The Truth About Celia by Kevin Brockmeier Read Free Book Online Page B

the inside jokes she used to know, the movies she has seen. By now Celia is only a few whitened memories to her and a blurred feeling of sadness. The bus slows to take a speed bump, and, as always, as soon as the front wheels have thumped over, the bus driver accelerates, so that when the back wheels hit, the girls are bucked into the air, landing hard on their tailbones. When Kristen looks out the back window, she sees a thick band of clouds at the horizon, pressed together like rolls of fat. They are a charcoal black, though the rest of the sky is still open and blue. A police car glides in next to the bus at a stoplight, and the boy in front of her pumps his arm in the air as though the car were a tractor trailer, trying to get the police officer to sound his siren.
    Kimson Perry gives the siren a single clipped
b-woop
and then flashes his revolving lights, nodding at the boy on the bus, who is offering him the thumbs-up sign. When the stoplight changes he shoots along the reservoir toward home. It is nearly four-thirty, and he still has to shower and change for the memorial service. At the head of his block stands the Second Friendship Baptist Church, a small brick building with a cross on the roof that rotates in the wind like a weather vane, and as he turns the corner he brakes to read the signboard on the lawn:
    NOTHING MAKES GOD LAUGH LIKE WHEN WE TELL HIM OUR PLANS FOR THE FUTURE
    As usual, he finds himself framing an argument against it. He is sure that what the sign means to suggest is that we don’t need to worry, we’re in good hands, but there is a certain thoughtless brutality to the message that disturbs him. After all, there are people in this world who know nothing but suffering. Their plans are all they have to live for. Which is to say that the message fails to give solace to the very people who might need it most. What kind of God would deny us so much, even the comfort of our wishes, he wonders. Kimson pulls into his driveway and unlocks his front door and then washes and shaves and tightens himself into his shirt and tie. More than 750,000 children are reported missing every year, but almost all of them are found within hours or days. Celia has been missing since March of 1997, and though he would never tell Janet this, he can’t imagine that she isn’t dead. What makes the case so goddamn frustrating is how little there is to go on, how little there ever was. There were no clues, no witnesses. She was playing in her own backyard. She had no reason to run away, and no one to run to. It has been more than a year since the tip-line has taken a phone call, and if it weren’t for Janet, he is certain he would have allowed the case to go quietly inactive by now. He brushes his teeth, rinses the collar of foam from the bristles, and afterward drives to the pavilion, where the crowd for the memorial service is gathering. Janet is already there, standing beside her husband, and when Kimson hugs her hello, her lips graze his cheek and one of her knees knocks against him and he smells the peachlike fragrance of her shampoo. He is embarrassed to find himself becoming aroused.
    Janet squeezes Kimson by the muscles of his upper arms and thanks him for coming, and when she lets him go, he takes her hand and says that of course he will always be there for her, she should know that, slipping his thumb ever so flickeringly into and out of her palm, like a minnow. She has been friends with Kimson for years now, sitting two chairs over from him in the community orchestra, where she plays clarinet and he plays contrabassoon, but ever since she lost her daughter she has spoken to him almost daily. He will even phone her in the evening occasionally—worried, he will say, that he hasn’t heard from her during his shift. She has seen so many people this afternoon, though, accepted so many token condolences, that she doesn’t have the energy to think about that thumb and what it might mean. She still loves her husband