“It’s okay, Nor. Water under the bridge,” Warren said, but his wife was contemplating their daughter.
“She called once,” Noreen said. “It was maybe a week after Djuna was gone. I came home to her message on the machine. It was the first time I’d ever heard Grace sounding anything less than completely self-assured.”
“Who was she calling for?” Celia whispered.
“She said she was calling for me,” Noreen said, “but it was you she asked about. She wanted to know how you were doing, if you were eating and sleeping all right. I never called back.”
As the sky outside the window darkened, the sodium streetlights flickered on. Once, there’d been a propane gas lamp at the foot of every driveway, a glowing yellow trail leading home.
“How long did they stay?” Celia asked.
“Who?” Noreen asked.
“Djuna’s parents,” Celia said. “How long after did they stay in the house?”
Noreen shook her head. “Six months? Nine months, maybe? If it’s something you need to know, I can—”
“I was just wondering,” Celia said. “When I drove past, the colors were gone.”
“The house has been that way for a long time,” Noreen said. “After Grace left—”
“She’s listed,” Celia said. “I found her straight off, but I wanted to reach the others first. I wanted to be able to tell Mrs. Pearson that I’d told everyone the truth. Except that when I talked to Becky and Josie, when I told them what had really happened, they both said that they remembered seeing a car.”
“You mean that they—” Noreen began.
“They don’t believe me either,” Celia said. She tried to ignore the sight of three faces going slack with relief.
Warren leaned forward, and for once Celia found herself looking forward to one of his nervous non sequiturs about cars or music, started counting the seconds until she might excuse herself from the table without seeming rude.
“It’s strange what people do or don’t remember,” he said instead. “Once, I asked Jem if he recalled that last day in his room.” He paused. “You and I have never talked about this, Cee Cee. I always meant to tell you, but it never seemed like the right time.”
When he looked to his wife, Noreen nodded, and something inside Celia’s father unfurled.
“Your brother told me he remembered watching himself on the floor,” Warren said. “An out-of-body experience, I guess you’d call it, which was something he’d never had before. He said he kind of liked it, but he could tell that something was wrong because he couldn’t feel anything. It wasn’t like being numb. It was like he didn’t have anything to do with the person he was looking at. He remembered wondering if he was dying, if maybe he was already dead. Then he heard a voice calling his name, and that was when the griffin came into his room. Jem said it was as big as a man, with gold wings and a golden tail. At first he was scared because he thought maybe it meant he really was dead. But then he felt himself being lifted, and he wasn’t on the floor anymore. And then …” Warren gazed at his lap. His shoulders shuddered and he took a few deep breaths. “And then,” he continued, “he told me that he loved me, but in his mind it would always be a griffin that had saved him. I told him I didn’t care what he saw walk into his room that day. All that I wanted was for him to be all right.”
Noreen reached across the table, and Warren met her there, his arm longer than hers, their hands joining just short of center.
“Cee Cee,” he said, “I can’t bring myself to believe that you left Djuna in those woods, but even if it were true, I’d love you all the same.”
“You’ll always be our little girl,” Noreen whispered.
Within minutes, the remains of the take-out dinner would be eaten. Noreen would shoo Huck from the dirty dishes, but allow Celia to spell her at the sink. Warren would spin his newest vinyl acquisition and defend the superior playback qualities of the Stereohedron stylus. Celia would have to remind herself that the conversation had happened at all.
Once Warren and Noreen had retreated upstairs, Celia and Huck settled in front of the television. When Huck left the den, Celia assumed he’d gone to the bathroom until his absence stretched long.
“Front or back?” she asked when he reappeared.
“Back, of course. A seven-foot privacy fence is a beautiful thing.”
She wanted to tell him not to sit back down, worried about the smell seeding itself into the couch.
“I thought you didn’t do that here,” she said.
“Extenuating circumstances.” His arm, still cold from the outside air, chilled the skin at the back of her neck.
Celia feigned interest in the TV. “Just hold off tomorrow, okay? At least while Jeremy’s around.”
Huck rolled his eyes. “Jeez, Ceel, I’ve never been anything but completely conscientious.” He chuckled. “Though your brother totally knows.”
“How?” she asked. “You haven’t done it in front—”
“Oh, come on,” Huck groaned. “We talked about it once, that’s all. He said that smoking was one of the things he missed the least. Said it always made him feel stupid and slightly paranoid.” He smiled. “Man, how about your dad tonight? Just when I think he’s all old jazz and manual transmissions, he goes and says something like that.”
“Yeah,” Celia said. Her voice rose to her ear like windborne ash. “Jem loved griffins. He went through this whole mythological phase starting from when he was, like, ten and going until he was at least thirteen.” She sighed. “I wish you hadn’t smoked.”
“Ceel,” he said. “Is that really what you want to be talking about?”
“It’s why you can’t get up on time anymore,” she said. “It’s why you’ve been going straight to sleep when the movie ends instead of …” She stared at the television. “You’ve been unhappy for a long time.”
Huck exhaled a long breath.
“I know,” he said.
“It’s like you start shutting down and you don’t even know that you’re doing it. You start coming up with ways not to have to deal with me … volunteering for after-school stuff, deciding that you need to watch every film with a certain actress.”
“I wish it had all been as clear to me,” he said.
She shook her head. “I knew that I needed to say something, but if I told you, then we’d have to deal with it, and if we dealt with it, that might mean …” She tried to concentrate on the sound of her breath. “So instead, I just tried to live with it, until one morning I was on my way to work … and now, here I am.”
“That’s good, Ceel. What’s happening here is a good thing.”
“But what’s the point if no one believes me?”
“This isn’t about belief,” Huck said.
“Sure it is.”
“It’s not,” Huck said. “No one thinks that you’re lying, Ceel. They just don’t agree with what you remember.”
“Including you,” Celia said.
Huck shook his head. “It doesn’t matter what I think.”
“Actually, it does.”
The television was unloading the tail end of a cable movie. The timed lamps downstairs had switched off, leaving the two of them pallid in the television’s sloughed light.
“Okay then.” Huck sighed. “If you really want to know, I think considering that Becky, and Josie, and your parents—”
“Wait.” She turned away. “I changed my mind.”
They stared at the television.
“I’m going to see Leanne first thing in the morning,” Celia said.
Huck pressed the remote’s red button. It became very quiet. “I think that’s a really bad idea,” he said.
“It might be,” she agreed, “but I’m going to do it anyway. In case this is my only chance.”
“This isn’t the same as your job, Ceel. You don’t get special access to all the places you need in order to fulfill your fact-finding mission. You are distinctly uninvited.”
“It’s okay,
” Celia said. “I won’t ask you to go with me.”
She closed her eyes.
“When we get back to Chicago,” he said, “I think you should start seeing a therapist.”
She remained perfectly still. She could hear her pulse in her ear.
“You too,” she said. They sat in sodium-tinted darkness, the room suffused in an orange glow. When a car passed, the beam of its headlamps cast itself like a searchlight across the room’s surfaces, an illuminated parade of shapes in brief rally against the night.
CHAPTER 20
Celia left the next morning while Huck was still sleeping. She told her parents she had a breakfast date, which was true enough to get her to the car guilt-free. She would have been terrible company, refusing coffee and unable to eat. Celia felt better in the car, but then saw she’d need to waste at least forty-five minutes before it became a civilized hour to stop by. Leanne’s address put her in Pritchard. Celia had only ever been there once before, to visit a flea market with Huck, the two of them treading between rickety folding tables heaped with ceremonial swords, homemade deer jerky, 9/11 memorial T-shirts, animal-shaped bottle openers, and secondhand children’s clothing, a pageant they’d fled after fifteen minutes. Leanne lived a few miles east of the flea market, in a neighborhood of small, one-story homes just past a trailer park and a gas station that advertised tune-ups and live bait. Celia drove past kids on battered bicycles, a man leaning over the hood of a car, a girl sitting on her front stoop chewing the hair of a Barbie doll. Leanne’s was the nicest house on her block, with a trimmed lawn, a recent paint job, and a sturdy porch sheltering a wicker chair in good repair. Celia drove past once without stopping, then circled around and pulled into the driveway. She parked behind an aging pickup truck with a Wilson-Smith University decal in its back window and a bumper sticker that read NONE OF YOUR BUSINESS.
She slammed the car door, hoping the sound might carry through the open windows. The porch steps creaked under her weight. Flanking the wicker chair was a wicker side table that held a full ashtray and a stack of magazines. Celia tried to create an adult portrait of Leanne sitting in that chair, reading a magazine and smoking a cigarette, but all she could see was a skinny girl with crooked ash-blond bangs and ragged fingernails. Celia stood on the porch a moment, hoping it would be enough: just the outer screen door was closed. “Hello?” she called. When nothing happened, she crossed to the door and placed her face against the mesh. She made out a stairwell and an easy chair. From the back of the house, a shadow ambled forward.
“Can I help you?” a man asked from the other side of the screen. Celia couldn’t tell whether she looked as familiar to him as he looked to her.
“Hi,” she began. “I’m an old friend of Leanne’s and I just happened to be in the neighborhood.” She gasped inwardly at the flimsiness of the lie. “Did I manage to catch her at home?”
The man looked her over.
“No, you did not,” he finally answered.
He stepped onto the porch. He was slender with a gentle face, the type Celia would have had a crush on, but when she ran through her mental teenage roster of heartbreaks and unrequited loves, she came up blank. She tried and failed to place him in the middle school cafeteria or a high school classroom. When he looked her over a second time, she realized they were playing the same memory game. He gave a small grunt.
“I know who you are,” he said.
“You do?”
“You’re Celia Durst.”
“Have we met?” she asked.
“Not really,” he said.
“Because you look familiar to me too. Are you and Leanne related?”
“You got it in one,” he said.
“Well, it’s nice to meet you,” she said, and held out her hand. He hesitated before offering his. “I can’t tell if I’m remembering you because we met as kids or because you’ve got your sister’s eyes.”
“It’s the resemblance,” he said. “We’ve also got the same sense of humor.”
Down the block a screen door slammed and Celia turned toward the sound. A dog bounded from a house, dragging a boy by its leash. When Celia turned back toward Leanne’s brother, his wariness seemed to have been replaced by something milder.
“You back visiting your folks or something?” he asked.
She nodded. “I forgot how nice it was here in spring.”
“It can get real pretty.”
“Are you visiting too?”
When he laughed, Celia could see his sister in his smile.
“Me?” he said. “No. I’m more or less stuck with this place.”
“What about Leanne?”
He shook his head. “Lee’s the same as me.”
“Were you a grade or two above us? Maybe we saw each other on the playground?”
“We didn’t.”
“But still,” she persisted, “it’s not like Jensenville’s a huge place. We must have—”
“Look,” he said. “I know you’ve been sending e-mails and I also know you’ve come here uninvited, so I’m not going to ask you in, but since you’re here anyway I guess I don’t mind talking with you on the porch. You want something? I’ve got water.”
“Do you think Leanne will be back soon?”
He shook his head. “Don’t count on it.”
“Water’s fine,” she said, and he disappeared back through the door into the darkened house.
She sat in the single chair. Someone across the street was blaring rap through an open window, the bass ricocheting against the side of the neighboring house. She knew Leanne’s brother had returned by the slam of the screen door behind her.
“You comfortable?” he asked, and she realized she was meant to turn her chair to face him. He was standing behind a second wicker chair that he had brought from inside and still gripped in his hands. A single glass of water rested on the table beside her.
“Sure,” she said.
“You’re sitting in a chair that Lee restored. Sturdied up the frame and recaned the whole thing. You should have seen it before—the seat had a big hole busted in it and the entire piece had been painted this trashy shade of orange. Stripping the paint off was a bitch, but it sure looks beautiful now.”
“Sounds like a pretty big job.”
“It was, but that was just what Lee needed. Wicker restoration is what got Lee through the first few years of recovery. Now it’s kind of a vocation.” He pointed to a sign in the front window that read WICKER BY LEE—RESTORATION AND ORIGINAL CREATIONS in bold blue type. “Pretty much everybody’s got an old busted wicker chair lying around,” he continued. “It’s good furniture and it lasts a lifetime if you treat it right. I bet your folks have a chair or two that Lee could fix for them.”
“Um, I don’t know. I’ll have to check.” She reached for the water and took a sip. It was warm.
“Now that is something Lee would surely appreciate,” he said. “Remind me and I’ll give you a business card before you go.” He looked at her. She feigned absorption in her glass.
“I’m glad to know Leanne is doing well,” she said. Her chair creaked every time she moved.
“Yeah,” he said. “There were some real rough times. Really tough. Anybody who at all gave a shit for Lee was pretty worried, but now Lee is doing all right.” He nodded. “You went to college,” he told her. “What did you study?”
“I ended up as an economics major.”
“An economist? Now that actually sounds useful. One thing I could never understand was people paying all that money to study English or religion or whatnot. You must be doing pretty well for yourself over in Chicago.”
“How did you know I was—”
“Your e-mails,” he said.
“But I didn’t—”
“You’re not the only one who knows how to type a name into the Internet.”
He leaned against the house as he looked her over, his eyes studying her as if he could see through to her veins.
“You know,” he said,
“Lee was kind of freaked when you turned up again after all these years.”
“Well, I really appreciate her writing me back.”
“You were somebody Lee had been pretty happy to leave behind,” he said. “It’s actually fairly fucked up, you sitting here on Lee’s porch, acting like this perfectly considerate person.”
“I was hoping to apologize,” she said.
“You already did.”
Celia shook her head. “Not really. Not in the way she deserves.”
“But Lee didn’t want that,” he said, his shaking head mocking her own. “Lee wanted never to see you again, so what does that do to your apology? It turns it into more harm done, doesn’t it? Some new messed-up thing that you’ve got to make amends for.”
Celia could not stop staring.
“I’m sorry,” she said.
“Leanne was so unhappy,” he continued. “She didn’t need any help from you and Djuna on that account. Ever since she could remember, she knew she was different. She was already the most miserable little girl, and then the two of you took that and cranked it up higher than it should have been possible to go.”
Celia stared, and he smiled, neither of them able to stop.
“I hated you for what you did,” he said, those words from between his smiling lips raising the hair on the back of Celia’s neck. “I thought I’d gotten past that, but seeing you like this, I realize that I still do.”
“You and Leanne must be pretty close,” she said.
“As close as it’s possible to be in this world.”
“It was wrong of me to come.” Celia shook her head. “I don’t expect you to believe it, but I’m not usually this … I should be going.” She began to stand.
“Not yet,” he said in a way that froze her where she was.
The music from across the street had stopped. It was quiet save for the distant sounds of cars.
“What time did you used to wake up for school?” he asked.
“Excuse me?”
“I said, what time?”
The False Friend Page 17