Peter Heller: Celine

Pete cooked up his Wicked Mac and Cheese, with a side of optimistic sautéed bok choy, and tiny side salads, and the three ate mostly in easy silence. Gabriela seemed happy for the respite. One of Pete’s other talents was to allow long conversations to be nonverbal and to have his companions be comfortable with it. They finished, made a fresh pot of coffee, and put up the dishes. Celine and Gabriela walked slowly out onto the rough planks of the dock across the street and leaned against the railing. Night had settled. The incoming tide was tearing against the pilings, and the lights of Manhattan and of the great bridge were as grand and familiar to Celine as any constellation.

Gabriela said, “You can almost still smell it. Like embers.”

Celine waited. The Towers, their absence, would have had an effect on the girl, too. On everyone… she feels the dark / Encroachment of that old catastrophe, / As a calm darkens among water-lights. Those gorgeous lines from Stevens kept surfacing, like the refrain of a pop song.

Gabriela said, “I’m torn. The time with you has just flown. I haven’t felt so good in someone’s company since I can remember.”

Celine felt the same way. She also knew the grip of an irresistible story. “There’s so much,” Gabriela said and glanced at her watch. “I promised Callie we’d play Scrabble at eight.” She turned to Celine. “It was our ritual at Sarah Lawrence, every night before finals.” She smiled. “Other students would be cramming and we’d have these killer games, head-to-head. It was our way of staying calm, I guess.”

“You want to keep the date?”

“I want to figure out how to tell the rest. Without—”

Without eviscerating the people in the world you love the most, Celine thought. She knew a little about that.

“Can you give me a day or two?”

“Of course.” Nothing surprised her. So many of her clients had come right to the brink. “I’m on the hook, you know.”

Gabriela’s smile brightened. Celine wondered if she had carried her own grief with as much grace as this young woman. Gabriela said, “I left my file on the counter. I’ll just go pick it up and say thank you to Pete.”

Hank lived on a lake in Denver, on the west side of town. He was a magazine journalist, a closet poet, and until recently he had shared his house with his wife, Kim. He was also an outdoorsman, something he attributed, oddly, to the influence of his cosmopolitan mother. Well, he was named after her father, Harry, who was a legendary sportsman. Over many summers it was she who had taught him to fish, and to swim, and to make the calls of a bobwhite, a whip-poor-will, a barn owl. Hank’s father had taught him to throw a football and to write a sonnet, and had read Jack London and Faulkner aloud to him when Hank was a very young child, but it was Celine who taught him to love nature in all her moods. And so, though he lived in the city, it gave him great solace to sit on his front porch and see almost nothing but grass, trees, water, mountains. His favorite part of the day was to drink coffee out there as the day was breaking, and watch the first light flush the snows of the Continental Divide. He was doing that when he heard the phone ring inside.

“It’s Mombo.”

“It’s early for you. Even for New York.”

“I can’t sleep.”

Hank braced himself. That could be a prelude to many things, the best of which was the story of a stubborn case. Other possibilities included anxiety about his marriage or his next assignment. Or simply that she was too brokenhearted. She hadn’t been herself for months. Hank was one of the rare young men who was fascinated by his mother. Her life often seemed much more interesting than his own, which he thought was an inversion of the natural order, and may have been part of the reason he got into writing adventure stories. Well, he had also inherited his mother’s restlessness. He refilled his mug and took the phone back out to the Adirondack chair.

“And?” he prompted.

“I was wondering how you were doing,” she said.

“You mean am I eating a vegetable?”

“That, too.”

“You should try one, it’s kind of fun. Full of vitamins.”

“Hank—”

“Kim’ll come back, Mombo. I think.”

Silence. His mother cleared her throat. “Are you—”

“Drinking? Not yet.”

“Please don’t say that.”

“Sorry.”

“Well, I just had the most interesting talk with a young woman exactly your age. Very pretty.”

“Whoa! Are you trying to set me up? Has it gotten to that?” He almost laughed.

“No, no. I just—”

Hank set his cup down on the arm of the chair. The mug said Trouts Fly Fishing and had a watercolor graphic of a speckled rainbow leaping for a mayfly. It was corny but he liked it. It gave him some comfort, especially on waking to a half-empty bed.

“This woman called you?”

“Yes.”

“She wanted to tell you a story?”

“Yes.”

“She wanted to hire you?”

“I’m not sure. Yes, probably. I haven’t heard the full story, but there’s something about it.”

“If she does—want to hire you—will you take it?”

“That’s what I’m not sure about. It’s been an exhausting year. Are you eating regular meals?” she said.

“Mombo, I made green chili yesterday. And I got an assignment from Brad at BusinessWeek. About the surfing industry, go figure.”

“Oh, great. How’s the poetry?”

He deflected the question. “I caught a twelve-pound carp below the stadium yesterday.”

“In the Platte? Wow. On what? Remember when you took me down there and we caught a body?” She had taught him to throw big streamers in the Ausable when he could barely hold a rod, and a few years ago in Denver they had snagged the body of a young man one morning. She had. That was another story.

“How could I forget? I got the carp on a Clouser crayfish. Number eight. Mombo?”

“Yes?”

“Don’t worry,” he said.

“Why on earth would I ever worry about you?” She kissed the phone and hung up.

The second morning after Gabriela’s visit, Celine woke to breakfast in bed. She had dreamed of a big hospital on an empty gray beach. The hospital didn’t seem to have any doctors and there were hundreds of empty rooms. Musical scores were taped onto the green doors instead of charts.

She sat up and felt for her oversize tortoiseshell reading glasses.

“Oh, Pete.” She reached up for a kiss. On the silver tray was a soft-boiled egg in its cup, the tiny spoon, toast, marmalade, coffee, and an envelope. On the envelope her name, in blue ink, in a free and flowing hand. She ate the egg, drank half a cup of coffee, and then opened the letter with the penknife she kept on the bedside table. Inside were five or six sheets of fine, pale blue stationery, handwritten, and she didn’t have to flip to the end to know who it was from.

“It was under the door,” Pete said. “She must have come very early.” Celine heard a trace of respect. For some reason Pete always admired people who got up even earlier than he did. She read:

“Dear Celine, Thank you. For the wonderful dinner and for your kind attention. Your willingness to listen. It means the world to me.

“I was telling you about the death of my mother. What happened next. Easier, I think, if I write it. After the accident, Pop tried. He did. The next two months after the funeral are a blur. I remember that we flew out east and spent a few weeks up in the Adirondacks at a cabin a friend had loaned us. Near Keene Valley. We spent a lot of time swimming in icy-cold water beneath a waterfall and we didn’t say much. I remember the way these tiny bubbles came up through the black depths of a stone pothole.” Celine let a warm memory overtake her: She might have swum in that very pool, it was probably on Johns Brook, beside the first lean-to shelter. She so loved that country. She had taught Hank to fish there, and to start a fire, before he entered first grade. She continued reading: “He took me canoeing on Saranac Lake and we caught fish. When school started, I know he must have been getting drunk at night because he forgot to wake me up.