The False Friend (24 page)

“That’s all right,” she said. “I should have told you when you called.”

They sat in the chairs that had always been theirs. It was possible they had not been alone in a room since the Clinton administration. The skin around Jeremy’s eyes was cross-hatched with tiny lines, as if he’d spent his life in the sun rather than in the ninth-cloudiest city in America.

“Jem,” she said. “What was I like back then?”

Her brother swirled a water glass in his hands, his eyes fixed on the small whirlpool inside.

“Which ‘back then’?” he asked.

“When we were kids,” she said. “Did I pick on you?” She had given up on
little
long ago, but
younger
was equally irrelevant. The man sitting across the table from her was simply her brother.

“I’d like to know what you remember,” she said.

Jeremy appraised her from across the table. “You want me to list all the terrible things you did to me when we were little?”

She nodded.

“All right, let me think.” He made his mental tally. “Okay,” he said. “For years when we played Monopoly, you got me to trade you things like Park Place for Baltic Avenue by telling me that purple was a better color than blue. Once, you handed me water mixed with toothpaste and a few drops of liquid soap and told me it was a new kind of milk. And sometimes you’d hide behind the couch and wait until I came in so you could growl like a wolf and scare the bejesus out of me.” He leaned back in his chair.

“Is that everything?” she asked.

He nodded. “That’s it. All the biggest stuff, anyway. According
to Mom, you bit my finger right after I came home from the hospital to see if I was a real baby, but even my memory doesn’t go back that far.”

She gave a shaky exhale.

“Cee?” he asked. “You okay? I’m not holding out on you. Really, you were a good big sister.”

“Even when Djuna was around?”

He shrugged. “You were meaner then, but we had fun.”

“How was I mean?” she whispered.

“Just stupid stuff. You’d call me names sometimes, or if the three of us were playing together I always had to be the slave or the dog or the baby. But, man, you two were entertaining. You were so intense about everything. My friends and I were never like that. I mean, sure, sometimes we’d fight over who got to be Boba Fett, but then we’d tackle each other and we’d be over it. Pam says it’s a girl thing.” He smiled. “I have to say, as much as I love women, looking at what Pam’s going through now and what you went through back then, I don’t envy any of you one bit.”

From the den they could hear their mother crooning tuneless nursery rhymes.

“Jem?” Celia said. “Back when we were kids, there was this girl. The one you said you didn’t remember on the phone.”

“Leanne?”

Celia nodded. “She was this tomboy from the east side who kind of adopted us one day. Started eating at our lunch table, following us around at recess, would pretty much do anything we told her.”

“There are always kids like that,” Jeremy said.

“I guess, but we took it too far. Leanne wanted to be like us, and it became this game. Every day Djuna and I would rate her, and whenever she scored too low …”

“What?”

“It’s not even like I forgot,” Celia said softly. “I just sort of glossed over it. Jem, we were terrible. We invented all these ‘treatments’ that we said would help her, like only eating carrots or using lotion instead of shampoo. And whenever she failed our inspections we’d do stupid stuff like call her Reject or tell her that she could only talk if one of us talked to her first. She’d always do it. And because we were ‘good girls,’ and Leanne didn’t tell, no one ever knew.”

“How long?” he asked.

“A while. All winter and into the spring. We did it every day. We never got bored. But she must have, because finally … I didn’t remember this part until I talked to Josie.”

“Cee?” Jeremy asked. “You okay?”

“No. I’m just so … I can’t even look at you right now.”

“You don’t have to tell me.”

Celia nodded. “I do. This one day, Leanne showed up wearing all the wrong things … brown pants and a soccer shirt, black sneakers, and even a cowboy belt. We always rated her in three categories: colors, fashion, and presence—we got that last one from
Star Search
—and that day she failed them all.” Celia gazed past Jeremy out the window. “I thought we should make her go into the woods and Djuna thought that we should give her a haircut, so instead of fight about it we decided to do both.”

When she closed her eyes she could picture the classroom
art cabinet and an institutional soup can containing scissors by the blunt-tipped dozen, each waiting, blade-end down.

“It was the first time Leanne said no,” Celia said. “She said if we wanted to leave her out in the woods that was fine, but no haircut. I could tell it wasn’t going to happen that way because of how quickly Djuna agreed. All of us met behind the school that afternoon when the buses came. I knew Djuna had the scissors. The first thing she did was tie Leanne’s hands. Leanne said, ‘Please,’ and I told Djuna that I didn’t think it was a good idea, but Djuna wouldn’t listen. Leanne struggled at first but then Josie helped me hold her, and I think she must have decided it wasn’t worth it. Djuna cut off all the hair in the back, right above the neck, and then started in on the sides. I don’t know whether Leanne started to squirm, or if Djuna was just being careless, but Leanne yelped and when Djuna pulled away there was this little cut on Leanne’s ear. It was small, the sort of thing that happens with home haircuts sometimes, but it scared even Djuna because she stopped right away and said that the haircut was over and that we should head for the woods. I told her I thought we’d done enough. I told her all the way down Ripley Road, and around the curve. I mean, we’d said that we hated each other plenty of times before, but on that day …”

The silence at the dining room table was a glass bead the house held in its mouth.

“When I got on the bus that afternoon and you weren’t there,” Jeremy said, “I spent the whole ride wondering whether or not to tell. When Mom saw me, she decided that you’d gone to Djuna’s, so I didn’t bother to correct her. I figured
that you’d owe me. Then the police brought you home.” He shook his head. “I hid on the stairs. I thought Mom would make me go back to my room, but she never did. The first thing you did was throw up, right in the middle of the floor. You weren’t crying or anything. Instead you had this look on your face like … I don’t know, Cee. Like a part of you had been torn out.”

“You saw the whole thing?”

He nodded. “Part of me wanted to go back to my room, or at least plug my ears, but I couldn’t. And the more I listened, the more mad I got.”

“At me?”

“At Djuna!” he said. “Seeing you like that … I mean, even
I
knew you weren’t supposed to get into a stranger’s car, and I was only eight!”

She examined her brother’s face. “Jem,” she began.

“I know,” he said. “Mom told me what you say you remember. About the woods. I’m not going to try to contradict you, Cee, but it sure sounded to me that day like you were telling the truth.”

She glanced away.

“Look,” he said. “If it’s at all helpful, my own memory’s only perfect up to a certain point. Big sections of my high school years, the beginning of my recovery … they’re just gone. When I was first getting myself together, I’d go someplace like the Quik Mart and someone would come up to me and be all like ‘Hey man,’ and I’d have no idea who they were.”

“What would you do?”

“At first, I just stared through whoever it was like he was
some kind of ghost, but that didn’t seem right. I mean, it wasn’t their fault that they remembered something I didn’t. So eventually I just started saying ‘Hey’ back and made small talk, say where I was at. It didn’t cost me anything and it was over soon enough. And then I would get on with my life.”

“I wasn’t here,” she said. “You were going through all this and I just … I should have stayed.”

Jeremy smiled.

“Nope,” he said. “You were where you were supposed to be. Off in Chicago, starting the next chapter of your life. To be honest, it probably would have been harder having you around instead of as this long-distance reminder of all the ways I was messing up. It’s the curse of the little brother, living in someone’s shadow. I was always doomed to be jealous, even about all that stuff with Djuna.”

Celia’s eyes widened.

“I know,” he laughed. “It sounds crazy, but think of it this way: everyone started being extra nice to you! Like, we’d go to the library and the librarian would give you a book from the donations pile, or we’d go to the grocery store and the cashier would give you a piece of candy, not like you were even aware of it at the time. You were like a zombie, which is the only reason it worked. If you’d been like a normal kid, people would have stopped doing that stuff, which is how I realized I didn’t want to be like you after all. You were way too sad.”

Light from the window played across his face, casting the same old shadows.

“Do you ever worry?” Celia said. “Now that it’s not just
you? I’m not even talking about Daniel. Let’s start with the idea of just being with another person. I think that all these years, part of me has been afraid that if I wasn’t careful, I’d just … I mean, once you know what you’re capable of, how can you be sure …”

“You can’t,” Jeremy said. “At first I was going to meetings about three times a day, and it still didn’t feel like enough. But Daniel gives me something to focus on, plus just his being here reminds me of how different things are now.”

“But don’t you worry that one day—”

“All the time,” he said. “I mean, I wake up every morning thinking about
exactly
what it would take to fuck it all up. But knowing how to do something isn’t the same as doing it. So, I just decide over and over again not to. And, sure, it’s way more work for me than other people, but I like to think that it’s something everybody has to do. I’m doing it right now. And in one way or another, I bet that you are too.”

Noreen poked her head through the doorway.

“Sorry to interrupt,” she said, “but Pam says that Daniel’s binky is in the car and you have the keys?”

“Is it naptime already?” Celia’s brother headed for the door, gripping his keys as if they might bolt from his hands.

M
rs. Pearson lived off a county road that had a name but was mostly known by its number, a two-lane highway dotted with fields, the occasional produce stand, and family homes whose yards bordered the road, inducing fear for the safety of their children. In the fading light, Celia didn’t realize she had missed the turnoff until she reached the next town, the directions printed off the Web not having included a description of something narrow and unpaved, and marked only by the dilapidated stone foundation of the small house just preceding it.

The road seemed less a road than an encroachment into the woods. At irregular intervals, mailboxes with peeling numbers on their sides marked gravel driveways. Celia suspected
that people who lived here year-round made a proud habit of being snowed in. Thick foliage allowed for occasional glimpses of houses. Most were clad in exuberantly rustic wood shingles spared from silliness only by the dignity of the surrounding trees. The house at the end of Mrs. Pearson’s drive was older and simpler than the rest. Celia could imagine a woodsman building it for his family, back when people made their own clothes and children walked miles to school in all weather. This might have made it charming if Celia hadn’t felt as if she were the last living person on earth. In town, the bark of a dog or the grumble of a passing car resembled urban silence enough to put her at ease, but here even the wind chime dangling from the awning was still. Celia tried and failed to imagine Djuna’s mother inside.

The front door opened just as she reached to knock.

“I’m sorry!” Mrs. Pearson said. “Did I startle you?”

Celia was blindsided by the smell of cinnamon. “I’m fine, I was just—” She closed her eyes and found herself in Djuna’s foyer: there was the antique writing desk covered with the day’s mail; to the left, the staircase with its burgundy runner; to the right, the dark wood-framed mirror on a wall the color of a cloudless sky. Opened eyes brought dislocation. Only the scent remained.

“Oh my goodness, it really is you,” said Mrs. Pearson. “When I got off the phone I wasn’t sure. I thought maybe I’d been daydreaming. You see, in the back of my mind I always thought that as long as I stayed listed, one day you might …” She smiled. She was wearing a blouse Celia thought she remembered, an ivory-colored silk with pearl buttons and
tapered sleeves that showed off her hands. Mrs. Pearson’s face had aged, and the dark hair that wound into the familiar bun was filigreed with gray, but she was Djuna’s mother still. “Celia, you look exactly like I thought you would. You look wonderful. Would you mind if I … How silly. I don’t need to ask permission! Come here so I can give you a hug!”

Mrs. Pearson’s hugs were the whole-body immersions Celia’s family reserved for very bad news. Even as a child, Celia knew better than to resist. Before, she had been enclosed at belly level. Today Mrs. Pearson’s mouth aligned with her shoulder.

“Look at you,” Djuna’s mother whispered.

She held Celia at arm’s length and stared, her gaze starting at Celia’s head and working its way down. Twenty-one years ago, Celia hadn’t noticed the resemblance between mother and daughter, but they shared the same protuberant eyes, the same sharp chin.

“Welcome to my home,” Mrs. Pearson said.

A small living room opened onto an equally small kitchen, a table visible through the doorway. To the right, a hall led to what could only be the bedroom. There was no familiar furniture. In place of the pomegranate couch, the living room contained a small beige love seat and matching recliner. In lieu of photographs, colored glass bottles lined the ledge of the room’s picture window.

“I knew that you would have become a young woman,” Mrs. Pearson continued, “that of course you would have grown up … but we should sit down. Do you remember those cookies, the ones with the cinnamon on top?”