Searching for Celia (23 page)

But even as I lost Cecelia Frost, I gained something much greater. When I held Celia close that morning among the graves, felt her slender curve of bone and the pressure of her spine against my sternum, I understood what my mother must have felt as she held my Rory, my doomed and precious son; as tiny as he was, his shape, his weight, his very essence, must have been immense and overwhelming. I know my mother hasn’t told me everything about those moments, but someday she will. Just as someday I will tell Celia everything—when she is finally ready to listen, when at last she is able to hear.

Celia refuses to forgive me, of course, to forgive me for witnessing her weakness, and for never being able to see her exactly the same way as before. She revealed too much during those desperate, panicky moments inside Highgate Cemetery; her careful mask slipped and I caught a glimpse of her soul, saw her lost and scared and vulnerable, the little girl with the ice cream waiting patiently on the swing for the mother who would never return. She resents me for that now, and always will. But her resentment, this cleft in our relationship, is a small price to pay for her life, and it’s a price I will pay gladly until the day I die. In the end, Cecelia Frost remains a mystery. But I find I am less and less a mystery to myself.

Elizabeth Ridley was born and raised in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. She has a bachelor’s degree in journalism from Northwestern University and a master’s degree in creative writing from the University of East Anglia in Norwich, England, where she studied under former Poet Laureate Sir Andrew Motion. In 1994, she received a Hawthornden Fellowship to Hawthornden Castle in Lasswade, Scotland, and in 2011 she received a Literary Artist Fellowship from the Wisconsin Arts Board based on the first three chapters of
Searching for Celia
.
Searching for Celia
is her fifth novel. She lives in Milwaukee with her two cats, Claudius and Calpurnia, and is producing her first feature film,
Handle with Care
. www.elizabethridley.com.

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