Flat-Out Celeste (30 page)

When she reached the clearing, she immediately steered herself to the driveway without looking up at the tree. The rumble of the truck was relaxing. It meant this would soon be over.

Trent pulled his phone company truck up next to her. “I was certainly surprised to hear from you,” he said with a smile. “Lordy, you must be freezing! No coat? No hat? It’s goddamn sleeting like crazy out there.”

He was right. Celeste hadn’t noticed her lack of winter attire until Trent pointed it out. It was only now that she realized that her thin shoes and socks were drenched with ice water. No matter. She barely felt anything.

“I am fine,” she said. “You also are not sporting appropriate clothing.” She nodded in his direction. “You have on only a light shirt.”

He winked. “So I guess we’re both tough mother—” He winced. “Well, you know what I mean. But we are both tough, and I’ll leave it at that.”

He could not be more wrong. Only one of them was tough.

“So how is Justin? What’s going on with that boy?” he asked. “I haven’t heard from him in weeks, and he’s not calling me back.”

He might as well have ripped a knife through her chest. Of course he would mention Justin. It was incredibly stupid of her not to have considered this. And now she had no response for him. Celeste looked up at Trent. “Would you… would you…” She swallowed hard. “Would you be so kind as to help me retrieve something from the top of that tree? It would be most appreciated, as I surely cannot climb or otherwise rise to such heights, but it is of great necessity that I obtain an item left there.” She could hear the crying start, the choking, but she could not stop it. “It is with great urgency… I simply had no one else to whom I could extend the request…” She wiped her eyes. “I am very sorry for putting you out, as I imagine that this weather is causing telephone wire damage, and your services must be needed elsewhere.”

“Hey, hey, easy there, little love.” Trent frowned, the confusion on his face clear. “I’ll help you. You wait here, okay? I’ll get you what you need.” He put the car in gear. “Tell me what I’m looking for.”

“Thank you. Thank you.” Celeste caught her breath and turned to point at the upper branches of the tree. Justin’s tree. The lights were gone, as was the star. With every ounce of her being, she needed the box to be there. “In the top branches, there should be a small plastic container.”

He nodded. “Hold tight. I gotcha.”

Trent drove forward and pulled the truck up next to the tree and lowered the cherry picker. Nimbly, he stepped into the bucket and steered the crane to raise him to the top. It was with great anxiety that she watched him lean over the side, his hand disappearing among the branches. It felt like an eternity, but eventually he held a hand in her direction and waved his arm. He had found their notes. The last piece.

She felt relief. She felt devastation.

She felt nothing, and she felt everything.

Trent lowered the bucket back to the bed of the truck and ducked back into the cab, then circled the truck back to her. He held out the box, but kept his hand on it when she tried to take it from him. “You gonna be okay?”

Celeste met his eyes. She didn’t know what to say.

“I’ve known Justin for years,” he said.

She nodded. “Yes.”

“He’s my best friend. Like a brother. I know what you mean to him.”

She froze. “Do not tell him about this. I beg you. It will make it worse. I know that.”

“And I know that it’s not over until it’s really,
unforgivably
over.” He let go of the box and faced forward. “Make sure it’s unforgivably over, or you’re going to regret it.”

HINGES

THE BOX WITH their Christmas notes sat on her nightstand for a week. Celeste was unable to destroy it as planned. It would make sense to, and it would finalize everything. But it sat beside her bed. She lay on her side with her head on the pillow and stared at it. She would not open it; she would not read what he had written. She would not.

Her room was back to its overly organized state. She had spent the morning cleaning and doing laundry, and she could still smell the bleach on her comforter. Her parents had asked her to join them on a day trip to Cape Cod, but the last thing she felt like doing was going antiquing or eating fried fish. Or pretending to be happy. Or doing anything, really.

She could do nothing, feel nothing, and think nothin
g. She might as well be dead. This had to end sometime. If she waited it out, this would end. The peace that she reflected on the outside would seep into her soul, and she would feel it. That’s what she’d thought anyway, but it had been a month now, a full month, and her despondence held strong. She needed help, but there was no one to help her. No respite, no comfort.

Before, in her darkest days after Finn’s death, when she couldn’t accept all that Matt tried to do for her, there had been Flat Finn. His arrival at the house immediately turned things around. Not that she had ever believed he was actually her brother. Her thinking had never been
that
twisted. But it had been as a young child is with a beloved blanket or stuffed animal. A transitional object one uses and imbues with the feeling of a relationship. One can feel loved and supported by unconventional means.

Celeste knew what she had to do.

She rose from bed and left her room, walking to the door to the attic. The light flickered when she turned it on, but did not go out. Confidently, she made her way up the creaky stairs and scanned the dusty room. Tucked in the messenger bag that Julie had given her, he was right where she’d left him so many years ago behind a hope chest. Rather amusing placement, she noted to herself. The bag was dusty, but she wiped it with her hand, hung the strap over her shoulder and marched back to her room. And then, with exceptional care, she slid Flat Finn from the bag and unfolded the cardboard cutout. She pulled out the flaps on the back and set him standing tall in the center of her room. Some of the photo paper had wrinkled a bit, but she was pleased to see that essentially he was in good shape. This was a positive sign.

Celeste backed up and sat cross-legged on the floor in front of him. The gold hinges that Julie helped her affix were all there, put on so that this life-size replica could be folded and tucked away when Celeste needed him to be less conspicuous and more portable. For the first time in weeks, she smiled. The familiarity of having Flat Finn stand guard in her room was overwhelming. “We are back together, my friend. Things are just as they are supposed to be.”

She stared at Flat Finn and waited. This would work.
He
would work. Going back to what had helped in the past was quite logical. If only she’d thought of this sooner. No matter. At least she’d thought of it now.

So she sat, and stared, and breathed in the musty attic smell that rose off of Flat Finn and the bag. She sat for an hour. Then two. Then she decided that perhaps there was too much pressure this way and engaging in normal activity would help. It was a bit difficult to determine what was normal activity, though, since in recent days it had meant laying catatonic on the bed. What did she used to do? Celeste flinched. She was asking herself what she used to do before her life imploded.

Read. She could curl up in her chair and read. She pulled a book from her shelf and sat down by the window. Four chapters later, and barely comprehending a word of what she was reading, she glanced at Flat Finn. He was failing to console her. “Come on; you can do this,” she encouraged him. “Work. Like you used to.”

The sky outside began to darken, and Celeste’s anxiety grew. “I am asking you to help me,” she said forcefully. “Now!”

She felt as lifeless as he was.

A sense of fury rushed through her. She stood and hurled the heavy book at Flat Finn, knocking him to the floor. “This is unfair of you! This is a betrayal! You are failing me when I need you the most! This is a betrayal of the highest order!” Enraged, Celeste rushed to her desk and searched through the three drawers until she located what she needed. Now, with a box cutter in hand, she moved so that she was on all fours on top of the cardboard brother.

And she started cutting, and cutting, and cutting.

With each shard she sliced, her heart pounded more, and the shaking in her hands intensified. Over and over, she slid the blade across Flat Finn, splicing his arms and legs into strands. A scream poured from her gut as she slashed his face, the face of the brother who had left and taken with him his vivacious, bold spirit. Whose death had traumatized the entire family. She wiped a hand across the only part of the photo not in fragments, smearing her tears across the red of Finn’s shirt. “You are a piece of shit! You are a piece of shit! I hate you!” she yelled, unleashing every bit of her pain. “I hate you!”

“Celeste.” Matt was there, kneeling on the floor behind her. “Oh my God.”

Delicately, he took the box cutter from her hand and took her in his arms.

She sobbed, unable to stop. “He is broken, Matthew. Flat Finn is broken! He is a piece of shit! What am I going to do?”

Matt held her, rocking her back and forth as she cried.

Suddenly, she tensed. “What have I done? No, no, no. What have I done to him? Matthew, we have to fix him. We can fix him.” She lunged from Matt’s hold and crawled back to her desk drawer, grabbing a box of hinges leftover from Julie’s endeavors so long ago. “We can fix him; we can fix him,” she said over and over. “Help me, Matty. Please. Fix him for me; fix him for me! You can do this. You can do anything. Oh, please, help.” With her hands shaking, she dumped the box onto the mess of cardboard shreds and bits of rug that she’d cut off in her fit.

“I can’t, Celeste,” Matt said quietly. “I can’t fix him, honey.”

She whipped her head to face him. “Yes! Yes, we can! You will help me! You will do this for me. I am begging you!” But when she looked down at the floor, she saw there were only five gold hinges. She shook her head, over and over. “No, no… Oh God, no.” This couldn’t be right. “There are not enough hinges. There are not enough hinges.” Then Matt was holding her again, pulling her back into his body, surrounding her. “Why aren’t there enough?” She took fistfuls of cardboard shreds in both hands and angrily threw them into the air.

Matt squeezed her. “Stop. Please, stop.”

She panted and fought to get free from his hold. Celeste screamed in one final burst of despair. “I have destroyed him, and now there are not enough hinges!”

Her brother, the one who was here and who she knew loved her, dropped his head onto her shoulder. She felt her shirt get wet.

“Matthew,” she said, calm now. “Matty, please do not cry.”

“I think,” he replied with his head still down, “I think we need to make our own hinges now.”

She thought. “Yes. I believe you are right.”

Together they stayed on the floor of her room, both recovering.

Celeste was drained. “I’m sorry I hurt you. I’m sorry that I wrecked everything for you and Julie.”

“You didn’t. I wish you hadn’t heard what I said in San Diego. It wasn’t you, Celeste, it was me. I’m the one who screwed it all up. I used you as an excuse not to go with Julie to California because… I don’t know… because…”

“Because you were afraid it would not last,” she finished. “That she couldn’t possibly love you as much as you loved her.”

“Yeah.”

“But you stayed with me to keep me safe.”

“There’s something wrong with me. It was a horrible thing to put on you. I didn’t mean to.”

She closed her eyes and listened to her own breathing. “You did a wonderful thing for me, Matty, because you were right. I did need you. Very much.” She touched his arm. “I don’t know what would have happened to me if you had left, and that’s the truth.”

“You are much stronger than you think, and you would have found a way to make things work. You always do. Sometimes it’s a little… different…” He ran a hand though the Flat Finn remnants. “But you make it work.”

She couldn’t help but laugh a bit. “So now we need to find hinges for you.”

“And for you.”

“You first. You do still love Julie, do you not? I was right about that.”

Matt sighed. “Yeah. Yeah, I still love Julie. She’s moving to London. This summer. It’s part of the foreign-study travel program at the college where she works. She’s going to be in charge of settling students into campus life, acting as the head rep for the college. I didn’t hear the details of it, but it sounds like a big deal. I don’t think I got the chance to tell you that because of the whole shunning-your-brother thing.”

“I feel terrible about that. About many things. Tell me, Matt, how did your conversation end with her?”

“Oh, I don’t know. It didn’t really go anywhere but in circles. We left soon after you did.”

“I’m sorry.”

“I made this mess, not you.” Matt blew out a chest full of air. “And it hurts like a bitch.”

“I am allowing your use of exceptionally bad language because you and I have faced extraordinary circumstances today, and therefore those sorts of words are appropriate. They capture the strength of our difficulties. And I, too, know that it hurts like that word.”

“I know you do. You’re not talking to Justin, I gather?”

“You gather correctly.” There were tears again, silent this time, and she let them fall. It was nice to finally feel again. She needed that. “Why did you send in the Barton application on my behalf? Was it because you felt that you could pass me off safely into Justin’s hands? Then you would be able to move on?”

“What? No, not at all. You have it all wrong. It didn’t have anything to do with Justin, actually.”

“I am confused.”

“I just thought that… you might like it better at a school where the academic pressure was less strong.”

“Because you do not have confidence that I could keep up?”

“Again, you have it all wrong. Celeste, we all know that you could take those schools by storm, but even for you, it would still be a massive amount of work. And I know you well enough to know you just might take that opportunity to do only that. You’d drown in schoolwork, and there would be nothing else. I think that at a place like Barton you could still get a great education, and you’d know how to push the limits and get all you could out of it, but… I don’t know how to explain it.”