When he’d walked through the apartment door, there’d been no reason to think that she had beaten him home, nothing to indicate a difference between that Monday and any other. Huck had taken the girls for their afternoon walk, and was coming into the bedroom to fetch a magazine. He reached his side of the bed before noticing her, the surprise of it causing him to jump as if she’d crept up from behind. “Ceel?” he’d said, as if he wasn’t sure. She’d woken him that morning with the usual hand on his shoulder, his name pronounced in that way that recalled the creak of their aging couch, the sound of something that needed to be fixed. As Huck had stood over Celia in the half-light cast by the approaching dusk, he had struggled to imagine a malady dire enough to send her home from work. She’d been known to barricade herself inside her private office with herbal tea, ibuprofen, and zinc lozenges to avoid taking a sick day. Huck had considered the possibility that nursing her through some awful affliction would force an end to his late mornings, and perhaps return him to the sort of person who ministered to the slow-draining sink in the bathroom, the loose bedroom-door handle, or their beloved creaking couch. He would restore Celia to wellness, and himself to a person who did all the stuff he was supposed to do, and by the following week they’d both be their normal selves again.
But Celia hadn’t been sick. They’d sat on the couch, her body huddled against his like someone desperate for warmth. Huck hadn’t been able to see Celia’s face, and this had conspired with the utter incongruity of what she was saying to turn her unfamiliar. For not more than two heartbeats, Huck had found himself inhabiting a stranger’s life. It was one of the most frightening things that had ever happened to him. The furniture, the dogs, the woman beside him—Huck had wanted none of it, recognized nothing. “Oh dear,” he’d said, the sound of his voice bringing him back. When he had grasped Celia’s chin and turned her toward him, her features were vulnerable in a way he’d never witnessed, a sight as surprising as raindrops falling up, or the ocean going still. Gone was the woman of recipes and how-to manuals, schedules and flow charts, each task reduced to its composite steps. Huck telephoned the airline himself to book their respective flights, then held Celia’s hand as she’d called home. The dogs rose to their feet when Celia spoke Djuna’s name, the fragility of her voice awakening a protective instinct that manifested in Huck as a faster pulse and the need to hold her close. Celia’s self-reliance was such a constant that its disintegration was no less revealing than Huck’s first sight of her naked, sleeping body. As they’d discussed how she should approach the coming week, Huck’s solicitude had paired with Celia’s uncertainty to provide a new kind of union.
Neither of them had slept that night. Smoking usually helped Huck, but Celia had lately become bothered again by his habit, so instead he had spent long swaths of time taking deep, even breaths and trying not to move. This had bestowed the single advantage of allowing him to follow her out of bed so that she hadn’t needed to wake him the morning of her flight. He’d been kissing her good-bye when he realized that it had been weeks since they’d last had sex, and it struck him that something was happening to them, had been happening for a while now—a sound beneath the threshold of their hearing, a vibration so slow and steady that it had been mistaken for stillness.
“Wait,” he’d said, and watched as Celia’s shoulders tensed. The dogs had pricked their ears.
Sharing his discovery would have meant forcing her to carry it with her onto the plane. For the next four days, it would have occupied the empty place beside her on the mattress, casting its own imprint on the second pillow.
“I’ll miss you,” he had said instead, and kissed her again. She’d smiled, and then was gone.
CHAPTER 5
At night, the tartan walls of the Scottish Suite could be mistaken for tasteful in the ambient light, which was just bright enough to allow Celia to read the titles lining the bookshelf along the far wall. This informal history of family pursuits abandoned or outgrown was arranged by topic, with sections devoted to genealogy, home maintenance, career self-diagnostics, school counseling, gardening, and fantasy baseball. A selection of guidebooks—some well-worn, others pristine, all domestic—attested to Warren’s ambition to drive to all the major national parks, an aspiration he’d shelved when gas had topped two dollars a gallon. Without an actual guest beside her, Celia felt uncomfortably aligned with the guest bedroom’s castoffs, an exile with nowhere else to go.
Her loneliness that first night magnified the foldout bed’s usual discomforts, shuttling her from oblivion into hyperalertness, her brain humming with imaginary versions of all the conversations she needed to have. After a failed attempt at slow, deep breathing, Celia tried to drown her thoughts in a torrent of trivia from her most recent audits. She counted sheep by summoning scores from PepsiCo’s successful vending bid over Coca-Cola. She recited the various percentages by which requests for psych-hospital beds had surpassed capacity. At some point a threshold of exhaustion was reached. Statistics beat down her mental rehearsals for the coming day until none of it sounded like language, her words denatured, her head filled with bleats and yowls.
When mid-morning angled its way through a gap in the window shade, she jolted upright, panicked that she hadn’t walked the dogs. One foot was on the floor before she remembered where she was. According to her watch it was eight A.M. Her father would have left early in order to swim, but her mother’s school day didn’t start until nine. “Mommy?” she called, even though the stillness of the house told her she was alone. Her watch was still running on Central time.
Celia braved the hallway in her nightshirt. As children, she and Jeremy had been permitted downstairs in pajamas, but their parents only ever left the bedroom fully clothed. At some point Celia had adopted this habit, until Huck—early on in their courtship, the first demand of her he ever made—refused to serve post-coital pancakes to a woman wearing anything more than a bathrobe. The stairway carpet on the soles of Celia’s feet felt like Christmas morning, circa 1981. In the kitchen, she found a note beside a fresh half pot of coffee—Good Morning! Call me when you wake up. Love, Mom, the office number penned beneath, as if Celia could have forgotten. Through the kitchen window, the day proceeded without her. Celia was briefly a child kept out of school. Sunlight through the hummingbird feeder stretched an illumined band of red across the table’s surface. Birds were new. When Celia was growing up, her father had taken in a stray kitten, an avid hunter who—by the time Celia left for college—still had not gotten over a formative, stray-life trauma that compelled it to mewl between mouthfuls of food. A month after Howler’s death, Noreen had bought the hummingbird feeder in wordless protest against the idea of adopting another.
When Celia began to dial, she realized that her mother’s number did not exist in her mind as serial digits, but as a pattern her fingers tap-danced across the phone’s numeric grid. Her mother picked up on the first ring.
“Good morning, this is Noreen Durst.”
“Hi, Mom.”
Celia had forgotten this brisker version of her mother, whose voice had overseen her daily return from middle school, marshaling the hours that separated her children’s homecoming from her own. Later, that voice became the arbiter of adolescent sick days, fake and genuine, Celia’s fate decided by a judge far less suggestible over the phone.
“Celie! I’m so glad you called. Did you just wake up?”
“Yeah.” A smiley face beamed from the note’s bottom edge. “Thanks for the coffee.”
“Did you eat yet?” Noreen asked. “Everything’s where we always keep it, except the cereal, which isn’t in the pantry anymore. Your father moved it to the cabinet—”
“—above the coffeemaker, I know. It’s been that way for years.”
“Has it? Well, in the grand scheme of things it hasn’t been there long. My goodness, Celie, when was the last time you called me at school?”
Through the receiver Celia heard a bell, the sound upping her pulse as if no time had pas
sed. She checked the wall clock: second period had just begun. “That’s funny,” she said once the bell had stopped. “I was just wondering the same thing.”
“Maybe it’s the school phone line,” Noreen mused, “but your voice sounds exactly like it used to. Your high school phone voice.”
“Really?”
“This morning when I told Beverley that you were coming, we dusted off the yearbook from your senior year and took a look. I forgot how cramped the guidance suite used to be.”
“I’m glad I finally get to see your new office.”
“Not so new anymore. I got a ride with Lynne so you could have a car. She said it’s no trouble for her to drive me all week.”
Celia had overlooked that forgoing a rental meant depending on her parents for transportation for the first time since she’d turned sixteen.
“What time are you coming?” her mother asked.
Celia reset her watch. An hour of morning was swept away. “Would eleven fifteen be okay?”
“I told the ladies at the main office that you’d be stopping in, but you’ll still need to show ID. Everything has become much more bureaucratic.”
Through the receiver Celia heard the click of a door being shut. The ambient office sounds at the other end of the line ceased. Celia’s mother had been cubicle-bound until the head counselor’s retirement. Noreen had been dismissive of the promotion, which automatically went to the most senior employee. Most counselors stayed on just long enough to learn they wanted a different career, a process of disillusionment that lasted anywhere between one and four years.
“Celie?” she asked, as if uncertain her daughter was still there. “Did you sleep all right? Last night you looked so … tired. I got the feeling that your father and I had tuckered you out.”
Celia was thankful there was no witness to her expression, which she’d last worn with hairspray and raspberry lip gloss.
“I slept fine, Mom. See you soon, all right?”
“There might be one hard-boiled egg,” Noreen said. “Check the cold cut drawer on the left-hand side.” Celia did not want an egg. After hanging up she opened the drawer. There was the egg, the very last one.
Even had Celia not spent four years remanded to her mother’s place of employment, Jensenville High would have been easy to find. The school sat on a hill above the banks of the flood-prone Chenango like a giant box waiting to be filled with unwanted kittens and tossed in. It had been built in the energy-conscious 1970s, when a windowless building had seemed like a forward-thinking idea. Most people took it for a prison. On a neighboring hill, the graceful onion bulbs of the town’s Eastern Orthodox church curved against the skyline with all the beauty the school did not possess. Since graduation, Celia had returned there only in her sleep.
The sight of the parking lot was both familiar and strange, like a gap-toothed former babysitter who had gotten bridgework. In Celia’s day, the student lot had organized itself around Accords and Volvos that had sweetened sixteens in Jensenville’s hillside neighborhood, and retooled Camaros and pickups from the floodplain side of town. The SUV had demolished these distinctions. Rarely had teenage tastes dovetailed so smoothly and universally with parental priorities, insulating car-infatuated children from their own inexperience and poor judgment with a ride guaranteed to annihilate anything it hit, scraped, or ran down.
The school building itself was utterly unchanged. A familiar sense of dread settled in Celia’s belly as she approached, a reflex born of countless mornings sacrificed to its shadow. Only the front plaza was different: to the right, a bench gifted by the class of 1995 faced a bust dwarfed by its pedestal. On closer inspection, the bust—inscribed with the name William Jensen, gift of the class of 1996—was only slightly smaller than life, but the class must have spent their entire gift budget on its commission. The base was a donation, a monumental thing that turned the town founder into a pinhead. The opposite edge of the walk displayed a gray boulder the size of a crouching child. On it were carved the words JENSENVILLE HIGH, GIFT OF CLASS OF 1993, above which hovered the school’s mascot, the Jensenville Jay’s wings outspread in its trademark gesture of capitulation. The rock reminded Celia of a marker designating the future resting place of herself and her former classmates, all of them to be interred beneath in eternal, obligatory reunion.
Having already funneled its students to their respective classrooms, the school’s front hall was empty, its glass showcase in the same neglected spot outside the front office. Its plaques, trophies, and newspaper photos were indistinguishable from the detritus of achievement that had filled it in Celia’s day. She looked at it briefly, her eyes sweeping over the faces of students whose adult trajectories would lead them either to gloss over these moments or to spend their lives pining for their return. Celia’s vague recollection of the school’s main office was sharpened by the wait to be acknowledged from behind its counter. Within minutes, the muscles of her face remembered its supplicatory smile. There were three desks, which seemed like two more than necessary. Celia saw a bottle of nail polish on one, a paperback on another. Forms were shuffled, phone receivers picked up and replaced in a show of busyness. Finally, as if it had only just occurred to her, the nail-polish secretary turned toward the long, narrow counter that represented the length and breadth of her domain. Once Celia had signed in, cries of “Oh, you’re Noreen’s daughter!” were followed by mutual visual inspections. Two of the secretaries wore the hoop earrings, acrylic nails, and hand-drawn eyebrows of blue-collar Jensenville; the third, the French manicure and gold studs of the hillside middle class. The younger two still wore their hair long, but once they hit menopause they too would go short like the secretary with hair like Celia’s mother. Celia’s appraisals were no less mercenary than the secretaries’ raking stares. This was what high school did to people.
The older one said, “Back to visit your mom?” in a voice that evoked a smoke-damaged June Cleaver. A voice like that had logged Celia’s late arrivals but she couldn’t tell if this was the same one. In high school she’d never bothered to discern individuals among ambient personnel over thirty. Celia nodded, and gazes returned to desks in a collective vote of disappointment. Barring the dispatch of a behavior problem to the vice principal, it looked as though the day’s highlight would be confined to lunch from the new take-out place. Without ceremony, the daughter of Noreen from Guidance was granted an adhesive tag and ejected into the hall.
Celia had arrived in the middle of fourth period. The only visible students stared out from class election posters decorating the hallway. For a portion of a portion of a second, Celia was fifteen again and late to English. Then the feeling disappeared, and she was once again a thirty-two-year-old examining homemade flyers taped to a wall. The current crop of aspiring presidents and treasurers showed the same bluster that had passed for experience when Celia was a sophomore, but with more ethnic variation. One of Celia’s private embarrassments after moving to Chicago was a late-blooming awareness of her childhood’s uniculture. Born to a brick monolith, she had not known to miss windows.
The school’s guidance suite was at the far end of the second floor. As a freshman, Celia had climbed back stairwells to avoid passing it on her way to class. Even now, her internal awareness of the place remained her personal magnetic north. She could feel the assertion of that private compass point—lying to her left as she crossed the first-floor hallway, moving center-right as she mounted the stairs. Jensenville was small enough that a few of Celia’s classmates had been the children of teachers. Celia suspected they thought she had gotten the better deal, but to her teenaged mind a teacher was less embarrassing. It was the word counselor that did it, binding her to a mother professionally certified to dispense advice.
The guidance suite’s location above the music room had earned it carpeting. Tufted broadloom easily squelched the treble atrocity of Flute Choir—a concession to the chronic popularity of the instrument (so thin!) among dieting girls—but even deepest shag would not
have muted the marching band. On rainy afternoons, or when the outside temperature dropped below 45 degrees, thumps and screeches radiated upward. The first thing Celia noticed was that brown carpet had been traded for blue. There were fewer cubicles, the school’s guidance personnel having dwindled along with Jensenville’s student population. Geometric lines of darker carpet color marked where the cubicles had been, a shadow grid of deeper blue compromised by fewer coffee stains and blots of trampled gum.
Celia’s arrival was met by anxious glances from two girls sitting inside the door, but their faces relaxed as soon as they judged her to be irrelevant. One wall of the waiting area was given to posters eschewing drugs, suicide, and sex, the other to glossy college photos. Celia wondered if there was significance to the girls’ position beneath the wall of vice.
“How can I help you?”
The guidance suite secretary asked the question in a way that did not leave Celia feeling as if she was being appraised for gossip or entertainment value, a quality Celia suspected had impressed her mother when Noreen was deciding who to hire for the job.
“Wait a minute, you must be Celia!” the secretary revised. “You’re just a perfect grown-up version of your yearbook picture. I’m Beverley. You’ve got your mother’s eyes.”
On hearing the word mother, the heads of the girls turned.
“This lucky woman is Mrs. Durst’s daughter,” Beverley explained. To Celia’s mortification, she found herself blushing.
“For real?” one of the girls said. At first glance, Celia thought her baby doll T-shirt spelled NUBILE in gold across the front. Celia had forgotten how pristine teenagers were—their bad habits still nascent, their bodies still indefatigable. Celia blinked. The T-shirt read NUBIAN. The girl could just as easily have been freshman or senior. Somewhere in the intervening decades, Celia had lost the ability to tell.
The False Friend Page 5