The False Friend

by Myla Goldberg

  She looked at him.

  “It’s not a trick question,” he said, leaning closer. “Back when you were still just an innocent little girl, what time did you wake up to get ready for school?”

  He was wearing a T-shirt and she could tell that he liked to work out. His arms bulged from shoulder to forearm before tapering into slim, almost dainty wrists. If she had stood, her mouth would have just grazed the top of his head, but he had more muscle. She considered returning to the car. Instead, she stayed where she was and looked at him looking at her, his question spiking the air between them.

  “Seven o’clock?” she offered. “Seven thirty? I’m sorry, I really don’t—”

  “Every morning Leanne woke up at five A.M.,” he said. “Five A.M. to prepare for your stupid inspections. She’d stand in front of the mirror, looking at her hair, her clothes, her personality for chrissake, wondering what she could do to get a passing grade. And you were so clever about it. You let her pass just often enough not to allow her to give up hope, to let her think there was some sort of objective logic. That the two of you actually could help her to become a better girl.”

  Celia remembered making up the form with Djuna each morning on the bus, drawing boxes with a black pen in a notebook placed between them. Half the time they would fill in the grades before they even got to school, in order to get it out of the way.

  “I’m ashamed of what we did,” she said softly. “It was stupid and mean and I wish I could say that I wasn’t aware of that at the time, but I’m sure that I was. I do know that we didn’t do it according to any sort of thought-out plan.”

  “Well, I guess that makes you born geniuses of the mindfuck,” he said. “Must feel good to be so naturally gifted at something. Leanne sure as hell wasn’t. Not at the most basic little thing. You had her so whipped, she actually felt relieved that day you told her you were going to leave her in the woods. There wasn’t even any need for you to have walked her there. After that haircut, she was so far gone that you could have pointed in any direction you wanted and told her to walk until she fell off the edge of the world.”

  “Was that what we were doing that day?” Celia asked softly.

  He laughed. “It was your brilliant plan, only by the time we started out you weren’t so sure you liked it anymore. In some corner of your puny little heart you thought it might be wrong to leave someone in the woods like that. But by then, of course, it was too late because Djuna thought it was the best idea she’d ever heard.”

  The chair he had brought for himself was like Celia’s, but smaller—the sort of chair that might be used at a writing desk. He was still standing behind it, sometimes grasping the top rail with one hand. Every time he did, the wicker creaked like old bones.

  “Final question,” he continued. “When was the first time Leanne tried to kill herself?”

  Celia swallowed her breath.

  “Tell me,” he said, his voice louder. “Because I’m really curious. Do you know the first time Leanne tried to take her own life?”

  “No,” she whispered.

  “No,” he repeated. “No, you do not.”

  He drew a lighter and a pack of Marlboros from his shirt pocket, tapped a cigarette into his palm and lit it, gazing at the street. Exhaled smoke wafted past the porch and into the yard. A newer, nicer pickup than the one in Leanne’s driveway cruised by.

  “It was the summer after fifth grade,” he said. “July 1986. She tried to swallow a bottle of aspirin, but threw it up halfway and passed out. I suppose it was a good thing it happened in that order and not the other way around. As it was, she cleaned up the mess when she woke up and no one was the wiser. She never told a soul.”

  Celia opened her mouth, then closed it again.

  “All through that whole school year, she’d prayed for the two of you to be punished,” he said. “Every night before bed she got on her knees and asked for something terrible to happen. Then it did. What do you do when your prayers get answered like that?”

  “I’m so sorry,” Celia murmured.

  “Well thank you,” he said. “Thank you, Celia Durst, for being sorry.”

  Celia thought back to the birthday party, to the small living room, to the photos of two girls, sisters for a hairsbreadth of time.

  “You—” she began. She couldn’t look at him the same way, and this shamed her—one last, unredeemable offense.

  He started toward her and she braced herself against the chair. He stood over her and looked down. The eyes were exactly the same.

  “I owe you nothing,” he hissed. “You aren’t family and you sure as hell are not my friend. You, Celia Durst, are only one of the many, many things in my life that I have left behind.”

  He stubbed his cigarette in the ashtray beside her, turned back around, and returned to the front door.

  “You found your way out here okay so I won’t give you directions on how to get back,” he said. He pulled the door open. “But I will say this: if you want to do a good turn for Lee, I highly suggest that for the rest of this natural-born life you keep away. And in the next life, when you come back as a bug or as a vermin, you’d best keep a healthy distance between yourself and the sole of Lee’s shoe. Now leave here and don’t come back.”

  The screen door closed behind him. Celia heard his footsteps inside the house, and then she heard nothing at all.

  CHAPTER 21

  Huck shifted into Celia’s space on the mattress. His sleep had been punctuated by dream arguments that left him exhausted when the bed had creaked its alarm that morning. By the time he’d said, “C’mere,” Celia was already half dressed. She’d returned to him just long enough to kiss his forehead.

  Huck wished this friend of hers could have fled farther than the neighboring town, somewhere beyond the operational radius of Celia’s desire. He had never thought he’d find a downside to Celia’s determination, but here it was. Her insistence that good could come of her visit to Leanne was no different, in his mind, than believing in fairies. Such unyielding persistence was the closest Celia came to the bully she claimed to have once been.

  Warren and Noreen, earlier risers both, would already be waiting with fresh coffee. Huck could picture Warren at the stove minding a pan of eggs while Noreen sliced fruit, Saturday’s ritual breakfast. In the early years there had been bacon, until Warren had started monitoring his cholesterol. Its disappearance had coincided with Huck’s own first concessions to age—the stretching needed before and after a pickup basketball game, the supreme importance of getting to bed no later than ten thirty on a school night—measures that had revoked any lingering belief in his immortal youth. Around the same time that Huck conceded his afternoon candy bar to a slowing metabolism, he had attended a three-day teaching conference in Wisconsin where he met a teacher from North Dakota—a state he was in no danger of ever visiting—who had the most beautifully unruly hair and an adorable history teacher’s crush on Alexander Hamilton. It would have been perfectly safe; they didn’t even know each other’s last names. The final night of the conference, Huck had paced his hotel room pondering the ways in which a one-night stand might impact all his nights to come. In the end he had called Celia, ascended into telephonic perversity, and fallen asleep a happy man.

  Huck stepped into yesterday’s pants and slipped on a fresh shirt, debating whether to go online now, or after appearing downstairs. He decided it was less rude to delay than to disappear once he had come down, but he would need to be careful. If he arrived too late, the fruit salad would be portioned into individual bowls and wrapped in plastic. Noreen and Warren would be sipping coffee before empty, waiting plates, their apparent happiness at the timing of Huck’s appearance belied by the dryness of the eggs.

  Huck crept down the hall to prolong the impression he was still in bed. Entering Jeremy’s old room felt like a violation of their tacit friendship. Nine Christmases ago, when Celia’s brother had been attending community college and daily NA meetings, Jeremy and Huck had each re
cognized in the other a fellow survivor of a chancy adolescence. Huck knew he had been spared Jeremy’s battles only due to the random calibration of his endorphin receptors and plain, dumb luck. Having scaled and descended different cliff faces seemed less important than their both having returned alive.

  As Huck waited for the computer to boot, he spotted two familiar books on an abandoned bookshelf, a fistful of multi-sided dice gathering dust beside them. The mounted cavalier on the cover of Jeremy’s old D&D Player’s Handbook was as familiar to Huck as his own face, the griffin on the Monster Manual an old friend. Huck blew dust from the dice and remembered when resting them in his palm had felt like holding precious gems. When he returned his attention to the computer, he felt like he’d been welcomed.

  Huck hadn’t expected so many images at the art gallery’s Web site, and had begun to worry he’d somehow missed the ones Celia was talking about, when there they were. Jocelyn Linke’s figures were suggestive of bodies rather than imitative: they did not always have the right number of fingers; some of them had extra hands, or peepholes installed in their torsos. The realism of the girls’ faces jarred with their bodies, their heads more precise than anything below the neck. The first piece showed four girls walking in formation around a fifth, whose arms were crossed as if tied. In the second, two girls argued with a vehemence that could have been funny if their faces hadn’t looked so grim. One of these girls echoed one of Celia’s studio portraits on the family picture wall—chin-length hair tucked behind the ears, nose just beginning to elongate to its final, regal length—but the exaggerated ferocity of the features turned the face into a weapon.

  In the last image, a girl with a dark ponytail sat apart from two others, one of them Celia, her face crossed by a grief that reminded Huck of that famous painting by Munch, expressing the sort of deep emotion sighted only rarely, like some terrible comet, at moments of greatest loss. It made Huck wish he had been there. Never mind that he would have been ten and living in Cleveland, over a decade removed from his and Celia’s first meeting. He envied what Josie had seen. The shame of this did not lessen his want, and the realization that he might eventually get his wish briefly eclipsed the fact that it would come at Celia’s expense. As long as they were still together when life’s built-in schedule of loss inflicted such grief on Celia again, Huck would fulfill this basest urge to own every aspect of his lover.

  Huck turned off the computer. He was exactly on time—at the stairwell he heard Noreen setting out the breakfast things. He would peaceably submit to her proxy mothering and Warren’s music soliloquies. Coming to terms with his putative in-laws had been like making peace with his parents, only more efficient: compressed into the span of a few Christmases and entirely without their knowledge, Huck had traversed unquestioning approval and reflexive rejection to arrive at acceptance. The experience had reinforced his notion that adulthood didn’t change people so much as smooth their edges, but now he wondered if there wasn’t a chrysalis model of maturity. Perhaps the child transformed itself into an entirely different organism, its remnants discarded with the ruptured cocoon. Huck wondered if the Celia he knew was recognizable to friends who had only known her earlier incarnation, or if they were as baffled by her now as he was by the girl she claimed to have once been.

  CHAPTER 22

  Lee’s voice echoed in Celia’s head on the drive back from Pritchard. Celia replayed his appearance at the door, his handing her a drink, his enumeration of all that she’d forgotten along with all that she had no right to know. Each of Celia’s mistakes sat inside her like a swallowed stone.

  She arrived home to Jeremy’s car in the driveway. By the time she’d come up the walk, her father was standing just inside the front door.

  “Here she is!” he announced to Daniel squirming in his arms. “Here’s Aunt Cee Cee.”

  “No,” Daniel pronounced and angled toward her, his lips a wet pucker, his face speckled with crumbs.

  Celia leaned to meet her nephew’s mouth.

  “Hello, Daniel,” she said. As his proto-kiss grazed her cheek, Jeremy and Huck emerged from the hallway.

  “Hey, Cee,” Jeremy said. His hug smelled like baby powder. “I see you’ve met Dr. No.”

  “No,” Daniel said, and reached for his father.

  People took Celia and Jeremy for brother and sister only in the company of their parents, whose salient qualities had been divvied up neatly between them. Jeremy had his father’s black hair and chestnut eyes, but those eyes were close-set like Noreen’s, his features distributed more centrally than Celia’s, as if someone hadn’t been sure his face had the room. They were both tall but where Celia was lanky, Jeremy was the kind of person you’d want beside you in a stiff wind or while leaping from rock to rock. Celia blamed recovery and marriage equally for her brother’s transformation from solid to chunky. His face, neck, and belly had thickened, and she suspected a stranger would take him for the older sibling now. The thought distressed her more than it appealed to her vanity, though she didn’t think Jeremy would mind. Marriage and fatherhood had buoyed him into an almost continuous state of gratitude that Celia would have found irritating in anyone who was not family, or for whom it had not been so hard-earned.

  “It’s great to see you,” he told her. He balanced Daniel on his hip with an ease Celia had previously assigned to mothers. “Pam is in the den,” he said, “being waited on by Mom hand and foot.”

  “Congratulations,” Celia said.

  He smiled. “We weren’t expecting it, but we weren’t exactly surprised either.”

  “How’s Pam feeling?”

  “Oh, she’ll be happy to tell you all about it,” Jeremy said.

  Daniel pumped his legs.

  “What is it, bugaloo? You wanna walk?” Jeremy grinned. “He’s like one of those wind-up toys,” he told her as he released Daniel and shadowed him down the hall.

  “How are you?” Huck asked under his breath as they filed into the den.

  Celia felt her legs wobble, wished she could pull Huck by the hand to some quiet corner of the house and tell him everything. “You were right,” she said. “I shouldn’t have gone.”

  “What’s that?” Warren called.

  “Nothing, Daddy.”

  “Did you see your friend?” her father asked.

  Celia paused. “She wasn’t there.”

  Pam waved at Celia from Noreen’s recliner. “Pardon me for not getting up,” she said, “but Mom installed me in here so good I don’t think I could get out without a trailer hitch.” Pam looked big for thirteen weeks and Celia wondered if it had to do with the shirt. She suspected most maternity clothing of being constructed to exaggerate the condition of its wearer, wordlessly accomplishing the mission of T-shirts that read BUN IN THE OVEN or BAKING MY LITTLE BEAN, an entire industry predicated on the pregnant woman’s fear of being taken for fat. Celia had hoped a natural affinity would develop between herself and her brother’s wife, but after four Christmases Pam still addressed Celia with impenetrable cheer. Pam belonged to a Tompkins County strain of brothers, sisters, uncles, aunts, and cousins who never crossed state lines. Celia could tell Pam liked her, but restraint seemed to run in Pam’s blood, an innate animal caution toward a creature that had left the forest.

  “How do you feel?” she asked, and Pam made a face.

  “I won’t bore you with it,” Pam said, “but let’s just say I’m on the baked potato and banana diet.”

  “I have both of those,” Noreen trilled from the kitchen. “I had a feeling you might not be interested in quiche.”

  Pam blanched. “Please don’t mention anything having to do with eggs,” she whispered.

  The next half hour was devoted to observing Daniel’s circumnavigation of the first floor, sometimes waving like royalty, sometimes dragging a plush lobster the size of his torso. Over brunch, Pam’s tales of morning sickness chorused each ode to infancy—what Daniel could say, what he could eat, how he slept, how many teeth he had. The monomania of
first-time parents and grandparents afforded Celia refuge behind grins and nods, though Huck wasn’t fooled.

  At the meal’s end, Warren enlisted Huck’s help in the kitchen while Noreen disappeared with Pam and Daniel into the den, leaving Celia alone with her brother.

  “Don’t get mad,” Jeremy told her after the room’s evacuation, “but Mom and Dad told me why you’re here.” Celia longed for some of the ease in Jeremy’s voice, the legacy of daily conversations with their parents that she would never share.

  “That’s all right,” she said. “I should have told you when you called.”

  They sat in the chairs that had always been theirs. It was possible they had not been alone in a room since the Clinton administration. The skin around Jeremy’s eyes was cross-hatched with tiny lines, as if he’d spent his life in the sun rather than in the ninth-cloudiest city in America.

  “Jem,” she said. “What was I like back then?”

  Her brother swirled a water glass in his hands, his eyes fixed on the small whirlpool inside.

  “Which ‘back then’?” he asked.

  “When we were kids,” she said. “Did I pick on you?” She had given up on little long ago, but younger was equally irrelevant. The man sitting across the table from her was simply her brother.

  “I’d like to know what you remember,” she said.

  Jeremy appraised her from across the table. “You want me to list all the terrible things you did to me when we were little?”

  She nodded.

  “All right, let me think.” He made his mental tally. “Okay,” he said. “For years when we played Monopoly, you got me to trade you things like Park Place for Baltic Avenue by telling me that purple was a better color than blue. Once, you handed me water mixed with toothpaste and a few drops of liquid soap and told me it was a new kind of milk. And sometimes you’d hide behind the couch and wait until I came in so you could growl like a wolf and scare the bejesus out of me.” He leaned back in his chair.