The Truth About Celia (11 page)

She took her seat on the bench and listened to the people shuffling by in the corridor, to the clock ticking on the wall, to the streamer flickering from the rotating fan, and it was only a few minutes before the steel door wheeled open and Kimson Perry came out, the boy and the girl trailing quietly behind him. The sleeves of their jackets were gathered at their elbows. Their fingertips were spiraled with ink.

Kimson cleared his throat with a small interrogative cough. “Can you give me just one more minute with these two, Janet? I promised their parents I’d wait for them. It shouldn’t be too long.”

“Of course.” She held out the statement she had signed. “Do you want this?”

“Oh, right. The F-11. Let me go slip that in your file,” he said, and with a few short taps of his shoes he was gone again.

The girl dropped heavily onto the bench across from Janet. “This sucks,” she said, lightly taking hold of the boy’s jacket.

“Sucks indeed,” the boy answered, and he reached into his pocket and came up with a gray bandanna. He walked to the watercooler and doused it through, waiting for the color to deepen, then sat beside the girl and began wiping the ink from her fingers, delicately, one by one, blowing each finger dry when he was finished.

“Not only do our parents know all about the houses now,” the girl said, and she shut her eyes, “but we’re going to have to tell them why we did it. You realize that, don’t you?”

“I do,” the boy said, and Janet watched him lay her first hand aside and start on the second. He looked as though he were cleaning an antique satin doll, or a bird that had just hatched from its egg, something infinitely soft and fragile.

“Why
did
you do it?” Janet asked.

The girl opened her eyes. “We’re not just some bored juvenile delinquents if that’s what you’re thinking. But, well, we’re going to be needing the extra money soon—aren’t we, Pierre?”

At that she opened her free hand and pressed it gently, deliberately, to her stomach.

A smile lifted into the boy’s cheeks, and he nodded.

Janet heard an involuntary
oh
slip from her mouth, a quick little gasp of surprise and sadness and trepidation, muddled together with the strangest envy. She felt suddenly as though she had become the girl’s mother, or even the girl herself, as though she were playing her in a movie while a hundred spectators watched from the audience, and she wondered what she was going to say next.

“You’re going to be a mother?” she asked.

“Uh-huh.”

“But you’re so—young,” Janet said.

A ticking stillness filled the room. The girl’s mouth twitched and her eyes began to glass over—from sadness or joy or exhaustion, or some other, nameless emotion—and the boy touched the bandanna to her cheek, leaving a lash-shaped mark of gray ink there. “I know,” she said, her voice all but toneless. Janet could not tell what she was feeling until she gave a short breath of what sounded like laughter. Then she shook her head, declaring, “I’m not supposed to be happy about this, am I? But I can’t help it,” and she laughed again, more clearly this time.

She kissed the boy. “Happy, happy, happy,” she whispered, and the boy whispered something back, something indistinguishable, that made the girl grin.

Janet felt an unexpected lightening inside her. There was no behavior so outlandish that it wasn’t a believable human response to the world. She heard the steel door opening behind her and looked up to see Kimson standing over her shoulder, but before he could interrupt, she turned back to the girl. “But what are your parents going to say?” she asked her.

“Well,
my
folks aren’t too bad,” the girl said. “But Pierre—” She realized it all at once. “Oh my God! Pierre, your father is going to kill you.”

The boy lifted one shoulder, a nervous shrug that almost touched his ear. “I know. He’s on his way right now. I just called him.”

And at that moment a car rattled to a stop outside the station. They heard the door slam at the curb—all four of them— and they turned to look. But it was not the boy’s father. Janet recognized the car. It was her husband arriving, out of his silence and out of his grief, to take her home.

The Ghost of Travis Worley

The trouble is they don’t know they’re dead.

They hang around. The kindest thing to do
if you should ever see one is simply to say,
“Listen, you’re dead. You’re dead. Get out of here.”
That’s what the ghost eventually will do when we’ve told it again and again to go.
“Get out of here. Get out of here. You’re dead.”
They can’t of course go anywhere on purpose;
you have to give them intent to make them go. And who knows where?

—MILLER WILLIAMS

Sometimes I remember my friends and family so clearly it’s as if I’m looking down at them through a flawless lens of water, the kind that lay over our pond on those quiet spring mornings after nights of heavy rain, but the vision never seems to last for long. Something inside me always shifts or gives way, and a fog of silt spreads through the water, and one by one they disappear. My mom and my dad. My best friend Kristen Lanzetta. My other friends Robin Unwer and Oscar Martin and Andrea Onopa. And the new kid, whose name we could never remember, or maybe he just never told us, so that after a while we simply gave up and called him Kid: “Hey, Kid, why don’t you play goalie for us?” “Did anybody see where the Kid went?”

They waver and darken, the people I knew. They hide away from me and step into the light.

I remember playing in my front yard one winter afternoon with Oscar Martin and Kristen Lanzetta. Kick the Can. The Lion King. Bubblegum, Bubblegum. The sun was out, but we could feel the wind cutting at us as the cars passed by, and there were places in the shade where needles of ice still floated in the puddles. The last of the snow was melting from the gutters into pockets of wet black grit, and in another day or two it would be completely gone. Kristen and I had on our matching purple jackets and gloves, the ones our mothers had bought for us before the school year started, and which we had been so excited to wear—we would look
exactly the same, like sisters
—that we began carrying them to school with us at the very first hint of cold weather.

This is how sharply I see everything before it begins to fade away.

Kristen and Oscar and I were tossing a tennis ball to each other, swinging at it with Oscar’s red plastic bat, when we caught sight of the new kid watching us from beneath the maple trees at the side yard of the house (there were two of them there, and an elm tree, their branches fanning out above a crumbling stone wall). He was rocking his sister back and forth in the ancient hoodless baby carriage he always wheeled her around in, and she was watching him through her deep blue eyes, her hands opening and closing at her shoulder. She was a tiny thing, always perfectly quiet, so small that she might have nestled comfortably, squirrel-like, inside a Kleenex box. Every time I saw her this was the image that came to my mind.

“Hey, we’re playing baseball. You want to pitch?” I called out to Kid. He came over and took the ball from me. “I’m good at this game,” he said, and he was. He gave a few arcing tosses which Kristen sent thumping against the wall of the house and Oscar and I swung at and missed, swung at and missed. Then we offered him the bat. He couldn’t seem to get a grip on it. It kept bouncing out of his hands to the ground.

“Wait a second,” he told us, and he gave a hitching run over to the stone wall where he had left his baby sister, coming back with a long stick that had fallen from the maple tree. “Can I use this instead?” he asked, and when he crouched over the pizza box we were using for a plate and Oscar pitched him the ball, saying, “Let’s see you try and hit this one,” he snapped his arm around the way a cat bats at its reflection in the water, and the ball sailed off the side of the house and came tumbling back over our heads.

We watched it land across the street.

“He who hits it, gets it,” Oscar said, angry that Kid had connected with the ball. He made a gesture with his thumb. “And that’s you, Limpy.”

Kristen had come home from school with me to spend the night, so it must have been a Friday afternoon. Cars and trucks and SUVs were barreling by on their way home from work, but Kid acted as though he didn’t see them at all. He dropped the stick and walked into the street and then across it, and he collected the tennis ball from Enid Embry’s thornbushes, holding it up so that it glowed like a yellow apple in the sunlight. Then he stepped off the curb and walked straight into the path of a minivan.

I screwed my eyes shut and listened for the shriek of tires, for the smack of his body as it rolled up the hood. But when I looked again he was standing safely in my own front yard. He gave the ball to me and tucked his hand in his pocket. The minivan was at the other end of the street, waiting its turn at the stop sign, as peaceful as a cow chewing grass.

“Holy crap,” I heard Kristen say, “I thought you were dead for sure.”

And then—

Then it happens. Once again I turn my head, or I try to reach out for them, and they dissolve in a ripple of sparks.

I cannot see them.

I do not know where they’ve gone.

When my vision clears again (it would be impossible for me to say how much time has passed: minutes? years?), I see myself cleaning out the refrigerator in our kitchen. This was one of my chores, back when I was a girl. I had to clean the refrigerator, and keep my bedroom tidy, and empty the small bathroom trash cans into the big kitchen trash can. I had to borrow sugar or milk or flour from Enid Embry or Sara Cadwallader, our neighbors, and return their Tupperware to them when we were finished. And then there were the chores that Kristen Lanzetta and I invented for ourselves, a different one nearly every day, chores we carried out with an almost religious fussiness. We had to touch our elbows whenever someone said our name. We had to wear our matching yellow socks, the ones with the ducks on them, inside-out to school. We could not step on cracks, including the cracks that separated the panels of the sidewalk. We could not walk in the shade one day, or on the grass the next, or in the sunlight the next.

I was waiting for Kristen to knock on the door while I sorted through the refrigerator. It was Sunday morning, a week or so after the ice had melted from the puddles. Kristen was going to spend the day with me. Her mom and dad had promised to drop her off on their way to the movies.

Our refrigerator had a lazy motor, so that the food decayed much more quickly than it should have. I had to poke through it once a week (and every day during the summer) looking for signs of mold and rot. I checked fruits and vegetables for circles of gray fuzz. I opened milk bottles and containers of soup, sniffing for the sweet, sickly smell of spoilage. I was worried that Kristen would get there before I was finished. I had a secret I wanted to tell her—only her, my best friend—and I could feel it pushing like an enormous bubble against the back of my throat. My dad was at the stove, layering cheese and tuna and spinach into a casserole, and when I asked him if I had to clean the whole refrigerator right then, if I couldn’t wait to do half of it tomorrow, he said that
when he was my age he had to walk five
miles through the ice and snow to clean his refrigerator, and afterward
he spent the whole day chopping logs and digging holes and throwing
the logs he had chopped into the holes he had dug.

“Yes, you have to do the whole thing,” he said. He squeezed the back of my neck. “If Kristen gets here before you’re finished, I’m sure she’ll wait for you.”

The air in the refrigerator was only medium-cool, contained in a single, solid block that I could barely even feel on my skin, and I looked through the food shelf by shelf, listening all the while for Kristen’s car to purr to a stop in our driveway. The secret I wanted to tell her was this:
I had a dream last night
that Oscar Martin asked me if he could be my boyfriend, and I told
him yes, and he kissed me on the lips.
These were the exact words I was going to use.

I held a container of peaches to the window, watching the sun strike the syrup. I thought I saw Kid for a moment—he was standing by the pond in my backyard, just behind the line of elm trees, steadying his sister against his chest with his palm— but when I looked again he wasn’t there. I put the peaches back on the shelf.

“This is all I found,” I said to my dad, and I showed him a plate of sliced cheeses that had hardened to a pale crust at the edges. “Do you want me to throw them away?”

He took the plate from me and peeled the cling wrap off. When he caught the odor, he gave a grimace of such honest disgust that I couldn’t keep from laughing. “Good Lord!” he said, and he replaced the cling wrap. “Here, throw the whole plate away. I can’t imagine we’ll want to use it again after this.” He looked at the refrigerator and shook his head. “Ever. What’s wrong with that thing, anyway?”

“I heard that,” my mom said. She was coming down the winding wooden staircase that joined our kitchen to the rooms above, which always reminded me of the corkscrew my dad kept by the wine rack—I thought of it as an elaborate toy, with arms that could rise and fall in jumping jacks, but it was never as much fun to play with as I hoped it would be.

“What happened this time?” my mom asked, and my dad said, “We had a cheese fiasco.”

She took the plate from me. “You know I’m ready to replace that thing just as soon as you are, Christopher. All you have to do is say the word.”

He sprinkled some bread crumbs onto the casserole and shrugged his shoulders. “Let’s give it a few more weeks to get its act together.”

“You’re the boss,” she said. She turned to the refrigerator. “You hear that? You’ve been granted a stay of execution. I suggest you make the most of it.” She scraped the cheese into the trash can and shut the lid.

A car turned off the street, and I heard its engine powering down though not switching off in our driveway. The sound shifted unmistakably, the way that water pouring from a faucet will change its pitch as it grows warmer or colder. A few seconds later there was a knock on the front door.

“See, finished in the nick of time,” my dad said to me, but I was barely listening. I ran for the living room, past the staircase and the television and the decorative glass table, through the front room and into the foyer. I could feel the words popping open inside me:
I had a dream last night that Oscar Martin asked
me if he could be my boyfriend, and I said yes, and he kissed me on the
lips. You can’t tell anyone else, okay? It’s just between you and me.
Promise you won’t tell anyone, okay, Kristen? I had a dream last night
that . . .

But when I opened the door—and I can already see the moment shrinking away, consuming itself as I watch—Kristen was waiting there for me with Robin Unwer and Andrea Onopa. Each of them was wearing a clear plastic bracelet made of identical diamond-shaped beads. Kristen held hers out for me to see.

“We got them at the grocery store last night,” she said. “Aren’t they beautiful? Robin and Andrea spent the night with me, and I told them they could come over today. It’s more fun this way, don’t you think? With all four of us instead of just the two? You don’t mind, do you, Celia? Do you?”

Another episode: Kid and I were playing on the wooden deck behind my house, jumping to the ground from the long, rickety incline of the staircase. Each time we landed we would climb one step higher and leap again, first him and then me. So far we had made it to the eighth stair. “Eight’s my record,” I told him. “Any higher and I chicken out,” and he looked at me, and looked at the staircase, and then looked at me again, and said, “I bet we can do nine if we try it together.”

I was doubtful. “If you think so . . .”

“I do.” And so I followed behind him, counting off the steps. We lined up at the very edge of the ninth stair, leaning out over the drop. My legs went weak on me, soft and quivery. I felt like they would slide out from under me like a pair of soupy eggs. “I don’t know about this,” I said. “Are you sure we—”

“On the count of three,” Kid interrupted, “One, two”—and just before we jumped, he took my hand—“three.”

As we fell through the air everything seemed to vanish for a moment—the trees, the house, even my own body—but then, abruptly, it all came back. I had let go of Kid’s hand, but I could still see him beside me. The stairs were rising up to meet us as they dropped away toward the ground. I felt the wind prickling against my scalp like a cloud of gnats. We landed hard.

I brushed the grass off my knees and stood up. “We did it!” I yelled. “We broke the record!”

Kid opened his mouth to answer, but a jet plane was passing overhead with a high thunder that grew louder and louder, and I couldn’t tell what he was saying. He kept talking as though he didn’t notice the plane at all. After the noise fell away, I asked him, “What was that? I didn’t hear you.”

“I said I’m hungry.” He gave me a strange look and shook his head. “You need to get your ears checked.”

“Come on, then, if you’re hungry,” I told him, and he followed me with his halting walk into the kitchen.

I decided that we should fix sandwiches. “I’ll get the peanut butter and jelly ready, and you can make the toast,” I said. “Okay?” and I laid the bread out on the counter. The jelly was inside the door of the refrigerator, but the peanut butter was tucked deep in the top shelf of the cabinet, and I had to stand on a chair I pulled over from the kitchen table to fish it out. I worked the jar open with both hands and then towed the chair back to the table. When I finished I saw that Kid was browning the bread inside the oven. I laughed. “Why didn’t you just use the toaster?” I said.

“The toaster?”

“Of course the toaster. Here.” But when I showed it to him, depressing the lever with its flattened-out rasping noise, he diverted his eyes.

“I—I don’t know how to use that kind,” he said, and he slipped an oven mitt onto his hand and collected the toast off the rack.