The April Tree

by Judith Arnold

  Into the warren of narrow roads beyond Harvard Street, passing one six-story brick building and another until he found his own. Up the stairs, his head starting to throb again, a pause on the landing for another medicinal dose of vodka, and then he reached his apartment and let himself in.

  Abrasive hip-hop pounded from Dale’s room—Dale was an asshole, but he’d supplied the apartment with a fifty-inch flat-screen TV, so Mark and Aston tolerated him—and the air carried traces of that morning’s microwaved bacon and last night’s weed. Mark accepted responsibility for the latter but not the former. Bacon was too taxing on his digestive system after a night of doping.

  He closed the door, twisted the three deadbolts—it might be a student neighborhood, but it wasn’t an overly safe one—and continued into the living room.

  And froze when he saw her sitting on the couch.

  A small, graceful headphone arched across the top of her skull, ending in puffy pads that covered her ears like high-tech ear muffs. A wire snaked down into her oversized purse where, no doubt, she had an MP3 player stashed. A laptop sat open on her knees and her eyes—her dark, pretty eyes—were focused on the screen.

  He shrank back a step. What the hell was she doing here?

  Why did she have to be the most beautiful girl he’d ever encountered?

  Why did she have to be the best friend of the girl he’d killed?

  She obviously hadn’t heard him enter, what with the headset, but his movement must have alerted her, because she lifted her gaze and smiled. “Hi,” she said, gently releasing her ears from the headset.

  What the hell are you doing here? “Hi,” he managed.

  “Your roommate let me in.”

  “Oh.” Oh? That was the best he could do? He cleared his throat. “Look. The other night—”

  “—Was the other night,” she said simply. “Today is today. I’m starving. Are we going to eat here, or should we go out?”

  Elyse. He’d been wrecked Saturday night, and talking to her had wrecked him further, but he remembered her name. He remembered her smell. He remembered the softness of her body snuggled against his in his bed, and his inability to feel even the faintest stirrings of a hard-on with her. Not because she didn’t turn him on; shit, she was gorgeous, sexy, everything a guy could want. But he couldn’t, wouldn’t, didn’t want her because of who she was: one of those three girls with tennis racquets huddled underneath a tree on Baker’s Hill Road five years ago, trembling and weeping because he’d killed their friend.

  Elyse knew things about him his own friends didn’t know. Things he’d never told Remy or Aston or his parents. Things he’d never tell his brother, things his sister-in-law had tried unsuccessfully to pry out of him because, for some reason, she seemed to care about him. Things oceans of liquor couldn’t wash away, things kilos of grass couldn’t burn to ash.

  She knew that no matter what a police report said, no matter what the witness statements provided by her and the other two girls claimed, no matter what the facts indicated, the truth was that he was a killer.

  “We probably have some food here,” he said. He wouldn’t be getting his paycheck until the end of the week, and he wasn’t sure he had enough cash on hand to take her out for dinner. She was a classy girl. She’d expect to go to one of the upscale neighborhood restaurants, not one of the grungy ones.

  Because he worked at a supermarket, he got a discount on the food he bought there, which had proven a lot more useful than any discount the carpet store had offered its employees. He might not be able to take Elyse out in style, but there was always food in the fridge, and it was his, not Aston’s or Dale’s. If she was hungry, he could feed her.

  Too bad he was such a lousy cook. Half the time, he ate what he brought back from the store cold. Vegetables, sliced deli meats, tubs of ice cream. Wash it down with enough booze and who cared what it tasted like?

  This was not a strategy he could suggest to Elyse.

  He opened the refrigerator and stared at its contents as its icy interior air flattened against his face. Would any of this make more sense to him if he hadn’t had a few sips on the way home? Would the fact that Elyse, a girl who’d been there that day, was currently leaning against the small, Formica-topped table in the corner of his kitchen, her arms folded over her breasts and her hair rippling around her face, make sense? Hadn’t Officer Romano once told him that God had his reasons for doing things?

  Maybe God had planted Elyse’s sweet, round ass against the edge of the kitchen table. Maybe he had his reasons for bringing her into his life.

  Sure. Blame God. Blame God for the fact he was halfway to drunk and wished he could get the rest of the way there.

  “If you want, I’ll fix something,” she said, pushing away from the table and sidling up next to him. “Which of this food is yours?”

  For the next half hour, she went at it, boiling water, tossing in the contents of an open box of whole-wheat pasta she found in the back of one of the cabinets—that might not have been his, but Aston and Dale would never notice—mincing garlic and dicing tomatoes, sautéing them in olive oil, adding a can of tuna. She asked if he had any white wine, and he offered to run down to Harvard Avenue to pick up a bottle. She told him to buy a bottle of red, too. “White for the sauce, red to drink.”

  Yes. Red to drink. He charged down the stairs, jogged through the winding streets to the nearest liquor store, bought one white and two reds and plucked an airplane-dose bottle of gin from a display by the cash register. The miniature bottle of gin was empty by the time he returned to his building. He tossed it into the Dumpster, briefly regretted not having any breath mints with him, then shrugged and climbed back upstairs to his apartment.

  “What’s she making?” Aston asked as Mark strode through the living room to the kitchen. Aston stood in the middle of the room, thin and eager, his hair straighter than Remy’s and fanning out from his scalp in wispy spikes. “It smells heavenly,” he added dramatically.

  One of the problems of living with an aspiring actor was that everything he said sounded like a line from a script. He also dressed as if he was always in costume. Today he had on a Hawaiian shirt, the fabric flocked with neon-hued palm trees and parrots and flowers garish enough to hurt Mark’s eyes. It was October, too cold for Hawaiian shirts.

  “No idea,” Mark said. Not inviting Aston to join them for dinner was rude, but what the hell. This was a date, sort of. Maybe by the time they were done eating, she’d want to spend a night in his bed again. Maybe if she did, something might happen. “You mind eating in the living room?”

  Aston took the hint. “I was just going to heat up a pizza,” he said, looking more crestfallen than the occasion warranted. “I can eat that anywhere.”

  “So long as it’s not where she and I are eating,” Mark said before continuing on into the kitchen.

  She stood at the counter, rinsing salad fixings in the sink, floppy green leaves of romaine, a bright orange stalk of carrot, half a tomato as red as a ruby. Her salad was going to be as colorful as Aston’s shirt. Fragrant steam drifted up from a pot on the cramped stove. Ordinarily, Mark wouldn’t have noticed the stains on its enamel surface, the mysterious brown rivulets, the glints of grease. Maybe he and his roommates ought to put some effort into cleaning the place. But who had time to clean? It took all his energy just to put one foot in front of the other. He had to graduate this year. He had to earn three more credits. Merely thinking about what he had to accomplish made him wish he’d bought a second shot-bottle of gin.

  Instead, he opened two bottles of wine, the white for her recipe and one of the reds for drinking. He poked around in the cabinets but didn’t find any stemware. He hoped she wouldn’t mind drinking the wine out of a tumbler. Not like it was such an elegant wine, anyway.

  “You’re a good cook,” he said.

  She glanced over he
r shoulder and smiled. “You haven’t tasted it yet,” she said, then took the bottle of white from him and splashed some into the simmering pot.

  “I’ve smelled it.” He handed her a glass of red wine, then took a gulp from his own glass. “Smells great.”

  She resumed her work at the sink, tearing the rinsed romaine leaves into a bowl. Where had she found that bowl? He’d never seen it before. “My parents went through a bunch of shit when I was in high school,” she told him. “They wound up getting a divorce. Neither of them paid much attention to fixing meals, so I figured, either I learn how to cook or my sister and I would starve.”

  “You’re a good sister,” he said.

  She laughed. “You’d have to ask my sister about that. She’d probably admit I was an okay cook and hedge her bets on anything else.” She shook her hands dry, took a sip of wine, and reached for a knife to slice the tomato. “All I ever wanted to be was a good friend,” she said.

  And the girl she was a good friend to had died, he thought. The red wine was cheap, leaving a coat of bitter on his tongue. He drank some more, anyway. It was his fault that Elyse could not be the good friend she’d wanted to be. His fault.

  He should have bought more wine.

  They didn’t talk again until she carried two plates of pasta and the salad bowl to the tiny table against the wall. He hastily cleared it ahead of her, gathering the piles of fliers and take-out Chinese menus that had accumulated there, addressed to “resident” and abandoned since no one by that name lived in the apartment.

  “We’ll need silverware and napkins,” she reminded him, and he wondered if either of his roommates had any napkins he could filch. He opened a few drawers, then quit searching and tore two squares of paper towel from the roll near the sink.

  “Sorry there isn’t room for a candle,” he apologized, waiting until she’d sat down before lowering himself onto the chair facing her.

  “Are you even allowed to burn candles in these apartments?” She glanced around. A smoke detector clung to the ceiling near the stove, but a smoke detector wouldn’t put out a fire. Another thing he ought to buy, along with napkins, was a fire extinguisher. He’d lived here five years and never thought to buy one.

  Like he cared if the place went up in smoke. Like that would actually matter.

  “So tell me, Mark—what’s your problem?” she asked.

  Jesus. Did she think cooking for him gave her license to poke around his psyche? “Who says I have a problem?”

  “You drink too much,” she said, then took a sip from her own hefty tumbler of wine.

  He tasted the pasta. Yeah, she was a good cook. If she was going to give him shit about drinking, though, she wouldn’t qualify as a good friend.

  Not that they were friends or anything.

  “You majoring in psych?” he asked.

  “No. You are,” she said, as if she thought he needed to be reminded.

  “Okay. So my problem is, let’s see.” His problem was that he didn’t care if a candle ignited the apartment and burned the place to cinders. But he didn’t think he ought to share that with her. “OCD,” he said. “Cyclothymia, borderline personality disorder, and obviously anorexia.” He punctuated the statement by shoveling a heaping forkful of food into his mouth. Damn, it was good. All that garlic, the salty flakes of tuna, the dry whisper of wine. He devoured another enthusiastic forkful and smiled.

  “You don’t smile enough,” she told him.

  “I just smiled.”

  “If that’s your idea of a smile, you need work.”

  He nodded. “Fine. I need work. That’s my problem.” He drank some wine, then asked, “Did you come here to give me a hard time?”

  “Maybe.” She ate more delicately, but she clearly didn’t have anorexia, either. “You’re this very cool guy, Mark. You’re smart, you’ve got a sense of humor buried inside there somewhere, you’re hot . . . but you never smile. You wrap yourself in darkness.”

  He decided not to argue with her about his relative hotness. He didn’t work out, he cared as much about his apparel as he did about setting the apartment on fire, and his hair looked as if it had been styled by Harpo Marx. “I’m wrapped in darkness. Meaning . . . what? You’re going to lead me to the light?”

  She flashed a smile at him. Even, white teeth. Kids who grew up in Wheatley were not allowed to graduate into the real world with crooked teeth. The town probably had more orthodontists per capita than any other town in America. Mark’s teeth had been wired into the proper alignment during his three years in middle school. Danny, of course, had been born with straight teeth. Danny was perfect.

  Instead of answering Mark’s question, she said, “You’re so lucky to have a full kitchen. I decided to live in a dorm this year, because I didn’t want to have to share an apartment with anyone and couldn’t afford one on my own. I had this idea of sharing a place with my friend Beck, who’s at MIT, but she wanted to live on campus so she could spend twenty-three hours a day doing her research, and I didn’t want to live across the river in Cambridge. So I wound up in a dorm with a mini-fridge and a microwave. It’s okay, but I can’t make meals like this there.”

  “It’s really good,” Mark said, unsure whether she was fishing for compliments but deciding to hook one onto her line, just in case.

  “We should have had garlic bread, too. God, I love carbs. I’m going to wind up a blimp before I’m thirty.”

  “No you won’t.”

  She shrugged. “If I do, I won’t have to worry about my mother stealing my clothes anymore. Well, I don’t have to worry about that, anyway. I emptied my closet when I left for college, and when I’m visiting, I never pack more than a couple of items. Especially things I know she wouldn’t want to wear. She is such a bitch.”

  Elyse went on, describing her bitchy mother and her bitchy mother’s toadish boyfriend, and her wimpy father, and her bratty sister who wanted to become a nun, which didn’t sound particularly bratty to Mark, although as a nominal Jew he wasn’t really qualified to have an opinion on nuns. He liked listening to Elyse talk. She had a soft, slightly fuzzy voice, like the skin of a bruised peach. Like her own skin, maybe. He couldn’t imagine her fat, but he couldn’t imagine her skinny, either. Just the way she was, solid and round. He imagined the full weight of her breasts in his hands, shifting and filling his palms like water balloons, and felt his dick twitch. But nothing in his head. Nothing but No, not her. Not now.

  He refilled his tumbler with wine. Getting drunk would either liberate his brain so he could do the naked tango with her, or it would make him pass out, in which case sex would be out of the question.

  He was not the most sensitive guy in the world, but he was picking up vibes from her: I-will-yammer-nonstop-and-then-you-can-screw-me-silly vibes. He’d met women before who seemed to think any guy willing to listen to them babble for a while deserved some sweaty sack time as a reward. Some guys faked listening, but he was a better man than that. He actually tried to listen. Enough liquor and words began to melt into an undifferentiated blob, but he tried.

  Elyse clearly had issues with her mother. Even without all those psych courses he’d dragged his ass through, he would have been able to reach that conclusion. Then again, he’d never met a girl his own age who didn’t have issues with her mother.

  Last time he’d seen Tracy, at a family barbecue his uncle had hosted that he’d been unable to get out of, she’d gone on at length about her mother’s passive-aggressive behavior. Danny had repeatedly interjected that the woman was a municipal court judge, and therefore pretty damned wonderful, and Tracy had ended up ignoring him and pouring her heart out to Mark. She’d been wearing a white cotton blouse trimmed with lace, and her arms had looked as slender and graceful as a ballerina’s, and he’d spent the night wondering why the hell she’d married Danny, who was passive-aggressive without the p
assive. Asshole-aggressive, that was Danny. Assive-aggressive.

  Apparently, Elyse’s mother used to steal Elyse’s clothing and wear it to her assignations with her boyfriend, back when she was still married to Elyse’s father. Even as the wine, added to the hard stuff he’d drunk earlier, began to numb the edges of his brain, Mark could see why Elyse considered her mother a bitch. “I mean, why would she do that? She’d borrow one of my shirts. And I’d think, ick, what if there are drips of his cum on it?” She shuddered.

  “Maybe she was trying to hang onto her youth,” Mark said, relieved and even a bit proud that he could come up with such a smart analysis. “Having a boyfriend and wearing your clothes—she probably wanted to pretend she was back in high school and had her whole life ahead of her.”

  “I don’t know why anyone would want to pretend they were back in high school,” Elyse remarked dryly. “Those were the worst years of my life.”

  Sure they were. Her best friend had died. How much worse could it get?

  EVENTUALLY THEY wound up in his bed. Clothed, more or less. She’d unbuttoned his flannel shirt so she could stroke his chest, which she seemed to think was something special, and she’d stripped down to her underwear. The bikini panties and bra matched, navy blue with lacy trim, like a skimpy, filmy swimsuit. Her breasts looked even sexier in the bra than he’d imagined them feeling, but other than kissing her, he couldn’t rev his body up to do what she clearly wanted it to do.

  Everything was heading in one direction: her hair spilling against his cheek and throat, her fingers tracing figure eights over his rib cage, one lush, bare knee wedged between his thighs. But . . . nothing. Not her, not now.

  She didn’t seem terribly upset about it. She wasn’t pushing. Just nestling against him, her curves molding to his hollows and angles. Stroking, occasionally dropping a whispery kiss onto his chin or his shoulder. “Tell me about your first time,” she said.