The False Friend (9 page)

According to the unadjusted time on her cell phone, it was Huck’s planning period.

“Finally,” he said.

“Is this an okay time?” she asked. She gaped at the plain house like it was on fire.

“I’ve been sitting here with the phone lying between my grade book and my third-period essays on Manifest Destiny and Mission,” he said. “How did it go with your mom?”

Celia could not stop staring. She tried to project the colors from her memory, but nothing would stick.

“Sweetheart,” Huck said. “You’re crying.”

“I made a detour on my way back,” she said. “I don’t know why, but I thought it was a good idea.”

“Ceel, where are you?”

“At Djuna’s.”

“You sound so sad.”

She looked around. There—in that narrow strip of grass between houses, beside a gray electrical box the size of an industrial freezer—she could almost see the girls they once had been. She remembered crouching with Djuna, out of breath from running, between them a library tote filled with whatever food they had filched from the kitchen on their way out the door. The steady hum of the electrical box was imperceptible unless you were right next to it, and became downright ominous when you placed your ear to its metal side. Because they’d never seen anyone else there; because they’d discovered the sound for themselves; because their friendship thrived on such exclusive mutual possessions, they decided they were the only ones in the world who knew the box’s secret. They alone had managed to evade its net of inaudible sound waves, designed to prevent everyone else in the neighborhood from wanting to leave. At age eleven, Celia and Djuna had been old enough to ride their bikes wherever they wanted, and to pocket keys to their respective homes. They’d taken their first steps into the hugeness of the universe beyond, and found each other. The grass around the electrical box formed a long, untended zone that no one else had claimed. To crouch there was to become invisible. For Celia, the best moment was when they first arrived, each grasping one of the tote bag’s handles, a single creature composed of four ready legs and two synchronous hearts. Whenever she agreed to the game, it was for this moment of union, the strongest alliance she’d experienced
outside the inherited bonds of family, and the most powerful, vulnerable thing she knew. Her fun lay in skulking behind bushes and evading imagined pursuers while gorging on commandeered cornflakes and chocolate-covered raisins, but Djuna talked of Greyhound buses to New York City, and of money her mother kept in a bureau drawer. After exhausting their supplies while arguing over destination behind a series of trees and parked cars, they invariably returned to Djuna’s, an endgame Celia treated as a private victory every time.

Driving back along Schubert, Celia passed two joggers in matching sorority T-shirts, identical ponytails bobbing behind them. Across the street, a student tenant sat enthroned upon his lawn’s recliner. He listened to his iPod, his head bobbing at a more frantic tempo than the jogging sorority sisters, an open textbook resting on his lap. When Celia exited the car, he briefly looked up before returning his gaze to the book, abandoning Celia in mid-wave, her mouth having assumed the reflexive neighborly smile. It was further proof that she was getting old, this allegiance to etiquette abandoned by the younger generation. Once upon a time, her own parents had scolded her for not saying hello. Soon, even eye contact would be discarded. All pretense of community would be extinguished.

Celia opened the front door with the same key she’d always used, the one she never failed to bring back east. Between the fake rock and her parents’ spares she knew there was no chance of being locked out, but Celia had owned this key for two-thirds of her life. It had survived the era of lost umbrellas, hats, and retainers. It bore the stamp of a hardware store that had
burned down under suspicious circumstances around the time she was learning to drive. In some future Celia hesitated to imagine, her parents actually would move and the key would be thrown away or consigned to a jar of orphaned objects—but for now, it slid in and turned without a hitch. Not all keys did: this one had been well-made. It was not Celia’s house anymore, but each time she turned this key in the lock, it became her house again.

She entered the den before remembering that the computer had been moved to her brother’s old room, opposite hers at the far end of the second floor. Celia took the stairs slowly, noticing for the first time that years of direct sunlight from the front hall had blanched the pine carpeting to pale green. She hadn’t spent much time in Jeremy’s room beyond putting him to bed as his conscripted babysitter. Before she’d left for college, her brother had been an uncomplicated creature of navy blue Converse and cargo pants, a boy who smelled of peanut butter. His room had held no allure, its secrets either outdated or irrelevant. Warren had talked of wanting a home office, but Celia suspected the computer’s relocation had more to do with trying to rid the place of its ghosts. According to Noreen, Warren had been the one to find him. He had needed to let himself in—the only detail Celia had been told, but it was enough. The house had been built before the invention of doorknobs with push-button locks. The keyhole of each interior door had been unsexed long ago by the loss of its key. It was impossible to know whether or not her parents’ pathological respect for privacy had predated their habitation of a house with unlockable doors, but even in grade school, when night frights had
sent Jeremy screaming awake, Warren’s headlong rush for his son’s room had always stopped at the threshold. Knocking, he would say, “Jem, it’s Dad. Is it okay for me to come in?”

All that was visible from her brother’s doorway was the computer desk and the bookshelf on the wall just beyond the door’s reach. Crossing inside, Celia wondered whether she was walking over the spot where her brother had collapsed. The replacement carpet contrasted oddly with the rest of the room, which was a ravaged time capsule. Only the least coveted artifacts of childhood remained—uncherished books and unloved toys, unprized awards and souvenirs from unmemorable vacations. Beside a dust-choked field day medal sat the carapace of a plaster arm-cast covered in faded signatures. Next to that, the relevant Jensenville High yearbooks, bought reflexively by Noreen each year when purchasing her own. Jeremy’s were fuzzed with dust, their spines unbroken. Thumbtacks memorializing the dimensions of discarded posters were interspersed with spackled wall patches, none smaller than the width of a fist. The ceiling was dotted with a few persistent glow-in-the-dark stars that had long outlasted their constellations.

Warren’s computer monitor displayed a more recent photo of Daniel than the one on the coffee table downstairs. It was a candid shot that Jeremy or Pam must have taken since last Christmas, because he was wearing a sweater Celia remembered him receiving. Her nephew was napping on a couch, looking more like his father than ever. Asleep, Daniel sucked his thumb just as Jeremy had; he had the same thick eyebrows and—Celia wasn’t sure why she’d never noticed it before—the same oblong mole in the center of his left cheek. Daniel would
turn two in June. Though Celia was kept up-to-date by the photos Pam faithfully posted online, last Christmas was only the second time she had seen him in person. Daniel’s boundless enthusiasm for motion and collision did not remind Celia of Jeremy in particular. She had witnessed it in enough of her friends’ children to know it was the province of small boys. What struck Celia most about young children was the intensity of their passions, life too new to be modulated, perspective a possession not yet acquired. At that age friendship was a continuous present based on proximity and the shared fact of being alive. Heartbreak and betrayal were commonplace, authentic and ardent each time, forgotten within moments.

Celia stared at the computer screen, willing herself to begin. All she had to go on were their names at age eleven: Rebecca Miller, Jocelyn Linke, Leanne Forrest. Less than a decade ago seeking them out would have required, at the very least, the cultivation of a reference librarian or a local archivist, perhaps even a private investigator. Now all Celia needed was broadband access. Of the three, only Rebecca’s name was hopelessly generic. Celia started with Josie. What had once been fodder for countless noir movies had been reduced to typing a name and clicking on a button that said Search.

There was just one. The hits were all related, all having to do with art. Jocelyn Linke had kept her name. Celia stared at the monitor, stunned by how easy it had been.

A gallery Web site provided a bio. Place and date of birth were all the confirmation Celia needed, the only information she recognized. After college in Wisconsin, Josie had attended the Art Institute of Chicago. The year Celia started working
for the Auditor General, Josie had been seven blocks away finishing her MFA. They might have ridden the same El train, eaten the same weekday lunch specials. Back when she’d known Josie, everyone was artistic, life a steady accretion of paintings and stories, lopsided clay animals and braided friendship bracelets. Josie’s people had looked like people, her trees like trees, but no more or less than anybody else’s. She had become the sort of artist Celia didn’t have a name for, the kind who did a bit of everything. Thumbnail images of Josie’s paintings, sculptures, and installations lined the bottom of the screen, each in turn filling the upper portion in a cycling slideshow. All the images depicted women and girls in various configurations, but three made Celia flinch. She had been anticipating a search that would take days, a mental road trip that would provide her time to prepare for seeing the people she had pushed to her memory’s margins. Instead, as if delivered by supersonic transport, here were Josie’s monogrammed glasses, Becky’s narrow-set eyes, and Leanne’s broad forehead, details Celia’s mind had elided but which were as native to her as her own scent. Their familiar faces sat atop fanciful bodies that sprouted bells, scales, or thorns. The first piece showed the five of them on the march, their girl bodies tapering into duck feet below the knees. Celia and Djuna led the procession, their heads perfectly aligned, Celia by now having permanently adopted the good posture she had once disdained. Josie and Becky flanked Leanne, whose arms were crossed to form an X as if frozen in the middle of a walking version of a hand game—
Miss Mary Mack, Mack, Mack/All dressed in black, black, black
. Except for Leanne, intent on her game, they were all smiling.

The second image showed Celia and Djuna frozen in mid-argument, their legs rooted to the ground. Their bodies had been transformed into prickly plants leaning toward each other as if bent by opposing winds. Celia could feel the memory of her sneer in the muscles of her face, recalled the way her jaw would ache afterward.

She couldn’t bear to look at the last piece for more than a few moments. Djuna sat with her face averted, her seated body a network of gauges gone haywire, their needles all in the red. Josie watched from a distance, her head attached to a body of peepholes, while Celia stood with her back to Djuna not more than one arm’s length away. Celia’s body was frozen in escape but her head was turned fully around, owl-like, to stare at Djuna from a 180-degree angle. Celia felt as though the contents of her mind’s most protected corner had been rifled and put on display. The scene Josie had re-created was proof that at least one person already knew what Celia had come back to say.

The gallery didn’t provide any contact info aside from its own. Celia spent half an hour traveling from hit to hit along the information highway looking for a personal phone number or an e-mail address before noticing her brother’s old push-button telephone, waiting all this time at the edge of her vision. She went downstairs to consult the White Pages. It had been years, but her parents kept the phone book in the same place they always had, in the magazine rack beneath the phone handset that, in the pre-cordless era, had endowed that corner of the den with special powers. Celia didn’t think the apartment in Chicago even contained a telephone directory, remembered
annually ignoring the stoop-side appearance of each new edition, so deracinated by the rise of the cell phone that it had become no more desirable than a Chinese take-out menu.

The listing for Ron and Sandy Linke was nestled between
Lin
and
Linker
. Celia had never visited Josie’s house but remembered the sight of the corner street sign outside the bus window, and Josie’s pronunciation of Mozart Street as if referring to art owned by a guy named Moe. The afternoon bus provided Celia and Djuna the day’s best opportunity to wield their power, its two- and three-seaters enforcing a much stricter pecking order than any lunchroom table. They’d choose a three-seater, using their backpacks to fill the extra space until the bus lurched into motion, at which point they’d remove their bags to reveal the available seat, fifth-grade Salomes executing their own Dance of the Seven Veils. They ignored Becky and Josie’s nearby two-seater, except on the days they invited Becky to join them at Djuna’s house to play. On those occasions, Becky would sit between them, leaving Josie stranded across the aisle. As Josie’s stop neared, she would open a book and pretend to read, never turning a page. Celia remembered the deliberation with which Josie would hoist her book bag and then check her seat, feigning deep interest in ensuring she had left nothing behind, hesitating until the bus driver threatened to make her walk from the next stop if she didn’t get a move on, forcing Josie to accept that she was not going to be invited too. “Call me,” she would say each time she left the bus. They never did.

Mrs. Linke recognized Celia’s name, told her she was sure Josie would be thrilled to hear from such a good old friend.
She would get back to her with contact information; Josie had so many different phone numbers these days, she was never sure which one to give. Celia expressed thanks and hung up, her hands shaking. She had forgotten Mrs. Linke until she’d heard the slight Southern drawl. Josie’s mother had been a frequent field trip chaperone and classroom helper, a tirelessly upbeat woman in long, flowing skirts and scoop-necked blouses, whose equally fervent praise of tangled cursive exercises and perfect math worksheets confounded any nascent impulse toward self-pride. Though the same sugared voice had greeted Celia on the phone, Mrs. Linke had skipped the What-do-you-dos and Where-are-you-nows that were the standard parlance of old friends’ mothers. This former enthusiast for anything remotely related to her daughter had not wanted to know anything more about Celia than she already did.