Between Here and April

by Deborah Copaken Kogan

  Since uprooting the kids to France was not in the cards, Mark and I decided that I would switch from my full-time magazine job to freelance television producing for a few years, figuring we’d reassess the situation and our finances once the girls were in school. Then, just as Tess was getting ready for kindergarten, just as I was getting ready to “ramp back on,” as the social scientists were now calling it, the news divisions of all the major networks announced massive layoffs. A month later, my old editor at Newsworld took me out to lunch to inform me that not only was my former position there no longer available, it no longer even existed on the masthead. “We’re down to one foreign editor,” he said, mumbling something about falling ad revenues, the rise of online media, the lack of general interest in international news. The only magazines with any real budgets to burn, he said, were either lifestyle/consumer or celebrity ones, but if I wanted, he could definitely set me up an interview with the editor of a new venture called Scoop, which sounded promising, until I got to the interview and blew the job within the first five minutes of sitting down. “What do you mean you’ve never heard of Pratesi?” squawked the editor.

  But I’d never heard of Pratesi. Or Frette or Crème de la Mer. And I couldn’t bring myself to care, either about the products or the celebrities who used them.

  And so I fell deeper and deeper into journalistic purgatory, writing press releases about antifungal medications and a new brand of sneakers for a viral marketing firm, comparing the suction strength of various breast pumps for an online parenting site.

  Dr. Rivers jotted down another note on her pad, crossed her left leg over her right. “What about your marriage? Everything okay on the home front?”

  “It could be better,” I said.

  “Meaning?”

  “Well, my husband and I hardly ever see each other these days, for one.”

  “And for another?”

  “I don’t know. I just said, ‘for one’ as an expression. I don’t really have a ‘for two.’ “

  “I see.” She glanced at her clock. “Look, Elizabeth, I think we should focus, before our time is up today, on the blackouts themselves.” She wondered aloud whether there might be anything to unite them: a thought process; a feeling; a circumstance; a trigger. “The first time you fainted, for example, where were you? What was going through your mind?”

  “I was at the theater,” I said. “Watching the last act of Medea. Then I suddenly remembered this girl April. From elementary school.”

  “She was a classmate?”

  “A friend. My best friend, actually. In first grade.”

  “And what happened to her after first grade?”

  “She . . . I don’t know. She left. Never came back to school.”

  “She moved?”

  “No, I think she . . . actually, I really don’t know. I never found out. And I haven’t really thought about her since. Until that night, I mean.”

  “I see.” She was now scribbling furiously on her pad. “And what about the other blackouts? Same questions: where were you, what were you thinking about?”

  I lined all the other episodes up in my head, a row of dominos: the time at the grocery store, when the girls were playing ring around the rosie in the aisle; the one at the school yard, when I was able to catch myself on the fence; the Saturday when we rented a car to visit friends who’d moved out to the suburbs, and we’d stopped off at an Exxon station to fill up on the way back; the time I was riding on that crowded crosstown bus with Daisy, the two of us sandwiched in the aisle between two other women, one who was nuzzling her nose against the fragrant head of her infant, the other who was ignoring her crying toddler. “They were all totally random,” I said, listing each one, fall by fall. Picturing the dominos tumbling down. “And there’s no pattern to what I was thinking about beforehand. I mean ring around the rosie? A bus ride? A gas station? One has nothing to do with the other.”

  Dr. Rivers glanced at her clock and sighed. “We’re out of time today,” she said. “But I’d like you to do something for me this week. A little writing assignment, if you will. I’d like you to jot down everything you can remember about that friend of yours. The one who disappeared. I’m not saying she has anything to do with your blackouts, but I have a hunch, if she preceded the first episode, that this disappearance may somehow be significant. At the very least, it’ll be a useful exercise. To focus on your memories. From the past. To try to figure out the significance of their sudden emergence into your present. Especially when it involves a close relationship that was severed.”

  “I never said my relationship with April was painful.”

  Dr. Rivers’s eyes widened. “Neither did I.” She scribbled another note. “Was it a painful relationship?”

  “No,” I said, looking down at my hands, noting the prominence of the veins, the cracked crevices of their surface, like a dinosaur’s. Whose hands were these? “We were children. Good friends. Nothing painful in that.”

  Dr. Rivers stole another glance at her clock and gathered her papers, her demeanor calm but expedient. “I’ll see you next week,” she said, standing up. Then she showed me, cordially, to the door.

  CHAPTER 3

  THAT NIGHT, UNABLE TO SLEEP, I trained my eyes on the ceiling, trying to conjure April anew. Her significance to my present? What could that possibly mean? We were best friends for two months tops. When we were six. I could barely even remember how we met. I closed my eyes again, trying to will myself into a state of unconsciousness, but my mind kept drifting—to the dentist appointment for the girls I would have to reschedule; to the sheet music that had to be located in a music store in midtown and purchased before Tuesday’s lesson; to a three-by-five-inch piece of wood, jelly beans, and tube of fabric glue that Daisy’s teacher required for god only knew what. And then, just as I was remembering the note Tess’s teacher had sent home, asking me to please replace the extra clothing in her cubby with February-appropriate gear, an image appeared: a young girl standing in front of a wall of cubbies, her arms crossed over her chest like a dare.

  I grabbed my laptop from my bedside table and turned it on, anxious to transcribe the ghost before she disappeared once again. Then I opened a new file and started to write.

  April Cassidy, I typed, feeling a slight jolt from just the shape of her name on the page, was my best friend from the first day of first grade in September of 1972, until a couple of months later, when she failed to show up for school. During the weeks following her disappearance, as leaf-littered lawns succumbed to snow . . .

  That’s a start, I thought, finishing the first paragraph.

  Because her last name began with a C and mine with a B, we shared a cubby, into which we placed our lunch bags and our brown grocery bags full of accident clothes. April’s bag contained underwear, socks, pants, a shirt, and a pair of red shorts, and I remember being impressed that first day when she reached into her bag, pulled out the shorts, and slipped them on under her dress. Bell-bottomed, braless girlwomen may have been marching against the war and for their rights just down the road on the steps of the Capitol, but we suburban DC dainties, whose mothers had learned a thing or two about fashion from Jackie O, were still made to wear dresses and Mary Janes on our first days of school, rendering all hopes of climbing trees and scaling monkey bars moot.

  “I was supposed to be born a boy,” April said, by way of introduction, “but God made a mistake. He’s sending my boy parts with Santa. Do you do Christmas or Hanukah?”

  “Hanukah,” I said, suddenly fretting over how I’d get my boy parts delivered.

  April, I would learn, never fretted. About anything. If her mother forgot to pack her lunch, she’d forage from others. If she found a knot in her hair, she’d snip it out. If she needed a permission slip signed, she’d forge it. Her pigtails were always uneven, her socks unmatched, and the day Miss Martin asked us to draw what we’d eaten for breakfast that morning, April’s was the only picture containing a can of SpaghettiOs and a can of TaB.r />
  “Come on,” she said, reaching into our cubby and removing the shorts from my own stash of accident clothes. “Put these on, and let’s go outside.”

  I’d never had a best friend before April, let alone one who was female, but because April professed the same aversions to Barbies as I did, because her favorite book, too, was Where the Wild Things Are, because when she scraped her knee she not only never cried, she rejoiced in the anticipation of a new scab, I grew enamored of her.

  By the end of that first week of school, we had already fallen into a comfortable twosome, having chicken fights on the monkey bars, playing ring around the rosie in the rain until we were mud-caked and dizzy, searching for four-leafed clovers for April’s massive (so she claimed) collection. April was the first person to show me that a worm, unlike us, could be cut in half and still survive. I showed her how to capture a frog, by cupping your hands over him like a dome. We created our own friendship oath and secret handshake, whose motions I can no longer recall, aside from a fluttering up of fingers, like birds, at the end.

  The only problem with our newfound paradise was its inevitable dissolution at the sound of the school bell. April couldn’t come over to my house after school because it had temporarily become a zoo, filled with me, my three younger sisters, an infant brother, and a postpartum mother drowning in laundry, diapers, and spit-up. And I couldn’t go over to April’s house to play because, well, I wasn’t sure. “Why can’t I come over?” I’d ask.

  “You just can’t,” she’d say, and I wouldn’t push it. Even at that age, I must have understood that a house which served SpaghettiOs and TaB for breakfast might have difficulties absorbing guests. Besides, April and I didn’t live close enough to each others’ houses to walk anyway. In fact, her subdivision was more than a mile from mine, separated by two busy thoroughfares. I had about as much chance of finding my way there solo as I had of rocketing myself to the moon.

  A few weeks before Halloween, we were sitting on top of the monkey bars, discussing costumes. I couldn’t decide between Batman and Cousin Itt. April said anyone could be a superhero. Monsters were much more interesting, because underneath their fur was a creature just like us. Or sort of like us, only different. Like Max in Where the Wild Things Are. We decided we should both be Cousin Itt, one for her neighborhood, one for mine, but we would definitely need a lot of yellow yarn for the hair, even though April was certain Cousin Itt was blue. “But never mind, yellow’s fine,” she conceded after only a minute, because even though she was pretty sure she was right, April had no interest in proving it. Or anything. The one time she was chastised for making noise in class, she didn’t even defend herself. She just said, “I’m sorry, Miss Martin, I won’t do it again,” and moved away from the guilty party.

  Then, one day in October, about an hour before lunch, a woman in a frayed housedress and flip-flops lumbered into our classroom. Her short, gray-blond hair was matted down on one side, making her appear slightly askew, while the housedress was stretched beyond capacity across her swollen bosom.

  “Look at that woman,” I whispered to April, who was sitting on the floor next to me, her eyes glued to the filmstrip on mammals. “I think she’s lost.”

  April tore herself away from the image of nursing baby mice, narrated by a baritone voice which was explaining how, if the infants were touched or licked or handled by another creature, the mother would consider them contaminated and eat them. When April’s gaze came to rest on the new visitor, her bottom lip started to quiver, and then her shoulders caved inward, as if she were trying to turn herself inside out.

  “April?” our teacher, Miss Martin, called out from behind us.

  Then, suddenly straightening, April whispered, “That’s my mom’s friend. My mom couldn’t take me to the dentist today, so her friend is taking me.”

  “Why couldn’t your mom take you?” I’d never heard of anyone being taken to the dentist by an adult other than her mother.

  “She’s busy.”

  “Doing what?” I thought of all the things that could occupy a mother’s time: going to the grocery store, folding laundry, making dinner.

  “Fighting her inner diamonds.”

  “Her inner what?” I cocked my head.

  But before April could answer, Miss Martin called out once again. “April, sweetheart? Your mother’s here to pick you up.”

  April reddened as she stood up. Then she shrugged and raised her eyebrows in confusion, as if to say, Hmm, how weird. I could have sworn it was my mother’s friend.

  The next day, when I asked her about it, she blamed her confusion on the dust whipped up from the slide projector.

  “But I thought the dust was already there, and the light just makes it twinkle,” I said.

  “No. The light actually makes the dust. I read it in a filmstrip book.”

  And then, exactly one week before Halloween, April didn’t show up for school. The first day, I assumed she had a cold or a sore throat and gave it no further thought. But four days later, when she still hadn’t returned, I cornered Miss Martin by the reading lab. “Where’s April?” I asked.

  Miss Martin’s already thin lips pressed together into a single line. “She’s not here, Lizzie.”

  Well of course she’s not here, I thought. I figured that one out all by myself. “Does she have the chicken pox?” I’d had it the year before, and the memories of soaking in oatmeal and wearing gloves to bed were still fresh. Plus I’d missed the class picture, an absence I was certain would result in the annihilation of my existence from my classmates’ memories. But to miss Halloween? Now that would be tragic.

  “No, she doesn’t have the chicken pox.”

  “Is she sick?”

  “No, she’s not sick.”

  “Did she switch schools?” I’d known two kids who had been siphoned away from Sycamore Hill Elementary in such an unfortunate manner.

  “No, sweetheart, she did not switch schools.”

  “Well, when is she coming back?”

  “We’re not sure, Lizzie. Did you finish—”

  “But where is she?”

  “—your handwriting assignment?”

  “Yes, but . . .” Now I was totally confused. April wasn’t sick. Nor had she switched schools. And yet, despite these facts (oh to be Nancy Drew!), there remained the issue of her absence from school. To complicate matters, Miss Martin, a woman who in every other domain knew all things about everything, did not know when April might be coming back. But Halloween is just around the corner! I thought, beginning to panic. Did she have problems gluing the pieces of yarn down to the grocery bag with the eye holes cut out of it, as I had? I wanted to tell her she should glue the yarn to a piece of cardboard first and then stick the whole thing to the top of the grocery bag, to keep it from drooping. “. . . but I need to tell her something.”

  “Well,” Miss Martin said, but then she patted me on the arm and fell silent for a moment. “If you’re done with handwriting, why don’t you go work on your subtraction problems?”

  But I don’t want to subtract! I thought, fretting as usual, wishing I could be more blasé about everything, like April.

  And then, the day before Halloween, Miss Martin sat us down on the floor, all three classes of first graders, and told us that April and her older sister, Lily, would not be coming back to school. Ever. “We’ll all miss her,” she said, “but we’ll always hold her in our hearts.”

  I raised my hand. “Will she be trick-or-treating somewhere else then?”

  Miss Martin shook her head and began to blink more than usual. “No,” she said. And then the bell rang.

  Afterwards, and for many years hence, I’d believe that the human form could spontaneously disintegrate, like Mr. Spock or Mike Teevee, only without the molecular reintegration on the other side. I wondered if April might have simply slipped through a looking glass, like Alice, and would reemerge years later the same person but somehow altered, the way the girls in the sixth grade always showed up i
n September tall as skyscrapers and wearing bras.

  I hunted lions by myself that day. I tried playing chicken alone. I picked a scab on my elbow and watched it bleed. I made a valiant attempt to join in with the boys, who were playing a game of tag on the blacktop. “Cooties! Cooties!” they all screamed, running away from me as fast as their knobby knees would allow.

  “I hope a killer bee comes and stings you all,” I muttered under my breath. I wondered how far away Canada was, how high their fence was to keep the bees out. April, I was certain, would have known the answer to that.

  That afternoon, on the bus heading home from school, I sat alone behind two third-grade boys, classmates of April’s sister, Lily, one of whom was drawing small lines onto a piece of paper, his Ticonderoga No. 2 casting long shadows onto his lap. “How do you turn these into a bad person, using only three diagonal lines?” he asked the boy next to him.

  I peeked over the seat to eavesdrop. The boy had drawn a few lines and a circle on the page, like this:

  11111

  The other boy stared at the paper, then drew two arms coming out of the circle, then erased them. “I don’t know,” he said.

  “Think!” said the other.

  “I’m thinking.”

  “No you’re not.” I’d seen Billy Nussbaum show Randy Hays the same puzzle. It had taken Randy the entirety of recess before he finally gave up, but the boy on the bus waited no more than a second or two before giving the whole thing away. “Okay, here’s a hint: who’s the president of the United States?”

  “Nixon?”

  “Yep.” The boy with the pencil drew a diagonal line between the first and second lines, crossing the fourth line to form an X. The fifth and sixth lines he also turned into an N. Like this:

  NIXON

  The other boy rolled his eyes, claiming the puzzle was stupid since Nixon wasn’t really a bad person. Not like Lily’s mother, Mrs. Cassidy. My ears suddenly pricked up. “I can’t believe she did that to them,” he said.