The April Tree Page 7

  “All right, so look,” he said. “Do you have a problem with me going to the memorial? Last I heard, it was open to anyone who wanted to go.”

  “But you didn’t even know April. You just went because—why? Curiosity factor? Rubbernecking?”

  “I knew April,” he argued. “We were in history together last year. Or maybe it was English.” He thought for a moment. “Yeah, English.”

  April had made such a powerful impression on him that he couldn’t even remember which class he’d had with her. Elyse wanted to smack him. He smelled like Old Spice, her father’s aftershave, and she wanted to smack him for that, too.

  “You went because you thought it would be an event,” she accused him. “Major news at the high school. A kid died.”

  He looked startled by her hostility, and then annoyed. Those eyes that April had thought were so beautiful grew chilly, as if their surfaces were frosting over, like windowpanes in the winter. “What’s the big deal? I mean, yeah, so you were her friend. You didn’t own her. Other people are allowed to feel bad that she died, okay?”

  “You didn’t give a shit about her when she was alive,” Elyse said. Maybe she was attacking him unfairly. Maybe she was totally irrational. She didn’t care. At that moment, she felt like April’s defender, her protector. This boy had caused April pain, however inadvertently, and Elyse hated him for it. “She was so in love with you, and you didn’t give a shit.”

  “What?” Tommy spoke so loudly, his friends by the caf doorway glanced toward him and Elyse, poised to intervene.

  She lowered her voice in the hope that Tommy would take a hint and lower his, too. “She had a wicked crush on you. I spent the past year and a half listening to her sigh over you, and you never even said hello to her.”

  “I did so say hello to her,” he argued, although he sounded a bit unsure. “It’s not like we hung out or anything, but you know. We had that class together.”

  “Right. English or history. Or maybe it was gym, or art. What’s the difference?”

  “I said hello to her,” he insisted, his voice sounding grainy. “I knew who she was. But she, you know. She was in a different group. You girls—April was one of you. The smart girls. You and her and Beck the Brain.”

  “Beck the Brain?” In spite of her fury, a laugh escaped Elyse. What would Becky think if she knew guys like Tommy called her Beck the Brain? She’d probably be amused. Maybe even flattered. Maybe indignant. It was pretty funny, though. Beck the Brain. Elyse wondered what nickname they might have for her. Elyse the Twit? Elyse the Jackass? Not even in her dreams did she come close to being as brainy as Becky.

  Her laughter, however brief, made Tommy relax, as if he felt he was no longer under attack. Maybe he wasn’t. He didn’t get defensive when Elyse asked, “So, if April weren’t so smart, would you have asked her out?”

  He considered the question long enough to convince Elyse he took it seriously. “I don’t know. I mean, she was kind of cute, I guess. She liked me, huh.”

  “That proves she wasn’t so smart, after all,” Elyse said, but it came out as a tease, not an insult.

  “It proves she had great taste.” His smile faded. His eyes were too light, his gaze too smug. April had had great taste in friends, but in guys? Well, taste was an individual thing. Even standing this close to Tommy and observing the play of emotions on his broad face, the humanizing flashes of humor and anger and sadness, Elyse couldn’t grasp what April had seen in him.

  But she could accept him as human now. He wasn’t just that boy April used to moon over. He was a real person who’d had a class with April and who was sorry she’d died. And apparently was sorry he hadn’t known how she’d felt about him.

  “All right,” he said, rolling his shoulders in a shrug. “So. Are we cool?”

  “Yeah.” Elyse’s rage was spent. She was no longer sure what had caused it. Grief, she supposed. Grief and despair and the anxiety and loss you felt when you jumped into a pool and lowered your legs and discovered there was nothing under your feet, nothing to stand on. Staying afloat took a lot of effort, and if you let up for even an instant you’d go under.

  She spun on her heel and flipped her hair back behind her shoulders. She’d washed it that morning, and it had done her the favor of blow-drying smooth and shiny. When she saw her reflection walking past the glass walls of the school’s front office, she avoided focusing on her butt and instead gazed at her hair. She wondered if Tommy noticed how silky it looked, how glossy, like black patent leather.

  He was a guy. He probably didn’t even know what patent leather was. But he probably did know that hair like Elyse’s was a good thing.

  Chapter Nine

  MARK STARED at the chaos of his bedroom. Neatness had never been his strong suit, but right now the place looked more like a trash palace than the Wheatley town dump did. He’d always been impressed by how tidy the town dump was. Recycled stuff here. Biodegradable stuff there. Swap area over there. And all the rest trucked off to a deep pit for burial. Everything in its place.

  Nothing was in its place in Mark’s room. Not even Mark.

  He surveyed the mayhem, his eyes registering what his brain couldn’t. His globe would stay. His baseball trophies. He wouldn’t need his boots for months, at least.

  He’d filled a couple of cartons and stashed his laptop in its padded canvas bag. The old suitcase that used to belong to his grandmother and still smelled faintly of her honey-sweet perfume was crammed with underwear and T-shirts. His sleeping bag was rolled and stuffed into its nylon sack, his pillow resting on top of it. His duffel still had space for more stuff inside it, but he’d have it full before long.

  It wasn’t as if he was moving across the country. Just back to Boston. If he left something behind and discovered he needed it, he could always take the train home or mooch a ride to Wheatley. Maybe his parents would even drive into town for him. They didn’t hate him. At least he didn’t think they did.

  Not the way Danny hated him.

  Not the way Mark hated himself.

  Comb. Deodorant. Toothbrush. He’d snag a tube of toothpaste from the cabinet in his parents’ bathroom where his mother stockpiled supplies.

  “You shouldn’t just toss your toiletries loose into your duffel,” Tracy said from the door.

  He glanced over his shoulder. She leaned against the door jamb, her hair pulled into a loose braid, her slim shoulder hitched where it pressed the molding, and the diamond Danny had given her at his graduation party glinting above a knuckle on her left hand. She was actually not a bad person. Why she wanted to marry his brother was beyond him.

  “Don’t you have a toiletries bag?” she asked.

  He probably did, but he couldn’t waste time looking for it. Remy would be swinging by in—he dug his phone from a deep pocket of his cargo shorts and flipped it open to check the time—forty minutes. As soon as Remy pulled up the circular driveway, Mark wanted to be out the door. Away. Gone from here.

  He dropped his phone back into his pocket, then gathered whatever was left on the top of his bureau—a deck of cards, some flash drives that might or might not be blank, the crappy ear-buds that came with his iPod, a ticket stub from a Sox game—and threw them into the duffel with his toiletries. He’d sort it all out when he got to Boston.

  “I wish you weren’t leaving,” Tracy said. “I was hoping we’d get to know each other better this summer.”

  “Yeah. Well.” He spotted his favorite flannel shirt on the floor, half-hidden by the blanket that had oozed over the side of his bed. He scooped up the shirt, shook it out, and shoved it into the bag.

  “I’m sure you could find a job here.”

  Sure. His father could give him a make-work summer position at his company. They manufactured packing materials, and there was always junk work available. Sweeping debris. Mowing the lawn surro
unding the building. Answering phones. Mark could do any of those jobs, but he wouldn’t. He couldn’t stay here.

  “I’ve got something lined up in the city,” he told her. Not technically true, but Remy was pretty sure there were openings at the carpet store where he worked. They needed strong young men to load the rolls of carpet into the trucks. If the job wasn’t too awful, Mark might continue it into the fall part-time, when he wasn’t in class.

  Or he could drop out of college and hoist carpet rolls into trucks full-time. He was the fuck-up Gottlieb son, after all. Not the Yale son. Would a college degree really make a difference? Would it undo anything, reverse time, make life bearable? Would it bring the girl he killed back to life?

  “It’s none of my business,” Tracy persisted, “but talking to a counselor might help.”

  You’re right—it’s none of your business. He didn’t say that, because she was being so nice. She didn’t deserve to drown in a tsunami of his grief and rage.

  She also didn’t deserve to hear him explain that he didn’t want help. Feeling the way he did seemed just about right. Sometimes, when circumstances warranted, a person was supposed to feel like shit. This was one of those times.

  Besides, as nice as Tracy was, she was Danny’s ally. Christ, she was sleeping with him. She was going to marry him. Sometime in the foreseeable future, Mark was going to have to stand at a linen-covered, flower-bedecked reception-room table, dressed in a tuxedo, holding a champagne flute high, and drink a toast to the happy couple. He wondered what the protocol was when you thought the groom was a prick and his bride was a fool for marrying a prick. Could the best man include that heartfelt insight in his toast?

  Maybe he’d get lucky and Danny would choose someone else to be his best man. Maybe he’d get even luckier, and Danny wouldn’t invite him to the wedding.

  He glanced toward Tracy. She remained in the doorway, watching him expectantly. He felt obligated to say something. “We’ll get to know each other. But right now, I have to go.”

  “You don’t have to.”

  “Yeah. I do.” He zipped his duffel shut, pleased by the finality of the sound. After hoisting the strap over his shoulder, he wrapped his arm around the two cartons, one stacked on top of the other. Heavy, but he could manage. Compared to this, lifting rolls of carpet would be easy.

  Not long after he’d lugged his stuff down to the front porch, Remy cruised up the drive in his dinged-up Subaru wagon. Fortunately, Mark’s parents were both out, his father at work, his mother wherever. He would phone them tonight to explain where he was. That would be easier than saying good-bye to them in person. Danny was avoiding Mark, for which he was grateful. The only person available to wave him off was Tracy. She stood in the foyer, watching through the front door’s beveled glass sidelight as he and Remy heaved his things into the back of the wagon, shifting a box here, a bag there to wedge everything in.

  Remy slammed the rear door down, and Mark turned to the porch. Was he supposed to say good-bye to her? Give her a hug? Advise her to return that pricy diamond ring to Danny and run for her life?

  Mark acknowledged her with a half-hearted nod, then climbed into the passenger seat and stared straight ahead, not wanting to see if she was waving good-bye.

  Remy didn’t speak until they’d turned the corner. “So, dude,” he said. “What the fuck?”

  Mark smiled sullenly. He’d gotten to know Remy last year when they’d lived across the hall from each other in a seedy freshman dorm, both of them saddled with obnoxious roommates. The son of unreconstructed hippies with weird senses of humor—they’d named him Remy because their last name was Martin—Remy had endeared himself to Mark by being the antithesis of Mark’s wealthy, ambitious family. Remy’s hair was long and shrubby. He smelled like burlap. He was majoring in anthropology and aspired to nothing more significant than to be happy. Law school, med school, business school—not for him.

  At the end of the school year, he’d talked his way onto the lease of a group apartment in Brighton. The original plan was for Mark to join him in the apartment at the end of August, after one of the other tenants moved out. Mark had believed he would be spending the summer at home, eating his mother’s cooking and not having to pay for it or for the roof over his head. He’d work for his father, pocket his earnings, and return to college well-fed and flush with cash.

  But that was then. “I really appreciate you guys squeezing me in this summer,” he said.

  “Not a problem, as long as you’re willing to sleep on a futon and live out of your suitcase. Splitting the rent four ways is cheaper than splitting it three ways. Everybody’s cool.”

  “That’s great.”

  “So I repeat: what the fuck? What happened here in Status Symbol Land?”

  “It just wasn’t working out,” Mark said evasively. He and Remy were good friends, but he wasn’t ready to confide that he’d killed a girl. He wasn’t even sure he could speak the words without his throat going into spasm and his gut turning inside out. “My brother is a dick. I didn’t realize he was going to be spending the summer in Wheatley.” That was a crock. He’d known Danny’s plans. And as hard as Danny was to take under ordinary circumstances, Mark could have tolerated his holier-than-thou Yale Man shit for a couple of months.

  But not now. Not after he’d killed a girl.

  “A dick, huh.”

  “Turn left at the corner,” Mark alerted Remy.

  Remy’s car was a wreck, perfect for parking in the crowded Brighton neighborhood, because there were sure to be newer, fancier cars parked near it, making it less tempting to thieves. But despite its dents and scabs of rust, its stained upholstery and the accumulation of trash littering its floor, it had a state-of-the-art GPS attached to the windshield. State-of-the-art GPS’s didn’t know the local shortcuts Mark knew, and fortunately Remy was willing to obey Mark rather than his techno-gizmo.

  “Is this your Ivy League brother?”

  “He’s the only brother I have.” The sun glared across the windshield, illuminating a constellation of dead bugs stuck to the glass. Mark remembered a different windshield, a different glare. He closed his eyes and guided his thoughts back to Danny. “He’s got a fiancée. She lives on Long Island, but she’s spending more time at our house than her own. Every time I turn around, there she is.”

  “Is she a dick, too?” Remy asked. There was nothing aggressive in his questions, nothing particularly nosy. Remy just liked to ask questions. “What’s the female equivalent of a dick?”

  “A cunt,” Mark said, “and no, she’s not. She’s actually nice. I don’t know what she sees in Danny.”

  “Dollar signs, my boy. Dollar signs.” Remy drove in silence for a minute, ruminating. “I hate that word, cunt. An ugly word for a beautiful thing.”

  Mark attempted a smile. He’d had a girlfriend last year, but they’d broken up in honor of the calendar. Spring term had been winding down, and they’d be heading their separate ways that summer, and it wasn’t as if they actually loved each other. So they’d invented something to fight about and she’d stormed out of his life in an indignant huff. At the time, Mark had felt relief. Liberation. He’d been exhilarated by the prospect of new women, new conquests. Now he couldn’t imagine himself with a woman. He was unworthy. Killers didn’t deserve to experience pleasure.

  Another sharp flash of white across the windshield as Remy steered into the sun. Mark closed his eyes, and his brain stumbled over Officer Romano’s words: That Mark wasn’t at fault. That fate had killed April Walden. That God had his reasons, and people weren’t supposed to know what they were. If he cut us in on his thoughts, then where would the mystery be?

  Romano was the one who’d urged Mark to return to Boston. The guy was pretty smart for a cop, more philosophical than Mark would have expected. Maybe he was a detective. Apparently he wasn’t bothered by mysteries.


  Mysteries didn’t bother Mark, either—unless he was trying to solve them and they stymied him. Then he didn’t like them at all.

  Would he be worthy of a girlfriend if he solved this mystery? The mystery of his life, the mystery of a girl’s death, the mystery of how the universe could spin out of control so quickly. The mystery of what it meant, what a person was supposed to believe, how a person could believe anything at all.

  “Forget it,” Remy said.

  “Forget what?”

  “Whatever it is you’re remembering. We’ll be in Boston in fifteen minutes, and you’ll wake up and realize it was all just a bad dream.”

  “Yeah,” Mark said, although he knew that was just one more thing he couldn’t believe.

  Chapter Ten

  “APRIL IS THE cruelest month,” Mr. Schenk intoned. “What does that mean?”

  Florie stared down at her hands, flattened against the pages of her literature anthology. She’d learned that if you stared out the window, Mr. Schenk would call on you, but if you looked down, he would assume you were concentrating on the lesson, not daydreaming.

  Florie wasn’t daydreaming. She would have been thinking about how ugly her fingernails were, blunt and unpolished, the cuticles spreading onto her nails as if her skin had leaked. Or she would have been thinking about the hum of the fluorescent light overhead, low and insidious, causing the nerves in her temples to twitch. Or she would have been thinking about the balmy afternoon outside the window. Or about how she wished her parents would let her take voice lessons because the chorus teacher only gave solos to the kids with trained voices. One of Florie’s greatest and most realistic fears was that she was doomed to spend her entire life as a back-up singer, both actually and metaphorically.