Peter Heller: Celine

“Well. I… I called because I thought—I have a story to tell you. Is this a good time?”

“Please. I was just finishing something up.”

A beat, she could hear Gabriela trying to decide the best way in.

“I was going to start by telling you about something that happened while I was at Sarah Lawrence. But let me back up. I should begin earlier so you understand. My mother’s name was Amana Penteado Ambrosio…”

“Amana, in Tupi-Guarani, means rain. That is how I thought of her when I lay awake at night in my apartment—just a sec.”

A rustling, the sliding of maybe a chair on a wood floor.

“Okay, I’m back. I want to—I don’t want to intrude.”

Celine shook her head. She felt fully awake for the first time in weeks. “Intrude? You’ve pretty much set the hook. I just had an idea. You said you were up in the Heights?”

“Yes.”

“It’s very close. Why don’t you join us for dinner? My husband Pete just went up the hill for provisions.”

“I—”

“I think he’s going to make his famous Wicked Mac and Cheese.”

“Hah!”

“He’s from Maine,” Celine added, as if that explained it.

“I just got back from a run. A two-second shower and—you live on the dock, don’t you?” Gabriela had done her homework.

“At 8 Old Fulton. It’s the red door, you can’t miss it.”

The young woman who showed up at the door must have run. It didn’t seem that even fifteen minutes had passed. She was wearing a loose cotton mid-length summer dress with a batik pattern of tiny elephants, and running shoes. Her wet hair was tied back in a ponytail, her face was flushed, and she came bearing flowers that she must have gathered in passing from the gardens that overflowed the wrought-iron fences en route. Celine approved: Stealing roadside flowers was a family tradition; her own mother, Baboo, would gather up her work gloves and clippers on Fishers Island afternoons and tell her daughters it was time to go “highwaying and bywaying,” which meant appropriating bouquets from the generous hedges and thickets that crowded the country lane. Celine noticed that Gabriela also carried a thick manila file tied with string.

Celine took the handful of wild roses and tall grasses and the girl leaned down and kissed her on both cheeks. She was much taller than Celine. She was not a girl, of course—if she’d graduated in ’82 she’d be in her early forties, the same age as her son, Hank—but Celine could not help thinking of her as a youth. Her tan, oval face, her green eyes full of lights, her bowed mouth. On her left temple was a scar, a ragged arc like the edge of a leaf. Gabriela was one of those women whose beauty could not be parsed because it was mostly energetic—it hit one like the first scent of apple blossoms.

“Thank you.” Celine took the flowers to the sink where she filled an empty olive oil bottle and snugged them in, hastily arranging them with her mother’s swift eye. She turned. Gabriela was taking in the room with an expression Celine was not unused to seeing in her friends’ first visits. The girl’s eyes traveled to the gold-leafed skull, to another human skull emerging from a rock hollow with a barbed-wire crown of thorns, to a black altar cluttered with knives, bottles, dolls, crosses; the stuffed crow with a doll in his beak; the totem pole of human and animal bones.

“That altar,” Gabriela murmured.

“That’s to Baron Samedi, the Haitian voodoo god of the underworld. That’s him in the corner in the top hat. Two visiting Haitian friends became possessed walking in here. I thought we might have to call a mambo.”

“Gee.”

“Gee is right. Come, come, sit. Here.” Celine led Gabriela to a wrought-iron café table. “I heard you eating crackers on the phone and it seemed like a good idea.” In truth, Celine never went too long without eating. HALT. It was her AA training. Hungry, Angry, Lonely, Tired—don’t let yourself become any of those, if you can help it. Her favorite snack was a chunk of Lindt chocolate bedded on a tablespoon of peanut butter. She could have lived on it.

They sat. Gabriela said, “I loved the article about you. I called an old friend, a retired dean who knew you, and he said that you were one of the best in the country at solving very cold cases, cases many years old.”

“Renato? He’s sweet. Searching for birth families is by definition a wading into cold cases.”

“He also said you can go incognito anywhere, and that you once attended a diplomat’s party dressed as a man. He said you were an amazing shot and owned an armory of handguns.”

“Well. We shouldn’t get carried away. You were telling me a story,” Celine said.

Gabriela set the file on the table and drank a whole glass of sparkling water, refilled the glass. Her scar blazed. “You had cats,” she said. “I count two, in framed pictures.”

“Two loves of my life.”

Gabriela hesitated. “In San Francisco, the year of Miss Brandt—so it was second grade, I was seven—we had a little cat named Jackson. He was spotted like a cow, all black and white, but fluffy. So small he fit in my mother’s palm.”

Celine nodded. Everybody can agree on a kitten.

“Amana called him Moto, which is short for motorcycle, because of the way he purred. I said that he didn’t look anything like a motorcycle, and Mom said, ‘You probably want to name him something all-American like Jackson,’ so that’s what we called him.”

Celine smiled.

“He slept with me. I remember he would stick his wet nose in my ear as hard as he could like he wanted to crawl in and live in here. I wish he had.” Gabriela rubbed the corner of her eye and Celine thought she was exceedingly lovely.

“Why did you wish that?”

“He got lost.”

“Oh.”

“We used to let him go out into the back garden, which I guess was dumb. One day he didn’t come home. He was so small, he must’ve gotten over a fence and been nabbed by a neighbor’s dog. I like to think that someone thought he was a stray and just adopted him. For years afterward I prayed for that. I also left my window open. When I had my own apartment, my bedroom faced the gardens and I left my window open winter and summer so that he could smell me and maybe jump up onto the sill and come home.”

Celine could feel heat climb into her own face.

“And Mom, too. Rain. After she died I opened the window a little wider and when it rained I’d let the drops spatter on the brick sill and bounce onto my face and in the dark I’d imagine it was my mother coming to touch me. Maybe it was her in the rain. I used to think that maybe at night things could happen that aren’t allowed in the daytime.”

Gabriela reached for the water and refilled her glass, drank the whole thing again in one go. She looked out the windows to the bridge.

“Mom’s paternal name was Ambrosio. Very Brazilian. I loved that, too. When I was finally out of school, out of college, and had a minute to take stock, I made it my middle name.” She turned back to Celine. “I didn’t cry every night as a kid, I wouldn’t want you to think that I did. I was pretty tough.”

“Wait,” Celine said. “Wait. Your mother was Brazilian and she died when you were like—what?”

“The same year, second grade. In February.”

“Right. So you were—”

“I was seven. Well, eight. She died on my birthday.”