Lost and Wanted

by Nell Freudenberger

  A certain excitement manifested itself under Simmi’s guarded expression.

  “I’d love to see.”

  “We have to go in there,” she said.

  She took me to the back bedroom, the larger of the two, and it was immediately clear where Terrence had focused his decorating energy. Most of the floor was covered with a rainbow-colored sectional mat, and there was a small trampoline in one corner. Above her bed, he had drilled a toggle bolt into the joist, from which was suspended a net canopy edged with pink ribbon. Synthetic net is made of carbon fiber; the mat was probably vinyl and polyethylene foam. I often think about the oceanic gyres where so many of these materials will remain, long after all of us are gone.

  “Could you stand against the wall?” Simmi asked politely. “I don’t want to kick you.”

  I backed up and almost bumped into the small wooden play kitchen that Terrence had shipped from L.A. The kitchen had a range and control panel at the right height for a toddler, as well as an oven crammed with pots, cooking utensils, and wooden food. Simmi saw me looking at it.

  “I don’t play with that anymore,” she said.

  “Jack keeps some toys he used to play with, too.”

  “Uh huh. Okay, watch.”

  I watched her do a series of tricks; she did the walkover Jack admired, several cartwheel variations, and walked on her hands. Then, to my alarm, she jumped on the trampoline and launched herself backward in the air, doing a full rotation before landing on the mat. She raised both arms in the air, Olympian-style.

  “That’s really something,” I said.

  Simmi dropped into a split. “My grandma doesn’t like me to do it so much.”

  “How come?”

  “She says I’m going to be too tall for gymnastics.”

  “I wouldn’t worry about that now.”

  “She thinks I should do ballet instead.”

  “Well, if you like gymnastics…”

  “That’s what my mom used to say. But I think she really wanted me to be a scientist, like you.”

  “Really?”

  “She was really into science. She wanted to write a show about it.”

  “She told me that.”

  Simmi nodded. “I don’t know if I like science, though.” She bent her front knee, drawing it toward her, and lifted her back foot, clasping it with both hands behind her head.

  “Moms want their kids to do what makes them happy.” It was the kind of platitude I try not to rely on too heavily, but it seemed best to go with safe and dull, under the circumstances.

  Simmi trained her big eyes on me. “Did she tell you that?”

  “Well, not exactly—we didn’t talk on the phone too much.”

  “She hated talking on the phone,” Simmi said.

  “I don’t like it either.”

  “But you know what?” Simmi rotated her hips into a straddle, then stretched forward, so her forehead was against the mat. “Sometimes when it rings, I think it’s her. Isn’t that weird?”

  * * *

  —

  We ate at a small table in the kitchen downstairs, Terrence sitting on a stool because there were only three chairs. He held his plate on his lap, and reached down periodically to make sure we all had what we needed for the meal. There were no glasses—we drank water from mugs, but Terrence had found small bowls for various garnishes: sour cream, cheese, cilantro, and sriracha.

  “This is amazing,” I said.

  Terrence was skeptical. “You just got back from Europe.”

  “Dessert in Austria is so great, but you’d think the rest of the food would be better than it is.”

  He turned to Simmi. “They fly Helen all the way to Europe to talk about physics.”

  “What is that, again?” Simmi said.

  I looked at Jack, but he didn’t seem interested in volunteering.

  “Physics is the study of forces. We use math to describe the way things move.”

  “I hate math,” Simmi said.

  “Me, too,” Jack said immediately.

  “You don’t hate math,” Terrence said. There was a sort of pleading in his voice that surprised me.

  “I do,” Simmi said. “It’s so boring.”

  “It is so boring,” I said.

  Both children looked at me, Jack in amazement, and Simmi with that same kind of wary interest.

  “It’s so boring until you get to higher math, which is one of the most fun things you can do.”

  “When is higher math?” Simmi asked.

  “It can start in high school,” I said. “Some people take two years of calculus in high school—I did.”

  “I’m not going to do that,” Jack put in.

  “But you have to do math, so you might as well work hard.” I had an inspiration. “It’s like gymnastics,” I said. “Imagine if all you did was warm up. If you had to do warm-ups every day in practice, but you decided never to try the tumbling.”

  Simmi laughed. “That would be stupid.”

  “Or surfing,” Terrence said: “What if you just practiced pop-ups on the sand and never got in the water?”

  “Exactly,” I said.

  “But math isn’t like gymnastics,” Jack said.

  “She says it is.” Terrence gave me one of his disconcerting smiles.

  “I could take you guys to see a real physics lab one day,” I said. “We could have a private tour.”

  “Would we wear lab coats?”

  I couldn’t tell if lab coats were a draw. “Not coats, but definitely eye protection.”

  “Protection from what?”

  “Lasers. We could go see a project called LIGO.” If nothing else, Neel’s presence would make this an easy promise to fulfill.

  “Lasers are like light sabers,” Jack explained.

  “I know what they are,” Simmi said. “May we be excused?”

  I looked at their plates: both children had finished the chili, which substituted hominy and vegetables for meat, and was somewhat spicy. When they’d left the table, I complimented Terrence.

  “He would never eat that at home—even if I knew how to make it.”

  “When they help cook, they always eat.”

  Terrence began gathering the plates. His T-shirt was short-sleeved, a brilliant blue, as if it were the middle of the summer, and it was clear that the kettlebells were in use. The tattoo on the inside of his arm that I hadn’t been able to make out before was a sea creature—a stingray.

  “I was thinking about the yard in the back,” Terrence said. “Do you ever grow anything?”

  “Besides the grass?”

  “Simmi and I had a little garden in L.A.—peas, strawberries, Chinese cabbage, gigante beans. We even tried some corn.”

  “Really?”

  “I wouldn’t start with that here. But maybe some tomatoes and beans. Even summer squash would probably work.” He picked up the stack of plates, and took them to the sink. I’d automatically agreed with Charlie’s parents, when I’d first heard about Terrence from Charlie, that he was somehow beneath her—now I realized how stupid that was. What woman wouldn’t want to be with a handsome surfer who cared about his daughter’s education in math, and loved to cook? It was true that Terrence had gone to a two-year community college, did a job that had nothing to do with what he’d learned there. Wasn’t the kind of education Charlie and I had received simply a set of words and references that connected you to a group of people like yourself? In physics we say that we do science for science’s sake, and that there is value in that. Our knowledge of our universe itself, from its explosive early inflation to its current growth rate, has become exponentially more precise in my lifetime. We could all give a quote to a journalist, or end an undergraduate lecture with a few sentences about scientific thinking as a key component of our humani
ty, and I think most of us really believe those words. When a practical application is available, though—the ramifications of closing the freedom-of-choice loophole for cybersecurity, for example—we rush to emphasize it. While someone services our car, cooks our meal, or bathes our children, the sentences and paragraphs about our fundamental utility spin out like magic.

  “That sounds great,” I told Terrence. “Anything that makes him enthusiastic about food. He doesn’t like being shorter than the other boys in his grade—I tell him he has to eat to grow.”

  “How tall was the guy?”

  I wasn’t used to anyone asking about Jack’s origins. Even my closest friends tiptoed around it. I thought I might have behaved the same way in their places, and yet I always wanted to talk about it. Charlie, notably, had wanted to know all the details. She’d expressed remorse at the time that she hadn’t been there to go through the bios with me, to help me choose.

  “Tall,” I said. “Six-two—most of them are. It seems like height is a lot of mothers’ primary concern.”

  The kitchen was too small for me to be helpful without getting in Terrence’s way, and so I went back to the table to get the mugs, the crumpled paper towels the kids had been using for napkins.

  “I’m going to have to start going down to New York,” he said. “Maybe every other weekend. We’re opening a store in Williamsburg. I’ve been postponing it—you can do that, when you work for your brother—but it can’t last forever.”

  I was hoping I knew what he was going to say, but I didn’t want to guess and be wrong.

  “She’ll usually be with her grandparents, except this weekend they’re going to a wedding. They said they could skip it, but I thought—”

  “We’d love to have her.”

  “It’s only two nights. And then the next time you go away—”

  “It’s no problem.”

  “I get you, you get me back.” He looked up then, hopeful. “And I think it’s good for them, too, since—”

  “—they don’t have siblings.”

  Terrence looked relieved. “Yeah.”

  We could hear the kids jumping around in Simmi’s room; she had put on Taylor Swift.

  “You know, I thought Addie would be so helpful. To have a woman in Simmi’s life right now, and all that. My mom’s—well, we’re good now. But she’s not anyone’s idea of a role model.”

  I laughed. “Addie’s definitely role model material.”

  Terrence nodded. “Charlie’s ‘issues’ with her mom seemed like a lot of nonsense to me, honestly,” he said. “She would go on about ballet and piano and church, and I would be like, uh huh. I mean, it sounded ideal.”

  “In some ways, I guess.”

  “But now I totally see it. I’m not even talking about Addie’s whole thing with me. I could deal with that—temporarily—if it was good for Simmi. But I don’t know anymore. She was asking the other day if it wouldn’t be better to sign her up for ballet instead of gym.” He shook his head. “And I’m like, yeah—let’s change up the one thing she actually fucking likes—the one thing that makes her happy right now—so she can fit into your little vision of how everything’s supposed to look.”

  “You want me to dry those?”

  “They’ll dry.” He reached into the fridge and pulled out a dark brown bottle with an elaborate label. “It’s kombucha,” he said. “You want some?”

  It was already past Jack’s bedtime, and I knew I should take him upstairs. I was postponing it, not only because he would fight, but because it was comfortable here with Terrence and Simmi, the pop music playing in the other room. When we went up to our apartment, I would have to start all over again with the loud cheerfulness I often employ to make it feel as if there aren’t only two of us there.

  “I’ll try it,” I said.

  Terrence poured the fizzy brown liquid into clean mugs. “Charlie thought this was a better place for kids to grow up,” Terrence said. “She didn’t always think that way, though, not when Simmi was born. She used to talk about how great Southern California was: the beach, and being outside year-round. But then the more successful she got, the more she’d complain—about the values out there. I was like, we don’t have Hollywood values on the beach…but Charlie was just in the thick of it. She started to talk about Boston all the time—that’s the main reason I thought we’d try it now.”

  “I guess we have our own set of problems.”

  Terrence laughed, and his expression showed his agreement a little more readily than I would have liked. “But I think Charlie thought everyone here was like you.”

  “Like me?”

  Terrence nodded. “Because you don’t care about all the nonsense that’s such a big deal in L.A.—money and style and all that.”

  I was wearing a long sweater over leggings, which had taken me some time to select. I moved slightly, so that the lower half of my body was concealed by the kitchen counter.

  From the bedroom, the children were shouting happily over the music. Five seconds, Simmi yelled, and Jack counted down: 5-4-3-2-1!

  “And even the way you had him on your own—on purpose. She really admired that.”

  “Tons of women do it,” I said. “More and more.”

  “Okay.” Terrence leaned back against the counter, one leg crossed over the other. He took a drink of the sour, heavily carbonated tea, which I was getting down only a little at a time. “But your career, too. She said you’d given a lot up for it.”

  Where had they had this conversation? Sitting in traffic? Over dinner just the two of them, or just before they fell asleep at night?

  “You don’t give a fuck what people think,” Terrence said.

  “Thanks?”

  “Yeah, man,” he said. “It’s a compliment.”

  10.

  Terrence went to New York that Friday morning after dropping Simmi off at school. I skipped a department meeting in order to pick her up, but I had to put Jack in aftercare so that I could get to Simmi’s school on time. I had considered asking Jack’s sitter to do both pickups, but Simmi had only met Julia once or twice. I worried that she would be uncomfortable, and I wanted the first time she stayed with us to be perfect. The mania to perfect things that are by their nature imperfectible is one of those areas in which I most frequently make a wrong turn.

  I just made it to Simmi’s school by three, and I was waiting in the car on the school’s circular drive when she came out. I had imagined that she might exit alone, even dejected: she’d been at the school only four months, and I remembered girls her age as especially nasty to newcomers. Instead she came out an alley alongside the brick building with two other girls, one with an arm draped over her shoulder, and the other trying to get her attention. Simmi was ignoring both of them; she was scanning the line of cars, looking for me.

  I leaned out the window and waved, and she detached herself from her friends, came through the gate.

  She came to the passenger window first, and smiled in at me. “Do you notice something different about me?”

  She was wearing the silver parka, with hot pink trim, sweater leggings, and a popular brand of furry blue boots. Her mood seemed buoyant. Otherwise I couldn’t see anything different, except maybe that the backs of her hands were covered with scrawled writing. The temperature was only in the twenties, but she wasn’t wearing gloves.

  “You wrote on your hands?”

  Simmi got into the backseat and glanced at her hands, surprised. “I always do that. No—look!”

  I pulled up a little, and then turned to face her. She had pushed her braids behind her ears to reveal a pair of earrings, gold studs with red rhinestone centers.

  “Oh,” I said. “Nice! It’s going to be cold this weekend, though—do you have gloves, or a hat?”

  “I can’t because of my earrings—it hurts.”

 
“Bye, Simmi!” a child called, a different girl than she’d come out with, and Simmi gave a casual wave out the window.

  “I don’t think they’re supposed to hurt,” I told her.

  “They’re infected,” Simmi said. “So. I’m supposed to be putting stuff on them every night, but sometimes I forget.”

  I felt a moment of annoyance toward Terrence, who hadn’t said anything to me about ear care.

  “I’ll remind you this weekend.”

  She looked up at me. “Yours aren’t pierced.”

  “I played soccer when I was your age.”

  “You couldn’t tape them?”

  “You could, but it seemed like too much trouble.”

  “I’ve been asking forever, but my mom always said no. And then we were just walking by a place, weekend before last, and my dad surprised me. He’s been wanting another tat—he had the design in his phone—and so we just went in and did both. It’s three fish.”

  Simmi looked at me in her strange way—as if she could see me wondering where her father’s new tattoo was located.

  “It’s because he’s Pisces. And it’s perfect, because of surfing.”

  “Cool,” I said. “Well, let’s go get Jack.” I turned to check and saw that she’d fastened her seat belt without being reminded.

  “Ready?”

  “You didn’t say the safety word.”

  “What?”

  “We had to have a safety word, at my old school. You weren’t supposed to go home with anyone unless they said it, even if you knew them.”

  “Oh,” I said. “Well—I think that’s a good system, but your dad didn’t say anything about it. You want me to call him?”

  Simmi considered. “No—I know I’m supposed to go with you.”

  I thought of asking what the word was, and didn’t.

  “Anyway, my mom’s the one who made it up—it’s in Latin,” she added. “I’m probably the only person who remembers it.”

  * * *

  —

  We had quesadillas for dinner, and talked about Harry Potter. Jack and I had gotten only as far as volume three, and it annoyed me that the scenes Simmi was narrating came from later in the series. Jack looked so transfixed, though, that at first I didn’t interrupt.