The Truth About Celia (20 page)

Ragland Fowler, the Gift Warehouse magnate, is running for an open seat on the City Council. He wants to build a strip mall that bisects the entire town, which he says will attract tourism dollars. Opponents are trying to subvert his candidacy by planting FOR SALE BY OWNER signs next to all the RAGLAND FOWLER signs in town. Campaign signs on wooden stakes decorate half the yards in Springfield: DEAN SNYDER FOR ASST. CITY DIRECTOR; RE–ELECT JUDGE ELI BUTTERS; VOTE
NO
ON PROPOSITION 204. Teenagers throw bottles of beer at the signs from the windows of their cars, and at night, on every block, you can hear the blooming sound of breaking glass. One night, while he was reading through the Trivial Pursuit deck, he received a threatening phone call from a person who may or may not have been Ragland Fowler. “I know you’re a part of this,” the voice said, and it was interrupted by a tick of silence. A long, deep sigh broke through the line. “Hold on,” the voice said, “I have another call,” and then the connection went dead. Though he continues to reject Ragland Fowler’s offer to buy his house, he has neither the will nor the expertise to have participated in the campaign of signs against him. He suspects they are the brainwork of Rudy Miller, former mayor Tuck Miller’s grandson, since Tuck Miller, though more than a century old, is also running for the open seat on the city council, and Rudy Miller is working as his campaign manager. Tuck Miller retired from public office in 1978, shortly after the Nelson Pinkwater incident, and devoted himself to the gardening of roses, a hobby he was forced to abandon during the Depression of the 1930s. For the past three years his roses have been ruined by sawflies, and for the three years before that they were ruined by aphids. He has decided to reenter politics. He is the very model of the age of medication: a life so long that every piece of it has returned.

From the time she was a toddler, Celia’s favorite dinner foods were macaroni casserole and a dish called cracker salad that Janet used to make using lettuce, tuna, mayonnaise, and saltines. On those days when he does not find a parcel of beef stew or pot roast waiting by his front door, he spends the afternoon preparing dinner for himself in the kitchen. He cooks better than he eats, and he always has. The refrigerator is filled with neat towers of Tupperware as high as milk bottles. Every few days he scrapes another stack of them into the garbage can.
President Warren G. Harding died in the bathtub, of a busted gut. The
word planteration means torture by overfeeding.
Though he can never eat all the food he prepares, he likes the way the smell of cooking spreads from the kitchen while he is at the stove, leaving a thick fog of scent that makes the house feel crowded with family. He and Janet used to make love on the bed and the couch and the bathroom floor, fucking out of eagerness, lust, and affection, and much later out of desperation. Once, when Celia asked them about the thumping noise, they told her there was a badger on the roof.

A few days ago he saw his neighbor Matt Shuptrine at the supermarket atop the hill. Matt clapped his shoulder and asked him, “So what do you think of this weather?” and he did not know how to answer. Instead, he opened and closed his mouth a few times, like a fish, until Matt said, “Well, I’ve got light-bulbs to buy,” and shuffled away, looking back at him queerly. He is less and less able to respond to perfunctory questions, and less and less able to ask them. It is as if the instrument inside him which used to understand how people spoke to one another has cracked and fallen to pieces. He finds it hard to remember which questions are supposed to be casual and which are supposed to be impertinent. He apologizes for all the wrong ones—questions like
How are you doing?
or
What have you
been up to lately?
—and he poses the others—
So, are you worried
about another miscarriage? Which of your dreams have you given up on
for good? What do you two really think of each other?
—with a tone of drowsy half-interest that should infuriate the people he asks them of, but somehow doesn’t.

The last time he had sex with Janet, she kissed him and said, “I really don’t blame you,” and he said, “Which means you really do,” and she said, “Which means I really do.” The second-to-last time he had sex with Janet, it was purely reflexive, a matter of grief and habit and desperation. They were two people touching and stroking each other because they remembered how and where to touch and stroke each other—that was all. It was as if, together, they were posing one of those perfunctory questions that don’t really require an answer, the kind he no longer knows what to say to. The night was warm, and there was a deadness in the air between them, and Janet pushed herself away and began to cry.

“What’s wrong?” he asked, though he already knew the answer.

“Why are we doing this?” she said.

Seven years ago, when his daughter Celia vanished, Janet was across town at the Catholic Assembly Hall, rehearsing a Menotti ballet with the Community Orchestra. Sara Cadwallader was outside calling to Mudpie and Thisbe, and the neighborhood children were clattering around on their scooters. Donald and Joan Pytlik were in his living room, where he was showing them the stone fireplace, its alcove darkened from years of soot.
The ashes have left a starlike pattern here on the hearth,
he said, tapping the stone with his knuckles.
Sometimes the wind blows down
the chimney, and that pattern you see there is the result.
He looked out the window for a moment onto the side yard of the house. Celia was there, tightrope-walking along the fragment of stone wall between the elm tree and the maples. It was a gleaming spring day, the third Saturday of the month, and there was still a stitch of cold in the air. The sky behind her was a startled blue, so bright that he had to screw his face together to look at her. He cut his eyes away.
Okay, come with me,
he said, and the Pytliks followed him out of the living room. He led them to the kitchen and the anteroom, where he told them the story of Stephen Wilkes and Thomas Booth, and then the story of Abraham Lincoln, and then the story of Edwin Reasoner, the woodwright, who engraved his initials beneath the top stair of the winding staircase. Donald and Joan Pytlik were traveling across the state on a tour of historic yellow stone houses. They wanted to write a book.

It was then that he heard—or thinks that he heard—a shout. It was very brief, almost curt, like the sound that a needle makes when it’s lifted too clumsily from a record. The shout did not seem to hold any fear or panic: just a sudden note of surprise. He thinks that he remembers hearing this.

When he passed back through the living room and looked out the window, Celia was no longer there.

The temperature of a raked-out bed of coals is nearly 800° F, but
coal conducts heat very slowly, like a sponge, which is why you can
walk across it without burning your feet.
It was not until later that afternoon that he began to worry. Janet came home from Community Orchestra rehearsal just as the Pytliks were driving away. She stowed her clarinet in the closet and began to read through the entertainment listings in the
Spring field Citizen-Gazette.
They had booked Melanie Sparks to baby-sit that night and were planning to go to dinner and a movie. “Where’s Celia?” she asked as she smoothed the creases out of the newspaper. They were sitting by the glass table in the front room— he in the high-backed chair, she kneeling on the floor. It was mid-afternoon, almost four o’clock, and if the sun had been just a little lower in the sky it would have struck the table with its light, throwing the orrery of hidden stars onto the ceiling. But it was not that time of year.

“She’s outside somewhere,” he said. “Probably playing with some of the other kids.”

“As long as she’s home by five,” said Janet.

“I’m sure she will be.” But as the sun tilted toward the trees, and a pale sliver of moon appeared overhead, she was still nowhere to be found. They hollered her name from the four corners of the yard. They searched through the elm trees and behind the Worley gravestone. They walked up and down the block, knocking on all the doors, but they did not find her, and she did not come home. Sometimes he thinks that the world as we know it is as thin as a tissue of cloud—that we can pierce through it without even trying, stepping sideways out of ourselves, and end up in some other world altogether, or in no world at all. Sometimes he thinks that the shout he heard that afternoon was the sound Celia made as the tissue closed behind her. Last month, when he was cleaning the gutter along the roof, he found a red rubber ball she had lost seven years before. It still felt firm between his fingers, and when he tossed it onto the deck, it leapt in a single high arc over the grass and into the pond. When you walk through the doors of the police station, you can hear Kimson Perry, the Springfield police chief, practicing his contrabassoon—a steadfast, plangent, echoing sound that rolls from his office into the marble hallways. That evening, when they could not find Celia, Janet called him at the police station and begged for his help. He said, “Well, normally we’re supposed to wait twenty-four hours in a case like this, so we can’t file an M.P. form until then. But I’ll get some of my men over there and we’ll have a look around.” He played with her in the Community Orchestra. This was before she left them both behind. Within half an hour, he had arrived with eight of his officers. They coasted noiselessly down the street, their blue lights spinning in the falling darkness, and they
bwooped
their sirens once or twice as they pulled to a stop. Kimson Perry lined his officers up at the rear border of the lawn, six feet apart, so that they looked like golfers at a driving range. “Don’t you worry,” he said to Janet, just before they stepped into the elm trees. “We’ll find your girl for you.” And they marched forward on the same beat, the beams of their flashlights cutting across one another like the blades of scissors.

That was the night he began to see flashes of Celia’s face where she could not possibly be—in the bank of shadows in his closet, in the torn screen door of the house across the street, in the way a group of twigs were cinched together inside a bush. He would see her from the edge of his vision, and each time he did, something inside him would prickle and let out a gasp before he realized what he was actually looking at. He remembers the day he drove through town and she seemed to explode out at him and disappear a hundred times, to the left and the right, every few seconds, until he thought he was going mad: the police, it turned out, had stapled her picture onto the telephone poles. For a short time after she vanished the police called him every few hours, and later every few days, and later every few weeks. They had interviewed everybody in the neighborhood by then. They had found Donald and Joan Pytlik at a hotel in the northwest corner of the state and taken their statements over the telephone. They had contacted all the area hospitals and runaway shelters, and they suggested that he and Janet continue to call them periodically for any new information. The same phone book that contained the bookstore and locksmith and pizza delivery numbers also contained these other numbers, pages and pages of them, that people turned to only in their grief. He was ashamed to be surprised by this. Soon after Celia disappeared, their neighbors began to arrive at the door with their condolences. They said many things. Thick shocks of grass grow from beneath the fragment of stone wall, sprouting from the crevices he cannot reach with the lawnmower.

Todd Paul Taulbee said, “I’m not much for, you know, the right words, but if I can do anything for you and your family, you just name it. I’m real good with tools, for instance.”

Tommy Taulbee, his youngest son, said, “That goes for all of us. The whole family. Anything you need.”

Sheila Lanzetta said, “It’s only been three days—do you want to hear this?—so you’ve still got a good chance of recovering her. After a week the chances drop to fifty-fifty, and after that . . .” and her voice trailed away. Kristen Lanzetta, her daughter, who was Celia’s best friend, would not leave the car, and she sat in the backseat peeling and reattaching a suction-cup teddy bear to the window.

Enid Embry said, “Sometimes they show up miles away, and they don’t have any clothes on, and they don’t remember a thing that happened to them until you put them under hypnosis. I’ve been watching all kinds of stories about it on TV.” She gave them a pan of banana bread.

Greg Martin, whose son, Oscar, would be tried four years later in juvenile court for setting fire to the spinney of oak trees atop the hill, said, “We’ll be praying for you.” His wife, Alma, said, “We already have been.”

Ragland Fowler sent a short typed letter that read, in total: “Condolences on the occasion of your loss. Please phone regarding my offer on the house.”

Officer Kimson Perry said, “We haven’t given up hope yet, and I don’t want you folks to, either.” He took Janet’s hand.

Matt Shuptrine said, “She was a real little trouper, your daughter.”

Sara Cadwallader said, “We’re all going to miss her.”

Melanie Sparks said, “She was the sweetest little kid I knew.”

Nathan Caru, who had moved to Springfield only the month before, when Robert Corrigan, the previous mail carrier, retired to follow his brother to Florida, said, “Is there a Celia”—and he mispronounced her last name—“residing at this dwelling?”

Her pictures gradually faded on the telephone poles, were covered by rock-concert leaflets and garage-sale announcements, and finally they were torn down by the Springfield Beautification Committee.

“It was your fault,” Janet told him. “You did it.”

At seven o’clock exactly, on the night Celia disappeared, there was a rapping on the front door—three quick knocks. The police, who were gathered in his living room, fell suddenly silent, taking root where they stood. Janet flattened a hand to her chest and then motioned for him to answer the door. It was Melanie Sparks. A clutch of police cars was parked behind her, and a pair of headphones hung in a circle around her neck, giving out a tinny heavy metal music. She peered past him into the house. “Are you guys having a party or something?” she said. “I thought I was supposed to baby-sit tonight.”