“She’s outside somewhere,” he said. “Probably playing with some of the other kids.”
“As long as she’s home by five,” said Janet.
“I’m sure she will be.” But as the sun tilted toward the trees, and a pale sliver of moon appeared overhead, she was still nowhere to be found. They hollered her name from the four corners of the yard. They searched through the elm trees and behind the Worley gravestone. They walked up and down the block, knocking on all the doors, but they did not find her, and she did not come home. Sometimes he thinks that the world as we know it is as thin as a tissue of cloud—that we can pierce through it without even trying, stepping sideways out of ourselves, and end up in some other world altogether, or in no world at all. Sometimes he thinks that the shout he heard that afternoon was the sound Celia made as the tissue closed behind her. Last month, when he was cleaning the gutter along the roof, he found a red rubber ball she had lost seven years before. It still felt firm between his fingers, and when he tossed it onto the deck, it leapt in a single high arc over the grass and into the pond. When you walk through the doors of the police station, you can hear Kimson Perry, the Springfield police chief, practicing his contrabassoon—a steadfast, plangent, echoing sound that rolls from his office into the marble hallways. That evening, when they could not find Celia, Janet called him at the police station and begged for his help. He said, “Well, normally we’re supposed to wait twenty-four hours in a case like this, so we can’t file an M.P. form until then. But I’ll get some of my men over there and we’ll have a look around.” He played with her in the Community Orchestra. This was before she left them both behind. Within half an hour, he had arrived with eight of his officers. They coasted noiselessly down the street, their blue lights spinning in the falling darkness, and they bwooped their sirens once or twice as they pulled to a stop. Kimson Perry lined his officers up at the rear border of the lawn, six feet apart, so that they looked like golfers at a driving range. “Don’t you worry,” he said to Janet, just before they stepped into the elm trees. “We’ll find your girl for you.” And they marched forward on the same beat, the beams of their flashlights cutting across one another like the blades of scissors.
That was the night he began to see flashes of Celia’s face where she could not possibly be—in the bank of shadows in his closet, in the torn screen door of the house across the street, in the way a group of twigs were cinched together inside a bush. He would see her from the edge of his vision, and each time he did, something inside him would prickle and let out a gasp before he realized what he was actually looking at. He remembers the day he drove through town and she seemed to explode out at him and disappear a hundred times, to the left and the right, every few seconds, until he thought he was going mad: the police, it turned out, had stapled her picture onto the telephone poles. For a short time after she vanished the police called him every few hours, and later every few days, and later every few weeks. They had interviewed everybody in the neighborhood by then. They had found Donald and Joan Pytlik at a hotel in the northwest corner of the state and taken their statements over the telephone. They had contacted all the area hospitals and runaway shelters, and they suggested that he and Janet continue to call them periodically for any new information. The same phone book that contained the bookstore and locksmith and pizza delivery numbers also contained these other numbers, pages and pages of them, that people turned to only in their grief. He was ashamed to be surprised by this. Soon after Celia disappeared, their neighbors began to arrive at the door with their condolences. They said many things. Thick shocks of grass grow from beneath the fragment of stone wall, sprouting from the crevices he cannot reach with the lawnmower.
Todd Paul Taulbee said, “I’m not much for, you know, the right words, but if I can do anything for you and your family, you just name it. I’m real good with tools, for instance.”
Tommy Taulbee, his youngest son, said, “That goes for all of us. The whole family. Anything you need.”
Sheila Lanzetta said, “It’s only been three days—do you want to hear this?—so you’ve still got a good chance of recovering her. After a week the chances drop to fifty-fifty, and after that . . .” and her voice trailed away. Kristen Lanzetta, her daughter, who was Celia’s best friend, would not leave the car, and she sat in the backseat peeling and reattaching a suction-cup teddy bear to the window.
Enid Embry said, “Sometimes they show up miles away, and they don’t have any clothes on, and they don’t remember a thing that happened to them until you put them under hypnosis. I’ve been watching all kinds of stories about it on TV.” She gave them a pan of banana bread.
Greg Martin, whose son, Oscar, would be tried four years later in juvenile court for setting fire to the spinney of oak trees atop the hill, said, “We’ll be praying for you.” His wife, Alma, said, “We already have been.”
Ragland Fowler sent a short typed letter that read, in total: “Condolences on the occasion of your loss. Please phone regarding my offer on the house.”
Officer Kimson Perry said, “We haven’t given up hope yet, and I don’t want you folks to, either.” He took Janet’s hand.
Matt Shuptrine said, “She was a real little trouper, your daughter.”
Sara Cadwallader said, “We’re all going to miss her.”
Melanie Sparks said, “She was the sweetest little kid I knew.”
Nathan Caru, who had moved to Springfield only the month before, when Robert Corrigan, the previous mail carrier, retired to follow his brother to Florida, said, “Is there a Celia”—and he mispronounced her last name—“residing at this dwelling?”
Her pictures gradually faded on the telephone poles, were covered by rock-concert leaflets and garage-sale announcements, and finally they were torn down by the Springfield Beautification Committee.
“It was your fault,” Janet told him. “You did it.”
At seven o’clock exactly, on the night Celia disappeared, there was a rapping on the front door—three quick knocks. The police, who were gathered in his living room, fell suddenly silent, taking root where they stood. Janet flattened a hand to her chest and then motioned for him to answer the door. It was Melanie Sparks. A clutch of police cars was parked behind her, and a pair of headphones hung in a circle around her neck, giving out a tinny heavy metal music. She peered past him into the house. “Are you guys having a party or something?” she said. “I thought I was supposed to baby-sit tonight.”
Years later, after his last big fight with Janet, she touched her hand to the back of his neck and said that she did not mean what she had told him. Her skin was cold, and his was warm, and a great snake of shivering traveled up his spine into his shoulders. She said, “I’m sorry, baby. It wasn’t your fault. Can you hear me? You didn’t do it. You didn’t do it, baby. I’m sorry.”
In the summer he lets the grass around his house grow as high as his ankles, then mows it into neat parallel bands that look like the nap of a freshly vacuumed carpet. Crickets and grasshoppers hop from his path by the hundreds, along with tiny white insects that look like the seeds of strawberries. Mudpie and Thisbe are fascinated by this turbulence of bugs. They hide behind the fire hydrant and follow the lawnmower with their heads, tripping into the street every time it rattles near. Celia used to straddle the nozzle of the fire hydrant and pretend it was a horse. Manhattan was purchased by the Dutch from the wrong tribe—the Canarsees, native to Brooklyn, rather than the Weckquaesgeeks, who actually lived on the island. In the fall, drifts of elm and maple leaves blow down from the hillside and he rakes them into black plastic trash bags that he stores beneath the back deck. The bags are as large as barrels, and whenever he feels the slumping sensation of gravity that comes just before a heavy rainstorm, he hauls them onto the hill and empties them there. He wants the leaves to sink back into the humus, where they belong. Once, Todd Paul Taulbee saw him walking into the trees with a trash bag saddled over each shoulder and another one hooked to his belt. “What in the holy h
ell are you doing that for?” he said. The leaves always dry out as soon as the sun comes up, skittering back into the yard in pairs and waves and clusters until the grass is completely hidden. The process never takes more than a week. It is a losing battle.
The children on the block call his house the Sand Castle, and when they see him working in the yard, with his rake and his trash bag and his hair tangled by the wind, they call him the Sand Witch. He can hear them making whooshing noises in the yard across the street as if they are flying about on brooms. Sometimes the bravest ones—ten or eleven years old—will cross the sidewalk and ask him which leaves he is raking, or which day of the week it is. They always call him “Mister.” He pretends not to understand that they are making fun of him, and he has to bottle his own laughter at their bubbling and puffing and coughing. Afterward, he watches them boil back across the street, where their friends wait for them in a cluster. These same children were wearing diapers and pull-ups seven years ago. Some of them were just minnows jerking about in the fishbowls of their mothers. The man who developed Vaseline swallowed a spoonful every day and lived to be ninety-six years old. He once heard an interview with an Iranian film actress who said that she did not lose her virginity, and in fact had never kissed a man, until she was thirty years old. She had been raised to believe that women who allowed their bodies to appear on screen assumed the lust of millions on their souls, and that if they wished to enter Heaven they had to forsake all desire. “People can grow old and ugly from lack of affection,” the film actress said. “I was afraid that it would happen to me.” In the winter, icicles as round and bulky as legs hang from the eaves of the house, glistening whenever the sun peeks through the clouds. A thick rind of ice covers the Pinkwater Reservoir. Nathan Caru shakes visibly in every limb: he wears a snowsuit as he walks his mail route. In the spring, after the snow melts, the blanket of leaves on the hillside gives off the sweet, slightly acrid smell of burnt marshmallows. When he opens the windows of the house, a bracing wind blows through. He feels like an old man.
Janet called him last week. “I know I don’t have the right to say this to you”—and then she said it anyway: “But I do miss you. I wanted to see how you were holding yourself together.”
“With glue and paper clips,” he told her.
Barely, he meant.
Janet is living with her sister in Chicago. When he dreams about her, she is always riding a glass elevator to the top of a tall building. She steps out and she can see the whole world, highways and cities and a small flickering light on the far horizon, which is his own home, their own home. Though she does not recognize it, she cannot stop looking. When she called that night, he told her that, in truth, he was holding himself together by sleeping and dreaming as much as he could, and, when he was awake, by letting his thoughts snap from subject to subject as though each part of his life were contained in its own little box, shut off from every other. It helps, he has found, to think of his life in this way. Last month, Matt Shuptrine excised the chunk of calcite from his front yard and sold it to the Springfield quarry. He stood with Enid Embry as one of the quarrymen hoisted the stone onto the bed of a trailer and drove it away: it looked like a gigantic human tooth, with a long, tapering root. On Sunday he found the mangled frame of a shopping cart in his backyard with a trail of footprints stumbling away from it into the woods. The footprints looped and slanted over the dewy grass, interrupted by a handprint or two. “From that new supermarket, I guess?” Janet asked him over the telephone, and he said, “Looks like the teenagers finally managed to ride one all the way down.” He was standing in the doorway of Celia’s bedroom as he spoke to her, the cordless phone held tight in his hand. You can hypnotize a chicken by holding its beak to a line you’ve drawn in the sand. It was night, and the moon shone through the window—a watery yellow color. “Sometimes I think about what it would be like to start over,” Janet said.
There is a story about the color of the moon that Sara Cadwallader, who reads picture books to children at the local library, once told him. Long ago, the story goes, the moon was of many different colors, like an opal or a piece of shot silk. On the coldest nights of the year, when the air was so clear you could see to the ends of the sky, the colors seemed to twist around each other like oil on the surface of a puddle. The earth was just a young man then, and he loved the moon like a daughter. Every night he watched her drift through the stars, and when the sun chased her out of the sky in the morning, he opened his other eye, on the opposite side of the world, and watched her once again. It was an act of devotion. One day, though, the earth closed his eyes for a moment, or looked away, or fell asleep—the story is not clear. What is clear is that when he looked for the moon again, she was on the wrong side of the world, falling into the sun. The sky grew so dark above the earth that he could see the stars piercing through like a thousand shining claws. He watched the moon touch the sun, then turn black, and then diminish to the smallest prick. Whereupon she vanished. A few nights later she rose again, but the earth could tell that she was only a ghost, for her eyes were gray and her face was a bloodless white. This is the story of how the moon lost her colors. Now, whenever she shows a brighter face, it is never more than the mistiest shade of yellow, orange, or blue—simply the earth remembering what she used to look like long ago when he was young.
He sometimes stretches out in the grass on the side yard of his house and watches the clouds pass through the branches of the maple trees. In the fall he lies in the leaves, and in the winter on the fragment of stone wall. He can hear the cars on the street, and the birds in the trees, and the children rolling by on their Big Wheels. “The kids don’t really like that story,” Sara Cadwallader said when she finished telling him about the moon. “With them it’s all robots and dinosaurs these days.” He knows better than to lie down in the snow. The human brain runs at a power rating of twenty watts. He does not have to cook dinner this afternoon, and he will not go inside until it is dark. He will eat a light meal of meat loaf with a boiled egg baked into the center, a little Tupperware casket of which he found waiting on his front porch this morning. He will clean the dishes and lie in bed and watch television until it is time to go to sleep. It is sweeps month, and all the programs will have guest stars. He wishes sometimes that he could find a door that would open into the past, before every single thing that he knows: before Enid Embry lost her husband and Nathan Caru lost his country, before Nelson Pinkwater went dropping through the reservoir like a stone, before Tuck Miller marched through Springfield throwing firecrackers onto the road, before the spring ran dry behind the general store and Travis and Baby Girl Worley died, before UFOs and shopping malls and telephone books and Trivial Pursuit cards.
He would step through the door and there he would be: a century of decades ago, when his house was newly built, the only house in the neighborhood, and flocks of sheep were still cropping the grass. He wonders what the world would look like then. He has heard that the birds were so plentiful the sky went black with wings when they passed. He would like to see that. Why had he imagined that life must always end in death, and never in anything else? He is not nearly at the end.
Kevin Brockmeier
THE TRUTH ABOUT CELIA
Kevin Brockmeier is the author of the story collection Things That Fall from the Sky and the children’s novel City of Names. He has published stories in many magazines and anthologies, including The New Yorker, The Georgia Review, McSweeney’s, and The Best American Short Stories; his story “The Green Children” from The Truth About Celia was selected for The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror. He has received the Chicago Tribune’s Nelson Algren Award, an Italo Calvino Short Fiction Award, a James Michener–Paul Engle Fellowship, two O. Henry Awards (one of which was a first prize), and, most recently, an NEA grant. He lives in Little Rock, Arkansas.
ALSO BY KEVIN BROCKMEIER
Things That Fall from the Sky
City of Names
FIRST VINTAGE CONTEMPORARIES EDITION, JU
LY 2004
Copyright © 2003 by Kevin Brockmeier
Vintage and colophon are registered trademarks and Vintage Contemporaries is a trademark
of Random House, Inc.
Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following for permission to reprint previously published material: Far Corner Books: Poem “Over the Fence” from Under the Words: Selected Poems by Naomi Shihab Nye. Copyright © 1995. Hal Leonard Music Corp.: Excerpt from the song lyric “Celia” by Phil Ochs. Copyright © 1963 by Barricade Music, Inc. Copyright renewed. All rights controlled and administered by Almo Music Corp. All rights reserved. Louisiana State University Press: Poem “Ghosts” from Distractions: Poems by Miller Williams. Copyright © 1981 by Miller Williams.
The Library of Congress has cataloged the Pantheon edition as follows:
Brockmeier, Kevin.
The truth about Celia / Kevin Brockmeier.
p. cm.
1. Fantasy fiction—Authorship—Fiction. 2. Fathers and daughters—Fiction.
3. Loss (Psychology) —Fiction. 4. Missing children—Fiction.
5. Girls—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3602.R63 T’.6—dc21 2002035513
www.randomhouse.com
eISBN: 978-0-307-42947-6
v3.0
Kevin Brockmeier, The Truth About Celia
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