The False Friend (13 page)

   Driving home, Celia owed her safe return to a straight road and few cars, to sixty miles of highway that accommodated a full brain. Becky’s words had knocked something loose, something
oddly shaped with a jagged edge. Celia wasn’t sure how the daily ratings had started, only that Leanne had presented herself for inspection each morning. Sometimes she tied her stringy hair into a limp ponytail; sometimes she switched her worn cords for a faded dress. Once, Leanne had proudly presented nails a shade of red filched from her mother’s drawer, the polish overreaching each ragged nail onto the cuticle and fingertip. Negative points, they had told her, too messy a job. Then there was the time Celia and Djuna had surprised Leanne in the girls’ bathroom. With a little boost, Djuna had been able to peer over the stall door at Leanne with her panties around her ankles. Leanne had shrieked as if she’d been smacked. “Just checking,” Djuna had said before she and Celia had run, giggling, into the hall.

When Celia returned to Schubert Street the phone was ringing. She dashed to pick it up, certain it was Mrs. Linke, terrified that if she didn’t answer she wouldn’t get another chance.

“Hello?” she panted.

“Cee?”

Jeremy had a late-night radio DJ’s voice that, at its onset, had sounded like a practical joke, puberty’s first shuffle-step having created a puny, smooth-cheeked boy who sounded like Isaac Hayes. The initial shock of that odd timing had never worn off. Even now Jeremy spoke quietly, still apologizing for a discrepancy long since corrected.

“What’s wrong?” Celia asked, her pulse racing. The last time her brother had called was to announce that Daniel had
been born, and before that Celia couldn’t remember. Holiday visits had always been enough, their parents filling in the gaps between.

“Nothing,” he said, and Celia realized that it was true. This was not her phone, not her house, not a place where her idea of normal applied. “But are you okay?” he asked. “You sound a little strange.”

“Sorry. I forgot where I was. When the phone rang, I just—”

“No worries,” he said. “I was just calling about Saturday. Mom wasn’t sure whether you wanted to do brunch or dinner, and I was going to leave a message to say that either would be fine.” He paused. “You know, I was kind of surprised when Mom said you were here.”

“It was pretty spontaneous,” Celia said.

“Is something up? You’re not sick or anything, are you? Or are you and Huck—”

“We’re fine. I’m fine.” Celia walked to the kitchen’s edge and then back again, a reflex from a corded age. “I’m trying to track down some old friends. I’ll tell you about it when you come on Saturday.”

“Who?”

“Huh?”

“Who are you trying to track down?”

When awareness of her cordless state erased the desire to pace, Celia sank into a kitchen chair. “You probably wouldn’t remember her, but I actually just came back from seeing Becky Miller.”

“Becky Miller,” Jeremy echoed. “Brainy girl with bangs and bony arms. Crazy-sounding laugh. You and her were always going off on expeditions.”

“Jem, how do you know that? You were, like, seven at the time.” Her father’s chair offered a wider backyard view than her own place at the table. Celia could see all the way to the side-yard privacy fence, its cedar planking a bulwark against a rising tide.

“Pam calls it my elephant brain,” Jeremy said. “But Becky’s easy. She saved my life.”

“What?”

“Well, not really, but it felt like it at the time. The three of us were coming back from the creek.”

“I forgot you would play with us,” Celia said. “She really liked having you around.”

“I think I was the closest she ever got to being an older sister,” Jeremy said. “Anyway, we were crossing a street on the way home, when I stepped into a place in the road where the asphalt had fallen in. It wasn’t big enough for a traffic cone. I don’t think it was much bigger than a kid’s foot, but I managed to step in it anyway and went down past my knee. A car was coming, but I was so surprised that I didn’t move. You and Becky were already across. You were yelling at me to get out of the street, but Becky ran back out and held up her hand to stop the car. You felt bad because you were supposed to have been holding my hand. Even if the car hadn’t seen me it would have missed me. It was a pretty wide road, but when Becky did that she became a superhero, or at least someone I knew I
was going to marry someday. It’s funny, hearing her name again.”

Celia tried to call up Jeremy’s story but could only summon its constituent parts, a handful of jigsaw pieces that seemed drawn from different puzzles.

“Jem,” she asked into the phone, “was I ever cruel?”

“It wasn’t like you left me in the road on purpose. It was an accident.”

“I don’t mean then,” Celia said. “I mean in general. Was I?”

Jeremy laughed. “What would make you think that?”

“But if I was, you would tell me, right?” she asked.

“Sure, but you weren’t. You were a pretty good big sister. If you want mean, you should talk to Pam; her brothers make the rest of us look like saints.”

Celia tried to assess her reflection in the kitchen window. She felt unequal to memory’s hidden mechanism of cogs and wheels.

“Seeing Becky today made me think about someone else I used to know, a girl named Leanne.”

She waited.

“Her I don’t remember,” Jeremy said. “You must not have brought her home. Look, how are the dogs? Are the dogs all right?”

Her brother had only ever seen pictures. “The dogs are good.”

“Good,” said Jeremy. “I’ll see you Saturday, then. Brunch, dinner, whatever. And if you don’t mind me asking, where is Becky?”

“Becky?”

“You said you saw her?”

“She lives in Scranton, if you can believe it.”

“Wow, Scranton.” He paused. “Is she happy?”

Celia hadn’t considered it. “Yeah,” she told him. “I think she is.”

“Happy is good,” Jeremy said.

R
eturning to her brother’s room after hanging up with him felt like trespassing, but Celia had nowhere else to go. To postpone coming back to the computer, she briefly pivoted right instead of left at the end of the hall. Stripped of meaningful possessions, her old bedroom had succumbed to that universal law regarding nature and vacuums: the closet had been overrun by her parents’ off-season clothes, and gifts from two careers of office holiday parties populated the bottom drawers of her old bureau. The room’s edges had been colonized by assorted boxes—financial documents, wrapping paper, Christmas decorations—all easier to fetch from an unoccupied bedroom than from beneath the attic’s low-hung ceiling. The few
remaining childhood items—the high bed with its dotted quilt and matching bed skirt, a faded poster of Elton John, the shelf that held a dusty souvenir glass from junior prom, an abandoned
Child’s Garden of Verses
, and several nondescript stuffed animals that had failed to inspire names—were too scant to project a younger self among them. Celia felt no more attached to this room than a hermit crab to its discarded shell.

The same feeling had found her earlier that week in Chicago, though thinking back to Monday felt like peering into a funhouse mirror that stretched three days into something impossibly distant. The street corner had grown blurry in her mind, and all that remained of the office were Gary’s and Helene’s expressions, but Celia remembered the reverse commute, the girls’ giddy barks at the sound of her arrival, the click of their nails on the far side of the apartment door, and finally the reprieve of Bella and Sylvie licking her face, their bodies solid and warm and forgiving everything. Celia had been sitting on the couch when the apartment became a museum. She had pictured a placard beside Huck’s guitar in its corner, curatorial labels beside the photos she’d had matted and framed to celebrate their first year in the apartment, even an instructive diagram of herself sitting on her customary couch cushion on the left-hand side, Huck to her right. In the time between that morning’s departure and her return, these had become historical truths, artifacts from her life as it had once been.

Huck liked to point out that history was a retrospective pastime. Because it was impossible to intuit the future significance of any given moment, it was always a good idea to be your best possible self, increasing the odds of not wanting to
disown whatever inadvertent history you created. What was Huck’s rallying cry in the classroom became his mantra when he got particularly stoned at parties and propounded upon the potential future significance of this
very
moment, this one
right now
. The idea charmed or irritated Celia, depending on her mood, but sitting with the dogs on the couch that Monday she had sensed its truth. Earlier that morning—as she and Huck had gotten dressed, toasted their bagels, and headed out into their respective days—they had unwittingly experienced the end of an era, the last link of a deteriorating chain.

Inside the evacuation zone of Jeremy’s old room, Celia sat at her brother’s desk. Its surface had once hosted an evolving array of fantasy figurines, game cartridges, baseball books, and CDs. Now there was just her father’s computer, a Conklin Junior College mug with pens and a pair of scissors, and a Mensa calendar abandoned at a puzzle for a Wednesday three Aprils past. On a faded Post-it note attached to the monitor, a list in Warren’s hand proposed
Furnace?, Chimney?, Tax Receipts, Vacuum Cleaner Bags
, with only the last two items crossed through. Beyond the desk, Jeremy’s bare mattress had been draped with a green blanket that still bore creases from its original packaging. Its crispness, like that of the new carpet, was at odds with the empty shelves, the patched walls, the flaccid curtains sewn from bedsheets so long ago that the sun had bleached their blue stripes to gray.

Leanne had already written back. The e-mail’s electronic postmark awakened in Celia a dormant species of hive knowledge: Leanne had pressed Send while Celia and Becky had been conducting their mutual interview. Once upon a time,
Celia had known when Djuna ate her dinner, when Becky took her bath. She had prized this information with the inarticulate ardor that presages sex. Back when passion was still in utero—a beating heart without legs—its rudiments had been present but primal, means that had not yet acquired perceivable ends. Friendship had been fathomed by phone—
It’s four thirty, are you watching
The Flintstones
?
—the question both test and assertion. Djuna was always right, even when she wasn’t—but when Becky or Josie called, Celia would sometimes deny them.
No, I’m doing homework
, she would say, muting the television to make it seem true. As Celia stared at Leanne’s name on the computer screen, she wondered what Josie had been doing at 1:43
P.M
., the diminished hydra of their friendship briefly revived.

Once Celia reached the end of the message, she scrolled back to the top and read it again, to amend the nervous rush of her first read. Late afternoon light through the window cast her profile on the near wall. Noreen and Warren’s bedroom displayed a framed silhouette of a younger Celia cut from black
construction paper. Its nose was an indistinct nub, but its lips and chin were miniature versions of Celia’s adult shadow.

She thought to consult her watch only after she had dialed.

“Can I call you back?” Huck asked. “I’m with a student.”

Celia tried to say something that passed for acquiescence.

“You sound terrible,” he said. “Hang on.”

His voice disappeared, then returned.