The Truth About Celia (17 page)

That diving-bell sensation in my stomach. The terrible flash of guilt.

I had to restrain myself from calling the police station to report Janet missing.

Shortly before midnight the telephone rang, and I rushed to the kitchen to answer it. “Hello? Janet?” There was no one on the line. When I heard a second ring, I ran immediately to Celia’s bedroom and knelt on the floor beside her Walt Disney Talk-to-Me Telephone, which was still resting placidly on her toy chest.

I put the receiver to my ear. “Is that you? I’m here, Celia,” I said.

“I’m here, too,” she replied. And I sank my forehead onto the worn rope handle of her toy chest.

“Thank God.” My heart beat in my ears with the slow pounding sound that waves make underwater. “I didn’t know whether I would ever hear from you again.”

“Well, I wasn’t sure I would be able to call back so soon, but I found another telephone. Listen, Dad, is Mom there? I was hoping to talk to Mom this time.” Her voice was clearer than it had been the night before, and I imagined for a second that she was on her way home, traveling toward me in a fast car, its wheels carrying her steadily closer.

“Your mom is . . . out for a while. She didn’t say where she was going”

“Oh. Okay. Will you tell her I wanted to talk to her, then? Tell her I said that I miss her.”

“Of course. I meant to let her know about our conversation this morning, but—” I interrupted myself. “Celia! You have to tell me where you are! We’ve been searching for you all this time, but we haven’t been able to find you. I guess you know that. But we’ve tried everything, Celia. Everything. If you tell me where you are, I can call the police and have somebody pick you up.”

“I’m not really sure where I am. That’s the problem. Everything is still kind of blurry.”

It occurred to me that she might not be alone. “Are you okay? Are you in danger?”

“I’m fine, Dad.”

“Is somebody listening in, then? If somebody else is there, just tell me—tell me you feel hungry. Or tell me you need to wash your hands.”

A threadlike laugh passed through her voice. “There are people all around, Dad. But I don’t think any of them are paying attention to us.”

“You can talk, then?”

“I can talk, but I don’t know for how long. I used my last quarter, so we’ll probably get cut off pretty soon. Anyway, there’s something I need to tell you. About what happened. I was—” The sentence was broken in two by a pocket of silence, and when Celia’s voice returned, she said, “That was the operator, Dad. I was right. I’m out of time.”

“Can you give me the number there?” I asked. “I’ll call you right back.”

“Okay, hold on a second.” I heard her mumbling something to herself. “Well, the first two numbers are scratched out, but the rest of it is two-five-seven—”

The line disengaged with a muffled pop. In frustration I jabbed at the keypad with my palm, and a hiccuping chuckle came through the receiver: “Ah-
hyuk.
This is Goofy. Can I come over and play?” I put the phone back in its cradle.

I stood and gazed out the arched window above the toy chest, just as I had the night before. Its glass carried a reflection of the light from the hallway, a tiny split yellow moon, and I had to shield the glare from my eyes to see outside. A car was parked at the curb. When I looked into the front seat, I saw Janet sitting peacefully next to Kimson, her head resting in the crook of his arm, his hand inscribing circles in her hair.

Early the next morning I woke to hear Janet talking in the kitchen. She was using the sort of impassioned whisper that slices through the air like a dart or a bullet, as loud as any rallying cry, though I was certain she thought I could not hear her. We had not spoken the night before. She had come inside after half an hour, tiptoeing up the stairs, and I had pretended to be asleep, listening to her as she brushed her teeth and cleaned her face and put on the billowing white T-shirt she liked to wear to bed. When she lay down beside me I curled narrowly around my stomach, imagining what it would be like to say, “Janet, we need to talk about this,” or, “Janet, it’s time we came clean,” until I faded imperceptibly into my dreams and then opened my eyes to a gleaming blue sky.

I could hear her in conversation with someone. “No, Kimson. No, we talked about this last night,” and I pressed the mute button on the bedside phone to listen in. “Look, you’ve been fine with leaving the decisions up to me so far,” Janet said. “And we agreed right at the beginning that that’s how it would be— everything is my call. So why is that a problem all of a sudden?”

“Because I’m good for you,” Kimson answered. “And you’re good for me. And you know that, but you won’t admit it.”

“I
do
admit it,” she said.

“There.” He gave a sandpapery laugh. “Then we’re agreed.”

“We’re agreed, but so what? I need to give Christopher another chance. That’s all there is to it. I have to see where my marriage is heading.”

“I know. Your marriage.” He paused. “Janet, I’ve been watching your marriage for four years, just about as closely as you have. Christopher isn’t going to get any better. He just isn’t.”

“See, but you can’t say that. It’s too soon to tell.”

“Of course I can tell. The way he floats around inside that house—”

I slipped the phone back into its mounting, folded the sheets down, and climbed out of bed.

Some thirty minutes later, when I had showered and dressed, I met Janet in the kitchen. She was loading a coffee mug and an egg-stained plate into the dishwasher, and the cuff of one of her sleeves was darkened with a half-circle of tap water. “Morning,” she said, and I repeated the word: “Morning.” Without comment I watched her wring her sleeve into the sink and pad from the kitchen in her slippers, settling onto the living room sofa, where she turned on the television. I poured a packet of maple and brown sugar oatmeal into a bowl and brought the pot of lukewarm water on the stove to a fresh boil. When it was hot enough, I stirred the water into the oatmeal and waited a few seconds for it to cool, watching the surface pock and dimple as some of it evaporated into steam.

I could hear a news report being broadcast in the other room, that imposing ceremonial baritone. “Sweet Christ,” Janet said, and she boosted the volume. “Christopher, come here, you need to see this.”

What if the dead and the missing can communicate with us through the objects they have left behind? Blankets and dresses and favorite sweaters. Passport photos and stacks of novels. Glasses and wristwatches and rings. I have seen men whose wives have died pressing lockets and combs to their lips as though they could feel them breathing, women who have lost their husbands holding frayed shirts and jackets to their ears as though they could hear them speaking. And I have noticed that whenever a child vanishes her friends and neighbors will assemble shrines to her memory, decorating her school locker or the chain-link fence behind her house with all the things that were most familiar to her—teddy bears and soccer trophies and snapshots of her family. We leave our parents and marry and follow jobs to other cities, carrying everything we own from one place to another, arranging it all around us, and I have heard people whose houses have burned to the ground say that when the fire took their belongings, the lives they knew turned to ash along with them, abandoned to the flames with their books and clothing and furniture. No one can doubt that we are more than the possessions we keep. Still, it is true that rooms take on the character of the people who live in them, and objects the features of the people who use them. Is it too much to imagine that when the world wrenches fiercely to one side, bearing us away by violence or chance or some fleeting compulsion of the landscape, we cling to the objects we loved the most?

Two days later, when Celia called again, I recognized the jingling of her telephone almost immediately—a high-pitched wobbly tone, muffled in plastic. I hurried upstairs and answered it just as it began to ring again, clipping it off at the first ting of the bell. It was Thursday afternoon, and Janet was at the Community Orchestra office, sending out postcards to announce the postponement of the Saturday-night Mendelssohn concert. I held the phone to my ear. “Hello? Celia?”

“It’s me, Dad,” she said. “We got cut off.”

“I know. Are you okay? Can you talk?”

“Uh-huh. I brought some extra quarters this time.”

“Good.” Again, I felt a knot forming in my throat. “I’m relieved you’re still there.” I leaned my hand against the window, which had been warmed by the sunlight, and the glass shifted in its frame with a small popping noise. A grasshopper resting on the ledge outside sprang away, motoring its wings. “I’ve been so worried about you,” I said.

“You don’t need to be. I’m better now.”

“You’re better now? . . . Celia, what happened that day? I need to ask.”

“Oh, Dad, Dad.” She turned the words into a little tune. “It was so long ago that I only half remember. But if you want me to try, I will.”

“Try,” I said to her.

“Okay,” she said. “Okay, I promise I’ll try. Do you know what it feels like when you’re drifting off to sleep and all of a sudden something yanks you awake? Well, think of that in reverse—that’s what it was like. I was playing outside, and I felt this tingle in my body like something was going to happen, and then it did. Something jerked me right off the wall. It felt like a giant arm. Then everything was dark, and I didn’t know how much time had passed, and I wasn’t sure where I was at first. I had trouble moving my arms and legs, but I heard some sort of jingling noise when I shifted my head. It sounded like coat-hangers knocking together. I was so tired and dizzy that it took me a long time to figure anything out. Eventually, somebody gave me some water.”

“Who?” I asked. “Who was it?”

“I don’t know. I couldn’t see very well because there was something covering my eyes, but I did hear them moving around. There was more than one of them, I think. I never saw their faces, but I’m pretty sure that’s true. Anyway I must have passed out after they fed me. By the time I woke up they had taken me someplace else. It was no place I’d ever been before. I never did find out exactly where it was. I know how I got out, and I
thought
I knew how long I was there, but I never knew that.”

When I sighed into the mouthpiece I heard the sound cycling through the receiver, channeled and exaggerated so that it sounded like a blast of wind. “Do you know where you are now?”

“Well, that’s why I called you back. Not exactly, but everything
is
sort of familiar. I can see a bar and a little grocery store beside the phone booth, and across the street there’s this lake or something, with picnic tables on the grass and a few benches here and there. And there’s a roof that doesn’t have any walls— what do you call it?”

“A pavilion?”

“A pavilion. That’s it.”

I knew a place just like the one she was describing, a street at the center of town that stretched alongside the park and the reservoir before bending out of sight over a low hill. It couldn’t be, I thought. But as I asked her, “What else can you see?” I felt a restless exhilaration making my toes and fingers tighten.

“There’s a plane flying overhead. Wait. Two planes. They’re both leaving trails in the sky, but they’re flying in different directions. One of them is about to hit the other one’s vapor trail, right . . . now.”

When I looked outside, I saw a white cross above the trees. Two of its strands were unraveling and drifting apart, the other two were blossoming behind pinpricks of silver. “Do they make an X-shape in the sky, Celia? The vapor trails?”

“That’s right,” she said. “An X.”

This would be heaven.

“Stay where you are, honey. I love you. I’ll be right there.”

“But Dad—” I placed a kiss on the mouthpiece of the Walt Disney Talk-to-Me Telephone and left it swinging from the side of the toy chest.

I snatched the keys from my dresser and drummed downstairs, racing for the front door. Janet was climbing from her car as I stepped outside. When she saw me walking toward her, smiling helplessly, she said, “My word, Christopher, what are you twinkling about?” and I took her hand and pressed it to my cheek, passing my lips over it. Her face slackened in surprise. I let go of her and unlocked my car, and she fastened onto my arm. “Wait, Christopher. There’s something I have to tell you.”

I slipped into the front seat and started the engine. “Give me twenty minutes,” I said. And I backed out of the driveway, racing into town.

I passed a school bus and an automobile trailer and a furniture delivery van. I had to hesitate briefly at a stoplight, but surged ahead at the first break in the traffic, leaving twin strips of black rubber on the asphalt. Our place in the world is the narrowest possible perch—I had learned it many times—and the smallest jostle can cause us to lose our footing. I wanted to get to Celia before she was taken away again. When I reached the reservoir, I parked the car and ran across the street.

There was a phone booth between the bar and the convenience store, a gray metal kiosk with warped glass windows from the waist to the ceiling, and I could see a figure standing inside, her hand resting casually against the door. I shouted to her: “Celia! Celia!”

But it was not my daughter. It was a teenage girl with two long locks of henna in her hair.

I tapped on the glass, and the girl held her index finger out to me—
hold on a second
—and when she opened the booth, cradling the phone against her chest, I asked, “Did you see where—was there someone else here before you? A little girl?”

“I don’t know, the phone was just hanging off the hook. Look, can I get back to my conversation, guy?” She blew a strand of hair off her forehead. “I’m kind of in the middle of something here.”

I turned away and stood with my hands billed together at my eyes, hunting for Celia along the sidewalk and the green by the reservoir. A man was chaining his bicycle to a fire hydrant, and a mother was wheeling her baby past in a stroller. A few cars were waiting at a stoplight, sending wiry plumes of exhaust into the air. A woman was throwing empty windows of bread crust into the reservoir, feeding either the ducks or the fish, but Celia was nowhere to be found.