Celia gestured as if to push Becky’s words away with her hands.
“I know!” Becky exclaimed. “Can you believe it? About five years ago, I talked to him. First time since I was thirteen. What he remembers is the time he picked up a lamp and threw it against the wall. Heirloom lamp. Belonged to my mother’s grandmother. He feels terrible about it. The wrong way to end a marriage that had to end some way, he told me.” Becky smiled. “I didn’t try to correct him. No point. Plus, he didn’t ask for my opinion. But in this instance you have asked, so I’ll tell you this: I remember standing by the side of the road while you and Djuna went off to argue. Leanne wasn’t wearing a single one of the right colors. Before, she’d always tried to have something—lavender socks, a pink belt. But that day, it was like she had been deliberately trying to take things too far. You haven’t mentioned the haircut, but that’s fine with me; it makes me sick to think of it. Let’s skip ahead. Until that afternoon, at least when it came to Leanne, you and Djuna had always been a united front. You having second thoughts when we got to the road … well, it really pissed Djuna off. You and she had just gone around the curve. Leanne was with me and Josie, staring in your direction with this almost hungry look.” Becky shook her head. “That was when I decided to say something. And when I was spared from having to.”
Becky stared at Celia as if she had forgotten where she was. “If I had come around that curve just a little earlier I would have seen Djuna getting in. That would have been harder to live with, I think, because I might have been stuck thinking I could have done something about it. As it was, the car was already pulling away. When the policeman asked me, all I could tell him was ‘brown.’ You told us she’d gotten a ride home. You said that we had to go straight to her house to make sure. I wasn’t sure why, but you said it with such certainty that I didn’t bother to argue. I spent that walk thinking it was a new beginning, that you and I could finally be friends like before. I was so impressed that you’d stood up to her, that we’d both reached a breaking point at the same time. When we got to Djuna’s, I was going to invite you back to my house, right in front of her. Then we arrived, and Mrs. Pearson answered the door, and of course Djuna wasn’t there. That was when you said you hadn’t recognized the driver and I understood why we’d made the walk. It was the word stranger that did it. Use that word with car and it only means one thing. The mind is good at selective forgetting—Yoshi, the baby, isn’t six months yet and already his birth is fuzzy in my mind—but I still remember standing on Djuna’s front walk, not even knowing I’d peed my pants until I felt it against my leg. Even now, when I think back to you on that road, I’m still impressed. If it had been me, I think I would have gone too. Knowing it was a terrible idea, I would have gotten in that car because Djuna already had. I’ve always wondered how you managed not to do it. I’ve wondered about that more than I care to admit.”
“Becky,” Celia said. “There was no car.”
She had meant to say it quietly, but the women at a neighboring table turned to look. Becky smiled and said something in a language Celia didn’t understand. The women laughed. Becky’s gaze canvassed the dining room before her mouth relaxed again. When she looked at Celia, her eyes were soft.
“Listen, Celia,” she said. “Because I have a simple answer for you.” Becky leaned toward her, and in the angle of Becky’s neck Celia glimpsed a girl seeking artifacts in upturned soil. “Tell Leanne that you’re sorry. An apology is a powerful thing. It’s the advice I would have given my father, if he had ever asked.”
Becky gazed at her watch, then stood and offered her hand. When Celia rose too, Becky cupped Celia’s face and kissed her on both cheeks. “Zei gezunt, Celia. Be well.” By the time Celia noticed the money for the bill, it was too late to give any of it back.
Driving home, Celia owed her safe return to a straight road and few cars, to sixty miles of highway that accommodated a full brain. Becky’s words had knocked something loose, something oddly shaped with a jagged edge. Celia wasn’t sure how the daily ratings had started, only that Leanne had presented herself for inspection each morning. Sometimes she tied her stringy hair into a limp ponytail; sometimes she switched her worn cords for a faded dress. Once, Leanne had proudly presented nails a shade of red filched from her mother’s drawer, the polish overreaching each ragged nail onto the cuticle and fingertip. Negative points, they had told her, too messy a job. Then there was the time Celia and Djuna had surprised Leanne in the girls’ bathroom. With a little boost, Djuna had been able to peer over the stall door at Leanne with her panties around her ankles. Leanne had shrieked as if she’d been smacked. “Just checking,” Djuna had said before she and Celia had run, giggling, into the hall.
When Celia returned to Schubert Street the phone was ringing. She dashed to pick it up, certain it was Mrs. Linke, terrified that if she didn’t answer she wouldn’t get another chance.
“Hello?” she panted.
“Cee?”
Jeremy had a late-night radio DJ’s voice that, at its onset, had sounded like a practical joke, puberty’s first shuffle-step having created a puny, smooth-cheeked boy who sounded like Isaac Hayes. The initial shock of that odd timing had never worn off. Even now Jeremy spoke quietly, still apologizing for a discrepancy long since corrected.
“What’s wrong?” Celia asked, her pulse racing. The last time her brother had called was to announce that Daniel had been born, and before that Celia couldn’t remember. Holiday visits had always been enough, their parents filling in the gaps between.
“Nothing,” he said, and Celia realized that it was true. This was not her phone, not her house, not a place where her idea of normal applied. “But are you okay?” he asked. “You sound a little strange.”
“Sorry. I forgot where I was. When the phone rang, I just—”
“No worries,” he said. “I was just calling about Saturday. Mom wasn’t sure whether you wanted to do brunch or dinner, and I was going to leave a message to say that either would be fine.” He paused. “You know, I was kind of surprised when Mom said you were here.”
“It was pretty spontaneous,” Celia said.
“Is something up? You’re not sick or anything, are you? Or are you and Huck—”
“We’re fine. I’m fine.” Celia walked to the kitchen’s edge and then back again, a reflex from a corded age. “I’m trying to track down some old friends. I’ll tell you about it when you come on Saturday.”
“Who?”
“Huh?”
“Who are you trying to track down?”
When awareness of her cordless state erased the desire to pace, Celia sank into a kitchen chair. “You probably wouldn’t remember her, but I actually just came back from seeing Becky Miller.”
“Becky Miller,” Jeremy echoed. “Brainy girl with bangs and bony arms. Crazy-sounding laugh. You and her were always going off on expeditions.”
“Jem, how do you know that? You were, like, seven at the time.” Her father’s chair offered a wider backyard view than her own place at the table. Celia could see all the way to the side-yard privacy fence, its cedar planking a bulwark against a rising tide.
“Pam calls it my elephant brain,” Jeremy said. “But Becky’s easy. She saved my life.”
“What?”
“Well, not really, but it felt like it at the time. The three of us were coming back from the creek.”
“I forgot you would play with us,” Celia said. “She really liked having you around.”
“I think I was the closest she ever got to being an older sister,” Jeremy said. “Anyway, we were crossing a street on the way home, when I stepped into a place in the road where the asphalt had fallen in. It wasn’t big enough for a traffic cone. I don’t think it was much bigger than a kid’s foot, but I managed to step in it anyway and went down past my knee. A car was coming, but I was so surprised that I didn’t move. You and Becky were already across. You were yelling at me to get out of the street, but Becky ran back out and held up her han
d to stop the car. You felt bad because you were supposed to have been holding my hand. Even if the car hadn’t seen me it would have missed me. It was a pretty wide road, but when Becky did that she became a superhero, or at least someone I knew I was going to marry someday. It’s funny, hearing her name again.”
Celia tried to call up Jeremy’s story but could only summon its constituent parts, a handful of jigsaw pieces that seemed drawn from different puzzles.
“Jem,” she asked into the phone, “was I ever cruel?”
“It wasn’t like you left me in the road on purpose. It was an accident.”
“I don’t mean then,” Celia said. “I mean in general. Was I?”
Jeremy laughed. “What would make you think that?”
“But if I was, you would tell me, right?” she asked.
“Sure, but you weren’t. You were a pretty good big sister. If you want mean, you should talk to Pam; her brothers make the rest of us look like saints.”
Celia tried to assess her reflection in the kitchen window. She felt unequal to memory’s hidden mechanism of cogs and wheels.
“Seeing Becky today made me think about someone else I used to know, a girl named Leanne.”
She waited.
“Her I don’t remember,” Jeremy said. “You must not have brought her home. Look, how are the dogs? Are the dogs all right?”
Her brother had only ever seen pictures. “The dogs are good.”
“Good,” said Jeremy. “I’ll see you Saturday, then. Brunch, dinner, whatever. And if you don’t mind me asking, where is Becky?”
“Becky?”
“You said you saw her?”
“She lives in Scranton, if you can believe it.”
“Wow, Scranton.” He paused. “Is she happy?”
Celia hadn’t considered it. “Yeah,” she told him. “I think she is.”
“Happy is good,” Jeremy said.
CHAPTER 9
Returning to her brother’s room after hanging up with him felt like trespassing, but Celia had nowhere else to go. To postpone coming back to the computer, she briefly pivoted right instead of left at the end of the hall. Stripped of meaningful possessions, her old bedroom had succumbed to that universal law regarding nature and vacuums: the closet had been overrun by her parents’ off-season clothes, and gifts from two careers of office holiday parties populated the bottom drawers of her old bureau. The room’s edges had been colonized by assorted boxes—financial documents, wrapping paper, Christmas decorations—all easier to fetch from an unoccupied bedroom than from beneath the attic’s low-hung ceiling. The few remaining childhood items—the high bed with its dotted quilt and matching bed skirt, a faded poster of Elton John, the shelf that held a dusty souvenir glass from junior prom, an abandoned Child’s Garden of Verses, and several nondescript stuffed animals that had failed to inspire names—were too scant to project a younger self among them. Celia felt no more attached to this room than a hermit crab to its discarded shell.
The same feeling had found her earlier that week in Chicago, though thinking back to Monday felt like peering into a funhouse mirror that stretched three days into something impossibly distant. The street corner had grown blurry in her mind, and all that remained of the office were Gary’s and Helene’s expressions, but Celia remembered the reverse commute, the girls’ giddy barks at the sound of her arrival, the click of their nails on the far side of the apartment door, and finally the reprieve of Bella and Sylvie licking her face, their bodies solid and warm and forgiving everything. Celia had been sitting on the couch when the apartment became a museum. She had pictured a placard beside Huck’s guitar in its corner, curatorial labels beside the photos she’d had matted and framed to celebrate their first year in the apartment, even an instructive diagram of herself sitting on her customary couch cushion on the left-hand side, Huck to her right. In the time between that morning’s departure and her return, these had become historical truths, artifacts from her life as it had once been.
Huck liked to point out that history was a retrospective pastime. Because it was impossible to intuit the future significance of any given moment, it was always a good idea to be your best possible self, increasing the odds of not wanting to disown whatever inadvertent history you created. What was Huck’s rallying cry in the classroom became his mantra when he got particularly stoned at parties and propounded upon the potential future significance of this very moment, this one right now. The idea charmed or irritated Celia, depending on her mood, but sitting with the dogs on the couch that Monday she had sensed its truth. Earlier that morning—as she and Huck had gotten dressed, toasted their bagels, and headed out into their respective days—they had unwittingly experienced the end of an era, the last link of a deteriorating chain.
Inside the evacuation zone of Jeremy’s old room, Celia sat at her brother’s desk. Its surface had once hosted an evolving array of fantasy figurines, game cartridges, baseball books, and CDs. Now there was just her father’s computer, a Conklin Junior College mug with pens and a pair of scissors, and a Mensa calendar abandoned at a puzzle for a Wednesday three Aprils past. On a faded Post-it note attached to the monitor, a list in Warren’s hand proposed Furnace?, Chimney?, Tax Receipts, Vacuum Cleaner Bags, with only the last two items crossed through. Beyond the desk, Jeremy’s bare mattress had been draped with a green blanket that still bore creases from its original packaging. Its crispness, like that of the new carpet, was at odds with the empty shelves, the patched walls, the flaccid curtains sewn from bedsheets so long ago that the sun had bleached their blue stripes to gray.
Leanne had already written back. The e-mail’s electronic postmark awakened in Celia a dormant species of hive knowledge: Leanne had pressed Send while Celia and Becky had been conducting their mutual interview. Once upon a time, Celia had known when Djuna ate her dinner, when Becky took her bath. She had prized this information with the inarticulate ardor that presages sex. Back when passion was still in utero—a beating heart without legs—its rudiments had been present but primal, means that had not yet acquired perceivable ends. Friendship had been fathomed by phone—It’s four thirty, are you watching The Flintstones?—the question both test and assertion. Djuna was always right, even when she wasn’t—but when Becky or Josie called, Celia would sometimes deny them. No, I’m doing homework, she would say, muting the television to make it seem true. As Celia stared at Leanne’s name on the computer screen, she wondered what Josie had been doing at 1:43 P.M., the diminished hydra of their friendship briefly revived.
From: Lee Forrest
To: Celia Durst
Subject: Re: Re:
Celia—You wanted to know if I still think about Djuna. The past isn’t something I spend a whole lot of time on anymore, but sometimes I wonder about the guy who took her. Mostly if he wants to find forgiveness or if he even knows what he did. If he was tricked up on something, he might have been a stranger even to himself. It’s a miracle my own memory didn’t go the way of my liver, though a little amnesia might have been nice. At least when it came time for me to make my amends, writing out my list was pretty straightforward. By the way, I told my sponsor about that people-finding Web site. I wish that sort of thing had been around seven years ago.
Since you said you wanted to face up to what happened when we were kids, I’m guessing that you’re trying to make some amends of your own. It’s true you weren’t the nicest person to me back then and sometimes you were just plain evil, but it’s not like I put up a fight. If you were even half as miserable as I was, it’s a wonder you didn’t act five times worse, which is my way of saying that if you’ve got your own list you’re working your way down, you can consider me crossed off. I didn’t hold on to any of that stuff after Djuna disappeared. To be honest, I think I saw what happened to her as a sort of rough justice. Just goes to show what a vindictive little fucker I was when I was a girl.
If you do end up tracking Becky down, let me know how she’s doing, okay?
—Lee
She thought to consult her watch only after she had dialed.
“Can I call you back?” Huck asked. “I’m with a student.”
Celia tried to say something that passed for acquiescence.
“You sound terrible,” he said. “Hang on.”
His voice disappeared, then returned.
“You still there?”
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I didn’t check the time.”
“It’s all right. School’s out. Jackson was just hanging around. Tell me what’s going on.”
“Wait,” she said. She left her brother’s room and crossed the hall. She closed the bedroom door behind her, habit guarding her conversation from the hollow ear of the empty house.
“I found them,” she said.
The bed beneath her dotted quilt held her like a steadying palm. Celia started with Josie, then proceeded to Becky in Scranton. “I was prepared for Becky to be surprised,” she said, “but not for her to believe that she had actually seen the car.”
The silence that followed was just long enough to cause Celia’s jaw to clench.
“What exactly did Becky say about it?” Huck asked. “I mean, did she basically repeat the same story you told back then or did she—”
“She said that she remembered seeing a brown car. I didn’t ask her for details, okay? I mean, why would I ask about something that didn’t exist?”
When Celia closed her eyes, she saw Becky leaning across the table, her face close enough to show the bobby pins along the edge of her scalp.
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