April & Oliver (22 page)

“You’re right, of course,” she says. They stare out the window.

“Oliver, you know you can’t fill the gap her brother left. No one can.”

“Who says I’m trying?”

Bernadette purses her lips, appraising him, working out calculus, he the apparent equation. He looks at her for a long moment.
If he were more of a man, he thinks, he would ask her what she was thinking. Instead, he glides his fingers over the silk
of her blouse and kisses her. He moves his hand down her waist, hip, calf, then circling her ankle, narrow as a colt’s.

“Sure you don’t want to come upstairs?” She winks.

“Mm,” he says, kissing her again. “Next time. I need to get up early tomorrow to catch up on work.”

“On a Saturday?” she says. “I’m taking a few kids to a petting farm. I was hoping you could join us.”

“Another time,” he says. “You know how I love llamas and goats.”

She smiles with disappointment.

“Tomorrow night,” he says. “I’ll want to hear all about your kids. And the ducks and bunnies, too.”

He watches her skip up the steps to her building. After a moment a light goes on in her apartment. From the third-floor window
she waves to him with her scarf. Not her usual enthusiastic wave, he thinks.

He stops at an intersection, the traffic light reflecting bloodily on the hood of the car. He imagines his future with Bernadette:
a cedar-shingled Colonial in Connecticut from which he will commute to a law firm in Manhattan, she to her private practice;
an au pair for the children, blond like their mother; racquetball on Thursday nights; sailboating on the Sound.

The light turns, luxuriant night air pouring in the car window, ruffling his hair, awakening his skin. It rained earlier in
the day, and the air is clean. He smells the heaviness of summer, hears the song of crickets and the swish of dense trees
illuminated by moonlight. The breeze traveling through his shirt caresses him. He flips his directional, and knows without
having to decide that he is going to look for April.

It is after eleven when he reaches her building. Most firework shows are over, but a single rocket soars above a rooftop,
explodes in all directions, and dissipates. The windows of April’s apartment blaze with light, but she does not answer the
buzzer. Her car is not in the station lot.

Oliver returns to his car. As he flips on his directional to pull away, he notices a police barricade under the train trestle.
Yellow police tape flaps in the wind. He pulls up alongside an idling cab. “Excuse me,” Oliver calls to the driver. “Do you
know what happened here?”

“Shooting or stabbing,” the man calls casually.

Oliver cuts the engine though he’s right in the middle of the street. “Someone was killed?” he says.

“Well, they weren’t rushing the person to the hospital, let’s put it that way. Police photographer took a good two rolls.
You should’ve seen the crowd when the nine fifty-two let out. Something to talk about over dinner, I guess.”

“So the victim was a man?” Oliver asks, hardly breathing.

“Couldn’t say. Take a look in the morning paper.”

Oliver remembers to restart his engine only after a cab behind him honks. He thinks the logical thing is to stop at the police
station and ask. Instead, he goes to the bar where she works. When she’s not there, he thinks of one more place he can try.

Twenty minutes later, he pulls up in front of his grandmother’s duplex. The bluish glow of the television flickers in the
front room. April’s car is in the street. He lets out a long breath, pressing his palm to his chest. He ought to go home,
he tells himself, now that he knows she is safe. He gets out slowly, touching the hood of her car as he passes. It’s still
warm. An old confidence surges up in him. He may not understand her, but he still knows how to find her.

The front door is unlocked. He lets himself in quietly, so as not to disturb Nana if she is asleep. Except for the glow of
the television, the living room is dark. He sees them huddled on the sofa, Nana’s head on April’s shoulder. The muscles in
his back ease. He didn’t realize how tense he had been. They don’t hear him, and for a moment he considers leaving; they look
so peaceful.

He walks around quietly to face them. Nana is asleep, her head slumped against April, who holds a pillow over her own stomach.
Although he is standing right beside her, she is not aware of him. On the screen, a television evangelist pounds his fist
on a pulpit and speaks of the fires of hell. April watches with eyes glazed, and Oliver sees she is elsewhere. He kneels beside
her.

“April,” he says. She blinks, turning to him glassy-eyed. His skin chills; he wonders if she is stoned. “Hey, are you okay?”

April draws a breath with some effort. “The fireworks freak her out,” she says. “Reminds her of the war.”

Oliver isn’t sure which war she means, but he nods.

“She’s asleep now. Shall we put her to bed?”

April nods, and this, too, is labored. Oliver kneels on the floor by Nana’s feet, peels open the Velcro on her orthopedic
shoes, and slips them off. He puts her leg brace beside the coffee table. Nana is breathing deeply, mouth open. “Her dentures
out?” Oliver asks. April nods. Oliver puts one arm behind Nana’s back, the other under her knees, and lifts her. He is alarmed
by how light she is—ninety pounds at the most. Her skin, damp and cool, has the texture of cellophane. He carries her to the
bedroom and sets her down.

When he comes back, he switches off the set, turns on a lamp, and is relieved to see no marks on April’s face or arms.

“She hates Independence Day,” she says, staring at the dead screen.

Oliver sits on the sofa beside her, the cushion warm from Nana. “April, what’s going on?”

She turns to him unsteadily, licking her lips. “She shouldn’t be living alone anymore. I offered to move in with her, but
she’s right: Who knows who might show up at the door? We’ve got to convince her to move in with your father.”

“He’s been trying for years. But I’m talking about you, April.”

“What kind of world is it where a man can set fire to his son?”

Oliver’s blood chills. “A free one.” There is a faint aroma in the room he cannot identify. Something warm and redolent and
unsettling.

“Six foster homes in ten years. Who was looking out for him?”

“April, you aren’t well.”

“Then he joined the army, straightened himself out, and learned to be a mechanic. When he got out, he met a girl who actually
loved him, and he felt his whole life would change. When they made love he thought how easy it would be to snap her little
bones with his hands, and he prayed never to do that, prayed to be free of the need to set fire to everything that made sense.
But his prayers weren’t good enough.”

Oliver sighs, running his hand through his hair. “Did you see him again today, after he left my father’s house?”

April turns to him, her eyes more focused now. “Imagine a boy who grows up without a single person who loves him. Imagine
if I had grown up without you, Oliver? Who’s to say I wouldn’t have killed by now? Who’s to say I haven’t?”

Oliver swallows, still unsure if she is high. Her voice is thick, her eyes shiny.

“Look, you’re full of shrapnel,” she says. “I’ve discharged everything on you.”

“You’re not making sense.”

“Debris,” she says. “I’ve been trying to tell you.”

He hesitates.

“Al says I’m a junkie, addicted to abuse.”

“Don’t believe that.”

“T.J.’s hooked on bourbon. What’s the difference?”

He hesitates.

“This is what I think. Addiction is just a way of trying to get at something else. Something bigger. Call it transcendence
if you want, but it’s a fucked-up way, like a rat in a maze. We all want the same thing. We all have this hole. The thing
you want offers relief, but it’s a trap. Same with my father. Every shot of whiskey, a promise.”

Oliver touches her hand on the pillow and finds it cold. He cups his fingers over hers.

“I want to get up,” she says. “Just walk away and leave myself behind.”

Oliver trembles. “April, tell me what you took.”

She closes her eyes for a second, and when she opens them they appear to have rolled back in her head. She refocuses, her
head nodding, and Oliver feels his skin prickle with fear. He touches her face and finds that it is searing. She leans back
and closes her eyes.

The scent is stronger now, more familiar. Oliver remembers the time Al almost cut off his finger with their father’s saw.
A chill sweeps down his spine.

“Oliver,” she says. “It might be worse than I thought.”

He lifts the pillow from her stomach, and sees that it is soaked with blood. He gasps, but no breath comes. For an instant
his lungs lock. April does not stir. Her shirt is torn and saturated. Her teeth chatter.

The room transfigures; Oliver is passing through a portal, one element to another. Colors appear as in a film that switches
from black-and-white. He sees the bluishness of her lips, the paleness of her face, the bracken-like shape of blood on her
shirt. Sounds come to him in a magnified way, like music played at the wrong speed. The raggedness of her breathing, and the
distant sound of his grandmother’s snores. He feels the air in the room touching his skin, the undulation of space, the fluidity
of things he thought fixed.

Even as his perception slows and warps and heightens, he works quickly, pressing the pillow over the wound, lifting her in
his arms, running. He hardly recognizes himself, this other Oliver, who knows what to do.

He moves faster than seems possible, hears his own pulse roar in his ears, yet everything feels slow. “Hold on,” he tells
her. “Stay with me.” He maneuvers her into the car, straps the seat belt over the pillow to keep pressure on the wound. “Do
you hear me? Stay awake.”

Her eyes flutter, attempting to obey, but as he drives, her head slumps against the window. Her hand lies across the emergency
brake, fingers limp. He leans on the horn and speeds through lights. He feels the presence of the hospital just seven blocks
away, the car hurling in a trajectory toward it. He glances over to see if she is breathing, but he cannot tell. He forces
himself to take breaths, resist panic. He can keep her alive through the force of his will. “April,” he shouts, but there
is no response.

Outside the ER, Oliver runs around to her side of the car and reaches in for her.

“Whoa, there.” A man wearing medical garb stamps out a cigarette before trotting over to them. “We got it from here,” he says,
shouting to someone inside. He takes his time checking her vitals. To Oliver, everything is taking much too long. Finally
someone appears with a gurney.

The waiting room is full. An elderly drunk lays passed out in a chair. A little girl vomits into a plastic plant.

The nurse at the triage desk waves to Oliver, telephone in the crook of her neck. “Trauma code,” she says into the phone.
“Gunshot?” she asks, hanging up.

“I don’t know,” Oliver says.

“How long has she been out?”

“Five minutes. I’m not sure.”

“What’s your name, sir?”

“Night,” he says absently. “Oliver.”

A pock-faced orderly in blue medical garb pushes through the double doors. He moves quickly in a kind of dance, shoes squishy
on the waxed floor. He hums under his breath as he takes hold of the gurney. Oliver holds the door open for him.

“You can’t go in there,” the nurse calls.

Oliver ignores her, his hand gripping the cool metal of the stretcher. The orderly doesn’t care. April lies still. In the
hallway, people are hurrying. They jostle one another in the entrance to the trauma room.

April is wheeled in, three nurses appearing at her side, a curtain pulled hastily around them. In the next bed, Oliver sees
the white knuckles of a teenage boy gripping a bed rail as his forehead is sutured. One nurse checks April’s breathing, another
her pulse, a third applies pressure to the wound with a mountain of gauze that goes instantly red. They call numbers to one
another in calm, urgent voices and cut the clothing from April’s body.

A doctor slips through the curtain, snapping a pair of latex gloves over his thin, graceful hands. “Are you hurt?” he says
to Oliver.

Oliver is startled to be noticed. He feels absent, observing a dream. He looks down at his shirt, saturated with blood, and
wavers. “No,” he answers. “It’s hers.”

“Then you’ll have to wait in the lobby.”

Oliver steps back but continues to stare through a gap in the curtain.

“What do we have here?” the doctor says, looking at April. A face mask and hair cap reveal only his eyes, pinched and exhausted.
“Stabbing?” he asks, prying the wound with his fingers.

“Looks that way. Pressure’s down,” says a nurse.

“Prep the OR,” he says, holding down a bandage. “We’ll need blood. Do we know her type?”

“O positive,” Oliver says. The universal donor. He knows because his is the same.

“Look, you’ll have to leave,” says one of the nurses.

“But wait outside,” the doctor says. “We’ll need to talk.”

Oliver doesn’t move. April is coming to, eyes fluttering.

“Good,” says the doctor, taking her hand with his bloody, gloved fingers. “Tell us what happened.” The orderly tries halfheartedly
to escort Oliver from the room. “What happened?” repeats the doctor.

Oliver moves inside the curtain, and April appears to see him. She opens her mouth to speak. Licks her lips. He imagines she
will call out to him, ask him not to leave her, but instead she says, “I’m fine, really,” and closes her eyes.

W
HEN BERNADETTE FINDS APRIL’S ROOM
, she pauses outside the door. Oliver’s call startled her from sleep. In her dream she had been tumbling inside the arc of
a wave, overpowered but strangely free. Now, as she stands outside the door, the atmosphere of the dream lingers. She did
not recognize his voice, gravelly and wan. He launched into particulars, twenty-eight stitches, blood transfusion, concussion.
It took her a moment to realize he was talking about April. Bernadette rushed over, though he said it wasn’t necessary, April
was stable and he would meet Bernadette for dinner with the details. Still, Bernadette wants to see for herself.