The Truth About Celia

by Kevin Brockmeier

  “I did,” said Janet.

  “Kick ass. Which movie?”

  She felt a smile quirk her lips. “Deep End of the Ocean.”

  The boy interrupted her: “Whoopi Goldberg.” He tossed his hair back from his forehead. “No eyebrows. Lady trips me out.”

  The girl tucked a loose strand of hair behind her ear. “We’re here for breaking and entering,” she said.

  “And theft,” said the boy.

  “Breaking and entering and theft,” the girl confirmed.

  It was neither a boast nor a confession, but seemed to contain something of each. “What did you steal?” Janet asked.

  The girl squeezed the boy’s hand. “Electronics components—television, computer, and stereo. The individual parts are worth more than the machines, it turns out. So what we did was we broke into people’s houses, opened the machines, and just took the parts we wanted. Then we put everything back together. It worked just fine until tonight.”

  “I don’t understand. You only took the parts?”

  “Yeah. Like I said, we could get more money that way.”

  The boy nodded. “We know this guy.”

  “But if all you want is one part or another, why not take the whole machine and then strip it down later? Wouldn’t that be quicker?”

  “That’s what I argued,” the girl said. She was running her finger around the outside of the boy’s ear, slowly, as though trying to draw a sustained note from the rim of a glass. “But Pierre wouldn’t do it.”

  “Funnier that way,” the boy said. “Picture all these people calling their repairmen, and the repairmen show up and they find nothing but these hollow shells waiting for them. ‘What is this, a joke, lady? You’re missing your motherboard here.’ This happens fifty or sixty times all over town, and suddenly nobody knows what to think anymore.”

  Janet tried to imagine the situation as the boy did, with the same air of harmless mischief, but she could not. Instead she saw only the people whose houses they had broken into. She thought of their faces when they discovered that something else was missing or broken in their home, something else had gone unaccountably wrong. Her conception of what other people were capable of shrugging off or accepting as part of the natural absurdity of the world had been forever altered by the loss of her daughter. You could not presume that people were healthy. You could not presume that they would welcome the little nudges and jostlings of life. You had to behave as though everyone you met was walking a thin wire far above the earth, where the slightest wind might rock them off their balance and send them tumbling to the ground. This was how you had to live if you wanted to be careful.

  “Anyway,” the boy said, “that was the idea.”

  The girl pressed firmly against his ankle with the toe of her shoe. “He’s a real expert when it comes to electronics. I mean, you wouldn’t believe it. He can take a machine apart and put it back together just like that.” She kissed him again, on the cheek, and he smiled and dropped his head and let his hair sweep back over his eyes.

  Then Kimson Perry returned from his office and they both fell silent, shrinking into their jackets like two mice hiding in a hummock of leaves.

  Kimson bent over Janet and asked, “So did you find Christopher?”

  “Not yet.” She passed him the phone. “I thought I would try him again in a few minutes. Either that or call a cab.”

  He gestured at the boy and the girl. “Let me have ten minutes with these two, and I can give you a ride myself.”

  She nodded. “Thanks.”

  “Good,” he said, and he handed her a slip of paper with three separate leaves—one white, one red, and one yellow. “Read this over and sign your name by the cross. It’s for the incident report. Nothing unusual,” and he made a beckoning motion to the teenagers on the bench. “Come on, you two. Follow me.”

  As they passed beside her, Janet saw the girl mouthing something to the boy—she could not distinguish the words— and the boy shrugged and shook his head. His left ear was a bright, wind-bitten red where she had been stroking it with her finger. He spidered his hand into the back pocket of her blue jeans.

  The door drifted smoothly shut behind them, locking in place with a final tug of the pneumatic rod.

  After Janet signed the document Kimson had given her—an account of “the incident” in the Reservoir Ten, along with a statement that she, “the perpetrator,” had agreed to pay any and all damages to the owner—she began to feel a rawness in her throat like the stab of a needle. There was a watercooler beneath the bulletin board at the other end of the waiting room, and, though she recognized the danger, she decided to risk a drink. She had been avoiding the bulletin board ever since she had come to the police station, letting her eyes skip away from it to the clock or the floor or the ceiling tiles so that she would not have to read the latest HAVE YOU SEEN THIS CHILD? poster:

  NAME: CELIA BROOKS

  AGE: 9

  DATE OF BIRTH: 12/06/89

  MISSING SINCE: 03/15/97

  She knew that if she allowed herself she would sink into those statistics like a stone—it had certainly happened before—so she did not permit herself to see them at all. She had found that she could do this: place a darkened slide over one section of a room or one paragraph of a book and simply refuse to perceive it, the way she could examine her face in the mirror without ever looking into her eyes.

  She searched for a cup by the watercooler and found a stacked column of them in the cabinet underneath. When she pressed the tap, the water trickled into the cup in two thin strands that joined and spindled about each other, and as she drank and filled her cup and drank again she remembered the orchestra rehearsal she had attended on the day that Celia vanished. It had something to do with the sound the water made, which reminded her of a song Celia had learned in kindergarten: “The clarinet / the clarinet / plays doodle-doodle-doodle-doodle-det”—a line that, even the first time she heard it, sounded to her more like the pattering of water than it did like the clarinet.

  The Springfield Community Orchestra rehearsed every Saturday at the Holy Souls Catholic Assembly Hall, a weathered brick building with a long sloping gallery and arched wooden rafters. She had called Christopher midway through the session that day, while the conductor was practicing with the strings, and he had said that Celia was playing outside, and she had asked him if he wanted her to pick anything up at the grocery store, and he had said hamburger buns and paper towels, and then, when she told him to take care, he had answered, “I always do.” Or had that been earlier? The orchestra was preparing a Menotti ballet for their spring performance, and as she hung up she had heard the violins playing a few light bars of an arietta. By the time she drove home that afternoon, Celia was already missing.

  Though she thought, in the weeks and months afterward, about leaving the orchestra, she did not. Instead, she held tight to it. She found the music—she found losing herself in it—a comfort, and it had been more than a year now since she had missed a rehearsal. In three months they would perform their annual summer pops concert, a program of songs from classic motion pictures, and she allowed some of the tunes to drift through her head: “As Time Goes By” from Casablanca, “In the Cool, Cool, Cool of the Evening” from Here Comes the Groom, “The Wishing Well Song” from Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.

  Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. It was the first movie Janet took Celia to see in the theater. She was only two years old at the time, and within five minutes she had taken her sandals off and stepped onto Janet’s lap to get a better view of the screen. She laughed each time Dopey appeared, giving a rigid little hop that made Janet grasp her beneath the arms to steady her, but she had nightmares for months about the Wicked Queen. Years later she told Janet that when she said her prayers at night, she always imagined the Queen dipping her red apple into the vat of poison at the phrase “God deliver us from evil.”

  The last movie Janet saw with Celia was Matilda, with Mara Wilson as Matilda and Danny DeVito
and Rhea Perlman as her parents. It was based on Celia’s favorite Roald Dahl book, which her father had read to her the month before she started school and which she herself, a precocious reader, had read three times since. The first paragraph was one of the most biting Janet had ever heard: “It’s a funny thing about mothers and fathers. Even when their own child is the most disgusting little blister you could ever imagine, they still think that he or she is wonderful,” and each time Celia finished the book, she took to calling her friends “blisters” for a few weeks whenever she argued with them. The movie was delightful—agile, irreverent, almost glowing with life—and after it ended the two of them went out for ice cream. They did not make it home until late that evening, when the sun was just a faint gleam of silver behind the darkest blue of the sky. Christopher was waiting on the porch when they pulled into the driveway. He said that he had been worried about them.

  The cooler released a tremendous bubble that broke through the water with a hiccuping noise and then shuddered apart at the surface, and Janet came blinking up out of her memories. She tossed her cup into the trash. She was just about to return to her seat when she heard footsteps clapping across the police station. Along the front of the waiting room was a glass wall with a sheet of wire netting inside that looked out onto the lobby, and from there to the sidewalk and the front curb. A black woman, shaking with nervous emotion, ran across the floor to the reception desk. She was calling the question that Janet had heard herself calling two years before, the question that all mothers call in their hearts: “Where’s my daughter? Where’s my daughter?” A police officer asked her for her name, then said, “Calm down, ma’am. We’ve got her in back,” and escorted her around the corner and out of sight. Janet listened as their footsteps faded away.

  She felt a tightness in her hands, a stinging pressure in the joints of her fingers, and when she looked down she found that she was kneading them like heavy lumps of modeling clay. She let go, flexing them one at a time in the air until they stopped tingling. Then she took another cup from beneath the watercooler and poured herself a second drink of water, which she tossed down in two swallows.

  She threw the cup away and then carefully, reflexively, wiped her fingerprint from the watercooler’s spout, using the tail of her shirt. Ever since she was a little girl, when she saw her first detective movie, she had been more than casually aware of where she left her fingerprints. It was a fixation that only became stronger in police stations and court buildings, hospitals and banks—places with hard, glossy surfaces where she felt dwarfed by the mechanisms of power. She remembered watching Basil Rathbone (or was it some later Sherlock Holmes?) dusting a glass with white powder and a tiny sweeper, then blowing gently to reveal the whorl of the criminal’s fingerprint, and she remembered, too, the surprise she felt as she realized for the first time that she left a record of herself in everything she touched—that nothing she did, nothing anybody did, could ever escape the world’s notice.

  It was not true, of course. She knew that now. There were some events, events beyond number, that left no record in the world at all. But still, whenever she was in a police station, she always tried to rub her fingerprints away. She couldn’t break the habit.

  She took her seat on the bench and listened to the people shuffling by in the corridor, to the clock ticking on the wall, to the streamer flickering from the rotating fan, and it was only a few minutes before the steel door wheeled open and Kimson Perry came out, the boy and the girl trailing quietly behind him. The sleeves of their jackets were gathered at their elbows. Their fingertips were spiraled with ink.

  Kimson cleared his throat with a small interrogative cough. “Can you give me just one more minute with these two, Janet? I promised their parents I’d wait for them. It shouldn’t be too long.”

  “Of course.” She held out the statement she had signed. “Do you want this?”

  “Oh, right. The F-11. Let me go slip that in your file,” he said, and with a few short taps of his shoes he was gone again.

  The girl dropped heavily onto the bench across from Janet. “This sucks,” she said, lightly taking hold of the boy’s jacket.

  “Sucks indeed,” the boy answered, and he reached into his pocket and came up with a gray bandanna. He walked to the watercooler and doused it through, waiting for the color to deepen, then sat beside the girl and began wiping the ink from her fingers, delicately, one by one, blowing each finger dry when he was finished.

  “Not only do our parents know all about the houses now,” the girl said, and she shut her eyes, “but we’re going to have to tell them why we did it. You realize that, don’t you?”

  “I do,” the boy said, and Janet watched him lay her first hand aside and start on the second. He looked as though he were cleaning an antique satin doll, or a bird that had just hatched from its egg, something infinitely soft and fragile.

  “Why did you do it?” Janet asked.

  The girl opened her eyes. “We’re not just some bored juvenile delinquents if that’s what you’re thinking. But, well, we’re going to be needing the extra money soon—aren’t we, Pierre?”

  At that she opened her free hand and pressed it gently, deliberately, to her stomach.

  A smile lifted into the boy’s cheeks, and he nodded.

  Janet heard an involuntary oh slip from her mouth, a quick little gasp of surprise and sadness and trepidation, muddled together with the strangest envy. She felt suddenly as though she had become the girl’s mother, or even the girl herself, as though she were playing her in a movie while a hundred spectators watched from the audience, and she wondered what she was going to say next.

  “You’re going to be a mother?” she asked.

  “Uh-huh.”

  “But you’re so—young,” Janet said.

  A ticking stillness filled the room. The girl’s mouth twitched and her eyes began to glass over—from sadness or joy or exhaustion, or some other, nameless emotion—and the boy touched the bandanna to her cheek, leaving a lash-shaped mark of gray ink there. “I know,” she said, her voice all but toneless. Janet could not tell what she was feeling until she gave a short breath of what sounded like laughter. Then she shook her head, declaring, “I’m not supposed to be happy about this, am I? But I can’t help it,” and she laughed again, more clearly this time.

  She kissed the boy. “Happy, happy, happy,” she whispered, and the boy whispered something back, something indistinguishable, that made the girl grin.

  Janet felt an unexpected lightening inside her. There was no behavior so outlandish that it wasn’t a believable human response to the world. She heard the steel door opening behind her and looked up to see Kimson standing over her shoulder, but before he could interrupt, she turned back to the girl. “But what are your parents going to say?” she asked her.

  “Well, my folks aren’t too bad,” the girl said. “But Pierre—” She realized it all at once. “Oh my God! Pierre, your father is going to kill you.”

  The boy lifted one shoulder, a nervous shrug that almost touched his ear. “I know. He’s on his way right now. I just called him.”

  And at that moment a car rattled to a stop outside the station. They heard the door slam at the curb—all four of them— and they turned to look. But it was not the boy’s father. Janet recognized the car. It was her husband arriving, out of his silence and out of his grief, to take her home.

  The Ghost of Travis Worley

  The trouble is they don’t know they’re dead.

  They hang around. The kindest thing to do if you should ever see one is simply to say, “Listen, you’re dead. You’re dead. Get out of here.” That’s what the ghost eventually will do when we’ve told it again and again to go. “Get out of here. Get out of here. You’re dead.” They can’t of course go anywhere on purpose; you have to give them intent to make them go. And who knows where?

  —MILLER WILLIAMS

  Sometimes I remember my friends and family so clearly it’s as if I’m looking down at th
em through a flawless lens of water, the kind that lay over our pond on those quiet spring mornings after nights of heavy rain, but the vision never seems to last for long. Something inside me always shifts or gives way, and a fog of silt spreads through the water, and one by one they disappear. My mom and my dad. My best friend Kristen Lanzetta. My other friends Robin Unwer and Oscar Martin and Andrea Onopa. And the new kid, whose name we could never remember, or maybe he just never told us, so that after a while we simply gave up and called him Kid: “Hey, Kid, why don’t you play goalie for us?” “Did anybody see where the Kid went?”

  They waver and darken, the people I knew. They hide away from me and step into the light.

  I remember playing in my front yard one winter afternoon with Oscar Martin and Kristen Lanzetta. Kick the Can. The Lion King. Bubblegum, Bubblegum. The sun was out, but we could feel the wind cutting at us as the cars passed by, and there were places in the shade where needles of ice still floated in the puddles. The last of the snow was melting from the gutters into pockets of wet black grit, and in another day or two it would be completely gone. Kristen and I had on our matching purple jackets and gloves, the ones our mothers had bought for us before the school year started, and which we had been so excited to wear—we would look exactly the same, like sisters —that we began carrying them to school with us at the very first hint of cold weather.

  This is how sharply I see everything before it begins to fade away.

  Kristen and Oscar and I were tossing a tennis ball to each other, swinging at it with Oscar’s red plastic bat, when we caught sight of the new kid watching us from beneath the maple trees at the side yard of the house (there were two of them there, and an elm tree, their branches fanning out above a crumbling stone wall). He was rocking his sister back and forth in the ancient hoodless baby carriage he always wheeled her around in, and she was watching him through her deep blue eyes, her hands opening and closing at her shoulder. She was a tiny thing, always perfectly quiet, so small that she might have nestled comfortably, squirrel-like, inside a Kleenex box. Every time I saw her this was the image that came to my mind.