April & Oliver

by Tess Callahan

Genres: Literary Fiction

Synopsis

April and Oliver have been soul mates since childhood, and the attraction between them has always been palpable. Now, years after being completely inseparable, they have become strangers, but the wildly different paths of their lives are about to collide once again with the sudden death of April's brother.

Sexual tension builds as Oliver, the responsible, newly engaged law student, finds himself drawn more than ever to the reckless, mystifying April-and cracks begin to appear in his carefully constructed life. Even as Oliver attempts to "save" his childhood friend from her grief, her menacing boyfriend, and herself, it soon becomes apparent that Oliver has some secrets of his own-secrets he hasn't shared with anyone, even his fiancée.

Yet April knows. Is it really her life that's unraveling, or is it his own? The answer awaits at the end of a downward spiral...toward a surprising revelation.

Release date: May 12, 2009

Publisher: Grand Central Publishing

Print pages: 352

Sample

BUDDY 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.


LONG 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.


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.



“Smoking again?” Oliver asks tentatively.

“No.” Al frowns. “She isn’t.”

April unscrews another container of olives, with pimientos this time, and eats them straight from the jar, licking the juice
from her fingers. “Anyone got a cigarette?” she calls.


She gave up smoking years ago. No one answers. She doesn’t really want to smoke, but a dull noise in her head is getting louder,
like an insect she cannot swat. She sees the fold in Oliver’s brow, knowing she has put it there. She can be kind to him one
minute, cruel the next. She doesn’t know why. It’s more like reflex than choice. She glances at Bernadette. “Your fiancé is
about to give me a lecture on smoking,” April says. “Can I see the rock?”


Bernadette glances down at the ring, extending her hand with ballerina grace. “I suppose we ought to announce it,” she says.

“We need good news.”

“The timing.” Oliver shakes his head.

“Anything to dilute this,” April says, glancing around the room.

“April,” Bernadette says. “Oliver’s told me how close you and Buddy were. I want you to know how awful I feel.”

“We fought a lot,” April says. A stupid response, and not true. She shoots Oliver a glance, but he looks away.

“I love that old picture of the three of you,” Bernadette says, “the one where you and Oliver are swinging Buddy by the arms
and legs.”


“I don’t remember that one,” she says. When Buddy wanted tips on stealing bases, he asked their father, but when he had trouble
with his math homework, he went to Oliver.


“He’ll make a good dad,” April says to Bernadette. Then April glances at Oliver, catching his eye. “He loved you,” she says,
her fingers grazing his tie just below the knot. Then she steps back, arms folded, surprised to have touched him.


Oliver lowers his eyes. Bernadette caresses him, and he puts his arm around her in a gesture so natural it appears involuntary.

April backs away, taking the last few olives. She goes upstairs to an out-of-the-way bathroom that once belonged to Oliver
and Al. Framed over the light switch hangs Oliver’s Eagle Scout badge, right where she remembers it. In the medicine cabinet
mirror April sees that her hair, which a grade school teacher once described as sable black, has turned overnight to dull
soot, overly long and unkempt. She bunches it in her fist, a handheld ponytail, and wonders how she would look bald. Shaving
it off would be easier than getting a comb through it. Better yet, let a mortician deal with it. They did wonders on Buddy.
Except for the subtle waxiness of his skin, April might have thought he was only asleep, and would bolt upright at any moment
to laugh at the mistake.


“April.”

She jolts. Bernadette stands outside the bathroom. For a moment, April sees only the hound’s-tooth, a pattern that plays tricks
with her eyes.


“Oh,” April says. “Were you waiting long?”

“No,” Bernadette says.

April gathers her purse, glancing around for her brush. She feels completely scattered. Bernadette, on the other hand, strikes
April as the kind of person who rarely misplaces anything. Even her face gives the impression of balance and harmony, no one
feature dominating the rest. Her eyes are blue, like Oliver’s, and full of sympathy. It is impossible to dislike her. “Sorry,”
April says, leaving the room. “All yours.”


“April,” Bernadette stammers. “Listen, I just want to say that I lost a sibling, too. My sister, I mean, when I was twelve.
I don’t mean to say that I know how you feel, just that I’m very sorry.”


“Thank you,” April says. “And I’m sorry about your sister.”

Bernadette’s eyes well up. “Fifteen years ago.” She waves her hand dismissively.

April caresses her shoulder.

“This isn’t what I meant to happen—you consoling me.”

“It’s okay,” April says. “Do you have a picture of her?”

Bernadette hesitates, then opens her purse and shows April the only photo in her wallet. A young woman waves at the camera
with stubby fingers. She has a wide, flat, freckly face; almond-shaped eyes tha. . .