The Truth About Celia (5 page)

NOTHING MAKES GOD LAUGH LIKE WHEN WE TELL HIM OUR PLANS FOR THE FUTURE

As usual, he finds himself framing an argument against it. He is sure that what the sign means to suggest is that we don’t need to worry, we’re in good hands, but there is a certain thoughtless brutality to the message that disturbs him. After all, there are people in this world who know nothing but suffering. Their plans are all they have to live for. Which is to say that the message fails to give solace to the very people who might need it most. What kind of God would deny us so much, even the comfort of our wishes, he wonders. Kimson pulls into his driveway and unlocks his front door and then washes and shaves and tightens himself into his shirt and tie. More than 750,000 children are reported missing every year, but almost all of them are found within hours or days. Celia has been missing since March of 1997, and though he would never tell Janet this, he can’t imagine that she isn’t dead. What makes the case so goddamn frustrating is how little there is to go on, how little there ever was. There were no clues, no witnesses. She was playing in her own backyard. She had no reason to run away, and no one to run to. It has been more than a year since the tip-line has taken a phone call, and if it weren’t for Janet, he is certain he would have allowed the case to go quietly inactive by now. He brushes his teeth, rinses the collar of foam from the bristles, and afterward drives to the pavilion, where the crowd for the memorial service is gathering. Janet is already there, standing beside her husband, and when Kimson hugs her hello, her lips graze his cheek and one of her knees knocks against him and he smells the peachlike fragrance of her shampoo. He is embarrassed to find himself becoming aroused.

Janet squeezes Kimson by the muscles of his upper arms and thanks him for coming, and when she lets him go, he takes her hand and says that of course he will always be there for her, she should know that, slipping his thumb ever so flickeringly into and out of her palm, like a minnow. She has been friends with Kimson for years now, sitting two chairs over from him in the community orchestra, where she plays clarinet and he plays contrabassoon, but ever since she lost her daughter she has spoken to him almost daily. He will even phone her in the evening occasionally—worried, he will say, that he hasn’t heard from her during his shift. She has seen so many people this afternoon, though, accepted so many token condolences, that she doesn’t have the energy to think about that thumb and what it might mean. She still loves her husband sometimes. She sinks her forehead onto her husband’s shoulder for a moment, sighing, and then lifts her head and looks out over the guests. She sees Rollie and Judy and Andrea Onopa, Greg and Alma and Oscar Martin, Enid Embry, Sara Cadwallader, Tommy Taulbee and his father, Todd Paul. The wind has blown a shoal of rain-clouds in from the east, so that half of the sky is a dense gray-black and the other half is filled with sunlight. The thick branches of an oak tree are rocking and creaking above the rows of folding chairs, and the skirt of Janet’s newly purchased black dress keeps billowing taut between her legs. She sees Sheila and Tim Lanzetta, but not their daughter Kristen, holding a cane umbrella across their laps. She sees Melanie Sparks, Celia’s old baby-sitter, who is standing at the margin of the grass, her arms wrapped around a lamppost she has pressed her ear to as though she were listening to vibrations from the ground. In the past four years Melanie might be the only person in town who has never told Janet what she should do to make herself feel better. She has been amazed at the number of people who seem to believe they know the answer, the one sure remedy she hasn’t thought to try yet, everything from yoga to Prozac to deer hunting to a good hard cry. The Reverend Gautreaux, who is waiting on the steps of the pavilion, signals to Janet that she and Christopher can take their seats, and the two of them walk down the aisle to the front row.

The thing about cigarettes, the Reverend has discovered, is that when you breathe through them they breathe right back, like another set of lungs, and this sensation of having your breath returned to you, along with the almost respiratory heat of the smoke, makes smoking a cigarette very much like exchanging a kiss—but a kiss that you can control, measuring it out in increments, however shallow or deep you wish them to be. It is one of his pet theories that this, as much as the nicotine, is what makes it so hard to quit smoking. He waits for a few late arrivals to settle into their chairs and then stiffens his posture as a sign that everyone should fall quiet. He learned to do this— to broadcast this aura of preparedness, like a runner poised on his mark—within weeks of accepting his parish. It never fails to work. United States Congressman Asa Hutchinson, drinking from a paper bag in the corner of the pavilion, stops to blow his nose loudly, explosively, into a handkerchief. When the Reverend asked him earlier if he would mind moving into the chairs until the ceremony was over, the congressman’s eyes flared into frightened blue stars and he gripped the banister behind his bench and said, You can’t make me go, this is where I live. The Reverend can feel a crawling sort of itch in the back of his throat, but it is only five-thirty, and he has another two hours before he will be safely home to light another cigarette. He coughs and tells the congregation, those who are gathered here to remember Celia Brooks, that he will read to them first from the book of Jeremiah. When his father died, Reverend Gautreaux found that he had underlined more than a thousand verses in his Bible, some with a watery blue ink that had faded to the color of a robin’s egg and others with a fluorescent yellow highlighter. This particular verse he had marked for some reason with a pair of stars and an exclamation point. The Reverend lifts the silk tail from his Bible, and Christopher listens as he begins to read.

For the hurt of the daughter of my people am I hurt; I am black;
astonishment hath taken hold on me. Is there no balm in Gilead; is
there no physician there? Why then is not the health of the daughter of
my people recovered?
The Reverend shuts his Bible and holds it against his stomach with both hands. Christopher watches the wind gather up his hair, tossing it about like streamers of grass, and listens as he says that it is hard for us not to react with anger, yes, with anger and confusion, when those we love are taken before their time. The air is piping through the trees, and his voice keeps rising and dropping away. Christopher is thinking about all the fathers he has read about, the ones who have lost their daughters to unknown circumstances, unknown powers, like the Arkansas millionaire who built a high stone wall around his house and then, when his daughter was returned to him, sank all his money into the world’s largest display of Christmas lights, which he donated to Walt Disney World after his neighbors complained about the crowd of sightseers. The Reverend is talking about the difficulty of knowing the mind of God. Why does He allow so many of us to come to grief? Whose world are we living in, after all? Christopher can feel his eyes stinging in the wind, but the eyedrops he bought are still at home in the medicine cabinet. It is only a few minutes later, when the Reverend says his daughter’s name again, Celia Elizabeth Brooks, and then something about how as long as we remember her she is inside all of us, that United States Congressman Asa Hutchinson begins to shout.

The congressman slashes his arms through the air in a wild X, the bottle in his hand whipping this way and that so that arcs of brass-colored liquor keep spattering onto the floor of the pavilion. She’s already dead, he cries, you can’t do this again, my wife is already dead. He can hear the distant chop of the reservoir, see the people in their folding chairs paused in a far-away stillness, but everything around him seems to be wrapped in a layer of wool. All his attention is gathered around the man in the black robe, a bat, who has been mocking his Elizabeth. He thinks of her burial plot, so many miles away, already scattered with the first few leaves of autumn. In October, when he travels north, he sees entire flocks of swallows and robins migrating south for the winter, thousands of them flying in clots and waves, and he imagines that he is a counterweight connected to them by an invisible steel rod, balancing their motion with his own. For a while, during the final months of his wife’s illness, the wasting smell of her body made him sick to his stomach, and he had to wear a surgical mask over his face as he washed and fed her. He has never forgiven himself. He watches the Reverend Gautreaux walking slowly toward him, palms extended, asking him to calm down, calm down, saying that everything will be all right. How dare he! The congressman hurls his liquor bottle at the man, but it rolls past his shoulder and hits one of the columns, shattering inside its paper bag with a heavy concussive sound. Sara Cadwallader and Sheila and Tim Lanzetta, who are sitting across the aisle from Celia’s parents in the front row, leap at the noise and skip back from their chairs.

Sara Cadwallader watches the Reverend back carefully away from the crazy man in gray clothing, moving with such an awkwardly wooden gait that he reminds her of her cats, Mudpie and Thisbe, treading over the floor vent in her living room, shaking their feet after each step as though their pads were sticking to the metal. The Reverend moves slowly down the stairs, stopping finally in the aisle beside her, and the crazy man looks away from him for a moment, right into Sara’s eyes. He has a crusted shaving cut above his lip, and his corneas are stained a pale yellow, and she has a curious desire to wave to him. Then he seems to notice the rest of the people in the crowd. He says something she does not understand and climbs onto his bench and from there into the rafters of the pavilion, shouting, Stay away from me, keep away, and glass liquor bottles begin raining down from him in twos and threes, breaking against the railing or bouncing and sailing into the chairs. There are so many of them that she thinks he must have hundreds up there. She takes cover behind the Reverend, who himself takes cover behind a wastebasket. Sara lives two houses down from the Brookses, and when Celia was seven years old, she used to invite her over for Kool-Aid and cookies and let her play with Mudpie and Thisbe. They were just kittens then, and they would press against Celia and purr, slinking through her ankles and collapsing onto her feet. It is hard for Sara to believe that someone so young could come and go from the world so quickly. Maybe she is not really gone, though, Sara thinks. Maybe no one is ever really gone. Maybe when we die we simply drift in and out of the people we have left behind, touching each of them in turn, like God does. This is what she likes to imagine, at least. She watches a few of the bigger men go in after the crazy person, braving the shower of glass inside the pavilion, but it is Rollie Onopa who manages to hoist himself into the rafters.

Rollie crawls over the dusty wooden beams on his hands and the balls of his feet, keeping to the outside edge of the pavilion, where the ceiling slants down to the narrowest wedge of space. Leaves and candy wrappers and potato chip bags have collected there in a deep hummock, and though they crumple beneath him with a sound like burning kindling, the congressman is too busy taking aim at all the people below to notice him. Rollie sees three long rows of bottles behind the congressman, green and brown and crystal-clear—several years’ worth of determined drinking, he would guess. He creeps along one of the cross-beams, approaching his quarry from behind. There is a flat, circular bird’s nest the size of a Frisbee in his path, and when he crawls over it he sees that it was actually constructed
inside
a Frisbee. He has a keen admiration for birds, for their grace and beauty and cleverness, but bird lovers have always seemed a bit nutty to him, and he doesn’t like to tell people about it. Stealing up on the congressman, he feels like he did as a child playing spy, when the giddy hammering of his heart never quite made him laugh but always came close. Before the congressman can turn around, Rollie grabs him in a bear hug. In the moment of silence that follows, he hears his daughter saying that her dad will catch him, you just watch, he’s probably got him already. When he tucks her in at night and she asks him if he loves her, he always says, Honey, you’re the whole ball of wax, and she answers, Dad, that’s really gross. The congressman tosses his head back and forth, growling, That’s-e-nough, one slow syllable at a time. He bucks against Rollie, and Rollie loses hold of him. Then, before he can stop him, the congressman tumbles backward out of the rafters, knocking his head on the ceiling, and falls lurching and thrashing into the arms of the men below.

Rollie leaps to the floor and helps them carry him down the stairs, past the chairs and the lamps and the picnic tables, and past Enid Embry, who is already tidying up the shards of broken glass, sweeping them into a single long drift with the edge of her foot. This afternoon a guest on
The Art Bell Show
said that aliens have infiltrated every town in America, disguising themselves as drifters, and Enid would not be at all surprised if United States Congressman Asa Hutchinson were one of them. Nothing is beyond explanation. Just look at all the trouble he has caused, not to mention the mess he has made. He is lucky that nobody got killed. She listens to him yelling, Don’t hit me, let me go, thy rod and thy staff, thy rod and thy staff, as those brave men pin his arms and legs to the ground and try to calm him down. After she has finished sweeping the glass from the first row of chairs, she brushes every last speck of it onto a sheet of cardboard that she finds lying by the wastebasket and throws it all away. There, she thinks. She has done her part. Everyone who hasn’t wandered over to help subdue the congressman is standing before the pavilion, watching and whispering, except for the Reverend, who is sitting with his head on his knees, and Janet, who is busy smoothing a line of ointment over a cut on Kimson Perry’s hand. The stormclouds have unfolded across most of the sky, and when Enid gazes out at the reservoir, she can see a thin blade of sunlight receding over the water. There is no rain, but listening closely she can hear a faint grumble of thunder, and she looks overhead, waiting for the first spark of lightning to flash. She sees a movement in the sky, swift and erratic, a sudden darting flicker of UFO gray, and feels a fishhook catch of excitement in her chest. But it is only a squirrel, high in the branches of an oak tree, swaying back and forth in the wind.