April & Oliver (11 page)

“I make mistakes.”

“Name one.”

“You’re trying to change the subject. You should see a doctor.”

“You don’t always have to be good, you know. You’re allowed to screw up.”

“I do, all the time.”

“Have you ever smoked a cigarette? Did you ever get drunk?”

“I’ve had a beer or two. Why should I get drunk if I don’t want to?”

“Okay, you name it, then. What’s something you secretly want to do, but know you shouldn’t?”

He blushed, averting his eyes. She saw his gaze fall to her bulky, high-heeled shoes, too heavy for her feet. Even she could
see that now. How stupid, her clothes! Her skirt had inched up, revealing the place where her stocking ended, the suggestion
of a garter, and a narrow swatch of exposed skin shockingly white against the dark nylon. Oliver got up abruptly and went
to the piano, running his finger clamorously up the scale. “I want to be a musician,” he said.

She leaned forward in her seat, pulling down her skirt. “And that’s bad?”

“It’s impractical.”

“What if Mozart thought that way?”

“I’m not Mozart. Besides, it’s a different world now.”

“Yo-Yo Ma? Midori?”

“I don’t need to be famous. I just want to play.”

“So?”

“You don’t understand. You’re a girl. Guys are supposed to make a living.”

“Is that what your father says?”

“You’re only asking that because you know the answer.”

“He loved books, so he became a professor. Maybe his parents thought
that
was impractical.”

“It’s a hell of a lot safer than trying to make it in music.”

“Safe?” She went over and stood near him at the piano. “Look, if your
dad
wants you to be happy, why don’t you?”

“I do. I am. I will be.”

She sat on the bench, looking up at him. “What if your mother weren’t sick?”

He turned sharply and stared down at her. “What does that have to do with anything?”

“Oliver,” she said gently. “Just because she’s dying doesn’t mean you have to follow her advice.”

“No one says she’s dying,” he said harshly. “Would you stop it? I don’t want to talk about this anymore.”

She took his elbow and pulled him down beside her on the bench. She slid her arm around his waist and leaned her head on his
shoulder. “I’m sorry,” she said.

He leaned his head on hers. She felt his breath through her hair. Told herself to keep breathing. “April,” he whispered. “I
want to go away somewhere. Far away. With you.”

As soon as the words were out, he stood nervously. He went over and inspected a cello that had hung in the same spot for years.
She took her cue and stood to leave, pretending not to have heard.

Someone touches her arm. She flinches, opening her eyes. Oliver slides down beside her. It takes her a moment to place herself
back in Hal’s living room. The fire crackles; Oliver must have added another log.

“Just get here?” he asks, though it must be obvious she was dozing. His voice sounds deliberately casual. His hair has grown
a bit since the funeral, and he is unshaven. Her fingers and toes tingle, adjusting to the warmth of the fire. She glances
behind her at the window. The shade is not drawn, but the room is dark enough that she decides not to worry. She takes the
tie from the armrest and coils it around her hands like a strangle cord, which she drapes across the back of her neck, chin
resting on her fists. She stares at the fire, listening to the sizzle and snap.

“Well, hello, Oliver,” he says to himself. “Nice to see you, too.”

She smiles at him despite herself.

He leans over and kisses her cheek. The abrasion of his skin against hers gives her a start, the prickly stubble, the warmth
of his lips. He smells faintly of dinner wine and his brother’s cigarettes. She brings her knees to her chest and folds her
arms around them.

“Why don’t you take your old room,” she says. “I’ll be fine here on the sofa.”

He waves a hand and settles back. “It was ridiculous here tonight,” he says. “All of us putting on a show for Nana.”

“Thank God my parents aren’t here. They would never have gotten through it.”

“And you?”

She sighs. “Buddy’s mail gets forwarded to me. You’d be amazed how many bills a dead person can get. I pay them and throw
out the catalogs.” An ember falls from the log, glows, and vanishes. “There’s a girl in Kingston who thinks she’s in love
with him. She doesn’t understand why he won’t answer her letters.”

“How awful.”

“So last night I wrote her a love letter and signed his name. I plan to send it along with his obituary, explaining that I
just came across the unmailed letter in his knapsack. What do you think?”

“You’re kidding, right?”

“Why?”

“It’s cruel.”

“I thought the opposite.”

“What if they hardly knew each other?”

“She’s crazy about him.”

“It’s a lie, April. What if you got some detail wrong? What if he wrote to her before, and she sees the handwriting is different?”

“She’ll believe because she’ll want to.”

“You’re playing with someone’s deepest emotions.”

“Am I?” She looks at him.

He turns toward the window.

“Would it be better to tell her that there’s no record of his feelings, and that for most of the time she’s been in love with
him, he’s been dead?”

“It’s honest.”

“Sometimes you have to think about the purpose of
honest
.”

“No you don’t.”

“I’m going to mail it.”

“Do what you like.”

“I think Buddy would want me to.”

“I can’t argue with that.”

They fall into silence.

“How are you?” he says finally. “I mean, really.”

A few glib answers pass through her mind; she lets them go. “Well, I got myself here tonight,” she says. “Snow and all.”

He nods appreciatively, glancing toward the window. “It’s lovely, isn’t it?”

“It never snows on Christmas,” she says. “Sleet, hail, freezing rain, okay. But this? It’s a goddamn Hallmark card out there.”

“No,” he says. “A card could never capture this. Nothing could.”

“Nothing?” she says. “Winslow Homer? Robert Frost?”

He smiles. “You just like disagreeing with me.”

“George Winston’s
Winter,
” she says. “Don’t tell me he didn’t capture snow.”

“Snow, yes. But
this
snow, here and now?” He turns to look at her. His eyes look different in this light, not the usual crystalline blue, but
a deep, smoky indigo. Her face warms.

“What do you think it means?” she asks, nodding toward the window.

“The snow?” He tilts his head curiously. “It means itself.”

“Don’t go getting all Zen on me.” She elbows him. “I’m a girl who needs answers.” She realizes immediately that it was a mistake
to touch him. He hasn’t moved, yet he feels much closer now.

“Answers, eh? So, what’s the question?”

She looks back toward the window.
The question.
She is still staring at the snow when she feels Oliver lift her hair out from behind the tie. She shudders, surprised by his
touch. He begins to braid her hair, the way he used to when they were children.

April closes her eyes. For a moment she allows herself to feel his closeness. Her scalp tingles. Grains of ice beat upon the
windowpane. Oliver’s breath moves in and out of his lungs. She feels it on her neck. She is in a trance. She tells herself
not to move and then to move quickly to break the spell.

“How’s Bernadette?”

“At her parents’,” he says, but that wasn’t what she asked.

“Have you set a date?”

He pauses, finishing the braid and pulling it snug. “December seventh,” he says.

“You’re kidding, right? Pearl Harbor?”

“The place she wants is booked till then.”

Oliver sifts his hands through the braid, loosening it. Her skin prickles, electrified. His fingers are cool as water. She
feels his hand on her shoulder. He slides the tie slowly from around her neck. The silk against her skin makes her shiver.
What Oliver fails to understand is the range of possibilities; that people can destroy themselves and one another and the
whole planet with nothing stepping in to stop them; that she can destroy him without even trying. It wouldn’t take much, she
thinks, to let her thigh relax against his, blood rising to the surface of her skin, until they began to consider the harmlessness
of a moment longer. And another.

April remembers Oliver’s high school graduation party, nearly a decade ago, when she pulled him from his chair for a slow
dance, leaning her body into his. Their cheeks pressed, she felt him stiffen against her, his blush warming her face. “Jesus,
April,” he breathed.

She laughed, pulled back, and left him there. She went to Al and sat on his lap. Still flushed, Oliver picked up his soda
can and took a gulp. He tried to joke with a friend, pretend he wasn’t watching, but she knew he was. She giggled, stabbing
Al’s chest with her finger, and he, his breath ripe with Heineken, moved his palm over her knee, playing with the hem of her
skirt.

After a moment, they announced that they were going to buy more beer and needed Oliver’s car to do it.

Oliver stood before them. “You’re in no shape to drive, Al,” he said. April couldn’t look at him.

“Relax, Oliver,” Al said, grabbing the keys from the table. “April’s driving. We’ll be right back.”

April was sure Oliver would stop them, but he didn’t. They never returned to the party. None of it was planned. She danced
with him as a joke, to embarrass him, and was caught off guard by the warm rush deep in her own body. He was so close she
could almost hear the movement of his thoughts, the roll of the tide; she had slipped inside his skin.

But she could never defile Oliver. He was too good. Too pure. So she had to make it look heedless, as though one brother were
as good as another.

April looks at him, not the high school boy anymore, but a man she barely knows wearing a fancy watch and a five o’clock shadow.
Almost nothing about him feels familiar, except the eyes. Those eyes. April gets up suddenly. Oliver doesn’t object. He draws
his hand down the side of his face and across his mouth, a gesture of deep consideration she has seen many times on his father.

“You know what they say.” She nods toward the fireplace. “If you stay awake, he’ll never come.”

He doesn’t smile, but only looks at her with a troubled, thoughtful expression. “Good night, April.”

It is nearly dawn when she has the dream. Buddy is at the top of the stairs looking down at her. He has put on a little weight
and looks ruddy, having just come in from the cold. He smiles at her, his eyes serene the way they sometimes looked after
he spent long hours out on the lake alone. He opens the window at the top of the stairs and begins to climb out. It is a two-story
drop. April screams, runs to him, but by the time she reaches the landing, he is gone.

She awakens in front of the half-open window, snow drifting in. She has never walked in her sleep before. She looks down at
the undisturbed lawn laden with snow. The sky is dark except for a pale glow on the eastern horizon, diffused by the dark
silhouettes of barren trees. In the thicket, a deer moves in a slow high-step, lifting its legs in and out of the deepening
snow.

Her breath fogs the glass, and the deer vanishes. Wind groans against the side of the house, and Oliver’s rondos rise in her
mind, circling there as they have all night. She remembers sitting beside him a few hours ago, the roughness of his cheek,
the crackle of embers, and the smell of ash. After they said good night, she felt different in her body, gentler toward herself.
Even now she feels the afterglow of his nearness, the way she once felt as a kid after receiving communion, saturated by presence.
Why can’t she feel Buddy’s presence that way? Her dream of him does not answer the question she still can’t fathom:
Where is he?
She shuts the snow-laden window and heads back to her room.

O
LIVER WAKES
to the smell of waffles and coffee, his neck stiff from the cot. The door to his old room is closed. He thinks of April on
the other side, asleep in his childhood bed.

The bathroom is damp and steamy, fragrant with someone’s shampoo. His grandmother’s slippers lie atop the scale, registering
nothing. He sees the impression of her feet, supine in the worn terry-cloth insoles. Al’s travel kit sits open on the counter
beside their father’s aftershave. Oliver looks around, but nothing belongs to April.

Downstairs, Christmas carols are turned on high. Nana chatters to Oliver’s father at the stove, correcting him on his cooking,
while the dog lies at his feet, waiting for something to fall.

“Goddamn it,” Al says, leaning on the Formica with the newspaper spread in front of him. “They screwed with my lead again.
Dumb-ass night editor—”

“Al,” his father scolds.

Al folds the paper. The phone rings and he grabs it.

Oliver looks at his watch. Bernadette is supposed to arrive in fifteen minutes; he doesn’t have much time to get ready.

Al hangs up. “Same idiot,” he says.

Their father frowns. “Someone keeps calling and hanging up,” he explains to Oliver.

“Where is April, anyway?” Al asks.

“Go wake her,” his father says. “This is almost ready.”

Before Oliver can make a move, Al is taking the stairs two at a time. “Rose,” he yells. “Haul your lazy ass out of bed.”

“Honestly,” Nana says to Hal. “To think you raised him.”

“He’s hopeless,” Hal says. He glances at the photograph of Oliver’s mother beside the phone; they often shared the same affectionate
lament, Oliver recalls. Who would expect a son like Al from such quiet and serious parents? Oliver was studious and obedient
to make up for his brother, but in retrospect he can see it was Al who baffled and delighted them.

He fills a mug with coffee and glances at his brother’s byline. The lead is fine, probably improved. Al isn’t good at accepting
criticism, unlike Oliver, who is, he knows, too willing.