The Truth About Celia

by Kevin Brockmeier

  Oscar Martin—who was not only in my class at school but who also lived down the street from me, so that he came over to play with me sometimes even though I was a girl. He had wide clear green eyes, with a comma-shaped flaw of blue in the left one, and in the dream I had, when he kissed me on the lips, his breath had tasted like vanilla wafers. He was the fastest boy in the first grade, and on Track and Field Day he had won three separate races, one of them against the second- and third-graders. When there were no adults around he used words like “damn” and “hell” and “sucks,” and once I had even heard him say “bitch.” He was the most popular boy in our class.

  Robin Unwer—who put stickers of unicorns on all her notebooks, and was allergic to peanuts and bee stings, and had a swimming-pool-sized trampoline in her backyard. She liked to ice-skate, and whenever she was in my house she would take her shoes off and slide across the long kitchen floor in only her ankle socks. Sometimes, and more and more often, I saw her whispering at recess with Kristen Lanzetta.

  Kid—who wore dark blue denim overalls and a white button-up shirt, the sleeves of which he rolled to his elbows, and whose sister wore a loose pink sleeper that looked like a pillowcase. He said that he had been living in our neighborhood as long as he could remember, though we had only met him recently, and he moved about so quietly that we never saw him coming or going: he was either there or he wasn’t, like a light switch with only two settings. He walked with a limp in his right leg from a disease he had had when he was smaller—it was not the chicken pox, and it was not the measles, but something I had never heard of called polio, and he was worried that his baby sister was going to catch it, too. I never learned his name.

  And there was, of course, my dad—who liked to cook and read and stare out the window. Whenever I complained about my chores, he would make up stories about the hardships of his childhood: When I was your age I had to take fourteen naps a day, one every hour until it was time for me to go to bed, or: When I was your age I ate nothing but creamed corn, bowl after bowl of it, and if I didn’t finish every single bite, I would have to take a bath in whatever was left. He had broken his arm once, before I was born. He sometimes got headaches. He did not know how to whistle. In the evening he stood talking on the lawn with the real people who were our neighbors, and in the morning he wrote books filled with the imaginary ones who lived only in his head, and at times I think that if I wish or pray or concentrate hard enough, I will be able to tell my story through his hands.

  When they disappear, and they always do, I imagine that a thick gray mist has surrounded me, rising from the ground in a thousand ribbons, and I can no longer see them through the haze. I might just as well imagine the opposite—that I am waiting in a park, the sun beating down on my shoulders, and they have run behind a hill or a stand of trees, chasing a leaf of paper that has just now caught the wind. I watched them go, and they will be right back. I could call to them, and I’m certain they would hear me.

  There is little to do here but watch and remember.

  The day before everything changed began as one of those late winter mornings where the first touch of sunlight melts the frost from the grass and became, as the sun lengthened and took the sky, one of those early spring afternoons where the wind carries the sound of a thousand birds.

  It was recess, and I was kicking a trench into the gravel by the merry-go-round, waiting for my turn on the swingset. The older kids were all playing soccer in the parking lot, and around me on the playground were only the kindergartners and the other first-graders, coasting down the slide and climbing up the fireman’s tower. Shocks of grass were pushing up through the gravel, and the first tight honeysuckle buds had appeared along the vine at the back fence. When the recess monitor blew her whistle, the four kids who were on the swings stopped pumping their legs, the two on the low swings skidding to a stop and the two on the high swings making soaring leaps into the gravel. I grabbed hold of the ropes and lifted myself into one of the high swings.

  There was nothing I liked better, when I was a girl, than sinking my weight into a swing, feeling the ropes tighten in my hands, and sailing back and forth as high and as fast as I could. As I surged forward, I would stretch myself out as though I were pushing back into a reclining chair, and then, as I dropped back to the ground, I would tuck myself into the narrowest possible ball. It was a continuous fluid motion, almost effortless, and I liked to imagine that I didn’t even have to breathe—that all I had to do was open my mouth and the air would flow into me and drain back out with the force of my swinging. I could see the whole playground from the height of the swingset: the boys climbing on the jungle gym, the girls crawling through the tunnel, the row of houses across the street. Kristen Lanzetta was sitting cross-legged on top of the picnic table with Robin Unwer and Andrea Onopa. Oscar Martin was having a gravel war with one of the other boys in our class, hiding behind the fireman’s tower so that the recess monitor wouldn’t see them. When the whistle shrilled, I let go of the ropes and jumped to the ground.

  I landed crookedly, wrenching one of my knees, and I felt a queer tightness in my leg when I began to walk. I hitched over to the picnic table where Kristen was talking with Robin and Andrea.

  Their voices fell away, and Andrea looked me up and down. “Why on earth are you walking like that?”

  “I don’t know. I think I hurt my leg.”

  “Well, stop it,” she said. “You look like a retard.”

  I hoisted myself gently onto the picnic table, holding my leg rigid so that it wouldn’t jar against the corner. “What are you guys doing?” I asked.

  “Talking,” Andrea said.

  “About what?”

  “About you. We all think you’re a retard. We took a vote.”

  Kristen cocked her finger and gave Andrea a hard thump on the ridge of her knuckles. A small red mark blossomed there. “Cut it out, Andrea,” she said, and she slid over so that I could squeeze into the circle. “We were talking about who we wanted to be our boyfriends. I picked Nathan.”

  “And I picked William,” Andrea said.

  “And I picked Oscar,” Robin said.

  I remembered the dream I had had about Oscar, the one where he kissed me and asked if he could be my boyfriend. Ever since then I had been a different person around him. His seat was right across the aisle from mine, and when we lay with our heads on our desks during Quiet Time I would stare at the back of his neck from behind the covering of my hair, until one day he scribbled a note on a scrap of paper, wadded it into a ball, and popped it across the aisle to me. “Would you knock it off?” it read. My dreams seemed as rich to me as my life (though now I remember very few of them), and I was always a bit surprised when somebody I had dreamed about behaved as though nothing had happened.

  A brown oak leaf that had survived the entire winter fluttering on the tip of a branch came pinwheeling down from the tree above the picnic table, landing on one of the benches. I turned to Robin and Kristen and Andrea and said, “I want to pick Oscar, too.”

  “You can’t,” said Robin. “I already did.”

  “That’s right,” said Kristen. “Robin got first pick, and she picked Oscar. You have to choose somebody else.”

  “Why can’t we both choose Oscar?”

  “Because you just can’t, that’s why.” Andrea was massaging saliva into the red mark on the back of her hand, holding it up to her face to look more closely. “Hey, when I rub my hand like this, the skin slides all over the place,” she said. “Take a look,” and she showed us how the skin pulled and shifted above her bones when she rubbed it.

  “Well, if I can’t pick Oscar, I don’t want to have a boyfriend,” I said. “You can play without me.”

  “I knew you were going to say that,” Robin announced. “Didn’t I know she was going to say that?” she said.

  “You did,” Andrea nodded. Then she turned to me and asked, “So why are you always like that?”

  “Like what?”

  The girls l
ooked at Kristen. She gave a long sigh through her nostrils. I saw her smothering a grin. She said, “You can be kind of bratty sometimes. No offense, Celia, but you can. That’s why Robin and Andrea are my best friends now.”

  Before I could answer, the recess monitor gave three sharp blows of her whistle, and there was a scramble of arms and legs as we ran in a mass from the playground. We lined up along the parking strips to go inside. I tried to signal to Kristen as we passed through the front doors, Look at me. Hello, I want to tell you something, but her eyes kept skipping away from me to a place somewhere just past my left shoulder. It was like she could see straight through me.

  That afternoon, when I got home from school, I ran immediately up the corkscrew stairs to my bedroom. My dad was calling to me from the kitchen, “Hey, Ceely, what do you think of ravioli for dinner? Celia?” but I didn’t answer. I took the porcelain box where I kept my ring collection off the dresser and let it spill out onto the carpet. Then I bent down and sifted roughly through the collection—eighteen different rings and a dozen different colors, all clattering together in my hands.

  By the time my dad came to the door, I was lying on my stomach, crying furiously, two or three rings on every finger. “What’s wrong, Celia? Come here,” he said, “Let me help you,” and he lifted me into his arms, sinking back onto my bed. I heard the mattress springs grating as he sat down. “Sshhh, honey, sshhh. It will be all right.”

  “I—”

  I was crying too hard to get the words out.

  “I—”

  He brushed a strand of wet hair off my cheek and whispered, “That’s okay, baby, you don’t have to tell me. Let’s just sit here for a while.” I let myself cry. I rested my forehead on his shoulder and felt the heat soaking through his shirt, a crescent-shaped damp spot that slowly extended into his collar, and I listened as he told me that everything would be okay, that we could have whatever I wanted for dinner, it didn’t have to be ravioli, if he’d known I disliked it so much . . . , that when he was my age he had a mom and dad who loved him more than anything in this world, and that just like them he would never let anything bad happen to me.

  And the silt spreads, and the water settles, and soon I see myself playing in the backyard, stirring the pond with a crooked stick and climbing onto the stone wall between the maple trees. It was the next day, and the wind was traveling in visible waves though the long grass at the far end of the yard, where the clearing gave way to a thicket of elm trees. I was tightrope-walking along the wall when I noticed Kid standing in the shadow of our deck. He was carrying his baby sister in a sling against his chest.

  I called to him, and he came limping over.

  “I hurt my leg just like you,” I said. “I twisted it jumping off a swing.” And then I noticed: “But it’s better now.” I sat down and let my leg sway back and forth against the wall, tapping at one of the stones with the heel of my shoe.

  Kid boosted himself onto the wall and sat beside me. “I was just looking at a spiderweb,” he said. “It was empty.”

  We rested there for a long time without talking. Kid’s sister rose and fell against his chest, sometimes with his breath and sometimes with her own. The sun passed behind a cloud. The sky was a deep, hard blue.

  Eventually I said, “You’re my only friend now.”

  “I am?” he asked.

  “Uh-huh. None of the others like me anymore.” I heard a car rolling by on the street. “How come you don’t go to school with me?”

  “Well, I did go to school for a while,” he said, “but then when I got sick my mom and dad started teaching me at home. I guess I just never went back.”

  “I go every day. Except one time when I pretended I had a fever, and I got to stay home and eat ice cream. Nobody else knows that. Now that you’re my best friend, we can tell each other our secrets.”

  He shrugged. “I’m not sure I have any secrets.”

  “I bet you do. Like what’s your real name? I can never remember.”

  “I know,” he said, and he frowned and shook his head. “I must have told you a thousand times. It’s Travis Worley.”

  “And I never see you anywhere but on this street. Where do you live, anyway?”

  He blew at a wisp of his sister’s hair so that it stood up in a tiny loop, then smoothed it back down with his palm. He looked me in the eye.

  “Would you like to go there?” he asked.

  I said that I would.

  “Come on, then,” he said, and he hopped off the wall. “It’s this way.”

  That was the day when everything changed. I remember that I took his hand, and he led me into the woods, up the rising hill of elm trees, and everything I could see and hear, and everything I could feel on my skin, seemed to melt away and disappear—the leaves, the insects, even the ground beneath my feet. All around me the world was suddenly much clearer and much smaller. I would have been frightened if it were not so beautiful.

  For a moment I could still feel the hand of the new kid, whose name I could never remember, or maybe he just never told me, so that I gave up and called him Kid. And then I felt only the tip of his littlest finger. And then that, too was gone. Perhaps when I lost hold of him I went drifting away like a boat whose mooring has snapped, sailing through the currents of the ocean. Perhaps I—

  But I do not know.

  So much time has passed since then, but even now I remember the life I left behind. I imagine that it is still there waiting for me, and that if only I can see it plainly enough, remember it distinctly enough, I will be able to return to it. I will join my memories together into the wood and frame and hinges of a door, and that door will open, and I will step through it. I see myself racing up the stairs of my house, calling out to the people I knew, to my mom and my dad, Kristen Lanzetta and Oscar Martin, Robin Unwer and Andrea Onopa. They will all be there, milling around my bedroom and wondering where I have been. They will welcome me home with their arms and their voices, help me brush the dirt and the leaves from my clothing, and ask me if I am all right. And I will tell them that I only fell asleep in the elm trees and lost hold of the time. I was their daughter, and I was their friend. I had not meant to keep them waiting so long.

  Appearance, Disappearance, Levitation, Transformation, and the Divided Woman

  First there was the incident at the water park. One of the wooden buttresses supporting the tornado slide collapsed, causing a long section of the tunnel to tilt backward off its axis and crash to the ground. A family of four who had been picnicking underneath were killed instantly, as well as two boys who spilled from a high curve of the chute into the open air. A girl who was inside the tunnel as it gave way, and who must have imagined that a great rush of water was lifting her back to the top, was all but uninjured by the fall, popping safely out onto a cushion of grass. The State Office of Recreational Safety shut the park down that very afternoon, securing the gates with locks the size of human heads. It was just one of those things.

  Then, two weeks later, when the paper had relegated news of the event to a quarter column at the back of the local pages, the video arcade burned to the ground. It was an electrical fire, started when a gang of boys knocked a VR machine over into a distribution box. The boys had drilled a hole through a game token and tied it to a line of fishing wire so that they could thread it back out of the machine when they were done playing. When the token got lodged inside, they rocked the machine onto its edge and then tipped it over, running away when its weight carried it through the wall. The room went up in a geyser of sparks. No one was killed in the blaze, though a child who had fallen asleep in the ball crawl suffered second-degree burns on her arms and legs from the heat of the melting plastic.

  Finally, only a few days later, the eastern wall of the skating rink was demolished by a wrecking crew who mistook the building for an abandoned warehouse. The warehouse in question was at 1800 Taylor Loop, and the skating rink was at 1800 Taylor Boulevard, and when the manager arrived to unlock the front door, he
found a dozen men in hardhats frowning over a pile of concrete at the polished wooden oval of the skating floor.

  So it was that Stephanie hired a magician for her son’s birthday—though all he had spoken about since the summer began was the party he wanted to have at Wild River Country, and then at Aladdin’s Castle, and then at Eight Wheels. When she heard that the skating rink was closed for reconstruction, she had asked him, “What do you think? Wouldn’t a magician be fun instead?” and he bent to his comic book with a negligent shrug. “I guess so,” he said, and then, after a few seconds, “But he’ll probably get hit by a car.”

  The man she hired wasn’t even a very good magician, it turned out, with his ungainly fish hands and his ragged black cape. Brown crumbs littered his mustache from the piece of cake he had eaten when he arrived, and more than once, as Stephanie watched his performance, she saw him pocketing some egg or coin that was supposed to have disappeared into thin air. But the children seemed to enjoy him, and that’s what mattered. One or two of them even shouted out in surprise when he released a dove from a silver pan—and they all clapped and laughed when it escaped and perched on his shoulder, pecking at the crumbs in his mustache. All except Micah, that is, who sat staring blankly ahead. Either he was so fascinated by the show that his face had locked in an expression of perfect calm, or he was so bored by it that he was imagining himself at the water park, the wave pool billowing beneath him with the tautness of muscle. Or, Stephanie thought, he was thinking about his father. She couldn’t tell.

  At the end of his act, the magician said, “And now for my final trick I need a volunteer. Is there anyone in the audience who’s exactly ten years old?” He glanced uncertainly at Stephanie and mouthed the word “ten,” a question, and when she nodded, he continued with his patter. “As I say, a volunteer who’s exactly ten years old. Not nine years old and three hundred sixty-four days. Not ten years old and one day. If there’s anyone in the audience who’s ten years old on the button, will that person please come forward? I won’t be able to summon the magic without your assistance.”