The Truth About Celia Read online

  “Beth Doyle, that’s right.” The man tugs on the leash and meets her at the curb, his dog pattering along at his feet.

  “Why is your dog shaped like that?” Celia asks.

  “That’s just the way they come. They’re called dachshunds.” He stoops down to his ankles, massaging the dog’s skull so that his lips are pulled back over his teeth. “His name’s Teeter. You can stroke him if you want to.”

  When she bends over to pet him, the dog gives a bark and licks the back of her hand. His tongue feels smooth and flat, like wet paper, and his breath smells like glue. “Yuck,” she says.

  The man laughs—a thin, wheezing sound. “Lick him back. That’s what I always do.”

  She can feel her mouth stretching into a grin. “No, you don’t.”

  “No,” he admits, and he winks at her. “I don’t.” A plastic bag, tangled in the hatching of a tree branch, balloons momentarily in the wind. She sees the hazy shape of her dad moving past the arched window of her bedroom, but he does not notice her. “What did you say your name was?” the man asks.

  “Celia.”

  “Celia. Did you know that your tongue is purple, Celia?”

  She extends her tongue, crossing her eyes to look at it, but sees only a lens-shaped slice of her own nose. “It must be from the popsicles. Purple is my favorite flavor.”

  “I’m feeling purple right about now myself,” he says, and though she does not understand the joke, she laughs along with him. Her own favorite joke, ever since she was little, is a knock-knock joke: Knock knock.—Who’s there?—Banana.— Banana who?—Knock knock.—Who’s there?— Banana.—Banana who?— Knock knock.— Who’s there?—Orange.—Orange who?—Orange you glad I didn’t say banana. She likes the way the joke makes a perfect ring, wrapping around on itself again and again, like a pin-wheel or a revolving door, but not everyone thinks it is funny. Sometimes she can lead her dad through four or five different bananas before he finally gives up on her.

  “That’s a wonderful joke,” says the man with the sausage-shaped dog. “Did you come up with it all by yourself?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Well, it’s a good joke anyway. Cute as can be.”

  Celia tries to think of a reply. “My mom says I’m cute as a bunny.”

  “Cute as a bunny, huh?” He taps her nose, letting his finger rest there for a second. “Wiggle, wiggle,” he says, and his hand brushes over her face—first the cheek, then the lip. “Is your mom inside right now?”

  “She’s at rehearsal. My dad’s inside, though. Do you want me to go get him?”

  “No, no.” A van drives down the road, jouncing noisily over a pothole, and pebbles of asphalt go spinning up into the carriage. The man, who has been crouching all this time, so that his enormous coat was draped over the curb, hiding his feet, and his eyes were level with her own, stands and softly takes her hand. “It’s been a pleasure meeting you, Celia,” he says. “I’ll look for you—okay?”

  The way he speaks makes it sound like a true question, and so she answers it. “Okay.”

  “Good.” He squeezes her fingers, and she watches him walk up the street. A ripple of cloud passes over the sun, and a lawnmower buzzes from somewhere nearby. She tries to turn a cart-wheel on the grass, but the ground is too wet, and she accidentally slides forward onto her elbows. She brushes herself off and then rinses her hands clean in the puddle by the chimney.

  She does not see the man again for another half-hour, when she feels herself plunging off the fragment of stone wall between the two maple trees. We never find her.

  Or maybe there was no man in a white-brown coat, no kidnapper who stole her away. It has been so long, and still we do not know. Sometimes, when I wake in the morning, floating upward through the last misty layers of sleep, I imagine I can see the world as she did that day. I watch her running through the yard in her blue jeans and sweater, kicking at the elm leaves in the grass. She kneels by the pond, her legs tucked beneath her in an X, and reaches for the minnows, and each time she does, her reflection crimps and separates on the surface of the water, until she no longer grabs for the minnows at all, just her own reflection, prodding and flicking at it. The tadpoles are easier to catch than the minnows, but they have not yet hatched this year. She pushes herself to her feet and races across the yard.

  Her scooter is resting on its side beneath the deck. It is blue and white, with peeling red trim, and she takes its handle, settles her foot on the footboard, and propels herself around the house. The scooter trundles bumpily over all the little hills and troughs in the ground. It is harder to ride in the dirt and grass than it is on the pavement, but she is not allowed to play in the street without her mom or dad looking on. She is not allowed to stay up past nine o’clock, or eat snacks in her bedroom, or take her dollhouse to school with her. She is not allowed to do anything. She makes only one circle of the house before abandoning her scooter in the puddle behind the chimney, where a police detachment will find it later that evening.

  The grass is soft and cushiony, green with rain, and she decides to lie down for a while. She props herself on her elbows and watches the pattern of shadows shift on the stone of the house. She can see her dad through the kitchen window, talking with a man and woman she does not know. I am her dad. The sunlight from the pond shimmers over her body in waves that look like golden wires. Her fingers tweeze a blade of grass into long, narrow threads. My God. When I cross into the living room, the window vanishes behind a wall and I lose sight of her.

  The moisture from the grass is soaking through her blue jeans, and she pinches the fabric away from her skin. Then she stands and tromps to the edge of the yard. She winds through the elm trees behind the house, stopping beside her favorite. The cocoon that has been there since November is empty now, slit down the center, like a banana twisted at both its ends, and she can’t help but feel disappointed. Once, last fall, she collected all the caterpillars she could find from the school playground, tens and twenties and thirties of them, peeling them off the bushes and dropping them into her lunch sack. On the way home she remembers stopping at a grocery store with her dad. The bag unfurled inside the car, and the caterpillars climbed free. By the time the two of them came back outside, the caterpillars were everywhere: on the seats, the ceiling, the steering wheel. She had to collect them again and release them into the trees behind the house. By the next morning most of them were gone, but she did find one, spinning a pale, tight cocoon in the crutch of this branch. She sees a twitching high in the tree and thinks for a moment that it is the butterfly, but it is only the sprig of a leaf.

  When the caterpillars escaped inside the car, her dad’s face turned pale and smooth and he yelled at her. And this morning he yelled at her just for singing a song about the books in the library. She thinks for the hundredth time that she ought to run away. She could stay with her best friend Kristen Lanzetta, or her other friend Oscar Martin, or she could sleep on the gym mats at school. If she left home and did not come back for five days (she can count as high as one hundred), then her mom and dad would have to be nice to her.

  She presses a line of footprints into the ground, which is still spongy from the big storm, stamping every time her foot falls and slowly rolling her weight to make each step sharp and deep. When she has finished, she sits on the fragment of stone wall and lets her eyes follow the trail she has made. She feels like a hunter or a detective, so easily able to trace where she has been. Though she is not supposed to remove her shoes outside, she decides to take them off anyway, burrowing her feet into the cool black dirt. She is not wearing any socks, and she pretends her toes are earthworms. She shivers and laces her shoes back onto her feet. She is afraid of catching something.

  As she balances herself atop the stone wall, extending her arms and placing one foot in front of the other like an acrobat, her dad walks past the living room window and looks out at her. He winks at her, but she pretends not to notice him. For no good reason, he sent her outside
when he was gathering stuff for the yard sale. A yard sale is when you set tables and boxes up in the front yard and let people take your things away. She likes all her things and wishes that she could keep them, but didn’t her dad say that she would have to give her stuffed giraffe away? She feels a prickling heat behind her eyes and blinks a few times to keep from crying.

  A maple leaf skates across the tips of the grass.

  A dog barks repeatedly across the street.

  She can picture her dad opening her bedroom door, spreading his arms wide, and telling the man and woman she does not know that they can help themselves, take anything they want, feel free to look around. She leaps from the wall and begins to run.

  “Tell you what, Celia,” I say. “Why don’t you go outside and play?”

  It is an hour earlier, and we are finishing our popsicles, biting the last clumps of ice, which have already melted to sleet, from around the center of the stick. She presses hers against the roof of her mouth, and I hear her breath puffing flatly through her nose. This is something else she does: breathes through her nose whenever she chews or swallows. At its loudest, when she has a cold, it reminds me of the sound that air makes escaping from a balloon. “Now?” she asks.

  “Just for a little while. Is your sweater in your bedroom? You should probably go put it on.”

  “O-kay,” she says. Two notes. She snaps her popsicle stick in half, drops it in the trash, and ascends the stairs.

  I decide to take a Tylenol for my headache and so am in the bathroom when she leaves.

  It is another half hour, and I have finished my inspection of both the library and the guest room, when I hear a knock on the front door. Our house is an old one, listed in the State Registry of Historic Places, with a stone fireplace, a winding wooden staircase, and a pantry as large as the kitchen. One Saturday a month I conduct any visitors who come to the door through its rooms, recounting the story of its construction, which I know by heart. Today the visitors are Donald and Joan Pytlik, who are traveling across the region in their minivan to visit all the houses catalogued in the State Department of Recreation and Tourism brochure. It wasn’t them.

  “We had been wanting to take this trip for twenty years, but there never seemed to be the time,” Mrs. Pytlik says, draping her jacket over the coat-frame in the hall.

  “So we made the time,” Mr. Pytlik says. He shifts his leather belt around his large belly.

  They stand by the door, holding hands.

  “Your house is certainly beautiful,” says Mrs. Pytlik, and Mr. Pytlik says, “It is, it is,” and I thank them. Then I lead them into the front room and begin my recitation.

  I show them the rounded baseboards and the antique glass table and the fireplace with the ash-darkened hearth. I show them the hatch in the wall that used to lead to the coal cellar. There is a corner of the pantry where the wood is a slightly darker shade of brown, and I tell them how we had to replace a few boards when a mysterious rot began to spread through them in 1995. In the kitchen I show them the wood-burning stove, which has been in place since the house was constructed in the mid-1800s. “But we rarely use it,” I say. “After all, we have the fireplace to heat the living room and the gas oven to cook our food.” I can see Celia through the kitchen window, playing safely in the backyard. “Not to mention central heating and the microwave,” I finish, and I usher the Pytliks into the living room. Beneath the winding staircase, carved from a single giant sycamore, I point to the place where the woodwright incised his name some hundred and fifty years ago—Edwin Reasoner. I let them trace it with their fingers. This is how I conduct my tour, every third Saturday of the month.

  We are upstairs in the master bedroom when we hear a thump on the roof, followed by a drumming noise which accelerates and comes to a sudden stop. It sounds like a bullet of hail, but the sky is perfectly blue.

  “What on earth was that?” Mrs. Pytlik says, her hands on her hips, staring at the ceiling.

  “A bird must have dropped something,” her husband says.

  “Or something dropped a bird,” she says.

  There is another crack above us, slightly louder this time, and their shoulders give a start.

  I can still hear Celia galloping around in the backyard, and I am not concerned. “Nothing to worry about. Now if you’d like to follow me down the hall, I can show you the morning room.” We hear the sound three more times before it stops, with a tinny clank.

  Later, as I escort the Pytliks back downstairs, the phone begins to ring, and I answer it in the kitchen. It is Janet, on recess from her session with the Community Orchestra. “They’re rehearsing the strings right now,” she says. “Listen, I’m going to stop by the grocery store on the way home. Do we need anything?”

  “Hamburger buns. And paper towels. And I think Celia just lost her last rubber ball, so—”

  “—so whatever I do, don’t buy another.”

  “Exactly.”

  She laughs. “Are you guys okay?”

  “We’re fine. Celia’s playing outside. I’m showing the house to a couple from upstate.”

  “Oh! I’ll let you go, then.” She blows a kiss into the transmitter—a chirping sound. “Take care,” she says.

  I return the telephone to its cradle.

  The Pytliks are waiting for me in the living room, looking at the photographs framed on the mantelpiece. I step over to the window and stand there for a moment. Celia is tightrope-walking along the fragment of stone wall between the two maple trees. Her arms are open wide, and she steps delicately, the way a leaf falls, from the shadow of the trees into the sunlight. I catch her gaze and wink at her. I want to understand what she is thinking, in this moment just before it happens (though I do not yet know that it will happen). What is she remembering, or noticing, or imagining? What is she watching so intently? It is important to me. Watching her, I feel an enormous plummeting sensation in my legs, as if I have missed the last step on a ladder, though it may be that I feel this only in retrospect. I do not know.

  Behind me Mrs. Pytlik clears her throat, and I hear the rustle of her skirt shifting on her body. “So where did the stone for the outside walls come from?” she asks. And I turn away.

  It goes on happening.

  Celia is running through the grass, as fast as she possibly can, and the arms and legs of her shadow are scissoring back and forth beneath her feet. It is almost noon. The way the sunlight flickers inside the branches of the trees reminds her of the flashing siren of an ambulance or a police car, and when she comes kicking to a stop, she gulps in air and blinks her eyes to see if she can duplicate the effect. The house vanishes and reappears, and so does the sky, and so does the ground. At school, during Career Day, a doctor visited her class with an ambulance, a policeman with a police car, and a fireman with a fire truck. They all ran their sirens simultaneously when one of the boys, Oscar Martin, asked them to, and it was so loud that she had to clap her hands over her ears. She climbs onto the deck and looks down at the yard, where the wind is making patterns in the grass, little pleats and ripples. She thinks of another jingle: All of the grass and all of the wind, oh they couldn’t put Humpty together again.

  A plastic bag, the kind you get from the grocery store, is tangled in the twigs of the tree beside the chimney, and she can see it rustling every time the breeze shifts. The tree is an elm tree, but her mom calls it the Plastic Bag Tree, because every few days another plastic bag will appear there like a tattered blue or white flower. Her dad has to pull them loose with a long hook. He says that it must have something to do with the air currents.

  She climbs down from the deck, jumping at the fifth stair from the bottom, and lands with a flat smack of her sneakers. A lawnmower buzzes across the street. The minnows in the pond glitter like silver nickels. There are flags of warm air in the wind. She can tell that spring is almost here. The next holiday on the calendar is Easter, and the last was St. Valentine’s Day.

  When she boosts herself onto the stone wall, she sees
a spider concealing itself in one of the cracks, so thin a brown that it is almost transparent, but she is not frightened of spiders. She sits and pulls her knees to her chin, then tightens her shoelaces. A chip of yellow rock zings away when she knocks her foot against the side of the wall. She rises and spreads her arms and paces along the ledge to the other end, where the wall crumbles into a staircase of dented stones, and then she sits down again. Out of the corner of her eye she sees something moving.

  There it is. The butterfly.

  It has settled on the border of the very last stone and is swaying gently in the breeze. She watches it close its wings. They fold together, meet in a plane, and then, to her surprise, fold closer still, crossing into one another, so that she cannot see the butterfly at all anymore. It is as though it has simply hidden itself away in the spaces between the air. She wonders if it has melted to nothing, like a puff of fog, but then the wings swivel back into sight and it is resting right where it was before. She wipes her eyes and looks more closely. Its antennae give a few twitches. It lifts one of its legs. A moment later she watches it happen all over again: first it is there and then it is gone.

  It is like nothing she has ever seen before, and when the butterfly opens its wings again, dipping and tilting its head, she reaches out to take it in her hand.

  Faces, and How They Look from Behind

  The pavilion where United States Congressman Asa Hutchinson sleeps was built in 1989, the year he finally gave up on the world. George Bush was president at the time, and then Bill Clinton, and then George Bush again, but a different George Bush, a younger one. The congressman lives in the pavilion every year from May to October, when he hitchhikes north, into the winter. He knows the exact path the squirrels follow when crossing the rafters, and he can hear the lapping waters of the reservoir even when he plugs his ears, the way that roller skaters will feel their legs gliding beneath them long after they have removed their skates. The Community Orchestra uses the pavilion as a concert shell on Memorial Day, but the one year they tried to remove Congressman Hutchinson—1995—he cried out that he was being kidnapped, flailing his limbs so wildly that he broke the first violinist’s nose, and they allow him to listen now from his bench in the corner. He applauds, loudly, at every silence and weeps openly into his hands. He seems to think they are generating the music just for him. The congressman spends hours every day asking passers-by if they can spare a dollar, a quarter, a nickel, some change, which is what he asks as Tommy Taulbee jogs past the pavilion this morning. Asa Hutchinson has never heard of the actual United States Congressman Asa Hutchinson, who rose to prominence during the Whitewater hearings and later directed the DEA. The fact that people suddenly began calling him Congressman one year, with a knowing grin, and later by simple routine, he considers, like so many other things, beyond explanation.