“April isn’t here,” Florie said, sounding more assertive than she usually did. “April is in heaven.”
“How do you know this isn’t heaven?” Elyse asked, gesturing toward the tree.
The candle flickered and sent another ribbon of dark smoke up into the air. “Stop arguing,” Becky ordered them, tired of their squabbling. “Let’s stay focused. Do we want to meet Mark or don’t we?”
“We have to meet him,” Elyse said. “I mean, you have to meet him. I already know him and can’t get through to him. We have to do this together. We have to help him to forgive himself.”
As if Becky could do that when she hadn’t even forgiven herself. How was she going to convince a stranger? A stranger who’d been behind the wheel, who’d felt the impact of April’s body on his car. How do you forgive yourself after that thud, the shudder of the chassis, the splintering of the windshield?
“God is about forgiveness,” Florie said.
“Then let’s go.” Suddenly Elyse and Florie were allies. They both turned to Becky as if awaiting her consent. “We don’t have to meet him here. We can see him at his house. Maybe we can bring him here later, depending on how it goes.”
“Or we can bring him to church,” Florie suggested, sounding far cheerier than she had a minute ago.
“I think he’s Jewish,” Elyse said. “He’s not going to go to church.”
“Maybe he will. Jesus was Jewish, too,” Florie noted.
Oh, wonderful, Becky thought. We’ll teach him forgiveness and convert him at the same time. Hallelujah. “So, we’re agreed? We’re going to his house now?”
“I have his parents’ address,” Elyse said. “And my dad’s car. We may as well.”
“No time like the present,” Florie chirped.
With a sigh, Becky bent over, cupped her hand around the glass rim of the candle, and blew. The flame twitched and died. “April, April died in May,” she whispered into the scent of wax and smoke. “Please make this be okay. I love you, April.”
They piled into Elyse’s father’s car. Florie instinctively knew to take the backseat, even though she was bigger than Becky and the backseat offered less leg room. Elyse started the engine and eased off the shoulder of the road, cranking a U-turn. The car coasted down the hill, toward the high school, toward the heart of town.
“My father said he wanted a GPS for Christmas,” Elyse said, squinting slightly in the gray late-morning light. “Like I’m supposed to have enough money to buy him one. Right? I can barely afford to eat.”
“Tell him to pack up his Thanksgiving leftovers for you to take back to school,” Becky suggested. “Did he actually make a second Thanksgiving dinner?”
“Pre-packaged sliced turkey on rye bread,” Elyse told her. “After the feast my mother served us three hours earlier, I could barely eat one sandwich. Katie ate two. She’s put on the freshman twenty and shows no sign of stopping.”
A murmur drifted forward from the backseat. Becky twisted to peer over her shoulder. She saw Florie, her mittened hands pressed together, palm to palm, her head bowed, her lips moving in a hushed recitation. Whatever she was praying, it didn’t sound anything like Apra apra dida may.
As they drove past the high school, Becky thought the building looked smaller, somehow. Her first year of college, she’d gone back to the high school during her winter break to see a couple of teachers, but the visit had been awkward. Her calculus teacher had paraded her in front of the class and announced that she was now at MIT, and if they all worked as hard as Becky had, they could go to MIT, too. Becky didn’t want to be anyone’s role model. Besides, she hadn’t worked that hard; calculus had come easily to her. And who knew if any of them would go to MIT, if any of them would get accepted, if any of them would even want to go there. It was an intense place, lacking the ivy-and-brick charm of so many other colleges and universities. Why should her old math teacher be promising them something they might not get and might not want? And holding her up as some sort of ideal?
She’d hoped to say hello to her physics teacher as well, but his lab had been empty and she hadn’t felt like stalking him to the faculty lounge. So she’d said good-bye to Wheatley High School, walked out of the building, and never entered it again.
Now it looked dark and desolate, a one-building ghost town. The windows were black, the lot empty, the American flag limp on its pole at the center of the bus circle. Becky realized with a pang that she hated the place. Other students might have had fun there. She’d been in mourning most of the time she’d attended high school.
Past the school, past the playing fields, past that ramshackle hut . . . what was it called? The Snack Shack. For people who couldn’t get through a football game without stuffing their faces. In all the time she’d spent at that school, she had never bought so much as a stick of gum at the Snack Shack.
Further, toward the town green, then west, then off the main road into a neighborhood of artfully curving streets, precisely planted trees, ornamental shrubs, and decorative stone walls that started and stopped, creating terraces and property lines, causing the sprawling lawns to stutter. The houses were huge, adorned with pompous, pillared entries, Palladian windows, bay windows, staggered rooflines, and circular driveways. It was all quite impressive, if you were the type to be impressed by ostentatious houses.
Elyse didn’t need a GPS to find her way through the meandering roads. She must have memorized a map. Or maybe in high school she’d slept with someone from this neighborhood. Becky couldn’t think of anyone they’d known in school who’d lived here.
A few twists and turns later, Elyse turned onto a driveway that arched across the lawn in front of a sprawling house with a fieldstone façade and a broad, paneled front door flanked by beveled sidelights.
They emerged from the car, walked up the bluestone front walk, and gathered on the matching bluestone porch. “Are you sure he’s here?” Florie asked.
“Where else would he be?” Elyse asked. “It’s Thanksgiving weekend. He told me he’s spending the holiday with his family.” She reached past Florie and pressed the doorbell. Through the glass, they heard bells chime, as resonant as a carillon in a Renaissance cathedral.
Less than ten seconds after the final chime had faded to silence, the door opened. A young woman stood in the marble-floored entry. Clad in denim jeans and a loose-fitting sweater, she had flyaway blond hair and a narrow face. Her body was thin everywhere except for her abdomen, which swelled like half-inflated basketball. “Yes?”
“We’re here to see Mark,” Elyse said.
“Oh.” The woman seemed to shrink back a step. “He’s . . . not here.”
“He said he’d be here,” Elyse insisted.
“I’m sorry. He’s not.”
Elyse dug into the pocket of her vest and pulled out her cell phone. “I’ll call him,” she said, her voice clipped, determined, daring the woman to stop her.
“No.” The woman’s shoulders slumped. “Don’t call him. He’s in the hospital.”
Chapter Twenty-Eight
THE WORLD around him blurred, as if someone had poured baby oil into his eyes. His stomach hurt. His throat hurt. An IV tube dripped fluid into his arm. His skull was playing host to an army of jackhammers.
He wanted a drink.
Shit. How had he wound up here?
Thanksgiving. That was how.
Elyse had wanted to travel to Wheatley for the holiday break with him. If she’d owned a car, he might have accepted a ride from her. Fortunately, she didn’t own a car, so he could avoid that temptation. Riding to Wheatley with her would have prompted too many questions from his parents when she dropped him off: “Who is she? Are you seeing her?”
Of course he was seeing her—at least he was when his vision was clear and she was around. He saw her, and he saw his roommates, and he saw his pr
ofs, and he saw his joy juice, and he saw the rusty stains wobbling down from the window sill in his bedroom because the window sometimes leaked in the rain, and he saw the view of Brighton when he ventured up to the roof of his building and gazed out at all those other roofs, too flat to challenge the sky. Seeing a person was as simple as opening your eyes.
But he had no idea how to define his relationship with Elyse. She was gorgeous. She was friendly. She wanted him to bang her. He couldn’t bring himself to do that—not because he was physically incapable but because . . .
Because of that day five years ago on Baker’s Hill Road. Because she wanted to give him what he couldn’t accept: forgiveness, affection, pleasure. Because drinking liquor made more sense than drinking in her kindness.
It had turned out that a friend of Aston’s was driving Aston to Vermont for the long holiday weekend, and Aston had conceded that Wheatley was kind of on the way. So Mark had caught a ride with them.
As they’d idled in the pre-Thanksgiving traffic oozing out of Boston, Mark had tried to recall what he had to give thanks for. There would be good food, he knew—a feast better than anything he could prepare for himself, even with his employee discount at the supermarket. There would be his old bed, more comfortable than the crappy mattress and box spring in the apartment. There would be a washer and dryer that didn’t require money to function. There would be bottles of wine on the table, so at least during the ritual Thursday dinner, he would be able to drink without depleting his own supply of booze.
He could survive it, even if Elyse insisted on their getting together while they were both in Wheatley. He wasn’t looking forward to that . . . except that seeing Elyse, whether or not they were seeing each other, was always an esthetic treat.
He should have known Danny and Tracy would be at his parents’ house to celebrate the holiday with the family, but he’d let that possibility slip through a crack in his brain. Mr. Perfect, Esquire, and his lovely wife had spent Thanksgiving with Tracy’s family last year, and Mark had mentally deleted them from the day. They lived in a ritzy suburb of New York now, Danny an associate at a Wall Street law firm, Tracy pushing papers in a human resources department of a company that did something Mark could never remember. Manufacturing? Service? Who knew? Who gave a fuck? She wasn’t working for the money; Danny was paid an obscene salary by his firm. She worked either because she loved pushing papers and being a human resource, or because she didn’t want to be completely eclipsed by Danny’s blinding brilliance.
Mark had arrived at his parents’ house late Wednesday afternoon and, after a perfunctory exchange with his mother—“Hi, everything’s good, school’s good, smells great in here, love you”—he’d shut himself up inside his bedroom and taken a few hits from the bottle he’d stashed in his backpack. “His bedroom” was actually a misnomer. His parents hadn’t remodeled it into a study or a sewing room or whatever parents did to their children’s bedrooms once their children moved out, but it no longer felt like Mark’s space. The air was stale, the walls blank, the closet empty enough to echo. No clutter, no books on the night table, no overturned sneakers under the bed or trophies on the shelf. The sheets were too smooth, and they smelled of fabric softener.
Still, it was a bedroom. Danny’s bedroom was still a bedroom, too, and still his, because unlike Mark, he hadn’t stripped the room of his personal belongings when he’d turned twenty-one. His walls were still decorated with certificates from the Honor Society and the local Chamber of Commerce and rudimentary drawings he’d created in art classes, set in frames he’d built in industrial arts classes. The shelf above his desk glittered with awards for everything from high school forensics to Little League T-ball.
Mark had been a better athlete than Danny. He’d pitched, Danny had caught. He’d batted .350 or better every year, Danny somewhere down in the mid .200s. He’d made the varsity team in high school. Danny had wisely chosen not to try out. He’d been too busy with the debate team and all his advanced-placement classes to waste time with baseball.
His exact words: “I don’t want to waste time with that.” As if anything Mark pursued, anything he excelled in, was by definition a waste of time.
Danny and Tracy arrived at the house around noon on Thursday, and from his bedroom, where he’d been more or less hiding since his arrival the afternoon before, Mark heard the exultant cries and exuberant chatter as his parents greeted them. He dosed himself with vodka, dug through his backpack for his breath mints, and popped a few into his mouth. And promised himself that if Danny didn’t act like an asshole, Mark would be civil. Maybe even friendly. Brotherly would be a stretch, but with enough alcohol in his bloodstream, he could do friendly for a few hours.
What he wasn’t prepared for was the melon-sized bulge swelling out from Tracy’s abdomen. Sound the trumpets, cue the heavenly choir—in a matter of months, Mark’s parents would become grandparents. Once again, Danny would be bringing them unmitigated joy. “Such nachus,” Mark’s father was shouting at Tracy’s stomach as Mark descended the stairs, as if becoming a grandfather inspired the old man to reclaim his Jewish heritage.
Mark sent Tracy a bemused smile as his father gave her an awkward hug and then backed away as if afraid he might have crushed her fetus. “This little baby—” he gestured at her bulge “—is going to bring us such nachus!”
Mark’s mother was hovering in the entry, beaming brightly enough to illuminate the entire house as she regarded Danny and Tracy, this couple who had brought her so much nachus by being fruitful and multiplying. As soon as Mark joined the happy group, however, she returned to the kitchen. The scent of roasting turkey, mingled with that of her cranberry dressing, which as far as Mark knew was just a pot of cranberries and sugar simmered until they formed a cloying purple syrup, filled the two-story foyer. “Tracy, sweetheart,” she called over her shoulder as she vanished down the hall, “have a glass of milk.”
“Now that you’re here,” Mark’s father said, “I’ve got to go pick up Grandma and Grandpa. Danny, you want to keep me company?”
“Sure.”
Mark resolved not to take personally his father’s choice of companion. Maybe his father just wanted to get Danny out of the house and away from Mark for a while, which could be interpreted as a loving gesture toward his younger son.
“I’m not kidding, Tracy,” his mother hollered from the kitchen. “Come have some milk.”
Mark followed Tracy to the kitchen and plucked a bottle of beer from the refrigerator door for himself once Tracy accepted the milk his mother had poured. His mother pointed out a pile of napkins, which Tracy offered to arrange on the dining room table. Not wanting to be alone with his mother, and not knowing how to flee back to his bedroom without arousing suspicion, Mark accompanied Tracy to the dining room and tried not to stare at her abdomen.
“I love folding napkins,” Tracy announced once they were alone in the dining room. The table had already been draped with a linen cloth and set with the good china and silver, a pair of pewter candlesticks fitted with white tapers and, Mark was happy to see, wine goblets. “You can be so creative with them.” She proceeded to fold one of the napkins into a complicated shape.
Mark had never met someone who claimed to love folding napkins. He slouched against the wall near the breakfront, arms folded, beer bottle clutched, gaze veering again and again to Tracy’s pear-shaped torso. She’d always been so slim, so petite, and she still was, from the collarbones up and the crotch down. But her breasts were puffy now. Cleavage was visible in the V of her sweater.
“So, how are you doing?” she asked. Her voice hadn’t changed. It was still gentle enough to irritate the hell out of him.
“I’m okay. When did that happen?” He gestured toward her swollen belly with the neck of the beer bottle, then groaned inwardly at his utter lack of tact.
She smiled. “You can probably do the math. I’m due in early
March.”
“I mean—why didn’t anyone tell me?”
She stopped fussing with the napkin in her hand and frowned at him. “Didn’t Danny call you? Or email you? I told him to let you know you were going to be an uncle.”
Christ. He was going to be an uncle. Weren’t uncles supposed to be fun and loving and special? Weren’t they supposed to provide endless horsy rides and organize trips to the beach or the amusement park? Weren’t they supposed to introduce the kid to the more amusing vices—bubble gum, firecrackers, pot? And bail them out behind their parents’ backs when they got in trouble?
If he was going to be even a mediocre uncle, Mark would have to get his shit together. And the odds of his doing that were pretty dismal.
“So,” he asked, desperate not to dwell his own shortcomings, “are you still working?”
Tracy nodded and resumed her craftsmanship with the napkins. “I’m planning to quit after New Year’s. I guess I’m supposed to say I’m just taking a maternity leave, but I can’t imagine going back to work after the baby is born.” She sighed, wistful. “At least not for a couple of years.”
“At which time you’ll probably be pregnant again,” Mark pointed out, thinking his prediction would make her smile.
It didn’t. “It’s not as if we need my income,” she said. “Danny’s very big on the whole breadwinner thing.”
“Quite the caveman, isn’t he.” Mark took a swig of beer. “How are you feeling?”
“Fine, other than throwing up every day.”
Just like me, Mark wanted to joke. Actually, he didn’t puke that often, considering how much he drank.
“A little nausea is a small price to pay for the joy of having a baby,” she continued. “I can’t wait to be a mother.”
Mark considered making a snide remark about how she could be a mother to Danny, who was pretty immature in his own arrogant way. But then he thought about how she always treated him as if he was in need of mothering, reassuring him, telling him not to pay attention to Danny’s snarkiness and sarcasm, reminding him that he was a good person, as if she’d memorized a few books on building self-esteem in children who suffered from chronic self-loathing.
The April Tree Page 22
