A Winter Dream

Chapter


Seventeen


It is impossible to build a solid foundation on the sand of the unkown.

Joseph Jacobson’s Diary





My high school football coach used to say, “Men, sometimes you gotta walk through Hell to get to Heaven.” I was beginning to believe him. As difficult as being thrown out of Colorado had been, I was actually starting to feel grateful that it had happened. I never would have met April if I hadn’t left home. My job at Leo Burnett was fulfilling. My Bank On It campaign was a big success, and April never failed to point out the BankOne billboards we passed. She even cut out BankOne ads she saw in newspapers or magazines.

The next eight months were not what I expected when I first arrived in Chicago. They were good. A better word would be “idyllic.” April and I grew closer, to the point I couldn’t imagine being without her.

I finally met April’s roommate, Ruth. She was not what I expected—practically a photographic negative of April. The evening I met her she was wearing a torn Nirvana T-shirt revealing the tattoos on her arms and neck. She had tattoos on her face and at least a dozen piercings. She wore small safety pins in her ears.

She was friendly and soft-spoken, like April, but otherwise the two couldn’t have been a more incongruous pair. After we left the apartment, I asked April, “How did you two meet?”

“She’s an old friend,” she said. “From Utah.”



The route April took from Mr. G’s to the Jefferson Park station led past my apartment, so I gave her a key to my place so she could save the trip home and wait at my place after her shift on the evenings we planned to go out. She began stopping by and cleaning my place or bringing me food from the diner and leaving it in my refrigerator, usually with a love note.

I remembered what my father had said about love—“You’ll know it’s love when you don’t have to ask.” I now understood what he meant. With Ashley, my heart was always asking. It seemed to me that with her, love was an emotional shell game. With April there was no such doubt. I wasn’t so much in love as love was in me. I felt it all the time with her; in every phone call, every smile, every frown of concern.

In July, I came down with the flu for a week and she barely left my side, bringing me soup from the diner, doing my laundry and picking up my medications. She seemed grateful for the chance to take care of me. The inverse was true too. I wanted to make her happy. Ashley was right. For better or worse, I was a pleaser. And pleasers tend to become doormats for those with different sensibilities. April was also a pleaser. We were perfect together. I’d never been closer to anyone in my life.

Nor had I ever known anyone who was more honest, which was the greatest irony of our relationship. She simultaneously hid nothing present and everything past. It was as if a big curtain had been drawn over the largest part of her life.

Most of the time it was possible to ignore the curtain. But every now and then something would slip out, and I would be reminded that there was something about her I didn’t know—something, perhaps, that could take her away from me.

I learned one more thing. April was highly susceptible to guilt, and whatever it was she was hiding was definitely eating at her. At those times she would pray more and read her Bible and sometimes fast. She would put boundaries between us physically. These times would remind me that even in Eden there were snakes.

April’s birthday came in August. On Timothy’s recommendation, I took her to the Berghoff, one of Chicago’s oldest and most famous restaurants. At dinner I gave her my gift, a silver chain with a Tiffany heart lock pendant in sterling silver with Tiffany Blue enamel finish. She squealed when she saw it. She asked me to put it on her. After that I never saw her without it.



Summer slipped into fall, and fall into winter. As the weather cooled and the holidays approached, I could feel something happening between April and me as well. Relationships either grow or die, but they never stay the same. We’d come to a place of decision. I had already made mine. I wanted to take this to the next step. I didn’t care about what I didn’t know, or at least I didn’t think I did. I couldn’t imagine anything that would change the way I felt about her. What I knew for certain is that I couldn’t imagine a world without her. Whatever she was hiding, we were going to make this work.

The day before Thanksgiving, Timothy reminded everyone about the upcoming Leo Burnett Holiday Formal in mid-December—one of the highlights of the company’s year. Timothy summed up the event with two words. “Legendary. Epic.”

Thanksgiving came and though I was homesick, I was not without company. I helped April cook Thanksgiving dinner, which we shared with Ruth and her boyfriend, Bob, who, compared to Ruth, looked surprisingly normal.

The dinner was good, but April was acting quiet again and there was sadness in her eyes. Her sadness made me afraid. It hadn’t really been that long since Ashley had thrown me aside. I had been wrong before. Who was to say I wasn’t wrong now? Had April stopped loving me? Or had the specter of her past returned to claim her?

After dinner I told April about the Leo Burnett Christmas party. She was even more excited than I thought she’d be. “I’ve never been to anything like that before,” she said. “Ruth has some beautiful dresses I could borrow.” She kissed me. “They’re a little, uh, showy, at least for me, but I don’t think you’ll mind.”

I smiled. “I doubt it.”



Weeks passed and December brought an earnest chill. The cold even seemed to creep into our relationship. Relationships, by nature, require trust, and trust cannot grow in the fog of secrecy. Whether it was paranoia or the nature of our circumstance, April seemed different to me. I was afraid I was losing her. And fear is the most untrustworthy of counselors.

Fear demanded that I know where we were going, and I couldn’t know that, I couldn’t trust that, without knowing where she’d been. She needed to come clean about her past. No more secrets. She needed to tell me everything.

On December 7, a week before the Leo Burnett party, I decided to make her tell me.