Searching For Celia Part 19

I struggled for a long time deciding how best to honor Celia. She had offered the ultimate sacrifice, been willing to give up her life for my own. Ultimately I purchased a burned-out old factory and the surrounding brownfield on Chicago's Far South Side and invested $250,000 to build the Marguerite Alderton Memorial Women's Center. Celia, given her modesty, would not have wanted the center to bear her own name. So I gave it her mother's name instead, to memorialize a woman, long gone, whose name represented for Celia her hopes and dreams of a new life in America.

The Alderton Center, in one of the city's poorest neighborhoods, will provide disadvantaged, immigrant, and abused women with shelter, health care, job training, and other social services. And Celia will arrive from London in two weeks' time to run the center, once all her green card paperwork is approved.

Celia's knife wound, though serious, was not fatal, although it took numerous transfusions and hours of surgery to save her life, followed by weeks of a slow and painful recovery. Edwina and I saw her through the worst of it, keeping nightly vigil at her hospital bedside, where we slept in s.h.i.+fts so one of us would always be awake to watch over her. Celia was a terrible patient-rude and moody, refusing to eat and always quick to complain. But I must say, she has been left with a rather s.e.xy little scar. And I have kept my promise; I never did tell anyone that she'd been frightened.

But Celia's survival, though miraculous, has also been bittersweet. The truth is that I lost Celia that morning at Highgate Cemetery, just not in the way I imagined. I lost the Celia of my childhood, my one-time lover, that sharp yet tender friend who introduced me to the wonders of Joy Division and jam b.u.t.ties, who encouraged me to write like my life depended on it, and who taught me to smoke in my grandmother's bas.e.m.e.nt, with the stinky unfiltered Gauloises she had smuggled back from England in her suitcase, duty-free.

But even as I lost Cecelia Frost, I gained something much greater. When I held Celia close that morning among the graves, felt her slender curve of bone and the pressure of her spine against my sternum, I understood what my mother must have felt as she held my Rory, my doomed and precious son; as tiny as he was, his shape, his weight, his very essence, must have been immense and overwhelming. I know my mother hasn't told me everything about those moments, but someday she will. Just as someday I will tell Celia everything-when she is finally ready to listen, when at last she is able to hear.

Celia refuses to forgive me, of course, to forgive me for witnessing her weakness, and for never being able to see her exactly the same way as before. She revealed too much during those desperate, panicky moments inside Highgate Cemetery; her careful mask slipped and I caught a glimpse of her soul, saw her lost and scared and vulnerable, the little girl with the ice cream waiting patiently on the swing for the mother who would never return. She resents me for that now, and always will. But her resentment, this cleft in our relations.h.i.+p, is a small price to pay for her life, and it's a price I will pay gladly until the day I die. In the end, Cecelia Frost remains a mystery. But I find I am less and less a mystery to myself.

About the Author.

Elizabeth Ridley was born and raised in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. She has a bachelor's degree in journalism from Northwestern University and a master's degree in creative writing from the University of East Anglia in Norwich, England, where she studied under former Poet Laureate Sir Andrew Motion. In 1994, she received a Hawthornden Fellows.h.i.+p to Hawthornden Castle in La.s.swade, Scotland, and in 2011 she received a Literary Artist Fellows.h.i.+p from the Wisconsin Arts Board based on the first three chapters of Searching for Celia. Searching for Celia is her fifth novel. She lives in Milwaukee with her two cats, Claudius and Calpurnia, and is producing her first feature film, Handle with Care. www.elizabethridley.com.

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