Celine

by Peter Heller

  “There was an insurance policy, too. That drove her wild. Wilder. One million. All to Gabriela. It seems trite, doesn’t it? Like Dr. Evil putting his pinkie in the corner of his mouth and asking for a million dollars to ransom the world.”

  “Trite or not,” Celine said, “it’s a pile of cash for a college student on scholarship. But wait, how long before Lamont was declared dead? It was pretty fast, wasn’t it? I think she told me it was something like two months after his disappearance. That doesn’t seem right. Without a body.”

  “Yes.” She’d done it again. Worked out in a flash what had taken him not inconsiderable pondering. “A federal agent in Yellowstone National Park, and then a county judge, signed off. A smear of Lamont’s blood was found on the bark of a nearby fir tree. The prevailing theory was killer bear. And there was this otherwise destitute young woman who stood to inherit. The intensive search lasted about ten days. It probably would never have lasted that long except that it was fueled by media coverage. The story was sexy. Lamont was a handsome and well-known National Geographic photographer who took the photo of the wild horses clashing beneath the towers in Monument Valley. An unexpected long shot from above, the two stallions rearing up and dwarfed by the rock. You’ve seen it.”

  Celine nodded.

  “Gabriela said there were television vans all over Cooke City. The place only has one paved street and two motels. She said loggers and bearded recluses were renting out rooms to coiffed broadcast reporters in panty hose.” Pa chummed—his trademark utterance, between a chuckle and a hum. “There’s another detail.”

  Celine studied her husband, one eyebrow barely deigning to rise. He had done a lot of groundwork on his own in just a couple of days. While she was, admittedly, on her own frightful tear to get ready and out the door. This was not their usual way of doing things, however, and she felt a mixture of hurt, if not betrayal, as well as admiration for his thoroughness. “Yes? Another detail?”

  “An insight is perhaps better. Lamont disappeared just outside the boundaries of Yellowstone National Park. Half a mile outside. Had his car been found just south, within the park’s borders, the case, and the search, would have automatically been federal.”

  “Ahh.”

  “You see? He avoids both the FBI and the prodigious search-and-rescue apparatus of the national park and the federal government.”

  “He does?”

  “Yes. I mean if this was premeditated, if this wasn’t actually a killer bear attack. Except.”

  “What?”

  “Gabriela flew out from Sarah Lawrence as soon as she heard from Danette that her father had disappeared. She spoke to her professors and got deferments on the first papers and work groups. It was lucky that she had no labs. She landed in Bozeman, rented a Jeep, and drove down. She said she interviewed everybody, the biologists, the tracker, the cops and the searchers, park officials, even the people who ran the bar that Lamont frequented in Cooke City. She kept meticulous notes and a journal. And she kept running into a pair of officials she knew in her gut were feds and who would not talk to her. She said they avoided her.”

  “She brought the notes with her when she came to dinner,” Celine said. “But not the second time she came over. Can you please hand me my phone?”

  Pa’s telltale eyebrow lifted and fell, a bit like a Maine coast groundswell. He knew that his wife was constitutionally incapable of staying out of the fray and that she would not be sidelined for another minute.

  Gabriela answered on the first ring. “Hello, it’s Celine. I hope I haven’t caught you in the middle of dinner.”

  “No, no, we’ve eaten.” That clear voice, like mountain water, Celine thought. A voice to love.

  “Can you please FedEx a copy of your file of notes? The one I saw you with the other night?”

  “I can’t find it. I…I misplaced it.”

  “How? Do you remember? Can you tell me any more about that?”

  “No.” Neither woman was in the mood to beat around the bush. Celine knew there was more, but she also sensed that now was not the time.

  “I see. Well tell me: You spoke of certain rumors about your father. About his…his, ah, travel. All those places he went back to—Argentina, Peru, Chile. Do you think the rumors had merit?”

  “I’m not sure, but—”

  “But what?”

  Gabriela hesitated. The girl was clearly conflicted. “I mentioned on the dock that there was one thing—”

  “Yes, I remember.”

  “I told you that after…that I moved back into the larger apartment upstairs.”

  “Right.”

  “I did it on my Christmas break from school. My junior year at Sarah Lawrence. Not the funnest Christmas—”

  “Of course. Very bleak. I can imagine.”

  “Well, I was cleaning out the upstairs apartment, trying to purge the residue of Danette before I moved in, and…”

  “And?”

  “And I lifted out the silverware tray, the one with all the compartments for knives, forks—”

  Celine nodded impatiently into her phone. She knew what a silverware tray was.

  “I lifted it up and underneath was a stained sheet of thin oilcloth. It was sort of etched with the outline of a rectangle. I peeled up the sheet and underneath was a current U.S. passport. It bore Pop’s picture. But the name was Paul Lemonde Bozuwa.”

  Celine felt a rush, almost like the hit from a double espresso. Gabriela said she had put the passport back where she’d found it, she wasn’t sure why.

  They drove west up Main Street and halfway through town they saw a sign on the left that said SINKS CANYON—US FOREST SERVICE ACCESS. They turned. Bounced up the washboards for ten minutes and pulled off at a small meadow. When she opened her door the sound of a creek in a rock bed filled the night, and the smell of cold stones and water and sage, and she felt strangely elated.

  EIGHT

  They woke to rain. It drummed on the camper’s aluminum roof and pattered against the canvas walls of their upstairs bunk. She loved this as much as the presence of the stream. How long had it been? Rain on a tin roof? Except for the small incident in the night, she felt blessedly…something. Happiness was not a word that seemed to apply anymore, when she had lost so many close to her. There was a contentment that felt deeper, that acknowledged and accepted the quieter offerings of small joys—of love and occasional peace in a life that was full of pain.

  The summer before last, between two sisters’ funerals, they had gone back to Pete’s family compound on North Haven and stayed in the Doll’s House hard against the little inlet—just a clapboard cabin with odd-size salvaged windows, candles, a lantern, a woodstove—and she had loved it without knowing how much because the whole sojourn was heavy and darkened by grief. She must have loved it. It had rained there, hard, two nights running, and if she could love anything then she loved the feel of Pete warm beside her in the tiny bed, snoring with the peace of an elder who has come home after a long time away, and the sound of the rain sweeping against the mossy shingles. And walking slowly up the grassy track through spruce woods, holding Pete’s hand, walking slowly and stopping to catch her breath—the trail was steep, her emphysema a nuisance—up to the Big House, which was just a clapboard saltbox fitted out with small rooms and bookshelves stuffed with musty first editions. And a view down the clearing to the slate blue bay and an archipelago of little islands.

  There might not be a measure of happiness left in a life, but there could be beauty and grace and endless love.

  A few miles above Lander, the whole making-camp part of the night had been surprisingly easy. They undid the six outside latches, and Pete crouched inside and pushed up on the roof expecting a hard lift and the thing swished upward on its shocks at the first touch. He locked the struts with two small levers and the canvas walls stood taut. The bed was already made thanks to Hank, with the moose quilt and a light duvet. All they had to do was toss up a couple of pillows. One step on top of a storage
cabinet and they were up, and snug.

  Celine slept well, better than she had maybe since those nights in Maine. She woke once needing to pee, and as she was lying there in the warm quilts summoning her will to take up the little headlamp and make the climb down, she was startled by a sweep of headlights against the canvas.

  Her first thought was lightning, but then she heard the soft crunch of tires on the dirt road maybe thirty yards away. Was that what had woken her? And not her bladder, which was admittedly tiny? Well, it was now grouse or archery season or whatever in all of these states, isn’t that what Hank had told her? Some hunter was coming home late from the mountains up higher, or going out early.

  She was the one with the keen nose, and none of this smelled right. She felt for the Glock in its paddle holster that she’d dutifully clipped to the edge of the bed platform, and she climbed down without the light, feeling the cabinet and then the floor with her bare feet, finding her sheepskin slippers by touch. She shrugged on a fleece jacket that she’d hung off a high cabinet handle, also at the ready. She found the latch and door handle without trouble and eased herself out into the cold damp night. The smells of sage and water and fog were even stronger now. As if the darkness had allowed them to breathe. No rain yet, but the little clearing was now in the clouds that had pushed down into the valley, she could feel their wet touch. And then she saw the blurred red glow of taillights descending out of sight through mist. Hunh. Whoever was passing was not simply traveling—the time between the first flash of headlights and the now disappearing taillights was too long. Someone was curious, or doing recon.

  She peed, just squatted in the beaten grass and listened to the creek rush in the dark. Amazing how many sounds when you parsed it: gurgles and spills, a rill like a flute, gulps and drums, even deep gongs.

  Amazing, she thought: the layers of anything. The constituents that reveal themselves when you stop and pay attention.

  She did not mention anything to Pete until they were both fully awake. They made coffee with the door of the camper open and the smell of the French roast filling their little house. A scrim of rain outside the door. The steady hush. Celine marveled. Is that all it takes? To rearrange the world? To sense again that everything is working as it should? They sat at what Hank had called the side dinette. He couldn’t help but see Celine’s flash of skepticism when he said it.

  “I never in my life thought I would entertain myself at a side dinette,” she had murmured. “Sounds like Danette.” Hank saw the slightest shudder.

  But there they sat, drinking coffee at the vinyl table, and as at home in the swells of the hills as sailors on a little boat. She told Pete about the truck, she was sure it was a truck, and she said, “You know, you can tell a lot from the sound of tires on a road. Are they in a hurry or dawdling? Heedless of their surroundings or paying very close attention? You can even tell if the driver is mad. This driver was definitely not mad. Very cool. There was a distinctly surreptitious sound to the crunching of those tires.”

  Pete had long ago dismissed the notion he’d had in early days that he was indulging the active imagination of his wife. He sipped his coffee. “Mmm,” he said.

  “I feel something,” Celine said. “Something is off. This thing about Gabriela losing her thick file of notes.”

  “She didn’t say she lost it, she said, ‘I misplaced it. I can’t find it.’ Her exact words. Seems to me there’s a difference.”

  Celine chewed on the earpiece of her large tortoiseshell reading glasses. “There can be a big difference, can’t there?”

  “She sounded very upset,” Pete said. “But as if she were trying to cover.”

  “That’s just it. This feeling of cover. A cover-up.” Celine sipped. Delicious. Why should coffee with cream and honey be better out here? “I’m not sure of anything,” she said. “Which is almost wonderful.”

  They drank their coffee slowly and Celine wrote her letter to Hank. Then they buttoned up the truck and Celine picked up an animal bone that looked like a little mask—probably a pelvis, she’d use it for something—and they drove northwest toward Jackson Hole. The rain lightened then cleared and the groves of aspen running up through the slopes of black timber seemed to be a deeper yellow and the fields of wheatgrass tinged with faint green. Fall rain. They stopped for breakfast at the Fort Washakie Diner, which was crowded with mostly Native Americans eating breakfast after what looked like maybe night shifts working at the casino. A brown spotted pit bull snoozed contentedly in a corner and a round-faced Native girl served them with four curt syllables: “Can I getchyou?” She was almost as laconic as Pete.

  She took their order without a hint of smile, but when she brought coffee refills she couldn’t help herself. “You from L.A.?” she said. “He don’t look like it, but you do.” She pointed not quite accusingly with the pot.

  That set them to laughing and the girl finally cracked a smile that brightened the whole room.

  “New York,” they said.

  “Figured,” she said.

  “What’s the dog’s name?” asked Celine.

  “Orchard.”

  “Orchard? Why on earth do you call him Orchard?”

  The girl twisted her lips, “ ’Cuz he looks like a apple.” Her eyes sparkled.

  Celine looked at the muscly, lumpy, snoring dog. “Hunh. He’s about the furthest thing from an apple I think I’ve ever seen in my life.”

  “I said, Richard,” the girl chided.

  As they got up to pay at the counter Celine noticed a youngish trim-bearded white man at a booth in the corner, wearing a creased and unfaded plaid shirt, this one red. She couldn’t see his face because he was wearing a baseball cap and he was concentrating hard on a ketchup-covered omelet, head down.

  NINE

  We have all seen the posters and prints of the bends of the Snake River curling beneath the sharp granite towers of the Grand Tetons. The water is black and the peaks are dusted with new snow and the cottonwoods along the banks are yellow, their smoldering ranks throwing the scale of the mountains into perspective. Because the tall trees look tiny running along the bottom of the picture. It may be morning and the river is covered in mist that moves over the water like smoke, and there may be one man fishing, his fly rod bent back mid-cast. If he is there, it is only to remind us that the grandeur and shocking beauty are not of human scale. That the most indisputable beauty may be the one that people cannot ever touch. That God exists up there somehow, in the peaks and remote lakes and the sharp wind.

  Who knows why that picture stirs joy. It speaks directly to our impermanence and our smallness.

  Those were Celine’s thoughts as she drove along the river on just such a morning. The mist smoked and rose, the peaks towered, the cottonwoods caught the sun from the south and blazed and flamed. It was almost too grand. It could not be real.

  “Look, Pete,” she said. “There’s a man fishing down there in the fog. It looks just like that poster of Hank’s.”

  “Aye-yup.” Pa was speaking Maine this morning. Clearly the Washakie waitress in her reticence had reminded him of his first language.

  They drove out into the open grass valley where a herd of elk in their hundreds grazed head down unafraid of bow hunters. “That’s the National Elk Refuge,” said Celine, pointing. “I remember all this. I took Mimi skiing here for her thirtieth birthday. I remember we rode a big cable car to the top—that mountain there, can you see it?—and once we got above the fog it was bright sun and blue blue sky, and as we neared the summit an announcement in the gondola said something about ‘If you are not an expert ride back down.’ It was glorious skiing up there, all those steep chutes. And down below the whole valley obscured by a layer of clouds. When we took our long run all the way to the bottom for lunch we skied right through that floor of clouds, right into mist and snow! We were like two little airplanes!”

  “Mmm,” Pete hummed.

  “You’re not listening to a thing I say this morning!” Celine cried, t
hough she knew, of course, that this was not true.

  “Hmph.”

  “Hmph is right. We have good cell reception. When we get to town, I’m going to call Gabriela again.”

  “Good idea.”

  Suddenly they were at the edge of it, the bustling town. They wound past the rec center, the first ski shops and cafés, and entered the flow of traffic around the central square. The town was packed. Trucks loaded with kayaks and bikes, campers with fly-rod vaults on the roof. Everybody seemed to be on the way to Fun. A sunny cool September morning, bracing for real fall but unwilling to let go of summer, the kind of autumn day that can only occur a couple of weeks a year. Tourists posed for pictures at the corners of the square, beneath tall arches made of elk antlers, their big smiles not at all fake.

  “You’d think it was Fourth of July,” Celine exclaimed. “Gracious! Don’t any of these people have jobs?”

  “Hard to say.”

  “Let’s pull over.” As soon as she said it, an SUV carrying a canoe began backing out of one of the prized parking spots. Right in front of them. Pete did not comment. This was another of his wife’s talents: She had Parking Angels.

  They got out, stretched, walked slowly on stiff knees across the street to one of the antlered arches.

  “Pete, wait a sec. Let me catch my breath here. It’s all the sitting. Can you please post this letter for me. It’s to Hank. There’s a box there.” What a nuisance, emphysema. She thought she was a long way from having to carry oxygen, but higher altitudes could make things difficult, especially when she was tired, which she was. Her sleep had been troubled after seeing that truck vanish into the mist. She hadn’t imagined it, and she was sure that whoever was driving the vehicle had been scouting them. God knows why.