The Truth About Celia (9 page)

This is bullshit,
she thought,
this is terrible,
and then she said it out loud. She couldn’t help herself. “This is terrible.”

Her voice was barely a murmur, and the only person who seemed to hear her was the man in the next seat, who shifted his popcorn to his other leg and made a breathy sound of disapproval, a
hush
amputated just before the
sh.

She said it again, louder, “This is terrible,” and this time it was not that she couldn’t help herself, but that she didn’t want to. She felt as though a hot steel wire were buzzing in her head. Her hands twisted at the fabric of her skirt. There was a titter from the two small boys in front of her, and someone behind her kicked at the spine of her chair.

The man sitting next to her said, “Do you want me to call the manager?” On screen Treat Williams and Michelle Pfeiffer were discovering that the son they had finally found had run away—he wasn’t in his bedroom, he wasn’t in the kitchen. “Because I will,” the man declared.

Janet turned to him and, no longer bothering to muffle her voice, said, “It is, though. Pure bullshit. Can’t you see that?” and she flailed her hand angrily at the screen.

From three or four points around the theater she heard the snakelike hiss of people trying to silence her. The man beside her said, “Look,
lady,
people here are trying to watch the movie,” and another voice answered from a few rows behind, “Damn right we are.”

“Fine.” Janet rose into the aisle, fixing her purse around her shoulder. For a moment she truly thought she was going to leave. But then she heard Michelle Pfeiffer and Treat Williams arguing with each other—

“What are we gonna do now?”

“Don’t push me on this, Beth.”

“I want to give him back.”

—and she stopped still. They were standing in their backyard, clouds streaming over the sun in a slow gray thread, leaves rustling in the grass. Treat Williams set his jaw, and Michelle Pfeiffer let her eyes flicker away for a moment, then met his gaze. Later Janet would wonder why she did it, but at the time she did not think to put the question to herself; perhaps she wanted to push back at the movie, or push her way into it (if she were living inside the movie she could bend it down a different path, a better one), or perhaps it was simply a pause on her way to the back exit. She was acting on instinct, and she did not pretend to know the reason why. What happened was this: she took a few steps forward and, raising her arm above her head, pressed her palm to the screen. It was pliant and glossy, like the thick integument of an eggplant, and she imagined that if she dug her nails in she could leave permanent moon-shaped impressions there. Her arm took on the green shade and tiny hitching motions of the grass where Michelle Pfeiffer and Treat Williams were standing.

She heard a chair retracting and turned to see the man who had been sitting next to her stamping out of the theater. “Will you move already?” somebody said, and she dropped her hand.

There was a low door beneath the screen, no higher than her chest, and she saw a chink between the jamb and the frame where it had not been properly locked. She ran her fingers along the crack, almost idly, as one might trace a line of condensation on a water glass, and the door floated open.

She ducked her head through to look inside.

It appeared to be some sort of storage chamber. There were a few dusty boxes, a stack of empty film reels, and a tangled heap of black film that reminded her of the snarls of cassette tape she sometimes saw on the aprons of busy roads. She looked up a long wall of cinder blocks and saw the image of the missing boy reversed on the back of the screen. It filled the chamber with a light that shifted and jumped.

Though she had watched a thousand movies in this theater, and a hundred, probably, in this very room, she would never have known that such a space existed if she hadn’t chanced upon it. How many people did, she wondered. An A-frame ladder stood open on the floor, and she stepped inside—again, she did not know why, and later she would not be able to explain it—and climbed one, two, three rungs, until she faced the back of the screen, then two more, until her legs lifted out of the shadows and the light covered her entirely. On Celia’s fourth birthday, some three years before she vanished, she had scaled a ladder that a roofer had left leaning against the side of the house. It was during a game of hide-and-seek she was playing with her friends, and when she reached the highest rung, just beneath the rain gutter, she looked between her feet and froze rigid. Janet had to climb to the top and carry her back down, her scarecrow arms hooked tight around Janet’s neck. When they hit the ground with a final hop, Celia said, “You
saved
my
life,
Mommy,” and kissed her on the cheek, and then Robin Unwer tagged her and said, “You’re it.” That night, when Janet put Celia to bed, she complained that she could not sleep, and Janet believed she was witnessing the beginning of a phobia— that for the rest of her life her daughter would fall dizzy behind high windows, avoid railings and escalators, and refuse to cross bridges. Instead, and soon after, she headed straight in the other direction, climbing all the tallest structures she could find: jungle gyms, trees, the outer beams of the deck in the backyard. Standing on the ladder behind the movie screen, Janet thought she could understand why: when you rose into the air, even when nothing awaited you there, it always felt purposeful, like you were climbing
toward
something.

Michelle Pfeiffer was driving her son across the city in her car, and Janet could hear the thrum of the engine beneath their conversation, but she was too close to the screen to see where they were going. From where she stood they were giants—eyes as tall as doorways, lips as long as railroad ties. They could swallow her whole. A pencil of light was streaming through a hole in the screen, flickering against her shirt. She tried to plug it with her finger, but it was only wide enough to fit the sharp edge of her nail, which she twisted back and forth until it caught against a nick in the material.

A voice sounded from inside the theater. It was one of the boys in the front row. “I saw her. She crawled in there,” he said, and a moment later Janet heard a rustling of bodies beneath her.

When she fit her nail to the corner of the notch, sliding it up as far as her arm could reach, the screen split open just like a zipper.

There was
East of Eden,
which she watched with her high school film club on the same afternoon they saw
The Kid from Left Field,
borrowing both movies from the town library when they learned that James Dean and Gary Coleman shared a birthday (February 8—that was the date). She remembered how James Dean slouched against the wall in the police station, and how he held a red handkerchief to his face to staunch the bleeding, and how when Burl Ives showed him a picture of his parents he swallowed his words and said, “I hate her, and I hate him, too.” She did not remember much about
The Kid from Left Field
—only that she had seen it.

The school projector always sounded like a bicycle with a playing card pinned between the spokes, rattling softly and then loudly and then softly again, and it gave the movies they watched in the classroom a stuttering sort of rhythm, a cadence or music that lay just beneath the action and came to seem inseparable from it. Janet could hear this sound dimly in her head as she sat in the police station waiting to be processed, just an hour after the manager of the theater summoned a squad car to take her away. She spotted a streamer tied to a rotating fan, flickering in the air as the fan turned haltingly back and forth, and she listened to it growing louder as it swiveled toward her and weaker as it swiveled away, just like the projector at her high school.

No wonder these ancient movies were coming to mind.

The fan must have been new, she thought, chewing at the inside of her lip. She had never seen it before, and she had been in the police station many times these past two years, at least once a week since Celia.

Celia.

Her name—her simple, unembellished name—had become a shorthand for something else altogether:
the day Celia disappeared, and all the time since.
She used it the way she had once used
Christopher
to mean
when Christopher and I first started dating,
and later
when Christopher and I first got married,
the way she used
Oregon
to mean
the four years I spent in college.
She hated this change, hated the way it stripped her daughter’s name of all its life and joy, but she found it impossible to weed it from her mind.

She had been in the waiting room for almost half an hour. The benches were made of a yellow fiberglass, and whenever she tried to adjust her posture she would lose her purchase and slip forward a few inches. The teenage couple on the bench across from her were having the same problem, and after a while they began to mug for each other—tobogganing to the very edge of the bench, throwing up their arms, and giggling. Janet watched them. The girl spread the fingers of her right hand open, tapping them one at a time and chanting, “Johnny, Johnny, Johnny, Johnny! Whoops, Johnny! Whoops, Johnny!” and the boy slipped forward in his seat again, and then they both folded over with laughter, hiding their faces behind a curtain of limp black hair. Slowly and fitfully they grew calm again, dropping into another chain of laughter every thirty seconds or so, two or three or four links long, and then sighing and falling quiet once more, and when they had finally exhausted themselves the girl cupped her hand around the boy’s leg, and the boy rested his head on her shoulder, and they gave each other a lazy kiss.

Janet heard a door swinging open behind her, and a low voice, calming and ragged, a bartender’s voice, said, “They told me I’d find you out here.” It was Kimson Perry, the superintendent of the Springfield police force. He had been in charge of the local investigation of Celia’s disappearance—
is,
Janet reminded herself,
is
in charge—and was a friend of hers, the contrabassoonist in the Community Orchestra where she played clarinet. He sat beside her and took her hand. “So what happened, Janet? Terry said they picked you up for destruction of property.”

“I ripped the screen at the movie theater. It was almost an accident. I don’t know.” Only an hour ago the manager of the Reservoir Ten had coaxed her down from the ladder and into the sudden glaring brightness of the theater, where he announced to the patrons that the rest of this showing would have to be canceled—no, he couldn’t refund their money, it was already locked away, but they could collect their free passes from the ushers as they left—and already it seemed like a dream to her. She was always so quiet at the movies, so retiring. The story was one she would never recognize herself in. When she was a girl her father liked to tell their dinner guests about the night her mother was in labor with her: a nurse, it seemed, had told her that it wasn’t time to push yet, and her mother had coldcocked the nurse, knocking her flat. Afterward, her father said, when he tried to tell her what had happened, she wouldn’t believe him. He laughed gigantically whenever he told this story, slapping the table with his palm, but Janet knew then—and she knew even more now—how her mother must have felt each time she heard it: surprised and embarrassed by what she had done, but with a fierce, rapacious wish to defend herself.

Kimson Perry gave a barely perceptible nod. “That’s what I heard. Okay, Janet. I talked to the guy at the theater and explained your situation. Everyone’s allowed to go crazy once, I told him. It took some doing, but he agreed with me. So this is your one and only close call. Your get-out-of-jail-free card, as it were.”

“Thank you, Kimson.”

“You’re willing to pay the cost of repairs, of course?”

“Of course.”

“Good.” He let go of her hand. “We already have your prints on file from Celia, so you can take off as soon as you’re ready. Have you called Christopher yet?” She shook her head. “Here, use my cell.” He pulled the phone from his pocket, snapping it open so that the LCD monitor shone a cool, glacial green, and handed it over to her. “I’ll be back for it in a few minutes. And I’ll have a form or two we’ll need for you to sign, okay?” He stood then, reflexively touching his holster, the way that men from small towns will check their back pockets for their wallets when they visit a big city, and after hovering awkwardly over her for a moment he said, “We haven’t given up, you know.”

For a long minute he looked into her face, trying to present a conviction he could not possibly feel, and then he left through the thick steel door. It closed behind him with a pneumatic hiss.

Janet knew that Christopher would not answer the phone. He was shut away in the library—sometimes pacing, sometimes standing silently, as always—and he would be there for the rest of the night. She would be surprised if he even remembered she was gone. Eventually he would fall asleep in his armchair, a green-shaded table lamp warming his lap, and when he woke in the morning he would shower and walk downstairs and cook his breakfast and pretend that everything was okay. Sometimes, late at night, when Janet stood outside the library door she would hear him talking to himself. It was a habit they shared— speaking out loud to themselves—never in a chatty or a conversational way, but almost subliminally, flinging individual sentences into the air in response to the discussions they were having with themselves in their heads. Janet did it only to reassure herself, she had found:
It will be okay,
she would catch herself saying, or
Don’t you worry.
But when she listened to Christopher he always seemed to be accusing himself in a rage.
Stupid, stupid. I can’t believe it. No. No. It was all your fault.
Before Celia disappeared, they had spoken about having a second child—another girl, they hoped—but now they both found the idea horrifying. Especially Christopher. At breakfast one morning he had erupted with laughter—his own first laughter— when he found an Associated Press article about a man who had drowned after jumping from a 140-foot bridge into a harbor on a dare from his drinking buddies. He read the final sentence of the article aloud, “He told them he’d leaped from higher elevations,” then laughed again and handed the paper to Janet, creased beneath the last paragraph. The headline was MAN SHOUTS “YAHOO,” LEAPS TO DEATH.