The Truth About Celia (13 page)

A brown oak leaf that had survived the entire winter fluttering on the tip of a branch came pinwheeling down from the tree above the picnic table, landing on one of the benches. I turned to Robin and Kristen and Andrea and said, “I want to pick Oscar, too.”

“You can’t,” said Robin. “I already did.”

“That’s right,” said Kristen. “Robin got first pick, and she picked Oscar. You have to choose somebody else.”

“Why can’t we both choose Oscar?”

“Because you just can’t, that’s why.” Andrea was massaging saliva into the red mark on the back of her hand, holding it up to her face to look more closely. “Hey, when I rub my hand like this, the skin slides all over the place,” she said. “Take a look,” and she showed us how the skin pulled and shifted above her bones when she rubbed it.

“Well, if I can’t pick Oscar, I don’t want to have a boyfriend,” I said. “You can play without me.”

“I knew you were going to say that,” Robin announced. “Didn’t I know she was going to say that?” she said.

“You did,” Andrea nodded. Then she turned to me and asked, “So why are you always like that?”

“Like what?”

The girls looked at Kristen. She gave a long sigh through her nostrils. I saw her smothering a grin. She said, “You can be kind of bratty sometimes. No offense, Celia, but you can. That’s why Robin and Andrea are my best friends now.”

Before I could answer, the recess monitor gave three sharp blows of her whistle, and there was a scramble of arms and legs as we ran in a mass from the playground. We lined up along the parking strips to go inside. I tried to signal to Kristen as we passed through the front doors,
Look at me. Hello, I want to tell
you something,
but her eyes kept skipping away from me to a place somewhere just past my left shoulder. It was like she could see straight through me.

That afternoon, when I got home from school, I ran immediately up the corkscrew stairs to my bedroom. My dad was calling to me from the kitchen, “Hey, Ceely, what do you think of ravioli for dinner? Celia?” but I didn’t answer. I took the porcelain box where I kept my ring collection off the dresser and let it spill out onto the carpet. Then I bent down and sifted roughly through the collection—eighteen different rings and a dozen different colors, all clattering together in my hands.

By the time my dad came to the door, I was lying on my stomach, crying furiously, two or three rings on every finger. “What’s wrong, Celia? Come here,” he said, “Let me help you,” and he lifted me into his arms, sinking back onto my bed. I heard the mattress springs grating as he sat down. “Sshhh, honey, sshhh. It will be all right.”

“I—”

I was crying too hard to get the words out.

“I—”

He brushed a strand of wet hair off my cheek and whispered, “That’s okay, baby, you don’t have to tell me. Let’s just sit here for a while.” I let myself cry. I rested my forehead on his shoulder and felt the heat soaking through his shirt, a crescent-shaped damp spot that slowly extended into his collar, and I listened as he told me that
everything would be okay,
that
we could
have whatever I wanted for dinner, it didn’t have to be ravioli, if he’d
known I disliked it so much . . . ,
that
when he was my age he had a
mom and dad who loved him more than anything in this world, and
that just like them he would never let anything bad happen to me.

And the silt spreads, and the water settles, and soon I see myself playing in the backyard, stirring the pond with a crooked stick and climbing onto the stone wall between the maple trees. It was the next day, and the wind was traveling in visible waves though the long grass at the far end of the yard, where the clearing gave way to a thicket of elm trees. I was tightrope-walking along the wall when I noticed Kid standing in the shadow of our deck. He was carrying his baby sister in a sling against his chest.

I called to him, and he came limping over.

“I hurt my leg just like you,” I said. “I twisted it jumping off a swing.” And then I noticed: “But it’s better now.” I sat down and let my leg sway back and forth against the wall, tapping at one of the stones with the heel of my shoe.

Kid boosted himself onto the wall and sat beside me. “I was just looking at a spiderweb,” he said. “It was empty.”

We rested there for a long time without talking. Kid’s sister rose and fell against his chest, sometimes with his breath and sometimes with her own. The sun passed behind a cloud. The sky was a deep, hard blue.

Eventually I said, “You’re my only friend now.”

“I am?” he asked.

“Uh-huh. None of the others like me anymore.” I heard a car rolling by on the street. “How come you don’t go to school with me?”

“Well, I did go to school for a while,” he said, “but then when I got sick my mom and dad started teaching me at home. I guess I just never went back.”

“I go every day. Except one time when I pretended I had a fever, and I got to stay home and eat ice cream. Nobody else knows that. Now that you’re my best friend, we can tell each other our secrets.”

He shrugged. “I’m not sure I have any secrets.”

“I bet you do. Like what’s your real name? I can never remember.”

“I know,” he said, and he frowned and shook his head. “I must have told you a thousand times. It’s Travis Worley.”

“And I never see you anywhere but on this street. Where do you live, anyway?”

He blew at a wisp of his sister’s hair so that it stood up in a tiny loop, then smoothed it back down with his palm. He looked me in the eye.

“Would you like to go there?” he asked.

I said that I would.

“Come on, then,” he said, and he hopped off the wall. “It’s this way.”

That was the day when everything changed. I remember that I took his hand, and he led me into the woods, up the rising hill of elm trees, and everything I could see and hear, and everything I could feel on my skin, seemed to melt away and disappear—the leaves, the insects, even the ground beneath my feet. All around me the world was suddenly much clearer and much smaller. I would have been frightened if it were not so beautiful.

For a moment I could still feel the hand of the new kid, whose name I could never remember, or maybe he just never told me, so that I gave up and called him Kid. And then I felt only the tip of his littlest finger. And then that, too was gone. Perhaps when I lost hold of him I went drifting away like a boat whose mooring has snapped, sailing through the currents of the ocean. Perhaps I—

But I do not know.

So much time has passed since then, but even now I remember the life I left behind. I imagine that it is still there waiting for me, and that if only I can see it plainly enough, remember it distinctly enough, I will be able to return to it. I will join my memories together into the wood and frame and hinges of a door, and that door will open, and I will step through it. I see myself racing up the stairs of my house, calling out to the people I knew, to my mom and my dad, Kristen Lanzetta and Oscar Martin, Robin Unwer and Andrea Onopa. They will all be there, milling around my bedroom and wondering where I have been. They will welcome me home with their arms and their voices, help me brush the dirt and the leaves from my clothing, and ask me if I am all right. And I will tell them that I only fell asleep in the elm trees and lost hold of the time. I was their daughter, and I was their friend. I had not meant to keep them waiting so long.

Appearance, Disappearance, Levitation, Transformation, and the Divided Woman

First there was the incident at the water park. One of the wooden buttresses supporting the tornado slide collapsed, causing a long section of the tunnel to tilt backward off its axis and crash to the ground. A family of four who had been picnicking underneath were killed instantly, as well as two boys who spilled from a high curve of the chute into the open air. A girl who was inside the tunnel as it gave way, and who must have imagined that a great rush of water was lifting her back to the top, was all but uninjured by the fall, popping safely out onto a cushion of grass. The State Office of Recreational Safety shut the park down that very afternoon, securing the gates with locks the size of human heads. It was just one of those things.

Then, two weeks later, when the paper had relegated news of the event to a quarter column at the back of the local pages, the video arcade burned to the ground. It was an electrical fire, started when a gang of boys knocked a VR machine over into a distribution box. The boys had drilled a hole through a game token and tied it to a line of fishing wire so that they could thread it back out of the machine when they were done playing. When the token got lodged inside, they rocked the machine onto its edge and then tipped it over, running away when its weight carried it through the wall. The room went up in a geyser of sparks. No one was killed in the blaze, though a child who had fallen asleep in the ball crawl suffered second-degree burns on her arms and legs from the heat of the melting plastic.

Finally, only a few days later, the eastern wall of the skating rink was demolished by a wrecking crew who mistook the building for an abandoned warehouse. The warehouse in question was at 1800 Taylor Loop, and the skating rink was at 1800 Taylor Boulevard, and when the manager arrived to unlock the front door, he found a dozen men in hardhats frowning over a pile of concrete at the polished wooden oval of the skating floor.

So it was that Stephanie hired a magician for her son’s birthday—though all he had spoken about since the summer began was the party he wanted to have at Wild River Country, and then at Aladdin’s Castle, and then at Eight Wheels. When she heard that the skating rink was closed for reconstruction, she had asked him, “What do you think? Wouldn’t a magician be fun instead?” and he bent to his comic book with a negligent shrug. “I guess so,” he said, and then, after a few seconds, “But he’ll probably get hit by a car.”

The man she hired wasn’t even a very good magician, it turned out, with his ungainly fish hands and his ragged black cape. Brown crumbs littered his mustache from the piece of cake he had eaten when he arrived, and more than once, as Stephanie watched his performance, she saw him pocketing some egg or coin that was supposed to have disappeared into thin air. But the children seemed to enjoy him, and that’s what mattered. One or two of them even shouted out in surprise when he released a dove from a silver pan—and they all clapped and laughed when it escaped and perched on his shoulder, pecking at the crumbs in his mustache. All except Micah, that is, who sat staring blankly ahead. Either he was so fascinated by the show that his face had locked in an expression of perfect calm, or he was so bored by it that he was imagining himself at the water park, the wave pool billowing beneath him with the tautness of muscle. Or, Stephanie thought, he was thinking about his father. She couldn’t tell.

At the end of his act, the magician said, “And now for my final trick I need a volunteer. Is there anyone in the audience who’s
exactly
ten years old?” He glanced uncertainly at Stephanie and mouthed the word “ten,” a question, and when she nodded, he continued with his patter. “As I say, a volunteer who’s exactly ten years old. Not nine years old and three hundred sixty-four days. Not ten years old and one day. If there’s anyone in the audience who’s ten years old
on the button,
will that person please come forward? I won’t be able to summon the magic without your assistance.”

Reluctantly, Micah stood and walked to the magician’s side. “You’re ten years old?” the magician asked, and Micah nodded. “Hm. That’s really something. I would have guessed you were at least twenty-seven.”

“Ten,” Micah insisted. “On the button.”

The trick the magician performed was a simple one: he displayed his hands to the room—they were empty—and then cupped them together and told Micah to strike them with his “two best fingers” while he said the magic words. “And a gold nugget will appear. Are you ready? One, two, three—abracablat!” He opened his hands, and an egg was resting on his palm. The children laughed. “No, that’s not it. How does it go? One, two, three—abracablam!” This time it was a plastic novelty whistle. “No, that’s not right, either. Ah, yes. One, two, three— abracadabra!” and he removed a lump of pyrite—fool’s gold— from his hands. Stephanie wondered for a moment if the man’s earlier ineptitude had simply been part of the act, but when he offered the fool’s gold to Micah it bobbled off his fingers, made a dinking noise against his belt buckle, and went rolling away.

Micah chased after it. “What do you want me to do with this?” he asked.

“You can keep it, of course. Happy birthday.”

“Well, I don’t really want it,” Micah said. But nevertheless he slipped it into his pocket.

The magician had taken his bow, then mopped the sweat from his forehead with the tail of his cape. It looked as though he planned to gather it around himself and disappear, like a real magician, in a swelling crack of smoke, but instead he let it fall back to his waist, its loose threads clinging to his shirt so that the fabric dimpled and hooked on him. He handed each of the kids a chocolate sucker shaped like a top hat with a rabbit inside it. Then he collected his check from Stephanie, which he had her make out to “Frank Lentini, Magician,” and he headed for the front door. Just before he left, Micah took his sleeve and asked him a question: “You’re not me coming back from the future to tell me about my life, are you?”

Instead of laughing as Stephanie expected him to, the magician frowned and cocked his head. He seemed for all the world to be thinking about it. “No, son,” he finally said. “No, I wish I was. Some tricks even a magician can’t perform.”

That night, as she was preparing their supper, stirring the ground beef, onions, and chopped green peppers over a flared gas flame, Micah asked her whether his father had called. That was the word he used—the word they both used, always—
father.
He was sitting on a high stool by the telephone, swiveling from side to side on the metal discus of one of the legs as he gripped the kitchen counter. Stephanie’s ex-husband had moved to the West Coast shortly after they divorced, taking a promotional job with a movie studio to escape what he called “the change in the weather.” This had been his nickname for her from the very first days of their marriage:
the weather. How’s the weather today?
he would ask when he woke her up in the morning, running the pads of his fingers over her stomach, or later, when things started to go bad,
Uh-oh, I feel a chill coming on in the weather,
and
I hardly wanted to leave the office today, the weather has been so
lousy,
and
Always the same old weather, isn’t it?
Then he would drum his knuckles against the nearest hard surface, making the rimshot and cymbal sound that comedians always use to punctuate a joke. Within a year of moving away he had remarried, and within two years he was raising a second son, Jacob, and sometimes Stephanie thought that he had forgotten about Micah altogether. “Your father phoned during the party,” she wanted to tell him, “but you guys were having so much fun that we couldn’t bear to interrupt you.” But the two of them had made a compact: he wouldn’t lie to protect his skin if she wouldn’t lie to protect his feelings.

“No,” she said. “He didn’t call. I’m sorry, M.”

To which he said, “I want to take magic lessons.”

He hoisted himself onto the counter, allowing the stool to spin out from under him and totter across the floor. It shivered in a tight circle like a quarter. Stephanie watched it come to a stop on its legs, still upright.

“Wow,” she said. “How on earth did you do that?”

And Micah said, “Magic,” and gave a theatrical flicker of his fingers.

The next day Stephanie phoned Frank Lentini, Magician, and every Tuesday and Thursday afternoon thereafter she delivered Micah to Lentini’s studio above the bicycle shop for a ninety-minute lesson. She picked him up at exactly six o’clock, parking by the thin, balding locust tree on the sidewalk and honking twice. He would come out smelling of butane and flash powder, and though she barely noticed the scent when he first sat down in the car, it would intensify as she drove him home, a bitter perfume, until she felt it as a thornlike pinch high in her nostrils. He began to accumulate magic supplies, which he carefully shelved in his bedroom: decks of cards and compressed streamers and even a palm-sized guillotine that could chop a cigarette in two or leave it whole depending on how he manipulated it. “So you’re enjoying this, huh?” she asked him one day. “These magic lessons?”

“They’re okay. So far none of it’s
real
magic, though. Just a bunch of illusions.” He shrugged his shoulders. “The Great Lentini says you have to start small.”

Stephanie laughed. “You call him the Great Lentini?” She remembered the way he had fumbled with the check she gave him at the birthday party, miscreasing it so that the corners formed jutting triangular wings.

“Uh-huh,” said Micah. “I call him the Great Lentini, and he calls me the Great Zakrzewski.”

Zakrzewski.
This was his father’s name, which Micah shared. During the long months of their engagement, after hearing him wearily correct someone’s poor pronunciation of it for the thousandth time, Stephanie had decided to keep her own name, the simple Burch. Still, every time she introduced Micah to a new teacher or took him to the doctor’s office, she found herself parroting the exact same words: “No, it’s not Zak-ruh-zoo-ski, it’s Zuh-krev-ski. No, it’s not Zak-ruh-zoo-ski, it’s Zuh-krev-ski.”

While Micah was taking his magic lessons, she usually went to the park a few blocks away, where she walked beneath the trees, listening to the hissing sound her shoes made as she kicked through the pine needles. That was the summer when it rained every day between four and five o’clock, big drops that left coin-sized impressions when they soaked into the ground, but by the time she stepped outside, all the standing water would have drained or evaporated and nothing would remain but the fresh green smell of leaves in the air. Hundreds of seed-like insects went twitching and flying through the grass, a sight she had always loved, and children ran in packs through the playground. She would sit on a fiberglass bench and watch them.

Though much of her childhood was still a shining path to her, one she could walk down at will, she remembered nothing at all of her life before the age of seven, when she woke in her bedroom from what her parents told her was a high fever. Most people, it was true, did not remember their life before the age of seven, but they were connected to it by a long thread of tastes and associations and family stories, so that they did not notice the loss so readily. In her case, Stephanie felt, that thread had snapped and fallen away in the heat of her fever. She had gone sailing off into her adulthood like a kite. She had a rich life, a bountiful life (I want her to be happy), but when she sat watching the children in the park, running and swinging, shouting and crying, she sometimes wondered about those missing years and whether part of her hadn’t gone missing as well, some small shape inside her no bigger than a girl.

When the shadow of the playground structure reached as far as her bench, she knew that it was time to go, and she would head back to the studio to collect Micah and drive home. She would wait for him to come barreling down the stoop, linen scarves fluttering from the zipper of his backpack. He did not like her to come upstairs to the studio, some hocus-pocus about “breaking the magician’s code,” and so she rarely did— only the afternoon of his very first lesson and the time she had to pick him up early for a dentist’s appointment.

And on one other occasion. It was a muggy evening near the end of the summer, so hot that the line of red ants on the sidewalk had all but stopped moving, waiting for the shadow of the locust tree to slant back over their path. Micah had not come out when she honked her horn. She sat through an entire cycle of the traffic light, honked again, and then locked the car and went upstairs. She found him in the anteroom of the studio, kneeling beside Frank Lentini, who was tied to a wooden chair with three long tendons of gray-green rope.

“Hello, Ms. Burch,” Mr. Lentini said.

“Hey, Mom.” Micah let loose of the knot he was trying to unpick with his teeth. “He was showing me how to escape from a chair, but I tied the ropes too tight.”

Stephanie covered her grin with her hand. “I see.” She helped Micah free the man, loosening the knots with a hairpin she found in her purse, and after the ropes had fallen away, she told Micah to run and get his backpack.

“Thank you, Ms. Burch,” Lentini said, standing and picking the bristles of rope from his shirt.

“You know,” she shook her head, “you might be the single worst magician I’ve ever seen.”

The sight of his face wincing and draining of color made her stomach plunge. “Oh, I’m sorry, I—”

“No need to apologize,” he said. “I know. It’s these damn hands.” He held them out like two gloves frozen on a clothes-line. “Most mornings it takes me more than one try to even get my shoelaces right.”

“Then why on earth did you decide to go into magic?”

“It’s always been this way,” he sighed. “Everything I really like is just out of my reach. When I was Micah’s age, believe it or not, I wanted to perform with an orchestra. But, well . . .” He shrugged and smiled. “Let’s just say the world lost a fourth-rate pianist when it gained a third-rate magician. I try to make up for it by being funny. Forgetting people’s names, letting the dove eat crumbs out of my mustache, things like that.”