beach, where he’d dozed and gotten sunburned and prayed for the queasy tension in his gut to subside.

  If Lynnette had still been at the house when he’d finally abandoned the beach, hours later, he hadn’t seen her. But he’d found a business card tucked into an outer pocket of his knapsack. It said, “Smile. Jesus Loves You.”

  Mark highly doubted that Jesus harbored any feelings for him, one way or another. He was nominally Jewish—or at least he’d been Jewish long enough to undergo a bar mitzvah and deposit a nice chunk of gift money into his bank account. Since that occasion, the only times he’d been inside a synagogue had been for friends’ bar mitzvahs—one a month on average throughout most of middle school—and his cousin Sarah’s wedding a couple of years ago. He supposed he’d enter a synagogue for Danny’s wedding, too, assuming Danny deigned to invite him.

  Even if Danny didn’t want Mark there, Tracy would. So would his parents, if only because it would be too embarrassing not to have their younger son present to witness their older son’s marriage.

  Jesus had no reason to love Mark. And if Jesus did love him, the Son of God had better accept that his love was unrequited.

  Still, Mark knew Lynnette had left that card. Who else would have?

  Weird. Just plain weird. It made him queasy all over again.

  Yet he’d kept the card. He’d tucked it into his wallet—so he’d remember it was there, he told himself. So it wouldn’t suddenly appear and freak him out the next time he used his knapsack, which might not be for weeks. Once he got home, he could discard it. Or save it as a souvenir, a memento of the weekend he’d spent at a house that he, like Remy, couldn’t even afford to dream of owning.

  The drive back to their apartment in Brighton took a half hour longer than it should have, thanks to the traffic. Although Remy had grown up in rural Vermont, he’d driven in Boston long enough to have adapted the native fashion of recklessness behind the wheel. Mark found Remy’s weaving, aggressive turns, horn-pounding, and gleeful defiance of traffic signals and other vehicles oddly comforting. He maneuvered the car into a parking space an inch too short for it, and they entered the grimy brick building and climbed the stairs to their apartment.

  As expected, it was too hot, the single AC unit in the living room window rattling and wheezing and failing to spew cold air more than a few feet beyond its dust-caked vents. The apartment smelled of fried onions and dirty socks. Chattering voices drifted out from the tiny kitchen, and when Mark squeezed into the room he found not just six people—roommates and neighbors—but two cases of beer.

  If he’d thought about it, he’d be appalled at how much liquor he’d consumed in the past two days, how much he’d consumed in the past few weeks. But he’d learned that thinking about things was not a useful activity, so he shut down his brain and grabbed a beer.

  Hours later, the apartment was quiet. He unrolled his sleeping bag onto the futon, which was a marginal improvement over the couch he’d slept on at the beach house. Remy and his other roommates had retired to their bedrooms, the visiting neighbors and friends had departed, and Mark lay atop his sleeping bag and listened to the asthmatic gasps of the air conditioner. He was still cramped and restless, still buzzed and hung over and wondering why Lynnette had chosen him of all people to spread her legs for. Why she’d left him that card about Jesus. Why anything in the world happened the way it did.

  Unable to sleep, he tugged on a pair of shorts and wandered through the kitchen to the fire escape. The Brighton neighborhood was filled with old brick apartment buildings, virtually all of them occupied by packs of students. They used the fire escapes as terraces.

  Tonight, he used the fire escape as a stairway to the roof of the six-story building. The roof was asphalt, slightly gummy from the day’s heat. The only view it offered was of other buildings, other roofs, Harvard Street in the distance still humming with traffic, pedestrians weaving from club to club, even on a Sunday night.

  He narrowed his focus from the neighborhood to the sidewalk below the building. It didn’t seem that far down, but he knew it was far enough. A person could fall, jump, simply lean over the railing. Careless, oops, dead.

  Smile. Jesus Loves You.

  He didn’t smile. He didn’t believe Jesus loved him any more than he believed Lynnette loved him. He stared down at the sidewalk and wondered what a person thought as he fell. What entered his mind the instant before the concrete slammed into his body and shattered it? What was the last thing a person could know?

  What was the last thing April Walden knew before he’d killed her? What was her last thought as her body bounced off his car, her last sensation as she slammed into the ground, her last hope as the stillness of death settled over her like a blanket?

  Did she see her salvation? Glimpse heaven? Feel pain? Feel nothing, nothing, nothingness? Did Jesus love her? Did she smile?

  The air was steamy. Clouds drifted across the purple night, pale ripples straining the sky.

  He could just lean too far. It would be easy. Nothingness was so tempt
ing.

  No. He didn’t deserve death. He hadn’t earned that release.

  So he simply sat, breathed in the sour city atmosphere, and told himself all he had to do was get through tomorrow. That was all, one small goal. Load rolls of carpeting. One day.

  Nothingness could wait.

  Chapter Seventeen

  THEY SAT UNDER the tree, the three of them. They’d already touched the trunk and chanted their poems, and now they sprawled in the shade of the wine-colored leaves, a glass-enclosed candle wedged between two knobs of root. This candle was citronella, the glass tinted yellow and shaped like a bowl. Becky had hoped its pungent smoke would keep the blackflies away, but it was doing a pretty lousy job of that.

  April, April died in May.

  Left the world a shade of gray.

  The sky was, in fact, an intense, cloudless blue. The sun was a westward-drifting ball of white, its radiance snagging on the chrome trim of Elyse’s and Florie’s bicycles. Elyse had moved back to her own home yesterday, after spending a week at the Zinn house. She’d phoned Becky three times last night while Becky was babysitting for the Carpello kids. Fortunately, they’d been so captivated by a DVD of Monsters, Inc. that they hadn’t even noticed her leaving the family room for the kitchen to talk to Elyse.

  “I think my mother’s scared of me,” Elyse had confided.

  “That’s good, isn’t it?”

  “I think so.”

  An hour later: “Katie saved me a slice of her birthday cake. I think she was saving it for herself, but after I gave her the earrings I bought her, she decided to give me the piece.”

  “Was it good?”

  “It was chocolate,” Elyse said, which Becky took to mean it was good. “It had a balloon on it. An icing balloon.”

  “I’m glad Katie liked the earrings.”

  “She still has no idea what’s going on with my mother. She just turned twelve. I hate for her to have to know what a bitch her mother is, especially right around her birthday. Maybe I’ll tell her next year.”

  “Maybe by next year she’ll have figured it out for herself,” Becky had pointed out.

  And later yet, after the movie had ended and Becky had tucked the kids into bed: “My father still hasn’t said a word to me. I think he’s pissed at me for forcing things into the open. Now he can’t pretend it’s not happening.”

  “As long as you’re all right,” Becky had said. “As long as no one is hitting you.”

  “If they do, I’m heading right back to your house.”

  “Absolutely.”

  But no one had hit Elyse since her return home. She would have told Becky if they had. Not just told her; Elyse would have moved in with Becky, filled out change-of-address forms, and alerted the school that Becky’s parents were now her legal guardians. Elyse had changed from angry and bitter to fierce. A smart change, Becky thought. Angry and bitter drained a person of energy without making her feel any better.

  None of the grass seeds Becky had planted at the foot of the tree had sprouted. She didn’t know if it was too soon for them to have germinated, or if she hadn’t planted them the right way, or if she hadn’t given them enough water, or if the dense canopy of the red maple’s leaves blocked out too much sun. Most Wheatley homeowners hired professional landscapers to tend to their lawns, and while her own parents did most of their own yard work, they were haphazard about it. Her mother liked to say their front yard had the feel of a meadow, which Becky took to mean it looked unkempt and weedy. But even if her mother had known how to plant and care for a lawn, Becky wouldn’t have asked her for advice.

  Her parents didn’t know about her rituals beneath the April tree, and she preferred to leave them out of it. This was hers, hers and Elyse’s and Florie’s. And April’s. If Becky’s parents found out about it, they wouldn’t condemn her, but they’d ask her what the point was—they worshiped at the altar of rationality—and Becky couldn’t answer that. She wasn’t even sure there was a point. When it came to certain rituals, having a point was beside the point.

  Today she’d brought a packet of flower seeds with her. It had appeared in the Zinn mailbox yesterday, stapled to a business card advertising a house-cleaning service. What dusting and vacuuming had to do with flowers Becky didn’t know, but she’d asked her mother if she could donate the seeds to a garden at school and her mother had said yes. The picture on the envelope showed a vivid, multicolored array of blossoms. If they sprouted beneath the tree, they would look beautiful. If they didn’t, the seeds would be just one more thing she’d planted around the tree’s roots, like the grass seed and the cigarette butts and a small, gold charm shaped like a heart that Grandma Zinn had given her when she’d been about five. Just a charm, no bracelet, no chain, and Becky was not a heart-type girl, so she’d never worn it.

  But hearts symbolized love, and she loved April. So she’d buried it beneath the gnarled roots, the day Elyse had moved back to her own house. Becky had come here alone, dug a hole beneath a burly knot on one of the roots, and recited, April, April, died in May . . . My heart I give you, s’il vous plais.

  Unlike the heart charm, the seeds were public—or they would be, if they sprouted. As soon as she’d lit the candle and recited some April, April poems, she’d strewn the seeds around on the parched ground. She’d doused them with water from the bottle she’d tucked into her backpack, and then, because the afternoon was hot and humid, she, Elyse, and Florie had sprawled out in the tree’s shade.

  “Am I a bad person because I don’t want my brother home from college for the summer?” Florie asked. “I’m serious. Does that make me bad?”

  “Is your brother cute?” Elyse asked. She lay on her back, one arm thrown dramatically across her eyes.

  “No,” Florie said. “I don’t know. I guess some girls might say he is.”

  “Don’t even think about it,” Becky warned Elyse. Dating Florie’s brother would be practically incestuous, and also weird.

  “Having an older brother is better than having a younger sister,” Elyse argued.

  “I think Becky is the lucky one,” Florie argued back. “She doesn’t have to deal with any brothers or sisters.”

  “I have two sisters,” Becky said. “You two.” She hesitated for a moment, then added quietly, “I used to have three.”

  They sat in silence for a few long seconds, thinking about the sister they’d lost. “God, it’s hot,” Elyse finally said. “I need my sunglasses.”

  “We’re in the shade,” Florie said.

  Elyse pushed herself to sit and gave Florie a withering look. “Even the shade is too hot.”

  “Sunglasses aren’t going to make you feel cooler,” Florie argued.

  Becky grinned. Florie and Elyse bickered like sisters.

  Elyse stretched to grab her backpack and dragged it closer to her. When she unzipped one of the compartments, her sunglasses fell out. So did a small square packet. At first Becky thought it might be more flower seeds—had the cleaning service left a business card in Elyse’s mail box, too? Except the seed packet Becky brought with her had been rectangular, and it had had a picture of colorful flowers on it. The packet that had fallen out of Elyse’s pack was a condom.

  Before Elyse could grab it and stuff it back into her pack, Becky snatched it. “Oh, God,” she muttered.

  “What is that?” Florie asked, wide-eyed.

  “None of your business.” Elyse extended her hand toward Becky, palm up, expectant.

  “Where did you get this?” Becky asked.

  “Give it to me.”

  “What is it?” Florie asked again. She could be so unbearably dense sometimes.

  “Did you actually go into the drug store and buy it?”

  “Of course not. I got it in the school nurse’s office. It’s a condom,” she said, glaring at Florie. Becky
could feel the annoyance in Elyse’s eyes right through the tinted lenses of her sunglasses, directed first at Florie and then at Becky. “Unused,” she said.

  “So far.”

  “A condom?” Florie seemed flabbergasted. “The school nurse gave that to you? You’re a girl. What do you need that for?”

  “The same reason a boy would need it,” Elyse said dryly. Becky released the packet into Elyse’s hand, and she tucked the condom back into the side pocket of her pack and zipped it shut.

  “I really wish you’d forget that whole idea,” Becky said.

  “What idea?” Florie asked.

  Becky felt sorry for Florie, not knowing what Becky and Elyse were talking about. But it wasn’t Becky’s information to share. If Elyse wanted Florie to know her crackpot notion about losing her virginity before she died—as if death swarmed close like the bloodthirsty blackflies buzzing in circles around them beneath the tree—it was up to Elyse to tell Florie.

  “It’s not about me,” Elyse declared. “It’s about April. I’m doing this for her.”

  “She wouldn’t want you to do it.”

  “Do what?” Florie asked.

  Becky sent Elyse a sharp look, which she hoped Elyse would interpret as: tell Florie already, so we don’t have to listen to her asking and asking and asking.

  Elyse didn’t tell Florie, so Becky pressed her. “Honestly, Elyse, think about it. If April were here right now, would she tell you to go through with this?”

  “She is here right now, in a way,” Elyse argued. “And yes, she’d be telling me to do all the important things in life before I die. All the stuff she never had a chance to do.”

  “There are lots of other things you could do that she didn’t do. Go to Paris. Get a college degree. Learn to drive.”

  “I’ll learn to drive next year—assuming I don’t die first,” Elyse said. “And I’ll get a college degree if I live long enough. I’d love to go to Paris. But I can’t afford that.”