The False Friend (22 page)

Huck exhaled a long breath.

“I know,” he said.

“It’s like you start shutting down and you don’t even know that you’re doing it. You start coming up with ways not to have to deal with me … volunteering for after-school stuff, deciding that you need to watch every film with a certain actress.”

“I wish it had all been as clear to me,” he said.

She shook her head. “I knew that I needed to say something, but if I told you, then we’d have to deal with it, and if we dealt with it, that might mean …” She tried to concentrate on the sound of her breath. “So instead, I just tried to live with it, until one morning I was on my way to work … and now, here I am.”

“That’s good, Ceel. What’s happening here is a good thing.”

“But what’s the point if no one believes me?”

“This isn’t about belief,” Huck said.

“Sure it is.”

“It’s not,” Huck said. “No one thinks that you’re lying, Ceel. They just don’t agree with what you remember.”

“Including you,” Celia said.

Huck shook his head. “It doesn’t matter what I think.”

“Actually, it does.”

The television was unloading the tail end of a cable movie.
The timed lamps downstairs had switched off, leaving the two of them pallid in the television’s sloughed light.

“Okay then.” Huck sighed. “If you really want to know, I think considering that Becky, and Josie, and your parents—”

“Wait.” She turned away. “I changed my mind.”

They stared at the television.

“I’m going to see Leanne first thing in the morning,” Celia said.

Huck pressed the remote’s red button. It became very quiet. “I think that’s a really bad idea,” he said.

“It might be,” she agreed, “but I’m going to do it anyway. In case this is my only chance.”

“This isn’t the same as your job, Ceel. You don’t get special access to all the places you need in order to fulfill your fact-finding mission. You are distinctly uninvited.”

“It’s okay,” Celia said. “I won’t ask you to go with me.”

She closed her eyes.

“When we get back to Chicago,” he said, “I think you should start seeing a therapist.”

She remained perfectly still. She could hear her pulse in her ear.

“You too,” she said. They sat in sodium-tinted darkness, the room suffused in an orange glow. When a car passed, the beam of its headlamps cast itself like a searchlight across the room’s surfaces, an illuminated parade of shapes in brief rally against the night.

C
elia left the next morning while Huck was still sleeping. She told her parents she had a breakfast date, which was true enough to get her to the car guilt-free. She would have been terrible company, refusing coffee and unable to eat. Celia felt better in the car, but then saw she’d need to waste at least forty-five minutes before it became a civilized hour to stop by. Leanne’s address put her in Pritchard. Celia had only ever been there once before, to visit a flea market with Huck, the two of them treading between rickety folding tables heaped with ceremonial swords, homemade deer jerky, 9/11 memorial T-shirts, animal-shaped bottle openers, and secondhand children’s clothing, a pageant they’d fled after fifteen minutes.
Leanne lived a few miles east of the flea market, in a neighborhood of small, one-story homes just past a trailer park and a gas station that advertised tune-ups and live bait. Celia drove past kids on battered bicycles, a man leaning over the hood of a car, a girl sitting on her front stoop chewing the hair of a Barbie doll. Leanne’s was the nicest house on her block, with a trimmed lawn, a recent paint job, and a sturdy porch sheltering a wicker chair in good repair. Celia drove past once without stopping, then circled around and pulled into the driveway. She parked behind an aging pickup truck with a Wilson-Smith University decal in its back window and a bumper sticker that read
NONE OF YOUR BUSINESS
.

She slammed the car door, hoping the sound might carry through the open windows. The porch steps creaked under her weight. Flanking the wicker chair was a wicker side table that held a full ashtray and a stack of magazines. Celia tried to create an adult portrait of Leanne sitting in that chair, reading a magazine and smoking a cigarette, but all she could see was a skinny girl with crooked ash-blond bangs and ragged fingernails. Celia stood on the porch a moment, hoping it would be enough: just the outer screen door was closed. “Hello?” she called. When nothing happened, she crossed to the door and placed her face against the mesh. She made out a stairwell and an easy chair. From the back of the house, a shadow ambled forward.

“Can I help you?” a man asked from the other side of the screen. Celia couldn’t tell whether she looked as familiar to him as he looked to her.

“Hi,” she began. “I’m an old friend of Leanne’s and I just
happened to be in the neighborhood.” She gasped inwardly at the flimsiness of the lie. “Did I manage to catch her at home?”

The man looked her over.

“No, you did not,” he finally answered.

He stepped onto the porch. He was slender with a gentle face, the type Celia would have had a crush on, but when she ran through her mental teenage roster of heartbreaks and unrequited loves, she came up blank. She tried and failed to place him in the middle school cafeteria or a high school classroom. When he looked her over a second time, she realized they were playing the same memory game. He gave a small grunt.

“I know who you are,” he said.

“You do?”

“You’re Celia Durst.”

“Have we met?” she asked.

“Not really,” he said.

“Because you look familiar to me too. Are you and Leanne related?”

“You got it in one,” he said.

“Well, it’s nice to meet you,” she said, and held out her hand. He hesitated before offering his. “I can’t tell if I’m remembering you because we met as kids or because you’ve got your sister’s eyes.”

“It’s the resemblance,” he said. “We’ve also got the same sense of humor.”

Down the block a screen door slammed and Celia turned toward the sound. A dog bounded from a house, dragging a boy by its leash. When Celia turned back toward Leanne’s
brother, his wariness seemed to have been replaced by something milder.

“You back visiting your folks or something?” he asked.

She nodded. “I forgot how nice it was here in spring.”

“It can get real pretty.”

“Are you visiting too?”

When he laughed, Celia could see his sister in his smile.

“Me?” he said. “No. I’m more or less stuck with this place.”

“What about Leanne?”

He shook his head. “Lee’s the same as me.”

“Were you a grade or two above us? Maybe we saw each other on the playground?”

“We didn’t.”

“But still,” she persisted, “it’s not like Jensenville’s a huge place. We must have—”

“Look,” he said. “I know you’ve been sending e-mails and I also know you’ve come here uninvited, so I’m not going to ask you in, but since you’re here anyway I guess I don’t mind talking with you on the porch. You want something? I’ve got water.”

“Do you think Leanne will be back soon?”

He shook his head. “Don’t count on it.”

“Water’s fine,” she said, and he disappeared back through the door into the darkened house.

She sat in the single chair. Someone across the street was blaring rap through an open window, the bass ricocheting against the side of the neighboring house. She knew Leanne’s
brother had returned by the slam of the screen door behind her.

“You comfortable?” he asked, and she realized she was meant to turn her chair to face him. He was standing behind a second wicker chair that he had brought from inside and still gripped in his hands. A single glass of water rested on the table beside her.

“Sure,” she said.

“You’re sitting in a chair that Lee restored. Sturdied up the frame and recaned the whole thing. You should have seen it before—the seat had a big hole busted in it and the entire piece had been painted this trashy shade of orange. Stripping the paint off was a bitch, but it sure looks beautiful now.”

“Sounds like a pretty big job.”

“It was, but that was just what Lee needed. Wicker restoration is what got Lee through the first few years of recovery. Now it’s kind of a vocation.” He pointed to a sign in the front window that read
WICKER BY LEE—RESTORATION AND ORIGINAL CREATIONS
in bold blue type. “Pretty much everybody’s got an old busted wicker chair lying around,” he continued. “It’s good furniture and it lasts a lifetime if you treat it right. I bet your folks have a chair or two that Lee could fix for them.”

“Um, I don’t know. I’ll have to check.” She reached for the water and took a sip. It was warm.

“Now that is something Lee would surely appreciate,” he said. “Remind me and I’ll give you a business card before you go.” He looked at her. She feigned absorption in her glass.

“I’m glad to know Leanne is doing well,” she said. Her chair creaked every time she moved.

“Yeah,” he said. “There were some real rough times. Really tough. Anybody who at all gave a shit for Lee was pretty worried, but now Lee is doing all right.” He nodded. “You went to college,” he told her. “What did you study?”

“I ended up as an economics major.”

“An economist? Now that actually sounds useful. One thing I could never understand was people paying all that money to study English or religion or whatnot. You must be doing pretty well for yourself over in Chicago.”

“How did you know I was—”

“Your e-mails,” he said.

“But I didn’t—”

“You’re not the only one who knows how to type a name into the Internet.”

He leaned against the house as he looked her over, his eyes studying her as if he could see through to her veins.

“You know,” he said, “Lee was kind of freaked when you turned up again after all these years.”

“Well, I really appreciate her writing me back.”

“You were somebody Lee had been pretty happy to leave behind,” he said. “It’s actually fairly fucked up, you sitting here on Lee’s porch, acting like this perfectly considerate person.”

“I was hoping to apologize,” she said.

“You already did.”

Celia shook her head. “Not really. Not in the way she deserves.”

“But Lee didn’t want that,” he said, his shaking head mocking her own. “Lee wanted never to see you again, so what does that do to your apology? It turns it into more harm done,
doesn’t it? Some new messed-up thing that you’ve got to make amends for.”

Celia could not stop staring.

“I’m sorry,” she said.

“Leanne was so unhappy,” he continued. “She didn’t need any help from you and Djuna on that account. Ever since she could remember, she knew she was different. She was already the most miserable little girl, and then the two of you took that and cranked it up higher than it should have been possible to go.”

Celia stared, and he smiled, neither of them able to stop.

“I hated you for what you did,” he said, those words from between his smiling lips raising the hair on the back of Celia’s neck. “I thought I’d gotten past that, but seeing you like this, I realize that I still do.”

“You and Leanne must be pretty close,” she said.

“As close as it’s possible to be in this world.”

“It was wrong of me to come.” Celia shook her head. “I don’t expect you to believe it, but I’m not usually this … I should be going.” She began to stand.

“Not yet,” he said in a way that froze her where she was.

The music from across the street had stopped. It was quiet save for the distant sounds of cars.

“What time did you used to wake up for school?” he asked.

“Excuse me?”

“I said, what time?”

She looked at him.

“It’s not a trick question,” he said, leaning closer. “Back when you were still just an innocent little girl, what time did you wake up to get ready for school?”

He was wearing a T-shirt and she could tell that he liked to work out. His arms bulged from shoulder to forearm before tapering into slim, almost dainty wrists. If she had stood, her mouth would have just grazed the top of his head, but he had more muscle. She considered returning to the car. Instead, she stayed where she was and looked at him looking at her, his question spiking the air between them.

“Seven o’clock?” she offered. “Seven thirty? I’m sorry, I really don’t—”

“Every morning Leanne woke up at five
A.M
.,” he said. “Five
A.M
. to prepare for your stupid inspections. She’d stand in front of the mirror, looking at her hair, her clothes, her personality for chrissake, wondering what she could do to get a passing grade. And you were so clever about it. You let her pass just often enough not to allow her to give up hope, to let her think there was some sort of objective logic. That the two of you actually
could
help her to become a better girl.”

Celia remembered making up the form with Djuna each morning on the bus, drawing boxes with a black pen in a notebook placed between them. Half the time they would fill in the grades before they even got to school, in order to get it out of the way.

“I’m ashamed of what we did,” she said softly. “It was stupid and mean and I wish I could say that I wasn’t aware of that at the time, but I’m sure that I was. I do know that we didn’t do it according to any sort of thought-out plan.”

“Well, I guess that makes you born geniuses of the mindfuck,” he said. “Must feel good to be so naturally gifted at something. Leanne sure as hell wasn’t. Not at the most basic
little thing. You had her so whipped, she actually felt relieved that day you told her you were going to leave her in the woods. There wasn’t even any need for you to have walked her there. After that haircut, she was so far gone that you could have pointed in any direction you wanted and told her to walk until she fell off the edge of the world.”

“Was that what we were doing that day?” Celia asked softly.

He laughed. “It was
your
brilliant plan, only by the time we started out you weren’t so sure you liked it anymore. In some corner of your puny little heart you thought it might be
wrong
to leave someone in the woods like that. But by then, of course, it was too late because Djuna thought it was the best idea she’d ever heard.”