Peter Heller: Celine

“How? I can’t re—”

“She drowned. On Big Sur. We were in this cove called Jade Cove, hunting for bits of green stone that looked like our eyes.”

Celine nodded.

“We all almost died. Pop tried to save her. A stranger drove me to the hospital. A cannery worker from Monterey. I still get letters from him. He lives in Santa Cruz with his niece.”

Celine felt herself inclining forward. In her experience stories fell into two phyla: those that followed predictable contours like the track of a game trail along a hillside, and those that were stranger from the start, more feral, and that struck out cross-country on the merest whim. The strange ones had a certain scent. She handed the girl a cracker with blue cheese.

“Thanks. We were living in the Haight, in San Francisco, and it was my eighth birthday. It fell on a Saturday in February when the poppies would be blooming, so we decided to make the drive down to Big Sur, which was our favorite place. I remember I rode on Mom’s lap the whole way, just because I wanted to, and she squeezed me and was singing a Brazilian song in my ear. The song was about a rabbit who wanted the rice in the rice paddies but couldn’t swim. They grow a lot of rice in Brazil.” Her face blurred with whimsy. “Too much information, I guess.”

“Not at all.”

“Well.” Gabriela twisted the strap of the athletic watch on her wrist. “We got to the cliffs and they were on fire with poppies. I remember we ran down the trail, we were so excited. It’s a little pocket cove and it feels very wild but also sheltered, and I remember thinking this was our own private beach, just for us. The water rushed onto the pebbles and made the jade shine. Amana and I were racing each other to find a piece that looked like a green eye. She kept tickling me so I wouldn’t beat her. And then a rogue wave hit and swept the beach and knocked us off our feet and we were pulled in. I remember the shock of the cold and screaming for Mom and I don’t remember much after that. I guess we all got swept. We didn’t know it but a storm was coming in.”

“Whoa.”

“I know. I guess Pop somehow grabbed me and hauled me out. I was covered in blood and unconscious. Apparently he saw my mother trying to swim in the cove and more waves were coming, and he saw me all bloody and barely breathing and he made a split-second decision he would have to live with for the rest of his life. He gathered me up and ran up the trail and there was this older man there, the stranger. Pop shoved me into his arms and yelled to take me to the hospital, and then he ran back down the trail and dove in and actually swam after Amana. It was crazy. He had seen she was being swept north and he swam that way. I guess he almost drowned himself. He washed up on another beach two miles away.”

“Jesus.”

The girl nodded, her eyes focused on a place beyond the room.

“I woke up at Community Hospital in Monterey. All the blood was just a head cut. I guess they can bleed a lot.”

Celine nodded.

“The nice man waited by my bed. Pop didn’t show up all night and then the man had to go. I found out later he was a supervisor at one of the last docks along Cannery Row, and he worked Sundays. He promised he’d be back after work.”

Celine closed her eyes, conjured the hospital rooms.

“Pop didn’t show up that morning. I remember that with more terror than the accident. Where’s Daddy? I remember the confusion the way we remember some smells, the confusion and what must have been fear on the faces of the nurses. Where’s Mommy, I want Mommy! I began to cry, to wail. They kept asking me my name, my full name, I kept saying AmanaAmanaAmana, maybe they thought I was saying Mama I don’t know.”

Celine opened her eyes. Gabriela was speaking now to the tall windows, the dusk over the dock, and the East River, the wider world. Her fingertips rested lightly on the edge of the wrought-iron table as if she were playing a piece on a piano, counting the beats of a caesura.

“He showed up sometime in the afternoon. I was hysterical when I saw him. They told him that I was basically fine and coming around, and that it was clear he needed stitches in his head right now, and probably other places. I think they tried to make him sign some papers, they were tugging on his sleeves and he pulled away from them and carried me out of that hospital. He was never the same. I can’t have realized that then, but I know it now. He had swum and swum in the rough water and twice he thought he saw her ahead of him and tried to sprint there and lost her. And I guess he lost his mind.”

She turned to Celine, shook herself. “It’s a lot, I know. I can finish another time.”

They often said that. When they were getting to the part they least liked to tell, or had never told. Celine said, “I’m fine. Would you like some tea?”

Gabriela shook her head. The young woman looked around the big, airy studio as if seeing it for the first time. “Your art is kind of terrifying,” she said. “Did I already tell you that?”

“I think you might have. Do you want to take a break?”

“I’m okay.” She tucked a strand of black hair behind her ear, gave Celine an uncertain smile. “Well. Pop did the best he could. He was unhinged. We both were—”

The brass bell on the front door jingled and she saw Gabriela huff out a breath with what must have been relief. Round One, saved by the bell.

Pete carried in two cloth tote bags. Celine could see bunches of probably kale sticking out the top of one and rolled her eyes. For twenty years he had been trying to get her to eat a vegetable with little success. His tenacity was superhuman. Pete tipped his chin and gave his wife what no one else in the world would know was a smile, and he set the bags on the counter and took off his tweed newsboy cap. He cocked his head at the young woman and gave a friendly wave. He didn’t say a word. Pete, who the rest of the family called Pa, had grown up on an island in Maine where Reticence was the state bird. The rest of the family also called him the Quiet American. Celine waved a cracker at him and said, “Whew. I’m starved. Pete, this is Gabriela Ambrosio Lamont. She went to my alma mater and she is just telling me the most remarkable story. She’ll be joining us for dinner. Can you whip up one of your Blue Plate Specials?”

“We can probably do that.”

Cooking was one of Pete’s many skills. On North Haven, as a boy, he had learned to pitch hay, milk cows, and build small boats. Also, to feed a family of nine when his mother was busy doing something else. Now, in Brooklyn, he channeled his talents into making healthy dinners that his wife would half eat, and into carving unabashedly erotic sculptures that the cleaning lady refused to dust.

Pete had attended Harvard like his father and all his uncles. He was an athlete and played football for a year, and while in Cambridge he became a card-carrying Communist, when being a card-carrying Communist could seriously screw with one’s prospects. After college he had enlisted in the army and promptly married a black civil rights activist named Tee, and when he got out of the service he moved with her to Brooklyn and edited the revolutionary civil rights magazine Liberator. Some of the most heartbreaking letters Celine had ever read were from Pete’s parents, asking him not to come back to North Haven in the summers with his Negro wife, and trying so hard to explain that it wasn’t because any of them were racist. The correspondence was eloquent and awkward by turns, and so hot with love and shame the stationery almost smoldered. This was all before Pete’s career as a Wall Street architect, an amateur historian, a long-haul backpacker, and a legendary drinker. Which brought him into Alcoholics Anonymous where he met Celine. The man was definitely a strange cat.