The Truth About Celia

  Tommy Taulbee tosses a quarter to the congressman as he huffs through the park, flipping it off his thumb and forefinger so that it looks like a perfect, spinning globe. Every day Tommy jogs two miles along the reservoir before he showers and drives to school. He teaches four sections of senior English at Springfield High School, with the first two periods of his day reserved for prep, so that he doesn’t actually have to appear in his classroom until ten-fifteen. From May to October he sets out on his jog with a quarter already tucked in his hand, and when he tosses it to Congressman Asa Hutchinson, the congressman always says that he thanks him for his goodness and mercy, which have followed him all the days of his life. On those few mornings when the congressman has wandered away from the park, Tommy arrives home with the quarter still in his hand, its ridges incised neatly into his palm. He runs past the empty public playground, the brewery, and the T-shaped docks with their chains of boats, thinking about all the papers he has yet to grade. Yesterday one of his students, Pierre Douglas, turned in an essay making the argument that people with guns should not shoot bystanders. Another, Chrissy Symancyk, wrote a science-fiction story that ended with the heroine, Chrissy herself, waking in what she called a poodle of sweat. He likes his students, even admires many of them, but when he returns their papers he often has to prevent a note of ridicule from puckering his voice. He listens to his tennis shoes slapping the pavement as he crosses the street—they echo off the broad side of a building with a surprisingly explosive series of cracks. It is a beautiful, still morning, cool and sunny, with hardly a breath of wind in the air. Tommy jogs past the Why Not Bar and the Lily Taylor Hair Salon and the Quik Stop Convenience Store, where Christopher Brooks stands at the counter, buying a bottle of eyedrops and a box of antacids. Christopher watches him pass.

  He pays for the eyedrops and the antacids with a five-dollar bill, pocketing the change, and grips the bell hanging from the door as he leaves, muffling it in his hand so that it won’t jingle. This is something he has found himself doing these past few years, and he does not know why. The doors at the newer shops and convenience stores, with their electronic chimes that ding automatically, make him ever so fractionally uncomfortable, and he can feel his face wincing whenever he goes to open one. As he heads down the sidewalk toward his car, his stomach sends a sudden, liquid pain through his body that causes his toes to tighten and a terrible heat to roll through the soles of his feet. It feels as though something inside him is wobbling just at the point of collapse, like a bead of water immediately before it spills out of itself. He is a mess. He stops by the door of the Why Not Bar, pressing his hand to his gut, and waits for the sensation to crest and fade away. Rollie Onopa calls out to him from the roof, where he is replacing a line of rain-rotted shingles. He says that he and the wife and the daughter will be there this evening for sure, they wouldn’t miss it, he just wants to let Christopher know, and Christopher says that he appreciates it. I’ll see you later on tonight, then, Christopher calls to him, and Rollie says, You can count on it.

  Rollie takes another few nails from the box as Christopher swallows his breath and pushes on toward the car. He squares one beneath the hammer and holds the other three in his mouth like toothpicks. Since there are no more joggers on the street, he knocks the nail into the shingle with a gentle tap, then drives it through with one easy swing. He takes a clean muscular pride in his facility with tools, in sawing smoothly through the kinks in a block of wood or whipping a spare lump of mortar off his trowel. He remembers his father telling him that the best men in the world knew how to use a tool, that Jesus Himself was a carpenter and you can be damn sure that when He fixed the joint in a door, that joint was by God perfect. Whenever Rollie spots joggers running below him, he likes to hammer in time with their footfalls. The way they stare at their feet trying to figure out what’s going on always amuses him. He certainly confused the hell out of the one who passed a few minutes ago, that schoolteacher. He lays another shingle on the roof. His daughter means everything to him, and he doesn’t know what he would do if he were to lose her. He can’t imagine how Christopher manages to get out of bed in the morning, to drive into town, to buy eyedrops and envelopes as though nothing has happened. After he has nailed the shingle in place, he stands and stretches into the sunlight, a single pearl of sweat sliding down his back. From the roof of the bar the road through town looks like an ascending chain of stoplights, falling green one by one, and just before he bends to his knees again he sees Christopher’s car disappearing over the brow of the hill.

  The traffic is light, and Christopher drives home as quickly as he can. A Styrofoam cup stirs and lifts behind a schoolbus, tumbling over his hood, and he watches it sail smartly into a telephone pole. He is preparing himself for his daughter’s memorial service. When he gets home he takes a pair of the antacids he bought, washing them down with a glass of ginger ale, which a school nurse once told him was good for soothing the stomach. He does not believe that Celia is dead. He does not even believe that she is not coming back. She simply vanished one day, when she was seven years old, and they have not been able to find her. Little Bo Peep has lost her sheep and doesn’t know where to find them. When she was a toddler, this was her favorite nursery rhyme. Christopher used to recite it to her every night before she went to sleep, leaning over her bed’s protective railing to kiss her good night. Lately he hears its bobbing cadence in his head a dozen times a day. He has even begun to match his stride to it. His wife, Janet, is upstairs in their bedroom sifting through the closet, and the sound of the wire hangers scraping along the metal rod, the empty ones tinkling loosely together, sounds to him like a wind chime combined with a rotary saw. The memorial service was Janet’s idea. Several weeks ago the two of them were having an argument about books that became an argument about Celia that became an argument about when he was going to climb free of it. He does not believe that he will ever climb free of it. He is not ready to memorialize his daughter, or at least he is not ready to ceremonialize her: in his own way he has been memorializing her ever since she was born. When she was three she swallowed a button. When she was five she climbed a maple tree. When she was six she found a yellow jacket in her room, but she wouldn’t let him kill it. He had to capture it in a butter dish and set it free outside. He is standing in the living room, staring blankly out the window.

  Janet does not know which dress to wear to the service. She has inspected all of them, draping them over her body with the collar pinned under her chin and the sleeves trailing down her arms so that she looks in the mirror like a statue of Saint Francis blessing the animals. She has looked at each dress more than once—so many times, in fact, that they have become just so much fabric to her, a great illimitable ocean of fabric—and she is sitting on the floor now, paddling her hand through them like Celia used to do when she crawled beneath the carousels at the department store. She owns only two black dresses, both of them of the sexy little number variety, and while she would love to wear simply her blue jeans, softened to velvet from years of laundering, she knows that she cannot. She hears Christopher downstairs, shuffling into the kitchen and rinsing something out in the sink. It was only two weeks ago when he told her that the only reason she didn’t like James Agee’s A Death in the Family was that she couldn’t stand to believe that the world was sad, and she told him that the only reason he didn’t like John Fowles’s The Magus was that he couldn’t stand to believe that the world was meaningless, and he said, But the world is sad, and she said, But the world is meaningless, or at least it can be, Christopher, and then somehow she ended up insisting that it was time to have a funeral—it had been four years, after all, it was something she needed, and if he wasn’t ready for a funeral, then surely he could allow her a simple memorial service, was that too much to ask? When the phone rings, she is briefly startled, as though someone has suddenly appeared in the room screaming. She does not remember when she began flinching at the sound of doorbells and telephones, at all the familiar announcements
of company, only that she was different once, a few years ago. She answers the phone to the voice of Reverend Gautreaux, who says that he is just calling to see if she is ready for the ceremony tonight and to ask how she is holding up, but he has no advice to offer when she says that she can’t seem to find a proper dress.

  The Reverend tamps a cigarette quietly against his wrist-watch, flexing his toes in the cool deep carpet of the vestry. He tells Janet that if there is nothing else, he will see her this evening at the pavilion, the weather should be lovely, and if she needs any last-minute help before then, she can always find him here at the church. I should be okay until tonight, she says, and he tells her, Well, just in case, then. . . . After he hangs up, he lights his cigarette, smoking it quickly, furtively, and then lights and smokes a second one. He has told his new assistant, Miss Unwer, that he has already quit smoking, and he allows himself to hope, though never to pray, that he will finish before she discovers him. He has hidden a palm-sized fan in the wardrobe to loosen and disperse the smoke, but when he turns it on, it makes the angry, granular whine of a horsefly, and he does not like to use it. He can see the smoke hovering over him in a thin fog. He will be offering the eulogy tonight. He is a young man, only twenty-nine, barely out of seminary, and this is his first congregation. He notches his lighter into the empty cigarette packet and conceals it in a small inner drawer of the wardrobe atop a neat stack of other cigarette packets. He has two secrets, the lesser of which is his smoking habit, and the greater of which is this: he has been unable to pray these last few months, ever since his father died. He feels sometimes that he has become one of the damned, those to whom prayer is forbidden. He slips his shoes on and opens the vestry door and steps out into the sanctuary. His father spent his entire life trying to read the Bible from cover to cover, and when he died, at sixty, of a heart attack, the Reverend Gautreaux found his bookmark six pages from the last amen, at the eighteenth chapter of the Book of Revelation. He does not understand how a life could end so abruptly, so close to its natural completion.

  The Reverend hears a premonitory cough in the pews and turns to see Kimson Perry, the police chief, standing there with his arms crossed. Kimson asks him how his smoke was and then laughs at the way his face blanches. The Reverend is so easy to rattle that Kimson can’t help himself sometimes. The sun shining through the stained-glass window casts an arrowhead of red and yellow light down the aisle, and Kimson follows it to the chancel. He likes to call the Reverend Rev, filling the smile that always spreads out from his lips with the sound of a revving engine. He was the first officer to investigate the disappearance of the little girl, the Brookses’ daughter. The Reverend looks at his watch and tells Kimson that he’s about an hour early for the noon mass, which is a joke. Kimson is a determined agnostic. The Reverend likes to tell him that this is exactly right, he is downright determined not to know, to which Kimson always answers, No, I’m determined not to pretend that I know. Kimson says that he has come to ask the Reverend if he wants to catch an early lunch, before the flock comes calling, and the Reverend nods and feels behind him for his wallet. He calls out to Miss Unwer that he is leaving for half an hour, then tells Kimson to lead the way. Kimson knows that the Reverend considers his agnosticism a form of intellectual laziness, and he likes to debate the matter with him once or twice a week over lunch. It is Kimson’s thought that the Reverend thinks of life as a dart, which is to say that what matters to him is where it will land, while Kimson himself thinks of life as a paper airplane, which is to say that what matters is the fact that it’s flying. He has been waiting to use this metaphor for almost a month, but the Reverend has seemed dispirited lately, as if Kimson could poke right through their banter and find him shriveled to his bones with anxiety. He has had to ease away from the debate. A ruff of clouds hangs just around the sun, like a tire. On their way to the diner, Kimson and the Reverend have to step off the sidewalk to weave past Enid Embry, who is carrying a swaying tower of Tupperware to her car—meat loaf tubs and picnic hampers and soup tureens.

  Enid Embry lifts the door handle with the very tips of her fingers, probing blindly, and totters around the edge of the door as she opens it, allowing the Tupperware to tumble willynilly into her backseat. Ever since her husband retired and passed away—God rest his soul—she has spent her days baking for her friends and neighbors and listening to broadcasts of The Art Bell Show. One thing she has discovered is that even her dearest friends often do not return her Tupperware, so once a year she orders a completely new set, picking it up from Belinda Kuperman, her Tupperware agent, in four separate shipments. Enid lives directly across the street from the Brooks family— though can she really call them a family anymore, now that it is just the two of them? She doesn’t know. After she has driven home, she bakes a pan of Macaroni Hot Dog Surprise and waits for it to cool on the counter. Art Bell is discussing time travel with his callers: Is time travel possible? How would a time traveler avoid the infamous temporal paradoxes popularized by Star Trek and the Back to the Future movies? The air in Enid’s kitchen is thickening with the scent of cheese and hot dogs and a hint of nutmeg, which is the Surprise in her Macaroni Hot Dog Surprise. Enid has seen three flying saucers in her life— wavering silver brightnesses that paused over her house and then lifted suddenly away—though two of them were actually cigar-shaped. One of the callers informs Art Bell that he is himself a time traveler, but when Mr. Bell asks the caller what the coming decade holds in store for us, the caller will say only that there will be a war somewhere, and an earthquake somewhere else, and that a beloved Hollywood film star will die. After the Macaroni Hot Dog Surprise has cooled, Enid slides it out of the pan, listening to the heavy wet kissing noise it makes as she levers it free with a spatula, then she seals it in a Tupperware container. She carries it outside and across the street.

  Janet answers the door to that woman from across the way, Enid Embry, the one who has referred to her and Christopher as You Poor People ever since Celia went missing. I brought You Poor People something to eat. If You Poor People need anything, don’t hesitate to call on me. Janet can’t help but grate her teeth when she hears the phrase, biting so hard that she thinks sometimes they will shear apart like pieces of shale, but she knows that Enid means well, and she thanks her for the Macaroni Hot Dog Surprise. Enid says goodbye, and Janet shuts the door. There is a small breeze in the air that was not there this morning, and she can feel it pushing through the open kitchen window, swelling every so often and rattling the cooking utensils that hang on their metal hooks. She picks up an envelope that has wafted to the floor—a royalty check from Christopher’s publisher. Thank God the old books are still selling. He hasn’t been able to write anything in years. She has decided that she will have to buy a new dress for the funeral—or, rather, for the memorial service. Though she has reminded Christopher of the distinction a thousand times, she still finds herself making the same slip in her innermost thoughts. She discovers him in the bathroom, where he is standing with his head craned back, his mouth open in a hapless O, squeezing eyedrops into his eyes. He looks almost like a baby bird begging for food, so adorably helpless that she can’t help but forgive him for a moment for everything he’s ever done, laughing and kissing him on the cheek. She tells him that she is going to head into town for a while. Do you need anything? she asks, and he says that he doesn’t, futilely trying to smother a yawn.

  The impulse is irresistible: whenever Christopher tilts his head back and stares into the light, the yawns rise through him one after another, entire chains of them, as though he were simply a chimney exhaling rings of smoke. Janet heads upstairs in her socks, and a few minutes later he hears her marching back down, her footsteps sounding more square and solid in her shoes. He switches the bathroom light off. It has been weeks since he slept through till morning, and yesterday, when he was shaving, he found a tick-sized system of exploded blood vessels in his right eye. Every night he wakes at two or three o’clock, when even the frogs and the crickets h
ave fallen silent. No matter what he tries he can’t settle back to sleep. He pads to the kitchen in his T-shirt and underwear and eats boluses of peanut butter from the end of a spoon, plates of leftover casserole, entire boxes of saltine crackers. Once, at four in the morning, Janet stumbled into the kitchen and caught him with a brick of cheddar in one hand and a cucumber in the other, both cheeks bloated with food, and she turned around and went back to bed. He has learned what every beggar knows: that for short periods of time, a few days perhaps, no longer, he can replace sleep with eating or eating with sleep, though it has been at least twenty-four hours since he has done either. His stomach is just now beginning to settle. The last time he saw Celia she was balancing herself on the stone wall in the side yard of their house, the arms of a maple tree stretching above her. This was through his living room window, and when he looked again, a few minutes later, she was gone. Janet calls goodbye to him from the foyer, closing the front door just as he closes the kitchen window, and the air, which had been flowing past him in loops and curves, seems to tighten suddenly and take on the shape of the room.