The Suburban Strange (36 page)

Celia was jolted back to the present by the voice of the principal, who had moved on to the news of the new wing that would be built over the summer. He told the assembly about the money the graduating seniors had raised for a mosaic in the hallway of the new wing, commemorating their class. “I am happy to share with you now this artist’s rendering of their mosaic!” Principal Spennicut exclaimed, and an image of the drawing Celia had produced under Liz and Brenden’s direction was projected onto the screen at the back of the stage. The audience applauded, and Regine and Marco poked her, telling her how good it looked. She smiled for them, but when she looked up at her lines projected on the screen, she barely recognized her own work.

IT'S NICE MY BODY WILL
stand and sit, and smile sometimes and talk a little, without me having to tell it what to do, Celia thought as she wandered around the Fourads' home during the graduation party. Because I don't know what to tell it now. At a few points she thought her self actually might have left her body and she could look down on the room from somewhere up by the ceiling. She wondered if her father had felt this way, when he knew he was going to die. She wondered if there was some place where she might see him. She knew she should be taking this opportunity to say meaningful things to her friends, who were all so happy around her. If she was going to die, shouldn't she make the most of the time she had left? But she had no idea what she possibly could say.

“You’re so quiet,” Regine said when she found her in the study, rereading the Lewis Carroll quote on the wall.

“I know. I’m sorry,” Celia said. She looked over at Regine and realized too late her eyes were filling with tears.

“Celia!” Regine put her arms around her and stroked her hair. “Last night you were upset, too! You’ve been a shadow of yourself for a week! Is it Mariette? Is it the end of the year? It’s like the life has drained out of you.”

“I don’t know.” Celia looked at the ceiling, searching her mind for something she could say. “I just feel like it’s all over.”

“I know,” Regine said, and Celia was soothed by her voice. “I guess, in a way, it is. It won’t ever be the same. It makes me sad, too, when I think about it. But we have to carry on. Next year we’ll have to figure out how things are going to be. We have to stick together. And we will. We’ll be okay.”

“What if we’re not?” Celia asked. “What if we don’t make it?”

“Why wouldn’t we? And especially you? You’re the reason we’re all still together, don’t you realize? If it weren’t for you, we wouldn’t be here now. You know it’s true.”

“You guys would have been fine,” Celia said weakly.

“Maybe, maybe not. But the way it happened, the way it really happened . . .” Regine was silent for a moment. “I wish I were as strong as you are.”

“But I’m not! I’m not strong at all!” Celia caught a sob in her throat.

“Yes you are! You may not feel like it, but I know better. I might have believed you when we met. But now there’s no doubt in my mind.” Regine pulled back and looked at her. “You look exhausted. Let’s go. It’s getting late, and it’s not like we won’t be together again soon. We have the whole summer to go to Diaboliques before anyone goes anywhere.”

Regine steered her gently through the party. Celia hugged each of her friends, ignoring their looks of concern, not saying anything when Regine told them Celia was tired and emotional about the end of the year. Finally they made it outside, where dusk was creeping up behind the trees. “It’s kind of chilly.” Regine shivered. “It feels like it could storm, but there isn’t a cloud in the sky.”

Celia settled into the front seat of Regine’s car, and impulsively she turned and pulled the gray cashmere blanket from the back seat, spreading it over her lap. Regine watched her and said, “I don’t think anyone has ever used that before.”

“I’ve always wanted to,” Celia said. She looked out the window, where the sky ranged from orange to purple to indigo above her.

On the post above their car, the streetlamp blinked on and then flickered, struggling to wake up. It reminded Celia of the fluorescent lights that had sputtered and pinged in the chemistry lab and the chandelier in the lobby at the country club, where Mr. Sumeletso had made his threatening intentions clear. She closed her eyes for a moment and listened for the music from the car stereo. It was a song she liked, but something about it was stale now. She’d heard it too many times. Celia opened her eyes again and stared out the window.

Regine drove at her usual stately pace down the street. As they passed under the next light post, the oval lamp flickered on like an alien eye lurching to life above them. Farther down the street the lights remained dark. Celia waited for the next post, and as they passed under it, the lamp sputtered and lit up. “He’s coming,” she said under her breath.

“What did you say?” Regine asked her.

“Drive faster,” Celia said.

“What?”

“Drive faster!” Celia pleaded with her. Outside the window the next streetlight blinked on ominously over them. “I need to get home.”

“Okay.” Regine sped up to the actual speed limit, and still each streetlight came awake just as they passed underneath it. Panic filled Celia like a cat in a burlap sack, thrashing around inside her as it heard the sound of the rushing river coming closer. She fought to keep her fear from escaping up her throat and past her lips.

The daylight was almost gone, and when Regine turned a corner the full moon swung into view out the front window, impossibly large, pale, and alone. On this street, too, the lights stayed dark until their car approached; then they blinked and flickered to life. Celia thought she could hear them pinging overhead, as if a large white moth were struggling to get out of each glass. Why didn’t Regine notice? Regine had lapsed back into her customary slow speed, and Celia was in agony counting down the blocks, lifting her eyes to each new Unkind sentry quivering like a dying firefly above the car.

Celia opened the door before the car had completely stopped at her front walk. “Are you going to be okay?” Regine asked.

“I don’t know.” Celia got out and pushed the door closed before Regine could say anything else. Once again there were just two girls as she and Regine stared at each other through the glass. Inside the car the first girl looked scared and hurt. She gave Celia a searching look. Reflected in the window, Celia could see only the silhouette of the second girl. The chilly wind pushed by her, and the trees creaked overhead. Regine got out.

She implored Celia across the black roof of the car. “Why won’t you tell me what’s happening?” The wind pushed her bob into the corner of her mouth.

“When we met in that class last summer, why did you choose me? Why did you bring me into the Rosary?” Celia asked.

“Because . . . because I could tell. You were right for us, even if you didn’t know it.”

“
How
could you tell?”

“Well, I wasn’t wrong, was I?” A tear escaped Regine’s eye. “Are we still right for you?”

“Of course you are! I’m sorry. I’m just . . . There’s something I have to do alone. I’m sorry.”

Finally Regine drove away. Up and down the street in both directions the streetlamps shone, but they took turns switching on and off, threatening her like giants rattling their sabers. The cold breeze lifted her hair above her head. Celia looked in every direction, but she saw no one. Overhead, the full moon was large and orange, and the earth’s shadow had begun to slice into one side.

And then everything was calm. The wind died. The streetlamps shone evenly. There was no sound, no movement. On the eclipsed edge of the moon a bloody red tinge was seeping across the orange face, like the first leak of death after a guillotine has fallen. Celia turned and ran into her house.

Her mother was waiting for her. “How was graduation?”

“It was fine. It was long.” Celia tried to escape to her room, but her mother stopped her.

“Wait—how about the party?”

“It was nice.” She hated shutting her mother out, but if she tried to explain anything at all, it would only get worse.

“Are you in a hurry?”

“Kind of. I need to go upstairs.” Celia had no idea what she was going to do, but she needed to escape her mother’s small talk.

“Well, are you hungry? There are some leftovers in the fridge.”

“I’m not hungry.”

“Can we talk later? I haven’t caught up with you in a while.”

“Can we talk tomorrow?”

“Okay. Is everything all right?”

“I think so. I’m not sure. I think so.” Celia tried not to run up the stairs, but halfway up she lost the battle and sprinted the rest of the way.

In her room she sank onto her bed, but she didn’t feel any safer than when she had been standing on her front walk. Four walls, a locked front door, her mother—none of that was going to make any difference. Celia looked around helplessly.

Nothing happened.
What is he waiting for?
she thought in anguish.
I know he’s close by. He must be waiting to get stronger.

She thought about dying. Celia knew all the versions of the story: a bright light, her life flashing before her eyes, the stranger who would appear to escort her to the other side. Now Celia guessed it would be different from all those things. There was going to be terror, and then there was going to be nothing—infinite nothing, deeper and darker and colder than the deepest space in the universe, so absolute it would instantly drive her insane, except by then it wouldn’t matter. Celia wondered what she was supposed to do with these final minutes. She reached for her sketchbook.

She paged through the pictures she had drawn of her father and her mother. She found the sketches she had made of Liz and Ivo, of Marco and Brenden, of Regine, and of Mariette. She looked for a picture of Tomasi, but she never had drawn him, and her heart grew heavy with regret.
I don’t really love him,
she tried to convince herself.
It will be so much easier to lose him if I don’t love him.
If she believed that, she could stick to a depressing but neat equation that balanced the two people she loved in the world: she was going to leave her mother behind and be with her father again.

But Celia’s heart rose up in protest. A beautiful possibility pounded in her chest, and she knew its name as surely as she knew her own.
Tomasi
. She cursed the province of love. No roads ran straight, but it made no difference because she was being driven away, and she couldn’t bear to leave. No bells rang on time, but what did time matter, anyway, now that it was running out? It only made Celia wish she never had found that province at all, yet she knew she didn’t mean it. All she wanted was to see Tomasi again, even if it was for the last time. There were pages and pages of their conversations in the sketchbook, but his face . . . How was it she never had drawn him?

“I am such a fool,” Celia said, reaching for a pencil. She glanced out her window, where the earth’s shadow continued to creep across the bloodied moon. On a blank page she roughed in Tomasi’s eyes, his nose, lips, and the square set of his jaw. She drew confidently, even though her memory depended on so many shy glances she had stolen, so many moments she literally had dared herself to look at him. She teased out the scruff of hair on his head and set his ears against each side. All the while the luster of blood orange moonlight gradually drained away from the front lawn. It would be another hour before the eclipse was total. She shaded in the planes of Tomasi’s neck, the way it widened to meet his shoulders. It was comforting somehow, even if she never would see him again. Celia’s eyes welled up—what cruel world would put all these beautiful people in front of her, only to snatch them away again?

By the light of her bedside lamp, Celia thought she saw her drawing stir on the page. She blinked, rubbed the tears out of her eyes, and looked carefully again. In her drawing, the lines of Tomasi’s lips moved. Next to his face, letters appeared, much more ornate than his own handwriting, and forming words much faster than when he had written to her before.

Looks great. Can I come over?

Celia stared.
Now?
she jotted next to his message.
Aren’t you at your grandfather’s?

Immediately a shadow filled the page and then stretched out across her bedspread. A silhouette rose up the wall, and Celia recognized Tomasi’s broad shoulders, forearms beneath sleeves rolled to his elbow, legs slightly apart. The shadow darkened to black and then turned around, and Tomasi was there, standing in front of her, looking as surprised as she was.

“I’ve never done that before,” he said, looking around curiously.

“How did you do that?” There in her bedroom it felt as though she had allowed an exotic, possibly mythical creature in from the wild, and now she was about to discover how tame it was after all.

“I think that’s the power you just gave me.” He gave her a half smile, but it faded when he saw her expression. “I’m so sorry about that phone call, when you were at prom. My parents completely freaked out. They gave me five minutes to pack, and they didn’t even tell me where we were going, but I knew. Grandpa’s asleep at the farm right now,” he said bitterly.

“Why didn’t you write back before?”

“He locked up all the books! I looked everywhere, but he knows everything that happened, and he decided not to take any chances, I guess. I just convinced him to give me a freaking Bible tonight! We have to get help—the eclipse has started, and your teacher is going to be after you.”

“I think it’s too late,” she said.

“Why didn’t you tell me before?” His voice was harsh, but she knew it was because he was confused.

“I didn’t want you to do anything that would get you hurt!” Celia cried. “Mariette
died!
If something happened to you and it was my fault—” She began to sob, and felt Tomasi sit next to her and take her in his arms.

“It’s okay. But we have to do something now. At least we know who we’re up against.”

“What can we do?”

“I don’t know.” Tomasi concentrated, but he stayed silent, and she could tell that ideas were not coming to him.