Peter Heller - Celine

Who, when she returned to school, did she now studiously avoid? Whose eyes met hers and flickered away as she navigated the flagstone walk between the library and the science building?

Did the father of her child even know or suspect? Did he wonder at the sudden breaking off?

In the end maybe all that mattered was that she carried the child and labored and gave birth and gave it up. Was it a boy or a girl? Did Hank have a brother or a sister?

He had asked Bobby about the boating accident, too. She came alive at the memory. She pushed the button on the motorized bed and brought herself up. Her smile made her younger. The blood flowed to her cheeks.

She said, “Do you remember when you were staying with us and you and Ted ran the canoe over the dam and nearly killed yourselves?”

Hank grinned. Ted was Bobby’s third son and a good friend growing up. Hank was smiling but it still contracted his guts, the memory of being recycled again and again in the hydraulic below the weir, knowing he was going to die.

“Remember how mad I got?”

Hank nodded.

“Well, you come by it honestly. I’m about to tell you another story about your mother. You know you guys destroyed your grandfather’s handmade canvas canoe.”

“Sorry.” He reached out and held her thin hand.

“You heard about me diving off the dock?” she said.

“Everybody is eager to tell everyone else’s story.”

A shadow crossed her face. “You heard about the gardener? Alfonse?”

He nodded.

“Oh boy.”

He waited.

“It was my idea,” she said. He nodded. “I have prayed and prayed about it. Not just what I did to the poor man but that I enlisted my little sisters in what is tantamount to murder.” She reached for her sippy cup and took a long suck of apple juice. He noticed that the cup trembled as she set it down. “You know, your mother and I were brought up to believe in Hell.”

“Baboo told me that Gaga had her baptized Catholic. Which scandalized the Cheneys. Do you believe in it now?”

“Certain Hells, definitely.” She turned to the window. On the lawn were three deer grazing as if they owned the place. The one buck was a spike, just a year old. When hunting season came he would not be a legal take. Reprieve.

“I don’t think you murdered the man. It was a prank. At that point anything could have set him off. He had already relinquished any shred of happiness.”

“Is that the point? Happiness?”

Hank didn’t say anything because he didn’t know. She turned her face to him and said, “Sometimes now I think just making it through a day is the point. Practically a triumph, don’t you think? If you don’t melt down or kill anyone or just give up? If you happen to be kind, or help someone else, or create something beautiful, well, you’ve really done something to crow about.”

He squeezed her hand. Bobby had been a fine-arts photographer and he thought some of her pictures were magnificent. There was a self-portrait reflected in the stainless shine of the back of a toaster oven—herself holding the camera of course—that he thought was one of the best portraits of an artist he had ever seen. Something about how the object tried to stretch and bend her figure—did bend it—and how beautiful and intent she was anyway. There was a metaphor there about what the imagination does to the world, and what the world does back to it, but he wasn’t sure what it was. She looked bemused at his laughter. “You will get a blue ribbon,” he said. “What an artist you are.”

“I will meet the man,” she said. “I don’t have a doubt in the world. We can shish kebab our toes together.” She said it lightly and he knew she wasn’t joking.

“Don’t you think,” Hank said at last, “that children get a certain dispensation? Limbo, wasn’t it? Green meadows and sadness.”

“No,” she said. “Children always take the brunt.”

Bobby asked for some tea, green tea, weak, in a real teacup, and joked about what life had come to when all you wanted was green tea. She had been a devotee of single malt scotch before she quit drinking and enjoyed an occasional cigar. Not a cheroot, either, but a robust Churchill or torpedo. Which men found slightly terrifying, also sexy. It was how she met David—smoking on the balcony of a wedding party. He had not been intimidated at all but approached her, leaned against the railing, and lit up his own Partagas. They smoked in silence for a couple of minutes, enjoying the surprising lacuna and relishing their smokes, when Bobby finally said, “Trade you.” And they swapped cigars and were married ten months later.

Hank brought her the tea. Celine was out on her longest errand, which was grocery shopping for the next few days. She wouldn’t be back for a while.

“You asked me about her sailing escapade?” Bobby said, setting down her cup.

“Yes.”

“It was the afternoon she found out—or maybe she intuited it, I’m not sure. But in any event she knew that Mummy’s marriage with Papa was truly over.”

“Right.”

“I won’t say she was impulsive. She was, we all were. Diving off the dock into shallow water was impulsive. Ha. With Celine, the mot juste might be intractable. She got an idea in her head and she was damn headstrong. But the ideas always had a certain, I don’t know— rigor. She didn’t just fly off. There was always a certain poetic logic to whatever your mother dreamed up.”

“I get that.”

“This had something to do with Harry promising to take her sailing, but also the idea that one might be able to sail to another land where fathers and mothers stayed together always. She ran down to the beach and launched the catboat. You know she’d been taking lessons with this fabulously handsome Dutchman. We all thought he was.”

Hank had poured himself a cup of her green tea, and he raised an eyebrow over the rim of the cup.

“He was terribly serious. He hadn’t a clue. Why did your mother and I sometimes simply stare at Gustav like rabbits when we were supposed to be trimming the sail or coming about? He thought we were terrified.” She laughed, the hoarse constrained laugh Hank hadn’t heard in a while. “Well, of course we were! Terrified we might miss a single ripple of his countless muscles! Or that profile! Those hands! God. He had no idea. Which drove us even more wild. He got very stern when we spaced out. He thought we needed more backbone. ‘Sailing,’ he would say, ‘is serious business!’ That was his motto.”

She took a long thirsty sip and managed to spill very little. “He was the most single-task person I’ve ever met. Wonderful—an absolute absence, completely, of any sense of humor. Made him very safe.” She smiled as if she regretted it.

“Despite these distractions, Celine was a quick study. She sailed three times a week, and by the time of the accident she was mostly skippering and he was teaching her the finer points of tack and trim. Amazing for a seven-year-old, but then she was always surprisingly strong. She had just had a lesson and she ran down to the beach and managed to get the little boat into the water and the sail up. There was quite a blow on the sound. It was why Gustav had cut their lesson short. She headed northeast for open water and rounded Simmons Point and was making her way onto the wide Atlantic. Imagine. I wonder if she were planning to sail to Greenland.” Bobby shook her head. “ Refractory, that’s the word. Eliot uses it about the camels.”

Hank remembered again how erudite all three sisters were. Bobby had attended Vassar, like her mother, and majored in comparative literature. She dropped out when she married David. A lawn mower started up from the other side of the house, muffled, a comforting summer sound.