Free The False Friend by Myla Goldberg

always like that, one of us storming off.” She had told Huck with his arm draped around her like a rescue blanket, the steady warmth of him helping to lead the words from her mouth. Celia wouldn’t have wanted such physical charity from her mother, but she had not anticipated the loneliness of a single, straight-backed chair. “Djuna ran into the woods fast, like itwas easy for her, but where I went in, there was no clear place to walk. It was all dead branches and overgrown bushes. If anyone was going to fall, it should have been me.”
    After she had finished, mother and daughter sat in their respective chairs, not quite looking at each other. An art calendar pinned to the wall behind Noreen’s head displayed a print of one of Monet’s lily ponds. Beside it was the same poster for Cornell that had decorated Celia’s bedroom until a week before her high school graduation.
    “You’re telling me that Djuna was hurt,” Noreen began slowly. “That she fell in the woods—”
    “Into a hole,” Celia confirmed.
    “—and that you never told anyone?”
    “That’s right,” she whispered. She had been crying for a while, but only now noticed the tissue box at the corner of her mother’s desk, placed at the perfect reach.
    “Celie,” her mother coaxed. “The police searched those woods. The police searched everywhere. They didn’t find a thing.”
    “She fell into a hole,” Celia repeated, because only a hole would explain the suddenness of it, the way Djuna had been there one moment and gone the next. Perhaps a ditch or some sort of abandoned well. This was adult logic, applied to childhood images belatedly remanded to her custody. This was the best that she could do. “They weren’t looking for that,” she explained. “They were looking for a man and a car.”
    “Celia, listen to me,” Noreen urged, as if trying to amend a child’s fear of the dark. “They searched. Everybody searched. Your father searched. I searched. We all combed every bladeof grass and looked behind every tree along the road and beyond. If Djuna had been there—”
    If anything, the softness around her mother’s eyes and mouth had deepened. Celia could not remember the last time she had seen her mother’s face so brimming with kindness.
    “You don’t believe me,” Celia said, winded by the possibility. In all her mind’s ceaseless variations of this moment, she had not imagined this.
    “You were just a little girl,” Noreen apologized. “A little girl forced to handle a terrible thing all by herself because her parents—” Noreen was the one crying now, her tears dampening the fabric of her blouse.
    Celia looked at the glass thermometer on her mother’s desk, the colored globes floating in place.
    “At least with you I had the excuse that I didn’t know what I was doing yet,” Noreen said, shaking her head. “At least with you I wasn’t in the middle of getting my degree.”
    “You don’t believe me,” Celia repeated, for herself as much as for her mother.
    Noreen looked into her daughter’s eyes. “I believe that’s what you believe,” she affirmed.
    “That’s not the same thing,” said Celia.
    “I can’t believe it, sweetheart. Not knowing what I know.”
    “What could you possibly know?” she argued. “You weren’t there!”
    “Darling, do you remember talking to the police?”
    Celia shook her head.
    “Well, I do,” Noreen said. “They came to the house, a man and a woman. There was only one woman on the force backthen and she was home sick that day but they called her in because they wanted a woman to talk to you girls. They sat down with the two of us at the dining room table. They asked if you wanted to talk to them alone but you said no, you wanted me there. You’d been holding my hand from the moment you’d gotten home and you didn’t let go, except to go to the bathroom and to eat. For the next month I had to sit next to you in bed, holding your hand until you fell asleep. They had