Huck shifted into Celia’s space on the mattress. His sleep had been punctuated by dream arguments that left him exhausted when the bed had creaked its alarm that morning. By the time he’d said, “C’mere,” Celia was already half dressed. She’d returned to him just long enough to kiss his forehead.
Huck wished this friend of hers could have fled farther than the neighboring town, somewhere beyond the operational radius of Celia’s desire. He had never thought he’d find a downside to Celia’s determination, but here it was. Her insistence that good could come of her visit to Leanne was no different, in his mind, than believing in fairies. Such unyielding persistence was the closest Celia came to the bully she claimed to have once been.
Warren and Noreen, earlier risers both, would already be waiting with fresh coffee. Huck could picture Warren at the stove minding a pan of eggs while Noreen sliced fruit, Saturday’s ritual breakfast. In the early years there had been bacon, until Warren had started monitoring his cholesterol. Its disappearance had coincided with Huck’s own first concessions to age—the stretching needed before and after a pickup basketball game, the supreme importance of getting to bed no later than ten thirty on a school night—measures that had revoked any lingering belief in his immortal youth. Around the same time that Huck conceded his afternoon candy bar to a slowing metabolism, he had attended a three-day teaching conference in Wisconsin where he met a teacher from North Dakota—a state he was in no danger of ever visiting—who had the most beautifully unruly hair and an adorable history teacher’s crush on Alexander Hamilton. It would have been perfectly safe; they didn’t even know each other’s last names. The final night of the conference, Huck had paced his hotel room pondering the ways in which a one-night stand might impact all his nights to come. In the end he had called Celia, ascended into telephonic perversity, and fallen asleep a happy man.
Huck stepped into yesterday’s pants and slipped on a fresh shirt, debating whether to go online now, or after appearing downstairs. He decided it was less rude to delay than to disappear once he had come down, but he would need to be careful. If he arrived too late, the fruit salad would be portioned into individual bowls and wrapped in plastic. Noreen and Warren would be sipping coffee before empty, waiting plates, their apparent happiness at the timing of Huck’s appearance belied by the dryness of the eggs.
Huck crept down the hall to prolong the impression he was still in bed. Entering Jeremy’s old room felt like a violation of their tacit friendship. Nine Christmases ago, when Celia’s brother had been attending community college and daily NA meetings, Jeremy and Huck had each recognized in the other a fellow survivor of a chancy adolescence. Huck knew he had been spared Jeremy’s battles only due to the random calibration of his endorphin receptors and plain, dumb luck. Having scaled and descended different cliff faces seemed less important than their both having returned alive.
As Huck waited for the computer to boot, he spotted two familiar books on an abandoned bookshelf, a fistful of multisided dice gathering dust beside them. The mounted cavalier on the cover of Jeremy’s old D&D Player’s Handbook was as familiar to Huck as his own face, the griffin on the Monster Manual an old friend. Huck blew dust from the dice and remembered when resting them in his palm had felt like holding precious gems. When he returned his attention to the computer, he felt like he’d been welcomed.
Huck hadn’t expected so many images at the art gallery’s Web site, and had begun to worry he’d somehow missed the ones Celia was talking about, when there they were. Jocelyn Linke’s figures were suggestive of bodies rather than imitative: they did not always have the right number of fingers; some of them had extra hands, or peepholes installed in their torsos. The realism of the girls’ faces jarred with their bodies, their heads more precise than anything below the neck. The first piece showed four girls walking in formation around a fifth, whose arms were crossed as if tied. In the second, two girls argued with a vehemence that could have been funny if their faces hadn’t looked so grim. One of these girls echoed one of Celia’s studio portraits on the family picture wall—chin-length hair tucked behind the ears, nose just beginning to elongate to its final, regal length—but the exaggerated ferocity of the features turned the face into a weapon.
In the last image, a girl with a dark ponytail sat apart from two others, one of them Celia, her face crossed by a grief that reminded Huck of that famous painting by Munch, expressing the sort of deep emotion sighted only rarely, like some terrible comet, at moments of greatest loss. It made Huck wish he had been there. Never mind that he would have been ten and living in Cleveland, over a decade removed from his and Celia’s first meeting. He envied what Josie had seen. The shame of this did not lessen his want, and the realization that he might eventually get his wish briefly eclipsed the fact that it would come at Celia’s expense. As long as they were still together when life’s built-in schedule of loss inflicted such grief on Celia again, Huck would fulfill this basest urge to own every aspect of his lover.
Huck turned off the computer. He was exactly on time—at the stairwell he heard Noreen setting out the breakfast things. He would peaceably submit to her proxy mothering and Warren’s music soliloquies. Coming to terms with his putative in-laws had been like making peace with his parents, only more efficient: compressed into the span of a few Christmases and entirely without their knowledge, Huck had traversed unquestioning approval and reflexive rejection to arrive at acceptance. The experience had reinforced his notion that adulthood didn’t change people so much as smooth their edges, but now he wondered if there wasn’t a chrysalis model of maturity. Perhaps the child transformed itself into an entirely different organism, its remnants discarded with the ruptured cocoon. Huck wondered if the Celia he knew was recognizable to friends who had only known her earlier incarnation, or if they were as baffled by her now as he was by the girl she claimed to have once been.