Between Here and April Read online

  “No, not yet.” I was still setting up the camera I’d rented for the day, wishing I’d taken the time to read the instruction manual more thoroughly the night before, instead of passing out in Daisy’s bed with a copy of Green Eggs and Ham on my face. “I’m just fiddling with the white balance.” After swearing to Lucy that April’s story was real, I was able to convince her to finance one day of shooting in Potomac—“Expenses only, and nothing outrageous!” she’d said—in exchange for a first look at the material, although she couldn’t see how a crime that had happened so many years ago had any relevance at all to the present moment.

  I’d run a mic up through Mavis’s silk blouse and seated her on the large sectional in her living room, beneath an eight-by-ten-foot rendering, in acrylic and glitter, of her and her husband, Arnie, their preternaturally youthful faces surrounded by smaller scenes of the two of them playing golf, tending a bar-beque grill, eating Chinese food, and strolling along the Delaware shore in front of the orange Dolle’s sign. The painting, Mavis told me, was commissioned by a local artist who drew his inspiration from either Roy Lichtenstein or LeRoy Neiman, she could never remember who.

  Beneath the painting, in various crystal frames, were photographs of Traub children, stiffly posed in hotel lobbies on their wedding days, as well as younger Traubs, presumably the grandchildren, whose chubby heads were floating in seas of school-portrait blue. On the opposite wall, directly across from the painting of Mavis and Arnie, looming almost as large, stood a massive wide-screen TV, tuned to a morning talk show but muted, as per my request.

  “So anyway,” said Mavis, “when everything went south with the new guy, well, you know.”

  “No, I don’t,” I said, finally turning on the camera. “Please, tell me.”

  “Oy gevalt,” she said, suddenly standing up. “I forgot to put out the pecan ring. You want some? It’s Entenmann’s.”

  I shut off the camera. “No, thanks.”

  She sat back down again. “You girls these days. Such will-power. Coffee?”

  “That’s okay. I already had a cup at the airport this morning.”

  “The airport?”

  “I live in New York.”

  “New York? Your poor mother. Mine stayed.” Mavis beamed. “All three of them. Well, one’s in Gaithersburg, the other’s in Rockville, but close enough. You have children?”

  “Two daughters. Six and almost eight. But I was wondering if we could talk about—”

  “Well, isn’t that interesting . . .” I flipped on the camera once again, hoping Mavis would follow up with a comment about April and Lily having been the same ages as my daughters when they disappeared, a detail which struck me as not insignificant. “My Debbie has two, six and eight.” She pointed to a photo of two nondescript boys wearing soccer uniforms. “That’s Dylan, and that’s Drew. They’re all d’s. Dylan, Drew, Daniel, and Debbie. Can you imagine?” I couldn’t tell if Mavis was amused or embarrassed by this fact. I vaguely remembered Debbie Traub from high school, a slightly zaftig girl who wore dense layers of Indian Earth and blue mascara and gave head to Sean Graham, or so went the story, in the mimeograph room off the teachers’ lounge. “She stays home with them, though. Her husband’s in finance.”

  “That’s nice,” I said, picturing Debbie shuttling Dylan and Drew back and forth to soccer practice in her SUV, armed only with her wits and a giant frappuccino, before coming home to blow Daniel. I made a point of picking up the questions I’d prepared and rustling the pages to keep us on track. “But let’s get back to Adele. You knew her well?”

  “Did I know her well? We were like this.” She stared into the camera, crossed her fingers, and held them up in the air.

  I turned off the camera again. “Actually, Mavis, you shouldn’t look straight into the lens. Just talk to me as if the camera weren’t here, okay?”

  “Oh, I’m sorry. Like this?” She turned her gaze toward me. “I’m just so used to all of these reality shows, you know, where they look at the camera and confide in you.”

  I pressed the record button once more. “Okay, let’s start again. And if you don’t mind, since my questions are off camera, I’ll need you to rephrase each one at the beginning of your answer. Like if I say, ‘What color is the sky?’ don’t just say, ‘Blue.’ Say, ‘The sky is blue.’ Got it?” Mavis nodded. “Okay, so. When did you first become aware, if at all, of Adele’s depression?”

  “After April was born.”

  “No, you have to—”

  “Oh, sorry, I mean, I first became aware of Adele’s depression after April was born,” she said. She was fiddling with an errant string on a needlepoint pillow that said, Orthodontists do it with braces! and staring up into her cathedral ceiling. “Or maybe it was a few years later. Anyway, Adele had gained a lot of weight with the pregnancy, and so she hired this guy, this diet guru, to come over. You know, one of these guys who comes to your house and helps you plan meals and do sit-ups. None of us with small children could get out back then. We didn’t have nannies or, what are you girls calling them these days, caregivers? So people came to us.”

  I’d decided to speak to Mavis, who was quoted at the end of the Washington Post article, first. I had a lead on Adele Cassidy’s sister, whom I’d since located in College Park and was planning on shooting later in the day, as well as the name and address of the psychiatrist in Rockville who, according to the police report, had once treated April’s mother. “And what was the diet guy’s name?” I said, resigned to simply keep the camera rolling no matter the digression.

  “Well, let’s see, I don’t remember, but he wrote that book, Blendercize for Thinner Thighs? You know, with all those recipes that were just, well, let’s face it, they were just air with a little bit of fruit juice and ice thrown in. What was his name?” I vaguely recalled seeing a copy of the book on my mother’s kitchen counter, wedged like a rebuke between the Joy of Cooking and Your Jewish Table. “Morton! Lenny Morton. Anyway, after his divorce, he quits his job—I think he was in medical supplies or something—and he starts going door to door—I kid you not, I got a knock myself—and he asks everyone in the neighborhood, ‘What’s missing from your life?’ Well, none of us really knows what to say. We’re fine, we say. We’ve got husbands, lovely homes, beautiful children, washer-dryers. We had everything a woman could want. Oh, sure, maybe if we could lose a few pounds, that would be good. Thinner thighs, now that would make us happy. Three months later, he’s got a new business card and his first clients.”

  “Adele?”

  “Yes, Adele. She was one of his first. I’d go over to her house afterwards. Her older one, Lily, was the same age as my Jessica, and they played together nicely, you know, not like some kids where you have to always be watching to make sure they don’t whack each other over the heads with the Lincoln Logs.”

  “And what year was this?”

  “Oh, let’s see. April was still a toddler then, so it must have been around, what, when was she born again?”

  “1966.”

  “So this must have been sometime around 1968. I remember we were sitting there watching Ethel Kennedy, pregnant, crying on that kitchen floor, and we just couldn’t believe it. Another Kennedy. Anyway, I’d go over there to let some light and air in that place—she always kept it so dark!—and one day while I’m doing this, just to make conversation, I say, ‘What’d you do with Lenny today?’ and Adele’s face turns beet red. ‘Nothing special,’ she says. ‘We blended some meals,’ or ‘He sat on my feet while I did sit-ups,’ but I could tell something else was going on. And who could blame her, really, with that husband of hers. Shep. So goyisha and serious, and that cross over their bed, can you imagine? He was in plumbing supplies or something like that, but he made a decent living at it because they had some nice things. Oy, but a temper. You’ve never seen such a temper. And he didn’t get that a girl needs to play football like she needs a hole in the head. Some ballet lessons maybe, I told him, a little piano, but football? He kept treating h
is daughters like sons, but you get what you get, right?”

  “Wait,” I said. “You told him he shouldn’t be teaching the girls to play football? When did you say this? How did you phrase it?”

  “Oh, I don’t remember,” said Mavis, with a dismissive toss of her hand. “It was so long ago. I think I must have said something like, ‘Shep, those girls are going to have a hell of a time finding husbands who can outthrow them.’ Anyway, whatever Lenny was doing with Adele on the diet front, let me tell you, it was working. She. Looked. Fabulous. She lost something like sixty-five pounds that first year, and she kept it off for a long time, at least a year and a half. I remember going to Loehmann’s with her one Saturday, and we were trying on clothes in front of that giant mirror. Two old ladies were there with us in their bras and underpants, and Adele was standing in front of the mirror looking, well, not svelte, but thin enough to try on tens. She was trying on this burgundy wool skirt, with a row of tiny gold buttons up the front, so stylish, and the waist buttoned beautifully, and one of the ladies looks over at her and says, ‘Very slimming. If you don’t take it, I will,’ and the other one says something like, ‘Oh, bubelah, if you can fit your tuchas into that one, I’m paying for lunch,’ and then they were both laughing, and so was Adele, and I remember thinking, that’s right, laugh all you like, sweetheart. You deserve it.”

  “I’m sorry, Mavis, hold on a sec.” I’d been taking notes while she spoke, marking the time code for possible sound bites, and I now flipped back through the pages, searching for a statement I felt needed clarifying. “You said before that Adele blushed when you asked her about Lenny. But did you know for a fact that she was having an affair with him? Did she ever tell you, ‘I’m having an affair with Lenny Morton’?”

  “Of course not. No one ever comes right out and says such a thing.” She rolled her eyes, shook her head. “You just know. You’re a woman, you’re married, you have eyes, you know.”

  I flipped back further, to the beginning of my notes. “And what did you mean by ‘things got messy’?”

  “I mean messy. Who knows what actually happened inside that house, but you’ve never heard such a racket coming out of it. Linda Deligdish, down the street, she heard it, too. A whore, Shep called her. As well as other things I shouldn’t mention in front of a camera. A week later, Lenny was gone.

  “Adele went downhill after that, especially after the girls were in school. She’d go for days without a shower. Started walking around in that pink schmatte and the flip-flops even in winter. Like she just didn’t care. Of course the skirt we’d bought together, the one with the gold buttons, stopped fitting. I saw it in her closet the day I went over to bring a kugel to Shep after the funeral. It was just sitting there in her closet, gathering dust.”

  Mavis stopped talking for a moment and stared off into the distance. “Oy, those girls.” She pursed her lips, shook her head and dabbed at the bottom of her eyelashes, heavy with mascara. “Those beautiful girls.”

  CHAPTER 8

  I DROVE MY RENTAL CAR, a gray Taurus, along Poplar Road, abutted on either side by thin patches of grass intersected at regular intervals with paved driveways, delineating the property lines of the many modest, late-sixties-era houses in shades of white, yellow, and olive. This was April’s territory, a neighborhood I’d driven by and through many times after her disappearance, on a school bus, in a carpool, in a battle-scarred station wagon packed full with teenagers and Schlitz, too busy trying to figure out my own life to stop and think about hers.

  The neighborhood itself hadn’t changed much in the intervening years, but like the bathroom stalls from one’s kindergarten, the houses, which had once seemed to me such massive and imposing structures, with enormous pilasters and grand Doric columns holding up roofs the size of God’s hand, now revealed themselves to be what they’d been all along: not small, exactly, but too small to have been burdened with the architectural flourishes they’d been given, like children playing dress-up in their parents’ clothes. Driving past them, I had the sudden sense of having remembered everything wrong.

  What am I doing here? I wondered. What had seemed like such a good idea back in New York now felt oddly impulsive, misguided. Plus Mavis’s interview, I could already tell without screening it, had yielded very little in terms of clean bites I could use.

  I meandered my way by feel onto Thorn Apple Way, April’s street, until I reached her old house. Seeing no signs of life inside, no car in the driveway, no telltale exhaust spewing forth from a dryer vent, I parked on the street and turned off the engine. The cement on the driveway was crumbling slightly where it met road, and the mailbox, dented in spots with two of its numbers missing, looked as if it had been smacked around by bored kids with a baseball bat.

  Sliding over to the passenger-side window, I slipped my hand through the mailbox’s black metal mouth, hoping for a clue, a name, someone I might call and ask what he or she had heard, if anything, about the former owners of the property. But when I pulled out the letters, I felt a sharp dip inside my chest, roller-coaster style.

  They were addressed to a Mr. Shepherd Cassidy. April’s father.

  I’d been meaning to find Shep, but I’d wanted to wait until I knew more, or at least until I’d made a preliminary visit to Potomac. Never once had I considered he’d stayed put. What was he doing still living in the same house?

  Surely Adele must have considered the aftermath of her decision when making it. Surely she must have thought about the kind of void she’d leave behind. Was that why she did it? To spite her husband, like Medea? But no. Medea had not killed herself. She’d spared her own life, experienced firsthand the frisson of retribution. Adele, by offing herself along with the children, could not have been driven purely—if at all—by revenge.

  I quickly shoved the letters back in the mailbox and shut the lid. I’d have to be careful. Now that I’d found him, there’d be little point in scaring Shep off with an unplanned visit. The question was how to approach him. A phone call? An email? No. A letter. Handwritten, on good stationery. Like a condolence card, only thirty-five years late.

  I slid back over to the driver’s side, turned the key in the ignition, and rolled forward twenty yards until my cell phone began chiming. The caller ID showed a Manhattan exchange followed by a familiar-looking arrangement of digits. “Bernie!” I said, picking up the phone.

  “Bad time?” he said.

  I pulled over to the curb. “No, no, totally fine. What’s up? Whose number do you need?” With Bernie, there was never any need for niceties. Conversation was purely for the expedient exchange of information, a habit born early on in his career, back when long-distance talk was anything but cheap.

  “No numbers this time, Elzy.” He sounded excited. I could almost picture him in his office, sitting on the edge of his chair, his desk covered with newspapers and used coffee cups. “Just a proposition.” He waited a long beat before saying it: “How’d you like to go to Baghdad for us?”

  It took me a long moment to find my voice. I was hurtled back to 1991, my first and last trip to Iraq. I’d written a fairly long story at the end of that war about collateral damage, starting off with the Iraqi I found lying facedown in the desert, his body charred beyond recognition, ending with the toddler I’d seen, wandering alone amid the debris. The piece never made it into print, however, as Newsworld had opted for a feel-good piece about cheering Kuwaitis instead. Bernie had been incensed by this, at the time, but he hadn’t had the power to change it either. “I don’t know, Bernie. I’d have to really think about it.”

  “Oh, come on, Elzy. Your girls are in school now, right?”

  I adjusted the rearview mirror, stole a glimpse of my increasingly lined and haggard-looking face. “That’s not really the issue, now is it?” How could my daughters possibly handle their mother’s departure for a war zone? How could I, at this point in my life, handle it? “Look, Bernie, I don’t know. From everything I hear, it’s almost impossible to do any street repo
rting these days. Don’t you already have people with more experience already on the ground?” Bernie had been nominated for a Pulitzer Prize for his coverage of Vietnam the same year Halberstam won; he’d also been maimed and blinded in his left eye by an errant grenade, marking the beginning of his reliance on a wheelchair and the end of his sight in three dimensions. “Plus let’s not forget the whole Jew thing.”

  “They’ll never know. Burns doesn’t sound Jewish.”

  “Neither did Pearl.”

  “Oh, come on Elzy. You can do this. I know you can.” Bernie had once claimed to understand why I wanted to leave combat journalism behind—why anyone would want to leave it behind—but because his own career was cut short involuntarily, he couldn’t accept the concept of voluntary departure, mine or anyone else’s. “What a pussy,” I once heard him say of my former colleague, an LA Times writer who traded street reporting in Rwanda for a career teaching journalism, after his son’s school counselor told him the boy’s fear over his father’s job was exacerbating an already acute anxiety disorder. “Look, I know,” he was now saying. “I know it’s out of left field. But I’ve got Renzo calling me, saying he can’t work with anyone else, and because of our new budget constraints, we’ve got to double up teams to save on vehicle and bodyguard expenses, and—”

  “Wait a minute. This was Renzo’s idea?”

  “Yeah, so what?”

  I’d loved Renzo once, or thought so at least, until the night in early spring of ’93, when we were holed up in the apartment we’d rented from a Bosnian family, eating stale granola, dry, and burning our last two candles. I’d just filed a story about Admira Ismic, a Muslim girl, and Bosko Brkic, her Serbian boyfriend, who’d been shot while trying to escape the city over the Vrbanja Bridge. Bosko was shot first, by sniper fire, “. . . dying instantly,” I’d written, “the blood spurting out of his skull in rhythmic bursts, like water poured too quickly from a jug.” Admira was only wounded, but she crawled over to her childhood sweetheart, wrapped her arm around his corpse, and inhaled her remaining breaths in his arms. Romeo and Juliet, I’d dubbed them, not very originally, as it would turn out, but Renzo was appalled by the description. “It’s a war, not a love story,” he said, rubbing a chamois over the glass filters of his camera lenses, as he did every night before bed. “They died, like all the others. She should have run for help instead of bleeding to death in his arms, silly girl.” He held the filter up to the light and sighed. “Merde. A scratch.” In Renzo’s world, nothing was more disagreeable than a less-than-pellucid lens.