Read Online The False Friend by Myla Goldberg - Free Book Online Page B

you mean when you said that you and Daddy didn’t want to do me more harm?” She understood why her mother had asked her to come. The windowless walls, the carpeting, and the closed office door created the feeling of a cloister, the world within kept separate from everything else.
    Her mother sighed. “After what happened to Djuna, you got quiet. And not just about that. You used to love to talk … to the mailman, the doctor, your stuffed animals at naptime. When you were very little, I even recall you having a long conversation with a button.”
    “I don’t remember,” Celia said.
    “It was like a tap had been turned off. No more coming home and going right into your day, or chattering about food or TV shows or the neighbors. Now you had to be asked first, and even then you didn’t always answer. Your father never forgave himself, said we helped to turn you from a parakeet into a regular mute swan. Then came junior high, and all of a sudden you were busy. All those clubs and meetings. I worried at first that you were taking on too much, but your schoolworkdidn’t suffer and you seemed happy again. I was so grateful that I made sure not to do or say anything that might shut you back down. I suppose we should have gotten help for you back then. But at the time, I thought you were dealing with it in your own way. Kids are so resilient, and I—”
    Celia shook her head. “This isn’t about what you didn’t do.”
    “But as a parent, as
your
parent, I can’t help thinking about what I might have done better. You’ll find this out for yourself, someday, when you and Huck—”
    Celia shifted in her chair and Noreen waved her hands over her desk as if trying to dispel smoke.
    “What I’m trying to say,” Noreen amended, “is that even though I know it’s too late, I’m ready to hear whatever you want to say.”
    Celia looked at her mother, unable to begin. Before she left Chicago she had thought that, having told Huck, the most difficult task lay behind her. But in the worst of all possible worlds—the one in which those she loved could not reconcile themselves to what she had done—Huck could always find somebody else.
    Celia took a moment to memorize the softness around her mother’s eyes and mouth. “Mommy,” she said. She looked away. “I don’t know how to do this.”
    “Sweetie,” her mother said. “Oh god, sweetheart. I’m so sorry. You’re being so brave, coming back to face this.”
    Celia shook her head. “That’s not it.” She took a breath. “I lied.” She turned to face her mother. “I lied, okay?”
    Noreen cocked her head, as if to hear better. “Darling, what do you mean?”
    “I mean Djuna,” Celia said, the name coming out louder than she intended. “I mean what really happened.”
    The room was so small, everything in it so carefully placed, that Celia felt as if she were inhabiting a shoe-box diorama.
    “The man, the car,” Celia said. “Djuna wasn’t … taken.”
    “Of course she was, sweetheart.”
    Celia shook her head. “I made it up.”
    Noreen made a sound that was almost a laugh. “You didn’t, darling. You saw it. You and Becky and Leanne and Josie.”
    Celia closed her eyes, opened them again. “No one saw anything because there was nothing to see. I said there was a car, and they believed me.”
    Celia recognized Noreen’s expression from one of her early college visits home. Jeremy had come to dinner wearing headphones and sunglasses, and their mother had watched him as if he were a strange child standing too close to the street, one she was uncertain she had the authority to pull back from the curb. Noreen looked at Celia this same way now.
    “That doesn’t make any sense, dear,” she said. “You must be confusing what happened with something else.”
    Celia took a breath. Over the course of countless mental retellings, the story’s bones had acquired flesh. “I don’t know what we were fighting about,” she said. “Only that it was