The Truth About Celia (4 page)

Enid Embry lifts the door handle with the very tips of her fingers, probing blindly, and totters around the edge of the door as she opens it, allowing the Tupperware to tumble willynilly into her backseat. Ever since her husband retired and passed away—God rest his soul—she has spent her days baking for her friends and neighbors and listening to broadcasts of
The
Art Bell Show.
One thing she has discovered is that even her dearest friends often do not return her Tupperware, so once a year she orders a completely new set, picking it up from Belinda Kuperman, her Tupperware agent, in four separate shipments. Enid lives directly across the street from the Brooks family— though can she really call them a family anymore, now that it is just the two of them? She doesn’t know. After she has driven home, she bakes a pan of Macaroni Hot Dog Surprise and waits for it to cool on the counter. Art Bell is discussing time travel with his callers: Is time travel possible? How would a time traveler avoid the infamous temporal paradoxes popularized by
Star Trek
and the
Back to the Future
movies? The air in Enid’s kitchen is thickening with the scent of cheese and hot dogs and a hint of nutmeg, which is the Surprise in her Macaroni Hot Dog Surprise. Enid has seen three flying saucers in her life— wavering silver brightnesses that paused over her house and then lifted suddenly away—though two of them were actually cigar-shaped. One of the callers informs Art Bell that he is himself a time traveler, but when Mr. Bell asks the caller what the coming decade holds in store for us, the caller will say only that there will be a war somewhere, and an earthquake somewhere else, and that a beloved Hollywood film star will die. After the Macaroni Hot Dog Surprise has cooled, Enid slides it out of the pan, listening to the heavy wet kissing noise it makes as she levers it free with a spatula, then she seals it in a Tupperware container. She carries it outside and across the street.

Janet answers the door to that woman from across the way, Enid Embry, the one who has referred to her and Christopher as
You Poor People
ever since Celia went missing. I brought
You
Poor People
something to eat. If
You Poor People
need anything, don’t hesitate to call on me. Janet can’t help but grate her teeth when she hears the phrase, biting so hard that she thinks sometimes they will shear apart like pieces of shale, but she knows that Enid means well, and she thanks her for the Macaroni Hot Dog Surprise. Enid says goodbye, and Janet shuts the door. There is a small breeze in the air that was not there this morning, and she can feel it pushing through the open kitchen window, swelling every so often and rattling the cooking utensils that hang on their metal hooks. She picks up an envelope that has wafted to the floor—a royalty check from Christopher’s publisher. Thank God the old books are still selling. He hasn’t been able to write anything in years. She has decided that she will have to buy a new dress for the funeral—or, rather, for the memorial service. Though she has reminded Christopher of the distinction a thousand times, she still finds herself making the same slip in her innermost thoughts. She discovers him in the bathroom, where he is standing with his head craned back, his mouth open in a hapless O, squeezing eyedrops into his eyes. He looks almost like a baby bird begging for food, so adorably helpless that she can’t help but forgive him for a moment for everything he’s ever done, laughing and kissing him on the cheek. She tells him that she is going to head into town for a while. Do you need anything? she asks, and he says that he doesn’t, futilely trying to smother a yawn.

The impulse is irresistible: whenever Christopher tilts his head back and stares into the light, the yawns rise through him one after another, entire chains of them, as though he were simply a chimney exhaling rings of smoke. Janet heads upstairs in her socks, and a few minutes later he hears her marching back down, her footsteps sounding more square and solid in her shoes. He switches the bathroom light off. It has been weeks since he slept through till morning, and yesterday, when he was shaving, he found a tick-sized system of exploded blood vessels in his right eye. Every night he wakes at two or three o’clock, when even the frogs and the crickets have fallen silent. No matter what he tries he can’t settle back to sleep. He pads to the kitchen in his T-shirt and underwear and eats boluses of peanut butter from the end of a spoon, plates of leftover casserole, entire boxes of saltine crackers. Once, at four in the morning, Janet stumbled into the kitchen and caught him with a brick of cheddar in one hand and a cucumber in the other, both cheeks bloated with food, and she turned around and went back to bed. He has learned what every beggar knows: that for short periods of time, a few days perhaps, no longer, he can replace sleep with eating or eating with sleep, though it has been at least twenty-four hours since he has done either. His stomach is just now beginning to settle. The last time he saw Celia she was balancing herself on the stone wall in the side yard of their house, the arms of a maple tree stretching above her. This was through his living room window, and when he looked again, a few minutes later, she was gone. Janet calls goodbye to him from the foyer, closing the front door just as he closes the kitchen window, and the air, which had been flowing past him in loops and curves, seems to tighten suddenly and take on the shape of the room.

It is a lovely day, the sky so powdery blue that Janet almost decides to walk to the store, but she would rather not have to carry her outfit back home. She drives into town with all four windows open, parking by the reservoir. D. Barnett Fashions, where she is planning to buy her dress, is less than a block away, just past the Quik Stop Convenience Store and the Lily Taylor Hair Salon and the Why Not Bar, which Rollie Onopa, the proprietor, named from a line in a song. The wind carries the rich sweet smell of the first browning leaves, a smell that has always reminded her of burnt marshmallows. When she was a child, she used to roast marshmallows in the fireplace every Christmas Eve while she and her parents watched
Rudolph the
Red-Nosed Reindeer
on TV. On the Christmas after Celia’s seventh birthday, a few short months before she vanished, Janet and Christopher gave her a Barbie doll and a set of glitter lipstick. It occurs to Janet that she would love to go to a movie this afternoon, to seal herself in a dark room for an hour and a half, completely anonymous, immersing all her sorrow and passion and curiosity in someone else’s story, a fiction, and then to step outside and clutch her chest and rock back on her heels, blind-sided by the fresh air and sunlight. She is no longer welcome at the Reservoir Ten, where she tore one of the movie screens a year or two ago—a long story—but she could easily visit one of the other theaters in town. She does not have the time, though. She would not be able to concentrate. And anyway she has to buy a dress. She is passing the pavilion where United States Congressman Asa Hutchinson stands asking for a quarter, a dollar, anything you can spare, when she sees Sheila Lanzetta, whose daughter, Kristen, was Celia’s best friend, sitting at a picnic table paging through a journal.

Sheila hears someone tapping past her on the sidewalk. She is reading an article in the latest issue of
Social Text,
a long, tangled piece about aboriginal Filipino culture and the concept of feminine time, a term the author uses without attribution, as though she has coined it. The author’s argument relies heavily on the ideas of Baudrillard and Kristeva, writers whose work has always seemed just so much wet cement to Sheila, and she has spent the last half hour or so trying to puzzle out the connection between multiple refractivity and the hermeneutics of the feminine. As such, she almost fails to see the person passing by, barely glancing up from her reading. Janet’s face is turned fully away from her, toward the sunlight crinkling on the surface of the reservoir, but Sheila recognizes her from the way she carries herself, her hands curled loosely into fists like a person holding a firefly she is trying not to crush. When Sheila calls out to her, Janet stops and spins about, a little too surprised, and gives a tiny laugh. She says that she was lost in her thoughts and didn’t see her. Sheila smiles. You were hoping I wouldn’t spot you, right? she asks, and Janet grimaces and admits that, yes, she was. She says that she has so many things on her mind right now, you know how it is, and Sheila says that she can certainly sympathize. Ever since Janet lost her daughter, she has fallen into uncomfortable languishing silences around Sheila, and Sheila believes that she understands why: it has to do with watching Kristen grow up and take on the first features of her adolescence, pierced ears and braces and training bras. Janet must see her own daughter, or what she could have been, reflected there. A page of Sheila’s journal, pressed open on the picnic table, lifts in the wind and then turns over, sagging down on itself. She can see that she is keeping Janet waiting, and so she tells her that she and Tim will see her tonight at the service. And Kristen will be there, too, if we can convince her to come, she says. Janet nods goodbye, and Sheila watches her stop for only a moment as she walks away, fishing a dollar out of her purse for United States Congressman Asa Hutchinson.

Congressman Hutchinson folds the bill into quarters, tucking it into the change pocket he has sewn into the band of his pants. He can tell by the way the pocket weighs against his gut that he will soon have enough for a drink of liquor. Empty bottles are stacked three deep along the rafter above his bench, and he can hear them clinking whenever a gust of wind shakes the pavilion. Once he made the mistake of telling a woman, a Jehovah’s Witness, that the dollar she had given him was the last he needed for the day and that now he was going to get good and drunk. He had reached out to shake her hand, saying what he always said when his pocket was finally full or he had generated enough warmth beneath his blanket to fall asleep, when, in short, any good thing happened to him, The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want, The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want, and the woman had demanded her money back. This was in another city, in the winter, when he was traveling. A blue-bird flutters past him and perches on the white railing of the stairs, excavating something from its feathers. It is September now, and he knows he will have to leave soon. Every year from November to April he tends his wife’s grave, combing the leaves from the grass and digging it free of the ice and snow. It is the least he can do for her. The groundskeeper of the cemetery knows him so well that he allows him to borrow his rake and shovel. The congressman’s wife fell sick with cancer in 1989— the same year that Celia was born, the same year the pavilion was built. Before she died, she made him promise to look after her burial plot in the winter. She said that she couldn’t stand the thought of being covered by all that snow. The congressman has groomed the site so many times by now that he has memorized the boundary line, and when he returns the groundskeeper’s rake and shovel to him, he leaves behind a perfect rectangle of yellowing grass. A squirrel crosses the rafters above his head, running first around the periphery and then along one of the spokes. It pauses halfway down a column to leap onto the trunk of an oak tree, scrabbling into the branches. The congressman watches it twist out of sight toward the Quik Stop and the liquor store as he gives his change pocket a protective tap.

If you are small enough and nimble enough, the trees are like a system of roads, and before half a minute has passed the squirrel has leaped from one tree onto another, and from that tree onto a third, leaving the sour smell of the pavilion far behind. There was a time, not fifty years ago, when you could cross the entire town without ever touching ground. The trees might have fallen, but the houses and strip malls and street-lamps have risen, and the squirrel sometimes races along them for miles, running as though he could never fall. He darts from a rooftop onto a fence, and from there onto a tree and a billboard. When he reaches the west end of town, the interlacing canopies of the trees take him across entire yards, and occasionally two or three branches will even meet above a busy street. He runs through the elm trees behind a row of apartments and crawls to the very tip of a branch that stretches far into the open air, testing the pliancy of the limb with his paw, then jumps onto a windowsill, allowing the spring of the bough to propel him a few extra inches. A few clusters of birds are pecking up bread crumbs from the grass, and when he bounds into the midst of them, the birds scatter and beat their way into the air—an exhilarating noise. He climbs over a wire fence and into a spindly cherry tree with a few red leaves still curling open inside it. It is almost autumn. He is biting into a wild cherry, gnawing around the hard, blackened dimple at one end, when he hears a sudden pop and a chip of bark flies into his side. He lights out.

Pierre Douglas doesn’t even see where the damned squirrel goes, only a flash of its tail and a twitching in the leaves. He rests the stock of the gun against his shoe, squinting into the sunlight. The wind is blowing in hard gusts from behind him, and because the elastic bands keep vanishing from his bathroom counter, he has to hold his hair out of his face with his hand. His girlfriend, Claire, wants him to wear his hair like he did when they first started dating, loose and scrappy like Thurston Moore from Sonic Youth, but he likes it better when it’s fastened into a ponytail. He hardly listens to Sonic Youth anymore. Lately he’s been getting into Tom Waits and the early Van Morrison. When he opens the back door, standing the gun against the wall, he can hear Claire singing “Mary Had a Little Lamb” to their son Pierre, the only song that will put him to sleep this early in the day. Claire calls the boy Pierre Jr., but Pierre himself likes to call him Pierre the Second—it makes him sound like royalty, he thinks, like a king, or maybe a pope. He finds Claire hovering over the playpen in the living room and kisses her, taking her whole ear into his mouth. Her singing voice skips and grates as she leans into him. She smiles. He can hear Maury Povich delivering his closing monologue on TV, which means that it’s almost three o’clock, which means that he needs to get to school. He was caught stealing electronics components a few years ago and has to attend class every day as part of his probation. Most of his teachers don’t seem to give a damn whether he shows up or not, but Mr. Taulbee, his English teacher, will have his ass in a sling if he’s not there by threefifteen. He’ll be back in an hour or so, he tells Claire, and when he asks her if she wants him to pick up something to eat, she suggests Chinese food. Chinese it is, he says, as long as you promise to stop hiding my hairbands. He kisses her goodbye, and then pats Pierre the Second on the belly, and he drives to Springfield High School in their shaky old Plymouth.