The April Tree

by Judith Arnold

  “What, is this a kidnapping? I’m your fucking hostage?”

  “Yeah, right. You can see the high stone walls and the bars on the windows. And wait till we show you our implements of torture.”

  A reluctant laugh escaped him. “You’re the MIT one, right? The genius?”

  “I go to MIT,” she confirmed. “I don’t claim to be a genius, though. We’re all just as messed up as you.”

  “I doubt that.”

  “It’s true.”

  “I was the one driving the car.”

  “I was the one who said we should walk along this road when you happened to be driving the car. Don’t be so sure you win the crown when it comes to being messed up. Anyway, it’s not a competition. Get out of the car, Mark. Touch the tree.”

  He twisted to stare at her. His eyes were dark, his brows angled. He was strikingly handsome, if your taste ran to tall, scruffy guys just released from the hospital.

  The air slapped cold against her cheeks and made her scalp cringe as she swung out of the car, dragging her pack with her. He wore only a hooded sweatshirt over his untucked flannel shirt, yet he seemed unfazed by the chill. Above the shadow of beard his complexion looked much too healthy for someone who’d allegedly suffered a severe enough bout of food poisoning to require hospitalization.

  They gathered under the tree. She pulled her candle and lighter from her pack. “We already did the candle earlier,” Florie reminded her.

  “There’s no rule that says you can only do it once a day,” she said, wedging the glass securely into the crotch of risen roots.

  Mark glanced at Elyse, who explained, “A candle is part of the ritual.”

  “One of your implements of torture?”

  Elyse appeared bewildered, but Becky laughed. “Yeah.” She ignited the wick, the flame a teardrop of heat inside the glass. “Touch the tree, Mark.”

  He reached up and tapped his hand against an overhead branch.

  “Is that right?” Florie asked, an uncharacteristically sarcastic undertone filtering through her voice. “Shouldn’t he touch the trunk?”

  Becky contemplated whether it mattered. She and Elyse and Florie touched the trunk because they couldn’t reach that branch. But when April had lain there, she’d gazed up and seen that very branch. Assuming she could have seen anything with a cracked skull and blood soaking into the crevices of her brain as if it were a sponge. “The branch is fine,” she said, then touched the trunk herself. “April, April died in May,” she intoned.

  Mark’s bewildered gaze ran a circuit from Becky to Florie to Elyse.

  “Lucky Mark is here today,” Elyse said.

  Becky glanced at Florie. “I want to go to church,” she complained.

  “That doesn’t rhyme.”

  “I’m telling you what’s in my heart. That’s what Father Joe would say—speak what’s in your heart. My heart says we should be in church.”

  “April, April died in May. That’s what Father Joe would say,” Becky quoted her. She had no idea who Father Joe was, but it didn’t matter. The words fit into the rhyme. “Say something, Mark. Say something that rhymes with ‘April, April died in May.’”

  “Why?”

  “Just do it,” Elyse urged him.

  He thought for a minute. “Rain, rain, go away.”

  A nursery rhyme. Before Becky could admonish him to come up with something better, Elyse said, “Great!” She turned to Becky. “Now what?”

  Now go screw your brains out. “Let’s just stand here for a moment. Let’s hold hands and close our eyes and think of April. Feel her forgiveness warming us like the candle.”

  Elyse took Becky’s left hand and Florie her right. The mitten was a scratchy wool, as if it had filaments of metal woven through it. Becky’s palm itched. She cracked one eye open and glanced at Mark, who held Elyse’s and Florie’s hands but kept his eyes wide, staring at her. Defiant.

  He clearly thought this was stupid. As if Becky cared what he thought. Next to him Elyse was beautiful, her face radiant, her eyelashes thick and dark against her cheeks. She could be asleep, she could be meditating, she could be in the throes of ecstasy. She had sex with every halfway decent guy she met, and she wanted to have sex with Mark, and if this did the trick, maybe she could move on with her life, even if he couldn’t. Becky was doing this for Elyse more than for him.

  Florie’s fingers felt as stiff as plywood inside her mitten. Her lips were pursed, her brows dipped into a deep frown. Whatever she was feeling, it wasn’t April’s forgiveness.

  Becky shut her own eyes, stared at the colorless dark on the insides of her lids, imagined the candle. Its warmth. April’s warmth. April came to her as she always did, here beneath the tree. April saying it was all right, an accident, she was gone, she was nothing anymore. She was the colorless dark, the zero.

  This shouldn’t have consoled Becky, but it did. If there was no heaven, no afterlife, nothing but nothing, she could accept that. All she needed was the truth. Under the tree, with April, she felt that truth.

  After about a minute, they separated, letting their arms fall to their sides. “I need a drink,” Mark said.

  “I can drive you home,” Elyse offered.

  “I can’t get a drink there.” He rolled his shoulders, as if loosening his muscles after a strenuous workout.

  “You have to drive me home,” Florie reminded her.

  “I thought you wanted to go to church,” Elyse said.

  Florie seemed momentarily flustered. “Right. That would be better than home.” She stared at Mark. “You can’t get a drink at home. I can’t pray properly at home.” Subtext: I am so much holier than you.

  He only shrugged. “What a coincidence.” To Elyse, he added, “I gotta get back to Boston. I don’t suppose you can drive me into the city?”

  “It’s my dad’s car,” she said apologetically.

  “What about me?” Florie asked plaintively.

  “All right, look.” Elyse snared Becky with a gaze that communicated her irritation with these demanding people. “I can drive you to your houses. Mark, I can drive you to the train station. Then I’ve got to return the car to my father and have a fight with my mother. I’m pretty sure that’s on the schedule. We haven’t had a fight yet today.”

  “If you can drive him to the train station, can you drive me to the bus station?” Florie asked. “I need to get back to Amherst.”

  That surprised Becky. Florie had never been the most diligent student. Anxious, fearful of getting bad grades, but not the sort who’d return to campus early during the Thanksgiving holiday. “Aren’t you going to stay with your family for the weekend?” she asked.

  “I actually—there’s a church there where I feel more comfortable,” she said. “I need to talk to Father Joe. You’ve got me praying here, saying these rhymes that aren’t part of the Bible, they don’t have anything to do with God, and I need to be there. I just . . . Jesus isn’t under this tree, Becky. I need to go back to Amherst.”

  Was Jesus hanging in western Massachusetts these days? Becky wondered. Couldn’t Florie find her god in Wheatley?

  In other circumstances, she would have asked. She would have engaged Florie in a spirited debate about where Jesus existed and why Florie couldn’t feel him here, beneath the April tree. But Florie seemed anxious and frantic, and today, after inviting Mark into their ritual, after he’d been hospitalized and they’d all spent yesterday supposedly giving thanks, did not seem an appropriate time to hike that philosophical trail. Florie’s agenda was so different from Elyse’s, which was so different from Mark’s. And Becky realized, with some sorrow, that none of their agendas was hers: to reach April, to share with her the dark of her death, to savor the paradox of her existing under this tree and in Becky’s mind even though she didn’t exist anywhere.

>   “You all go wherever you have to go,” she said. “I’ll walk home.”

  She watched as they strolled back to the car and climbed in. The crunch of their footsteps on crisp leaves and dry brown grass, the click of three car doors opening, and the clack of their closing. The groan of the car engine, the rattle of pebbles against the tires. The silence.

  Becky lowered herself to the ground and leaned back against the tree. The ground was cold, the tree hard.

  But the candle was still burning, the flame a white oval edged in gray, heat on a cold, cold day. A value imposed on the dark, dark zero.

  Chapter Thirty

  FLORIE WEPT the entire bus trip back to Amherst. She didn’t sob, she didn’t wail, but soft tears seeped steadily down her face, leaving tracks of chill on her cheeks.

  She’d lied to her parents, both by omission and by commission. Commission: she’d told them she had to return to school early to catch up on her studies. Omission: she hadn’t told them she was never returning to school.

  Lying depressed and frightened her. Jesus didn’t love liars. The Ten Commandments labeled lying a sin. But if she’d announced that she had dropped out of school, her parents might not have let her return to Amherst, and then she couldn’t take her place at Jubilee House, where she would be closer to Jesus than she’d be at home or anywhere else. Only at Jubilee would she be safe.

  Safe, she thought, letting her head roll back to rest against the textured fabric of the seat. Next to her, a bearded black man with a paunch and frayed cuffs on his jacket sleeves snored gently. In front of her was the blue faux-leather back of the next seat. To her left, the tinted glass of the window filmed the world outside in a faint, gloomy gray. The air smelled of stale urine masked beneath a too-sweet air refresher. She wished she’d been able to find a seat closer to the front of the bus, but she’d wound up at the rear, near the lavatory.

  She deserved the bad air quality. It was her punishment for lying to her parents. Breathing in the toilet miasma was her atonement; because she sat at the rear of the bus, Jesus would forgive her.

  Still, the tears kept rising in her eyes, breaching her lids and gliding down, funneling into the creases that framed her mouth and clinging to her chin until she dabbed them with a soggy tissue. She was bad, she was stupid, but Jesus would forgive her. He always did. He always would.

  She couldn’t do the tree anymore. She didn’t feel April there. She felt only Becky and Elyse—and now that man, Mark. What a mess he was. She shouldn’t judge, and considering herself superior because she was a true Christian and he wasn’t would be wrong. But he clearly needed more in his life than a tree and some silly poems. Not that she had any right to convert him, but she’d sneaked a Jubilee card into his pocket.

  The bus wheezed into the Springfield station. Beside her, the man stirred and snorted. She pulled another Jubilee card from an outer pocket of her purse. She always carried a small stack of them, three-by-two inch rectangles embossed with Father Joe’s name, the phone number and address of Jubilee House, and, illuminating the entire right side of the card, a glowing cross. It wasn’t really glowing—it was delineated in black ink, just like the name and address—but it had tiny stars and tapered lines radiating from it, like beams of light. She carefully tucked the card into a gaping pocket in the man’s jacket. He would find it later, wonder at it, maybe call Father Joe.

  Mark would find the card she’d left for him, too. Slipping that card into Mark’s pocket was probably the only worthwhile thing she had done while she’d been in Wheatley. Mark might be Jewish, he might be sick, he might have contributed to April’s death, but everyone deserved to be saved. Even him. And certainly this slumbering black man. Maybe they would both reach out to Father Joe and to Jesus. God worked in mysterious ways.

  Her seat companion was fully awake by the time the bus rolled to a stop in front of the Springfield bus station. He acknowledged her with a nod, and imagining him discovering the card in his pocket made her tears recede. She might have lied to her parents, she might have participated in Becky’s pagan ritual beneath the tree, but she’d delivered two Jubilee cards to strangers. She could return to Amherst with her head high and her eyes dry.

  FATHER JOE found her seated alone in the room known as the sanctuary. It was as close to a chapel as Jubilee had right now. In time, if they raised enough money, they would build something significant, something worthy of the Lord. But for now, Father Joe’s followers gathered for prayer in an all-purpose room adjacent to the kitchen. It had cream-colored walls, scuffed hardwood flooring, and rows of folding metal chairs all facing the simple oak cross that hung on the wall at the front of the room.

  Florie occasionally touched the cross, stroked its silky surface, and felt the power of it through her palms. It was without a doubt the finest object in the entire house, and she would consider it a privilege to be allowed to polish it. But so far, her housekeeping assignments invariably landed her in the kitchen, scrubbing the sink, scouring the stovetop, and mopping the floor.

  No one else had been in the sanctuary when she’d settled on a chair midway back. She hadn’t wanted to sit too close to the cross. That might seem too pushy.

  She had resumed crying on the bus from Springfield to Amherst, a bus much less crowded since most of the college kids would not be returning to campus until Sunday. She’d sniffled and blown her nose on the walk from the bus depot to Jubilee, feeling her nostrils chap in the cold. Once inside, she’d left her suitcase at the door to the sanctuary, found a seat, bowed her head, and prayed.

  She felt safe in this plain, clean room, safer than she’d felt anywhere since April had died. She’d never felt safe with Becky and Elyse, much as she’d yearned to, much as she’d appreciated their effort to accept her. In their case, it had been an effort. With April, no effort at all. She’d simply accepted Florie. April had recognized that Florie was new in town, and friendless, and April’s generous heart had compelled her to embrace Florie without question or hesitation. April was the most Jesus-like person Florie had ever known. And she’d died horribly, much too young, like Jesus.

  “Florence?” Father Joe’s voice reached her. “What are you doing here?”

  She lifted her head and glanced over her shoulder, watching him enter the sanctuary. She felt safe with him, too—not as safe as she’d felt with April, but more obedient, because he claimed an authority based on knowledge and scholarship and prayer, whereas April’s authority had been based only on kindness.

  “I came home early,” she said. Hearing herself refer to this place as home caused a twinge of tension in her stomach, an uprush of sensation into her throat. Not vomit—she’d eaten nothing since breakfast—but something visceral. Then it settled, and she told herself she was safe here, safe.

  “Can I help you?”

  “I need to pray.” The tears began again, and she ached to feel safe, safe, safe. She hated the uneasiness, the uncertainty.

  Becky was so sure of herself, so sure the tree was the source of understanding what had happened to them the day April died. Elyse was so sure sex and experience would make her understand. Florie wanted certainty, too. She wanted Jesus to tell her things had happened the way he’d wanted them to, they always did, and she shouldn’t have to ask why.

  “We can pray together,” Father Joe said, sitting two seats away from her in the same row, sending her a wide, toothy smile, and then bowing his head over his hands. As usual, he wore a crew-neck sweater and neatly pressed khakis. His hands were soft and white, fingernails clipped short. He smelled of a minty aftershave.

  She closed her eyes, felt the tears filter through her lashes, and begged Jesus for everything: forgiveness, reassurance, faith that April was in heaven. The end of all doubt, all questions.

  Please, God, make me feel safe.

  Chapter Thirty-One

  “BECK?” ELYSE squeezed her cell phone so
hard, she wondered why the frame didn’t crack. It just proved that plastic was stronger than she was.

  She’d always considered herself strong. She’d stood up to her mother, protected Katie as much as possible from their parents’ shit, and lived an independent life in Boston. Just last week, Elyse had informed her parents that she planned to move to Paris after graduation.

  Why Paris? they’d demanded to know. She’d babbled about the museums, about how she would be able to perfect her French. She was sure she’d be able to support herself somehow—modeling for art students, waitressing, hooking up with some rich guy if necessary.

  She could have told her parents the truth: that she wanted to go to Paris because April had died without ever going to Paris. But that was none of their business. What did they care about April, anyway? It was their fault she was dead. Elyse’s mother’s, mostly, but also her father’s because, if he’d been a better man, less whiny, less self-pitying, more daring and dashing, her mother wouldn’t have spent every afternoon with The Toad instead of doing what she’d promised to do, like picking Elyse and her friends up at the tennis court that god-awful Saturday afternoon.

  So yes, Elyse was strong. But not strong enough to talk Mark out of going up to the roof of his building.

  She’d arrived at his apartment after her last class of the day, planning to fix dinner for the two of them. He liked when she cooked for him, and she liked concocting feasts with the ingredients he had waiting for her, raw materials he’d purchased with his employee discount at the supermarket, meats and produce and starches he trusted her to convert into something delicious. Like a collagist, she would combine whatever she found in his fridge and cabinets into a creative meal.

  His two idiot roommates would come sniffing around like hungry street dogs, and sometimes if there were leftovers, Mark would share with them. But the dinners were for Mark and her, their own special bonding.