“I miss you too,” she said.
“You’re in the bedroom?” he said.
“Yeah.”
“The door’s closed?”
“Of course,” she said, checking again to make sure.
“Walk to the mirror.”
“I don’t know, Huck.”
“Let’s do this, Ceel. At least let’s try.”
It was the idea that she might do something for him.
“What are you wearing?” he asked.
“Nothing good,” she said. “My green sweater with the black pants. It’s what I wore to lunch.”
“Your green V-neck?”
“Yeah.”
“The one you wear with the camisole?”
“Yeah. Look, tomorrow night, once you’re here—”
“No, no,” he said. “This is perfect. Now listen: take off your bra and your camisole—but keep the sweater on—and then tell me what you see.”
They’d only ever done this once before, years ago. Huck had been attending a teaching conference in Wisconsin. He had woken her with his call, talking low and urgent into the phone. His voice had tipped something inside her.
Celia withdrew her arms from their sleeves and shimmied each in turn down the camisole’s inside seam. She remembered her single-minded optimism as she had dressed that morning, then pushed the memory aside. She reached behind to unclasp and slipped her bra straps from her shoulders. She pulled the bra from the bottom, the camisole through the neck. She pictured Huck with the phone pressed to his ear, alive to each slight sound.
“Okay,” she said.
“Tell me.”
“I took them off just like you said.”
“Tell me. You slid your arms out—”
“I took my arms out my sleeves and then took off the camisole from inside the sweater. Then I undid my bra.”
“One hand or two?”
“One. I just reached around and—”
“That’s right, you just reached around. Now, I know you’re standing at the mirror, because I told you to, but I bet you’re too far away. Stand close. Stand so that you fill it up.”
She moved closer, stood so that her shoulders spanned the mirror’s width.
“Okay,” she said.
“Can you see your mole?”
“What mole?”
“Have we never talked about this?”
She was unaccustomed to the sweater’s weft on her shoulder blades, her nipples.
“I don’t think so,” she said.
“The red mole on the curve of your left breast. Perched above your cleavage like it’s thinking of jumping in. Perfectly round, size of a sugar bead.”
She stepped even closer, leaned her head in.
“Oh,” she said.
“I bet you can just see it along the left edge of the V-neck.”
“How do you know that?”
“It’s my job to know. Now listen: I want you to keep that sweater on.”
“Okay.”
“I want you to keep it on the whole time. And don’t think you can fool me. I’ll know if you cheat.”
“Yes,” she said, warmth spreading from the center of her chest.
“Now go back to the bed,” he said. “Shuck your pants and panties. I want you naked from the waist down, on your back, knees bent, your legs spread wide.”
She tested the guest room door one last time, and wedged a blanket in the space below the door’s bottom edge. Then she lay down on the bed and did exactly what Huck told her to do.
CHAPTER 12
She was in the woods, the road in the distance, the silence around her punctuated by the phwa of passing cars. She turned her girl’s body back around, away from the road, and started back through the trees. She crossed the woods, the road behind her, the branches black slashes against the sky. Celia arrived at a dark hole in the ground the size of a soup bowl and startled awake, fear and longing pounding at her chest. A friendship like hers and Djuna’s could only ever be a child’s possession. Only a child could withstand its stranglehold.
Celia was dressed and backing the car out of the driveway before she realized she pictured Ripley Road only through school bus windows. The bus windshield view had delivered a seam of pitted asphalt lined by trees, no dashed yellow line to marshal the cars that careened down the hill. One window seat had offered successive slivers of house, glimpsed between trees like a giant zoëtrope. Opposite was a forest from Brothers Grimm, the foliage thick and unruly, and wrapped with vines. These images were unallied to any larger, internal map. Ripley Road had been etched into her memory when destinations were still passive affairs. To get there now, Celia would have to ghost her elementary school bus route, abdicating street names for childhood landmarks: a certain house, a certain street corner, an intersection at an acute angle, a gradual uphill grade past a church and then a quick left-hand turn.
Celia drove on instinct, relying on her child’s memory to tell her when to turn. The bus had traced a fractal path through hills, to houses strung like beads along winding back roads. Along the way, Celia encountered a wider road, an expanded church building, a grocery store where once there had been an empty lot, but most of the scenery remained. When she passed the railroad tracks, the plant nursery, the rough-hewn fence that enclosed a tiny clapboard house whose shutters were as green as her memory’s claim, each rediscovered landmark resonated within her like a gently plucked string.
The five of them had walked along the road’s narrow shoulder. Cars had passed in blasts of speed that launched pebbles at their legs with slingshot force. Celia remembered a pocked speed-limit sign at the curve in the road where Djuna ran ahead. When Celia had started into the woods, the sound of her breath had been drowned out by the percussion of so much tinder underfoot.
There had once been a fire, kindled by lightning, more than a school bus rumor because it had made the local news. This was in second grade, before Djuna’s time, when getting a window seat had been the most important thing. The day after the blaze, Celia remembered cupping her hands to her eyes and pressing her face to the rattling window glass. She had pictured trees reduced to charred skeletons, the forest’s secrets finally revealed, but the view along the road had remained unchanged. The fire became another story, one more secret the woods kept to itself.
Celia’s memory proved a perfect navigator until the final turn. The last street before Ripley felt longer than it should. At the top of the hill, where Celia was expecting an abutment, there was instead a curve that brought her to an unfamiliar traffic signal. She retraced her path in search of a missed turn, but everything until that final intersection matched. She reversed herself once more, driving back toward the unfamiliar traffic light.
When Celia turned through the intersection onto the strange street, she noticed the sign. The narrow, winding road had become a four-lane highway. North- and southbound straightaways extended as far as she could see, a simple exercise in one-point perspective, asphalt lines drawn along a gigantic ruler. Celia looked out her car window to where she had hoped to retrace Djuna’s path through the woods. She gaped at the office plaza where the forest once had been.
CHAPTER 13
The Jensenville Library inhabited the former home of the late William Jensen in what had once been the posh part of town, a street of three-story brick mansions limping into the twenty-first century in various states of subdivision and decay. Verandas and multiple chimneys, cupolas and Palladian windows adorned crumbling brick facades like heirloom jewelry on the exhausted skins of dowager aunts. Former ballrooms, dining rooms, and conservatories had been divvied up between doctors’ offices and real estate brokers, hairdressers and insurance agents. Among the subdivided was the orthodontist Celia had visited to have her braces tightened. Once every three weeks for two and a half years, Celia had walked the ten blocks from middle school to his office, and from there to the library where Noreen would pick her up. With the abrupt intensity of an acid flashback Celia recalled the sphincter-t
ightening revulsion of being made to bite into the soft, thick wax for the dental mold. Preserved was the view of poorly shaved Adam’s apple from the reclining dental chair, the orthodontist leaning over to apply dull force to her molar, the sound of his ministrations conducted through the bones of her skull. Dr. Krantz. His name was Dr. Krantz. As Celia now passed through the library’s front door, her upper jaw ached like a phantom limb.
Though the town founder’s good intentions were abundantly indicated by the plaque neighboring his life-sized statue in the library vestibule—“I give this, my house, as a repository of knowledge for the city of Jensenville, so that it might become as a second home to hungry minds”—the reality was that the place felt less like a second home than an overstuffed closet. Aside from the front entry’s mullioned windows, every other aperture had come to be blocked by additional bookshelves. Post-Jensen-era fluorescent light fixtures hummed along the length and breadth of plaster ceilings. Celia made for the side room, but the reference librarian’s desk had been replaced by a row of computer stations. The face of the late William Jensen bounced sedately within the glowing rectangle of each monitor’s blue screen.
At this time on a weekday morning, the library was refuge to the retired, the unemployed, and the unemployable. At a far table, a middle-aged man in a polyester sports coat and a tie the length and width of a cow’s tongue examined a book with malign suspicion; through a doorway, a woman held an Us magazine in one hand while using the other to suspend a bottle over a stroller at the level of her sleeping infant’s mouth.
“Excuse me,” called a voice behind her. “Would you like to sign up for computer time?”
Celia turned. The librarian of her childhood had been a cardiganed creature of onionskin, a pair of glasses secured to its neck by the same-caliber chain that tethered a pen to a bank service counter. This one had elaborate enamel earrings, no glasses, and a silk blouse slightly unbuttoned.
“I was looking for the reference desk,” Celia said.
The librarian laughed louder than seemed professionally appropriate. “Then I guess you haven’t been here in a while,” she said. “It’s over there now.” She gestured Celia to a different corner. Where Celia remembered racks of newspapers was the familiar thick-legged fundament of solid, dark wood—a desk fierce enough to hush raucous children.
“It took two burly guys and a heavy-duty furniture dolly to move it,” the librarian explained. “Where it used to be, there are leg impressions all the way through the carpet and into the floor. I could have gotten a new desk, but this one always seemed so ideally referential. Plus, it let me blow my furniture budget on a really cool chair.” She walked behind the desk and settled into something self-consciously ergonomic. “Now, how can I help you?”
“I was hoping to find information on a local street.”
“If it’s technical, you might need Public Works over at City Hall,” the librarian advised, “but we’ve got maps here, plus I’m a native Jensenvillian.”
Her smile, both eager and apologetic, was what passed for civic pride.
“When I was a kid,” Celia began, “my bus drove along a small wooded road to get to school. I’m pretty sure it was called Ripley.”
“I thought so!” The librarian beamed. “I can always tell the ones who come back.”
Celia flinched.
“You’re probably just home to see your folks,” she added. “Where do you live now?”
“Chicago,” Celia said, tempted to produce her driver’s license as proof.
The librarian nodded. “Such a shame about that road.” She sighed. “No more forest primeval. Ripley got expanded back when CompuDisc came to town, and they couldn’t exactly put it back the way it was after the Internet bubble burst.” She studied Celia’s face. “When were you at Jensenville Elementary?”
“Until ’86.”
The face before her brightened. “Did you know a girl named Betsy Jorgenson? She would have been a grade or two above you. She’s my little sister, though she’s Betsy Harris now. She did like I’m assuming you did and went away for college. That’s the only way to guarantee your escape.”
“A girl named Betsy?” Celia echoed.
“Long blond braids? Queen of the recess four-square set?”
“I don’t think so,” Celia said.
“I suppose it was a long time ago.”
The fluorescents buzzed softly above.
“Um, about Ripley Road,” Celia tried. “When they took down all the trees?”
“Wouldn’t it have been great if they’d found the wizard’s house? Or was it supposed to have been a witch?” Speech caused the librarian’s earrings to collide with the side of her neck. “I tell you, I don’t know what little kids do now when they want to scare the pants off of each other. I suppose there’s still the abandoned inebriate asylum off Route 17, but that’s a bit out of their league, don’t you think?”
Celia stared.
“I’m not always this gabby,” the librarian said. “It’s just so nice to talk to someone who isn’t constructing a conspiracy theory or watching videos of home accidents on YouTube. Was there something specific you were wondering about?”
“I just happened to be driving down Ripley, and I started thinking about that girl who disappeared back when we were kids—”
“Oh my god!” The librarian’s earrings spasmed. “I absolutely remember that! Wait a minute, it’ll come to me … Her name was J-something: Jessie, Julie, Jenna—”
“Djuna,” Celia said.
“That’s right! Djuna! Djuna P—” The librarian paused, then snapped her fingers. “Djuna Parson!”
“Pearson.”
“She was abducted from there, wasn’t she? Now that’s something I haven’t thought of in eons. I think my father helped with one of the search parties. For a while, I actually kept a milk carton with her face on it, until my mother found it and threw it away.” She paused. “You know, I bet we knew each other. I bet if we traded photos from back then, we would recognize who we used to be.”
Beside the librarian’s desk was a small reference shelf holding a dictionary, a thesaurus, a world atlas, and the local white and yellow pages. “Excuse me,” Celia said, and made for the door leading to the basement.
“You’ll need the key if you want to use the ladies,” the librarian called.
The sight of the phone directories had spurred a memory in Celia that was confirmed by the reverberation of the stairwell door closing behind her. She and Djuna had made a contest of seeing who could jump from the higher stair to the basement landing, their shoes exploding against the floor with a sound that shamed the thud of the door. The librarian—the childhood model—had never tried to investigate the noise. Whether she hadn’t heard or simply considered the bookless territory of the stairwell to be beyond her jurisdiction was unclear. Her negligence, deliberate or not, had created an inside version of the untended grass beside the electrical box on Djuna’s block. The railing felt low to Celia now, and the stairs were more worn, but when Celia jumped to the landing, the sound was the same. The forgotten pleasure of making noise in a quiet place was followed by the same, unadulterated feeling of triumph when no librarian came.
The steps had been prologue to their assault on the pay phone, which Djuna fed with change repurposed from a pewter mug Mr. Pearson kept on his desk. Library bathroom traffic was sparse, and the slam of the stairwell door gave ample warning of someone’s approach. Because Celia refused to talk, she was in charge of choosing phone numbers, her fingers walking the slopes of the library’s white pages in search of promising last names.
“Hello?” Djuna would begin. “My name is Nadine,” or Scarlet, or Francesca, “and I’m in ninth grade.” Ninth was the oldest Djuna thought she could manage; she pitched her voice low and overenunciated everything. “I was wondering if I could ask you some questions for a report I’m doing on trends in our community?”
Strangers seemed to enjoy helping a student with a school assi
gnment. Djuna would angle the top part of the handset away from her ear, so that Celia could listen in. Sometimes a child would answer. Sometimes they could tell by the voice that it was someone very old. Most of the time, Djuna would ask a few questions—How many children do you have? How many pets? How many televisions? What breakfast cereal do you eat?—before hanging up, but sometimes she would squeeze Celia’s arm. “What color is your underwear?” she would ask, her nails digging into Celia’s skin. Djuna would laugh as a dial tone replaced the person at the end of the line, but once a voice had answered back.
“Blue,” it had said. “I’ve got blue boxers on, and you have the sweetest, sexiest little voice that I have ever heard.” Djuna had hung up, grinning, and Celia had told her never to do that again. In lieu of an answer, Djuna had fished out her house key from inside her shirt and scratched her initial into the side of the phone; and that was the last time Celia had gone to the library with Djuna.
Celia couldn’t remember when she’d last seen a pay phone, an era having lapsed beneath her notice. Despite having entered the stairwell for no other purpose, she was still surprised to find the library’s model still clinging to the same wall between rest-room doors. It too was lower than Celia remembered. She had to bend sideways to see it, but the “D” was still there.
CHAPTER 14
The police were headquartered where downtown became the east side, an area shunned by Jensenville’s occasional fleeting attempts at renewal, due to the lack of anything there worth renewing. Celia drove past a Laundromat and a pawnshop, a fried chicken franchise and a bowling alley. The train tracks lay to the north, now used only for freight. Talk of Amtrak resuming passenger service came in cycles usually linked to local elections or increases in property taxes, a one-sided conversation that never mentioned the steady decline of Jensenville’s population in the thirty years since the train line’s demise.
The police station squatted at one end of a pocked parking lot, a brick bunker stacked regular as Legos. No one passed in or out in the five minutes Celia sat staring through her windshield. She tried to persuade herself that the station might be closed for lunch, which gave her the fortitude to exit her car. What had seemed like a natural next step at the library had degenerated, on the drive over, into something more questionable. She and Huck had discussed when to talk to the police, and this was not it: she was to first consult a lawyer. But all Celia wanted was information. She wouldn’t even have to tell them her name.
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