The False Friend Read online

  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.

  Each investigation was an intellectual road trip to a place of previously locked doors, a chance to peer at a new, obscure corner of civic life through a magnifying lens. It felt to Celia a bit like assembling a sand painting grain by grain and then destroying it once the pattern was complete, but the job satisfied her appetite for variety, optimized her long-standing industriousness. In high school and college, she had signed petitions and organized rallies on faith, unsure she was making a difference, but within a year of her first auditing assignments, the State Assembly had responded to her division’s recommendations, drafting legislation that better aligned state animal drug-testing standards with national practices, and providing funds to improve foster family recruitment and training techniques. It mystified Celia that more people didn’t want to do what she did, and that still fewer were interested in hearing about it—but even that came to feel like an asset. The very words Performance Auditor were an excellent cocktail-party litmus test to divine the curious from the incurious, the affable from the petty. Those who didn’t greet her job title with a polite smile and a quick glance over the rest of the room were rewarded with stories of drug surveillance via helicopter during a study of the Police Criminal Investigations Division, or an impromptu embalming-room anatomy lesson during an examination of the Funeral Directors’ Licensing Board. Huck loved
these stories, repeating them whenever he got the chance, but Warren’s interest went beyond anecdote. When Celia described to her father Chicago’s tobacco tax distributions, or the varying failure rates from the city’s emissions tests, she felt like she was offering game stats to a rabid baseball fan, a transaction Noreen observed with the detached enjoyment of a zoo visitor at feeding time.

  “Jeremy says hello,” Celia’s mother said once the air had cleared. “He and Pam would like to drive down to visit while you’re here.”

  “Your brother got promoted,” Warren added. “They made him a senior adjuster, which is good because they’re going to need the extra money now that Number Two is on the way.”

  “Pam is pregnant again?”

  Celia’s sister-in-law had been pregnant recently enough that Celia could picture Pam’s face hovering palely above a blue maternity dress, her Christmas dinner napkin lying on her rounded belly like a picnic blanket stranded on an alp.

  “Three months as of last week.” From the tone of her mother’s voice Celia could tell she was smiling. “They had wanted two, just maybe not this close together.”

  “It’s what you’d call a happy accident,” Warren pronounced, nodding in agreement with himself.

  When they arrived at their traditional roadside diner, Celia was unsurprised to find the interior unchanged down to their usual corner booth, though the place was called Jonnie’s now instead of the Treeview and nothing tasted as good—the onion rings no longer homemade, the soup saltier than before.

  “When was the last time you saw spring in New York State?” her father asked from behind his hamburger.

  “It’s been a while,” she said. The influence of her father’s conviviality was wearing off like a painkiller that stops masking a dull ache. Celia remembered the reason she had come.

  “You ought to visit again in September, when the leaves are going crazy,” her father said. “And bring that boyfriend of yours. The poor guy has only ever seen the Southern Tier when it’s frozen over.”

  “Warren—”

  Warren waved the voice away. “I bet if Huck got a taste of what it can be like here in the fall—”

  “Warren—”

  “It’s okay, Nor.”

  Warren rested his arm along the top of the booth where a taller woman’s shoulders would have been, his shirt sleeve adorning the back of Noreen’s head like a clever hat. In each other’s presence, Celia’s parents became a single organism, a consolidation that had occurred too long ago for Celia to ever undo. From across the table, Celia saw two versions of the same smile.

  “We’re awfully glad you’ve come, Cee Cee,” Warren said. “When you start getting older, you begin to appreciate what’s truly important, and you visiting like this … well, it means a lot to us.”

  Celia was briefly tempted to confirm her visit as a gift they could congratulate themselves for being given. Instead, she turned toward the window. In winter, the scenery was beautiful in a stark way, the bare skeletons of trees black against the frozen hills. Now it was all green.

  “Is there anything special you’d like to do while you’re here?” Noreen coaxed, as if trying to persuade Celia to eat her green beans. “There’s a new restaurant in Oswego we could try, and if the weather’s good I was thinking it might be fun to hike around the lake.”

  “Sure, Mom.” Celia tried to keep her voice even. “Look, I’m sorry I was so abrupt on the phone yesterday, but now that I’m here—”

  “Oh no, dear,” Noreen interrupted. “We understand perfectly. Phones are terrible for personal conversations. Phones …” She gestured at the tables around them. “… restaurants. Some things are much better left to discuss in person, and in private. It’s so important to be comfortable.”

  Celia’s parents nodded in spontaneous unison, a pair of bobblehead dolls. Celia’s mouth opened and shut. She had spent the plane ride preparing for this moment. Forcing the words back down felt like dry-swallowing pills. “But you asked what I’d like to do,” she stammered, “and, well, I’m hoping to track down Leanne, Becky, and Josie. Not to mention Mrs. Pearson.” She put her hands in her lap when she realized they were shaking.

  Celia’s mother blinked. “You mean Grace Pearson?”

  “Who’s Grace Pearson?” Warren asked.

  “Grace Pearson is Grace Pearson,” Noreen answered. “Dennis’s wife.”

  “You mean the mother of Cee Cee’s little friend—”

  “Djuna,” Celia said.

  They all looked out the window at once. Spring foliage hedged the parking lot, obscuring the view. There was probably a store or a fenced-in yard just a few feet away, but from the diner it looked like the trees went on forever.

  “Why do you want to see Grace Pearson?” Noreen asked in her guidance counselor voice, as if Grace Pearson were a college Celia shouldn’t pin her hopes on.

  “To talk to her,” Celia said. “Her, and everyone else who was part of what happened back then.”

  Noreen dabbed at an imaginary spot on the table.

  “Your mother’s right,” Warren said. “We’ll get back home, you’ll get a little rest, and then when you feel good and ready—”

  “But do you know if she even still lives around here?” Celia asked.

  Celia’s father scrutinized his plate.

  “Dennis left,” Noreen said quietly, “but Grace stayed. I don’t think she wanted … She didn’t like the idea of going too far.”

  Eventually, the three of them returned to the car. For the rest of the trip, Noreen remained intent on the passing scenery, her elbow propped on her armrest, her chin cupped in her hands. Celia’s identical pose in the front seat betrayed her as Noreen’s daughter. Had she not so resembled her father, the driver whose jittery fingers picked at the custom-wrapped steering wheel might have been taken for someone hired to ferry his passengers to a place neither wanted to go.

  CHAPTER 3

  When Jensens were still made in Jensenville and America’s rubber boot capital seemed as firmly rooted as a sycamore, the town built a stone arch carved on both sides with the words LET IT RAIN. After the factories had moved south and trains started skipping the local station, the arch remained, spanning the road like a tombstone. Depending on the direction being traveled, the inscription served as augury or epitaph. Leaving for college, Celia screamed those words loud enough to wind herself, and almost crashed into a stalled Ford Pinto. Each homecoming forced a new surrender.

  Djuna appeared at the edge of Celia’s vision as soon as Warren’s car cleared the arch’s shadow. As if to compensate for twenty-one years of banishment, there she was dancing by the corner drugstore waiting for the light to change; and there, in front of the post office where she had once fallen off her bike. Celia spotted Djuna striking poses before the defunct hobby shop, and a block later lounging on the bench beside the former stationery store. Trudy’s Card and Gift had been turned into a combination head shop and skateboard outlet called Skate and Bake. Seasonal window displays of hearts, Easter eggs, shamrocks, and turkeys had been replaced by a handwritten sign—SMOKEING EQUIPMENT MEANT FOR TOBACCO ONLY—that spelled its own imminent demise. Celia was reminded of another window, papered with sun-faded albums and a sign that read VISIONS IN VINYL. The place had stunk of cat piss and mildew. Even breathing through her mouth, Celia had barely tolerated standing inside the store while Djuna flitted down its aisles, trying to flirt with men intent on rummaging through the used-record bins. That shop front had long ago been painted pink and rechristened ELECTROLYSIS BY ELYCE.

  Djuna had disappeared by the time Celia reached the boarded-up dry cleaners at Elm and Main, its hazmat signs unchanged since the Reagan era. The prevailing high school wisdom had kids in search of a cheap buzz invading its basement to inhale fumes thrown off by moldering vats of solvent. Had Celia been around to witness her brother’s high school years, she might have known if it was true. Beyond the dry cleaners, the streets bore the stamp of Jensenville’s founding German émigré
s. The best proof of their successful assimilation was the local pronunciation of “Beth-o-ven” and “Go-ee-thee” streets. Such phonetic butchery had been sidestepped by Schubert, an asset Warren and Noreen had considered along with their home’s southern exposure and restored front porch before signing on the dotted line. Built before the cookie-cutter era of planned communities, the neighborhood’s diverse arrangements of porches, pitched roofs, and dormer windows had been realized by an early twentieth-century abundance of materials and labor. Celia grew up taking such charms for granted, along with the bounty of school-aged children. Those not in public school had attended the Immaculate Heart of Mary, whose adjoining church had tolled the hours from nine to six, as well as the daily masses. Celia had learned to count by tallying the call to worship to its thirty-ninth ring, but the number remained a mystery until Randy Blocker, a Heart of Mary boy two doors down, had described the special fervency of Immaculate Heart’s pastor for the number of lashes Christ received, extinguishing Celia’s envy of plaid uniforms.