The Truth About Celia

by Kevin Brockmeier

  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 li
kes 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.

  Tommy Taulbee is already calling the last name on the roster, James Young, when his three missing students come through the door: Pierre Douglas, Chrissy Symancyk, and Ethan Hummer. They slump into their seats, sinking so far that he can barely see their faces, and he makes three quick checkmarks by their names. The way his students sit at their desks makes him think of miners being lowered into the earth, or moles disappearing into their burrows. His back winces just to look at them. It is the first time in more than a month that his entire class has been here, and he pauses to admire the descending row of identical checkmarks in his roster. He has always, ever since he was a boy, loved images like this: the clean downward repetition of signs and letters. He assigns his students a freewriting exercise on the topic of family, and for thirty minutes, while they scratch away with their pens and pencils, he grades the last of their papers from the day before. The wind pushing through the courtyard makes a sandy noise against the window. The PA system clicks once or twice and then falls silent. When their time is up, he collects his students’ exercises from the front of the room and spends the last fifteen minutes of the hour giving them their next major assignment, which is due in mid-October. They have been studying African folklore in their textbook, and he wants them to write a folktale of their own, an original story that either teaches a lesson or presents the origin of something or relates the exploits of a god or a hero. After he has read the assignment to them, he says that he will be happy to answer any questions they have, and Melanie Sparks, who was Celia’s baby-sitter, raises her hand and asks if her folktale can be a work of fiction.

  Mr. Taulbee’s mouth sneaks open in a sort of punctured smile before he seals it off. Yes, he says, the folktales they write can and in fact should be fiction. He does this sort of thing all the time, Melanie has noticed—answers her questions as though he were talking to the whole class. Whatever. She shuffles her deck of cards behind the broad shoulders of Danny Ergenbright, quietly folding them together, and lays out another hand of solitaire. When she uncovers the aces, she always fills them in this order: hearts for love, spades for skill, clubs for power, and diamonds for money. She feels like she is making a wish, and if she wins the game it will come true. Danny starts to slouch in his chair, exposing the top of her desk to Mr. Taulbee, and she takes her pen and raps him on that soft spot at the root of his skull. Sit up straight, she whispers, and he does, because he has a thing for her. For a few months after Celia disappeared, Melanie was afraid to leave her house. She imagined that she could be pulled out of her skin at any time, and she refused to go anywhere alone, not even to water the plants in her backyard. She would need every resource she had, she thought, all the power and skill in the world, just to walk safely out her own front door, and for a while she filled her aces in a different order: clubs, spades, hearts, and diamonds. She used to read Celia’s favorite books to her, Matilda and Lizard Music, Frindle and Charlotte’s Web, after they had finished their dinner and before she put her to bed. Melanie was fourteen back then, twice as old as Celia, and in a few years she will be twenty-one, one and a half times as old. When she thinks about her future, about graduating and going to college, getting married and having children, she imagines that she can feel Celia catching up to her, one and a third, one and a quarter, one and an eighth, breathing like a ghost across the soft hairs on the back of her neck. The bell rings on the other side of the courtyard, and the sixth- and seventh-graders come trickling and then pouring out of Springfield Middle School.

  Melanie lays the five of hearts on top of the four, and the six on top of the five. Kristen Lanzetta can see her sitting at her desk, striped with sunlight from the windows at the back of the classroom, and these stripes, along with the bending limpness of her body, make her look like a stick of Juicy Fruit, Kristen’s favorite chewing gum. The middle school lets out five minutes earlier than the high school. Kristen heads straight for the bus and takes her usual seat on the long bench at the back, beside her friend Andrea Onopa. When Kristen asks Andrea whether she’s planning to go to the funeral tonight, Andrea says that she isn’t sure, it depends on what her dad wants her to do. Well, I’m not going, Kristen says. Or at least she doesn’t think she is. Celia was Kristen’s best friend, but that was more than four years ago, an entire lifetime. She was only in the first grade then, and she is in the sixth now. The bus rumbles out of the parking lot, and she watches the telephone lines rise and fall outside the window. Her mother has explained to her how time thins out as you grow older, how the four years between seven and eleven are as long in their way—how they contain as much of your life—as the ten years between thirty and forty. Her mother says that life is like a pitcher filling with water, and unless you’re one of those people who manages to forget her childhood as it passes, the pitcher will already be half-full by the time you’re eighteen. It is an idea that has always frightened Kristen, and so she has tried hard to forget everything she possibly can: the names of her old teachers, the inside jokes she used to know, the movies she has seen. By now Celia is only a few whitened memories to her and a blurred feeling of sadness. The bus slows to take a speed bump, and, as always, as soon as the front wheels have thumped over, the bus driver accelerates, so that when the back wheels hit, the girls are bucked into the air, landing hard on their tailbones. When Kristen looks out the back window, she sees a thick band of clouds at the horizon, pressed together like rolls of fat. They are a charcoal black, though the rest of the sky is still open and blue. A police car glides in next to the bus at a stoplight, and the boy in front of her pumps his arm in the air as though the car were a tractor trailer, trying to get the police officer to sound his siren.

  Kimson Perry gives the siren a single clipped b-woop and then flashes his revolving lights, nodding at the boy on the bus, who is offering him the thumbs-up sign. When the stoplight changes he shoots along the reservoir toward home. It is nearly four-thirty, and he still has to shower and change for the memorial service. At the head of his block stands the Second Friendship Baptist Church, a small brick building with a cross on the roof that rotates in the wind like a weather vane, and as he turns the corner he brakes to read the signboard on the lawn:

  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.