Peter Heller: Celine

“Well, that was the part I wasn’t sure I could get through. Not so bad after all. I think I realized as I was writing it that every family is screwed up once you scratch the surface. After all, how many little girls before me had an evil stepmom? Ha!”

That was one way of looking at it.

“It never got easier with Danette. I kept trying to think of her as a mother, but it was too painful, and as young as I was, I think I understood that some relationships are as inevitable and unchangeable as the seasons. I gave up. I spent time with Pop whenever I could, I kept a protected space in my heart for him, for us, but I had to be almost surreptitious. I lived downstairs, I went to school, I grew up. And then something happened.

“Thank you for reading this. I’d like to tell you the rest in person—the reason why I looked you up. I’ll be here until tomorrow afternoon. If you think you have the stamina—there’s not much more—I’ll run down to see you.

“With gratitude and affection, Gabriela.”

And her cell number. Celine set down the letter and reached for the phone on her bedside table and called.

Gabriela literally ran. She met Celine on the dock at the same spot they’d been two nights ago, but now she was in pale green running shorts, training shoes, and a fitted T-shirt of an Alaskan salmon colored in blocks like a Rothko. Fine beads of sweat misted her cheeks.

A warm, mid-September late morning, the dock bustling with tourists. Celine said, “You didn’t bring the file.” She stretched up and kissed the girl on both cheeks.

“I’m sick of carrying it around. I thought that if you wanted to see anything I’d copy and send it. I’d like to hold on to the originals anyway. Where were we?”

“You had your own apartment. You were all of eight.”

“Okay. Whew.” Gabriela blew a stray hair out of her face. She leaned on the railing and watched snowy gulls gyre out from under the bridge. “I missed Amana terribly. But I didn’t feel—I don’t know—like an outcast or anything. When you’re little you accept things, as I said. I guess I thought that this was something that just happens to some little girls. They get their own apartment. They cook their own meals. Some days I even got myself to school. Thinking about it now, that was crazy—”

“Back up. You didn’t join them for dinner? You didn’t go up for breakfast?”

“I had a key. It was a big, pale blue Victorian with a few apartments, it wasn’t like it was supermax or anything. And I did sometimes. Dinner, never breakfast, because in the morning they were usually hungover and a little mean. She was, and Pop in his morning-after fugue was helpless to protect me. So I ate cold cereal for breakfast, I mean I had a fridge and all, and Danette made sure I had generic cornflakes and ramen and cheap hamburger. She clearly didn’t want me to show up at school looking starved and then have Social Services come in. Remember she was a registered nurse, she had a professional reputation, and I guess she had her pride. A monster never sees itself as a monster. Remember poor Grendel.”

“Right. Poor Grendel.”

“I had a step stool, the kind little kids use to brush their teeth, and I had it by the stove so I could stir the noodles and cans of soup. I learned to fry eggs. For my ninth birthday Danette got me an omelet pan.”

“What did your father get you?”

“A trip to the Ice Capades.”

“Did Danette come too?”

“Yes, of course. She would have never let us go off to something as celebratory as the Ice Capades alone. It would be like letting Pop have some kind of ghost date with Amana. I know, it’s so fucked up. He couldn’t get three seats together because of course he remembered and got the tickets at the very last minute, so I sat in front of them. Pop bought me like three cotton candies and a tub of popcorn because I guess he felt guilty and I got sick. I threw up on the sidewalk and Danette threw a fit.”

“Wow.”

“I know. But before I got sick, Pop used his press pass and we went backstage and I met the Hula-Hoop lady.”

“Who was that?”

“She was a Romanian, tall and blond and sequined, terribly glamorous, perfectly in the Olympic figure-skater vein, but she did her act with Hula-Hoops! She could twirl, like, a dozen, on her arms and everything, while she skated. I thought she was the most queenly thing I’d ever seen. I still have a picture Pop took of me in my pink princess dress with a plastic tiara on my head staring up in unadulterated awe at this six-foot ice queen.”

“This all sounds like some strange nightmare. It almost makes me woozy.”

“I know. Please don’t hate my father. I’m coming to understand. That he did the best he could. I’m convinced that he loved my mother more than anything on earth. More, even. With more love than can exist in the universe. It was too much. To lose her. Which makes his running with me up the trail even more heroic.” Her tone shifted. It deepened and saddened like rain when the wind stops and it falls straight down through trees. “I think he tried to live every day just so he wouldn’t die.”

I think he tried to live every day just so he wouldn’t die.

The line would become a refrain Celine couldn’t shake, like the chorus of a song. That was one way of putting it. Why some of us put one foot in front of the other. Celine had done enough of that in her own life. She wasn’t much older than the little girl in this story when she lost, for all intents and purposes, her own father. And just a few years later, something much more devastating.

Now, on the dock beneath the Brooklyn Bridge, warmed from a breakfast cooked by the man she loved most in the world, Celine listened to Gabriela and could not countenance the image of the child on a step stool at the stove, age eight, alone, stirring herself a pot full of ramen or minestrone. Taking it to the table, pouring it into a bowl, eating it, alone. Alone alone alone.

“Okay,” Celine said finally. “Tell me the rest.”

“There’s not a lot more to tell. That’s how it was. Danette tossed the photo of my mom on the ferry into a drawer where I retrieved it and hung it up over my bed. Right where some people hang a crucifix. Pop traveled a lot and the witch and I settled into a mistrustful détente. She kept me fed and clothed and walked me to school when Dad was home and too hungover. I think she was afraid that I would get bigger in some growth spurt and wreak unimaginable revenge. I don’t know. She treated me like a dangerous reptile, with respect and wariness. She was all hip sway and boobs at the school and she flirted with the young dads outside, and I don’t know for sure but I sensed that she had affairs with a few of them. Anyway, when I saw how they responded to her I wanted to kill her.”

“Right.”

“The years passed. Pop traveled and I heard rumors that he did work for the government, clandestine work, but he always laughed it off. I’m still not sure, but there was one thing—” She stopped short, shook herself off.

Celine raised an eyebrow. “One thing?”

The girl shivered. “Nothing. Sometimes I think my imagination runs away with me.”

Celine let it go. She knew when and when not to press.

Gabriela said, “He and I developed ways of communicating that circumvented her rage. Like when he gave me one of his favorite new photographs in a little frame—of a horse, a Chilean cowboy, a regatta—he always slipped another picture behind it. Hidden in the frame, behind the backing. Of Amana. Of the three of us camping or in a canoe. I don’t know where he had these stashed, but it was his way of saying, ‘We are still a family. Don’t forget.’