The False Friend (8 page)

“What I’m trying to say,” Noreen amended, “is that even though I know it’s too late, I’m ready to hear whatever you want to say.”

Celia looked at her mother, unable to begin. Before she left Chicago she had thought that, having told Huck, the most difficult task lay behind her. But in the worst of all possible worlds—the one in which those she loved could not reconcile themselves to what she had done—Huck could always find somebody else.

Celia took a moment to memorize the softness around her mother’s eyes and mouth. “Mommy,” she said. She looked away. “I don’t know how to do this.”

“Sweetie,” her mother said. “Oh god, sweetheart. I’m so sorry. You’re being so brave, coming back to face this.”

Celia shook her head. “That’s not it.” She took a breath. “I lied.” She turned to face her mother. “I lied, okay?”

Noreen cocked her head, as if to hear better. “Darling, what do you mean?”

“I mean Djuna,” Celia said, the name coming out louder than she intended. “I mean what really happened.”

The room was so small, everything in it so carefully placed, that Celia felt as if she were inhabiting a shoe-box diorama.

“The man, the car,” Celia said. “Djuna wasn’t … taken.”

“Of course she was, sweetheart.”

Celia shook her head. “I made it up.”

Noreen made a sound that was almost a laugh. “You didn’t, darling. You saw it. You and Becky and Leanne and Josie.”

Celia closed her eyes, opened them again. “No one saw anything because there was nothing to see. I said there was a car, and they believed me.”

Celia recognized Noreen’s expression from one of her early college visits home. Jeremy had come to dinner wearing headphones and sunglasses, and their mother had watched him as if he were a strange child standing too close to the street, one she was uncertain she had the authority to pull back from the curb. Noreen looked at Celia this same way now.

“That doesn’t make any sense, dear,” she said. “You must be confusing what happened with something else.”

Celia took a breath. Over the course of countless mental retellings, the story’s bones had acquired flesh. “I don’t know what we were fighting about,” she said. “Only that it was always like that, one of us storming off.” She had told Huck with his arm draped around her like a rescue blanket, the steady warmth of him helping to lead the words from her mouth. Celia wouldn’t have wanted such physical charity from her mother, but she had not anticipated the loneliness of a single, straight-backed chair. “Djuna ran into the woods fast, like it
was easy for her, but where I went in, there was no clear place to walk. It was all dead branches and overgrown bushes. If anyone was going to fall, it should have been me.”

After she had finished, mother and daughter sat in their respective chairs, not quite looking at each other. An art calendar pinned to the wall behind Noreen’s head displayed a print of one of Monet’s lily ponds. Beside it was the same poster for Cornell that had decorated Celia’s bedroom until a week before her high school graduation.

“You’re telling me that Djuna was hurt,” Noreen began slowly. “That she fell in the woods—”

“Into a hole,” Celia confirmed.

“—and that you never told anyone?”

“That’s right,” she whispered. She had been crying for a while, but only now noticed the tissue box at the corner of her mother’s desk, placed at the perfect reach.

“Celie,” her mother coaxed. “The police searched those woods. The police searched everywhere. They didn’t find a thing.”

“She fell into a hole,” Celia repeated, because only a hole would explain the suddenness of it, the way Djuna had been there one moment and gone the next. Perhaps a ditch or some sort of abandoned well. This was adult logic, applied to childhood images belatedly remanded to her custody. This was the best that she could do. “They weren’t looking for that,” she explained. “They were looking for a man and a car.”

“Celia, listen to me,” Noreen urged, as if trying to amend a child’s fear of the dark. “They searched. Everybody searched. Your father searched. I searched. We all combed every blade
of grass and looked behind every tree along the road and beyond. If Djuna had been there—”

If anything, the softness around her mother’s eyes and mouth had deepened. Celia could not remember the last time she had seen her mother’s face so brimming with kindness.

“You don’t believe me,” Celia said, winded by the possibility. In all her mind’s ceaseless variations of this moment, she had not imagined this.

“You were just a little girl,” Noreen apologized. “A little girl forced to handle a terrible thing all by herself because her parents—” Noreen was the one crying now, her tears dampening the fabric of her blouse.

Celia looked at the glass thermometer on her mother’s desk, the colored globes floating in place.

“At least with you I had the excuse that I didn’t know what I was doing yet,” Noreen said, shaking her head. “At least with you I wasn’t in the middle of getting my degree.”

“You don’t believe me,” Celia repeated, for herself as much as for her mother.

Noreen looked into her daughter’s eyes. “I believe that’s what you believe,” she affirmed.

“That’s not the same thing,” said Celia.

“I can’t believe it, sweetheart. Not knowing what I know.”

“What could you possibly know?” she argued. “You weren’t there!”

“Darling, do you remember talking to the police?”

Celia shook her head.

“Well, I do,” Noreen said. “They came to the house, a man and a woman. There was only one woman on the force back
then and she was home sick that day but they called her in because they wanted a woman to talk to you girls. They sat down with the two of us at the dining room table. They asked if you wanted to talk to them alone but you said no, you wanted me there. You’d been holding my hand from the moment you’d gotten home and you didn’t let go, except to go to the bathroom and to eat. For the next month I had to sit next to you in bed, holding your hand until you fell asleep. They had some dolls and toy cars. You told them as best you could, Celie, and you weren’t lying. I could always tell when you were lying because you lifted your chin and looked down your nose like you were daring me to contradict you. You weren’t like that during the interview. At one point they asked you something you didn’t know and you started crying because you had thought that as long as you could answer their questions, they would be able to find the man who took her.”

Celia waited for her mother’s words to catch on some mental corner and lift an obscuring page.

“You don’t remember any of this?” her mother asked.

Celia shook her head. “I only remember what I’ve told you. All that I know is that I lied.”

Noreen closed her eyes and massaged her temples. “You made it all up. The man, the car, the whole thing,” she said, her fingers distorting the shape of her face. Celia could see capillaries through the pale skin of her mother’s closed lids, thin traceries of red abutting the blue veins of her hands. “You lied to your friends, and then to me, and then to the police.”

Celia nodded. She realized it wasn’t sleep that made her parents look older. It was not being able to see their eyes. Eyes
were the one thing that didn’t gray, sag, or wrinkle; they distracted from the effects of time and gravity. With the eyes hidden, the deteriorating landscape was fully revealed.

“I’m sure part of why I can’t bring myself to accept what you’re telling me is that I’m your mother and I love you, but that’s not the main reason.” Noreen offered up a tired smile. “I was there, Celie. I’d like to think I know my own daughter.”

For a moment Celia just stared, pinned by her mother’s gaze. For a moment, nothing irrevocable happened. What she thought to say next seemed perfectly logical. A way to buttress her point of view.

“You didn’t know your own son,” Celia said, and then immediately wished she had not.

She could have added something more. There was time. Celia took scant comfort when hindsight came up equally empty in the days and weeks that followed. No number of mental repetitions produced a string of syllables with the ability to annul the power of those six words.

Silence should not have taken over. There should have been a sound to accompany the sight of her mother’s face at the moment Celia beheld the extent of the injury she had inflicted, something combining the shock of a puncture wound with the permanence of breaking glass.

“I’m sorry,” Celia whispered.

Noreen shook her head.

“I’m sorry,” Celia repeated. “It was unfair of me. It has nothing to do with—”

“I’m sure this sounds silly to you,” Noreen said quietly, “but I had this idea about myself. We all do, or maybe for you,
Celie, it’s different. But for me … I saw what was happening to Jem, but I didn’t want to be one of those mothers who made accusations.” Her body sagged under its weight. “To accuse your child is to rob him of so much!”

Celia touched the edge of her mother’s desk. “I didn’t mean to bring this back.”

“Oh you didn’t, dear,” Noreen said. “It never goes away. It’s been long enough that I can forget for a while, but it’s like a slipped disc or a torn knee. It never quite heals. What happened with Djuna is the same. Maybe you’ll convince people to believe what you want them to believe, but that won’t change anything for you, not in any large or helpful way.”

“Mommy,” Celia said.

Noreen blinked. “I’m so glad we had this talk. It’s a shame you have to go, but I’m sure you have so much to do, and—”

“I’m sorry,” Celia said.

“Why, whatever for,” her mother said in a way that sounded like good-bye.

C
elia’s fastest route home would have been a series of straightaways followed by right-hand turns, three stair steps that would have brought her through the town center. Instead she traced a wide curve that held fewer memories, past buildings that had been warehouses during Jensenville’s industrial zenith. One of these brick carcasses now held the town’s two art galleries, divided between photorealism and abstraction, aesthetic streams contained by a single gallery until the couple running it had divorced. Celia had taken Huck there during an initial Christmas visit when she had still felt compelled to keep him entertained. Her early itineraries had provided tours of Jensenville’s failed attempts at reinvention—Antiques Row, Artists’
Row, Restoration Row—until, exhausted by the town’s recidivism and no longer so anxious to please, she had reverted to restaurant dinners with her parents and occasional screenings of second-run films she and Huck would never have bothered with in Chicago.

Eventually Celia reached her neighborhood’s northeastern border. Her parents lived in the southwest corner closer to downtown, but Djuna had been here. Celia wasn’t used to coming at the Pearsons’ from this direction. Perhaps its unfamiliarity was what led her to notice the trees. During her winter visits, their bare branches disguised how much they’d grown since she was a girl. Now she saw foliage once confined to yards overarching the road in a continuous canopy of white blossoms, their petals fluttering to the street like springtime snow. Celia could not help but be impressed: she assumed trees like that had to be at least a century old. In fact, Mr. Jensen’s original chestnuts had perished in a fungal blight in the 1930s. Not until the 1950s had the community association managed to pool its resources to plant flowering pear saplings where the chestnuts had once been. These were the trees that Celia saw now—trees that in ten to fifteen years would reach the end of their natural life spans. In the 1950s, the community board had wanted something economical and fast-growing. Seventy-five years had seemed like a long time. It was an open question whether Celia’s parents or the flowering pears would last longer, but if Warren’s health kept up, it was likely that he and Noreen would witness this final indignity, the arboreal endgame of their neighborhood’s demise.

An educated guess followed by two corrective turns
brought Celia from Schiller to Handel, and the steep hill that had represented her favorite part of the bike ride to Djuna’s house. After twenty-one years, all of Celia’s childhood landmarks remained. Here—near the hill’s base at the corner of Handel and Mendelssohn—was the blue curbside mailbox she had fed with envelopes to make it feel wanted. Here, at the midway point, was the
SLOW CHILDREN
sign she had taken as an insult to her pedaling speed. There, at the top, announcing the beginning of the glorious downhill ride, was the lawn that had been inexpertly replaced by rock mulch. Handel’s hill was trivial to drive but on a single-speed, fixed-gear bicycle, the last few feet demanded a standing pedal. Starting from the ugliest yard in the world, Celia had coasted down Handel’s far side—continuing to stand because it made her feel like Evel Knievel; and, for reasons less clear but equally urgent, singing, “Be … all that you can be, in the Aaaarmy,” the penultimate syllable held for as long as her lungs could make it last. The sensation of the downward plunge—hair trailing like a dark pennant, eyes reduced to slits by the force of the air—had nullified the authority of good sense, debunked the doctrine of mortality. By car, Celia did not allow herself to ignore the stop sign at the base of the hill that, as a young cyclist, she had sped past, rounding the corner onto Wagner and into Djuna’s driveway in a binge of forward momentum.

Unbridled speed had reinforced the sense of magical transport Celia felt each time she saw the house. The mustard yellow facade with its red and orange trim seemed like a piece of Oz bequeathed to the real world via reverse-cyclone. Mrs. Pearson had claimed that polychrome exteriors were historically consistent
with the era of the town’s construction and had offered, as proof, a photography book of kindred homes. The book bored Djuna, but Celia had imagined each house as her own. Years later, after she left for college, a polychroming fad had flared among the more ambitious of the neighborhood boosters, some of whom acquired community improvement grants and fostered notions of a Jensenville Painted Lady District inspired by the famous homes of San Francisco. Enthusiasm had faded with the first paint jobs, which were no match for East Coast winters. Though a few stalwarts still enlivened the neighborhood like trees in perpetual autumn, Celia’s arrival onto Wagner Street showed that Djuna’s was not among them. Celia pulled over, her chest constricting. It had been ridiculous to think the colors would have survived. The thrill of turning a certain corner, restored after twenty-one years, was demolished by the sight of a white facade with brown trim.