April & Oliver (39 page)

“Oh, God,” she says. “I’m sorry, Oliver. If that’s true, I am absolutely sorry. But I know she’ll take you back. And I did
try to warn you. You have to admit that you acted like a complete ass. What were you thinking?”

“I have no idea,” he says. “I wasn’t thinking.”

He moves back to the driver’s-side door, leaning on the car as he goes.

“You’re not driving,” she says. “You’re half asleep.”

“I’m better now.”

She steers him toward the passenger seat instead.

“Bernadette asked me not to talk to you again, and I didn’t last.”

“It’s not too late,” April says, opening his door. “We’ll stop talking now.”

“I think we should, out of respect for Bernadette, even though she’ll never know.”

“Don’t be a pessimist,” she says, helping him into the car. “You’ll be married by Tuesday. Elope somewhere. Now put on your
seat belt.”

“How long?” he says, slumping back in the seat.

“Till Tuesday?”

“The not talking.”

“I don’t know. The rest of our lives? Give me your keys.”

He pulls them out of his pocket. “Six months, for starters,” he says. “That’s how long it takes to quit smoking.”

She goes around to the driver’s-side door and gets in. It must be true, what his father said about hallucinating, because
he thinks he hears the rustle of taffeta.

“Nana would want us to use Franklin’s Funeral Parlor. That’s where Spencer was. Hey, you’re not buckled,” she says.

He’s not sleeping; he just wants to close his eyes for a moment. She reaches across him for the belt. He feels her hair against
his cheek, smells pine needles near the tree line, and hears the crunch of their sneakers on snow. Outside the church, a bride
and groom duck under a shower of rice and into a waiting limousine. Bernadette’s laughter is hard and bright in the crisp
autumn air. She pulls her train in after her. It is miles long. The groom waves ecstatically to his family and dips in behind
her. His blond hair and white tuxedo catch the afternoon light. Oliver rakes his fingers through the hair at the base of her
neck, touches his cheek to hers until he feels her ear against his lips. “April,” he whispers. “I blame you for everything.”

She pats his knee. “Sh,” she says, turning over the engine. “Six months, remember?”

It’s three in the morning when Oliver wakes up in his driveway, still strapped in. The doors are locked and he finds the keys
in his pocket. Once inside his apartment, he paces from one room to the next. He knows he ought to do something, change his
clothes, eat, get to bed, but he can’t. Twice he picks up the phone to call Bernadette only to remember the time. Something
enormous has run over his chest, pulverizing everything.

The apartment is filled with wedding gifts. Those from his side of the family and friends had been left here while Bernadette’s
went to her parents’ house. He sees a rather large, flat box with fragile written in many directions. It takes him a moment
to recognize April’s handwriting.

He tells himself he doesn’t care what’s inside, but tears it open anyway. It’s a large, antique mirror with an elaborate,
carved trim. Odd, he thinks. What does she mean by this? As he leans it atop the mantel and steps back, a reflection appears,
a bedraggled man in a wrinkled black tuxedo with ashen skin and the saddest eyes Oliver has ever seen. It’s happened, he thinks.
He’s burned his life to the ground.

Absently he sits down on the piano bench. An emotion he cannot name thickens in his throat. He thinks of the woman from the
photograph with the bound feet, her queer, self-satisfied expression. Why didn’t he sell the piano long ago? What was the
point of keeping it now, after so many years? He imagines the woman, the pain she must have felt as hour by hour, year by
year, the natural force of her growth pressed against its confinement; the tension that must have permeated her entire being—all
set against the conviction she was doing what had to be done.

T
HE LATE-MARCH AIR IS COOL AND DAMP
, the swift clouds so low they appear within reach. As the road dips and rises along the rocky Massachusetts coastline, the
car passes through fog and emerges again. April is on her way home to study. She has a midterm tomorrow and another on Thursday,
followed by a two-week break. She has an urge to pick up and leave town for a few days, to go someplace she’s never been.

“I think you should.” Al called her at work earlier in the day. “In fact, I’ve got a game in Vegas next week. Why don’t you
come? I can give you the miles.”

“Why? So we can gamble away my riches?” she said.

“No,” Al said. “So we can eat sushi and get married.”

“Right,” she said, laughing.

“When are you going to take me seriously?” he said.

“Good-bye, Al,” she said.

“I mean it about the miles,” he said. “I’ll never use them all. Go ahead and get out of town. It doesn’t have to be with me.
You’ve got a passport, right?”

“Yes, but I was only thinking of Maine.”

“Expand your horizons, darling. I’ll even mind the Doobster for you.”

“Thanks,” she said. “I’ll think about it.”

The car is hesitant, stalling now and then. The engine sounds rougher than usual, or maybe it’s just the rain striking the
roof. After a winter by the sea, the car is in worse shape, fenders rusting, wires corroded. Buddy would not be pleased. The
registration is in April’s name; she pays for the insurance, but she still feels it is on extended loan.

The car is April’s reminder of everything she did, or allowed. The chain of cause and effect stretches back not only days
before Buddy’s death, the neglected brake job, but years, decades. April wonders if she had lived differently, if Buddy would
still be alive, or if Oliver might have his life back.

Her own loneliness does not concern her. She thinks of it as fertile ground, an oasis that has been with her all these years
but that she ignored until now. Her car radio died shortly after she moved to Nahant, and the first time she drove without
it she felt anxious and alone, the pressure of her own thoughts inflating like a balloon, empty and ready to burst. She could
not name how she felt about even the simplest things, like Oliver’s leaving. She was lost.

Now, although the radio is fixed, she drives without it. Her thoughts move not in a linear, directed way, but circuitously,
like the tide. She has learned to mark the currents in the cove near her apartment by noticing a boulder in the surf, dry
at the lowest ebb, submerged at the highest.

She turns onto the causeway. The surf is choppy, the salt air sharp in her nostrils. The car sways in the wind, and she struggles
to keep it in lane. She parks in front of her apartment and tucks her library books inside her jacket, Elizabeth Bishop, Willa
Cather, and
Do-It-Yourself Auto Repair
. The gale is so strong she can’t open the car door. Nahant is vulnerable to squalls because of its location, a tiny peninsula
jutting out into the North Atlantic, connected to the mainland by a narrow, two-mile isthmus. April chose the place for its
sound. After living by the station for so long, she cannot sleep in silence. The surf echoes in her apartment, plangent as
trains.

The apartments, set apart on the southernmost tip of the island, are the only rentals. Surrounded by ocean on three sides,
the Point is rocky and austere, a place of perpetual wind. With one church, one general store, and no bars, Nahant is not
a location anyone would have expected her to choose.

She tries again to shove open the car door, but the wind is too strong. With her wipers off, the hood appears to liquefy,
a blurry river of milk. She shifts over to the passenger seat where a gust nearly takes the door off its hinges.

As she opens her apartment door, Dubious’s scruffy snout sticks out. She hears his tail rapping against the furniture. “Doobie.”
She laughs, kneeling down. He rushes away and returns with a slipper.

“No,” she says gently.

He dashes off again, this time returning with a dish towel.

“Eh, eh.” She shakes her head.

Once more he darts away, racing back to her with a stringy, gnawed rope toy. “Well, thank you,” she says, returning it to
him. “You’re very thoughtful.”

He picks up his ball and runs hopefully to the door. “Tomorrow,” she says. “It’s raining.”

His ears flatten back.

“We’ll do business, though,” she says, taking the leash. “Just don’t blow away.”

He dances around her twice, and then sits for the leash.

After they return, she dries off his paws and goes out onto the balcony. The wind tangles the curtains behind her. Pictures
rattle against the walls. The sea is gray, the color of the sky, both in motion, barely distinguishable. Waves extend in frothy
lines from one horizon to the other, rolling inland. The rock is underwater, buffeted by invisible currents.

She goes indoors, makes tea, and flips through her mail, stopping when she sees Hal’s handwriting. Oliver has been writing
to his father once a month describing the places he encounters, and each time Hal mails photocopies to her and Al, surely
without Oliver’s knowledge. April takes the envelope, the fifth in five months, and puts it aside. Sometimes it takes her
days to open one. It’s not the content she braces herself for, but the familiarity of his handwriting.

The previous letters, now stacked on her desk, are long, sumptuous narratives worthy of a travel writer. He was smitten by
Europe, her castles, catacombs, and ruins. He wandered through them, searching for something that would open his mind to the
past. He filled pages with Krakow and Budapest, cities that embody their history. April pictures him moving across the continent
like a kid just out of college, with nothing but backpack and maps, his face unshaven and tanned. Before leaving, he sold
his car and gave up his apartment. His last act was to sell his piano and use the money for a plane ticket.

When April heard through Hal that Oliver was selling the piano, she found the ad in the newspaper and asked a friend to call
about it for her. When the piano movers came to take it, Oliver had no idea it was April who bought it. She can’t play, but
sometimes at night she sits with her back to its side.

She spreads her class notes on the small desk in her bedroom. Dubious makes three circles at her feet and settles down. Two
more months in a drafty lecture hall with runny-nosed teenagers and she will be done with her first semester. She turns the
pages of her textbook.
The History of Western Civilization,
chapter 27, the Weimar Republic.

She ought to sell the car, she thinks. The thought comes to her just like that. School is the place to advertise it. Some
nineteen-year-old will claim the car, and April will find herself something new to drive.

T
HE GROUND IS SPONGY
beneath Oliver’s hiking boots, the boggy turf green even in March. Island fog makes it hard for Oliver to get his bearings,
but the boom of ocean against rock below tells him he is nearing the bluffs. The island is wedge-shaped, with one side sloping
down to small, sandy beaches, and the other ending abruptly at hundred-foot cliffs.

He didn’t expect to come to Ireland, but after five months in seven countries, he found himself in Le Havre, France, where
a ferry was embarking for Rosslare. Two days on the Irish Sea seemed reason enough to board. It turned out to be a rough voyage.
Oliver spent day and night on deck, staring out at towering waves.

He crossed the lush Irish countryside by train and landed in Galway, where he saw a posting for a ferry to the Aran Islands.
Traveling alone, he has begun to remember how to move by instinct. He is like a boy in the woods, choosing trails by impulse
without worrying about how to get back, driven by the need to get lost. As the ferry chugged out of Galway Bay and into the
choppy Atlantic, he had no doubt this was where he had been headed all along. The mainland faded and disappeared, and the
three small islands rose up in a dare to the sea.

Inishmore is grassy, rocky, and nearly treeless. Since arriving over two weeks ago, Oliver has walked the circumference, first
the tranquil, sloping side, where water laps the beaches and pony traps pull the random tourist, and now the cliff side, which
faces nothing but ocean and, beyond the earth’s curve, North America. As far as he can tell, Oliver is standing on Europe’s
westernmost landfall.

There are no paths or guardrails. This side of the island is all grass, divided into parcels by mortarless walls that appear
as old as the island itself. The stones separate one man’s sheep from another’s.

He hears the cawing of terns below and sees he is only feet from the edge. He crab-walks to the rim, where he hangs his feet
over the bottomless drop. The cliff is wildly uneven; pastures have fallen into the sea at random. He is on the edge of a
jagged point; to his right and left the sea has chewed thirty or forty feet deeper into land. The tops of the cliffs cantilever
out over the ocean while it quarries below. Into these caves glide waves and cormorants. The slosh of water against rock is
intoxicating. Oliver is the stone, cleansed and carved.