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April- A short story

 
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Jason Tandro
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PostJason Tandro Posted: Mon Oct 11, 2010 4:50 am   Post subject: April- A short story Reply with quote

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Found this while perusing through my hard drive. It's probably one of the saddest stories I've ever written.

April
by: Micah Rodney

She was in one of her moods again. Screaming at him and chastising him like he was a little boy. He hated that side of her. She always had to be right. She always had to be the one in control. He was not a little boy anymore. He was a man, and he would do whatever he damn well pleased.
“Linda!” Jeff shouted. “Quiet down, you’ll wake up April.”
He had said the magic word. Mentioning their daughter was a sure way to get her to calm down. Linda remembered that it was almost midnight and their little girl, though she pretended to be asleep, would likely be sitting at the top of the stairs, listening to them fight, soft tears running down her precious face.
Their eight year old girl meant more to the two of them than anything, but sometimes, when he would come home late (as well as drunk) they would forget themselves in pointless, meandering arguments. Linda was certainly more shrill and vocal about her point of view, but Jeff had this unbearable air of bewildered amusement.
He put on this demeanor intentionally. Something animal about him loved to see her get riled up and excited, but at the same time, there was other people in the house who had to go to school in the morning.
“You might as well just stay down here then,” Linda hissed.
“I think I will,” Jeff replied with mock concern in his voice.
Linda knew the argument was over though and went around the corner and started up the stairs. Both parents heard the scurry of tiny feet and a door shutting softly. Linda slammed their bedroom door shut and Jeff began to go through his nightly ritual.
He drank two full cups of water, to prevent a hangover the next morning. He then moved cautiously through his kitchen to the first floor bathroom and washed his face, shortly before vomiting into the toilet.
Maybe she was right. Maybe the drink was bad for him. That thought annoyed him on a purely Y-chromosome level. The thought that the nagging woman was right. He never pretended to be much of a gentleman when drunk. His baser drives took over and…
He wiped his mouth with a wad of toilet paper. This was the same internal struggle he had every night. He was so sick of it.
---
The alarm on his cell phone blared far louder than Jeff thought it was possible. Surely the factory settings prevented it from attaining such decibels. Jeff’s hangover remedy had failed him for the first time in a blue moon, and he stumbled from the living room couch to the kitchen, desperately seeking the bottle of ibuprofen he kept stashed in his tool drawer for just such an emergency.
Unscrewing the cap with a little more force than was necessary, he began to chew on three of the chalky white pills. He heard April in the upstairs bathroom brushing her teeth. Even at eight, she was already taking care of herself.
He, on the other hand, wanted to call in sick to work today and forget the world. The morning light burned his eyes, even though the sun was blocked by clouds. Rain was pouring down in buckets. The cell phone alarm went off again, just to remind him that there was no escape from the real world.
He slammed the button to disable his alarm and then shoved his cell phone in his pocket. The upstairs sink turned off, and a few moments later those tiny feet marched down the stairs.
And there was April. Her mother’s curly brown hair, although longer than Linda kept hers now, his own green eyes, and a smile that was uniquely hers. She wore her purple raincoat, pink rain boots and her backpack.
“I’m going to school Daddy,” she smiled. She gave him a big hug and then was out the door in an instant.
Linda walked down the stairs next. His mental ranting of the night before evaporated at the site of her. She looked beautiful in her sky blue skirt and blouse. This was a woman who he clearly did not deserve.
“I’ll be dropping Linda off at my sisters this evening,” she said.
This was unusual. She was a teacher at the middle school, so picking up April was an ordinary course of events, but why would she be dropping April off at her sisters?
“We need to have a talk,” Linda nodded gravely. There was no affection in her voice. No love. Her words were hollow and empty, even moreso because Jeff knew he had made it so.
This was a woman who he clearly did not deserve.
---
His new apartment wasn’t that bad. It was a studio, because after alimony that was all he could afford, but that was all he needed. He was not as materialistic as Linda. A television, a computer, a bed and a desk was all he needed. He kept what little food he bought for the future in a mini-fridge next to his bed, and to his surprise it hadn’t been loaded with beer yet.
That was one of the bullet points of Linda’s little “talk”. That he drank too much. Once the courts agreed with his wife and only awarded him visiting rights to his daughter, it was the absolute proof he needed of his own idiocy.
The drink had ruined his life, but if he worked on it, really hard, perhaps he might be able to build himself back up. There might still be some hope for him.
He straightened up the little shack of an apartment. Today was one of those rare and precious “visiting” days. He heard a knock on the door and rushed to open it, but it was only the pizza delivery. After taking the large pizza and two-liter bottle of Sprite (Linda didn’t approve of April having too much caffeine), he closed the door again and sat down on his freshly made bed, waiting.
The apartment had gone in those few moments from a brand new comfy place of his own- the pinnacle of his self-sufficiency- to a cell where he was forced to wait for his only remaining loved one to bid him an audience.
This was hell. The absolute realization of your own inadequacy, the only embers left of hope smothered beneath the weight of your sin. This was not permanent. If he had to go to the meetings twice a day every day to quit, he would do it.
He wouldn’t lose April.
---
He woke with a bang. He had rolled out of his bed and hit the floor, bending his arm back at an awkward angle. He screamed in pain, but then heard a knocking at the door.
This was the anniversary of his first year sober, and as a reward, Linda had agreed to let April come over to see him. She said she might even stay too. This was supposed to be seen as a reward, but it was clear too Jeff that Linda did not fully trust him yet.
Nor would she ever, he feared. He got up and rubbed his arm for a moment, before un-latching the door and letting the eager nine-year old girl tackle her father in a hug.
“Hey, April! How’s my little girl?” Jeff smiled, patting her head.
He looked up and saw Linda in that same sky blue outfit she had worn the day that his life was shattered. Did she know this on some level and wear it intentionally to wound him? To remind him that, as she was fond of quoting to him each night he was drunk, “the more things change, the more they stay the same”?
“You look nice, Linda,” Jeff said sheepishly. It was as though he were meeting her for the first time. How do you talk to somebody after a year of solid, and well-founded, hatred.
“Thank you, Jeff,” was all she could reply. She must have noticed Jeff’s falter in step and tried to be slightly cheerier. “I can’t believe I haven’t seen this place in a year. It’s pretty nice for a studio.”
“Yeah, I like the view,” Jeff joked, as his only window looked out onto a fire-escape and another brick building.
Linda smiled bravely. “So, a year sober. That’s pretty impressive.”
April let go of her father. This was instinctual. Whenever Linda uttered the words “drunk” or “sober” it was usually the indicator of a fight. Only here, the little girl had nowhere to run and hide. Nowhere to pretend not to exist when the blows came. Fortunately, none did.
“I’ve been working very hard,” Jeff nodded. “I’m trying Linda.”
Linda nodded. “Would you, maybe, like to have lunch sometime?”
“Oh?” Jeff asked, trying to seem less desperate than he was.
“I just, was thinking that maybe we could discuss Joint custody, is all,” Linda amended.
“Really?” Jeff asked, his voice breaking. “That would be great.”
April gave her mother a hug this time. Jeff noticed the movement and could tell what Linda was going to say before she said it.
“April misses her father,” Linda said, with an even weaker smile.
---
Jeff’s knees were shaking. Why did this have to take place in the same court room where he had not only been forced to answer for a couple D.U.I.’s but also where the whole mess had started? Again, the full-circle of his crimes seemed too bitterly ironic to bear.
And where the hell was Linda?
The court-date was at 9:00 AM. Linda was just going to drop April off at school and then be on her way here. So where was she?
Was this all a joke? Was Linda having a good laugh? Still making him pay for daring to ever hurt her? No, no matter what had come between them a promise from Linda was solid. Unlike his own promises to her. But then where could she be?
8:40 rolled around. 8:50. 9:00 AM and he was being summoned into the courtroom. But as he was about to enter, his lawyer on his right, a man came running up from Jeff’s left side, down the hallway.
“Mr. Ames,” he said panting. “Your wife and child…”
But the man didn’t need to say another word. There was only one reason a man would run in a courthouse. Especially a man who was wearing an EMT uniform.
---
He hadn’t prayed in years. Not since he was a teenager and part of a youth choir in his church. But he was praying now more fiercely than he had ever prayed in his life. He sat in the hospital chapel, sobbing profusely, and begging God not to inflict the punishment he deserved on his wife and child.
The doctor had said that Linda had been side-swiped by a truck who was running a red light. That the side air-bags didn’t deploy. Linda’s skull had been smashed and was an absolute wreck. Jeff had been warned that her injuries were likely too severe to recover from. That she had a 10% chance, at best.
April was smaller and more fragile, but had been free from most of the collision as she had been sitting on the passenger side. Her chances were much better, 60%, but it was still a severe case. If she did survive, the odds were she would be hospitalized for months before she could go home, and there would probably be some permanent brain damage.
And so, Jeff prayed. He begged God to do his job. To punish him instead of taking out his vengeance on his family.
But as the doctor walked in, he knew the true worth of prayer. The doctor’s head hung low, and his only response to Jeff’s tear-stained, pleading eyes, was a solemn head shake.
Linda and April were dead.
---
That night, was the first time Jeff met Buddy.
He had left the hospital around midnight, only after the doctors had convinced him that there was nothing more they could do for April, and that there was nothing more he could do for her.
She didn’t look like she had been broken. Were it not for the taunting whine of the medical scanners, she could have been sleeping. Dreaming of her mommy and daddy getting back together and finally recognizing her for the little miracle she was.
But now she dreamt no more. The flatline was a chorus of Jeff’s personal demons, hissing at him. Whispering in his ear that it was his fault. His own sins had lead both of them to die. It was the cross he would bear for the rest of his life until he joined the cacophonous choir in Hell.
He wouldn’t drive. He didn’t want to. He walked home, along that lonely street. Memories of the past kept flooding back as he walked. He saw the window of the maternity ward where he would wave farewell to his wife before going to work. Where he would see her face light up as he walked in carrying a chocolate bar and a new toy for little April.
The alley on his left was the road which they ducked into one night in a fit of passion. That was the night that April was conceived. And somehow, he knew not how, he arrived downtown. His old drinking spot, McHenry’s Bar and Grill, glowed like a neon devil taunting him further still.
He could end it all now. He still had the gun he bought for protection back at his studio. But then, he realized that it would be expected of him to return to the house. To watch over it, and keep it like a sick memorial.
Was this his great act of penitence? To be forced to live on where others had the freedom to die? And besides, suicide would not reunite them. It would just ring in the eternal damnation he deserved. He sat down on a park bench and began to weep.
Why, God, could he not simply be dead? Why couldn’t they have survived? He’d heard stories of miracles before, and surely God in his infinite power could spare a nine-year old girl who had done nothing more wicked than stolen a cookie when she was five.
And then in his anger at God, he also saw the selfishness in his request. The expectancy of special treatment. How many little girls died every day? How many were kidnapped by strange men, or else had their lives taken in freak accidents just like April?
But none of them were April. April was special. April was perfect.
He felt something brush up against his leg. It was soft and furry. Jeff looked down and saw a tan cat with white mittens, rubbing up against him.
“Get away you dumb cat,” Jeff half-hissed, half-sobbed.
The cat did not care for orders much. He reminded Jeff painfully of how stubborn Linda was. The cat hopped up on his lap and began to paw at his shirt. It arched its back in a wide stretch and sat down.
Jeff wanted to throw the cat into the next street, but there was something inside him that told him not to. Maybe it was the good spark that April had most-assuredly put inside him, for she got all of her goodness from her mother.
Jeff began to stroke the cat and looked down at its collar. There was a heart-shaped nametag, which read “Buddy”.
“How you doing, Buddy?” Jeff asked as he stroked Buddy behind the ears. “Because I’m not doing so good myself.”
Buddy looked up into Jeff’s eyes and blinked. There was something familiar about this cat, but Jeff couldn’t put his finger on it.
“I wish I had some scraps to give you Buddy. But I don’t. I have to go home now,” Jeff picked Buddy up and set him down on the bench.
He began to walk off, but Buddy leapt down and began to follow him. Buddy let out a stalwart “Meow!”
Jeff looked back but did not stop walking. “Your free to follow me all you want, but I’m not about to play with you.”
---
The studio had been cleaned out. Linda’s sister had condescended to pay for movers to help him move back into the house, but as far as she was concerned Jeff had as good killed Linda. It was the first time they had ever agreed on anything.
The house was now back to its former shape, but it was no longer a place of happiness. In fact, if the studio had been a cell, then this house was now his tomb. There was something wrong with a man who lived alone having so much space. Some days, he refused to go downstairs, to do more than leave or cook dinner.
He just stayed in the bedroom that was too small for two people, and too big for one. Well, one and a half. Buddy had followed him all the way home and had not left his side. The two times he had tried to get Buddy to go he had just sat down and refused to move. When he had tried to take him to the animal pound he just growled and stared at Jeff until he turned the car round.
He couldn’t do it. He couldn’t cast something else aside. And this cat was a person. It had a presence. By day it would pounce about, playing with the drapery and the small balls of lint that would collect around the edges of the wall. By night, it slept on the bed, sometimes at the foot of the bed, and other times, curled up right beside him on Linda’s side of the bed.
April’s room he had locked. He would never open those doors again. There was a dark pit where that part of his heart used to be. Never again would he hear that door shut softly as April went back into her room, pretending that everything was alright.
Pretending that she didn’t know something was wrong.
---
Soft music. A piano played a melody that was stuck somewhere in the back of his mind. Jeff could not remember where it was that he had heard this, but the playing had a hypnotic effect. Or it would, were he not already fast asleep. Dreaming.
He dreamed he was swinging on a swingset with April in his lap. Linda stood watching the two smiling. He had forgotten how beautiful her smile was.
Winter came in a flash of light, and April was chasing Jeff around in the snow. Linda through a snowball at Jeff from behind and cried with delight.
“Got him!” She laughed.
“No!” Jeff fell into the white powder laughing. “Man down! Man down!”
The six-year old April jumped on top of him and then there was another flash.
It was summer time, and Linda was walking along the beach in her swimsuit, holding April’s hand as she carried a pail full of dirt.
And all this time, that soft music played.
---
Where had he heard it? It was surely not a song of his own invention. He didn’t believe that one could invent music within their own dreams. Surely everything that one dreamt had a basis, so what was the basis for this music?But as he slowly woke up, he noticed something odd.
Buddy was gone.
“Buddy!” Jeff called.
He looked around the room. His bedroom door was shut, so the little critter must be in here somewhere. Checking under the bed, he saw only the cardboard box with the photo albums that Linda had stored. He looked behind the headboard, and then the bureau but could not find the cat.
“Buddy!” Jeff cried, a little more urgently this time.
He heard a soft scratching. It was coming from down the hall. But how could it be? The door was shut. He opened the bedroom door, and went down the hall. He saw Buddy clawing at April’s door.
“No, no,” Jeff sighed. “We don’t go in there.”
He picked up the cat and stroked its neck.
“No, Buddy, that’s where my little girl…”
But he couldn’t finish the sentence.
---
Another night of dreaming, and this time the dreams were more like nightmares. The soft piano music played in his mind, but now the dreams were sickly twisted.
Linda and Jeff fighting the first time he had come home drunk. She shouted and he just laughed at her, mocking her.
Then in a dark spin, the first (and only) time he had hit Linda. He smacked her across the face, and instantly he felt sorry for what he had done, but as he tried to console her, she ran to the bedroom and locked the door crying. April, the two-month old infant, cried with her. This was the first night he had slept on the couch.
And that damned music kept playing through all of this. Why wouldn’t it stop? Where had he heard it?
---
This time, when he awoke, it was the dead of night. The digital clock read 4:00 AM. The door was open, and Buddy was neck to April’s door, scratching away.
Jeff jumped out of bed and went over to the door. “Damn it.”
He pulled a key from out of his pants pocket and showed it to Buddy. “You see this key, Buddy? This is what locked that door.”
He bent low to the ground. Buddy meowed in protest to what he was about to do, but he didn’t care. He slid the key to April’s room underneath the door frame.
“You see that, Buddy? Too bad, but we’re not getting into April’s room.” He picked Buddy up by the scruff of the neck. “And you know why?!” He was shouting now. “Because there’s nothing in there! Nothing! She’s dead, alright?! Dead!”
He dropped Buddy and went back to his room.
---
The scratching woke him up again, but this time it was a scratching at his own door. He had shut Buddy out last night.
He opened the door grudgingly and sighed. “I didn’t mean to yell at you last night. I was just…”
Buddy didn’t care. He jumped right into his lap and purred softly.
Jeff looked at the clock. 9:00 AM. But it was Saturday. He lay back on the bed and closed his eyes.
---
The dreams again, with that same music haunting him. Linda’s smile fading when she saw him arrive home carrying a 6-pack of beer. April asking him why he drank so much. April crying the first time she had heard the two of them fighting.
“What is that music?!” Jeff shouted as he awoke.
Buddy was gone, and the familiar scratching echoed through the darkness.
“Damn it Buddy!” Jeff shouted.
He jumped up. He rounded the hallway to April’s room and this time Buddy turned to face him. Buddy meowed firmly and he snapped.
“Fine!” He screamed as he kicked in April’s door. The latch broke with a splintering shatter. “What do you want in here? You see?! There’s nothing.”
But Buddy rushed over to April’s bed. Sitting on the nightstand was a music box that Jeff had never seen before. He opened it slowly and soft music began to play. It was the piano piece in miniature. The soft musical chiming of that haunting piece playing. But how? Jeff had never seen this music box, nor heard its melody.
He looked above the music box and saw a drawing that he had never seen before either. It was a family of cats. The big male cat was tan with white mittens. It was labeled Buddy. The mother cat had short brown fur, very much like Linda’s and was labeled Sally. The baby kitten that was between them was all brown with a curly tail. It was labeled April.
Buddy purred as the music played. Jeff picked up the picture and saw on the back that his daughter had signed it in crayon.
“To Daddy, From April. I love you.”
Buddy hopped off the bed and began to walk out of the room. It turned and looked at Jeff.
“No. Don’t go, Buddy,” Jeff whispered, as his eyes filled with tears. “I can’t lose her again.”
Buddy meowed bravely and walked out the door. Jeff rushed over to where the cat should be, but it had vanished. Jeff looked down at the picture of the cats, and his daughters last message to him.
He wept like a little boy.
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