But she did not care.
“April?”
“Go on.”
“You should stay. You’re doing something silly.”
“No,” she said. “I’m doing something smart.”
She was halfway out the door when something occurred to her and she turned around, coming back inside the house. He was at the bar pouring himself a drink. He raised his eyes at her approach.
“Craig,” she said, “before I said I’d love to kill you. But I don’t wish you were dead.”
“That’s nice of you.”
“I want you to live a long time,” she said. “I don’t want you to die young. I want you to live hard and fast, just the way you’ve always lived, without any moral code and without any sense of obligation to the rest of the world.”
He said nothing.
“I want you to grow to be a very old man,” she said. “Do you know why?”
“Why?”
“Because you’ll be the saddest old man in the world,” she said. “The most miserable old man in the whole world. You’d be very lucky if you died young, Craig, before you were old enough to see what a mess you were. And I don’t want that to happen. I want you to live long enough to be wretched.”
She walked out of the house and slammed the door and started walking.
She barely noticed the rain.
There was a lot of rain, and it was wet. In autumn Antrim has rainy days, and on these days it rains in spades. The sky opens up and the rain comes down, first in a drizzle and then in a torrent, and if you stay outside in the rain you get soaked through, despite galoshes, rainwear, umbrellas.
April had none of these. She was more than soaked. And she did not care.
No cars passed her in either direction while she walked down the narrow road from Craig Jeffers’ house to Route 68. There was only the road and the trees at either side, only the wet and the damp, only the wind like a sword through silk. She was wearing dungarees and a sweater, the wholesome costume of the wholesome girl, and the dungarees and sweater were plastered against her body by the rain.
She went on walking.
There was no place to go now. No place to go and nothing to do. She was stuck. By tomorrow morning both her mother and her father would know that she was a tramp. A rumor alone they might have sloughed off, but a rumor and a photograph are two different things entirely. Quite probably the pictures would literally kill them. And if they did not have heart attacks over the photographs, they would still be killed on the inside.
And they would be through with her. That much was painfully obvious. She could never live with them again, or see them again, or think of them again as people close to her. Home was the place where, when you had to go there, they had to take you in. But she did not have to go there. And if she did, it would be too damned bad for April North, because after her parents saw the pictures they would not feel compelled to take her in.
She kept walking. She could go to New York, maybe. But she had no money, and she did not want to go home and pack a suitcase. And there was more to it than that. She could never feel right simply by running away, simply by escaping. There had been a time when that course had made sense but it did not make sense now.
Nothing did.
Maybe she could kill herself. It would not be difficult, she thought. Just run in front of a fast car, or lie down on a railroad track, or find a bridge and jump from it Maybe that was the logical answer. If there was nothing to look forward to but misery, what was the sense in staying alive?
No.
No, suicide was no answer. Suicide was ridiculous, because there was always some chance for happiness even if you could not see it at the moment. There was nothing to gain and everything to lose in giving up the gift of life.
No suicide.
Then — what?
She reached 68 and started off away from Antrim and toward Xenia. She was walking away from Antrim rather than toward Xenia — God knew that there was nothing worth going to Xenia for, but she surely did not want to go home. She kept walking and wondering and then the car pulled up beside her.
At first she thought it was Craig. But it was not a Mercedes, not by any means.
And then she laughed.
Because she had come full circle, in some mysterious way, and the car beside her was a green Oldsmobile a year old, the green Oldsmobile where her virginity had been taken away in the back seat.
The driver was Danny Duncan.
11
She was sitting at Danny’s side in the front seat of the green Olds. She was not sure why she had entered the car but it had seemed like the right thing at the time. She was cold and drenching wet and shivering, and this particular car was where her trouble had all started, and somehow it seemed only fitting for her to get into the Olds now.
He had the radio playing rock-and-roll, and someone was singing Get out the papers and the trash/Or you don’t get no spending cash. She tried not to listen to the blare of the radio, tried not to notice the huge raindrops splattering on the window.
“I shouldn’t be here,” she said.
“Why not, April?”
“Because you were rotten to me,” she said.
“What do you mean?”
“You made love to me,” she said. “And then you told all your friends about it. That wasn’t very nice, Danny.”
He looked sheepish.
“I hated you for a while,” she went on. “But now I’m getting tired of hating people. I’m sick of it. There are too many rotten men in the world and if I keep on this way I’ll hate all of them. I guess there’s no future in it.”
They rode a mile or so in silence. She looked across at him, at the handsome profile, the basketball build. She remembered that first time — strange, she thought, that it should seem so long ago.
“What’s the trouble, April?”
“Everthing’s the trouble.”
“Tell me about it. Maybe I can help.”
She hesitated but only for a moment or two. “I have to go away,” she said ultimately. “I have to leave Antrim.”
“For good?”
“For better or for worse. If you mean forever, yes. I have to leave and I can’t come back.”
“Why?”
She looked at him. “I’m sorry,” she said slowly, “but I’d rather not tell you.”
“I can keep a secret.”
“So I’ve noticed,” she said bitterly. “Let’s just say I have to leave town and let it lie there.”
“Where will you go?”
“I don’t know. New York, I guess.”
“You’ll take a train?”
“I guess. I don’t have any money.”
She had money, of course. She had the five hundred forty-three dollars and seventy-four cents that she had drawn from her savings account when she tried to leave Antrim for the first time. But that money was at home, safely tucked away, and she could not get it without going home.
And she could not go home.
“I don’t have any money,” she repeated.
He looked at her. The radio had shifted gears to a jolly little number called Ave Maria Rock. The rain was still coming down hard and fast. She felt his eyes brush over her body, noting how the wet sweater clung to her full breasts. She wished he would stop looking at her that way. She didn’t like it, at all.
“Look, April. Maybe I can help.”
He could have helped once, she thought. He could have been more of a man and less of a boy. He could have kept her secret in the first place, could have gone on loving her instead of permitting his love to be killed by her final acceptance of it. Then what would have happened? She might have married him, she thought — and she was suddenly glad that he had talked about her, because she could imagine very few ways to spend her life that were worse than as the wife of Danny Duncan.