The False Friend (10 page)

Celia tried to turn her attention to the two friends who remained. For most of her elementary school career, Leanne had been no more than a February obligation, hers a remnant valentine after the best had been apportioned from the pack. Leanne had ridden a different school bus, and Celia’s memory was powerless to retrieve a phone number she was certain she had never dialed, but she thought she’d called Becky’s old number often enough to pick it from a list. Celia scanned the listings, a wilderness of Millers. She recalled a rough-barked tree with aboveground roots, a rainbow painted on a bedroom wall, a Jewish menorah and wineglass on a living room shelf, but she couldn’t recall where the house had been, and no numeric sequence caught her eye. Then she remembered: Becky’s parents had divorced. This had been in middle school, the news
coming to Celia as third-hand gossip in the cafeteria line. Mrs. Miller had been a trim woman with cropped hair who joked about her clumsiness, Mr. Miller a sharp-nosed man to whom Celia was always “Miss Durst.”

Upstairs at the computer, Celia typed Becky’s and Leanne’s names into a people-finding Web site that produced too many potential listings for Becky, but a single listing for a Leanne Forrest of the right age, living one town over. For $14.95, Celia was supplied with street and e-mail addresses. It was all horrifyingly easy. As Celia labored over a suitable message to send, a memory of Leanne returned to her, summoned by the motion of her fingers. Celia remembered a recess jump rope taken from the blacktop and dragged to the edge of the soccer field for an impromptu lesson in knots after Djuna had demanded that Leanne prove she was good at something. Leanne had handled the rope with shy assurance, her short fingers beautiful as they looped it around.

“This is a bowline,” she had explained in a soft voice at odds with her confident hands. “It’s good because it doesn’t slip or jam. You can tie it to pretty much anything you want to hold on to. Then there’s the square knot?”

As she tied it, Djuna had scowled. “Everyone knows that one.”

“Oh,” Leanne apologized, finishing it quickly before making it disappear. “Well … then maybe this one?” She crossed the rope once, then again over itself and through a loop before pulling it tight. “It’s called a figure eight.” Leanne surrendered it to Djuna for inspection, infinity on a string. “I’ve got a friend
who’s a Boy Scout. They get to do this stuff all the time.” Leanne had eyed the rope as if it were a delicious food.

“Cool,” Djuna had proclaimed, pulling the knot at either end. When they’d returned to class, Djuna had allowed Leanne to fill Celia’s usual spot beside her for the walk back. Celia had been jealous even as she’d known she was witnessing something too rare to covet, like a double rainbow or a summer hailstorm, a fleeting moment of grace that would end as inexplicably as it had begun.

T
he sound of the front door carried upstairs and froze Celia’s hands at the keyboard. Her mother’s arrival could only be awkward, their morning encounter tainting the space between them. Family conflicts were less often aired than suffocated, civility heaped upon civility until the trouble was smothered under the accumulated weight of so much decorum.

“Cee Ceee-ee, I’m ho-ome!”

The certainty of her mother’s arrival briefly made Warren a stranger.
There’s a man here
, Celia thought, and then realized it was her father. As a girl, she would have run to his outstretched arms shouting, “Daddy! Daddy!” Relief might have tempted her to do the same now, had she been less familiar with
her father’s schedule. He should still have been on campus. From the top of the stairs she saw that his hair, unlike her mother’s, was as thick as it had ever been.

“Aren’t you early?” she asked.

“The registrar’s office on a Wednesday afternoon is not a very busy place.” He grinned. “Your mother’s been delayed. We can get takeout or there’s a casserole in the freezer.”

“Won’t she be home for dinner?”

Warren shrugged. “She said she wouldn’t be back in time to get it started. What appeals?”

“Casserole is fine.” Celia examined her father’s face, looking for clues. “Did she sound—okay?”

“Oh, sure,” he said. “She feels terrible about having to miss out, but I guess there was an incident with one of her students and a conference was arranged at the last minute. She sends her love.”

He looked away, and that was how Celia knew that her mother had told him everything.

She was losing her touch: once, she wouldn’t even have needed her father to turn. Life with Huck had impaired her family fluency, dulled her eye for the slight tightening of muscles around the mouth. The subtle cadences of uncertainty, embarrassment, and avoidance had blurred to her unpracticed ear. She and Huck had almost broken up over his obliviousness to such subtle syntax. A certain glance accompanying a “No, nothing’s wrong” meant nothing to him. He was blind to the difference between an obliging and an assenting smile. Huck raised his voice in his defense; he spoke without first weighing his words. According to him, these were perfectly
acceptable ways to communicate and not, as Celia had been raised to think, the vocal equivalents of public frontal nudity.

By the time she joined her father downstairs, he was putting away his coat. They hesitated at hugging distance.

“So,” he said, patting her shoulder. “What have you been up to?”

Kissing his cheek, she encountered delicate skin, soft like a dried peach. Celia felt side-swiped by a sign of aging she had not anticipated, her father’s face gone fragile.

“Mostly searching the Internet,” she said. “Typing in names, seeing if I can find where everyone’s gone.”

“Any luck?”

“A little.”

Warren nodded. “Glad to hear someone’s putting that machine to good use.”

During a performance audit of a V.A. rehabilitation program, Celia’s team had discovered a cache of fancy new computers that had been left uninstalled, the V.A. staff still relying on ancient, slow contraptions that ran off floppy disks. The guy assigned to teach the new system had moved to California. One of Celia’s biggest challenges was to word her findings in ways that didn’t sound punitive, an exercise in euphemism for which her family life had left her uniquely prepared.
New equipment is underutilized
, Celia had reported.
Personnel would benefit greatly from training and initiative
.

Celia trailed her father into the kitchen, their reflected profiles darkening the portraits on the photo wall like passing clouds. “Lately we’ve been talking about redecorating that
room for Daniel,” he said. “A fresh coat of paint, some new curtains, toys on the shelves.”

Since finding Josie’s mother in the local directory, Celia had been carrying her cell phone in her pocket. Each time she moved her leg she felt the phone shift and thought,
Now
.

“Does Mommy stay late often?”

Her father opened the freezer and retrieved a baking dish opaque with frost. “Not so much, but she never says no. There’s a guidance counselor award the school nominates her for every year. Some sort of national recognition. She’s never won, but just the nomination itself is something, don’t you think?”

The casserole thudded against the counter, a frozen brick of food. Warren eyed it warily. “I think it’s great the way you and Huck trade off in the kitchen,” he said. “I mean, I’d call your mother and myself pretty modern for our generation, but it’s not like you two, or Jeremy and Pam for that matter. Your brother was so wonderful when Daniel was born—doing the laundry, cooking the meals. Made me realize how useless I’d been to your mother when you two came along.” He flashed the same grin that apologized for speeding tickets and forgotten errands, a smile somehow both contrite and proud.

“It’s awfully nice,” Celia said, “their offering to come all this way on Saturday, especially with Pam pregnant.” Her brother lived an hour’s drive northwest on Route 79, in a house newer and uglier than their parents’, a modest Cape Cod with vinyl siding that was set back from the road. For the same money, he could have gotten something older and prettier in town but Jeremy had wanted land. Enough trees edged the property to
block the sight of the neighboring houses, which were beyond shouting distance on either side. Her brother’s happiness there was the latest in a lifelong series of proofs demonstrating their differences.

“Well, that’s Jeremy for you,” Warren said. “I sleep easier knowing he’s so close. I never would have figured him for a country mouse, but then again I thought Chicago was just a stage for you, so I guess I’m oh for two.” He shrugged. “The older I get, the less I mind being wrong. As it turns out, life gets a lot more relaxing once you decide you don’t know a damn thing about it.”

“Daddy, what do you remember about Djuna?” Celia asked.

Her father’s features retracted like a frightened snail’s, and he turned to busy himself with the casserole and the microwave. Considering that Warren had grown up Catholic-schooled in a family of brothers, he had done an admirable job of fathering a female firstborn, but not even in the terrible months surrounding Jeremy’s detox did he worry for his son with the same grandiloquence. No return trip from Jensenville was complete without his phone call to confirm that Celia had arrived safely in Chicago. Her freshman year had birthed her father’s first bleeding ulcer—his body’s retort to being denied the chance to drive to his daughter’s aid at any moment. Celia hadn’t been informed until his release from the hospital, where he’d gone after vomiting blood. Her will to sound the depths of his anxiety was matched by his capacity for silence.

“Djuna was a real spitfire,” he said. “She told me once that I should go on business trips. Said you’d love me more if I went
away and then came back.” He shook his head. “She was willful, that girl. Once she decided to do something, there wasn’t any stopping her.”

He lifted his chin and cleared his throat, and Celia realized that whatever he was about to say had been practiced, perhaps even first written down. “You and me, Cee Cee, we’re numbers people. Your brother too.” He gauged Celia’s face for something he didn’t seem to see. “Heck, one of the main reasons I have a hard time thinking about retirement is that work is one of the few places I can be absolutely certain of anything. I mean, there’s always Sudoku but that’s not the same thing, is it?” His brow furrowed. “We’re people who like our lives orderly,” he asserted. “We like to know what we can rely on and what we should toss out. And when you’re told something that goes against almost everything you’ve come to believe about a certain subject, or a certain person—”

At the sound of the front door swinging open Warren called out, “Norrie?” like a man about to burst into song.

When Celia’s mother appeared in the kitchen doorway, relief waxed Warren’s face smooth. Differently timed traffic lights or a backup on Main Street, and Celia would have been subjected to her mother’s opinion all over again, dressed in her father’s voice.

“Hello, you two,” Noreen said, as if she’d arrived at a dinner party. “It looks like I lost a bet with myself. I was sure you were going to get Chinese.” She laughed in Celia’s general direction.

“You’re just in time to join us,” Warren said. “We’re mid-defrost.”

“Actually,” she chirped, “I’m going to go straight to bed. I was chin-deep in student assessments for five hours and I’m just so tired.”

“Would you like me to bring you a plate?” Warren asked.

“No thanks,” she demurred. “I ate a little something on my way home.”

“I’ll be up soon,” he promised.

She shrugged. “Whatever you like, dear. I’m sure I’m going to be out the minute my head touches the pillow.” It was seven thirty.

“Mommy?”

Her mother had retreated halfway down the hall. “Yes?”

“Good night,” Celia said, the word hanging between them like a limp sail.

“Good night, Celia.” For a moment it seemed that someone might say something more, but then no one did.

I
t was waiting for Celia the next morning, the half-familiar name sitting in her in-box in bold type:

When Celia had sent her message into the void, it had felt more séance than summons, her keystrokes so many table rappings to conjure a long-lost voice from the ether. Once her pulse had returned to normal and her grip on the chair had loosened, she read and reread Leanne’s words, searching for echoes of the girl who had trailed their small group like a late-day shadow. Leanne hadn’t worn their clothes, or earned their grades. One day they had arrived to find her at their regular
lunch table, already eating. On the second day she was waiting with a four-leaf clover she had sealed up in clear tape, and on the third with an old Wheatback penny. Djuna had accepted each offering as if it was her due, and on the fourth day Leanne handed each of them a perfectly smooth, tumbled stone.

“Can I join?” she’d asked.

“Join what?” Djuna replied for them.