April & Oliver
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are
used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.
Copyright © 2009 by Therese Callahan James
All rights reserved. Except as permitted under the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, no part of this publication may be reproduced,
distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior written
permission of the publisher.
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ISBN: 978-0-446-55207-3
Contents
For my parents,
GRACE
and
JOHN
For sharing their perceptions regarding this book in particular or writing in general, I thank Meliset Abreu, Douglas Bauer,
Sven Birkerts, Nicole Bokat, Anne Calcagno, Anne Callagy, Chris Callagy, Leonard Casper, Deirdre Day-MacLeod, Susan Dodd,
Don Freas, Amy Hempel, David Lehman, Tom Lorenz, Jill McCorkle, Naomi Rand, Marly Swick, and especially Caprice Garvin. I
am grateful to
Baltimore Sun
columnist David Steele for generous details about sportswriting. For musical inspiration, and for her insight into Beethoven’s
allegretto from Symphony No. 7, as expressed on NPR’s
All Songs Considered,
I thank pianist extraordinaire Hélène Grimaud. I am grateful to painter Roy Kinzer for making me a better writer by teaching
me how to see. Thank you to my old friend Andrea for bringing adventure to my childhood. I admire and appreciate my agent,
Anne Edelstein, for her wisdom and radiance, and my editor, Deb Futter, for her keen, intuitive eye. Finally, I thank my family
members and my husband, Vincent, for their faith and support.
I am especially grateful to my longtime friend and trusted reader Sasha Troyan, without whom this manuscript would still be
in a drawer.
B
UDDY HAS BEEN LOST FOR SOME TIME
, his wipers whisking the thick Maine snow, when he spots a missed turn in his rearview and brakes. The car fishtails, rocketing
into a spin. The faster it pivots, the slower time moves. Buddy is the fixed point, the world careening around him.
He takes a young maple with him into the gully. A few stubborn leaves cling to the branches that protrude through the windshield.
Everything is abruptly quiet. He sees bits of sky. A lone heron. The car is resting on its side with Buddy somehow in the
passenger seat, his back to the window and his foot beneath the crushed steering wheel. The angle is impossible; it appears
to be someone else’s leg. The dead engine ticks; he smells gasoline and sap, freshly split wood, his sister’s griddlecakes.
He remembers being lost in the woods as a child with his sister, April, and their friend, Oliver, the scent of wet leaves
and the downy chill of night descending. This is what comes to Buddy now. A brook gurgling and sloshing over scattered rocks.
The three of them stepping from stone to stone. His small hands in their big hands. Water funneling down. The beginnings of
a question he feels but can’t say. It has the shape of a person bending over him, waiting.
The mangled sapling creaks. Buddy looks into the car and sees a young man with startled eyes wearing his parka. He can’t imagine
who it is. He looks down on the smoldering baby-blue Malibu dusted with drifting snow. The scene is oddly tranquil. Strapped
to the sideways roof, the deer he shot this morning appears to stand upright, ready to bolt.
Specks of snow travel in. Buddy hears each flake as it touches his hair, the soft down on the buck’s antlers. He remembers
putting his hand on its side as it lay in the snow, feeling its heat. Those dark, gentle eyes. His sister’s eyes, worried
every time he skinned his knee. “I’m sorry, April,” he used to say.
“It’s okay, Budster,” she replied, dabbing the gash gingerly. “We all fall sometimes.” But her smile was pained; she hated
when he got hurt.
He wishes he could let her know that what’s happening now doesn’t hurt at all. He’s fine. A veil of snow shrouds the windshield.
Buddy feels a growing pause between each breath, like a stride lengthening, an aperture opening by increments, until at last
he slips through.
1
L
ONG BEFORE DAWN
on the morning of the funeral, a rogue wind enters April’s apartment, clattering the shells of her wind chime, causing her
to bolt upright in bed. Night air seizes her. Her mind hurtles through darkness, not wanting to remember, but the realization
gaining on her.
It’s today.
Papers fly off her nightstand. The curtains tangle and snap. She finds her way to the window, her long hair flaying, but
just as she reaches the sill, the gust dies down. Against reason, her thoughts clamber for a passage back, a chance to say
to him,
Don’t take this trip. I have a bad feeling
. Instead, they said good-bye cheerfully, without the slightest premonition.
An aria rises from the street below. A familiar man with a bedraggled overcoat and unkempt beard wanders the train station
across the way. When he has enough to drink, his voice carries clear across Sunrise Highway. The sad timbre of it reverberates
inside her, echoing just beneath her sternum. She closes the window.
The stillness of the train station tells her it’s not yet five in the morning. She doesn’t bother to look at the date; she
knows. Draped over the back of a chair lies the black dress she set out for herself. Instead, she pulls on some jeans, gets
in her car, and drives to the diner. It’s a Sunday, after all.
The usual waitress with milkweed hair and creviced eyes raises her brow. “Aren’t you about three hours early?” she asks, pouring
two cups of coffee.
“Busy day,” April says.
“He here yet?” she says, pointing to the second cup.
“I’ll drink both. Thanks.”
“Shoot yourself,” says the waitress over her shoulder.
April shudders.
Suit yourself.
Of course that’s what she said.
Jesus,
she thinks.
April draws the second mug over to her side of the table. The booth feels cold with no one else in it. An immense aquarium
illuminates the storefront—an improbable place for a fish tank, but she’s never seen an ounce of algae. Vibrant koi glide
back and forth. Buddy loved to watch them. April has been taking him here for breakfast most Sundays since he was eight. Ten
years already?
People pass by the storefront, heads bowed against the impulsive wind. April gives a start, thinking she sees Buddy dashing
to the door—he’s always late—but it’s only a jogger sprinting by. She cups her hands around the coffee, still too hot to touch.
Steam furls up in delicate ribbons—not an amorphous cloud, but a rhythmic swirl, a whirling dervish of mist. She feels the
warmth on her face. The vapor lifts and circles with excruciating grace, frail and lithe as the beggar’s notes. She cannot
bear to watch it, or to stop. Gradually, the rising steam slows and dissipates into shallow wisps of breath. April thinks
of many things—tying Buddy’s shoelaces, cleaning gravel from a scraped knee, combing his hair before school, the cowlick that
refused to flatten. And at the same time, she sees nothing but vapor.
For an instant she doesn’t know where she is. The coffee is long cold, and the restaurant teems with people. Outside the window,
sunlight bleaches the pavement. The deep-eyed waitress waits at the end of the booth, tapping her pen. “Oh, right,” April
says. “The check.”
She glances into her purse for her wallet and sees that his is there, too, though she’s not sure when she put it there. The
leather is smooth and molded to the shape of his back pocket. He always asked to treat her, and she never let him. Not once.
She takes a twenty from his wallet and leaves it on the table.
Back in her apartment, the wind has clustered papers up against the closet door—insurance forms, the accident report, the
death notice. She doesn’t pick them up, but leaves her jeans on the floor beside them. The slinky fabric of the dress chills
her skin. Rather than wrestle a brush through her windswept hair, she lets it be.
The church doors are locked, so she sits on the cold stone steps and waits. Since the accident she has lost grasp of time.
She asked that the hearse meet her here because she couldn’t bear to go back to the funeral parlor. Finally, carloads of people
arrive. They are teenagers mostly, with hip-hugging pants and thrice-pierced ears, yet their faces, shocked and raw, give
the impression of children.
The funeral mass and the drive to the cemetery pass like someone else’s dream. The only thing vivid is the past, those grimy
fingernails April could never get him to scrub. The home run he hit on his ninth birthday.
The priest opens his prayer book and reads, his words falling like leaves into the open grave. April cannot register them,
only the dull timbre of his voice and the barest whisk as he turns an onionskin page. She remembers the time she dropped Buddy
in the upstairs hallway, near the top of the stairs. She tripped on something—her father’s shoes, maybe; he was always leaving
them out in the open—and the baby went flying. She can still hear the thud when he hit the floor, the stunned silence when
he did not cry. She was sure she had killed him. When Buddy finally wailed, she was so relieved that she cried, too.
She glances right, feeling someone’s stare, only to realize it is Buddy’s car, its face turned toward her. She parked it haphazardly,
uneven with the others. It is hers now, by default, but it feels wrong for her to inherit it from Buddy, eighteen, barely
a driver himself.
From time to time, she feels Oliver look her way, his glance grazing her skin like a swatch of sun between clouds, a warmth
so brief she shivers. She is intensely awake, yet cannot shake the sense that she is dreaming. She rubs the worn band of her
wristwatch, thinking how time, too, has gone haywire, jumped its tracks, turning like a corkscrew instead of moving ahead,
so that the three days since the accident have elapsed in seconds while this moment in the cemetery spans her entire lifetime.
April looks at the line of cars, wondering if T.J. will show, if he has even heard the news. It has been two weeks since the
protection order, and the idiocy of missing him enrages her. Beyond the cars the sky is a fierce, crystalline blue, and against
it the trees shed vibrant shades of ocher, rust, and red. A group of leaves rise on a current of air, the breeze moving the
sleeves of April’s dress so softly she holds a breath. If the brilliance of the day is God’s idea of a joke, she isn’t laughing.
She wants thunder and hail. She thinks she can almost will it to happen.
When Buddy was a baby, the gentle smacking of his lips was enough to rouse her from sleep. She knew how to unlatch the crib
rail and slide it down quietly so as not to disturb the dog, whose jangling tags in the dead of night could awaken their father,
always grouchy when woken. She would give Buddy his bottle even before he cried for it. She remembers the milky scent of his
skin, the down of his hair, and the tiny half-moon of his fingernails.
The group blesses themselves, following the priest, and April does the same, drawing a line from head to heart, shoulder to
shoulder, father to son. The brakes were soft; April had noticed that. Week after week, she told herself to get them fixed
with her next paycheck.