Searching for Celia (14 page)

Wednesday

9:34 p.m.

With Celia gone, I glance at my watch. A little after nine thirty. I have just under twelve hours until we meet again at the Circle of Lebanon. I haven’t slept in a day and a half, haven’t eaten since eleven o’clock this morning. My broken hand aches with a bone-deep pain and I am beyond exhausted. But Celia lives and breathes and walks the earth, a fact that, for the moment anyway, redeems all sorrows that ever I have felt.

It’s a five-minute walk to Waterloo Station, through the concrete urban landscape of South London, where the darkened sky seems pierced, sectioned by bent metal cranes, and the girders, beams, and scaffolding of endless construction sites are soiled by street grime and runaway graffiti.

I enter the station and descend to the platform for the Northern Line, where a lone busker plays the guitar very badly and sings plaintively off-key, and the walls are plastered with ads for cheap overseas holidays and billboards for current West End plays, mostly recycled Broadway musicals.

I stand with my back to the station wall, close my eyes, and breathe in the trapped, drafty scent of emptiness that fills the Underground at night. At this hour a cold and filthy odor rises from every surface as the dirt and breath and dust and sweat accumulated throughout the day settle into permanence, pressing against the brick walls, conspiring beneath the platforms, tiptoeing along the tracks. But even this lonely, desperate, and despairing smell can’t lessen the joy of having just seen Celia. I lean back and smile.

*

When I enter Celia’s ransacked flat, nothing appears changed since I left for the conference three and a half hours earlier, but the cramped, chaotic, and messy little room seems immediately different, revealing with a sly grin the secret it’s been dying to tell me since I arrived this morning—that Cecelia Frost is still alive.

I change into a T-shirt and sweatpants, leaving my conference clothes in a heap beside the bed. As tired as I am, I am too wired to sleep just yet, so I put on one of Celia’s favorite CDs, Van Morrison’s
Veedon Fleece
, and listen as the warm, rich, throaty tones of the Belfast Cowboy fill the little room. I search the cabinets and find two bottles of wine, a cheap pinot grigio and a better merlot, along with a bottle of Glenfiddich scotch, three-quarters empty. I even manage to find and light two votive candles, which I place on the kitchen table as I pour myself a generous glass of merlot.

The achingly urgent falsetto of “Who Was That Masked Man” is just beginning and the merlot has sufficiently warmed my limbs when a tentative knock at the door startles me back to reality. Celia? I step to the unlocked door and grasp the handle, pressing it closed until I know for sure.

“Who’s there?” I ask, trying not to sound scared.

“Dayle?”

For a moment I can’t place the voice.

“Dayle—it’s me. Edwina.”

“Oh.” I open the door. “Come in,” I say softly, ushering her inside, where her large frame dominates the room. Edwina has changed clothes from earlier and now wears gray sweatpants, battered running shoes, a black leather jacket, and a man’s navy-blue V-neck sweater with a white T-shirt beneath. Her lips and eyelids are creased and swollen and her dense hair is flattened on one side, making her look younger, loose jointed, and unkempt.

“I thought you were with your brother,” I say softly. I can’t look her in the eye without revealing that Celia is still alive.

She nods. “I was. And Julian was lovely. But I need to be here. Close to Celia. Close to her things.” Her voice breaks as she draws a breath. “Sorry I didn’t ring first. I wasn’t sure if you’d be back yet.”

“That’s okay. I understand.”

She drapes her leather jacket on the doorknob and I guide her to the kitchen table as I grab a second glass and turn down the music. “A drink?” As I raise the merlot, the bottle trembles. I am moments away from telling Edwina everything.

“Please,” she replies with a nod. I pour her a glass and refill my own, then take the seat across from her at the kitchen table.

“How was the conference?” she asks.

“Good. Fine.” I know I sound nervous. “I ran into my former editor, Alec Stinson. It was nice seeing him again.”

“Celia had an editor on her last book.” She smiles bitterly. “They did
not
get on.”

“Yes. I remember. Daphne Quinn.”

“It’s overwhelming…”

“Yes?”

“How many people need to be told of Celia’s death. I don’t know where to begin.”

“You don’t have to worry about that tonight.”

“I suppose not.”

We both fall silent as Van Morrison sings softly in the background, barely audible. Edwina swirls her wine slowly, holding the glass by the stem and watching the dark red liquid lick the sides. She raises the glass to her lips but then sets it down without drinking.

“What do you think it was like?” she asks quietly.

“What?”

“When Celia died.”

When Celia died? But she didn’t. If only I could tell you. “I don’t know.” My glass quivers as I lift it to my lips.

“Do you think it was painful?”

“Not necessarily.” I swallow, too quickly, and the wine sears my throat. “Compared to some deaths.”

“But panicky.” She sounds almost hopeful as the pupils of her large gray eyes capture the candlelight.

“Maybe.”

“No, it would have to be,” she insists.

“I suppose you’re right.” Please—let’s change the subject.

She runs a thumbnail along a ridge in the kitchen table, pressing intensely until her nail turns white. “Have you ever been trapped underwater?”

This question surprises me. “No. Have you?”

She nods slowly, staring hypnotically at the candle. “Once. At a swimming pool. Someone jumped on my back and dunked me unexpectedly. It was brief, but horrible.”

I can’t stand this. “Edwina, maybe—”

“How could she?” Edwina looks up at me and her face collapses, paled by anguish. “I found her when she overdosed, you know. On the bathroom floor. Ashen. Barely breathing. When I lifted her, she vomited. I feared she might die in my arms.”

Please stop. “Edwina…”

“And now I wish that she had.” Her face suddenly hardens, triumphant with fury.

“Wish she had what?”

“Died in my arms.”

“You can’t mean that.”

She nods vigorously, bottom lip firm. “I do. I’d rather she died in my arms than jumped from Waterloo Bridge. If I’d known at the time of the overdose that her life would end like this, I would not have saved her.”

This is unbearable. “You couldn’t have known this would happen,” I argue.

“No? No?” She is nearly shouting now. “Celia attempted suicide twice, why not again? She obviously wanted to die.”

“No one can know what she thought or felt in those harrowing moments.” I take a deep breath and release it slowly. “But wherever she is now, at least she’s free.”

“It’s so easy for you Americans to believe that.” Her tone is bitter, accusatory. “Or at least pretend that you do.” She pauses. “You can’t possibly understand.”

“Don’t be so sure.”

“Really?” she challenges.

“Really.”

“You haven’t lost the love of your life.”

Haven’t I? I choose my words carefully. “I don’t believe in a hierarchy of grief. Pain is just pain, that’s all.” I pause. “But I have lost a child.”

She looks up with a start. “My God. I had no idea.”

“And he was the love of my life.”

“What happened?” she whispers.

I stand, move across the room, and take a seat on Celia’s stacked mattresses. I have no choice now but to tell Edwina everything. She rises from the table and comes to sit beside me. “Rory lived for fifty-three minutes,” I begin slowly. “From 4:16 to 5:09 p.m., last October nineteenth.”

I take a deep breath, rolling the wineglass between my palms. “Rory’s father never even knew I was pregnant. Michael was in town for a photo shoot. We hadn’t seen each other for a few years, so we had dinner, just to catch up, and one thing led to another. I don’t often sleep with men, but it happens. I found out I was pregnant six weeks later. By then Michael was in Singapore, I believe.”

“Wouldn’t he have wanted to know?” Edwina asks gently.

I nod. “I planned to tell him. After the baby was born, I suppose. So he couldn’t suggest an abortion.”

“I see.” Edwina folds her hands and wedges them between her knees.

“I never imagined myself having children, but suddenly I desperately wanted this baby,” I continue, my thoughts far from London now. “I didn’t mind being pregnant and on my own. I have the money, and my mother moved to Chicago to help out.”

Edwina rapidly scans my face. “Dayle, what happened? What went wrong?”

“My placenta ruptured,” I explain. “In the third trimester.”

She frowns. “I’m not certain what that means.”

I place my empty wineglass on the floor beside my foot. “It happens when the placenta, the organ inside the womb that supplies blood and nutrients to the baby, detaches from the wall of the uterus before it’s supposed to. This causes massive blood loss for the mother and jeopardizes the baby’s life.”

“God.” Edwina shivers. “How horrible.”

“I was in surgery for hours and had no idea what was happening. When I woke up afterward and saw my mother’s face beside me, I knew. Her eyes told me everything.”

Edwina strokes my back gently, as if afraid I might shatter. “I’m so sorry.”

I close my eyes and continue, speaking now from a place inside myself that is usually mute. “The doctors knew right away that they couldn’t save him. So the nurses bathed him and washed his hair, then wrapped him in a blue-and-white blanket and placed him in my mother’s arms. Mom had longed for him as much as I had. She had big plans for her grandson, but she put her hopes and dreams and grief aside and just held him, rocking him until he died.

“After I woke up from the anesthesia and was told he was gone, they wanted to bring him to me, but I said no. I didn’t want to see what I had lost. I preferred to think of it as a miscarriage, a blob of tissue expelled by my body, not a real little boy who had lived for fifty-three minutes. But the hospital psychologist insisted. She said I would regret not saying good-bye and that my grief would be easier to process this way.

“So they brought him to me in my hospital bed, still swaddled in the blue-and-white blanket. He seemed so fragile as I unwrapped him, like a porcelain doll, but much more detailed, as if he’d been fashioned by a loving hand. Mom was beside my bed and we took turns holding him and hugging him and kissing him—I was still very weak, you see. To me he seemed flawless, with dimpled elbows and fat little feet. A cleft chin and full lips, fuller than I would have expected, like the petals of a rosebud, or a four-leaf clover.

“I could not believe my body had made something so beautiful. Rory had light brown hair, enough for me to comb with my fingers. His eyes were closed, of course, when he came to me, but Mom had seen his eyes open and she said he seemed to recognize her. Like he wanted to tell her something about his journey. His eyes were a beautiful pale blue, she said, exactly like my father’s.”

I look up and see tears streaming down Edwina’s face, carving dark furrows into the smooth surface of her skin.

“I couldn’t bring my son safely into the world.” My voice breaks. “I gave him birth, yes, but not life, beyond those precious fifty-three minutes. I couldn’t bring him into this world and I wasn’t there to carry him into the next. I’m a failure. As a woman. As a mother.”

“No. Don’t say that.” Edwina takes my face in her hands and stares into my eyes. “Please, don’t. Your son’s life was perfect, in its own way. He never felt scared or lonely or rejected. He was held and cherished and loved every moment of his fifty-three minutes on earth. How many people can honestly say that?”

“Maybe you’re right.” A sob flutters from my throat. “But I wanted a whole life for him instead.”

Edwina wraps me in her arms and gently rocks me back and forth. “It’s all right, love. It’s all right,” she says. Her voice is deep and soothing, slipping into my ear and, from there, shuttling into my bloodstream, which slows in response. I close my eyes and dissolve in her arms. It has been so long since I felt this, I think, pressing against her neck. Felt anything, really. But especially this. And there is a word for it: solace.

Edwina circles my torso and leads me to a safe place at her center. I surrender to a long-forgotten dream of comfort, letting it flash up and down my arms as my skin blisters and peels, revealing something fresh and pink and naked underneath.

“Shh, just relax,” Edwina whispers in my ear. I raise my head and my lips brush her neck; before I know it, I am squeezing her shoulder. The muscles of her upper back tighten, solid as bedrock. She kisses my earlobe and a moan escapes her mouth as her bent knee seeks to separate my legs.

“Wait,” I say suddenly, pushing her away. She pulls back in surprise as a torrent of blood rushes to her face.

“Sorry,” she mumbles. “Sorry, sorry, sorry.”

“No, it’s all right.” I reach for her hand but instead clasp only her first two fingers, which she quickly withdraws.

“No, it’s not. I shouldn’t have.”

“Don’t apologize. Really.” I force a smile. “I’m flattered. But…”

“You’re afraid we’re betraying Celia.” Her pale eyes are huge and wounded.

“No, it’s not that. It’s that I haven’t been—haven’t been close to anyone in months. Since before Rory was born.” I stroke her arm, hoping she’ll understand. “I’m just not ready yet.”

“Can you believe me?” She gives a hollow laugh as her skin continues to darken, drenched with shame. “Celia not one day dead and I make a pass at her friend.”

“Please don’t say that. It’s normal to reach out. Especially now.” I lean close to touch her face but she pulls back and stands, weak-kneed, struggling for balance.

“This doesn’t have to be awkward.” I try to sound cheerful. “Come on, I think we could both use a drink.” I stand, grab my wineglass, and shuffle to the kitchen table. My hand shakes as I reach for the bottle of merlot.

“Thanks, but I’d best be on my way.” She hurries to the door, then grabs her leather jacket and fights it over her broad shoulders.