The False Friend (14 page)

“You still there?”

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I didn’t check the time.”

“It’s all right. School’s out. Jackson was just hanging around. Tell me what’s going on.”

“Wait,” she said. She left her brother’s room and crossed the hall. She closed the bedroom door behind her, habit guarding her conversation from the hollow ear of the empty house.

“I found them,” she said.

The bed beneath her dotted quilt held her like a steadying palm. Celia started with Josie, then proceeded to Becky in Scranton. “I was prepared for Becky to be surprised,” she said, “but not for her to believe that she had actually
seen
the car.”

The silence that followed was just long enough to cause Celia’s jaw to clench.

“What exactly did Becky say about it?” Huck asked. “I mean, did she basically repeat the same story you told back then or did she—”

“She said that she remembered seeing a brown car. I didn’t ask her for details, okay? I mean, why would I ask about something that didn’t exist?”

When Celia closed her eyes, she saw Becky leaning across
the table, her face close enough to show the bobby pins along the edge of her scalp.

“The whole time I was in that restaurant,” Celia said, “I kept thinking about the dress-up drawer that Becky had in third grade. She and I would put on her mother’s old clothes and invent stories about ourselves. Part of me kept expecting Becky to take off her wig and tell me that she didn’t have seven kids after all.”

Celia sat on the edge of the bed, surprised by how easily her feet reached the floor. She could remember her toes dangling at the level of the box spring, the carpet reached only after a moment’s free fall.

“Jem called,” she said.

“Did you tell him?”

“Not really.”

“Why not?” Huck was convinced of the redemptive powers of sibling communication, a faith consecrated inside the silent cathedral of the only child.

“It wasn’t a conversation I wanted to have on the phone,” Celia said. “He’s coming on Saturday with Pam and Daniel. Oh, and I forgot to tell you: Pam’s pregnant.”

Celia heard something in Huck contract.

“Daddy called it a happy accident,” she said.

Perhaps brothers or sisters on Huck’s side would have provided a broader spectrum of married and unmarried, begetting and abstaining, into which they might have more comfortably fit. Instead, the birth notices of friends or colleagues went undisplayed on fridge and table, weren’t even kept inside a bureau drawer. The silent interval that followed now was just
long enough for Huck to tuck Celia’s news away like one of those 5×7 envelopes whose stiffness betrayed the presence of the photo inside.

“Talk to me about Becky,” he said. “What was it like?”

“It’s always weird to see someone again after so long,” she said. “But the hard part was when Becky reminded me how mean we had been.”

Celia suspected she had elided her part in Leanne’s humiliation less from shame than because it had not seemed wrong at the time. To Celia at age eleven, their collective behavior had felt natural, Leanne the rodent to their parliament of owls. The reeducation of a tomboy had been a harmless prank, uncritically shelved. But it was true: they had been mean. There was always a window of opportunity in the morning, between when the buses arrived and when Mrs. Grandy led them into the school. Standing Leanne against the flagpole had lent their scrutiny an official air. Starting from her head, they worked their way down, inspecting the way she pushed her hair behind her ears, the slope of her neck as it emerged from her shirt, or some other random aspect of Leanne’s body completely beyond her control. Occasionally they gave Leanne homework, and she would show up the next day wearing something with flowers on it, or having curled her bangs. A passed inspection meant she was free to join them at lunch and recess; failure meant she had to earn their company. Leanne’s willingness to forgive Celia and even tender a motive for her cruelty had induced the shame Celia should have been feeling all along. Her behavior had no excuse. Celia had not been the
half-miserable girl of Leanne’s creation. She had abused Leanne simply because she could.

“It’s just so hard for me to picture all this,” Huck said.

“Why?”

“Because I know you!”

“People change,” Celia said. “I have a hard time believing some of the stories from when you were sixteen.”

“Yeah,” said Huck, “but a sixteen-year-old boy and an eleven-year-old girl are completely different animals.”

Celia wondered how she had managed half a lifetime of sleep on such a hard bed.

“Ceel,” Huck said. “Try to be kind to yourself. You’re doing everything you can.”

“But what if everyone is like Mommy and Becky?” she said. “What if no one believes me?”

She sensed what was coming next, began shaking her head even before Huck could ask.

“Well, do you think there’s any chance that Becky might be right?”

Celia held her breath.

“Just hear me out,” Huck said. “I’m not suggesting that Becky
is
right, or your mother. All I’m asking is that if someone’s memory is wrong, is there a possibility that it could be yours?”

She exhaled.

“You don’t have to do this,” she said.

“Do what?”

“Find a way to absolve me.”

“I’m not trying to find anything,” Huck said, “I’m only wondering if—”

“There’s nothing to wonder about, Huck.” Celia closed her eyes and watched Djuna fall in slow motion. “I
know
what I did. And it explains so many things.”

“Ceel, there’s nothing to—”

“Just stop, Huck. Of course there is. Everyone knows it’s not you. For years you’ve been patient, biding your time with your students and the girls.”

“Come on, Ceel,” Huck said. “Bella and Sylvie were your idea!”

“Of course they were!” she hissed. “But without them I think you would have left me a long time ago.”

Celia was shivering, her body shaking in a way that had nothing to do with cold. She stood from the bed as if to retrieve her words. The silence at the other end of the line was the pause between dropping a stone and waiting for it to hit bottom.

“You know,” Huck said, “until you left on Monday, I had no idea how depressed I’d become.”

Celia pulled her quilt from the bed and wrapped it around herself, the fabric stiff with age. “It’s been like watching a car crash in slow motion,” she said. “It’s been like this slow, steady bleed.”

“Don’t cry,” Huck said. “The last thing I want to do is make you cry.”

Their stillness amplified the distance, sadness that stretched for hundreds of miles.

“Ceel?”

She pinched the bridge of her nose, feeling the tension there gather and disperse.

“Call me tonight when your folks are asleep,” he continued. “Call me and we won’t talk about any of this.”

“Why?”

“Because right now I have to make sure that Jackson isn’t wandering the halls tagging lockers, and then I have to drive home before Bella and Sylvie start peeing in the kitchen. We shouldn’t have started this conversation … not like this, over the phone … but now that we have, I don’t want it to be what I’m thinking about when I go to sleep.”

“Don’t go yet,” she said.

“I love you, Ceel.”

“Promise?” She felt like she was five years old.

“Promise,” he said, and she told herself that she felt better.

A
t dinner, Celia reminded herself that the table’s empty chair was a temporary vacancy, but this did not banish her sense that some sort of non-elective surgery had been performed. The first time she’d brought Huck home, her parents had been so excited to have more than a name over the phone that he could have been a chain-smoker, a man twice her age, or a long-haul trucker and they would have treated him like nobility. Instead he was an aspiring history teacher who laughed at Warren’s jokes, and they had treated him like a son. Even so, it had taken two more Christmases before Noreen stopped asking Celia about her Chicago life and started asking, “How is Huck?” Celia had inherited her mother’s sense of caution. During
Huck’s first visit, Celia had been alternately gabby and silent, tense and at ease, until finally on the last night she had burst into tears while they lay together in bed. “You’re still here!” she’d confessed into the warmth of his neck, knowing how ridiculous it sounded and how deep her relief that it was true. Tonight, Warren had turned himself up a notch in compensation for Huck’s absence, his voice striving to fill the void. Noreen had set pitchers of water and iced tea on the table to disguise the place where Huck’s plate should have been.

“Did the two of you talk today?” she asked, as if the mention of Huck’s name might spoil her careful beverage arrangement along the table’s empty side.

“We did,” Celia said. “He sends his love.”

Since the previous morning, mother and daughter had been treating each other like circumstantial seatmates on a long-distance bus ride. It had been years since they had stooped to such depths of courtesy at such close range, not since the protracted sigh that had lasted the four months between Celia’s decision to forgo Cornell and the commencement of her Midwestern migration.

“Is he still coming?” Warren said.

“Warren!” Noreen winced.

Celia squelched the urge to run from the table, mount the stairs, and slam her bedroom door. “Why would you even ask that, Daddy?”

“No reason, I suppose.” He shrugged. “It’s just that I know how busy a teacher can get, and you do look a little down-at-the-mouth. I guess I was just wondering if the two of you—”

“This isn’t about me and Huck, okay?” Celia had mastered an older version of this exchange, complete with hair flips and narrowed eyes. Holding it back felt like strangling a sneeze. “I mean, sure, he’s worried, and he’s got a lot of the same … concerns as you and Mommy do. So I’m trying to help him put some of those to rest, but it’s hard. I mean, everything I’m trying to do … with you, and with Huck, and with people I don’t even
know
anymore … so if I seem a little
down-at-the-mouth
 …” She took a shaky breath.

“We used to worry,” Noreen said. “In high school, and then for most of college, you never mentioned anybody special. I used to think to myself, ‘What if my little girl never finds her true love?’ ” Noreen smiled. “Some people say there are all sorts of people who are right for each other and it’s a matter of any one of them being in the right place at the right time, but I just don’t believe that. The minute I met your father, I knew he was the one.”

“So if there’s anything we can do to help …” Warren gestured at the empty air. “With Huck, or with anything else …”

Celia stared at her father until he turned away. It didn’t take long.

“For example, if you wanted us to talk to him,” he offered to his water glass. “To give him our perspective on this whole thing.”

“Look, Daddy, there’s nothing you could tell Huck that he doesn’t know already. Can we … Can you … How about we talk about something else?”

Cutting and chewing took over. Warren ate like a man
possessed, while Noreen divided her meal into fork-friendly pieces. Celia shuttled the food into her mouth and made the requisite jaw motions without tasting a thing.

“Jem told me that you and he got a chance to chat,” Noreen said.

“When?” Celia asked.

“Oh, we speak almost every day.” It was hard not to admire the precision of her mother’s movements, an entire dinner reduced to one-inch squares. “Sometimes he’ll call from work, other times he’ll call in the evening. It’s funny, but when I look at what happened to him and what has come of it …” She shook her head. “When you said yesterday that I didn’t know him …” Noreen looked between her silverware and her plate of portioned food. There was nothing more to cut.

“I didn’t mean that,” Celia said.

“No, no,” Noreen said. “It’s true. I
didn’t
know him back then. I loved him, of course, and I worried for him, and I tried to give him what I thought he needed, but to really know a person, especially your own child … A sense of independence is so important, not to mention a sense of trust, and if you want to give your child those, well, I think that
knowing
them is a sacrifice you might have to make.”

“It worked with you,” Warren said. “Look at you now: independent, a successful career … though I have to say it was hard letting you go.”

Noreen nodded. “Jem missed you terribly when you left,” she said. “In a way, I think it was harder on him. All his life he’d had a sister, and then you were gone.”

Celia’s absence from what had easily been her family’s most traumatic period often left her feeling like she had slept through some crucial historic event—the siege of Leningrad, for example, or the Great Depression. Not for the first time, she pondered what might have been had she attended a school fifty rather than seven hundred miles away.

“He never told me,” Celia said.

“No point,” Warren said.

“You’d made your decision,” Noreen said, “and fourteen-year-old boys aren’t exactly known for sharing their feelings.”

Celia felt as if she were attending a class reunion with people she had only passed in the halls.

“Then I guess you know that Becky Miller lives in Scranton,” she said.

“Jem mentioned it,” Noreen confirmed. “That must have been a surprise.”

“Which one was Becky?” Warren asked.

“The sad, pale one who spoke in complex sentences,” her mother explained.

“The one who could recite the state capitals in alphabetical order?”

“That was her.”

Celia’s father cocked his head. “She was the one who didn’t think I was funny.”

“You two played so nicely together,” Noreen said. “And Becky was so full of ideas! She was smart, that one. Scranton would not have been my first guess.”

“We met at a kosher deli,” Celia said. “She’s Hasidic now.”

“Really?” Noreen asked. “You know, sometimes when she
was over, I’d watch from the kitchen window as the two of you played in the backyard. Not to keep an eye on you. The way you got along, I didn’t have to. You were like sisters, the way you played. I used to think …” She smiled. “It’s silly, but it’s what you do with your children. I pictured Becky as the friend you might grow up with, the one who’d always be around. Who would have thought …” She shook her head. “Were you able to recognize her? After all those years?”