Between Here and April

by Deborah Copaken Kogan

  We’d reached the open field now, between the forest and Astrid’s cabin, and I had to bite my lip to keep the floodgates from opening anew. How ironic, I thought. As overwhelmed as my mother had been as a parent, she’d metamorphosed into a burnished gem of a grandparent: present, benevolent, brimming with love, both for my daughters and for me.

  “That’s cheating,” said Daisy. “You can’t use the same reason twice.”

  “That’s okay, Daisy,” I said. “Let her say it. It’s true.”

  WHEN WE FINALLY reached the cabin, when we were finally inside, and I’d built a fire, and we’d settled in front of it, Tess laid her head on my lap, her eyes heavy with sleep. “Are we safe now?” she said. The fire crackled as the logs shifted.

  “Yes,” I said, “we’re safe.” I ran my palm over the top of her head, stroking her hair, then her sister’s. After awhile, as the flames settled down, I carried them to bed.

  I should have been exhausted, too. Instead I sat fidgeting in front of the fireplace, my head buzzing with embers. Renzo was right. April’s story could not rely solely—if at all—on fact or third person accounts or anything reality-based or external. What it required was internal: an imagination for the unimaginable, an empathy for monsters, a tolerance for yanking off scabs. At six I’d had all three. Then somewhere along the way I’d lost them.

  I threw another log onto the fire, pulled out my first-grade class photo from my purse, and stared at it, hard: the toothless smiles; the plaid dresses and blue Stride Rites; the dead girl’s spot usurped by the living. It was spring when the class photo was finally taken. April’s bones would have just begun to thaw.

  I let my eyes drift toward the flames; then back to the photo; then back to the flames. This was an old habit from when I was young. I’d lie on my bed, after having been sent there, and hold up my thumb in front of my face, shifting focus back and forth between thumb and dresser; thumb and window; thumb and sky. It calmed me down, focused my thoughts. Then I’d pull out a pencil and start to write.

  I need some paper, I thought. Now. I rummaged around in Astrid’s drawers until I found some.

  And then, pen in hand, I began the painful process of resurrection. I borrowed the opening image from my lunch with Renzo. I lifted a shard of glass I’d once found on the kitchen floor. I stole my darkest thoughts, the books off my children’s shelves, my mother’s moods, Daisy’s drawing off our refrigerator, a memory of a slice of pizza in College Park. I built a strip mall where one had never existed, paved a road where I needed a fork. It felt like cheating. Like pretending to be God. Like writing a poem to an unworthy recipient. But then, as it began to sputter out, as I accounted as best I could considering the limitations of memory and circumstance, what was dropped there and left on the page felt more and more like a distilled version of truth. Not the truth, but my truth, however imperfect.

  Herewith is the final version, slightly edited from the original.

  CHAPTER 21

  I.

  ON THE MORNING she decided to kill herself, Adele Cassidy scrubbed the kitchen floor with a new sponge. The old one had been shredding at the edges and smelled of mildew and old milk, and to have used it now would have been no way to have left a floor. Even so, she made a point of burying the old one in the trash under a pile of coffee grounds. Shep would have enough to deal with in a day or two. It didn’t seem fair to add the waste of a perfectly good sponge.

  She pressed hard as she scrubbed, going over the same spot several times, wringing out the dirt in the bucket of soapy water after every square foot covered, making sure each of the four corners and especially the tiles around the trash can and under the lip of the cabinets were free of grime, stray hairs, dried food. She was amazed at how productive she could be when the time stretching before her suddenly had a limit, how she barely even registered the annoyance of wet knees. And she marveled at the irony of how, having finally made a choice to put a limit on the clock, she could almost enjoy the hours she had left. Almost, she reminded herself. Let’s not get carried away.

  At the nexus where sink met floor she found a small fragment of broken glass, the size of a baby’s fingernail. She picked it up and held it in her palm, wondering which of the many recent accidents were to blame. The glass of orange juice April had dropped? The Coca-Cola bottle Lily had left too close to the edge of the counter? Or was it another piece of the blender Shep had smashed to the floor the day Lenny was over? The blender had been a wedding present, their only one, left on their doorstep a few weeks after they’d eloped, by friends with whom they no longer kept in touch. “Blend well!” the card had said. As if that were possible. She kept finding tiny shards of it for months afterwards, in the front hallway, under the kitchen table, once even wedged into the rough edge of her heel, which she had to dislodge with a pair of tweezers. She hadn’t come across another stray piece for at least a year now. She took the mystery shard and scraped it against her thigh, drawing just the tiniest stream of blood. The sting felt good, like a test run.

  I am nothing if not my mother’s daughter, she thought, watching the blood trickle down her leg. She’d tried to fight it, to be the kind of mother hers had never been. And in some ways, she knew, she’d succeeded. She’d listened, as best as she could, to their endless chatter. She’d sat on tiny chairs for tea parties with Lily, helped April build the edges of her jigsaw puzzles. She’d read to them at night, all those tales of wicked mothers and orphaned children, giving shape—and thus release—to their darkest fantasies. Making her look, by comparison, not so bad. She’d even indulged their after-school baking whims, like those mothers on TV. Cupcakes, banana bread, brownies, chocolate chip cookies: she tried to keep a fresh supply of eggs, flour, and baking soda on hand. But during the past year, or maybe two, she found herself making excuses. I couldn’t get to the store. I’m too tired. I can’t today. Go ask your sister for help. No you can’t use the oven by yourselves. Fine, I don’t care, do whatever you want. Please, just leave me alone!

  She felt like one of those goslings she’d seen on a recent nature show, who’d been tricked into following a wooden mother with wheels for legs and a click-clack patter when you pulled it, the kind Lily used to drag around the house. She had no blueprint for flying. No fumes of early nurture. Only a heart petrified for lack of succor and a pair of pine wings.

  She tossed the shard in the trash atop the coffee grounds, but then changed her mind and buried it underneath with the old sponge. Everything reminded her of Lenny. She might as well bury the reminders she could, since the ones she couldn’t were always in plain view: the front hallway where he first rang her doorbell; the living room where he would gently press the small of her back with his knee as she tried to touch her toes; the backyard where, in warmer months, they’d lie on chaise longues with their faces toward the sun and discuss everything from the nutritional benefits of spinach to their shared disappointment with the hand life had dealt them. The kitchen table where they . . . no. She couldn’t go there. It was too pathetic to even conjure, still made the back of her neck prickle up with warm shame. Even the sight of this yellow bucket, filled with soapy, gray water, could make her plunge into despair. It was where she’d hid the Playgirl she’d bought Lenny on a hunch, guessing correctly how it would affect him, and thus her, knowing it was one of the few hiding places in the house Shep would never happen upon. It was just her luck to fall in love with a man like Lenny. She couldn’t even get adultery right.

  The girls were still sleeping by the time she started unloading the dishwasher. She wanted them to stay in that state for just a little while longer, until everything could be cleaned and prepared, packed and put away, so she went about the task quietly, carefully, even if it meant pulling out one dish at a time and fishing the pieces of silverware out of the mesh basket like so many pick-up sticks. Normally, she’d make a racket unloading the dishes, not so much to let everyone else in the house know what she was doing, as Shep maintained, but to prove, to herself, she existed
.

  Outside, the sky was overcast but unthreatening, thank goodness, despite the weatherman’s prediction otherwise. Shep had a weekly golf game on Saturday mornings, and she was counting on his absence to make her escape.

  She’d called Trudy the night before, while Shep was out taking swigs from a bottle of scotch in the station wagon, even though he’d promised to quit. He was crouching low in the backseat, but not low enough. “I can see him from the second-floor window,” she told her sister, watching him, through wobbling binoculars, down another shot. “He parked under a streetlight, five houses down.” She tried to make herself feel something—anger, or guilt, or even pity for her husband’s addiction—but all she could feel was numb, as if her body had been shot through with Novocain.

  “Adele, what do you want me to say? You married a goy. That’s what they do. They drink. They drink in cars. They drink in bars. God, I sound like what’s-his-name, from Dr. Seuss. Just leave him if you’re so unhappy.”

  She gazed through the binoculars once again, thinking They drink here, they drink there, they drink everywhere . . . “Sam I am. Leaving him.” She was both stunned and not surprised to spot her neighbor Mavis walking down the street, glancing over her shoulder toward her own house, twice, as she made her way to the car, where she rapped on the window and then shut the door with the tiniest thud behind her. An odd sight made more peculiar by the fact that, aside from Halloween night and the week or so of Girl Scout cookie season, nobody in the neighborhood ever walked farther than the distance between their front door and the end of their driveway. In fact, most of the women in the neighborhood, including Adele, had perfected the art of driving up to the mailbox, on their way to or from some errand or carpool, so unless the paperboy’s aim was really off, tossing Posts into yards and bushes, a person could go for weeks without ever seeing another soul on the street. How did Mavis explain it to Arnie? “Bye, honey, I’m going for a walk?”

  “Wait, I’m confused,” said Trudy. “You are leaving him? Who’s Sam?”

  “Yes, tomorrow.” She watched her husband push Mavis down, hungrily, onto the wide seat, where they fell into a place she could no longer see. Shep was lucky the seats of the family station wagon—the family station wagon, for Christ’s sake!—were made of vinyl. Leather would have stained. “I want to see you before I go,” she said to her sister. She laid the binoculars down.

  Most women, she knew, would be searching the house for a weapon by now, running outside and screaming obscenities. Or at least that’s how they would have done it on a soap opera. Again she tried to make herself feel something: fury or jealousy or even grief over what had been lost. But what had been lost had been lost long ago, including her ability to care. “But you have to promise not to say a word to Shep if he calls looking for me. And I mean promise, okay? I need a few days to . . . to get settled in my new arrangement.”

  “Of course, of course,” said Trudy. “I wouldn’t say a word. What new arrangement?”

  And then Adele did something she’d never done to her sister before. “I found a nursing job in Frederick,” she lied. “And a cheap apartment near the hospital, until we get our bearings.”

  “That’s wonderful, Adele! Good for you!”

  It didn’t really feel like a lie. A former colleague had recently told her about two new openings on the maternity ward at Frederick Memorial, and she had entertained the notion of sending in her resume. A daily infusion of life’s greatest miracle might be just the jolt her battery needed. Although she wondered if the constant exposure to all that happiness wouldn’t eventually dull her reaction to it, the way the body habituates to morphine. And then there’d be the babies who wouldn’t make it. Babies with Down’s syndrome, without spinal columns. Babies born to parents who would beat them, or ignore them, or tell them they were worthless. There would be babies whose mothers would arrive home from the hospital filled with hope and good intentions only to wake up the next morning begging their husbands to hide the knives. Babies who would grow up into adults who’d spend every waking hour bent over dirty floors and unloading dishwashers and wondering why the fuck anything even mattered.

  She’d checked out the real estate section of the Washington Post to see what the rent on a two-bedroom apartment in Frederick would run her. She would have had to figure out some sort of after-school care for the girls, or she could have given them each a house key to wear around her neck on a lanyard, like two of the kids in Lily’s class had started wearing when their mothers, to the amazement of everyone but her, went back to work, but otherwise it would have been a perfectly reasonable remedy to a decaying marriage. Provided, of course, that’s what the problem was.

  Because gangrene, she knew, was only a symptom of the dying tissue, not the disease itself. Back when she was at Holy Cross Hospital, she was constantly having to explain this distinction to her patients and their families. Some kid would come in blue with pneumonia, and the parents would insist, “He just has a really bad cough. We’ve been giving him syrup, but for some reason he’s not getting any better.”

  “Because you’re only treating the symptoms, not the disease,” she’d say. Then she’d go on to explain that while giving the child Robitussin might temporarily alleviate some of his suffering, it would not combat the underlying infection of his lungs, which was the actual source of his illness. “Do you understand the difference?” she’d ask.

  Sometimes they did. And sometimes they didn’t. Depending upon their education. Actually, sometimes even the educated ones got confused. Or maybe they just couldn’t process the fact that they’d ignored what was right in front of their faces for so long.

  “Your leg is bleeding, Mommy.” April walked into the kitchen, rubbing her eyes. It was still strange seeing her daughter without Raggedy Ann clutched to her chest. Like she’d lost her female markings. Or a limb. Adele recently asked where poor Raggedy had gone, and April answered, with the slightest blush of shame, “Somewhere better. Where they speak doll.” The last time she’d seen the doll was during their ill-fated visit to Dr. Sherman’s (god what a miserable day that was), but she was sure April had taken it into the car when they left, because she remembered seeing her crying into its smocking in the rearview mirror on the drive back to school afterwards. Maybe she left it in her classroom, in that cubby with her accident clothes. If she did, it would be found soon enough, once the cubby was cleaned out.

  Oh god. She was actually going through with this, wasn’t she? Her heart pounded inside her like a rebuke.

  “You need a Band-Aid?” April was now shouting. How long had her daughter been standing there?

  “A Band-Aid?” Luckily she’d perfected the art of repetition: when in doubt, just repeat the last two words of any question the children asked. This had worked well until recently, when April finally wised up to her tactics.

  “Yes. A Band-Aid,” said April. “Why don’t you ever listen to me?”

  “Yes, yes. I’m listening to you. A Band-Aid.” She looked down at her bleeding leg. The words clicked in place. Band aid: aid in the form of a band. “No, muffin.” A Band-Aid. She nearly laughed at the absurdity of a band of cloth ever offering her aid. “I’m fine,” she said. “It’s just a nick.”

  She’d counted on Dr. Sherman to help her. But she might as well have been a parakeet for as well as he understood her. Or any woman. Not that she begrudged him this deficiency. How could a person who’d never given birth, never worn a maxi pad, never known the type of fluctuations in mood and temperament she’d experienced since that afternoon of her thirteenth summer, when her mother slapped her across the face—how could he ever understand what it meant to live, to think, to bleed in a woman’s body? She’d gone to the public library in Rockville one morning to see if she could find any mention in the medical literature regarding hormonal variations at the onset of menses, but there was nothing. Not a single citation in the entire library. The only books that came close to describing her particular form of lunar-rhythmic torment
were listed under fiction in the card catalogue, in the drawer labeled W–Z: “Werewolves and other transmogrifying creatures of fantasy.” That these cyclical aberrations were ascribed to men and to fantasy was hardly surprising. Trudy, who studied these things, said it happened all the time. She told Adele about the faculty Christmas party where she fumed to a male colleague, who’d claimed that the lack of childcare in America was not a “real” problem, Nothing is ever real unless it happens to a man.

  Adele was starting to see her point. But when she called her family physician to ask for a new referral, the man laughed and said, “Stick with Dr. Sherman. He knows what he’s doing.”

  Right, thought Adele. He knows what he’s doing. Giving me those pills which made me forget my daughter’s birthday. Suggesting that all I have to do is tell my story and everything will be better. Bringing my daughters into his office and making them feel worse than they already did beforehand. Where the fuck was that doll? It would have been helpful for her to have had it, today of all days. “April, sweetheart, go wake up your sister and get dressed.” She was writing a check to Dr. Sherman, which she would slip into the envelope she’d left by the door, with Shep’s name written across it. Inside the envelope was also a key to a safety deposit box, containing her wedding ring, the girls’ birth certificates, the instructions she’d painstakingly written two days earlier explaining how she wanted the bodies to be buried. “You can skip your shower, honey. Just go quickly. I’m taking you both on a little adventure.”

  “An adventure?” April said. “Really? What kind of adventure?”

  How long had it been since she’d taken the girls on a real outing? Aside from the yearly pilgrimage to Dewey Beach and the biannual visits to Montgomery Mall to buy clothes, all she could remember was a trip to the pumpkin patch when April was still in diapers. Hadn’t she promised herself that she’d take them to Great Falls, just as soon as they could walk, to throw breadcrumbs to the ducks? Hadn’t she planned on spending cold weekend afternoons visiting the Smithsonian, warm ones tossing a Frisbee across a field? Didn’t she discuss with Shep her desire to take the girls on an overnight camping trip in the foothills of the Ozarks? What happened to those plans? The girls were old enough now to appreciate those things. They’d been old enough for years. Even a jaunt around the neighborhood with a butterfly net would have sufficed. The realization of this only strengthened her resolve. “A secret adventure,” she said.