The Truth About Celia

by Kevin Brockmeier

  There is a story about the two maple trees in the side yard of his house that Jim Corrigan, the previous owner, told him before he moved to Florida. Once there were two men—one large, one small—who shared possible paternity for a little girl. Neither man loved the girl, and they would stride past her in the street without a glance, but when her mother died and it was learned that she would inherit the family fortune, they both came to claim their rights as fathers. First the men began to bicker, and then they began to throw punches, and then, right there where those two maple trees grow, the large one and the small one, they drew their pistols for a duel. The girl was watching from her window, and before they could fire, she shouted, “I hate you both!” Whereupon the men were transfigured. This is the story Jim Corrigan told him about the maple trees.

  The house is listed in the State Registry of Historic Places, so that he pays no property taxes on it but is required to open its doors to the public one Saturday a month. He tells the people who visit about the winding staircase and the sheep pen and the gravestone in the woods. Sometimes, when the weather is pleasant and the past seems far away, he tells them about the maple trees. Celia used to clamber through the branches of the smaller one, and Janet used to tap the larger one for syrup. When Jim Corrigan finished telling his story, he gave a long sigh and said, “The sand on Fort Walton Beach is as soft as flour, and so are the women.”

  Todd Paul Taulbee often brings his two Irish setters to fish with him in the pond behind the house. He sits atop a canvas stool on the soft corner of grass below the hillside, casting over the water, while his Irish setters chase each other through the trees. Todd Paul Taulbee has five grown children, all boys, but none of them will fish with him, because it is boring. He and Todd Paul used to chat together occasionally, but though they keep their silence now, Todd Paul continues to fish in his pond. Once or twice a week he will be inside the house reading Trivial Pursuit cards or filling out crossword puzzles and he will hear the beelike sound of a reel unspooling. When he looks out the window, he will see Todd Paul sitting there in the shade by the pond. He wears denim overalls, a baseball cap, and a heavy gray beard. His Irish setters bark at the circles the insects make on the water. They piss against the elm trees. “My sons are all either schoolteachers or vegetarians,” Todd Paul told him once, tugging his cap down in a gesture of disgust. “And Tommy, my youngest, is both.” There are no true fish in the pond, only tadpoles and minnows. Before Janet left, she used to call it the Puddle. Once, when Celia was only three or four, the three of them—he, Janet, and Celia—caught an eight-pound bass in the Springfield reservoir, carried it home in an ice chest filled with water, and released it into the pond, where it passed like a large white cloud between the reeds. The next day they were hiding on the back deck, watching, when Todd Paul Taulbee hooked it with a #2 fly. He fell off his stool, made a yipping noise, and shouted, “Thank You, Mary, Mother of God!” Celia began to cheer, and then to clap, and then to laugh so hard that she couldn’t walk. He had to carry her down to the pond in his arms. In the fall a layer of yellow elm leaves floats on the skin of the water, and in the winter the leaves darken, sink beneath the ice, and turn to a tarry black mud.

  He has lived in the house for fourteen years—the seven before it happened and the seven after. The only true sand castles he has ever seen are the kind that skill-less children make on ocean beaches. They look like upside-down buckets, and the first big wave always washes them away. His house looks nothing like a bucket. The front door, however, is twelve feet tall, and as wide as his outstretched arms, and he can see how it might suggest to the children of the neighborhood, in its age and in its stubbornness, a fortress or a castle. Two metal bands cross the door where the wood has split, and it is not hard to imagine it ratcheting down over a moat somewhere. Inside, the light is diluted by the dark wooden walls so that it slants through the windows in sharply defined pickets. He once heard an interview with a German film director who said that houses are like minds: both become unbearable when every corner is filled with light. The director said that he did not know the color of his own eyes. “We must live carefully with ourselves,” he said. In the middle of the front room is an old, decorative table with many small kinks and bubbles in the glass. Every year, in late August, between three and four in the afternoon, the light from the front window strikes the table in such a way that its reflection creates a field of stars on the ceiling. He and Janet used to lie on the carpet and wish on them. “I wish I had a million dollars,” she would say. And then, later, “I wish it could be the way it used to be.” The imperfections in the glass resemble tiny, transparent claws. It is uncanny. Behind the living room, off the kitchen, is a winding staircase which was carved from the trunk of a single giant sycamore tree by the woodwright Edwin Reasoner—born 1830, died 1904. This is what he tells the people who visit his house on the third Saturday of the month, on their Tour of Historic Places. The house itself was built under the direction of stonemason Stephen Wilkes and financed by solicitor Thomas Booth, the original tenant, so that until 1865 it was called the Wilkes-Booth House, and thereafter simply the Booth House. At the head of the winding staircase is the library, and behind that are the morning room and the master bedroom. The closet-sized chamber beside the bathroom, where the Booth family servant once lived, is now used as storage space. And at the end of the corridor, behind the arched window visible from the front lawn, is Celia’s bedroom, where she slept for seven years, which he is not yet ready to talk about.

  Enid Embry, his neighbor directly across the street, sometimes participates in the historic tours of his home. As often as ten times a year, she will come knocking on his door on the appropriate Saturday morning and say, “Well, it’s me again,” as he is drinking the last of his instant coffee. “I didn’t wake you, did I? You know me, I just can’t get enough of this local architecture.” She is a lonely woman. The small gift shop she used to operate went bankrupt when a Gift Warehouse the size of a football field opened its doors across town. That very same year, her children moved to Texas and California. Her husband, Hank, retired from the military and promptly died. Every Friday the Gift Warehouse hosts a Treat Yourself to a Gift Sale. Enid Embry believes in flying saucers, and while he conducts her through his house, telling her, once again, about the winding staircase or the coal cellar, she will announce that there was another sighting in Wisconsin last week, or another crop circle in Iowa. She says that the saucers are stealing our children: “They make them swallow this glow-in-the-dark dye,” she says, “and then watch them—you know—do their business.” She claims that the aliens are in league with the military, though her husband, Hank, would never talk about it while he was alive. Enid Embry leaves a container of beef stew and another of pot roast on his front porch every Wednesday morning. The gesture is supposed to be anonymous, but more than once he has seen her scurrying away from his house as he answers her tap on the door. She dodges between Big Wheels as she crosses the street. She wears bright linen skirts. In every direction, the sky is as blue as powder.

  Behind the elms on the wooded hillside, on a table of level ground, is a new Foster’s Supermarket. Two years ago there was merely a field of wood char and yellow grass there, and two years before that there was a spinney of oak trees. Springfield has changed so much in the last seven years, he wonders if Celia would even recognize it. He cannot see the supermarket from the window of his house—it is concealed by the hill—but now and then he does spot the wink of a street lamp through the knit of leaves and branches. Once, when he was replacing a pair of cracked shingles, he stood at the very peak of his roof and realized he could see the row of shopping registers and candy racks through the store’s plate-glass window, as though he were hovering right there. He felt like a ghost. At night, teenagers steal shopping carts from the parking lot and ride them like carriages over the edge of the hill. They collide with the trees, chipping their teeth, but they do it again and again. All of the carts have mangled frames and trick wheels
now, and they weave back and forth through the narrow lanes of the supermarket making a mouselike squeaking noise. The manager has posted a sign on the bulletin board reading: ABUSERS OF SHOP– PING CARTS WILL BE FINED AND/OR PROSECUTED. Surrounding it are all the usual grocery store leaflets: discount shopping inserts, pictures of missing dogs and cats, baby-sitter fliers with a fringe of telephone numbers along the bottom.

  He has taken to memorizing pieces of trivia. The gira fe sleeps only half an hour a day. Saint Claire is the patron saint of television. Peter the Great outlawed beards. Even as a child he had a tenacious memory for such little sparks of information. His seventh grade English teacher, Miss Vinson, once called him an encyclopedia of useless knowledge, a distinction he was young enough to feel flattered by at the time. Recently, though, he has taken up what you might almost call a program of study, reading almanacs, Trivial Pursuit decks, sugar packets, newspapers, dictionaries, magazines, and books with titles like A Field Guide to Insect Life and Culture to whittle away from them whatever facts he can. At odd hours of the day or night, with his teeth set and his eyes blinking, after he has set aside his writing, he will find himself rehearsing this particular fact, that particular one known thing. It is like the trick that all children learn of scratching just above or just below a mosquito bite to relieve the itch without inflaming the wound. This is how he explains it to himself: it feels, always, as if he has just been bitten.

  On the wooded hillside behind his house, high on the slope, is a single weathered gravestone with two names bitten into the surface: TRAVIS WORLEY, 1917-1925, and beneath it, in smaller letters, BABY GIRL WORLEY, MAY 1925. The gravestone is protected from the heaviest of the winds and rain by a few of the larger elm trees, and the left side is encrusted with rings of bright, pumpkin-colored lichen. On Halloween the kids in the neighborhood swipe the pumpkins from our front porches and smash them against Dumpsters and mailboxes. “It smells like a pie factory out here,” Janet used to say as she walked outside on the first of November. The Worley gravestone has been tilted forward by the exposed root of one of the elm trees. A wide bowl of dirt, filled with stagnant water, has formed behind it. In the summer, clouds of mosquitoes hatch from the water and rise wailing into the air. Celia used to call them needle-bugs. Though he has read through the Springfield newspaper archives, searching the obituaries, he has not been able to determine how the Worley children died. The root structure of a tree, growing unhindered, will be roughly the same shape and size as its branch structure. This is what happened: his daughter, Celia, vanished seven years ago.

  His house has become too big for him—or, if not too big, too encumbered: too freighted or congested or coated with memories. Everywhere he looks he sees pieces of his life with Janet and Celia. In the morning room is the plant he bought the day Celia was born. On the bureau in the library is the chunk of quartz she once carried to kindergarten, telling her best friend, Kristen Lanzetta, it was a diamond. In the living room is the sofa where he and Janet had sex for the last time, on the morning before she left. He pressed his face against her back, kissing the knots of her spine, and she gripped a pillow in one hand—that pillow, there on the easy chair. Afterward, as she wiped the sweat from her face with the bundle of her T-shirt, she said, “I really don’t blame you.”

  “Which means you really do,” he answered.

  She cocked her head in reflection for a moment. “Which means I really do,” she admitted. And then she kissed him on the cheek.

  The memories are like millions of tiny ball bearings that send him slipping and tumbling off his feet, making every step precarious. Sometimes he is almost afraid to move. Celia was seven years old when she disappeared and would be fourteen today. Now and then he sees her best friend, Kristen Lanzetta, at the shopping mall. He shops there for pants and sweaters. Kristen and the other girls float down the escalator like mannequins or artist’s models, posing meticulously in the glow from the skylights. When they whisper to each other, they move only their heads. Kristen will not answer him when he waves hello to her. He does not know if this is because she is a fourteen-year-old girl and he is an old man, or because she is a fourteen-year-old girl and he is the old man who was the father of her best friend. He does not see himself as an old man—he feels younger, in fact (or maybe it is that the rest of his life, the portion he has yet to live, feels longer), every single morning—but he is certain that Kristen Lanzetta does. Sheila Lanzetta, Kristen’s mother, once told him, “You should try not to think about it so much.” She is an intelligent woman, an anthropology professor, and she speaks with a note of careful pondering in her voice that makes such things sound reasonable. Sometimes he tells himself this: I do not think about it so much. I do not think about it so much anymore. I really don’t think about it so much anymore. But he is unable to believe it. There is so much time to fill.

  Ragland Fowler, the Gift Warehouse magnate, has offered to buy his house, but though the ball bearings are everywhere, rolling him this way and that, he is reluctant to sell. What if Celia were to reappear just as suddenly as she vanished, popping through some slit in the air and returning home? How would she ever find him? He can picture her wandering through the house, all the old hallways and bedrooms, and finding them filled with items from the Gift Warehouse— piñatas, beanbag furniture, Lava lamps with balloons of oil. Everything would be utterly changed. He is afraid to move. He remembers being startled the first time he was paging through the mail and saw her face on a postcard. Have you seen me? the card read. CALL 1-800-THE-LOST. And there inside a frame of black lines was Celia. Her photo, the same one he had on the dresser in his bedroom, had been subjected to some sort of aging process, so that her nose and chin were bolder, her hair longer and missing its ribbon. He thought, So this is what you look like now, and was gripped by a sudden fit of shivering.

  The mail arrives each day between one-thirty and two, and he often waits on the front porch for it, sipping from a canteen of water. The mail carrier, a French-African immigrant named Nathan Caru, speaks a crisp, night-school English but has a poor ear for the local dialect, which sounds to him, he has said, as if the words were crawling up from underneath the tongue. There is a red, white, and blue stripe across the door of his mail truck that bears a tiny © beneath it. He often points this out to his addressees, expressing amazement. “Who would have thought you could copyright a stripe?” he says. During stuffy weather, when Nathan Caru delivers his mail to him, he offers him a can of soda, during cold weather a mug of hot chocolate. The day he first saw the photograph of Celia on the postcard, he wanted desperately to show it to somebody—to celebrate, or confirm, that it was really there, that she was really his daughter, though even then he knew it was a desperate enterprise. He chased after Nathan Caru as he walked up the block, shouting, “Wait, wait. I have something to show you,” and then, when he caught up with him, he presented the card to him. “This is my daughter. Right here in this picture.” Nathan Caru smiled his lopsided smile and nodded his head, but it was plain that he did not understand. “Congratulations,” he said.

  When Celia was four and five and six years old, she had a habit of wandering away. He and Janet would glance up from their reading or their gardening and find that she was no longer in the house, no longer in the yard, and they would wonder where she had drifted off to. Buster Keaton was given his first name by Harry Houdini, with whom his parents were close personal friends. Celia would roam through the thicket of elm trees behind the house, collecting the dark, livery mushrooms that grew there. She would step out of her shoes to press her bare feet against the Worley gravestone. She would toss pebbles into the pond, sending clusters of minnows shimmering through the reeds. And she would visit with the nearest neighbors, standing in their driveways as they unloaded sacks of groceries from their cars. In those years this did not seem dangerous. She had never slept a night outside her own bed. The children were riding scooters then, not Big Wheels, and he remembers the sound they made as they glided down the stree
t with their sneakers slapping against the pavement—a sound like a trapped kite knocking against the branches of a tree. Enid Embry, whose husband was still alive at the time, used to invite Celia inside for Kool-Aid and tell her about the aliens. She said they invented Velcro, digital watches, the atom bomb, and nonstick cookware. Sara Cadwallader, who lives two houses down from him, used to let Celia play with her cats, Mudpie and Thisbe. Thisbe had not been spayed, and Mudpie had not been neutered, and they would snake themselves across Celia’s legs with a slow, rigid pressure. Once, when he asked Sara about the cats, she told him, I know, I know, but I just don’t have the heart to do it to them. I have to keep my eye on them every single minute of the day. Greg and Alma Martin, who both teach at Springfield Elementary School, and whose son Oscar was in the same grade as Celia, used to take the two of them to the movies during the summer, and Matt Shuptrine, who lives in the coffee-colored brick house at the end of the block, used to help her chip flakes of crystal from the chunk of calcite in his front yard. The children Celia knew then have graduated from scooters to skateboards, and soon they will graduate from skateboards to cars. He wonders if the children who play in the neighborhood today will graduate eventually from Big Wheels to ATVs—the progression seems inevitable. Though his neighbors have always been kind to him, and though they were always kind to Celia, there are nights when, trying to puzzle it through, he can’t help but view them all as suspects.