Celine

by Peter Heller

  “I’ll be damned,” she said. “Pete, I feel abandoned! Isn’t that weird? Empty nest all over again.”

  Pete chuckled. “Not so fast,” he said. “Didn’t you listen to the man’s job?”

  “Yes. Starving,” she muttered and took a spoonful of the borscht. “Mmm, wow. Wow. So what?”

  “He’s a trained hunter. Maybe at last you’ve met your match. A real James Bond.”

  “Humph.”

  “If he is that good, he knew you put the tracker on him. He’s surely trained to sweep his vehicle every day, as you said. Remember the Piss on Hippies guy?”

  “Of course.”

  “Wasn’t that the last place we saw young William?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Didn’t the driller’s truck say Jackson Hole on the door?”

  Celine stared at her husband. Incredible! Pete seemed all fusty and distracted and he didn’t miss a single beat, did he? Tanner might have simply moved the GPS on its magnet to the redneck’s truck. Damn. Still, it was just a guess.

  “Maybe,” Pete said, “he is done jogging out in the open, trying to intimidate us. Maybe he is going dark. Trying to.”

  She blew on another spoonful and swallowed it. Pete said, “Maybe he is hunting us now.”

  Celine dipped a piece of store-bought roll into the soup. Pete said, “Why don’t we check the second one, the one his surrogate mother put in the coffee grinder. Let’s see how good he really is.”

  Celine twisted her lips and ladled up more borscht. “This soup is really delicious,” she said. “You should eat something.” Pete grinned. His wife, he could see, was delaying the moment of truth. “Okay, okay,” she said. She patted her lips with her napkin and typed in the code for the second tracker. The map vanished and reformed and there was the blip in the middle of it, pulsing away like a headache. “He’s at the bar next door!” Celine said, triumphant. “Either that or he’s making coffee on his tailgate a block away.”

  “Did you want to invite him over for dinner?” Pete said dryly.

  “He kept my present!” she said. “Oh, Pete, you’re getting jealous!”

  Pete didn’t deign to respond. But he did say, “He may simply have known where we were going. Where else would we go? But maybe in the morning we should do our own sweep.”

  Celine pushed her salad bowl an inch closer to Pete’s side of the table. “I don’t think so,” she said. “I mean, sure, to see if something’s there. But if we are lit up, it may have a use later.”

  “Hmm,” Pete said. And she knew by the timbre that she wouldn’t have to explain.

  “But how do we know,” he continued, “when he has begun to really hunt us? When the fun and games is over with?”

  “We don’t,” she said.

  SEVENTEEN

  It was too late to call anybody. Celine wanted to talk to Sheriff Travers first, but that would have to wait until morning. Before they could order, Nastasia brought out two plates of hamburger steak fried flat and smothered in sauerkraut, two small dishes of creamed spinach, and a bowl of mashed potatoes.

  “Is this included in the meal, too?” Celine said. They hadn’t had time to order.

  “Actually, yes.” The waitress leveled her world-weary violet eyes at Celine. “Actually, it is the meal. There is one meal.” Her eyes were neutral, waiting for the challenge.

  “Great.”

  “Okay. Well.” Nastasia relaxed just a little and picked up the salad bowls. “By the way, I noticed that you were walking here. Be careful back to the motel. There is Problem Bear.”

  She must have been sitting in the window waiting for a customer. Cooke City suddenly seemed even sadder.

  “What is Problem Bear?”

  “He is big griz. He is eating garbage and he charged Sitka on the street, since three nights.” There was only one street.

  They walked back slowly. They held hands and walked down the middle of the dark county road that served as Main Street. There were no streetlights, only the neon in the bar and the lights from the motel sign and the windows of the two restaurants, a few houses. The rain had stopped but there were no stars, and the thick clouds were keeping the air from freezing. It smelled of woodsmoke. They could see the pale plumes rising from stovepipes into the stillness. Winter was coming fast and people were stoking their stoves, the air was thick with it. Celine wheezed a little as she walked, the thin reedy note on the inhale that almost sounded like a cat. Everything seemed sad. They heard a garbage can clatter somewhere behind them, but they were not scared of the bear because Celine was packing, though she knew that a nine millimeter round would more likely piss off a grizzly than stop it.

  It occurred to her as they walked that they were looking for a father who had disappeared more than two decades ago, but that he had truly left his child’s life long before that, that the young woman had grown up for all intents and purposes fatherless. As she did. That finding him now might resolve something in the woman’s heart but would not change the essential sadness. And that was the business she was in. She had had to accept it long ago: that her job was enabling just such reunions. That though they could not change someone’s childhood, still—there was a great raw need in her clients to know their parents and to meet them again. There was something in that resolution that was very important. To the child, and often to the parent. She certainly knew about that. And sometimes they—the parent and the child—started again. Rarely did it work, but sometimes it did. And then a child would have a mother and a mother a daughter.

  The saddest part was that parents would keep disappearing, and children would cry themselves to sleep night after night, for months, for years. And that mothers would have their babies taken from them before they had a chance to smell the tuft of soft hair, their ears, before they had a chance to say, “Oh how I love you! Forever and ever.” That the baby was taken before she had a chance to kiss her and wrap her properly in her arms.

  Pete guided her around a deep pothole partly filled with gravel and she gripped his hand more tightly. In the wan light from the motel sign she could see their truck, the only vehicle in the drive. The only guests. At the end of the street she could see the dark bulk of the Barronette rising against the night sky. Yes, sad. How it felt. She thought that one might not make a dent in the Great Sadness, but one could help make another person whole.

  That night in the overheated motel room Celine dreamed of Las Armas, the villa on the hill. She was returning after a long sojourn, she was not a little girl anymore but she was not a grown woman either. She was running down the shell drive and she was looking for Bobby and Mimi. She had something important to tell them and she wanted badly to run with them down to the little beach, to tell them away from Baboo. She wanted to tread water beneath Grayson’s dock and tell them.

  She got to the house and pushed open the door and there was a woman in the front hall picking the heavy receiver up from a black phone. The woman turned, startled. She was blond, handsome, her wrist glinted with a gold bracelet, she had the air of having everything she wanted in the world, but Celine didn’t recognize her. She wanted to call out for Gaga, but she was afraid of upsetting the woman who clearly lived in the house, and she was afraid Gaga would not answer. Celine looked past the woman to the main parlor and saw scaffolding and sheets and lumber. Broken plaster.

  “I…I…” she stammered. And then she was clawing at her throat, clawing for air. The I’s would not come out and they would not go back in. They came up from her lungs and hit the dead spot that swelled there like a bubble and they piled up, backed down her esophagus and up into her sinuses and her head. “I…I…”

  She must have been thrashing because Pete startled awake and his arm flung over and he felt her shaking, her whole thin body taut as tightened cable and shivering, her chest arching upward. Oh God.

  He hit the light and he saw her face drawn in a mask of terror, her eyes half closed and rolled back, and her face was blue. He did the only thing he could think of: he
rolled over onto his elbow and forced himself to his knees and bent his face to his smothering wife and sealed his lips around hers and blew. He blew hard. Felt the resistance, Jesus, and turned his head to the side and kissed her again and blew harder and he felt something release and when he turned his lips to the side again a rush of hot air blew against his cheek and she cried out. As weak and searing a cry as he had ever heard.

  He sat her up. Her eyes were glazed but the blue was almost gone from her cheeks. She breathed. A little. At least she breathed. Shallow and quivering, but inhale, exhale. Her strong arthritic hands gripped the crumpled counterpane as if she were holding herself to a cliff. Pete placed his open hand on her chest for a split second, she gave the barest of nods, and he let himself off the bed and made his way to the oxygen condenser on the other bed, tried not to shake as he unwound the tubing, turned it on, came back. Hooked the cannula gently over her ears, inserted it into her nostrils. She did not move her head, she held it rigid on her neck as if any movement might jeopardize the airway, but her eyes followed him. “Oh,” he said. “Inhaler. Red inhaler first,” and he saw her shut her eyes a second which meant No.

  “Okay, okay.”

  She breathed. Barely. Her chest moved as rapidly as a bird’s. She looked scared. Terrified. That’s what got to him the most, he didn’t know when she’d ever looked so frightened. And then her breathing hit another hitch and her eyes went wide. Oh God. Pete felt the world freeze and teeter. And then she released, whistled out another breath.

  Pete usually never panicked but now he did. He touched her again and rose and scrabbled his hands over the low bureau feeling for his phone, which he found and flipped open. No reception. Damn. Of course not. And the Yellowstone Lodge may be the only motel on the planet with no phone in the room. Pete did not easily succumb but for a moment he cursed. What the hell were they doing here? Cooke City was seventy-five hundred feet and it was cold and the air was thin and all the woodstoves cranking up were thickening the night with particulates and smoke, just about the worst recipe—he shook it off. No good going there. What they needed now was a doctor.

  Pete found his pants on the scarred armchair and pulled them on and shucked on the wool-lined Carhartt jacket without bothering to put on a shirt and said, “I’ll be right back, three minutes,” and she nodded, just the barest tilt of her chin and he was out the door and trotting as best he could over the rough pitted gravel of the parking lot. The motel office. Someone there would help, they would have a phone. A single bulb burned at the door. He knocked. Tried the knob, locked. Damn. Knocked harder. Nothing, no light. Maybe the owners didn’t even live here like every other motel-owning family. He went out onto the road, the main street, careful not to stumble on the frost heaves. For the first time he noticed that the night had misted, gone into low cloud, the moisture touched and needled his cheeks, maybe it was frost. Across the street he saw a light burning in a second story. It was the Polish restaurant, who knew who lived above—any harbor in a storm. He moved as fast as his stiff knees would carry him, could not bear to think of her struggling for breath in the room alone. He pounded now. Knocked as hard and fast as he could. He did not stop.

  A light flicked on, in the restaurant, over the counter. He saw through the small panes of the door Nastasia pulling tight a white terrycloth robe, knotting the belt. Her black hair was wild and she still wore traces of smudged mascara and she looked alarmed and suddenly many years older. Well. She came to the door at an angle like a gunfighter, tilting her head and peering the whole time, trying to make out the visitor—or intruder. She found a switch on the wall and Pete was suddenly rinsed in white light and her face relaxed. She even managed to quiver one corner of her mouth into a smile. Unlatched the door.

  “Wha—”

  “It’s my wife, Celine. She’s having a crisis—her breathing—”

  “Ja ja,” she knew, she remembered, she’d noticed.

  “I need a phone. Better, is there a doctor, a doctor right in town?”

  She shook her head, emphatic. “He is bird hunter. About maybe five kilometers he has a cabin, no phone, he comes from Bozeman.”

  “Oh God, I don’t drive. Do you?” For the first time he saw her unmasked: Her eyebrows were up, arched, her mouth in an O, her broad cheeks flat, eyes resigned and scared and excited all at once, she looked like a child who has been asked to jump off the high dive and knows she will do it. “Jimmy’s truck, he is owner, we will try. He showed me.”

  Pete did the math and it occurred to him that it was the same calculus Lamont must have done on the morning of the drowning. If they went back to the room to check on her it would eat up five or ten more minutes. But she might be having another seizure now and without help she would die. The thought hit him like a gust of hail. He may have never allowed himself to utter those words, even in his head, and the chasm it opened up was too wide and too deep. He flinched, shrank back. The truck was parked outside, a battered Nissan, and Nastasia yanked open the stuck front door like she was goading a stubborn ox. She had not dressed, she was naked under her robe, and she did not even go back in to find a coat. She must have been freezing, and it filled Pete with gratitude for the no-bullshit people of the earth, the people who knew what had to be done and would find their own damn coat later. She overcranked the starter, grated it again, got the truck going and then lurched it into the post that supported the steps. He could see her shaking her head, heard the gearbox chunk as she found Reverse, and then the pickup heaved back twice and stalled. Then he heard the bark of a Baltic curse and the door flew open. She was pissed, almost smoking with outrage. Pete felt paralyzed. He needed to get back to the room. Her violet eyes now black in the dim light flashed up to his and she saw everything, said, “Go! Go back! I know where! I will get Stumpy to drive! Go!” And with that she tore up the street to look for a driver—in a wreath of fuming frustration and whirling terrycloth like some Halloween ghost.

  Celine was not dead when he got back to the room. She was still struggling for breath but her head had relaxed on the pillow and her eyes were closed and the compressor was making rhythmic chuffs to boost each of her breaths. Her fingers still gripped the blanket. Pete sat beside her and placed his cool hand on her forehead and murmured that a doctor was coming. He wasn’t sure—not sure of anything: whether Nastasia would find Stumpy whoever he was, whether they’d get to the doctor’s, whether he’d be home—but that’s what Pete said: The doctor was coming. And when he said it, he thought he heard the tempo of the condenser slow, and thought he felt her forehead relax. Fear, he thought, is the enemy of breath.

  Who knew how much time had passed, it didn’t seem like much. Nobody even tapped. He heard the drum of several feet on the steps and the creaking wood of the porch and the door was shoved inward. A burly bearded man in a camo parka strode straight to the bed, carrying a teal daypack in one hand. He wore insulated L.L.Bean boots and at his heel was a bronze Weimaraner. Pete blinked. The two looked like they were about to prospect a hillside for grouse. “Dr. Arnold,” the man said. “Sit. Stay. Andy. Internist, hospital admissions, but we’ve done our share of ER. Huh.” Behind him was a scarecrow with a drawn pitted face and a scraggly mustache and one arm: must be the driver, Stumpy. And following them both was Nastasia, crossing her arms over her robe and beginning to shiver. Behind her was a heavyset woman in a native wool poncho whom Pete thought he had seen shooting pool in the pizza bar. Pete had no idea what the woman was doing here, but crises in tiny towns seemed to gather a crowd. Nastasia huffed and stepped behind the woman and slammed the door.

  Sometimes all a breathing attack takes is reassurance. What Pete thought. And a shot of prednisone. And two huffs of the red inhaler, then the white one. And a big burly doctor who looked a little like Ernest Hemingway to place his hand on an arm and keep repeating, “Just a reaction to the altitude, maybe the mist tonight and woodsmoke combined. You’ll be fine, fine. There now.” And a Latvian in a bathrobe—Oh God! Pete noticed now that she had ba
re feet! She had not even stopped to put on shoes—a barefoot Latvian to intone, “So beautiful, you really look like an angel,” and a one-armed hero who reeks of cigarettes and pot to keep saying happily, “Fuckin’ A, look, look at that, breathing fine now, fuckin’ A.”

  The doctor took Pete out onto the little rotting porch and told him that the next morning he should get her down to lower altitude and right to an ER if she continued to struggle. He refused to take any kind of payment. Celine slept soundly with her oxygen and woke unsteady and ragged, but strangely refreshed. The morning was windy and clear and had swept away the clouds and the smoke, and she insisted that they stay. They did not need to hurry down to lower altitude. She felt she’d be fine. Pete didn’t argue; he yielded to a predisposition to let people exercise their right to self-determination, even with those he loved most, and even when he didn’t quite understand their decisions. Especially then.

  They ate breakfast early at Poli’s and Celine gave Nastasia her favorite silk scarf, the one with little gold triangles that represent pine trees or mountains on a cobalt field, and the girl was so touched she had to hurry into the kitchen. They used the restaurant phone to call the sheriff in Livingston. Then they spent the morning relaxing in their room and looking over their notes and speculating and napping. There had been a lot of travel and emotion in the last few days and they needed the break.

  In the afternoon they roused themselves and called the main number for the park administration and asked for Timothy Farney in Law Enforcement. “By the way,” Celine said to the receptionist, “what is his official title now?”

  “Oh, he’s Chief Ranger,” the operator said cheerfully. Good, still around. A career man.

  “Of what, exactly?” asked Celine.

  “Of what?” the operator repeated, puzzled.

  “I mean what district or whatever?”