The April Tree Read online

  Other Bell Bridge Books from Judith Arnold

  Goodbye To All That

  The April Tree

  by

  Judith Arnold

  Bell Bridge Books

  Copyright

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons (living or dead), events or locations is entirely coincidental.

  Bell Bridge Books

  PO BOX 300921

  Memphis, TN 38130

  Ebook ISBN: 978-1-61194-312-2

  Print ISBN: 978-1-61194-289-7

  Bell Bridge Books is an Imprint of BelleBooks, Inc.

  Copyright © 2013 by Barbara Keiler writing as Judith Arnold

  Printed and bound in the United States of America.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review.

  We at BelleBooks enjoy hearing from readers.

  Visit our websites – www.BelleBooks.com and www.BellBridgeBooks.com.

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  Cover design: Debra Dixon

  Interior design: Hank Smith

  Photo credits:

  Maple leaves (manipulated) © Chris Sargent | Dreamstime.com

  Girl (manipulated) © Petr Malyshev | Dreamstime.com

  Tree/ground (manipulated) © Mythja | Dreamstime.com

  :Eatg:01:

  Dedication

  For Susan

  PART ONE

  Chapter One

  IT WAS NOT his fault.

  He willed himself to unclench his fingers, which were curled so tightly around the steering wheel they’d practically fused with the plastic. He imagined that if he ever let go, his hands would leave behind a shadow imprint, like the shadows left on the sidewalks where people had been standing in Hiroshima when the bomb fell. He’d heard about that somewhere, he didn’t know where, that people were incinerated where they stood, dissolved into fire, and when the fire died their shadows remained on the sidewalks like photographs of their souls.

  He’d heard lots of things, and he didn’t believe any of them.

  For instance, he didn’t believe that this wasn’t his fault. He knew it wasn’t. But knowing was different from believing.

  Remember everything. Remember it so you’ll be able to believe it someday. Remember because this is your life, from this point forward. Nothing else counts. This is it.

  Sunlight spilled across the windshield, silver and liquid. Through the glaze he saw trees, the foliage a dozen shades of green except for one rust-colored red maple, the trunks gray. Why did little kids always use brown crayons to draw tree trunks? Like lime lollipops with brown sticks. He used to draw trees that way, too.

  But it wasn’t true. Tree trunks were gray.

  Remember this, he ordered himself.

  The road wasn’t gray or black. It was an inky blue, and the double-stripe running down the center was school-bus yellow. The tennis ball was the nauseating green of anti-freeze. If only he’d seen it sooner—but he couldn’t have, because he’d been on the other side of the hill.

  Remember that, too. You were on the other side of the hill. You couldn’t see anything until it was too late. This isn’t your fault.

  The girls were a muddle of bare shoulders and slender, golden legs. They were wearing shorts, unnaturally white sneakers, and sleeveless white tops. He counted three of them standing, but they seemed bound together, moving as one six-legged creature with three heads. He couldn’t see the fourth girl, which was probably just as well.

  Not your fault, he told himself. Not your fault. You came up over the hill, and she was running, she ran right into you, you swerved, but it wasn’t enough. She ran into you, and there was that noise, that horrible thunk of metal that resonated in your chest like your heart imploding. It wasn’t your fault.

  He was a long way from believing.

  ELYSE BLAMED her mother.

  Her mother, who couldn’t keep a promise if she locked it in a safe deposit box. Whose life was just so fucking important that her own daughter and her daughter’s friends could slip her mind. Who’d said she would pick them up at four o’clock at the tennis court and never showed up, because her promises were worth shit.

  They’d waited. A fucking half hour. Elyse had phoned her mother’s cell twice, but her mother hadn’t answered. Elyse should have known better than to think her mother would actually do what she’d said she was going to do. She had one priority, one mission, one goal: pleasing herself. Doing whatever the hell she wanted. Getting whatever the hell she needed. Taking care of herself and tossing off promises that were as substantial as specks of dust in a shaft of sunlight. One tiny breath would blow them away.

  “You have to pick us up at four,” Elyse had told her mother, “because April’s parents are going out at five, and April has to babysit for her brothers, and the only way she can play tennis with us is if she can get home by five. Florie’s mom can drive us there if you can pick us up.”

  “No problem,” Elyse’s mother had said.

  No problem? Jesus fucking Christ. Because Elyse’s mother never showed up, they’d had to walk home, and because they’d had to walk home, April was now lying by the side of the road under a tree, not moving. No problem?

  She blamed her mother for this, the way she blamed her mother for shutting down in the middle of conversations and walking away when Elyse was trying to talk to her, and treating Elyse’s father as if he was just a fixture in the house, a faucet you could twist when you wanted water. She blamed her mother for borrowing her clothes without asking, and for sending out for Chinese because she’d forgotten to cook dinner. She blamed her mother for everything.

  She blamed herself even more, because she’d been stupid enough to trust her mother.

  FLORIE WOULD never forgive herself. She hated the fact that her hands and feet were too large, her body too long, her voice too shrill. She hated that her hair had waves in the wrong places, like a wrinkled sheet of paper, and that when she was concentrating she would tuck the tip of her tongue beneath her upper lip without realizing it, and it made her look like a chimpanzee. She hated that no matter what she did, no matter how hard she tried, she would never be graceful. She would never fit in.

  She wouldn’t have even been here if it weren’t for April. Oh, God, April. Lying on the side of the road, so still and pale, with the men from the ambulance doing things to her. Lord knew what things they were doing, but Florie prayed they were the right things, the magical things that would cause April to sit up and smile and say, “Whoa, that was weird.”

  April was kind. She had always been the one to include Florie in plans with Becky and Elyse. They were blessed with grace—April, Becky, and Elyse. They’d known each other forever, and it was only because April had insisted on being nice to the new girl who’d moved into the split-ranch down the street, the clumsy oaf, the chimp, the dimwit who wanted only one thing in life and that was for people to think she wasn’t a dimwit and an oaf and all the rest.

  April liked her, or at least pretended she did. Or tried to like her. She’d phoned and said, “We’re going to the town tennis court on Baker’s Hill Road. If you come, we can play doubles. Okay?”

  Becky might have invited Florie if they’d needed a fourth. Elyse would probably rather have played with three. In fact, Elyse would have rather not played at all than to incl
ude Florie. But Elyse wouldn’t have gotten her way, because April was the soul of the group. She was the sweet one, the generous one. She was the one who’d found room in her heart for Florie the loser.

  And now, look what Florie had done. She’d dropped the ball—literally. She’d been bouncing it up and down on the webbed netting of her racquet, and it had ricocheted as she walked along the shoulder—there was no sidewalk on Baker’s Hill Road because Wheatley, Massachusetts seemed to think forcing pedestrians to walk along the shoulders of twisting, hilly, tree-lined country roads helped to maintain the rural flavor of the town. So they’d been walking two by two along the shoulder, Elyse and Becky in front and Florie and April behind them, and Florie had decided to bounce the ball up and down on her racquet as they walked, to show April her hand-eye coordination wasn’t a total disaster, to prove she was adept at something.

  The ball had bounced wild into the street just as Elyse and Becky were cresting the hill. It had started to roll.

  Florie didn’t know why April chased it. Instinct, maybe—but more likely it was her innate kindness. She would have been thinking that Florie shouldn’t lose her tennis ball, and April would have chased it with no thought for her own safety. There was a selflessness about April, a consideration for everyone else. She liked to rescue people and errant tennis balls. Naturally, she’d dart into the street to retrieve the ball for Florie.

  Florie would never forgive herself for letting that ball bounce away.

  IT WAS ALL her fault, Becky thought, staring at the tree. She ought to be staring at April, but for once in her life she’d decided to do the easier thing, and it was easier to look at the tree than at her dead friend.

  She knew April was dead, knew it the way she knew the smell of air and the taste of water. The EMTs were acting as if there were still a chance. They slid a board under April’s limp body, braced her neck, and strapped her on securely, then lifted her with abundant caution onto a gurney and wheeled it to the ambulance. It was all a show, a bit of staging that was supposed to reassure Becky and Florie and Elyse, to leave them with a shred of hope.

  As if Florie and Elyse were even noticing. Florie’s face had crumpled, sinking in on itself like a deflated balloon, her eyes located in the most scrunched-up part. Tears gushed from them, rivers of tears, oceans.

  Elyse’s eyes were closed and her cheeks were shiny, but at least her face wasn’t scrunched. Even in pain, Elyse looked beautiful.

  They were probably both thinking that it was all Becky’s fault. She’d been the one to say they ought to walk, because April’s parents needed her home by five and Elyse’s mother, who was supposed to pick them up, was obviously running late.

  The tree was a red maple. Its leaves hadn’t fully opened yet. They budded along the branches, tiny tufts of reddish-brown, the color of fresh scabs. Red maples were strange trees. Their leaves were always the color of fall. They never had a chance to be green, to look like summer.

  The last thing April had seen would have been that tree, those budding blood-red leaves. Well, perhaps not—perhaps the last thing she’d seen was Florie’s stupid green tennis ball, or the pavement, or the car. Maybe she’d even seen the driver.

  Becky risked a glance toward the car. It was a metallic gray Volvo station wagon, a suburban-mom car. She didn’t think a suburban mom was driving, though. She’d heard one of the police officers use the pronoun “he” in reference to the driver. But she couldn’t see him. Sunlight washed across the windshield, turning it opaque.

  Had the sun glared into his eyes when he’d come over the hill? Had he been momentarily blinded?

  It didn’t matter. He hadn’t hit April. April had hit him. She’d been running so fast, chasing the ball as if it were something precious, something worth losing your life over.

  She was dead. Becky knew it. She stared at the tree and knew it was all her fault.

  Chapter Two

  BECKY’S PARENTS didn’t handle crises very well. They were bright—brilliant, actually—and they had the best of intentions. But Becky considered them strange creatures, refugees from a rarefied universe, out of place and out of step. Like foreigners, they couldn’t hear their own accents. They smiled when they were happy, when they were bewildered, when they were communicating with each other in their own alien language. Their smiles were their secret sign, their way of connecting with each other, distinguishing and detaching them from everyone else.

  They looked alike. Becky wondered whether they’d looked alike when they first met—had that been the attraction?—or gradually evolved to resemble each other because they’d been together for so long. She looked a little like them both, but not a lot like either of them. Fifteen years old, she still hadn’t mastered the secret smile.

  For them, a tragedy was to have a student drop out of one of their classes or see a colleague denied tenure. Tragedy was a wrong-headed editorial in the New York Times or a violent upheaval in one of those “-stan” countries—Kazakhstan or Uzbekistan.

  What had happened today wasn’t tragedy. It was reality. And when reality rained on them, they lacked the common sense to open an umbrella.

  Becky knew they were upset, mostly for her, but a bit for themselves, too. April had been in their home a million times. Before she and Becky got their own cell phones, April had regularly tied up Becky’s parents’ phone line, whining to Becky about their biology homework, analyzing the dynamics of various social pairings at school, or describing some obnoxious thing her younger brothers had done. April had slept in Becky’s parents’ house, eaten their whole-wheat pretzels, played Chopsticks on their piano, ridden in their car, and sat hunched on their porch steps, moaning that her fingernails were uneven and Tommy Crawford was the perfect guy for her except that she might as well be invisible, for all he noticed. She and Becky had littered the kitchen table with orange pine needles and twigs in the construction of a three-dimensional Civil War display for sixth-grade social studies—Becky’s job had been to cut limbs off the plastic toy soldiers they’d purchased, while April landscaped a miniature Shiloh on a sheet of particleboard. Then they’d scattered the amputee soldiers around the battlefield and dribbled red paint on their stumps.

  Becky wondered where their battlefield had wound up. In April’s basement, maybe. Becky wanted it. She wanted to sleep with it on the floor beside her bed, to see it first thing in the morning when she opened her eyes. If she couldn’t have April, she wanted to have Shiloh and all that blood and pain.

  Ever since she’d gotten home, she had wanted to sit by herself in her bedroom, but her parents wouldn’t let her. They were afraid to leave her alone. She had no idea what they expected would happen if they allowed her out of their sight. They had to know she wouldn’t drown in her tears. Crying did nothing for her, other than give her a sore throat and cramps. She always felt as bad after unrestrained weeping as she did before. It wasn’t worth the effort.

  She wanted to get away from her parents, though—and she couldn’t think of a tactful way to do that. They meant well. That could be their epitaphs, she thought: Here Lie Aaron Zinn and Helen Lundquist. They Meant Well.

  She sank deeper into the easy chair, her legs tucked under her as if she could fold in on herself. Human origami, she thought. She wished she could crease herself into a crane and fly away. Weren’t cranes supposed to carry dead people to heaven? Maybe April was with cranes now. Becky didn’t believe in heaven, but she liked the idea of April surrounded by beautiful white birds, flying.

  The Zinn living room was not a place for cranes. It was dim and murky, the ceiling low, the floor sloping slightly. Such flaws were typical of two-hundred-year-old houses. The window glass rippled, the floor planks lay dull and scuffed, and the air held the aroma of smoke even in late May, months after the family had last had a blaze going in the fireplace. Her parents were too eccentric to care about home decor, but they did try to maintain the his
torical integrity of the house, which meant the lamps all looked like gas lamps and the living room was always gloomy.

  It didn’t need much light, given the radioactive glow of her parents’ smiles. Their presence crowded her. Their soft, solicitous words irritated her. Three hours had passed since the accident, and all they seemed able to do, in their intelligent, affectionate way, was drive her crazy.

  Mixed with the leftover scent of last winter’s fires was the aroma of the dinner Becky hadn’t eaten. Her mother was a lazy cook, but on Saturday evenings she exerted herself to serve the kind of meal other families ate on a regular basis. Tonight it had been a roast turkey breast. The fragrance of hot butter and garlic haunted Becky.

  Ordinarily, she loved turkey. Ordinarily, she was starving by dinnertime. Ordinarily, she did not arrive home in a police cruiser after witnessing the death of her best friend.

  “Would you like to watch some television?” her father asked, swooping down on her with the newspaper’s TV listings page. Becky’s parents generally scorned television. The family owned one nineteen-inch set, no VCR or DVD player, no cable. That her father would actually recommend TV to Becky proved that he was desperate to fix things for her.

  “Maybe you’d like to take a bath and put on some fresh clothes,” her mother said. Becky was still wearing her tennis shorts and tank top. She could see whitish hairs fuzzing her legs. She should have shaved them that morning. Just because the hair was pale blond didn’t mean it was invisible. She looked like a skinny albino gorilla from the waist down.

  She suffered a pang of shame for fretting about the state of her legs. Such vanity, when April was dead.

  A shudder tore at her from the inside. She felt her organs fraying, her soul unraveling.

  April.

  What would the world be like without April in it? How was it possible that the planet continued to spin, the last of the dusk light fading through the windows, the shadows stretching across the rugs to climb the walls, the hair on Becky’s legs growing, her parents peering down at her with their odd, anxious smiles, fussing, hovering—and April was gone. How was such a thing possible?