Lost and Wanted

by Nell Freudenberger

  The other boy bounded up the front walk, where a bunch of red and gold balloons were tied to the porch railing. He was followed more slowly by his father, a balding man in his forties, encumbered by a sleeping bag and a wrapped gift. Jack watched them expectantly, one hand on the door.

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  4.

  On my way home I realized that I had the evening free, and could’ve made plans to meet a friend. Instead I picked up a burrito and ate it standing at the kitchen counter, which reminded me of being a student in a pleasurable way. I decided I would use the opportunity to do some work.

  This was the Saturday night before Neel’s team was slated to make their big announcement. The press conference would happen on Thursday, the same day the paper would finally be published in Physical Review Letters and go up on the open-access server. In four pages, the paper would announce the first detection of a gravitational wave and the first direct observation of a pair of black holes merging. Neel had sent it to me under strict confidence in January, and I had to admit it was beautiful: revelatory, concise, and comprehensible. It would make history, but as the LIGO scientists (who would have to continue justifying their funding) were quick to point out, it was only a beginning. Now that LIGO’s interferometers had detected two black holes merging, they would start to look for other cosmic events powerful enough to create gravitational waves they could measure. Most of all, they would want to see a kilonova, a collision of two neutron stars.

  Binaries of living stars were known to astronomers by the beginning of the nineteenth century; it was William Herschel who first understood the relationship between Mizar and a companion in Ursa Major. Objects that were more difficult or impossible to observe directly took longer, but even before John Wheeler coined the term “black hole,” in the late sixties, the Soviet physicists Zel’dovich and Novikov had proposed a search for these mysterious objects in binary relationships with stars. LIGO’s scientists had expected that the first detection would be a gravitational wave produced by a black hole–black hole binary, simply because the colossal mass of such objects allowed them to collide with more force than anything since the Big Bang.

  Black holes merge in absolute darkness; when an especially big star dies, the resulting supernova explosion produces light across the electromagnetic spectrum. Neutron stars are somewhere in between: they are dead stars that flicker like embers until they spiral into each other in a brilliant burst of color. What would be so exciting about detecting a kilonova with LIGO’s interferometers is that traditional astronomers could immediately point their telescopes in the same direction; it would be the first time we could hear the “chirp” of the gravitational wave and see the burst of light at the same time.

  There are two windows in my office, but the desk faces a wall, a strategy for concentration Arty once suggested to me. Nothing else about my setup at home is very considered. Mostly the desk is full of paperwork: bills, school forms, second-grade artwork, a large number of Post-it notes reminding me to pick up Jack’s allergy medication, email Vincenzo, buy toothpaste, and finish Bence’s recommendation letter by February 12. I was adding a note about the connection between primordial black holes and LIGO’s new findings—about the possibility of using the interferometers to search for dark matter—when it occurred to me that I had the ringer off and that Miles’s parents had no way to reach me if Jack were to get homesick or need something. I went downstairs and found the phone in my jacket pocket. At first I thought the message on the home screen was from Amy, since she often sends me pictures of my nieces.

  But there was an alert with the thumbnail: “Charlie’s iPhone would like to share a photo.” It had been almost two months since I’d gotten a message; our last exchange—in which I’d threatened to report the phone as stolen—had occurred just before Neel’s engagement party, at the beginning of December. Amy joked about “ghosting,” but the fact was that Charlie ghosted even while she was alive, even before that practice had a name. She wouldn’t answer an email or a phone message for months, even half a year; I would be hurt and swear that I’d given up on her. Then, out of the blue, she’d send me something—a picture of Simmi, usually—and I’d write back right away. It occurred to me, as I typed, that I’d managed to develop the same type of relationship with whoever was using her phone.

  I tapped “accept,” and the image opened on my screen. It was me and Charlie, on the day I’d been to visit her at their first house in L.A. Maybe we’d taken it when we went outside to drink coffee by the pool, or in front of the house before I left? At first I thought the poor resolution was due to the older device’s early-model camera, but even that didn’t explain how out-of-focus it was. I turned the phone horizontally to accommodate the photo’s orientation, and saw that it was a picture of a picture, taken on a table or desk (you could see the wood around the edges of the print). Part of my face, including one eye, was washed out by glare. If Charlie had reproduced it, she’d focused on herself, as well anyone might—it was an especially beautiful picture of her, vamping for the camera with her arm around my neck. My smile looked strained, the way it always does when I know I’m being photographed. The best pictures of you are the serious ones, Charlie once observed, but I only look good when I’m smiling. That was untrue: it was hard to take a bad picture of Charlie, regardless of her expression.

  Where did you get that picture?

  The oven.

  The answer startled me, and I almost dropped the phone. There was only one time I’d held human remains in my hands. My paternal grandmother’s ashes had gone into a plot in a churchyard in Kenosha, Wisconsin, where she was born. I had been surprised by how coarse they were, more rock than ash. I thought then of the physical process that had occurred: the temperature inside a cremator can reach two thousand degrees—about a fifth as hot as the surface temperature of the sun.

  I didn’t understand, and I sent back a question mark. The gray dots appeared, then disappeared, then appeared again. It took forever and I thought maybe the person on the other end was typing a detailed answer. But when it finally appeared, it was only four words long:

  Cottleston, Cottleston, Cottleston Pie.

  I stared at them; my chest hurt. People all over the world knew that rhyme, but how many people knew what it meant to Charlie?

  A fly can’t bird but a bird can fly.

  The person on the end seemed to be waiting. A minute passed, and then another. Were they still there? I tapped out the next line, experimentally:

  Ask me a riddle and I reply.

  The response came immediately:

  Cottleston, Cottleston, Cottleston Pie.

  I heard a noise, or imagined it. I was standing in the front hall with my back to the door. I felt the walls contract around me; the person, whoever they were, had suddenly seemed to come much closer: from the generic symbols, to the scientific inquiries, to the hiatus when I hadn’t heard anything at all—was that planned, so I would let down my guard?—to the photograph and this poem, more intimate than anything I’d yet received.

  Unlike my sister, I’ve always been afraid in a house alone. But our father instilled in us both a mania for saving electricity, and all my lights were off downstairs. I turned them on one at a time as I went through the living room and into the kitchen, to look out the window at the empty yard. I put my head into the small bathroom in the hall between the kitchen and Jack’s bedroom. It was unusual for his door to be closed, and I felt my pulse in my ears as I pushed it open.

  Clothing, Legos, and a game of Battleship littered the rug, and Jack’s unmade bed was crowded with plush animals. I told myself I was being foolish. I stood there waiting for the phone to ping, and when it didn’t, I began cleaning up. I wanted to be doing something. Dust had been among the primary triggers for Jack’s asthma, and he still wasn’t supposed to sleep with more than one stuffed toy. They tended to accu
mulate, though, and so I started to put them away. Their glass eyes were strangely animate, a trick of the light.

  I heard the noise again, now clearly the television coming from Terrence and Simmi’s apartment downstairs. At first the voices were reassuring. They were here; I wasn’t alone. And then I understood. The answer was so simple that I was ashamed I hadn’t thought of it. How is it possible, was what my parents used to say, on the frequent occasions when I failed to assimilate some piece of obvious practical information—someone as smart as you?

  I picked up the phone from Jack’s bed, and typed out her name:

  Simmi?

  I waited for several minutes, but there was nothing more. I felt frantic: we both knew now, and so there was nothing to hide. I thought of calling the phone, but of course it couldn’t take voice calls. Maybe her father had said something to her from the living room, where he was watching television; maybe Simmi was stashing the phone in whatever hiding place, or series of places, she’d been using for the past eight months. I went to my door and listened; when there was nothing, I went down the interior stairs and stood just inside the front door, where I could pretend I was on my way out if Terrence were to open the apartment door. I could hear the TV more clearly here; it was a popular political drama, not anything that would interest Simmi. Where was she now?

  I thought back to last June, the day after Charlie died. Simmi had been watching television while her father made call after call, alerting their friends—was it possible that she’d wanted to call someone, too? And what had she thought when I immediately called back—just as if her mother were alive? Was that what had prompted her to send the tiny pictures by email? Once the phone service was turned off, she’d had to use the Wi-Fi to send email, and then text. The first message was nonsensical, perhaps in imitation of a greeting Charlie would have used with tongue firmly planted in her cheek (“luvya lady”), but once Simmi actually met me, science would have seemed like a natural topic. The questions had been simple not because the person on the other end was unbalanced, but because she was eight years old.

  Could she have written to multiple people, and I was the only one to respond? It was possible that she hadn’t considered the fact that her messages would appear under the name “Charlie”—that in fact she hadn’t been playing any kind of trick. Instead she had simply been asking the same type of question she’d asked the first day she came to the house, about stars. Both her father and I had immediately shut that down, and so it made sense that Simmi had taken the conversation to another medium. Maybe it was less about a need for answers, and more about the connection—about getting to know a person who had been important to her mother before anything terrible had happened, in the radiant but increasingly insubstantial past.

  The front hall had been painted robin’s egg blue by the previous owners, and I had left it that color. There was an anodyne watercolor of a sailboat in a wooden frame. I stood in front of it, and felt a creeping guilt. I’d been using all my adult faculties to try to outsmart a child—Charlie’s child, who had wanted something from me. Whatever it was, I’d failed to give it to her. I thought of the arch tone I’d adopted: Are you interested in physics? Did it say something about me, that I had immediately suspected some kind of intentional provocation or foul play? Was I especially suspicious, liable to take offense, unapproachable? Was that the reason Simmi had adopted this strategy in the first place?

  Even if all of those things were true, I couldn’t understand why the messages had stopped suddenly, or why they’d started again tonight. Had she sent me something so personal, something only family and close friends would recognize, because she was finally ready to reveal herself? And if so, why now?

  Across from the sailboat was a row of hooks with Simmi’s silver parka hanging at the end of it, rainbow-striped knit gloves spilling out of the pocket, her scooter parked underneath it with an iridescent green helmet hanging off the T-bar. The other hooks held a collection of sweatshirts, canvas tote bags, and Terrence’s down vest and leather jacket. I couldn’t say anything to Terrence until I’d talked to Simmi; whatever I did, I had to let her know, now, that she could trust me. I allowed myself to think that it might not be too late, that there might be something I could do for her. She had come up with an ingenious way for us to talk, and I had to find a way to use it, before I was obliged to tell her father what I’d figured out.

  I scrolled through my own photos, the ones I’d collected of Charlie, but I was worried about making Simmi sad. Instead I sent one I’d taken of her and Jack in his room, in a fort they’d constructed from the sheets and pillows on his bed. They had called me to come see. It was a long, thin structure, a tunnel, and they had used it to create an optical illusion. Simmi’s head was sticking out the front and Jack’s legs out the back—as if they were one child, stretched in two directions.

  * * *

  —

  I wasn’t wearing my coat, but I didn’t want to go back upstairs. I took my sweatshirt from a peg in the hall and went out. It was forty-five degrees: warm for February—I thought I would walk just to the river and back to clear my head. I hurried past the quiet side streets, the rows of shabbily genteel, hundred-year-old houses, most of them filled with people like myself, obsessively committed to one obscure subject or another, the importance of which we communicated in books we passed among ourselves. It was exactly that insularity that Charlie had been eager to escape when she’d left home for L.A.

  I knew Charlie didn’t want to talk about being sick, but what if I had insisted? I had respected the boundaries she put up around her disease so carefully that our friendship had been squeezed out into the shrinking margins of her life. There was the body and there was the brain. Eventually there had been nothing but the body to talk about, and so we’d stopped talking. And I’d been self-involved enough, stupid enough, to take that as a rejection of me.

  The thoughts were painful, but there was something freeing about having them, as it is when you’re working on a difficult calculation and suddenly realize why your method is wrong. Charlie loved me, but it was too late; it was too late, but Charlie loved me. I felt closer to her than at any time since she’d died. It was almost as if a real ghost was nearby. When I heard someone behind me, I didn’t turn around. I was alone on the sidewalk, but I wasn’t afraid anymore. Our two sets of footsteps made a staccato rhythm on the cold pavement. Ask me a riddle, and I reply.

  Come on, I thought, and it was as if someone else was talking inside my head: If you’re going to come, come now.

  A man in a dress coat and shiny shoes passed me on the sidewalk, walking fast. A stranger.

  “Excuse me,” he murmured, before crossing the street toward a waiting car.

  I had come to the river. It was a clear night, but the skyline gave off too much light to see stars. I crossed the new pedestrian bridge over Memorial Drive, clogged with red and yellow taillights, but didn’t descend on the other side. From up here I could see the river. Jagged floes of gray ice clung to the shore, but out in the middle the office towers dropped their inverted reflections in still, black water.

  Automatically I reached for my phone. But what did I want to say, and to whom? The object had lost its special power because there was now no chance that something would come from “Charlie.” There was no chance, because there was no Charlie anymore. My friend was gone.

  5.

  I picked Jack up from Miles’s house the following morning. It was a crisp, bright day, and I had the idea I might take him downtown to the aquarium. I hoped Terrence and Simmi would agree to join us. I thought there would be a moment when the children would want to split up and see different exhibits. I could offer to take her wherever she wanted to go—the Pacific Reef, or the touch tank—and use that opportunity to talk with her alone. I’d texted Terrence early to suggest it; I hadn’t heard back, but when we came in the front door we could hear them in the apartment.
/>   “They’re home!” Jack said, and knocked.

  There were thumping feet, and then a female voice:

  “Just a sec!”

  Jack gave me a questioning look.

  The door was opened by a young woman. Simmi was behind her in the kitchen, and Terrence was nowhere to be seen.

  “Hey!” Simmi said. “I’m making pancakes by myself. You want some?”

  “Yeah!” Familiar with Terrence’s house rules, Jack slipped out of his shoes without being told, and hurried into the apartment. He barely looked at the stranger who’d opened the door.

  Her hair was dyed an artificial jet-black, cut short in a jagged style. She was wearing black jeans, ripped across the thigh, and a purple tank top, no bra; over the tank top was Terrence’s blue sweatshirt with the Japanese logo. She was wearing too much eye makeup for 9:00 a.m. on a Sunday, she was very pretty, and there was no way she was older than twenty-five.

  “Hi,” she said. “I’m Nicki.”

  “Is Terrence—”

  “He went surfing. I stayed over so he could leave last night.” She imparted this information in a helpful way, without suggesting that there might be anything disturbing about it.

  “Surfing where?”

  “Rhode Island? I don’t exactly know. I’ve only done it a couple of times—but I’ve dated surfers before? They get up really early. That was mostly when I lived in the Bay Area.” She spoke in a familiar way; it wasn’t only teenagers anymore. You heard it from parents pushing strollers in the supermarket, and podcasts on NPR: overwhelmingly interrogative and laden with pauses, confident in its carelessness, as if each sentence came as surprise—though not an unpleasant one—to its speaker.