The False Friend (2 page)

Celia and Djuna had been fighting, their anger so sharp that after twenty-one years the memory still made Celia flinch. The force of their argument had propelled them past the others and around a curve, nothing but road and trees stretching in either direction. The gravel shoulder along the road’s edge was just wide enough to walk two abreast, but Djuna pulled ahead of Celia and veered into the woods. They had fought so often, over the littlest things, that the cause of that day’s fury had merged in Celia’s mind with the sound of fracturing underbrush as she threaded her way between trees in an attempt to
follow. So much could have happened differently. If Celia had taken the same path as Djuna, she might have seen what was coming. Had Djuna entered the woods at a different point, she might have avoided the danger. Had they not been fighting to begin with, they might not have left the road. In any of those instances, the afternoon would have been indistinguishable from countless others.

Instead, Celia watched Djuna fall. One minute she was there, and the next the earth had swallowed her up.

Celia may have called into the silence. She may have stood there, waiting for Djuna to rise from the undergrowth. Maybe she meant to teach Djuna a lesson. Perhaps she thought her most secret, shameful wish had just come true. The unadult mind is immune to logic or foresight, unschooled by consequence, and endowed with a biblical sense of justice. The only thing more appalling to Celia than these excuses was the child’s act they contrived to explain. When Djuna failed to reappear or make a sound of any kind, Celia had not tried to help. Instead she’d retraced her own path through the trees to return to the road, then back around the curve to where Josie, Becky, and Leanne were still waiting. She told them that Djuna had gotten into a stranger’s car, and they had nodded like a trio of marionettes, the first in a town of fifty thousand to believe her.

Celia had envisioned a spectrum of doomsday scenarios to accompany her confession. None were remotely fulfilled. Huck certainly didn’t leave her. Instead, at the moment she had been dreading, he became very still. “Oh dear,” he had said like a nineteenth-century schoolgirl, surprise making him demure.
It had taken only a few seconds for the Huck she knew to return—sensible, fast-thinking Huck who specialized in contingencies—but the immediate effect of Celia’s words was to render him rudderless, a sight almost as frightening as anything she had forecast. Not until she was lying insomniac in Huck’s arms did she realize why she had gotten him so wrong. The eleven-year-old girl she had described to Huck was a stranger. Only Celia recognized that girl and what she had done. Neither the sound of Bella nor the cradle of Huck’s exuded warmth had trumped the loneliness of that knowledge, a secret she did not wish to keep.

On Celia’s annual Christmas trips home with Huck, the packed holiday plane felt like a multifamily station wagon, the stewardess dispensing extra packets of snack mix to stave off are-we-there-yets. Today’s flight was half empty, and rather than bartering with Huck for the window, Celia had a row of seats to herself. The first time she had ever flown back east had been with him, her solo drive condensed to a trip the length of a Hollywood movie. She’d been reluctant to give up seven hundred miles of highway, her progress measured in tanks of gas and cans of Dr Pepper, her thoughts ordered incrementally with each dashed yellow line. That yearly road trip had been a natural extension of her local driving expeditions, weekend explorations of her adopted state that had become as much a habit as the Sunday paper. Celia savored charting a course on a map to steer by, a simple objective stated and then achieved. Framed by a windshield, details of landscape caught her eye that she otherwise might have missed: a hand-painted billboard, a
dry-stacked stone wall. Sometimes the sound of her tires against different surfaces—smooth bitumen, weathered asphalt, the metal grid of a bridge—had even suggested new poems.

She and Huck had met when he introduced himself after a senior reading. He’d praised a sonnet whose beginning had come to her while she’d been driving over a covered bridge in Long Grove that seemed to say,
No songs, no songs, no songs
. The reading had been held at the Reynolds student center, where Celia’s ubiquity often got her mistaken for an employee. That semester, she’d been treasurer for two student advocacy groups, co-editor of the campus literary journal, and Urgent Action Coordinator for the campus chapter of Amnesty International. Huck had been a stranger to Reynolds. A hazel-eyed, strong-jawed creature without her cluttered schedule, he’d sparked in Celia the same detached, appreciative desire she felt for the grace of an animal observed in the wild—until she discovered that he had not learned to drive until his sophomore year of college. This exotic, absurd fact made him seem attainable. Instead of acquiescing to Huck’s interest, she began courting him with her car, wooing him with careful itineraries: old routes west of the lake that passed woods and prairies; a pilgrimage to Calumet’s smiley-faced water towers. Her solitary car trips came to an end, the obscure poetic utterances of the road replaced by boundless miles of two-way conversation, though even after she had won Huck he remained impervious to the more subtle charms of a twelve-hour drive. To quell her nervousness on their first flight—their relationship had never traveled so far or so fast—she had packed their traditional roadside
picnic, complete with red-checkered napkins for their seat-back trays, their plates of cold chicken sparking longing and envy across the aisle.

This morning Celia had given no thought to even basic airplane comforts—a water bottle, a mindless magazine—but when she reached into her carry-on, there was the familiar red-checked napkin, wrapped around a bagel. Huck would be at school by now, charming a room of teenagers into caring about the Louisiana Purchase or the Great Migration, but in that moment she felt him inviting her to enjoy the pleasure of a picnic at thirty thousand feet, and the sight of cirrus clouds outside her oval window.

When the plane’s descent through the clouds revealed a green patchwork instead of quilted whites and grays, Celia wondered if she had somehow boarded the wrong flight. After years of December arrivals, she had forgotten the place contained more than one season.

The breeze off the tarmac as she crossed to the gate brought thoughts of Bella and Sylvie alone in the apartment, enslaved to the approaching jingle of the dog walker’s keys. The girls had been with Celia so long that their preferred walking times in late morning and mid-afternoon turned Celia restless wherever she happened to be. She had visited the dog shelter directly after college graduation, thinking about volunteering. Instead, she’d adopted two scrawny shepherd/Lab mix puppies that had been found tied to a
MERGE
sign on a traffic median, and had gratefully devoted herself to their rehabilitation. Huck had been in Baltimore, teaching at a summer program
for precocious teens, and though they had met only recently, his months away had felt too long. Whether Celia adopted Bella and Sylvie to fill the unexpected void or to test Huck’s resolve on his return was rendered moot by the speed of his infatuation. Huck joked that Bella and Sylvie wouldn’t forgive them if they ever broke up, but it was true. From the start, the four of them had belonged to one another. In restaurants when Celia wasn’t too hungry, she ordered whatever she thought would be most eagerly gobbled from its take-home container. She couldn’t fly into Syracuse International without imagining Bella gleefully barking at arriving and departing planes, poor Sylvie cowering on one of the grassy stripes between runways, awaiting rescue.

Each Christmas she and Huck rented a car at the terminal, but over the phone her mother had insisted on meeting her at the airport. The phone call had been a disaster. Celia had fooled herself into thinking it would be possible to announce her arrival the next day without having to explain it, a delusion that had not lasted much beyond hello. “Has she been found?” Noreen asked after Celia mentioned Djuna, the first time anyone in her family had spoken that name in over twenty years. Celia was stymied by anything but the most simple answer to her mother’s question. She needed to wait until she could gauge the effect of her words on her mother’s face.

They had not needed to discuss where to meet. It was not a big airport, the second of its two terminals an artifact from a more prosperous age. At the base of the Terminal A escalator, among those disguising their waiting by talking on cell phones,
or feigning absorption in magazines, Noreen Durst stood stone-still, her eyes fixed on her daughter. The sight of her mother waiting to claim her on a weekday afternoon made Celia feel like a child sent home from school.

“Sweetheart,” Noreen said. She looked up to meet her daughter’s face. Celia bent down as she had ever since fourteen had turned her tall, but today felt different. Noreen had replaced her regular shampoo with something more cosmetic that garbled her scent. Celia felt like she was kissing a stranger.

“Where’s Dad?” Celia asked. He would be parked in the loading zone beyond the sliding glass doors, but the pretense of a search allowed Celia to trade her mother’s perfumed hair for the neutral air of baggage claim.

“In the car, but I didn’t want to miss a minute. Oh, Celie,” Noreen said, “it’s so nice that you’ve come.” Her hand reached toward her daughter’s face and then stopped. “You look fine,” she confirmed. “A little pale, maybe.”

Celia wanted to apologize for everything: for the oblique phone call, for their presence in the airport, for the schedule her arrival had interrupted. “I didn’t sleep well,” she said. She gazed across the top of her mother’s head and saw her mother’s scalp, luminous beneath a carefully constructed helmet of thinning hair the same dark brown as her own.

“Your eyes are a bit raccoony,” Noreen said. “But we’ll fix that. I made up two beds because I wasn’t sure. There’s the one in the guest room … but I, for one, can’t stand sleeping in a big bed when I’m all alone in it, so I also set up the one in your old bedroom, just in case.”

They had reached the luggage carousel. Dark-hued roller bags circled at glacial speed. People leaned forward to look, then back, a synchronized ripple of motion.

“The guest room will be fine,” Celia said. A tent in the backyard would have been fine, a space on the floor of the garage. Her mother’s presence amplified the shame that had found Celia in Chicago, seemed to extend it beyond the length of her body. A pine-green bag appeared at the top of the luggage portal. Celia leaned forward.

“I thought so.” Noreen sighed. “You’ve always been so much more independent. I don’t think your father and I have ever slept apart for more than—”

Celia patted her mother’s arm. “Mom, it’s okay,” she said. “Huck wanted to be here. I was the one who told him to wait. It’s almost the end of the quarter. Coming today would have meant sticking his kids with a sub, and his sixth-period class has the AP test in less than a month.”

“Of course,” Noreen affirmed, and began crying. “I’m sorry,” she said. She dabbed at her face with a crumpled tissue. “I’m a little … I didn’t sleep too well last night either. I was just so excited.” Her smile was lopsided, her lips unequal to the task of its formation.

Warren was parked at the curb directly beyond the exit doors in a new gray sedan, a Bud Powell tune streaming from its open windows. At the sight of his daughter, he leaned across to open the front passenger-side door.

“Welcome home, kiddo!” he called. His voice was barely audible above the torrent of piano, but his expression was as unambiguous as a wagging tail. Celia knew no other
human creature who greeted all he loved with such uncomplicated joy.

“Warren, turn that down!” Noreen scolded, smiling all the while. She turned to Celia. “He got us here forty minutes early, just in case.”

Celia slid back the front passenger seat to accommodate her legs, then realized that for the first time since she was fourteen, driver and passenger seats were unaligned. Her father had begun to shrink. Celia quickly slid her seat a notch closer in.

“What do you think?” Warren asked, gesturing at the car’s interior. He was wearing the same leather driving gloves as always and the most recent driving cap Celia had given him for Father’s Day.

“It’s what you always get!” Celia moaned. “When you said silver, I was picturing something sporty.”

“It is sporty!” he said, pointing. “Look, a moonroof!”

“It’s a Camry, Dad.”

“Of course it’s a Camry.” Warren shrugged. “The Camry is an excellent car.”

“Then why trade it in every other year?”

Warren winked. “Because, my sweet, I am trying to impress a certain lady.”

From the backseat, Celia’s mother giggled.

Hand clasping the steering wheel like a favorite dance partner, Warren was assured without being aggressive, could converse without missing a turn. He once described his weekly six-hour commute to court Noreen—Celia’s mother was in college while he was posted to Fort Letterkenny—as one of the
happiest times in his life. Celia understood precisely how that could be true.

“So how are things in Chi-town?” he asked, as if they shared the front seat every Tuesday afternoon. “You finished with the hospitals?”

“Back in January,” Celia said. “Now it’s beverage vending.”

Celia hadn’t known what a performance auditor was until halfway through graduate school, when her advisor had suggested that her reluctance to commit to any one aspect of public policy might make her an ideal candidate. She’d joined the Auditor General’s performance division the month she graduated, and was assigned to a team examining the Illinois Racing Board. For the next nine months Celia had surrendered herself to horseracing. She visited racetracks and talked with on-site veterinarians, becoming versed in the medical lexicon of butes and milk shakes and Lasix. She was permitted into detention barns as winning horses were bathed and cooled out. She never got used to the drug testing, flinching at the blood draws even when the doctor was quick with the needle and the horses unperturbed. By the following spring the audit was complete—the research done, the field interviews conducted, the report written and filed—and she was studying foster family placements through child protective services.