The April Tree

by Judith Arnold

  “I went to the meeting,” he said.

  Becky cracked a narrow smile and nodded. “And you survived.”

  “I sure could use a drink, though,” he said. At her frown, he added, “Joke.” Then, “I’m starving. Is there someplace I can get some food around here?”

  They didn’t talk much as Becky led him a few blocks to an aggressively modern building, its façade jumbled and angled so weirdly the structure looked as if the architect had been drunk when he’d designed it, or perhaps as if the building itself was drunk, staggering and twisting and missing a shoe. “What is this place?” he asked apprehensively.

  “The Strata Center. The Artificial Intelligence lab is here. Also, a café.”

  The café was thick with the aroma of pizza and coffee and toasted bread, scents that warmed a person as effectively as a radiator. Mark ordered a burger for himself and insisted on paying for Becky’s lentil soup. The coffee here smelled so much better than the sludge he’d sipped at the meeting, he bought a large cup for himself. Becky chose green tea.

  Gazing at her tray once they were seated at a table near an oddly angled window, he wondered if she was some kind of hippie. Did anyone besides vegetarians eat lentils?

  She didn’t seem flaky, though. In fact, she seemed less flaky than Elyse, who could cook like a gourmet chef but seemed more determined to collect experiences than to savor them. Sometimes when he was with her, he couldn’t escape the notion that he was just one of her experiences. Yet she cooked so well, and she was so easy on the eyes, and unlike Becky, she never pushed him to change his life. The only thing she pressured him about was sex.

  He liked sex. He liked the idea of it especially now, when he wasn’t so hammered he had to worry about whether he could get it up. Not that Becky was his type. Her face was too severe, her body too angular. Humping her would be like lying on a bed of twigs, all hard, knotty surfaces.

  “So,” she said, “how was the meeting?”

  He shrugged and took an eager bite from his burger. Grease dripped out the opposite side of the bun. He didn’t care. Hot meat, spongy roll, and sweet ketchup were the prime ingredients of nirvana, as far as he was concerned.

  “Do you think you’d do better with another group?” she asked. “This isn’t the only group that doesn’t meet in a church.”

  “I don’t need meetings. I’m not an alcoholic.”

  She eyed him skeptically.

  “Yeah, I tossed my cookies on you. That wasn’t cool, and I’m sorry. I was having a bad day.”

  “A bad day is when your computer freezes and you have to reboot it. A bad day isn’t when you climb onto the roof of your apartment building and lean over the edge.”

  Then maybe all those days he’d climbed onto the roof and leaned over the edge hadn’t been bad days. He’d often assumed they were just normal days. Normal for him. After a person had thoroughly ruined his life—and ended another person’s life—maybe it was normal to wish everything else would end. Nothing bad about it.

  Yet sitting in the brightly lit café with Becky, in the crooked, lopsided building where geniuses like her stretched their brains like rubber bands so they could wrap around ever bigger ideas, he didn’t want to end everything. He wanted . . .

  This hamburger.

  Food, light, warmth. A quasi-stranger giving Mark a card—a card that didn’t advertise Jesus—and assuring him he could call whenever he wanted.

  A walk across the river on a day when the sky was icy blue and the sun icy white.

  A stern blond chick who might take him back to the tree and teach him how to find peace there. The kind of peace that came not from leaning too far over the edge of the roof, but from these simple things. Food. Light. Warmth.

  Maybe it wasn’t too much to want.

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  ELYSE SAT cross-legged on her bed, her portfolio from her life drawing class open before her, and a generously filled glass of wine in her hand. Once she was in Paris, she would drink wine only from real wine glasses, not a plastic cup with three Greek letters printed in bright blue on the curved surface, a souvenir from a frat party she no longer remembered. And cheap wine in Paris would taste much better than cheap wine in Boston. This stuff had a sour undertaste and a finish of metal.

  She’d just returned from her end-of-the-semester review with her drawing professor. “Good work,” Professor Balfour had said, “but I notice something odd here. All your portraits are of the same person.”

  “No they’re not,” Elyse had argued. She’d worked especially hard on her portraits, doing quick charcoal sketches of passersby in the Public Garden or at her favorite breakfast place, more formal drawings of models in class, pastels of anyone willing to sit for her.

  The portraits in her portfolio captured a variety of people: an elderly man basking in the autumn sunlight on a bench. A young mother pushing a high-end stroller toward Newbury Street. Becky’s boyfriend Emerson seated on the floor of Becky’s room one afternoon, his back against the wall and his skinny legs extended before him. She recalled that he’d been grooving on a really bad song he’d punched up on Becky’s computer, an alt-punk band that did not seem particularly respectful of such trivial elements as pitch and tempo, and she’d drawn Emerson transported by that ghastly song, his mouth relaxed into a slack smile, his eyes focused on something beyond Elyse and Becky. He’d loved the drawing, and Elyse had promised to give it to him once she’d gotten her portfolio evaluated.

  “Look at the eyes, Elyse,” Balfour had said, a thread of steel weaving through her voice. She was an odd woman who sported a butch crew cut and favored elaborate, dangly earrings, shapeless colorful dresses, and clunky brown shoes. Elyse couldn’t read her and didn’t really want to. All she wanted was a good grade, and maybe the names of some art people Balfour might know in France whom Elyse could contact when she got there.

  She swept her hand across one drawing and then another. “The eyes, Elyse. Look closely. You’ll see it.”

  Now back in her dorm room, Elyse took another sip of wine, leaned forward over her knees, and studied one drawing and then another, spread across the quilt her mother had bought her in a fit of forced maternal attentiveness the summer after Elyse had finished high school. The Toad had already moved into the house by then. Elyse had scarcely been talking to her mother. But damn it, they were going to go college shopping together and have a mother-daughter bonding experience.

  Elyse hated the quilt, hated the coordinated sheets and pillow cases, hated every freaking thing she and her mother had purchased for the room. But she’d preferred spending her mother’s money to spending her own on this shit. That over the past three and a half years the bedding had been stained by spilled wine, ink, splattered paint, and semen suited Elyse just fine.

  The subjects of her drawings were different people, she concluded. The old guy, the woman, the Asian-American MIT nerd, the girl who lived across the hall, the girl from Mass College of Art who’d modeled naked in their class, just as Elyse modeled naked in Mass College of Art classes—and Elyse’s body was definitely better than that of the model she’d drawn, she thought with satisfaction—they were all different.

  Except . . .

  She saw it then. The eyes.

  Shit.

  They all had April’s eyes.

  A small gasp escaped her, and she splashed a little wine over the rim of the Delta Kappa cup. Fortunately, it landed on the blanket and not on any of her drawings.

  Eyes were hard to draw, detailed and delicate. The merest line or shading, the curl of a lash or the white dot of reflected light on a dark iris could alter the entire picture. The old guy she’d drawn in the park had had sagging lids, and Emerson had narrow, taut lids, and the shape of his eyes was completely different from the shape of the young mother’s eyes, or the model’s eyes . . .

  But
April was in every eye.

  And the angle of each head, tipped so slightly no one but an art professor would even notice.

  And the crescent of every bottom lip, thin yet dark enough to be prominent.

  Tears clouded Elyse’s eyes. She squeezed them shut and tried to force an image of April onto the dark screen of her mind. She was still able to conjure April’s voice in her memory, April saying, “Come on, let’s make Fluffernutters,” or “Come on, let’s all try out for the glee club,” or “Come on, let’s go to Baker’s Hill Road and play some tennis.” April had always emphasized the “on” in “come on,” as if she believed Becky and Elyse needed a little extra goading.

  Her appearance, though . . .

  Elyse was a visual person, yet she couldn’t conjure a clear image of April’s face. Maybe she couldn’t because she was a visual person, and when April had died she’d stopped existing visually.

  Yet her eyes had come back into existence in Elyse’s drawings. The directness of them, the hope implicit in them, the discernment. April had always gazed at people as if they really mattered to her. And the gentle angle at which she’d held her head, as if questioning or appraising or reaching for a different perspective. And the lower lip, which she used to gnaw on when she was concentrating.

  Even with her lids slammed shut, Elyse’s cheeks grew chilly with tears. She wiped them with the cuff of her sleeve, then took a slug of wine and reached for her cell phone, which lay on the night table she’d created out of a couple of cube-shaped plastic bins stacked one atop the other. She hit the buttons to speed-dial Becky, who answered after a few rings. “Beck, I’m freaking out,” she said.

  “Oh—yeah, okay. Listen, can I call you back?”

  “No, this is important,” Elyse insisted. “I’m drawing April. I’ve been drawing her for, like, the whole semester.” Maybe longer than the semester. She’d have to pull out last year’s portfolio and check. “It’s completely unintentional. I’ve just been doing it, like I’m possessed or something. She’s in all my portraits. Can you talk?”

  A brief hesitation. “I’m with Mark right now. He just left one of his meetings, and I promised I’d get a coffee with him. He seems to think that if I prevent him from drinking booze, I owe him a lot of coffee.”

  “He can drink coffee without you,” Elyse argued. “This is important.”

  “Absolutely. It’s very important. I’ll call you back as soon as I can, okay?”

  Click.

  Elyse stared at the drawings for a long, anxious minute. How could she have done this? How could she have done it without realizing? Why had she done it? Did it mean April was still alive somehow, her spirit guiding Elyse’s hand when she drew? Or else that there was something wrong with Elyse’s execution, that she ultimately could draw only one thing?

  She needed to talk to someone, and Becky wasn’t available. Nor was Mark, who might have been the second person on Elyse’s list of Friends-to- Phone-When-You’re-Freaking-Out. Not that he would be any good in such a situation, but he’d seen her in her underwear and eaten her cooking, and maybe when he was completely dried out he’d actually be useful.

  She had been wanting to draw him ever since they’d met at that party a couple of months ago. Her first impression of him that night was that he was ridiculously gorgeous, and her first impulse was to capture his physical beauty with her art. But she’d asked him to pose for her several times once they’d gotten to know each other, and he’d always said no. She’d contemplated drawing him when he was passed out or sleeping, but smuggling her sketch pad into his apartment would have been tricky, and she couldn’t count on him to be unconscious when she arrived. And now Becky was sobering him up, so the odds of his being unconscious around Elyse had dropped even further.

  He was so handsome, though, almost scary handsome, his dark, curly hair like a Greek god’s, his nose long and straight, his hazel eyes ringed in black and fringed with lashes so long and thick he might be mistaken for wearing mascara.

  What if she drew him, and he turned into April beneath the tip of Elyse’s charcoal? What if she captured every shape and shade and nuance of his beautiful face, and when she was done, April peered out from the page?

  Who could Elyse talk to? Not anyone who lived on her hall. They didn’t know April. They wouldn’t understand.

  Not Professor Balfour. She’d think Elyse had snapped and wouldn’t pass along the names of any of her connections in Paris. She’d probably lower Elyse’s grade, too—not that Elyse had to worry about maintaining her GPA at this point, but still, she had her pride.

  The truth was, only one other person would understand. With a sigh, Elyse tapped the contacts icon and scrolled to Florie.

  On the rare occasions Elyse phoned Florie, she always answered on the first ring, as if she couldn’t bear the sound of her phone’s ringtone. Or as if she were sitting by herself with her phone in her lap and her thumb on the connect button, just waiting for the damn thing to ring.

  Today it rang four times before Florie picked up.

  Don’t tell me she’s finally got a life, Elyse thought.

  “Hello?” Florie sounded slightly muffled, as if she’d wrapped her phone in gauze.

  “Florie, it’s Elyse.”

  “Oh—hi!” Florie sounded unduly delighted, despite the whispery din surrounding her voice. “Oh, wow! Hi!”

  Either she was off-the-scale thrilled to hear from Elyse, or she was stoned. No way would she be stoned. “Listen, the weirdest thing,” Elyse said. “I just had my portfolio evaluated, and my professor pointed out that all my portraits looked like April.”

  Florie sounded a bit less electrified when she asked, “Did your professor know April?”

  “No. She didn’t realize they looked like April. She just said they all looked like the same person. Then I studied them and realized they looked like April. What do you suppose that means?”

  Florie said nothing for a moment. “It means—oh, wait, hang on a minute.” Elyse heard her talking to someone, a brief exchange, Florie thanking the person several times, and then she returned to her cell phone. “I think it means that God is speaking to you. He’s asking you to honor April.”

  Elyse made a face, aware that Florie couldn’t see her. “That’s bullshit. It has nothing to do with God.”

  “It has everything to do with God. You’re a Christian, Elyse. Jesus loves you, you know that. He loves April, and he’s expressing that love through your drawings. He’s keeping her spirit alive in your art. That’s amazing. Oh—wait just a second . . . ”

  And then she was talking to someone else again, a man this time, Elyse guessed from the deeply pitched murmur she heard through the phone. A few words, a few thank-you’s, and then Florie was back. “I’m sorry, it’s just busy here right now.”

  “What are you doing?”

  “I’m . . . doing some church work.”

  “Outdoors?” Some of the noise orbiting around Florie’s voice sounded like automobile traffic. Elyse was positive she heard a honking horn.

  “Yes. It’s—we’re doing collections to help raise money for the new church building. It’s going to be wonderful, Elyse. Father Joe has shown us the designs, and it’s going to be an amazing building. A huge arched ceiling, and upholstered pews, and this glorious stained-glass window behind the altar.”

  “So—what? You’re standing on a street corner in the cold like a Salvation Army Santa?”

  “I’m not dressed like a Santa,” Florie said with a laugh. “But yes. I’m collecting donations.”

  What the hell kind of church took college kids and made them stand on street corners, asking passersby for spare change? For a church building? How many nickels would Florie have to collect to pay for that?

  “I’d love to see your drawings,” Florie said. “I bet God’s face is in them, too
. April’s face and God’s.”

  Elyse sighed through her nose, hoping Florie wouldn’t hear her exasperation. “Forget God for a minute, okay? I’m kind of weirded out here, and—”

  “I can’t forget God. You shouldn’t forget God either. Especially if you’re weirded out. Ask for his help. Ask him to explain it to you. You’re drawing April into all your pictures because he wants you to. Because he’s expressing himself through you. God has a reason for everything that happens. God is the reason. Open your heart to him, and it will all make sense to you.”

  Maybe Florie was stoned. OD-ing on God. “Okay, never mind,” Elyse said, regretting the call and no longer caring if Florie knew it. “I’ll let you get back to your important fundraising work.”

  “Wait—before you go, I have some news,” Florie said.

  “What?”

  “I’m getting married.”

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  BECKY SPLURGED on a cab for the trip across the river to Mark’s apartment. Mark’s sister-in-law had offered to drive into Boston to fetch him home for the winter break, and she’d generously agreed to give Elyse and Becky a lift back to Wheatley, as well.

  Mark had told Becky that his family didn’t celebrate Christmas, but they didn’t not celebrate it, either. It was a national holiday, after all, and his brother and sister-in-law had traveled to Massachusetts for a family gathering.

  Becky didn’t care about the religious dynamics of the Gottlieb family, whether they had a Hanukkah bush instead of a Christmas tree, whether they indulged in the same buying-and-giving frenzy as most Americans with the difference that they wrapped their gifts in blue and white paper instead of red and green paper. What mattered was that she was getting a free ride home at the end of a typically stressful and tiring final exam period. Feliz Navidad and all that.

  Last night, she and Emerson had exchanged presents. He’d given her a T-shirt that had a long, complicated differential equation printed across it, white on black, and below the equation the words: It Doesn’t Add Up. She’d given him a book titled DIY: How to Fix Everything. They’d laughed, wished each other a happy holiday, and gone out for dim sum and drinks.