The April Tree

by Judith Arnold

  “I don’t remember it.” If he exerted himself, he’d probably remember aspects of the experience. He remembered enough of it to know it wasn’t worth remembering. Freshman year of college. A party. Everyone shit-faced. Some girl. Whatever.

  “How can you not remember it?”

  “I was drunk.”

  “That I can believe.” She sketched a lazy line down to the waistband of his jeans and then back up. “My first time was in high school,” she told him.

  “You little slut,” he teased.

  “Yeah, right.” She snorted. “It was very deliberate. April had died a virgin, so I decided I better lose my virginity, just in case I died suddenly, too. I didn’t want to die a virgin.”

  He wasn’t sure he ought to feel guilty for killing April before she’d been popped, but he did. Anything to do with April, he felt guilty.

  “So I propositioned this guy. Tommy. I didn’t have a boyfriend, but I thought he’d do. It was a symbolic choice. April had had a crush on him, and I was kind of doing this for April.”

  He wanted to argue that she was doing it for herself . . . but he didn’t want to argue at all. Since he couldn’t give her a good, solid ride, he could give her his attention, his acceptance, his willingness to listen.

  “He was a virgin, too,” she went on. “Neither of us knew what we were doing. We had to go to his friend’s house, because his friend’s parents weren’t home and his friend lent him a key. So we were in this house neither of us knew, and we didn’t know which bedroom to use, so we just did it on the floor of the den.

  “It hurt like shit, not just because it was the first time, but because, I mean, I was so dry. He didn’t even know how to get me wet. I didn’t know. And I got rug burns all over my butt. But it was like this sacrifice to April, this ritual I was going through for her. Kind of like Beck’s poems.”

  “Beck’s poems?”

  “My friend Beck. Becky. She does this rhyming chant that’s all about April dying. Anyway, it doesn’t matter,” Elyse said, steering her monologue back to herself. “I wanted to cry, but that wasn’t part of the ritual. I felt like it was some deep, tribal thing, and I had to be stoical about it.

  “Then I bled a little on the rug, and Tommy didn’t want to help me clean it, so I had to do that myself. I used water, and the paper towels kind of dissolved into these little white dots of paper, and it took forever to get them all picked out off the nap of the rug. And he just stood there, looking panicked. I hated him, just standing there and watching me and not helping. But hating him was good. That was part of the ritual, too.”

  Mark had brought the second bottle of red wine into the bedroom, and he lifted himself off the bed enough to refill their glasses and gulp some down. He would have been happy to chug it directly from the bottle, but he owed Elyse the dignity of a glass.

  What she was telling him—he needed wine to process it. He needed more than wine, and he thought wistfully of the vodka in the bottle in his pack, and the Maker’s Mark on the shelf in his closet, and the Kahlua Aston always kept on hand because he liked his kicks to come in a sweet package.

  Elyse’s silence stretched long enough to signal that it was his turn to speak. “Sounds pretty awful,” he said. “After an experience like that, I’m surprised you didn’t join your sister in the nunnery.”

  “She’s not in a nunnery.” Elyse took a dainty sip of her wine, then stood her glass next to his on the scuffed maple nightstand he’d found on the sidewalk outside his building a couple of summers ago, left by a departing college kid who’d apparently run out of room in his U-Haul and had to leave a few pieces of furniture behind. Perhaps if Mark completed those three remaining credits next spring, he too would be a departing student, a graduate with no more need for the shabby, seedy furnishings in this dark little room in this dark little apartment.

  Although where would he go? Wherever it was, wouldn’t he need a night table there? A place where he could keep his glass an arm’s length away when he was in bed?

  “But who knows?” Elyse continued. “We both had a ghastly adolescence. I dealt with it by getting good at sex. Katie dealt with it by running the opposite way.”

  “So you’re good at sex, huh.” Mark wished he could rouse the spirit within himself to find out just how good she was.

  Abruptly she pushed away from him, swung off the bed, and reached for her sweater.

  “Where are you going?”

  “Home.”

  “You can stay.”

  “No.” She pulled the sweater over her head and then turned to face him. Her gaze drilled right through him, causing an almost physical hurt. “You’re a schmuck, Mark.”

  His mind swirled, threads of thought snarling in a gargantuan tangle. Yes, he was a schmuck, because he’d killed her friend. He was a schmuck because she’d cooked for him and stripped to her undies for him and pressed her body against his, and he hadn’t made love to her. He was a schmuck because Danny said so, and Danny was all-knowing.

  And how did she know the word schmuck? Her sister wanted to be a nun; how could she be throwing Yiddish in his face?

  “Yeah, I’m a schmuck,” he said. “I thought you knew that going in.”

  She reached for her jeans. “I could save you, if I decided you were worth the effort.”

  Save me, he thought.

  I’m past saving, he thought.

  “Not tonight, though. I’ve got to come up with a strategy.”

  Don’t waste your time.

  No! Save me!

  Her jeans on, she crossed to his desk, rummaged around near his computer and unearthed his cell phone. He fell back against the pillow and closed his eyes, listening to the beep-beep-beep as she tapped the buttons. “There,” she said. “I’ve programmed in my number.” He heard more rummaging sounds, the hiss of a zipper, the thick ripple of leather. “What’s your number?” she asked.

  He groaned. He wanted a drink. He recited his number and listened to her beep-beep-beep the buttons of her own phone.

  “Okay,” she said. “I’m leaving.”

  Maybe he should have asked her to stay. Maybe he should have begged her. Maybe he should have dropped trou and his dick would have sprung to life, and he could have given her a better experience, a better ritual, one that didn’t leave her with rug burns. He’d ready her. He’d make her wet. He’d make her come. He would clean up after her.

  Right. He couldn’t even clean up after himself. He made messes and couldn’t clean them up. His whole life was one big, uncleanable mess.

  Opening his eyes, he found himself alone in the room. She was gone.

  He lifted the wine from the night table and took a slug.

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  “I DON’T CARE if you think I’m crazy,” Elyse said. “You always think I’m crazy. I’m used to it.” She was sitting cross-legged on Becky’s bed, an open bottle of beer wedged into the nest created by her thighs, calves, and crotch. If she made a wrong move, she’d spill the beer all over Becky’s blanket, but while Elyse made a lot of wrong moves, she rarely spilled her beer.

  Becky sat in her desk chair, which she’d swiveled to face Elyse.

  Emerson occupied the floor near her chest of drawers, pieces of her bedside lamp strewn across the industrial-strength carpet in front of him. The socket where she plugged in that lamp was located behind her bed, and the bed frame had pressed into the cord long enough to wear the insulation away. It was an old, cheap lamp, shade faded and base chipped. The previous room’s tenant had left it behind; for all Becky knew, that previous tenant had inherited it from the tenant before him. It wasn’t an item anyone would want to keep after graduating and moving away.

  Now that the cord had eroded, Becky would happily toss it and buy a replacement, or help herself to one of the shabby lamps her parents had stashed in
their cellar, leftovers from the moves and deaths of assorted elderly relatives. For some reason, aged Zinns and Lundquists all viewed Becky’s parents’ cellar as the perfect storehouse for their belongings. They would move from house to condo to assisted living to nursing home, downsizing their lives with each transition and shedding a few more possessions, all of which somehow wound up in the chilly stone basement of the antique colonial in Wheatley.

  Her grandmother Zinn’s brocade sofa, pristine because she’d always kept the cushions zippered inside clear plastic that made embarrassing sounds whenever anyone sat on them. Great Aunt Ida’s ottoman, the fabric shredded by the claws of her cranky Siamese cat. A profoundly ugly spruce hutch Grandpa Lundquist claimed had been shipped to America from Norway by his own grandfather. A fainting couch, the provenance of which Becky had no idea, although she’d never known anyone on either side of her family to faint, ever. And lamps, lots of lamps, some of them still functional, most of them lacking bulbs and draped in lacy cobwebs.

  But Emerson had decided that repairing the hand-me-down lamp in Becky’s dorm room was a challenge worth rising to, and so he sat, his hair tufted, the sleeves of his flannel shirt rolled up, his eyes narrowed on the lamp lying before him like a patient undergoing surgery. Among Emerson’s tools was a scalpel he’d liberated from one of his biology labs.

  He was enjoying himself too much. Fixing a broken lamp should not be fun. Or else what he was enjoying was the opportunity to eavesdrop on Becky and Elyse as they discussed Elyse’s latest stupid obsession: Mark Gottlieb.

  Elyse was determined that Becky should meet Mark—so determined, she’d hiked across the BU Bridge to the Cambridge side of the Charles River to make her case in person, armed with a chilled six-pack. Budweiser, not Beck’s, which was fine with Becky. Imported beers were wasted on her. When she’d first learned that guys in high school were calling her Beck, she’d appreciated the beer allusion. But when she’d left for college and started drinking beer on her own, she’d discovered she couldn’t distinguish one beer from another. Emerson insisted on drinking Tsingtao whenever it was available, but put a blindfold on Becky and she’d think she was drinking Bud.

  She sipped from her bottle and shook her head. “Whether or not you’re crazy is a subject for another time,” she said. “The thing is . . . ” A deep sigh. “You know what this guy did.”

  “It wasn’t his fault,” Elyse argued. “My mother was supposed to pick us up that day. I never should have asked her. It was my fault more than his.”

  “Yeah, okay.” Becky didn’t want to revisit that afternoon, the guilt like a mudslide that had oozed around all of them and still clung, cold and filthy. “The thing is, you said this guy is all messed up.”

  “I said he was all fucked up,” Elyse corrected her, grinning.

  Becky could swear if the occasion warranted it, but cursing always seemed sloppy to her, both emotionally and linguistically. Cursing was what happened when a person didn’t have complete control over her tongue.

  “He’s tormented,” Elyse said. “He’s in pain.”

  “He drinks.”

  “Way too much,” Elyse confirmed.

  “He sounds like a loser,” Emerson said, his voice wafting up from the floor.

  “Elyse specializes in losers,” Becky told him.

  Elyse bristled. “He’s not a loser. He’s lost. He needs love.”

  “Who doesn’t?” Emerson asked.

  “Nobody’s talking to you,” Elyse snapped, then sighed. “Sorry, Emerson. You’re a nice guy. You fix lamps. This discussion has nothing to do with you.” She eyed Becky, her expression saying, Tell your asshole boyfriend to butt out.

  “If Mark Gottlieb needs love,” Becky said, “be my guest. Give him love. I don’t see why I have to be a part of it.”

  “You’re my best friend,” Elyse pointed out. “I want you to meet him. And you’re so smart. You can help me figure out how to help him.”

  “If he drinks too much, you can’t help him,” Becky said, even though she was no expert on alcoholism. She had managed to get through her entire life, including three years and two months at a pressure-cooker university where a large percentage of students got totally ripped every Saturday night, without ever having to clean up after a booze-head. But she did live on the planet earth, and she’d absorbed enough common wisdom to know that drunks had to save themselves. They could not be saved by others.

  Certainly not by Elyse Fabiano, whose idea of saving someone was to have sex with him and then move on.

  Which might be how she wanted to save Mark Gottlieb. She’d already confided to Becky that while Mark seemed attracted to Elyse, and happy to lie in bed with her, he refused to have sex with her. Was it her? Was it him? Was he impotent? Did he think she was fat? Did he have a mysterious war wound like the guy in that Hemingway novel she’d read in Modern Lit two years ago? She’d analyzed this with Becky during a phone call yesterday, a good thing since it wasn’t the sort of subject either of them would want to discuss with Emerson sprawled out on the floor just a few feet away.

  Becky couldn’t shake the suspicion that a large part of Mark’s appeal to Elyse was his refusal to have sex with her. If he just went ahead and did it, she would probably lose interest in him. Becky had mentioned this theory on the phone yesterday, but Elyse had disagreed. So much for her thinking Becky was smart and helpful.

  “If you want me to meet him,” she said, then took another sip, “Florie has to be there, too.”

  “Who’s Florie?” Emerson asked.

  Elyse gave him a sharp look, then returned her gaze to Becky, who promptly directed her attention to Emerson. He was whittling the insulation off the electrical cord, his scalpel peeling slivers of plastic that curled and dropped onto the carpet like black fingernail clippings. It was easier to look at the mess he was making than to explain to Elyse why she’d never mentioned Florie to him. Why she’d never mentioned anything about April to him.

  Emerson didn’t have to know about the accident, the tree, the candles and chants, about the peace that passeth understanding, which April might have reached but Becky still hadn’t.

  She supposed he could know about Florie, though. “She’s a friend of ours. She goes to UMass.”

  “Which means she’s not here in Boston, and she can’t meet Mark,” Elyse said pointedly.

  “Then I can’t meet him, either.” Becky didn’t care if her argument was irrational. Elyse thought she was smart. Maybe she’d buy this. “We’re all in this together.”

  “Fuck you.”

  Becky knew better than to be insulted. “Because you brought me beer, I will forgive you.” She thought for a minute, then said, “If you want me to meet him, maybe it can wait until Thanksgiving. We’ll be back home then, and so will Florie. Is Mark going to spend the holiday with his folks in Wheatley?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “I need electrical tape,” Emerson announced. “You have any, Beck?”

  “Oh, sure. I always keep a few rolls lying around,” she said, then gave him a sweet smile to dilute her sarcasm. “What’s his name, that friend of yours who’s an EE major? He might have some.”

  “Argash,” Emerson said, rising from the floor, his wiry body uncoiling like a snake charmer’s cobra. “I’ll go check with him.”

  Becky tried not to look too relieved that Emerson was leaving the room. Fixing her lamp was a favor, after all—not one she’d requested or particularly wished for, but a generous gesture nonetheless. She couldn’t let him realize how unwelcome he was.

  Once he was gone, the door shut behind him, she let out a breath. Across the room, Elyse exhaled as well, her posture softening. “What the hell is an EE major?”

  “Electrical Engineering.”

  “Oh, God. I’m in the land of nerds. Do I need to be vaccinated?” Elyse shuddered dr
amatically, drank some beer, and then gave Becky another sharp look. “He doesn’t know about Florie?”

  “He doesn’t know about April,” Becky said softly, swiftly, as if afraid he might swing through the door and discover how little he did know about his girlfriend.

  “Why not?”

  “It’s none of his business.”

  “Oh, come on, Beck. He’s your boyfriend.”

  “I just . . . ” How to explain? What Becky felt about April was too painful to share. It was too emotional. It made her irrational, fearful, given to inexplicable behaviors. When she thought about the dreadful dark of not-being that had sucked April out of her life, she stopped being Beck the Brain, the math whiz, the logical, analytical person she had always been and always wanted to be. She became someone else, clinging to inane rhymes and rituals.

  If she let Emerson in—if she let anyone in—they’d know her wounds and weaknesses. If she let anyone ever get as close to her as April had been, and that person vanished the way April had, the grief would destroy her.

  Elyse was that close because she’d been there, because the grief was as much hers as Becky’s. Florie was that close, too. Perhaps Becky wouldn’t have chosen to let Florie into her secret place of pain, but Florie was there and would always be there, and that made her as essential to Becky as Elyse was.

  Perhaps Mark was there, too. The boy who’d driven the car. The boy who’d killed April.

  Becky did not want to meet him.

  “If I were going to marry Emerson, I’d tell him,” she finally said, because Elyse was waiting for her to finish her thought. “I’m not going to marry him, ever.”

  “I thought you loved him,” Elyse said.

  Of course Elyse thought that. She was emotional, rapturous, romantic. “I don’t,” Becky said, not bothering to finish the thought: I don’t love anyone—except you and Florie and April. “He’s sweet. He doesn’t snore. He fixes lamps.” She gestured toward the ailing patient on the floor, its cord shaved bare, its lampshade set off to one side. “But that doesn’t mean I have to tell him every little secret.”