The Truth About Celia (19 page)

Ragland Fowler, the Gift Warehouse magnate, has offered to buy his house, but though the ball bearings are everywhere, rolling him this way and that, he is reluctant to sell. What if Celia were to reappear just as suddenly as she vanished, popping through some slit in the air and returning home? How would she ever find him? He can picture her wandering through the house, all the old hallways and bedrooms, and finding them filled with items from the Gift Warehouse— piñatas, beanbag furniture, Lava lamps with balloons of oil. Everything would be utterly changed. He is afraid to move. He remembers being startled the first time he was paging through the mail and saw her face on a postcard.
Have you seen me?
the card read.
CALL 1-800-THE-LOST.
And there inside a frame of black lines was Celia. Her photo, the same one he had on the dresser in his bedroom, had been subjected to some sort of aging process, so that her nose and chin were bolder, her hair longer and missing its ribbon. He thought, So this is what you look like now, and was gripped by a sudden fit of shivering.

The mail arrives each day between one-thirty and two, and he often waits on the front porch for it, sipping from a canteen of water. The mail carrier, a French-African immigrant named Nathan Caru, speaks a crisp, night-school English but has a poor ear for the local dialect, which sounds to him, he has said, as if the words were crawling up from underneath the tongue. There is a red, white, and blue stripe across the door of his mail truck that bears a tiny © beneath it. He often points this out to his addressees, expressing amazement. “Who would have thought you could copyright a stripe?” he says. During stuffy weather, when Nathan Caru delivers his mail to him, he offers him a can of soda, during cold weather a mug of hot chocolate. The day he first saw the photograph of Celia on the postcard, he wanted desperately to show it to somebody—to celebrate, or confirm, that it was really there, that she was really his daughter, though even then he knew it was a desperate enterprise. He chased after Nathan Caru as he walked up the block, shouting, “Wait, wait. I have something to show you,” and then, when he caught up with him, he presented the card to him. “This is my daughter. Right here in this picture.” Nathan Caru smiled his lopsided smile and nodded his head, but it was plain that he did not understand. “Congratulations,” he said.

When Celia was four and five and six years old, she had a habit of wandering away. He and Janet would glance up from their reading or their gardening and find that she was no longer in the house, no longer in the yard, and they would wonder where she had drifted off to.
Buster Keaton was given his first name
by Harry Houdini, with whom his parents were close personal friends.
Celia would roam through the thicket of elm trees behind the house, collecting the dark, livery mushrooms that grew there. She would step out of her shoes to press her bare feet against the Worley gravestone. She would toss pebbles into the pond, sending clusters of minnows shimmering through the reeds. And she would visit with the nearest neighbors, standing in their driveways as they unloaded sacks of groceries from their cars. In those years this did not seem dangerous. She had never slept a night outside her own bed. The children were riding scooters then, not Big Wheels, and he remembers the sound they made as they glided down the street with their sneakers slapping against the pavement—a sound like a trapped kite knocking against the branches of a tree. Enid Embry, whose husband was still alive at the time, used to invite Celia inside for Kool-Aid and tell her about the aliens. She said they invented Velcro, digital watches, the atom bomb, and nonstick cookware. Sara Cadwallader, who lives two houses down from him, used to let Celia play with her cats, Mudpie and Thisbe. Thisbe had not been spayed, and Mudpie had not been neutered, and they would snake themselves across Celia’s legs with a slow, rigid pressure. Once, when he asked Sara about the cats, she told him,
I know, I know, but I just don’t have the heart to
do it to them. I have to keep my eye on them every single minute of the
day.
Greg and Alma Martin, who both teach at Springfield Elementary School, and whose son Oscar was in the same grade as Celia, used to take the two of them to the movies during the summer, and Matt Shuptrine, who lives in the coffee-colored brick house at the end of the block, used to help her chip flakes of crystal from the chunk of calcite in his front yard. The children Celia knew then have graduated from scooters to skateboards, and soon they will graduate from skateboards to cars. He wonders if the children who play in the neighborhood today will graduate eventually from Big Wheels to ATVs—the progression seems inevitable. Though his neighbors have always been kind to him, and though they were always kind to Celia, there are nights when, trying to puzzle it through, he can’t help but view them all as suspects.

Every Fourth of July the town hosts a parade that begins at the Courthouse lawn, winds through the business district, and finishes on the banks of the Pinkwater Reservoir. The Pinkwater Reservoir is named not for the tint of the water, which is in fact a healthy greenish-blue, but for Nelson Pinkwater, whose house once stood on the land submerged by the water and who got drunk one night, forgot where he lived, and drove his Dodge Aspen down the shore into the water. Police divers found his car parked on the crumbling strip of his own driveway the next morning. His body was still buckled into the front seat. The parade takes place in the early hours of the evening and is followed by a weenie roast and the launching of the fireworks. Though he no longer attends the fireworks display, he can hear the muffled boom of the charges detonating from his front lawn. When the wind is blowing just right, softly and steadily, he can see the smoke clouds drifting by in the light of the street lamps. Some of the clouds are shaped like palm trees, and some are shaped like tousled hair. He has always found these shapes more interesting than the blossoming red and green sparks of the actual fireworks. The annual Fourth of July parade was instituted in 1974, when Tuck Miller, then mayor of Springfield, marched through town in an Uncle Sam costume, throwing strips of kindled firecrackers onto the curb. A crowd of children gathered behind him, following him to the RESERVOIR COM– ING SOON sign, where he lit a string of Roman candles and fired them over the swelling water. The next year, when he marched the same route, the children brought their parents and wore costumes and threw firecrackers of their own. Celia was always frightened of loud noises, but she was not afraid of sparklers or whirring dragonflies, and she did like holding the match to the punk. When Tuck Miller turned one hundred years old this year, the
Springfield Citizen-Gazette
ran a photograph of him snapped at last year’s parade. He was riding in the sidecar of his grandson Rudy’s motorcycle, his Uncle Sam hat yoked atop his head with an elastic chin-strap. His face was twisted together in the wind, and the effect was such that he looked like a tiny child in an enormous hat, indignant and vaguely alarmed. One of the late-night national talk shows broadcast the photograph in a
News of the Week
segment, tagging it with the punch line,
And in this week’s Where Are They Now? segment: Captain America
and Buffalo Bill Cody.
The audience let fall only the barest smattering of laughter, and afterward the host said,
Come on, folks.
Easy Rider? This is top-of-the-line comedy here.

He has moved the television set into his bedroom, and at night he lies awake in the toneless white light of the talk shows and quiz shows with his pillow folded to a hump beneath his head. He never used to watch TV, and he doesn’t particularly enjoy it now, but he uses it like a drug to prolong the last few minutes of the day. After midnight, when he has shut the TV off and the long hours of sleeplessness have set in, he lies in bed listening to the pushing and easing of the wind. The radio tower blinks through the opening in his curtains. He has learned not to stare at the clock, and not to fantasize, and never to reminisce. Instead, he thinks the most mundane thoughts he can and waits for the buzzing feeling of sleep to travel up his body and carry him away. One sheep. Two sheep. Three sheep.

At the west end of town, heaving up between two branches of the state highway, is a rolling field that puts out a blanket of small purple flowers each spring. The flowers are shaped like tiny bells, and they have the sweet, liquory odor of cough syrup. The last time Celia ran a fever, he served her cough medicine from the cap of the elixir bottle. The silver of the teaspoon, she said, hurt her teeth. The field, with its small purple flowers, is displayed on the cover of the local phone book, and on all the Springfield tourism brochures. Eli Butters, the second most prominent town historian, who serves as a criminal court judge, claims that the town derived its name from this field, where the earliest settlers were received by a carpet of purple blossoms in the spring of 1812. Tim Lanzetta, the most prominent town historian, claims that this is a myth—that the town was in fact named for the mineral spring that leapt from the soil behind the old general store, a spring which continued to dribble until the late 1940s, when it was diverted into the lawns of the Valley View subdivision. Janet used to drive through Valley View on her way to Community Orchestra rehearsals.
No
valley, no view,
she complained.
Just street after street of dead trees
and peeling houses.
She played the clarinet with a beautiful, bleak, pouring-water sound. She twisted like a hooked fish when he kissed the hollows of her knees.

There is a story about the field of purple flowers, which Tommy Taulbee, who teaches English at the local high school, told him once at a school board meeting. Years ago, it seems, when the town was just eight families living in rickety oak cabins, the flowers in the field were as yellow as dandelions. There was a little girl, a blind girl, who liked to go wandering through them, where a wonderful humming noise always filled the air— but where, she wondered, did the humming noise come from? Now and then she would lie on the ground and feel through the grass with her hands, hoping to find it, to touch something that shuddered or twitched or vibrated like a pair of lips. Her father was a careless man, and one day, hunting rabbits in the field, he saw a flash of motion in the grass and fired off a shot. Whereupon he saw his daughter, and his knees foundered beneath him. The next spring the flowers that blossomed in the field were the darkest possible shade of brown, the color of ground coffee, and the year after that they were the color of burnt mahogany. Every year since, they have blossomed a little bit paler than the year before, and one day, fifty or a hundred years from now, they might turn yellow again. It takes a long time for such places to heal. When Tommy Taulbee finished telling his story, he smoothed his beard with his fingers and said, “You know, the day my dad caught that fish in your pond”—and he gave a little breath of laughter—“I just want to tell you, he talks about that all the time. It must be one of the happiest days of his life.” Then he turned to him and clasped his arm and said, “You tell your family I said thanks, okay?”

It is the first week of June, and the ladybugs have hatched in multitudes. They boil and hop from the grass, hundreds and thousands of them, so many that he is reminded of the spray from a glass of soda. The spring has been particularly cold this year: the last snow did not fall until April, and there were great dirty hills of it in the parking lots until May. Each season, the ladybugs appear after the snow has melted from the shadiest corners of the woods and the sun has softened the ground. They emerge all at once and migrate slowly to the south, passing from yard to yard as the summer burns on. The television news tracks their progress during the weather report. Shortly after the ladybugs hatch, the neighborhood cats go into estrus, and he can hear Sara Cadwallader shouting at Mudpie and Thisbe from her front porch:
Mudpie! You get down from Thisbe, right
now!
Todd Paul Taulbee knocks on his door to ask if it would be all right if he uses the pond for a while. A curtain of fishing lures is hooked to the brim of his baseball cap, and his two Irish setters whirl round and round in the grass. Nathan Caru dons short pants for his mail route, exposing the hair on his legs, which is as thick and snaggy as Brillo. These things happen every year. For two or three weeks, whenever he opens his front door, ladybugs flit into the house, circle around, and bump softly but repeatedly against the windows. He coaxes them into his palm so that he can set them free outside, but he is never able to find them all, and for the rest of the summer their beady red bodies turn up behind the furniture or in the bowls of plants, their legs zigzagging into the air. They are the size and shape of a small split pea, so tiny that they can slip under the door of Celia’s bedroom, which remains shut even during the Saturday afternoon tours of his home.
The word formication means
the sensation of insects crawling over or under the skin.
At the end of the summer, at the south end of town, the ladybugs vanish, just as they appeared, all at once, burrowing into the ground or folding themselves into the air. No one knows where they go. It is something of a mystery.

For a few weeks every summer, Enid Embry’s two grandchildren visit from California. They knock each other down in her front yard, fighting with knee-length socks that have other socks balled in the toes. He can see them from the window of Celia’s bedroom: two red-haired boys in cut-off blue jeans whipping their arms about wildly. Celia’s bedroom has a dollhouse and a toy shelf and a bed painted to look like a turtle. It has not been changed since the day she left. Once, when Enid Embry came down with a fever, he took her grandchildren swimming in the neighborhood pool, and they quarreled incessantly, about everything, for almost two hours—from who got the red towel and who got the blue towel to which of them was Frick and which of them was Frack. They both wanted the red towel, and, for some reason, they both wanted to be Frick. A jump rope hangs over the doorknob of Celia’s bedroom, looped around twice so that it won’t slip to the floor. Her bed is painted with the face of a turtle on its headboard, the shell of a turtle on its base, and the four feet of a turtle on its corner posts, so that it looks not only like a turtle, but like a turtle that has tumbled over onto its back and cannot move. For a time, he could smell the dry, floury scent of her skin whenever he stepped into the bedroom, but within a year it faded and was replaced by the smell of rainwater in a metal pail. There is a picture book on her bedside table titled
. . . Is . . . ,
illustrated by a Dutch artist named Sisquo. He leafs through it sometimes as he lies on her bed. Each page contains a drawing of a squat little man and woman meant to illustrate some simple catch-phrase, like
Happiness is a sunflower,
or
Love is a rainbow,
or
Sadness is an empty pool.
The catchphrases are all clichés, written according to the same mawkish formula, and in his head he likes to substitute them with adages of his own making—for instance:
Grief is a weight that rolls and rolls, a horrible turning deep
inside your body.
Or:
Worry is a mean-faced dwarf who beats on your
heart like a kettledrum.
Or:
Regret is the way that ash billows from a
fire that has already burnt to embers when you pour water over it in the
gray light of the morning.
Celia borrowed the book from her school library, carrying it home on the Friday before she vanished. He did not have the heart to return it.
People reading books
blink approximately eighteen times a minute, and they almost always
synchronize their blinks with periods, commas, and the ends of lines.
Late in the afternoon, sunlight streams through the arched window of Celia’s bedroom, falling across the bed and the carpet. It is the same light that speckles the downstairs ceiling with stars. From this arched window he can see Enid Embry’s grandchildren chasing and whipping each other with socks. They play outside all day, but as soon as the sun drops, Enid hurries them inside. “I love having them around, of course, but you and I both know a person can’t be too careful these days,” she says. Enid traces the sign of the cross on her chest, glancing apprehensively at the sky. A gust of wind hisses through the trees, and every leaf in the neighborhood is moved.