The False Friend (18 page)

By Huck’s time, Celia had come to accept that passion was an inborn trait like perfect pitch or a photographic memory, easy to admire and impossible to cultivate. Physical passion wasn’t enough. She envied her father’s ardor for bebop, Huck’s zeal as he described the satirical writings of Benjamin Franklin. Growing up, she had mocked Jeremy’s serial obsessions—dinosaurs, Greek mythology, and Middle-Earth giving way to Gene Simmons and Trent Reznor—while secretly coveting an avocation of her own. The unpredictability of Djuna’s passions had been part of her appeal: anything that happened to catch her eye was fair game. In retrospect Celia realized their friendship had been the first in a long series of misguided chicken-pox
parties in which she had attempted through close and repeated contact to catch something wholly incommunicable. Not until the trouble with Jeremy had Celia finally understood the value of a stolid temperament like her own that sought, instead, to bask in reflected light.

Celia had been watching the odometer since gaining the highway. It suddenly seemed that seventy-five miles—now sixty-eight—was a distance she would much rather savor as she had their airport reunion, seeking refuge in vacation scenery and the familiar rhythms of the road.

“So let’s talk,” Huck said, and Celia’s stomach clenched. Huck slid forward to align his body with hers and removed his feet from the windshield, leaving two sunlit tread marks behind.

The odometer marked the demise of one more mile.

“What’s wrong?” he asked. “All the blood just drained from your face.”

“I guess I’m a little nervous.”

“Why?”

“When I was waiting for you at the airport …” She shook her head. “I wasn’t sure whether seeing you would be the same, but then it was. It was just like it had always been. And I know that should have felt good, but when we were walking to the car, I started thinking, what if this is the last time?” She pulled to the side of the road.

“Ceel,” he said.

She squeezed the wheel to steady herself, stared ahead to where the highway met the sky.

“Look at me, Ceel. After last night, do you really think—”

“But the thing is, I can’t remember when we last did that! I don’t mean on the phone. It’s been …” She shook her head.

“It’s been a long time,” he said.

“And so when we hung up, I started thinking. I didn’t want to, but I couldn’t help it, about the ways that people say good-bye.”

Huck stared. “Is that what you want?”

When she touched his cheek, she realized that he had shaved for her at some point before boarding the plane. “No,” she said. “But you’ve been unhappy, and we’ve been so … I don’t even mean this week. I mean before.”

Huck leaned across the seat and kissed her. The warmth of his face graced her cheeks, her chin, the skin of her closed eyes. “That was not a good-bye kiss,” he said.

Cars passed them in bursts of sound.

“Tell me what’s been going on,” he said.

“There’s just so much.” Celia closed her eyes. “There’s us, and then there’s Djuna, and there’s being at home, and each one feels like it’s hovering …”

Huck reached for her shoulder. “Start with today. There’s at least twelve hours I need to get caught up on. The rest …” He shrugged. “We’ll take the rest as it comes.”

“This morning,” Celia said, “I went back to Ripley Road. I hadn’t gone there since elementary school, but it’s stayed in my head ever since.”

Hearing the timbre of her voice, Celia recognized the ridiculous weight of that morning’s disappointment. The vanishment of the woods and all it had contained was a page torn
from childhood’s portfolio of impotence, that stunning array of rained-out field trips, poorly timed illnesses, and adult interventions that provided constant proof of one’s inconsequence to the larger world.

“To get there, I drove the route the school bus used to take,” she explained. “Everything matched my memory until I got to the last turn. Ripley used to be this twisty, wooded road barely two lanes wide, no lane markings, no side rails. Now it’s four straight lanes of traffic with an office building where the forest used to be.”

The scene outside Huck’s passenger-side window embodied what Celia had been hoping to find—trees stretching miles into the distance, a panoply of green. In her child’s memory, the unsullied forest bordering Ripley Road had marked the edge of the known world.

“Everything was gone?” Huck asked.

“Everything,” she echoed. “It might sound silly, but I was positive I’d be able to retrace Djuna’s path. I was sure I remembered which curve it had been, what road signs it was near. I’d been counting on those woods still being there.”

Huck nodded. “You wanted closure.”

“No.” The word ricocheted off the windshield, amplifying the sound of Celia’s exasperation. The day’s dashed hopes had temporarily reduced her to the childish presumption that someone she loved should, in return for that love, be able to read her mind. “I wanted proof,” she said. “A girl disappearing after a fall doesn’t sound nearly as convincing as a girl disappearing after getting into a stranger’s car—which is why I knew I had to find the well.”

Voicing the words felt like loosing a small, frail-limbed child into the world.

“I remember you mentioning a well on the phone,” Huck said.

“An abandoned well,” she corrected. “And stop looking at me like that.”

“Like what?”

“I don’t know. Like I’m made of some kind of fragile material you’re checking for cracks.”

Huck sighed. “You’re talking to me, Celia. When you talk to me, I look at you.”

“I know. I just really want for you to believe me.”

“Tell me about the well,” he coaxed. “The abandoned well, I mean.”

“I keep going over it in my mind and it’s the only thing that makes sense. There’s no reason there couldn’t have been a well left over from when someone had lived in those woods, or from when the land had been part of a larger estate. That would account for the suddenness of it, why Djuna wouldn’t have been able to make a sound or get back up after she fell.”

“And that’s what you were hoping to find.”

She didn’t like how soft his voice had become. “That’s not crazy, is it? I mean, if the woods hadn’t been cut down, the well might have still been there. I could have brought Becky, or Leanne, or Josie, or even my parents. Anyone who needed to be shown.”

“And you don’t think,” he said slowly, “that the police
would have found something like that before? Back when Djuna first disappeared and there were all those searches?”

Celia tightened her grip on the wheel. “It’s not like I haven’t considered that,” she said. “And no, Huck, I don’t.”

They returned to the road, Celia’s jaw clenching and unclenching, Huck gently chewing his lower lip.

“So then, what do you think happened?” he finally asked. “To the well, I mean.”

“I think it got filled in,” she said. “Either when they were widening the road or sometime before. If it happened before, it might have been a rushed job and they might not have even looked inside. And even if it was done right, and they cleared it out before filling it in, there’d be no reason to think anything would have been left for them to find. Not if they weren’t looking. Not if the hole had been open to the elements all that time, if there’d been standing water.”

From the corner of her eye, she thought she saw him nod.

“Have you shared this theory with your parents?” he asked.

“I just drove out there this morning,” she said. “Plus, I don’t want to tell them anything until I know I can convince them. With the woods gone, that means I’ll need to wait until after I’ve talked to Josie or Leanne.”

Her jaw ached as if she’d spent hours chewing gum. She couldn’t tell if she sounded reasonable or desperate.

“What about tomorrow,” Huck asked, “when your brother is here?”

“I’m still waiting to hear back from Mrs. Linke,” she said.
“I’m hoping to talk to both Josie and Leanne before I visit Djuna’s mother. So, I’m thinking I’ll visit Leanne before brunch tomorrow, and save Mrs. Pearson for the end of the day.”

“You mean your e-mail campaign with Leanne actually worked?”

“No,” Celia said. “But I know where she lives.”

“Wait.” Huck shook his head. “You can’t just show up. I mean, it took you twenty-one years to deal with this. Don’t you think Leanne deserves more than a couple days?”

“I can’t stand the idea of her being so close,” Celia said. “If I went back to Chicago without trying to see her, it would torture me. She might move or we might fall out of touch, and then I’d spend the rest of my life regretting that I hadn’t tried when I had the chance.”

Celia could feel Huck looking at her again. She feigned absorption in the road until he looked away.

“What do we do in the meantime?” he said. “This evening with your folks, for instance?”

“The same as always. We’ll eat and then watch cable until Mommy and Daddy go to bed.”

“But won’t it be unbearable?” he persisted. “All that sitting around together, not saying anything?”

She shrugged. “It’s what we do.”

The passing towns—Onondaga, Skaneateles, Assembly Park, Slab City—were testaments to what had been or had come to be. It occurred to Celia that Syracuse was roughly as far north along I-81 as Scranton was south. A comprehensive driving map of the past few days would resemble six o’clock
on a slightly eccentric watch face, with Jensenville at its center.

“Here comes Killawog,” Huck said. The names formed a familiar litany, a string of towns that only ever led to one destination.

T
he sight of Jensenville’s stone arch through the passenger-side window comforted Huck like the opening credits of a movie made familiar from frequent television airings. He wasn’t so intimate with Main Street as to know the exact arc of its commercial decline, but he had memorized the static contour of its skyline. Huck found it hard not to love the way Jensenville had aged. It was one of those time-capsule towns whose prosperity had been bestowed in a single lightning strike of good fortune and had dissipated just as quickly, leaving red-brick mansions with mansard roofs; the cupola atop City Hall; the wide, curved windows of the downtown storefronts; and the opera house with its stone tower. Writ larger, Jensenville could
have been a Pittsburgh, PA; smaller, and it could have been a Portsmouth, NH—all civic versions of the uncannily preserved corpse disinterred from the muck of a peat bog. Jensenville was an American fossil, a triumph of early twentieth-century industrialism set adrift in the twenty-first, emblem of an extinct age when factories begot cities.

Since falling silent at the 81 turnoff, Huck had been staring at the passing scenery, Celia drumming her fingers on the wheel. “What are you thinking about?” he asked.

“My parents should be home by now,” she said. “It’s been weird, me being here without you. They’re not used to it.”

“They miss me.” Huck sighed.

“They do,” she agreed. “Plus, I think they want to pump you for information.”

“What should I tell them?”

She shrugged. “Tell them whatever you want.”

As they passed the corner of Brahms and Hoffman, Huck was hazy on his exact relation to Schubert, but could have steered them in the right general direction. After years of walking tours, Huck knew the major landmarks: the former home of Celia’s bulimic babysitter; the corner where the kid with Down syndrome had stood for hours at a time, waving at passing cars. On a bench in Jensen Park, Celia had launched their only-ever public make-out session, explaining afterward that they had exorcised her memory of Harlan Posner, whose slobber had choked her on that very spot in eighth grade. With that, Huck had thought he’d been told everything there was to know.

Yesterday evening, he realized that he’d been treating his
solitude as a trial run. Mornings were a rush, then there was school, and even coming home at the end of the day to Bella and Sylvie had felt no different than before. Only in the hour following the dogs’ walk did loneliness assume Celia’s name, but Huck’s trouble distinguishing habit from need was an old, old problem, and one not limited to people. Though he would have never admitted it to Celia—he could barely admit it to himself—part of the thrill of their phone call later that night had been that once they got started, it could have been anyone on the other end of the line.

He would not go so far as to say that Celia’s surprise appearance at the airport had saved something, but Huck wasn’t sure how else he might have achieved the clarity of that moment. He had spotted her at the base of the escalator and recognition had spiked him to his marrow, an electric jolt proclaiming to his every cell and particle that he was hers alone. She’d been watching him the whole time, waiting until he saw her before calling his name, to let him see the shape of it in her mouth.

“I bet they were posting lookout from the living room,” she said as she pulled the car into the driveway. “Prepare yourself. Mommy came back from the store with, like, six bags of groceries.”

Warren and Noreen were hovering at the edge of the walk. Huck could not look at them without seeing a complex series of addends: Noreen’s hair + Noreen’s lips + Warren’s stature + Warren’s chin = Celia. Huck appreciated such genetic transparency for the glimpse it gave him of his future. Noreen’s hair was becoming wispier, the skin of Warren’s chin had loosened,
and they were both thicker in the waist, details that had helped Huck to picture himself at Celia’s side in the decades to come.

“Huck, it’s so nice to see you,” Noreen said. Her hug, which took in his shoulders but left space between their torsos, was followed by a kiss to the cheek and three pats to the back.

“Hello there, Huck.” Warren leaned in with a simultaneous back clasp and handshake. “I was telling Celia that you two should think about visiting more often when it’s warm and green.”

Huck nodded. “It was a beautiful drive from the airport.”

Huck was a full-service greeter by nature, active disdainer of the air kiss and half hug. Filmed in black and white and set to piano, his first few visits to Jensenville could have passed for silent comedy, his physical enthusiasm capsizing the Dursts’ restraint, several false starts endured in the search for a mutually comprehensible welcome. He had never seen Celia’s parents touch, outside chaste kisses exchanged at Christmas. Celia once told him that she had never seen her parents’ bedroom door closed; and in that brief, unwelcome moment before Huck banished Noreen and Warren’s sex life from his mind, he had prayed that there were certain fates he and Celia could avoid.