Lost and Wanted

by Nell Freudenberger

  “Do you remember when we talked about getting sperm from the cryobank?”

  He nodded, but still didn’t speak. I had always used the correct words for body parts, as the books told me to do. In fact, it had been much easier to answer Jack’s questions about his origins without having to go into any of the details about conventional reproduction.

  “And I said your donor was anonymous? That just means that we don’t get in touch with him, and he can’t get in touch with us.”

  Jack mumbled something.

  “What, sweetheart?”

  “Some do. Simmi has a friend with two moms, and she said she met her dad.”

  “Her biological dad—right. But that’s not the kind of donor I picked.”

  Now he looked at me, startled: “Why not?”

  I thought about several answers, and decided on the real one. In contrast to what my sister thought at the time, I didn’t choose an anonymous donor because I wanted to keep Jack from identifying his other parent.

  “The anonymous donors are the best. I mean, they have the best DNA. You remember what that is?”

  “My recipe,” Jack said.

  I thought he might ask why again, why did I think the anonymous donors were better than the ones who’d agreed to one visit. I was nervous about this, because I didn’t have what you would call experimental proof. It was just a theory. I wanted the kind of person who would complete the transaction and move on, rather than the type who wanted to see the results of what he’d done.

  But if Jack wanted the answer to that question, he didn’t want it from me. He made a bridge with his legs, and floated the red rubber truck underneath it. His wet hair looked darker than usual, slicked down around his ears, and his vertebrae made a knobby ridge down the middle of his back. When I asked if he wanted help getting out of the tub and into his pajamas, he scowled and hugged his knees. And so I left him in the bathroom, closing the door behind me.

  27.

  I called Terrence as soon as I’d dropped Jack at school the following morning to apologize. I said it was my fault for telling him about the metaphase typewriter.

  “No problem,” Terrence said. His voice was neutral, if not warm, not any different than usual. “She’s okay. Every day’s a new start with them, you know?”

  “Yeah.”

  “How’s Jack?”

  “He was a little quiet this morning.”

  “He didn’t want to talk about it,” Terrence guessed.

  “I tried to be very clear with him last night—no ghosts. I think he gets it, but I’m so sorry if he suggested that to Simmi.” I didn’t go into any more detail. Assuming Simmi had kept Jack’s supernatural encounter from her father, I didn’t want to make things worse by bringing it up.

  “Yeah, no—I’m sure the science project was a joint effort,” Terrence said. “But I was talking about the stuff with his dad.”

  I hesitated for a moment. I’d been worrying lately about the absence of men in Jack’s life, and had even made an effort to find him a male babysitter, without success. I would have liked for him to spend more time with my father and my brother-in-law, Ben, but they were all the way across the country. I’d even introduced him to Arty, who was willing but comically hopeless with children—including, he’d confessed to me, his own.

  Now, suddenly, I was talking to a man who’d grown up without a father himself, who was easy and natural with children, interested in Jack, and who might be prepared to move in downstairs.

  “We had a talk about it last night,” I said. “It was good, I think.”

  “It’s kind of hard to know about those talks,” Terrence said. “You know?”

  “Yeah.”

  “You plan it all out in advance. And you think you’ve had this big moment together, like you’re all connected and they totally get it—and then they’re like, ‘So, can we get doughnuts?’ And you realize they haven’t heard anything the last ten minutes. The little brain in there is going: doughnut, doughnut, doughnut.”

  I laughed. I’d thought the metaphase typewriter might scare Terrence away forever; instead he was joking with me in a way he never had before. I was uncomfortable, but this was the moment. I just had to blurt it out.

  “Weirdly, the apartment just got free.”

  “Yours?”

  “The tenants are moving to Brooklyn.”

  “Oh.”

  “I didn’t know if you were still—” There was a long silence in which I felt as if I were in tenth grade again, asking Adam Hurwitz to the semiformal. He had said that his family was going out of town, and then shown up with Sophie Anastopoulus.

  “Yeah,” Terrence said. “Yeah, we are.”

  “Oh,” I said. “Okay. Great!”

  “Yeah?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “Jack’ll be thrilled. You should come see it, though, make sure.”

  “The main thing is that it isn’t here,” Terrence said.

  If not flattering, it was at least definitive.

  He came to see the apartment the following afternoon, while I was at work; I thought it was better for him to see it when I wasn’t home. Andrea showed him around, and he texted me afterward to say that it was perfect. He especially liked the backyard, which is bigger than it looks from the street. We agreed that they would move in just after the holidays, while I was in Europe.

  * * *

  —

  Normally Jack and I spend Christmas at my sister and Ben’s, a ten-minute drive from my parents in Pasadena. The children, who see each other only once or twice a year, fall into a rhythm immediately; the cousin affinity I’ve heard described by other parents is maybe even more intense for him, as an only child. Bess, who is two years older than Jack, bosses him and her sister, Avery, around, and Avery and Jack happily obey her. I like going back to California, too, if not quite as much as Jack does; I’ve lived in Boston eighteen years now, but I still associate Christmas almost exclusively with the wide, palm-edged boulevards of my childhood, the terra-cotta-tiled roof of my parents’ church, where we would go for a carol service on Christmas Eve. The smell of the car’s heater, the first time we turn it on each winter, fills me with incredible nostalgia; it seemed to me that in Los Angeles, we’d only ever used it on that one evening.

  Still, there’s always the moment when my mother tells me that I look tired—can’t I take a break for a few months, and take care of myself? There’s the moment when I have to interrupt some holiday activity to take a call, and my sister picks up the slack with my son, something she seems to do more naturally than I manage to do with her daughters. And the moment when one of my nieces climbs onto her father’s lap after dinner, puts her head in the hollow of his shoulder, the look on Jack’s face when this happens. Every Christmas I suggest that we might host in Boston the following year, and am greeted with the reflexive financial argument from the adults (six plane tickets as opposed to two) and the now-reflexive argument from Jack: I like it better here.

  This year would be different, though. Because I was going to Europe for four days just after Christmas, Jack and I would go to California the week before. We would fly back on the twenty-sixth with my parents, who had agreed to take care of Jack while I was away. That made the holiday feel slightly more balanced than usual. Although I wouldn’t have said it to any of my family members, I was looking forward to staying in an Austrian hotel on my own for three nights, to talking to a European audience genuinely interested in physics, in an institute housed in a medieval castle. And I was looking forward to the following semester, in which I had a break from teaching; I would be returning to that luxurious schedule, and to having Terrence and Simmi in the apartment downstairs.

  * * *

  —

  I was Christmas shopping with Jack at the mall in Porter Square when the next message arrived. In general I do everything online, as close
to the holiday as I can reasonably complete it, but Jack likes to go to the toy store and choose gifts for his cousins himself. I’d been trying not to let the phone distract me when I was with him, and so I’d left it in my bag; now I tipped the bag slightly to read the illuminated screen while listening to Jack debate the merits of various boxed crafting activities that the girls in his class enjoyed. The toy store became more segregated by gender every year, much more so than when I was a child.

  Do scientists believe in God?

  More than any of the other messages, this one made me want to call Neel. During our years working together at Harvard, we’d had a running argument about Einstein, and when Walter Isaacson’s biography came out, two years after we published the Clapp-Jonnal, we both read it. If we had a difference of opinion, it was about Einstein and free will; Neel regarded Einstein’s determinism as an extension of the “cosmic pantheism” he’d gotten from Spinoza. There was an intricate and beautiful order to the universe, and we were smart enough to perceive only glimmers of it. The appreciation and investigation of this divine symphony, however, was the noblest of human pursuits.

  My feelings were a little different. I loved the way Einstein detached Judeo-Christian tradition and the idea of an anthropomorphic God from morality, but I thought he was a little quick in his rejection of free will, which I fundamentally didn’t understand. Neel had once spent several hours arguing that Einstein’s determinism was really just a profound faith in science. Everything, including human behavior, was governed by “causal laws.” I thought that this was nonsensical, as well as morally dubious, since it seemed to me to absolve human beings of all the responsibility for our actions.

  I wrote back to my correspondent immediately, as I had the last time:

  Some do. A lot of people think Einstein did, but if you read his letter to the philosopher Eric Gutkind, you’ll see that he didn’t think very highly of organized religion. He called himself a “religious nonbeliever” because he definitely thought there was more out there than just us. He said he had “unbounded admiration for the structure of the world so far as our science can reveal it.”

  For the first time, I got a reply to my reply:

  Is the earth going to crash into the sun?

  I had a sinking feeling. The questions had seemed, until this moment, quirky but smart, the product of a perhaps eccentric, but sincere reader. This disassociated rejoinder made me revise that assessment: I thought it suggested someone who wasn’t mentally stable. Instead of offering the reassuring answer to that question, with an explanation of angular momentum, I decided to move on to the question of the phone:

  There’s a reward for this phone. $500. I’ll transfer it to you via PayPal if you email me a receipt from the post office.

  This was met with a winged stack of money, which I took as an indication of interest. I wrote back:

  But I need the receipt first.

  The next question seemed obvious: Why should the person at the other end trust me to pay them, if they actually put the phone in the mail? I thought I would simply tell the truth. They couldn’t be sure that I would pay, but since the old phone had little value in itself, and was clearly valuable to me, it was a reasonable chance to take.

  But there was nothing. I waited a few minutes, giving whoever it was a chance to consider, and then tried what I’d decided was a last resort:

  Otherwise, the owner has told me that he’ll file a police report.

  This turned out to be a tactical error. Whoever was on the other end went silent, and I didn’t get another message from Charlie’s phone for almost two months.

  GRAVITY

  1.

  I looked at the phone immediately upon waking; the action was there before I was fully conscious, even if I’d taken ten milligrams of melatonin before bed. I’d read about psychological dependence on technology, and I thought that might be my problem. I turned the sounds off at night, but it was as if the pinging mechanism was inside my body. Someone was plucking my guts as I slept.

  I reached for it Thursday morning, and was disappointed to see an empty home screen. When I checked email to be sure, there was nothing from Charlie’s address. I was scrolling through the rest—an update from Vincenzo, a few newsletters, my cell phone bill—when I saw the unfamiliar address: roxanaaslani@msf.org. It only took me a second to identify it:

  dear helen—i’m SO thrilled to have the chance to write you, finally. i’be been looking forward to meeting you for so long. i think—hope!—N has told you how muhc I admire your books—i’ve listened to him go on & on about LIGO and GW in general, but honestly it wasn’t until i read YOU on black holes that it clicked. Am writing this in the airport, mad rush before we get on the plane—but wanted to let you knowa bout a get together we’re having in cambridge, w idea of meeting each other’s east-coast based friends before the wedding—do say you’ll come? we’ve rented a space—belly @ kendall sq., 7pm on 12/11. Hope to see yousoon! xx roxy

  I read that seven or eight times, then put the phone down on the unused side of the bed. I could hear Jack playing downstairs. Each time he dumped a box of Legos on the wood floor, it sounded like a catastrophe. December eleventh was a week from tomorrow, and Belly was the fanciest bar in the vicinity of MIT. I thought that the idea of “renting a space” would be anathema to Neel. I couldn’t even imagine him saying those words. He had written that he had an idea to discuss with me, and I realized as I lay there that I had actually imagined this exchange occurring in a specific place, at the Muddy Charles, in the summer, with plastic cups of beer in front of us, the view of the river the only luxury—not that any luxury was necessary when you were talking about the most profound descriptions we have of our universe with a person you’d once passionately loved. But it was the beginning of winter, and the only place I was likely to hear what Neel had to tell me was at the engagement party his fiancée had organized.

  2.

  It didn’t occur to me to make up an excuse. I knew that I wanted to go, and also that I couldn’t go alone. I briefly considered Marshall, but we hadn’t spoken in months, and arriving with an ex felt desperate. I probably knew a good portion of the people Neel was planning to invite; all I had to do was treat it like a work event and find someone else who was going. I texted Sonja at LIGO, who was brilliant and especially sociable for a physicist, also possibly an alcoholic; I thought that if I stuck by her, it would seem as if I were having a good time no matter what. Sonja wrote back to say absolutely—she was so curious about Neel’s fiancée that there was no way she’d miss it.

  I dislike choosing clothing, and have trouble determining what goes with what or what is flattering. Charlie used to say that the “clothing node” hadn’t been activated in my brain. When I have a stubborn wardrobe question (this happened more often before Jack, when I was doing the publicity for my books), I go to my sister. Amy is hardly an expert, but she’s better than I am; more important, she’s willing to be patient with the whole neurotic process. In this case she suggested a dark blue lace dress that she’d helped me select for the wedding of our horrible cousin Janine.

  “Is it too dressy for this?”

  “How did she describe it, exactly?”

  “A party so they could meet each other’s ‘East Coast–based friends.’ ”

  “But not an official wedding event.”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Are you going to the wedding? Because maybe you should save the blue dress for that.”

  “It’s in India.”

  “Jack could come stay with us.”

  “It’s in February—I will have just gotten back from Geneva.”

  “Is that why you’re going to Geneva?”

  “No! I have to go to Pöllau for my paperback’s reissue. And I’m stopping in Geneva at CERN on the way home.”

  “Uh huh. I just think the w
edding might give you closure.”

  “Nothing’s open.”

  Amy laughed. “Okay. The blue dress for this, then.”

  * * *

  —

  I was already wearing the dress when Sonja texted me, at ten minutes past six on the night of the party. She was coming down with the flu and she had a conference the following week. She thought she had to take some Tylenol Cold and go to bed. She hoped I “wasn’t going to kill her.” That remains one of my least favorite locutions, presuming your disappointment, allowing you no way out—but Sonja at least was perfectly correct in the way she wrote even casual communication. She used appropriate punctuation, and clearly reread before sending. The way Roxy’s email was written was more intimidating: the combination of haste and guileless friendliness, along with the distinguished address from Médecins Sans Frontières. She was so busy saving lives, and becoming Neel’s wife, that typos were inevitable.

  Jack’s sitter, Julia, had arrived and was giving him mac ’n’ cheese in the kitchen. I was doing my makeup in the upstairs bathroom, the phone balanced on the side of the sink. Unlike clothing, makeup calms me down. It’s the same every time. I have a steady hand—Mr. Ryshke, my AP Chemistry teacher, once said that I could be a surgeon, a fact I recalled just recently—and I especially enjoy doing my eyes. When Sonja’s message came, I continued doing them, rubbing pale shadow under the brow, a darker color in the crease. I lined them carefully with black powder and an angled brush (something Charlie taught me) and admired my work in the mirror. My eyes are hazel, and my hair has darkened from its orangey childhood shade to a more subdued auburn color. I also have what my mother used to refer to as “a good figure.” She would say this in a slightly accusatory way, as if I had purchased for myself some extravagant and unnecessary item. I have always felt that my nose is too big, and there are now impossible-to-cover lines in my forehead, exacerbated by reading too much in insufficient light or without my glasses. There was no way I could go alone.