The April Tree

by Judith Arnold

  Becky crying. He was seeing it, but he couldn’t imagine it.

  He searched for a place to pull the car off the road, but she flapped her hand toward the windshield. “Keep driving,” she murmured, her voice trapped inside a sob. “Go to the tree.”

  He kept driving. Past the high school, along the snow-lined road, past pine trees so dark their boughs looked black, past holly and rhododendron bushes, past a stand of apple trees, their empty branches twisted and stumpy, and onto Baker’s Hill Road. Oh, shit, he thought as the road began to climb. Oh, shit. I’m driving on this road.

  His hands gripped the wheel so tightly his fingers went numb. His breath grew labored. No yoga breathing now, not as the road climbed toward that rise, toward the tree, toward the place where a girl had ricocheted off the front of his car and died. I can’t do this.

  But Becky was crying. For once, she was needier than he was.

  He kept driving.

  By the time he reached the top of the hill his heart was clamoring inside his ribs, his throat was parched and his vision was too clear, everything framed in razor-sharp lines. He slammed on the brakes, and he and Becky jerked forward, their seatbelts snapping tight across their chests.

  She was sobbing openly now. Becky, the genius, the one who knew what to do, the one who’d talked him off the roof and back into the world, had come apart.

  He clicked open his seatbelt and hers, and she fell into his arms. Thin and angular, her hair as fine as a spider web, her chin as sharp as a dagger, she buried her face against his chest and wept. He held her trembling body and stared past her, through the window to where the tree stood, its winter-dead branches spreading over them.

  Chapter Forty

  WHERE DID ALL these tears come from?

  She lay on her back, staring at the ceiling, a flat gray expanse. The room’s only light seeped through the window, lemonade-pale, drenching Mark’s room with shadows. His roommates were gone for the holiday, and the only sounds in the apartment were the occasional clank of the radiators, the occasional whisper of a car cruising down the street outside, and Mark’s respiration, slow and deep and a bit rough, as if each breath had to pass through a coarse filter before escaping his lungs.

  Beneath her, the sheets were warm and flannel-soft. On top of her the blanket lay thick and woolly. Her cheeks were wet, tears running down her cheeks and channeling toward her nose. If she remained on her back, would she drown?

  A crazy thought, but everything was crazy right now. Nothing made sense. No wonder I’m crying, Becky thought. She needed things to make sense. When they didn’t, she lost her footing, her balance. Like a woman wading in the shallows along the shore, when suddenly the wet sand drops off and a riptide sweeps her away, and try as she might, she can no longer feel the earth under her feet. She can no longer stand.

  This was not supposed to happen. Mark was supposed to have sex with Elyse. She wanted him, and he’d be crazy not to want her. But here he was with Becky instead, heavy and naked beside her, his eyes closed and a leg, a hip, and half his chest exposed where the blanket had fallen away. He was bigger than she’d expected—broader-shouldered, longer-legged, heftier, more solid. She was used to Emerson, whose body was as skinny and insubstantial as her own.

  She was used to Emerson, who could screw her and withdraw from her and leave her pretty much unchanged by the entire experience. She was not used to what Mark had done. He’d made her come. More than once. He’d kissed her tears. He’d shed tears of his own.

  She did not want this.

  Even draped by the blanket, she felt perilously exposed. All her walls, her shields, the logic, the emotional moat she kept around her, filled with sharks and piranhas, crocodiles and nettles . . . Mark had swum across the moat. He’d penetrated her defenses. She was no longer safe.

  You let someone get that close to you, and then if you lose them you can’t survive. The pain is too great. Becky had learned that lesson five years ago. Loving someone hurts too much. Don’t let anyone in.

  If she eased out of bed very slowly, very quietly, maybe Mark wouldn’t notice. She was pretty sure he’d fallen asleep. She could grab her clothes from the floor and the car keys from the dresser where he’d tossed them and tiptoe out of the room. She could get dressed in the living room, slip out of the apartment, and drive herself home. And pretend this had never happened. Pretend he hadn’t broken through. Pretend she was still safe.

  Her cell phone rang, spoiling that plan. Mark’s eyes opened, and she realized he hadn’t been sleeping at all. Just resting deeply.

  With a sigh, she rolled out from under the blanket, barefooted across the room to her purse, and pulled out her phone. The screen revealed her home number. She clicked the button to connect the call. “Hello?”

  “Hi, Becky.” Her mother. “Just checking to see how you’re doing.”

  Becky frantically swallowed and cleared her throat so her mother wouldn’t hear the hoarseness left behind by her crying. “I’m fine.”

  “Where are you? I assume you aren’t on the road. You know better than to answer your phone when you’re driving.”

  Yeah, sure. “We’re still in Amherst,” she lied.

  “Having a good time?”

  “Yes.” Another lie.

  “Here’s the thing. Dad and I were invited to the Grabowskis. You remember Jim and Maryann Grabowski, don’t you? He teaches psychology.”

  “Sure, I remember him.” Lie.

  “Anyway, we probably won’t be home when you get back. You’re welcome to join us there, Jim and Maryann said—”

  “No, that’s okay.” At last, she could speak the truth. “I’d just as soon skip. You guys go and have fun.”

  “All right. You have your house key, right? So we can leave the house locked up.”

  “Yes.”

  “There’s some leftover lasagna in the fridge if you’re hungry when you get home.”

  “Don’t worry about it.” I may be drowning in a stormy sea, but I know how to feed myself. She said good-bye, clicked off the phone, and glanced toward the bed. Mark was watching her, the blanket slipped down to his waist, one arm folded behind his head.

  “You okay?”

  She nodded and tucked her phone back into her purse.

  “Man, you cry a lot.”

  “I don’t. Really. I don’t know why I’m crying so much today.” Merely uttering the words breached the dam again. More tears leaked out.

  Come here. He didn’t say the words but she could hear them. She could no longer sneak away, and standing across the room from him left her feeling chilled. She padded back to bed, the thin rug abrading the soles of her feet. She wondered when he had last vacuumed his room. Better not to know, she decided as she climbed into the bed.

  He pulled the blanket up around her and eased her against him. His body was hot, like those metal baskets of coal people in colonial times used to tuck at the foot of the bed to keep themselves warm. She didn’t want to snuggle up against him, but she needed his heat.

  Silence settled down around them like a fog, filling in the spaces between them. Like a fog, the silence was composed of substance—thoughts rather than moisture, thoughts unspoken like humidity suspended, refusing to gather into raindrops and fall to the ground. She suspected Mark wouldn’t break that silence. If she was wise, she wouldn’t either.

  She was smart, maybe, but not so wise. “It’s not Florie. I don’t care if she wants to believe Jesus is the answer for everything. It’s just . . . I feel like I’ve lost her. And I’m going to lose Elyse in June when she moves to France. If I haven’t lost her already.”

  “What makes you think you’ve lost her?”

  “This.” She touched his chest, the small, sweat-damp oval of hair at its center. Who knew how Elyse would react when she found out that Mark had slept with Bec
ky?

  “She doesn’t have to know.”

  “She’s my best friend,” Becky explained.

  “If you lose her because of this, she’s not your best friend.”

  Becky couldn’t argue that. But if she lost Elyse, it would mean she had no more friends. Not close ones. Not real ones. “I lost April. Now I’m losing everyone else.”

  “People come and go,” Mark said philosophically. “Sometimes you’ve just got to say good-bye.”

  “I can’t say good-bye to April.” The words emerged, shimmering with truth, brighter than a halo. “I’ve been trying to say good-bye to her for five years, and I can’t.”

  “So you go to the tree.”

  And she chanted. Apra apra dida may. And she lit candles. And she whispered, “I love you, April.” And in some inexplicable way, these things made April come back to her. If she shared Florie’s certainty about Jesus, it would mean April would never come back. If she followed Elyse’s path, it would mean she herself might never come back. But the tree and the candle and the chant and her profession of love, her own April ritual, her conjuring trick, her whack-job faith—it kept her from having to say good-bye.

  “You’ll leave, too,” she said.

  Mark shrugged, his shoulder flexing beneath her ear. “I don’t know. Maybe. Right now all I want to do is get my degree. And avoid roofs.” Lapsing into thought, he twirled his fingers through her hair. “You know what they say: when you save someone’s life, you own that person forever.”

  “I didn’t save your life,” Becky argued.

  He shrugged again, rocking her head. “Maybe I would have jumped that night. I used to get wasted and go up to the roof and look down, and think of how easy it would be just to take one more step, just to lean over the ledge and jump. Maybe that was the night I would have done it.”

  “Then Elyse owns you. She followed you up there and called me.”

  “Right. She was there, but she couldn’t get me away from the edge. That’s why she called you. She knew you could do it.”

  “She called me so you’d barf all over me instead of her.”

  “Maybe.” He laughed, an unexpected sound.

  “You wouldn’t have jumped if you had Jesus in your life,” she guessed. Wasn’t that what Florie’s belief system promised? Jesus could solve everything.

  “Maybe I’d have Jesus in my life if April had landed on her feet after I hit her, and she’d waved and held up the ball she was chasing and continued on her way down the road. That didn’t happen, though. If Jesus exists, where the hell was he when that shit was going down?”

  It occurred to Becky that she’d never talked to Emerson this way. Or even to Elyse and Florie. Now that the moat was drained, the tears shed, she and Mark could talk about what she’d held inside her for so long: the doubt. The fear. The comprehension that, no matter how smart you were, sometimes you were destined never to know the answer.

  “Gottlieb means God love, doesn’t it?”

  Mark nodded. “What does Zinn mean?”

  “It means an official at Ellis Island shortened my great-grandfather’s name from something long and unpronounceable.”

  He nodded again. “They have this saying at AA. ‘Let go and let God.’ Whenever someone says it, I think, let God what? Finish the damned sentence: let God what?”

  “Let God keep you sober?” Becky guessed. “Let God take care of everything?”

  “If God exists, he’s a royal fuck-up. I don’t see him taking care of things. Do you?”

  “I’m an atheist. I’m not the person to ask.”

  “But what I like about that saying is, let go. That’s what I’m trying to learn how to do. Let go.”

  Let Florie go to Jesus. Let Elyse go to Paris. Let April go. Let everything, everyone go.

  And then you wind up all alone.

  “If I had let go, you might have jumped off the roof,” she pointed out.

  “If I had jumped off the roof, you might have spent the next five years carrying my death on your back and hating yourself.”

  “Like you did with April. You never really let go,” Becky concluded. “Do you think you ever can?”

  “I don’t know.” He tightened his arm around her and sighed. “I don’t know.”

  She lay beside him, watching the light in the room fade as afternoon edged toward evening. Watching shadows stretch across his room, watching darkness take over. When there was nothing left to watch, she closed her eyes and felt Mark’s warmth, a haven in the chilly room.

  She would probably lose him, too. And it would hurt. The pain would be awful. People came and went, and he would go, and because she’d let him inside, her grief would be as excruciating as what she’d felt when April went.

  In a world so full of loss, she would not let God. She couldn’t trust him, so she wouldn’t let him.

  But maybe she could trust herself. So at least for now, she would not let go.

  PART THREE

  One Year Later

  Chapter 41

  THE TREE was gone.

  Mark had warned her. “There’s some sort of beetle infestation plaguing eastern Massachusetts,” he’d told her about a month ago. “They had to chop down a bunch of trees.” And last night, when she’d arrived at her parents’ house and phoned him to let him know she was in Wheatley, he’d said, “Don’t go.”

  Of course she went.

  Where the tree had once stood, only a low stump remained. Roots radiated from the stump, scraggling along the ground like gnarled hands reaching up from a grave in a cheesy horror movie. But above the stump there was only space. Emptiness. Air. Sky.

  She was back just for a week, the brief break she would allow herself now that the spring semester had ended. Her research was building momentum; she’d abandoned integers for artificial intelligence. It was easier and the odds of her earning a good living once she finished her doctorate were better in computer science than in number theory. At Stanford, computer science research got the funding, all those Silicon Valley enterprises eager to toss money at geniuses. She wasn’t convinced she qualified as a genius, but they were tossing money at her.

  Later that evening, she would head into Boston to see Mark. Dinner, sex, whatever. Becky had learned not to plan, not to predict or expect. What happened happened.

  A year ago, she would never have guessed that Florie would be the mother of an ugly baby and live in some sort of religious commune owned by the Jubilee Center or church or whatever it was, where she hand-crafted ugly angels which were then sold by her ugly husband. She’d sent Becky photos, and Becky had tried to be enthusiastic. Florie insisted she was happy. That would have to do.

  A year ago, Becky would never have guessed that Elyse would wind up on a Greek isle, working as a waitress in a resort. “The guys here are assholes,” she’d emailed Becky, “but they’re so freaking sexy, I forgive them.” She claimed she was happy, too.

  A year ago, Becky would never have guessed that Mark could be happy, and she still wasn’t certain he was. She would never have guessed that he’d decide to take graduate courses, training to become a therapist. That he worked as a counselor in a rehab center made sense to her, though. Maybe that was why she stayed in such close touch with him, and saw him whenever she flew east to visit her family, and made love with him. So little made sense in life, but in his own weird way, Mark did.

  Becky paced around the tree stump. His warning hadn’t prepared her for the shock of the tree’s non-existence. She might no longer be doing research on zero, but this was zero manifest. The absence of what should be there. The not-being of something that had once been.

  After circling the stump, she lowered herself to the ground, where she used to sit in the shade of fluttering scarlet leaves. If April died here today, her last vision would be not those red-map
le leaves but the open sky, June blue, with lacy wisps of cloud scattered across it. Would she think she was viewing heaven? Or the not-being of the tree?

  “April, April died in May,” Becky whispered, touching her hand to the stump. “April, you live in me this day. April, I still love you, okay?”

  Along the edge of one root—the root under which she’d buried a handful of cigarette butts and a heart-shaped gold charm so many years ago—grew dense tufts of soft, green grass. She remembered the seeds she’d planted at the base of the tree over the years she’d come here. The candle, the chant, the seeds in a plastic bag.

  Grass hadn’t sprouted before. Maybe it hadn’t been able to, because the tree had blocked the sunlight and sucked up all the available water in the soil. But now . . .

  Now there was grass.

  “April, April died in May. Grass is growing here today.”

  She shook her head. The rhymes felt wrong somehow. Without the tree’s thick trunk, the stretch of its limbs, the canopy of leaves, the rhymes didn’t work.

  The tree was gone. One more thing lost forever.

  She crossed her legs, propped her elbows on her knees, clasped her hands and rested her chin against her knuckles. The tree is gone. Accept it. Let it go.

  She stared at the grass. It didn’t seem possible that those vibrant green strands had sprung from the seeds she’d planted so long ago. Yet why couldn’t she believe that? People could believe whatever they wanted.

  This had been April’s tree. This could be April’s grass.

  So long ago. Once there had been a tree. Once there had been April. Once there had been high school. Mr. Schenk. T. S. Eliot. Shantih shantih shantih. The peace that passeth understanding.

  So long ago. So much gone.

  But grass had come, sweet and soft and new.

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