Between Here and April

by Deborah Copaken Kogan

  She tried conjuring the brief happiness of that farmer-in-the-dell era. It was happy, wasn’t it? She thought it was, she’d always told herself it was, with all those toddlers sitting around, gumming Nilla wafers, clapping their sticky hands, but wait, even then, she’d be sitting there in the circle, a kid on her lap, singing about doggies in windows or spiders on spouts, and her mind would start to wander back to the corridors of Holy Cross Hospital, back to the old colleagues she no longer saw, back to patients who no longer awaited her, back to a time when she was actually valued, instead of just needed.

  Adele: Add El. Like some sort of misguided slogan for the elevated train in Chicago. Or a command in a game of Scrabble. See that word? Add l, and you’ll have shovel. See? Shove. Shovel. I used a shovel to bury her.

  Add Hell. Well, she nearly laughed, how appropriate. Like instructions for a recipe. Take one woman, throw in a couple of eggs, a teaspoon of sour cream, and then add hell. How prescient of her mother. And each word stood perfectly on its own.

  How did that expression go again? Hell hath no fury like a woman . . . what? She spotted the metallic letters on the glove compartment—Plymouth Fury—at the same time she remembered the last word: . . . scorned. Some people would see this confluence, she knew, as a sign from God. These people were not her. Though sometimes she wished they were. How nice it would be to have faith in something. Anything. Even hell. But if you didn’t buy the whole virgin birth story, it was impossible to swallow the rest. Welcome to Maryland! she read, crossing back over the state line. Mary-land. The land of Mary. Even her state was a lie.

  “Just like the Sea Esta? Yay!” The girls shouted, which turned into a cacophonous medley of “Yay-yay-yay! Yay-yay-yay!” sung in 3/4 time, as they bounced up and down in the backseat, thinking about all those glistening ice cubes, just there for the scooping.

  “Yay,” whispered Adele, now feeling that familiar bulge of tears welling behind her eyes again. She took the next exit off of 1-270.

  5.

  “Adele Levine,” April’s mother was saying to the man behind the counter, even though that wasn’t her mother’s last name. It was her grandmother’s last name. Levine was her mother’s middle name. Maybe everyone had to use secret code names for the adventure. Like 007. Or Maxwell Smart. She started thinking of her own secret name. Noreen was her middle name, but April Noreen sounded stupid. She could try to be April Levine, like her mother, but she’d rather be April Brady. She and Lizzie Burns (which used to be Bernstein . . . another secret code) were always talking about wanting to be one of the kids on The Brady Bunch. God. How great would it be to be a part of that family who was always laughing with each other and teasing Alice about Sam the Butcher and getting into the kind of trouble that only lasted a half an hour! How great would it be to have a mother whose smile matched the flip of her mullet and a father who taught you lessons like, “A wise man forgets his trouble before he lies down to sleep.” That was a good one. She forgot what happened during the rest of the episode, but it didn’t matter, because now she knew a smart thing, and she wasn’t going to forget it. April was always trying to honor these words in her own life, like whenever Lily would cheat in jacks, and they’d get into a fight, she always tried to make up before they had to go to bed, even if she had to tell a white lie, which is a lie that doesn’t hurt anyone. So she’d say, “Okay, Lily, you didn’t cheat, and I’m not angry at you, because a wise girl always forgets her trouble before she lies down to sleep.”

  “Delle Vigne?” said the hotel clerk, in an Italian accent, pointing to his own nametag marked with the same name. He seemed excited to have found a member of his tribe. “From Firenze?”

  “No. Adele Levine. From the Bronx.”

  “But Mom,” April said, “That’s not your—” She suddenly felt her wrist being squeezed tight enough to hurt. Her mother’s secret signal for her to shut up, like the time when they were going on the Amtrak to visit her grandparents, and her mother told the woman she was four, not five, to save money, even though she was definitely five. “You lied!” she’d said to her mother afterwards, two little words that felt like fire coming out of her mouth. “I didn’t lie,” her mother had answered. “It was a white lie. Which means a lie that doesn’t hurt anyone.” To which April had countered, sobbing now, “Then I’m just going to tell everyone I’m a boy, because that’s what I’d rather be, and no one will get hurt if I say it!” But her mother just said, “Forget it. Just do what I say, young lady, and do not contradict me.” Her teachers had taught her to try to understand words in context; she decided “contradict” must mean “to tell the truth.”

  Today was turning into such a strange day. First her mother was in a medium mood, which is much better than a bad mood, even though she cut her leg, which would have made April cry. But mothers were always crying when things were happy, and doing nothing when things were bad. When her dad hit her mom, which he did really not that often, even though you’re not supposed to hit people ever, her mother would sit there, like those blow-up clowns you’re allowed to hit because they’re not people, and they don’t get hurt, they just rock back and forth. But when April brought home a drawing of her family she’d done at school—and it was a really good drawing, with everyone smiling, and the sun behind them, and even a rainbow, nothing that would ever upset people who aren’t mothers—her mother started crying so hard that she had to go to sleep for the rest of the afternoon, which meant frozen pizza again for dinner.

  Then her mother said they were going on an adventure, which is something April had been dreaming of doing ever since she could dream. So far, she loved the pizza with Aunt Trudy, and playing Mad Libs and checkers with Lily, but not sitting in the parking lot while her mom looked for flashlights. How long does it take a person to look for flashlights? Her mother was always leaving them in the parking lot. “Don’t talk to strangers, keep the doors locked, and don’t let anyone in this car,” she’d said. She and Lily had hidden below the window, crouched down on the floor of the car, petrified that one of the bad guys would try to push his way inside. What would he do, if he got in, she wondered? Give them Indian burns? Steal their tape recorder? There was no end to the horrible scenarios she could imagine.

  6.

  At the hotel, Adele ordered three hamburgers and two large French fries from room service and went into the bathroom to change her sanitary napkin, which, having forgotten to make provisions for such an occurrence, she’d had to scrounge at the last rest stop. What a hideous business, womanhood. Her uterus ached, her fingers were swollen, her energy sucked out and depleted. She pushed down on her pelvis to try to relieve the pain, but it was seized up with contractions and no more pliant than a basketball. As usual, the blood had flowed onto her underwear. She would have to clean them out in the sink.

  Or . . . not.

  She could, she suddenly realized, just toss them into the wastebasket. Another object left behind. Like April’s school books. The stripped Hoover. The girls’ lunch boxes. She would simply—how liberating—toss the whole mess into the trash. But instead of finding joy in this, she couldn’t breathe.

  A noise, she realized, was coming out of her. It sounded like a moan, only deeper, coming as it did from her diaphragm, not her throat. She held her head in her hands, her elbows digging into her knees. And soon she was crying again.

  “What’s wrong, Mommy?” April said, rushing into the bathroom, which Adele had neglected to lock. “What happened?” She stared down at her mother’s underwear and froze.

  “It’s nothing. It’s just . . .” Everything’s black. A ten-ton elephant, crushing the bones of my back. Every day, the waking up, the crumbs on the table, the trash piling up. “It’s just . . .” What a sight she must be, her thighs puckered over the porcelain, her stained underwear halfway down her legs, her eyes bloodshot and rheumy. “It’s just women stuff, sweetheart. Nothing for you to worry about.”

  “Are you dying?”

  In the background Adele could he
ar Walter Cronkite, counting the dead. “No, I’m not dying. Why don’t you change the channel, sweetheart? I bet ZOOM is on.” She could see Lily sitting on the edge of the bed, one eye glued to the screen, the other staring at her with what appeared to be contempt. By eight years old, one knew. If not consciously then somewhere inside. An eight-year-old knew other mothers were not spending their days in a fog. That they were not sleeping through the afternoon, or staring at the walls, or wailing at the sight of their own blood. They were crying for reasons a girl could forgive: a son sent home in a body bag; a husband shipped off to war. April, with only six years under her belt, may still have been giving Adele the benefit of the doubt, may still have believed a real mother lay under all those layers of sludge and lard, but Lily had already moved on, already made promises to herself about the kind of mother she would be when she grew up. And that mother looked nothing at all like her own. If anyone could understand such thoughts it was Adele. She’d made the same promises to herself, when she was her daughter’s age.

  Yet another reason to end the farce. Because, really, where would it end? It was a chain of despair, stretching infinitely from past to future. Why put her children through it? Why make them experience any of it? The sting of an unrequited crush, the pain of childbirth, the sudden appearance of a gray hair; the standing by, helplessly, as the world burned. Why make them reach for the dangling carrot of love only to find out, after biting down hard, that the soil in which it grew was rife with poison? Why give them any hope that their daughters could have happier childhoods, better fates, richer lives?

  And she was crying once again.

  7.

  April knew it. Her mother was dying. First it was her leg. Now her vagina. It was only a matter of time before her whole body would bleed, like that kid on the poster at the Deli Den, who had that disease with the ph that sounded like an f and made you die from a paper cut. You were supposed to leave your extra quarters for him in the tiny slots underneath his picture, even though it said March of Dimes, not March of Quarters. Or, wait. Maybe it was Easter Seals.

  So that’s why her mother had been crying so much. Of course. It all made sense now. April suddenly felt guilty for all the times she’d been bad. Her mother was bleeding to death and here she was, arguing with Lily about who got to shuffle the cards. Who got to sleep in the side of the bed nearest the window.

  From now on, she decided, she would be good. Better than good.

  So when she heard her mother moaning in the bathroom, she jumped off the bed—the side nearest the window, which now seemed an empty prize—and offered it to Lily, who was by now getting used to April’s pre-bedtime, Brady Bunch—inspired shows of largesse. Then she took the three flashlights and C batteries out of the Value Hardware bag, and, following the tiny diagram pasted inside the flashlight, loaded two of them into each barrel, nipple-side up. She had trouble screwing on the tops, though, because you had to press down on the exact center and screw on the top at the same time, which was impossible, but Lily, who was now kindly predisposed toward her, on account of her new proximity to the motel window, helped her do it during a commercial.

  Now she needed a pole. Finding nothing of that size and shape in the room, knowing her mother would remain sitting on the toilet crying for at least another half hour, maybe more, she told Lily she was going down the hall to get some ice, which was another white lie, something she did all the time these days, even to her friend Lizzie, because once you start lying it’s hard to stop, especially when you have something to hide, like a mother. But that was okay, because not only would she not be hurting someone this time, she might even be helping, which she decided should be called a silver lie.

  A few minutes later, she walked back into the room carrying a mop, which she’d found—okay, stole—from one of the maid’s carts in the hallway, after remembering the use of an unscrewed mop pole to play limbo at a recent birthday party. Lily said, “Where’s the ice? What’s that?”

  “It’s a mop,” said April. Lily rolled her eyes and shook her head and went back to watching her show. Let her think I’m stupid, thought April. That I can’t tell the difference between ice and mops. She’ll change her mind when she sees what I’ve made.

  Then April went to work, pulling the comforter off the bed, unscrewing the handle from the mop head, the latter which she threw into the trash because it smelled, and sliding the stick, perpendicularly, under the sheets. She tried tucking in the sides of the sheets between the box spring and mattress to make the pole stand up straight, but it kept falling down, so she simply crawled between sheet and mattress and held it up herself.

  It was magnificent under there, exactly as she’d imagined, and by the time her mother reemerged from the bathroom and she’d turned on both flashlights, it was ready for its unveiling.

  “April, what have you done?” said Adele, her voice tinged with irritation, which was at least better than silent.

  Lily stayed on her side of the bed, waiting to see where such irritation would lead.

  “It’s a tent,” said April, sticking her head out. She could barely contain her excitement. “I made it for you.”

  “For me?” said Adele.

  “So we can camp. So the rain won’t stop us,” she said, which, once again, made her mother cry. But not the scary kind of crying, like when she’d brought home the picture of her family with the rainbow, or when Lily asked her why Lenny never stopped by anymore with his jump rope and fruit. It was, as far as she could tell, a good cry, the kind the contestants sometimes did on The Price Is Right, when they won a new car.

  And then, because Lily felt bad about rolling her eyes at her little sister, and because April wanted her mother to experience camping before all the other parts of her started bleeding, and because Adele wanted her daughters to have one lasting memory of a pleasant moment with their mother, even if only for a day, they crawled under the tent together.

  8.

  “Does the flashlight make the dust, or is the dust already there before you turn on the flashlight?” April was asking. “Lizzie says it’s already there, but I told her she was wrong. You only see the dust when you shine something on it.”

  “Who’s Lizzie?” said Adele. She’d been on her back, a girl tucked under each arm, their heads warm against her chest, their flashlights dancing over the surface of the sheets above them in time to the Carpenters’ “Top Of The World” on Lily’s tape recorder. It had been decided that Adele would hold the pole between her legs, to keep the tent up, so she lay there with her three-foot erection, a broomstick Atlas, holding up the fragile dwelling.

  “She’s my best friend,” said April, sounding perturbed that this fact would not be common knowledge to everyone.

  “Oh, right,” said Adele, faking it. “Your best friend.” She? When had April made a girlfriend? She was twice the size of most of the girls in her class, preferred hunting imaginary animals to hopscotch, and had, as her kindergarten teacher once admonished during a parent/teacher conference the previous year, significant issues with “boundaries.” Which was why, the teacher said, April only played with boys, whose equally prodigious lack of boundaries—or “friskiness,” as she referred to it in their case—matched her own. The girls in her class not only didn’t appreciate her, they shunned her. Made fun of her “boy” body and Toughskins. Didn’t invite her to their birthday parties at Shakey’s. Called her fatso. Adele had wanted to rip every strand of hair from their skulls when April broke down one night and cried over that one.

  But now she felt a sudden rush of pride at her daughter’s accomplishment. A friend. A best friend, even. How . . . hopeful. And what if she left her here then? What if she were to drive them home, tell Shep she had to run an “errand” and then just never return? Maybe they’d be okay. Maybe they’d thrive.

  No. Without a mother, they wouldn’t. They couldn’t. She knew that as well as anyone. The muscles of her thighs were starting to tremble. She’d been anchoring the pole for nearly thirty minut
es, and she didn’t think she could take it much longer. It was too hard, holding up the world.

  What was she thinking, bringing two creatures into it? Imagining she could shelter them from everything ugly, everything bad. They would see it all soon. Rivers of shit. Cauldrons of fire. A parched desert atop an icy core. Lily was already starting to see it on the six o’clock news, all those boys zipped up in bags. Now April would, too. It was only a matter of time.

  “You and Lizzie are both right,” she said. “See?” She turned the flashlight on and off, on and off, on and off. A cone of dust. Black. A cone of dust. Black. A cone of dust. Black. Then, apologizing for her weakness, kissing her daughters good-night, she let the pole drop.

  9.

  Sunday morning, after driving around Gaithersburg for several hours, Adele found the perfect spot to hide a car. It was just off 1-270 in Martinsburg, where a small stretch of woods abutted a cornfield, whose stalks had recently been stripped.

  “Are we there yet?” April asked, for perhaps the tenth time.

  Adele had told the girls that she was looking for a place to set up camp. That they would be sleeping in the car, most likely with the heat on, as it was too cold this time of year to sleep outside. That they should trust her. It didn’t matter whether or not Daddy would be joining them, or why they were camping on a school night, or who would be collecting their homework for them during the days they would be missing. No, she didn’t know Lizzie Burns’s telephone number; no, they couldn’t stop at a phone booth to call information or Daddy; yes, other kids’ parents let them camp on school nights, too; no, killer bees did not live in the woods where they’d be camping; and yes, the tooth fairy does visit children who lose teeth far from home (as April had just done, biting into a pretzel stick). “Almost, April. We’re almost there.” She turned left onto the dirt path heading into the woods, the twin beams of her headlights guiding the way around trunks and leaves, branches and saplings, as twigs gently snapped under her tires.