The Truth About Celia (10 page)

As she dialed her home number, she pictured Christopher in the library. He would be staring out the window, pressing his forehead to the glass and then wiping away the spot of oil he had left, or collapsing into his armchair, waiting for the light to resume. Though she knew he was not listening, she left a message for him on the answering machine: “This is Janet, Christopher. Something’s happened, and I’m at the police station. Don’t worry, I’m okay, but I need you to come and get me. My car is still at the movies, and I need a ride. Are you there, Christopher? Pick up the phone if you’re listening. Hello. Hello. It isn’t Celia, nothing’s happened with Celia. Are you there? Come on, Christopher.” She looked around the waiting room—at the clock behind the wire grille, at the old nicked ashtray beneath the new NO SMOKING sign, at the boy and girl on the other bench. “All right. I’ll try you again in a little while,” she said, and she switched the phone off.

She shut her eyes, massaging them delicately with her index fingers, but they soon began to sting, and when she opened them again she saw two distinct, overlapping images of the room, which drifted slowly toward the center of her vision before they locked back together. The girl and the boy on the other bench were staring at her as though she had in fact split apart, cracking like a walnut into two separate pieces, viewing the world by a difference of inches. The girl said, “I just figured out where I recognize you from.”

Janet dropped a lazy, “Oh?” She knew what was coming.
You’re that woman, that mother,
the girl would say,
the one I saw on
the news, the one whose daughter went up like a puff of smoke.
She had heard it so many times before that the words took on strange echoes in her head.
That woman, that mother, another mother,
another lover. A puff of smoke, a cloud of dust, and a hearty heigh-ho-silver.
It was like the gabbling of voices she sometimes heard between radio stations, and she wished she could shut it off.

But the girl surprised her. She did not mention Celia. Perhaps she had never even heard of her. Instead she said, “You play with the Community Orchestra. Clarinet, right?”

“That’s right,” Janet said.

“I thought so. I play clarinet at my high school.” The boy, who was trailing his finger idly up and down the seam of her blue jeans, worked his mouth beneath the collar of her shirt and kissed her neck. She closed her eyes and gave a slow
mmm
of pleasure. Then she nudged him away and said, “Pierre plays oboe.” She leaned toward Janet and whispered conspiratorially, “And you ripped the screen at the movie theater? Really?”

“I did,” said Janet.

“Kick ass. Which movie?”

She felt a smile quirk her lips.
“Deep End of the Ocean.”

The boy interrupted her: “Whoopi Goldberg.” He tossed his hair back from his forehead. “No eyebrows. Lady trips me out.”

The girl tucked a loose strand of hair behind her ear. “We’re here for breaking and entering,” she said.

“And theft,” said the boy.

“Breaking and entering and theft,” the girl confirmed.

It was neither a boast nor a confession, but seemed to contain something of each. “What did you steal?” Janet asked.

The girl squeezed the boy’s hand. “Electronics components—television, computer, and stereo. The individual parts are worth more than the machines, it turns out. So what we did was we broke into people’s houses, opened the machines, and just took the parts we wanted. Then we put everything back together. It worked just fine until tonight.”

“I don’t understand. You only took the
parts?
”

“Yeah. Like I said, we could get more money that way.”

The boy nodded. “We know this guy.”

“But if all you want is one part or another, why not take the whole machine and then strip it down later? Wouldn’t that be quicker?”

“That’s what
I
argued,” the girl said. She was running her finger around the outside of the boy’s ear, slowly, as though trying to draw a sustained note from the rim of a glass. “But Pierre wouldn’t do it.”

“Funnier that way,” the boy said. “Picture all these people calling their repairmen, and the repairmen show up and they find nothing but these hollow shells waiting for them. ‘What is this, a joke, lady? You’re missing your motherboard here.’ This happens fifty or sixty times all over town, and suddenly nobody knows what to think anymore.”

Janet tried to imagine the situation as the boy did, with the same air of harmless mischief, but she could not. Instead she saw only the people whose houses they had broken into. She thought of their faces when they discovered that something else was missing or broken in their home, something else had gone unaccountably wrong. Her conception of what other people were capable of shrugging off or accepting as part of the natural absurdity of the world had been forever altered by the loss of her daughter. You could not presume that people were healthy. You could not presume that they would welcome the little nudges and jostlings of life. You had to behave as though everyone you met was walking a thin wire far above the earth, where the slightest wind might rock them off their balance and send them tumbling to the ground. This was how you had to live if you wanted to be careful.

“Anyway,” the boy said, “that was the idea.”

The girl pressed firmly against his ankle with the toe of her shoe. “He’s a real expert when it comes to electronics. I mean, you wouldn’t believe it. He can take a machine apart and put it back together just like that.” She kissed him again, on the cheek, and he smiled and dropped his head and let his hair sweep back over his eyes.

Then Kimson Perry returned from his office and they both fell silent, shrinking into their jackets like two mice hiding in a hummock of leaves.

Kimson bent over Janet and asked, “So did you find Christopher?”

“Not yet.” She passed him the phone. “I thought I would try him again in a few minutes. Either that or call a cab.”

He gestured at the boy and the girl. “Let me have ten minutes with these two, and I can give you a ride myself.”

She nodded. “Thanks.”

“Good,” he said, and he handed her a slip of paper with three separate leaves—one white, one red, and one yellow. “Read this over and sign your name by the cross. It’s for the incident report. Nothing unusual,” and he made a beckoning motion to the teenagers on the bench. “Come on, you two. Follow me.”

As they passed beside her, Janet saw the girl mouthing something to the boy—she could not distinguish the words— and the boy shrugged and shook his head. His left ear was a bright, wind-bitten red where she had been stroking it with her finger. He spidered his hand into the back pocket of her blue jeans.

The door drifted smoothly shut behind them, locking in place with a final tug of the pneumatic rod.

After Janet signed the document Kimson had given her—an account of “the incident” in the Reservoir Ten, along with a statement that she, “the perpetrator,” had agreed to pay any and all damages to the owner—she began to feel a rawness in her throat like the stab of a needle. There was a watercooler beneath the bulletin board at the other end of the waiting room, and, though she recognized the danger, she decided to risk a drink. She had been avoiding the bulletin board ever since she had come to the police station, letting her eyes skip away from it to the clock or the floor or the ceiling tiles so that she would not have to read the latest HAVE YOU SEEN THIS CHILD? poster:

NAME: CELIA BROOKS
AGE: 9
DATE OF BIRTH: 12/06/89
MISSING SINCE: 03/15/97

She knew that if she allowed herself she would sink into those statistics like a stone—it had certainly happened before—so she did not permit herself to see them at all. She had found that she could do this: place a darkened slide over one section of a room or one paragraph of a book and simply refuse to perceive it, the way she could examine her face in the mirror without ever looking into her eyes.

She searched for a cup by the watercooler and found a stacked column of them in the cabinet underneath. When she pressed the tap, the water trickled into the cup in two thin strands that joined and spindled about each other, and as she drank and filled her cup and drank again she remembered the orchestra rehearsal she had attended on the day that Celia vanished. It had something to do with the sound the water made, which reminded her of a song Celia had learned in kindergarten: “The clarinet / the clarinet / plays doodle-doodle-doodle-doodle-det”—a line that, even the first time she heard it, sounded to her more like the pattering of water than it did like the clarinet.

The Springfield Community Orchestra rehearsed every Saturday at the Holy Souls Catholic Assembly Hall, a weathered brick building with a long sloping gallery and arched wooden rafters. She had called Christopher midway through the session that day, while the conductor was practicing with the strings, and he had said that Celia was playing outside, and she had asked him if he wanted her to pick anything up at the grocery store, and he had said hamburger buns and paper towels, and then, when she told him to take care, he had answered, “I always do.” Or had that been earlier? The orchestra was preparing a Menotti ballet for their spring performance, and as she hung up she had heard the violins playing a few light bars of an arietta. By the time she drove home that afternoon, Celia was already missing.

Though she thought, in the weeks and months afterward, about leaving the orchestra, she did not. Instead, she held tight to it. She found the music—she found losing herself in it—a comfort, and it had been more than a year now since she had missed a rehearsal. In three months they would perform their annual summer pops concert, a program of songs from classic motion pictures, and she allowed some of the tunes to drift through her head: “As Time Goes By” from
Casablanca,
“In the Cool, Cool, Cool of the Evening” from
Here Comes the Groom,
“The Wishing Well Song” from
Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.

Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.
It was the first movie Janet took Celia to see in the theater. She was only two years old at the time, and within five minutes she had taken her sandals off and stepped onto Janet’s lap to get a better view of the screen. She laughed each time Dopey appeared, giving a rigid little hop that made Janet grasp her beneath the arms to steady her, but she had nightmares for months about the Wicked Queen. Years later she told Janet that when she said her prayers at night, she always imagined the Queen dipping her red apple into the vat of poison at the phrase “God deliver us from evil.”

The last movie Janet saw with Celia was
Matilda,
with Mara Wilson as Matilda and Danny DeVito and Rhea Perlman as her parents. It was based on Celia’s favorite Roald Dahl book, which her father had read to her the month before she started school and which she herself, a precocious reader, had read three times since. The first paragraph was one of the most biting Janet had ever heard: “It’s a funny thing about mothers and fathers. Even when their own child is the most disgusting little blister you could ever imagine, they still think that he or she is wonderful,” and each time Celia finished the book, she took to calling her friends “blisters” for a few weeks whenever she argued with them. The movie was delightful—agile, irreverent, almost glowing with life—and after it ended the two of them went out for ice cream. They did not make it home until late that evening, when the sun was just a faint gleam of silver behind the darkest blue of the sky. Christopher was waiting on the porch when they pulled into the driveway. He said that he had been worried about them.

The cooler released a tremendous bubble that broke through the water with a hiccuping noise and then shuddered apart at the surface, and Janet came blinking up out of her memories. She tossed her cup into the trash. She was just about to return to her seat when she heard footsteps clapping across the police station. Along the front of the waiting room was a glass wall with a sheet of wire netting inside that looked out onto the lobby, and from there to the sidewalk and the front curb. A black woman, shaking with nervous emotion, ran across the floor to the reception desk. She was calling the question that Janet had heard herself calling two years before, the question that all mothers call in their hearts: “Where’s my daughter? Where’s my daughter?” A police officer asked her for her name, then said, “Calm down, ma’am. We’ve got her in back,” and escorted her around the corner and out of sight. Janet listened as their footsteps faded away.

She felt a tightness in her hands, a stinging pressure in the joints of her fingers, and when she looked down she found that she was kneading them like heavy lumps of modeling clay. She let go, flexing them one at a time in the air until they stopped tingling. Then she took another cup from beneath the watercooler and poured herself a second drink of water, which she tossed down in two swallows.

She threw the cup away and then carefully, reflexively, wiped her fingerprint from the watercooler’s spout, using the tail of her shirt. Ever since she was a little girl, when she saw her first detective movie, she had been more than casually aware of where she left her fingerprints. It was a fixation that only became stronger in police stations and court buildings, hospitals and banks—places with hard, glossy surfaces where she felt dwarfed by the mechanisms of power. She remembered watching Basil Rathbone (or was it some later Sherlock Holmes?) dusting a glass with white powder and a tiny sweeper, then blowing gently to reveal the whorl of the criminal’s fingerprint, and she remembered, too, the surprise she felt as she realized for the first time that she left a record of herself in everything she touched—that nothing she did, nothing anybody did, could ever escape the world’s notice.

It was not true, of course. She knew that now. There were some events, events beyond number, that left no record in the world at all. But still, whenever she was in a police station, she always tried to rub her fingerprints away. She couldn’t break the habit.