Читать книгу What We Remember - Michael Thomas Ford - Страница 16

1983

Celeste looked at her watch. It was almost two in the morning.

They’re going to kill me, she thought as she eased open the front door, praying that it wouldn’t squeak and betray her arrival. They almost never used the front door, preferring the one in the kitchen, and she’d chosen it because it was closer to the stairs. With a little luck she could make it upstairs without anyone seeing her. Probably everyone would be asleep anyway, but her father sometimes kept odd hours. And he was the one she least wanted to run into.

To her immense relief the door hinges didn’t squeak. She peered inside and, finding the living room empty, slipped inside and gently pushed the door shut behind her. She had a clear shot to the stairs, and had one foot on the lowest step when she heard someone say, “Did you think I wouldn’t find out?”

It was her mother’s voice, angry and clear. Celeste turned, ready with an excuse, but found herself looking at empty space. Her mother wasn’t in the room.

“Well?” She heard the voice again. This time, having had a moment to collect herself, Celeste realized that it was coming from the kitchen.

“You don’t know what you’re talking about, Ada.” Her father. And he sounded angry.

Instinct told her to go to her room and forget about what she’d heard. After all, she was the one coming in well past midnight. If she was caught she would get the grilling of her life, and she doubted her parents would buy the explanation that she and Paul had been watching a movie at his house and fallen asleep on the couch. They didn’t much like Paul as it was; if they suspected that she and he were, as her mother said, “doing” something, then all hell would break loose.

Again she started up the stairs.

“Don’t tell me I’m imagining things, Daniel,” her mother said. “I saw the way you looked at her.”

Celeste paused, and this time curiosity got the better of her. She turned and walked slowly toward the kitchen. If she remained in the living room but kept close to the swinging doors that opened into the kitchen she would be able to hear everything clearly. And if she got caught, she could always pretend she’d come down for a glass of milk. This was, she knew, a bad plan, but she could probably fudge her way through if she had to.

She crept close to the door, stopping and leaning against the wall just outside the kitchen. She didn’t dare sneak a glance inside, but from her vantage point she could see through the door slats. Her father was seated at the table, still dressed in his uniform. Her mother was invisible to her, and Celeste assumed she must be standing by the refrigerator, which was on the other side of the room.

“Ada, you’re making a whole lot out of nothing,” her father said. His voice was weary, as if the argument had been going on for a long time.

“Am I?” her mother countered. “Are you telling me nothing ever went on between the two of you?”

Her father sighed. “All that was a very long time ago, Ada. You know that.”

Celeste stiffened, shocked to hear her father’s words. Had he had an affair? It certainly sounded like it. She held her breath, waiting to hear more.

“I want to believe you, Daniel,” her mother said. “I do. But I…” Her words trailed off.

“But you don’t,” her father said. “Just say it. You don’t trust me.”

“Don’t put words in my mouth,” her mother countered.

Her father gave a short, sharp laugh. “I’m not putting them there,” he said. “They’re already there. You’re just afraid to spit them out.”

There was the sound of something being dropped into the sink. A coffee cup, Celeste thought vaguely. It was followed by the sound of running water. Then her mother said, “This is getting us nowhere. I’m going to bed.”

The sound of feet coming toward the doorway sent Celeste scurrying for the stairs. She got there just as her mother pushed open the kitchen doors. Moving as quickly as she could, she stayed just far enough ahead of her mother that she wasn’t seen. As Celeste opened the door to her bedroom, her mother reached the top of the stairs. Celeste shut the door and leaned against it, her heart pounding.

Afraid to turn on the light lest someone see it underneath the door, she undressed in the dark. She wanted to brush her teeth, but the bathroom was a dangerous walk down the hall, and she didn’t dare risk it, at least not until she was fairly certain that her mother and father were asleep.

But she hadn’t heard her father come upstairs. Why would he? she asked herself. If he and her mother were having a serious fight, chances were he would either sleep on the couch or go to the station and sleep there. He’d done it before, although Celeste had never heard her parents fight over something as serious as what she’d just heard them discussing.

Pulling a T-shirt over her head, she got into bed and lay in the darkness. The moon was near full, and once her eyes adjusted to the darkness she could actually see fairly well. Above her desk the members of Duran Duran stared down at her with their sexy pouts. The giant stuffed bear Paul had won for her at a carnival sat in a corner, his enormous head tilted to one side and one of her bras draped across his shoulder. It was all familiar and comforting.

Yet she was distressed by what she’d heard her parents talking about. Was her father really having an affair? She couldn’t imagine it. Not that she thought about it a lot—or ever—but the idea of either of her parents having sex was kind of repulsive. They were her parents. She just couldn’t imagine them naked, fumbling around the way she and Paul sometimes did. She especially couldn’t imagine them doing it in the bedroom right down the hall from hers.

She pushed the image out of her mind and returned to the question of whether her father was cheating on her mother. From the sound of things, he might be. Then again, her mother sometimes blew things way out of proportion. Maybe she was doing it again.

I don’t know, Celeste argued with herself. That didn’t sound like their usual fights. Of course, cheating was a little more serious than her father forgetting an anniversary or not calling when he was going to be late. This was major. Like divorce major. Or take the gun from the bedside table and shoot someone major.

You’re being dramatic, she told herself.

She rolled over, hugging her pillow as she thought about her night with Paul. She thought she might be in love with him. No, she knew she was in love with him. After all, she’d let him be her first, and she wouldn’t have done that with someone she didn’t love. And he’d been so gentle with her. It had hardly hurt at all, and even though she hadn’t come, it had felt wonderful lying in Paul’s arms afterward.

She wished her parents liked him more than they did. She knew they both hoped she would break up with him and date someone more suitable. Suitable. That was her mother’s word, the one she’d used when she’d suggested that Celeste was too young to date seriously. “I’m sure Paul is a lot of fun,” she said. “But you shouldn’t settle on one boy. If you do, you won’t find someone suitable.”

“Suitable for what?” Celeste had asked her.

The answer, of course, was to marry. But Celeste wasn’t thinking about marriage, at least not in any real way. It wasn’t like she was picking out a dress or making a bridesmaid list or anything. She was just enjoying being in love with Paul. If she married him, she married him. It wasn’t like when her parents were her age and you had to marry the first guy you slept with. Or marry him just so you could sleep with him, she thought.

But what if she and Paul did get married? She tried to imagine them living together, maybe having a couple of kids. She couldn’t really see it. Then she tried to imagine Paul was cheating on her. She did know what that felt like. Her last boyfriend, Gary, had cheated on her with that whore from Elksville. Susan. He’d met her at a keg party. He’d said it was just a one-time thing, and Celeste had forgiven him. But then she’d found Susan’s coat in the back of his car a few weeks later, along with a used rubber, and Gary had admitted to seeing her again.

Paul wouldn’t do anything like that. He cared about her too much. But what if he did? she asked herself. What would you do?

With Gary she had been mad enough that she’d spread a rumor that he had a really tiny dick. The truth was she hadn’t liked him enough to really want to hurt him (at least not physically). But Paul was a different story. If she found out Paul was cheating on her, she wasn’t sure what she would do. Could she really get mad enough that she would try to kill him?

She’d seen it happen. A year earlier her father had been called to a trailer just outside of town. A man had stabbed his wife to death with a kitchen knife, then shot himself in the head with a shotgun. Only he’d missed, and the shot had blown off half of his face and not killed him. When he finally healed to where he could talk, he’d told the cops that he’d killed his wife because she was sleeping with his best friend. He’d meant to kill the friend, too, but the guy had run off somewhere. They never did find him, but it didn’t much matter. The husband was in jail anyhow.

Celeste didn’t think she could do something like that to Paul. Nor did she think her mother could ever do it. Then again, the man who now had half a face was also the father of two beautiful little girls and a deacon at his church. In every article about the killing, his neighbors said they couldn’t believe he had done such a thing because he was “such a nice guy.”

Suddenly she was worried, not so much that her mother might kill her father but just that their marriage might be unraveling. It wasn’t like they were the perfect American family, but they were pretty happy. She always felt sorry for her friends whose parents had split up, and even though she didn’t always get along with her mother and father, it was reassuring to know that they loved her and loved each other.

It was just a fight, she told herself. Her mother was just overreacting to something. In a few days she would forget all about it and things would be back to normal. That’s how it always was.

She realized suddenly that she very badly had to pee. She tried to ignore it, but eventually she resigned herself to the fact that, without going, she would never get to sleep. She threw back the covers, got out of bed, and opened her door. The hall was dark. No light came from downstairs, and the narrow space beneath her parents’ bedroom door was dark. She breathed a sigh of relief. Whatever had caused the fight, it now appeared to have passed.

She padded down the hallway, the rug soft beneath her feet. At the bathroom she stepped inside and shut the door before turning on the light. Cursing the male members of her family, she lowered the toilet seat, pushed her panties down, and sat. Immediately she felt better as the pressure on her bladder lessened. And I can brush my teeth, she thought. Her mouth tasted like beer and Paul. She blushed at this last thought, but it also made her happy.

She was tearing some sheets from the roll of tissue when she heard the muffled sound of someone crying. The bathroom was between her room and her parents’ room, and she knew from experience that people in either room could hear what was going on in the bathroom and that in the bathroom you could hear noises coming from either of the bedrooms. She’d once heard James playing with himself and had teased him mercilessly until he’d threatened to tape-record her using the toilet and play it for all of his friends.

She knew that what she was hearing was her mother crying. It was loud enough that Celeste thought her mother must really be sobbing. Hearing it made her sad and self-conscious. Was she supposed to go in and comfort her mother? Should she just go back to her room and pretend she hadn’t heard anything? If she flushed the toilet or ran the water, her mother would likely hear it and know that someone was listening to her.

She decided not to flush. James and Billy were always forgetting, and if anyone noticed they would blame one or the other of the boys. But she still wanted to brush her teeth. They felt funny, and she knew her breath would be horrible in the morning. After pulling her panties up, she opened the medicine cabinet and looked inside. She took out a bottle of mouthwash, opened it, and took a swig. As she swished the liquid around in her mouth, she recapped the bottle and put it away. After a minute she leaned down and spit the mouthwash into the sink, getting as much right into the drain as possible. The rest she wiped up with some more tissue, which she crumpled up and threw into the wastebasket beneath the sink.

Behind the wall her mother was still crying. The more Celeste listened, the more she wanted to knock on the bedroom door and see if her mother wanted to talk. But she just couldn’t. It was her mother who talked to her when things went wrong, not the other way around. Her mother was the adult. What could Celeste possibly say to her that would help?

She put the toilet seat back up to make it look more like one of the boys had been in there. Then she turned off the light and opened the door. Again she walked quickly to her bedroom, away from the sound of her mother crying. The air was chilly now, and she got into bed and pulled the covers up. She was tired, and although what she’d seen and heard that night still troubled her, her thoughts turned to her own romantic happiness. After a restless twenty minutes she had forgotten all about her parents’ marital difficulties and fell off to sleep to dream about being with Paul in a sun-dappled glade. His strong hands caressed her breasts, and as he kissed her he whispered in her ear. “Everything’s going to be all right.”