April & Oliver (2 page)

If her parents were alive, they would not survive this, she thinks. She imagines her father here, arms folded across his chest,
silken white hair quivering in the breeze.
His only son,
April thinks, his fishing partner, his shortstop, his free safety. Buddy was the only person to bear their father’s resemblance,
with the same thick neck, enormous hat size, and surprisingly high-pitched laugh.

“. . . and so we pray for the repose of the soul of Bede Simone Junior” the priest reads.

April bites the inside of her mouth. No one called him Bede; Buddy hated the name, short for Obedience. He said Bede is what
water does on Scotchgard, or a notch in a rosary, not something you call a human being.

The name suited their father, though. April can’t help but picture him here, and her mother, too. She would have been superbly
dressed for the occasion, her coarse wheat-colored hair pulled back in a fancy clip, accentuating the fine lines of her face.
April inherited that delicacy. She constantly has to prove to people, men especially, that she is not as fragile as she looks.

Buddy was just the opposite, tough on the outside only. In the winter of third grade, he had a bad case of strep throat. To
pass the days home from school, April and Oliver, then sixteen, constructed a tent in his room out of blankets and chairs,
and filled it with pillows, a lamp, and a step stool to act as a table. Inside, they took turns reading to Buddy from
King of the Wind
. When the boy was too tired to keep his eyes open, he asked Oliver to play piano on his back. “Bach,” Buddy said, smiling
at his own joke. “Beethoven will keep me awake.” Finally, Oliver lay back on the floor. It had grown dark inside the tent.
“He’s out,” he whispered. “What should we do now?”

“My dad’s home by now,” April said. “We could go to your music studio.”

“Let’s hang here for a while,” Oliver said.

April slid over and lay down perpendicular to Oliver, with her head against his chest. It was a daring thing to do, but neither
said anything. She heard Buddy’s lengthening breaths, and the solid percussion of Oliver’s heart sounding against his ribs.

April looks at the white of the coffin. She imagines the long screech ending in a crunch of metal. Then, silence. It was Oliver
at his piano who taught her about measuring sounds, holding them in memory, but that was ages ago. He lived in California
so long, she thought he was done with the East Coast, but two months ago she heard the news that he was back, and engaged.
April glances at him, his head bowed, one hand covering his mouth as the priest reads the final blessing, the other gripping
his fiancée’s fingers so tightly his knuckles are white. On Bernadette’s small hand, the ring looks big. April thinks she
ought to feel something, but doesn’t.

Bernadette wears a hound’s-tooth blazer and matching calf-length skirt, her fair hair neatly French-braided, silk scarf around
her neck. April compares this with her own dress—the black brocade, drop waist, and short, flouncy hemline—like something
she might wear dancing. She touches the pleats with her fingertips, wondering what possessed her. It doesn’t matter that her
mother has been dead seventeen years; she would disapprove.

The priest closes his book, and people turn back to their cars. A group of Buddy’s friends gathers in a spontaneous huddle,
arms across one another’s shoulders, foreheads touching. A boy with a shaved head lets out a sob. April pictures her dead
parents walking separately toward a limousine, not looking at each other.

April thinks of her living grandmother at home in her kitchen peeling onions. No one has told her. It is too soon after last
year’s stroke, they decided. But April suspects they don’t want to tell Nana because that would mean admitting it to themselves.
In any event, the decision is made, and it is not the first lie April has conspired in.

She hears car doors open and close, and rummages through her purse for her keys, Buddy’s keys, with the dangling pocketknife
he used to gut fish and cut lines. The knife was a gift from their father when Buddy was twelve, and the Swiss Army logo is
nearly worn off from his touch. She opens each blade and closes it again, then the can opener, nail file, scissors. He kept
it immaculate.

The huddle of Buddy’s friends breaks up. They walk arm in arm. Cars pull away. Small groups linger. Oliver and Bernadette
stand close together, speaking softly. Bernadette glances over. April can almost read her lips.
Go on, Oliver. Talk to her
. Bernadette retreats to the cars as Oliver moves toward April. Her skin heats. She holds the keys tightly, hearing his steps
in the grass.

The gravedigger switches a lever, and the mechanized pulley lowers the casket beside her parents’ graves.
This is the part you’re not supposed to see,
April thinks as the gleaming white hood descends into shadow. She steps closer to the edge, wondering if her parents are
watching from wherever they are, if they are anywhere. It’s hard to picture them together, let alone with Buddy. That would
not be his paradise. So what
would
be Buddy’s heaven? Here, she decides, back in his life.

“April,” Oliver calls.

“I don’t want to be buried here,” she says.

“What?”

“I want to be cremated.”

“Don’t talk like that,” he says.

The coffin, swallowed by shade, makes a small thud as it hits bottom. It’s real now. Her whole family is in this cemetery.
She wonders how long before they backfill. The grass is damp—at some point she slipped off her shoes—and she imagines the
earthen walls of the grave, cool to the touch. Oliver takes her arm. She feels herself collapsing, yet she is still standing.
She draws back from him. The gravedigger pulls up the straps, frowning at April to suggest she is too close.

“Hey,” Oliver says to him. “Can’t you see we’re still here?”

The man raises his arms. He looks only bored. April turns her back to Oliver and blows her nose. He puts his hand on her shoulder.
It feels heavy and warm. She moves away, certain that above all she must not fall apart, not with Oliver.

A horn sounds and his brother, Al, beckons from their father’s station wagon, the motor running. Bernadette gathers her skirt
and slips into the backseat. Oliver waves them on.

“There’s no room in my car,” April says quickly, her voice thicker than she wants. “Buddy’s shit is everywhere.” But Al is
already pulling away.

“We could have picked you up,” Oliver says. “You could have asked.”

“When I go, I don’t want a funeral. God forbid Nana feels she has to pay for it.”

“April,” he says tensely. “Why assume you’ll die before an eighty-year-old woman?”

“I’m just saying that she’s my only blood relative now. If anything were to happen . . .”

“Anything like what?”

She notices his perfectly pressed suit, the regimental tie. She says nothing.

The gravedigger walks to the backhoe some distance away and leans against one of the giant tires. April wonders what would
happen if she waited him out, but Oliver leads her toward the car. “I heard you went to the police,” he says, softening his
voice.

“Hm?” she says, glancing back. She thinks of the day her parents brought Buddy home from the hospital, swaddled up like a
spring roll, smelling of Desitin and her father’s cigarettes, his pale eyes transfixed on the ceiling fan.

“The protection order,” Oliver says. “My father told me.”

She looks at him, the handsome way he has aged, the chisel of his jaw, those soulful eyes. No wonder he was Nana’s favorite,
even if he wasn’t a true grandson. “What was I thinking?” she says. “If I croaked, no one would even tell Nana, would they?
They’d say I was on extended vacation. Me, who’s never taken a trip in my life.”

He frowns.

“I have a passport, though,” she says. “You never know when you might need to get out of the country.”

“I see you haven’t lost your knack for changing the subject,” he says.

“Well, Oliver,” she says, “I believe you’ve been known to do the same.”

He looks down. “Let’s go,” he says.

“Fine,” she says, turning abruptly. “I’ll drive.”

Oliver ignores this and gets behind the wheel. She wants to argue, but no words come. She clears off the passenger seat, tossing
Buddy’s cassette tapes and camping catalogs into the rear. Oliver moves his seat back and adjusts the mirrors.

“My father helped put up the money for this car, even before Buddy had his learner’s permit,” April says. “Can you imagine
how he would feel to see me get my hands on it?”

Oliver’s face is still. His Adam’s apple rises and falls. When he doesn’t know what to say, he doesn’t say anything; that’s
one thing she admires about him. She notices his profile, the crook in his nose that she has always found attractive. His
chin is more angular now, the contour of his face arresting. Yet something is missing. His hair, which in adolescence fell
in a lovely, disheveled mass, is neatly slicked back, giving him a gangster look. His eyes alone are the same, the color of
Caribbean shallows, so full of sincerity it is hard to look at them squarely. April’s are just the opposite, so dark that
the last time she was taken to the emergency room, the paramedic could not distinguish the pupil from the iris.

“I’m sorry I wasn’t here for your father’s funeral last year,” he says.

She hears by the gravel in his voice that he means it. “It was two years ago,” she answers. “And there’s no need to apologize.
California isn’t exactly a subway stop.”

“I sent a card, but I’m not sure if I had the right address.”

“I got it. Thank you. You know I’m not much of a letter writer.”

“Right, well, I left a voice mail, too.”

“I’m sorry, Oliver. I wasn’t in a frame of mind to talk. Please don’t take it personally.”

“Of course not,” he says. “I’m sure it wasn’t an easy time for you.”

“It was hard on Buddy. I became his legal guardian, though I’m pretty sure the judge had his doubts. Buddy moved in to my
apartment because I couldn’t keep up the taxes on my father’s house.”

“Didn’t you get some inheritance? Your father’s bar must have been worth something.”

Her father’s portion of the bar—co-owned with his partner, Quincy—was willed to his stepbrother, Oliver’s father, not April.
Oliver would object, if he knew. “There were liens on the property,” she says. “It wasn’t worth much. Anyway, Buddy eventually
got his own place near the university with friends. He was thrilled to start school.” She looks down at her dress, smoothing
out the pleats.

They park in the long, semicircular driveway of Oliver’s father’s home, behind the other cars. Oliver cuts the engine and
holds the keys in his hand. “How long since we’ve seen each other?” he asks. “Five years?”

“Maybe,” she says. “I’m bad with time.”

Crisp oak leaves fall onto the windshield. It feels strange to be in a car with Oliver again, here in this once familiar driveway.
It makes her want to feel like a teenager again, but instead she feels ancient.

“I ought to buy my dad a new plaque,” Oliver says, nodding at the one over the front door. the night family is carved in slightly
crooked letters. “I can’t believe he still has that one.”

“It’s beautiful,” April says. “He loves it because you made it for him.”

“Bernadette wants to know what happened to the
K
. It must have been dropped somewhere along the line, Ellis Island, I suppose. She says it’s not too late to change it back.”

“To Knight with a
K
? You’re kidding, right?”

“I think the idea of being
Bernadette Night
creeps her out.
Bernadette Day
would be fine.
Bernadette Sunshine
—that would suit her.”

“Oliver Knight, with a
K,
would be redundant. Forget chivalry. You need your darkness.”

He gives her a wry look; he’s missed that sort of remark. She avoids meeting his eye. In his lap he fingers the keys, noticing
Buddy’s pocketknife. “I hear Buddy was driving your car,” he says, handing her the key chain.

She blinks.

“I hope you’re not thinking that makes it your fault, because this car would have been even worse in the snow.”

“You don’t know what I drove.”

“Anything would be better.”

April shifts in her seat, feeling heat behind her eyes. “Let’s eat,” she says. “I’m starved.”

Patterns of cold cuts, neatly arranged on doilies, adorn the table in the family room. April ignores the sandwiches and pastries
but eats the olives one by one, spearing them with a toothpick until the bowl is empty. Beside her, Oliver spreads mustard
on a roll as Bernadette arranges a dainty salad on her plate. April feels Oliver’s eyes on her but doesn’t look up. She’s
not afraid of breaking down anymore. Her insides are smooth and hollow as a carved-out canoe. She’s floating. “Hey, Al, got
a smoke?” she calls.

Al stands nearby, his back to them, scooping potato chips onto his plate. He is shorter and broader than his brother, Oliver,
the lines in his face hard and mischievous. He glances at April over his shoulder. “Sorry,” he says, patting his chest pocket.