The April Tree

by Judith Arnold

  He wasn’t a good person. Was it a mother’s job to lie?

  Even with his grandparents present to dilute the gathering, Thanksgiving dinner was wretched. The food was delicious, except for his mother’s too-sweet cranberry sauce, and the wine, something white and as cold as the beer he’d drunk earlier, went down without any effort. His grandparents were as ecstatic about becoming great-grandparents as his parents were about becoming grandparents. Except for one snide comment from Danny about Mark’s taking longer to earn his bachelor’s degree than Danny had taken to earn both his undergraduate and law degrees, no one thought to ask Mark how things were going in Boston.

  Which was a blessing, since what could Mark say, other than that they were going well? Apparently uncles could lie as easily as mothers.

  After dinner, everyone lingered over pumpkin pie and apple cake and coffee. Mark didn’t want any coffee—it might sober him up—and he didn’t want to listen as the family debated names for the baby and discussed Tracy’s plans for decorating the nursery. A Winnie-the-Pooh motif seemed to be in the lead, although Danny thought a Harry Potter theme might be better. “It will scare the baby,” Tracy argued, and Danny retorted that the world was an ugly place and children needed to develop their special powers as early as possible.

  Mark excused himself, claiming he had some schoolwork to take care of—another lie, but no one called him on it—and detoured to the kitchen, ostensibly to carry his dishes to the sink, but also to snag a bottle of something, anything, from the liquor stash in the cabinet beside the refrigerator. He grabbed a bottle without bothering to look at the label until he’d shut himself up inside his bedroom. Rum, probably from the Caribbean cruise his parents had taken last February. They weren’t big rum drinkers. They wouldn’t miss this bottle.

  “TIME TO unplug you.” The nurse bustled in, brisk and unsmiling, dressed in white pants, a V-neck shirt with faded flowers printed across the fabric, and white sneakers. Sneakers. As if she was in training to run a 5-K race.

  He didn’t like her outfit. He didn’t like her face, which was thin and harsh, like a greyhound’s. He didn’t like the glint of judgment in her narrow eyes, the disapproval. Fuck you, he wanted to say. I didn’t ask to be brought here. Someone brought me because I was sick. Who the fuck are you to disapprove of sick people?

  Not that he felt sick, other than the headache, the upset stomach, and the profound disorientation warping his brain. He didn’t remember coming here, wasn’t sure how he’d wound up in a hospital bed with a tube snaking up his arm. He remembered drinking some rum, maybe a lot of rum. Maybe a whole bottle. He remembered thinking it was sweeter than his mother’s cranberry sauce, thinking it was sweet enough to choke him, except that he’d started throwing up. Maybe he was pregnant.

  No. Just drunk. Drunk enough that someone had brought him to the hospital.

  “Can I go home?” he asked. His lips felt like balsa wood, brittle and splintery.

  The nurse slid the IV needle out of his forearm and taped a square of gauze over the bead of blood that appeared in its wake. Her lips were pursed. Condemnation had a scent, he realized. It smelled like antiseptic.

  “Yes,” she said. “You’ll have to sign some papers, and then you can go home. Change into your street clothes. I’ll inform the social worker that you’re ready to be released.”

  Was there no doctor involved in all this? A nurse and a social worker. A couple of B-listers.

  The nurse left the room. He noticed a clear plastic trash bag resting on the chair next to his bed, then recognized one of his sneakers through the plastic. Shit. No doctors, and they stuffed his clothes into a trash bag. Next time, he’d check himself into a luxury hotel instead of this crap outfit.

  He got dressed and tried without success to tear off the plastic bracelets clipped around his left wrist—a white one identifying him as Gottlieb, Mark, a yellow one claiming he was a “Fall Risk.” Yeah, it was November, the heart of fall. Definitely a risky season.

  Finally a social worker entered the room. If the nurse was a greyhound, the social worker was one of those fluffy canine breeds whose owners clipped ribbons into the fur between their ears. She fluttered and yipped and gave him an earnest lecture on twelve-step programs and the value of counseling. He wondered whether scratching her belly would shut her up.

  He signed papers. He was left-handed, and the wristbands rustled against his skin as he scribbled his signature on the social worker’s forms. She handed him a few brochures about substance abuse and healthy living, and he was polite enough to wait until she’d departed from the room before he tossed them into the garbage pail.

  The greyhound nurse returned to the room pushing a wheelchair. “No way,” he muttered, edging around the wheelchair and out of the room.

  “Mr. Gottlieb?” She chased after him, one of the wheels on the chair squeaking with each revolution. He heard her, then saw Danny emerging from a small sitting area down the hall. Even in jeans and a leather bomber jacket, Danny looked like a fashion model. His hair was neat, his moc-style shoes making it clear that, jacket notwithstanding, he had not just torn into town on a Harley.

  The contempt in Danny’s gaze was so strong, it stung like an astringent splashed onto a raw wound. Poor Danny, stuck with a brother who thought nothing of chugging an entire bottle of rum in one sitting—and would do it again right now if only another bottle of rum did him the kindness of materializing. All Danny said was, “Mom and Dad are downstairs. They went to get some coffee.”

  “How long have you been here?”

  “Not the whole night,” Danny said, his voice scalpel-sharp. “I dropped you off and went home to sleep. Mom and Dad insisted that I bring them with me today.”

  Mark assumed from this information that he’d never been in any real danger. He might be a staggering disappointment to his parents, a source of relentless heartache, but they wouldn’t have gone home if he’d been hovering near death. “I could have slept this off at home, too,” he said. He’d slept off benders before. Nothing to it. You hurl, you go to bed, you wake up, you pop a few Excedrin.

  “Tracy was worried about you,” Danny told him as, ignoring the nurse with the wheelchair, they strode down the hall to the elevator. “And in her condition, I don’t like to alarm her. So I brought you here.”

  Tracy was worried about you.

  Evidently Danny wasn’t. His parents, who knew? They might have been alarmed, or they might have simply shrugged and thought about how little nachus their younger son gave them.

  “She didn’t have to worry,” Mark said. “I’m fine.” The elevator was large enough to transport a chamber orchestra downstairs. He and Danny had the entire thing to themselves.

  The elevator opened into a lobby, chilly with linoleum and pastel yellow walls and a wide glass sliding door that opened onto a pale gray morning. Mark immediately located his parents seated near a snack stand, holding lidded paper cups and monitoring the elevator bank. They rose, smiling cautiously, as soon as they spotted Mark and Danny. Would they take a bite out of him? Ground him for life? Fret in silence?

  He started toward them, then faltered as he noticed a trio of young women gathered near the door. He recognized Elyse at once, her dark, wavy hair, her funky vest and chic boots. Then he recognized the other two, even though he’d never met them. He’d seen them before, hovering just as they were hovering now. Only then, five years ago, clad in shorts and T-shirts and carrying tennis racquets, they’d been hovering around the motionless body of their friend at the foot of a tree blooming with burnt-red leaves.

  April Walden’s friends.

  No shorts and T-shirts today. Like Elyse, they were dressed for the blustery late-autumn weather. The tall one had on a long skirt and a puffy jacket that reminded him of the Marshmallow Man in the Ghostbuster movies. The skinny one had a scarf wrapped thickly around her neck. She resembled
a turtle with blond hair.

  “Mark, sweetie, how are you?” His mother started toward him, arms outstretched.

  He forced himself to smile at her, but his attention returned to Elyse and her friends, the witnesses. The sharers. The girls who knew what he’d done, who’d seen it.

  The squeeze of his mother’s hug forced a response from him. “I’m fine,” he said, just as he’d told Danny upstairs. No need to mention his headache and his ragged digestive system. Over his mother’s shoulder, he observed the girls stirring, turning, peering at him. Elyse fluttered her fingers in a faint wave.

  What was she doing here? How had she found him? In a fucking hospital, no less.

  “Really, I’m okay,” he insisted, returning his mother’s hug in the hope that she’d release him.

  “You did a stupid thing,” his father said.

  Mark had done a lot of stupid things. He could spend a few hours listing them. Instead, he watched the girls edging closer, three pairs of eyes zeroed in on him, assessing him.

  “Um . . . ” He gently extricated himself from his mother’s embrace. “Those girls over there—”

  “Let’s go home,” his mother said, half to him and half to his father. “Tracy is there all by herself. We shouldn’t be leaving her alone in her condition.”

  “Her condition is fine,” Danny snapped. Not exactly the doting husband-slash-father-to-be, Mark thought. Why on earth did Tracy stay with him? What did she see in him, besides the fact that he was handsome and brash and earning thousands of bucks an hour plus bonuses, and he had active, viable sperm?

  “Still, we should go home. I’ve got leftover turkey, some stuffing, pie, lots of cranberry sauce. We can have a second Thanksgiving dinner from all the leftovers.”

  The thought of his mother’s cranberry sauce made Mark’s stomach lurch. The girls kept approaching, and he took a step toward them. “I think—uh—I have to . . . ” He took another step.

  “Who are these people?” Danny asked.

  “I don’t know,” his mother said. “They just showed up a few minutes ago.”

  “I’m Mark’s friend Elyse,” Elyse introduced herself, extending her right hand toward Mark’s mother. “We can bring him home.”

  “Mark?” Ignoring Elyse’s outstretched hand, his mother eyed him quizzically.

  He stared at Elyse, at all of the girls, three faces, three fates, April Walden’s three sisters. Three people who seemingly emerged from that black, black day in better shape than he.

  Of course they had. They hadn’t killed anyone. None of it had been their fault.

  It had been his fault, all his. Yet they were here, gathering him in, accepting him even though he was a sick, stupid drunk who spent too much time on a Brighton rooftop, looking down. For reasons he couldn’t begin to fathom, they wanted him to be with them.

  “They’ll bring me home,” he said.

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  BECKY SAT IN the back with Florie, leaving the front passenger seat for Mark, ostensibly because he was tall and long-legged and would be more comfortable there, but mostly because he was Elyse’s . . . whatever. Buddy. Boyfriend. Person she wanted to screw. Person she wanted to save.

  Next to Becky, Florie sat with her mittened hands pressed together and her head bowed. Praying again. Jesus, Becky thought, then suppressed a wry laugh at the irony. What should an atheist mutter when she’s irritated by the sanctimonious behavior of a good Christian? Allah? Buddha?

  The pregnant woman at Mark’s house had declined to reveal which hospital he’d been taken to. All she’d told them, as they’d stood on the fancy stone porch, was that he was okay, his medical crisis was under control, and he’d be home by that afternoon. Elyse had concluded that they would find him at the local community hospital, not at Mass General or Beth-Israel, or one of the other Harvard-affiliated hospitals in the city, where people went when they had life-threatening conditions.

  Becky had no particular interest in visiting a stranger—a stranger who’d accidentally killed April with his car five years ago—in a hospital, but Elyse was on a mission. And Florie, either persuaded or cowed by Elyse’s certainty, didn’t raise a protest. So off to the community hospital they’d driven.

  That Mark showed up in the hospital’s main lobby within minutes of their arrival had been a sign, according to Elyse. “Amazing how we just walked into the hospital maybe five minutes before you stepped out of the elevator,” she was babbling as she steered her father’s car back toward Wheatley. “Definitely a sign that we were meant to find you there.”

  “Why weren’t you in a wheelchair?” Becky asked. Florie lifted her head from her prayerful hands long enough to peer quizzically at Becky, as if she didn’t believe anyone had the right to question hospital protocol. Becky ignored her. “I thought hospitals always made patients leave in a wheelchair, even if they’re able to walk.”

  “I didn’t want the wheelchair,” he said tersely.

  Becky couldn’t tell if he was relieved or annoyed that the three of them had rescued him from his family. His parents had seemed normal enough—concerned but not panicked, as preoccupied by their take-out cups of coffee as by their son. And the guy who’d exited the elevator with him—his brother, Becky guessed from the resemblance—had appeared more aggravated than worried.

  From her angle in the backseat, she could see only a sliver of Mark’s face, mostly his left jaw and cheek, which were hidden beneath a stubble of beard. He sat face forward, his attention on the street beyond the windshield, so she couldn’t read his expression. But she’d bet good money his cover story about why he’d been hospitalized—food poisoning—was a lie. His parents and brother had looked perfectly healthy, as had the pregnant lady at his house. If they’d all eaten the same Thanksgiving dinner, it wouldn’t make sense for only one of them to have been stricken.

  So he’d been rushed to the hospital for some other reason. Overdose? A gash sustained while carving the turkey? Too much booze? Elyse had mentioned that he drank a lot.

  “Where are you taking me?” he asked Elyse. His voice remained in the front seat, as if Becky and Florie weren’t even in the car.

  “To the tree, right?” Elyse’s eyes met Becky’s in the rear-view mirror.

  “I think we should go to church,” Florie said tentatively.

  “He’s Jewish, Florie,” Elyse responded, not bothering to filter her exasperation from her voice. Florie turned to Becky. “I just think . . . I mean, we’ve already been to the tree today. I think we need Jesus to join us in spirit. God, I mean,” she added to prove how ecumenical she was.

  “Can’t we access the spirit of Jesus at the tree?” Elyse asked.

  “Well, no, because in a church, Jesus is already there. It’s his house. His home.”

  “I’m no expert,” Becky argued, “and I assume you are—” what with all the praying and wearing a long, archaic skirt like a mother superior or some throwback Mormon bride “—but I’ve always heard that Jesus was plugged in all over. Think of all those kids in classrooms before a test, praying and crossing themselves. Don’t you think Jesus hears their prayers?”

  “He hears them better in a church. He wants his followers to go to church.”

  “Who the hell are these people?” Mark asked Elyse.

  She laughed. “My best friends. Shut up.”

  “And we’re going to a tree?”

  “Not just any tree. You’ll see.”

  He saw. They reached Baker’s Hill Road, followed its curving contours, ascended its slope, and Becky sensed the tension gathering in Mark’s shoulders. “What the fuck?” he muttered, just loud enough for the words to reach the backseat. Florie flinched and started praying again. “Elyse. I don’t want to be here.”

  “This is our special place,” she told him, easing up on the gas at the top of the
hill and letting the car roll off the asphalt until it bumped to a halt where she’d parked it earlier that morning. “This is where we worship.” She shot Florie a lethal look. Florie kept praying, her lips moving in a silent litany.

  “I’m not getting out of the car,” he said. “This is . . . shit.”

  “This is not shit,” Elyse retorted. She took a deep breath and spoke more calmly. “This is the place. This is where we were wounded, and where we start to heal. Right, Beck?”

  Becky might not be an expert about Jesus, but she was apparently the expert when it came to the tree. “This is where we worship,” she said.

  Next to her, Florie flinched again, as if she’d said fuck. “I don’t worship here,” she whispered.

  Becky almost retorted, Then don’t come here. Go home. But that would have been so Elyse-like. Becky was the one who insisted they had to be there together, all three of them. All four of them, now that Mark was a part of this. She could visit the tree alone, and often did, and she could feel April’s presence when she touched the tree and chanted the rhymes. She could feel April’s presence when she chanted the rhymes while seated at her desk overlooking the Charles in Cambridge, or walking across campus, or even when Emerson was on top of her, pretending her enjoyment was as important to him as his own while she pretended to be enjoying him. April was everywhere, because April was inside her.

  But if church was Jesus’s house, the tree was April’s house. And now they would be there together, and maybe Mark would feel it, and then he’d change in whatever way Elyse wanted him to change so they could have sex.

  He was feeling something now, but it wasn’t good. He sat rigid in his seat as Elyse shut off the engine and shoved her door open. With a sigh of resignation, Florie climbed out of the car, too, leaving Becky alone with him for a minute. “Get out,” she instructed him.