Lost and Wanted

by Nell Freudenberger

  “Jack?”

  He mumbled something.

  “What?”

  “Don’t tell him.” He looked up fiercely. “Promise you won’t. She told me not to tell anyone. She’ll hate me.”

  “Okay,” I said. “I promise. But I already knew she had a phone.”

  Jack’s sullenness returned. “You did?”

  “She told me.” I thought this was essentially true.

  “But do you know what she uses it for?”

  I was pretty sure Simmi hadn’t told Jack about our correspondence, and her behavior this morning had seemed to confirm it. Other possibilities occurred to me: shopping, pornography. There had been an incident in the third grade at Jack’s school last year.

  “No, what?”

  He got a little smile on his face, like when he’s going to try to sell me on something. “She doesn’t need the metamorphosis typewriter.”

  “Metaphase. Why not?”

  Now Jack had rolled up his sleeve, and was using the quill to scratch thin white lines on his arm.

  “Careful.”

  “She can talk to her mom on the phone.”

  “I don’t think so, Bug.”

  Jack nodded vigorously, contradicting me. “She showed me.” He was tugging on his ear.

  “Maybe she was writing to someone else?”

  “No,” he said, but he seemed to have gotten control of himself. It was only when someone refused to listen that he got really upset. “She wouldn’t let me see what she was writing, but she showed me the messages. It said, ‘Mom’ at the top.”

  “ ‘Mom’?”

  “Yes.”

  Something occurred to me, and my stomach curdled.

  “And she showed me pictures.”

  “Of her mom?”

  Jack shrugged. “Most are just her. Or her and her dad. One is even of you.” Jack looked up at me, gauging my reaction.

  “Me and Simmi’s mom.”

  He nodded. “Yeah. But that was a really long time ago.”

  7.

  Charlie died in June. Terrence and Simmi arrived in July, just before the memorial. In the middle of September, early one Monday morning, Gravitational Wave 150914 hit the machine in Livingston, Louisiana. Ten milliseconds later, it hit LIGO’s other machine, in Hanford, Washington. The wave stretched one arm of the L-shaped machine about one ten-thousandth of the width of a proton, and shrank the other arm by a corresponding amount. Its shape exactly matched the geometry for gravity that Einstein had described a century earlier, in November 1915.

  Einstein showed us that space bends time, and Schwarzschild gave us the math to prove it. He wrote down the first exact solution to what we call Einstein’s field equations of general relativity in a letter to Einstein in 1915. Schwarzschild was at that time serving in the German army, and most biographies have it that he wrote the solution from a wet and frigid trench on the Russian front, and sent it to Einstein by diplomatic pouch: As you see, the war treated me kindly enough, in spite of the heavy gunfire, to allow me to get away from it all and take this walk in the land of your ideas. The letter itself was probably written from Mulhouse, in Alsace, although Schwarzschild may well have done the math on the front lines. The trenches were also where he contracted the rare skin disease pemphigus, which led to his death the following year. There is a crater named for him on the northern part of the far side of the moon.

  Black holes were a consequence of Schwarzschild’s calculations, but neither he nor Einstein believed that they really existed. The wave Neel’s team recorded shows the last four rotations of two enormous black holes, just before they collided. The first was twenty-nine times the mass of our sun; the second, thirty-two. This happened more than a billion years ago, 1.4 billion light-years away, and so it’s just a coincidence that the technology Neel’s team built was ready to record it during a test run last September. The shape of the wave matches the theoreticians’ descriptions of such an event so perfectly that there is only a 1 in 3.5 million chance that they could be wrong.

  Physicists knew that gravity could stretch matter. We knew that a collision between enormously dense objects—black holes or neutron stars—was the most likely way we would be able to hear it. One scientist came up with a good Hollywood analogy—that the universe had finally “produced a talkie.” Actually, the universe has always produced talkies; it was only that we didn’t have the ears to hear them. Neel’s interferometers became the ears.

  You can hear about something for a lifetime, though, even something you know is happening all around you, and still not really believe it—until it happens close enough to feel yourself.

  8.

  I called Addie and asked if we could have a cup of coffee. She suggested that I come over to the house the following Thursday, and I rescheduled a talk I was giving. This was early February, just after the LIGO press conferences. Neel had attended the most important of them, at the National Press Club in D.C. I had watched it in my office with Vincenzo and several of our postdocs. At one point I thought I recognized the back of Neel’s head in the audience, but I later learned that he’d been in another room, watching on a monitor with members of his team. The next day he left for India, to get married.

  I turned into the Boyces’ driveway that Thursday a few minutes early. It took Addie some time to come to the door. Her face was exhausted, much more so than when I’d run into her outside the sandwich shop in September, but she was still beautifully dressed, in a dark orange cardigan, a brown wool skirt, and leather boots. The current set of terriers yapped around her feet.

  “George, off!” She moved one of the dogs out of my way with her boot. “We’ll be informal and have coffee in the kitchen.”

  I followed her down the hall, past two valuable pieces of art. One was a Kara Walker silhouette of a woman in a highly ornamented costume, beautiful and technically virtuosic. Charlie had once told me that her mother bought it while Walker was still studying at RISD. I knew without being told that Addie wouldn’t have hung any of Walker’s more violent images in her home, even if she was likely to admire them. The other was a triptych of tall, rectangular photographs meant to recall Chinese scroll paintings: one fresh peony, one fading, and one covered with frost. They looked real until you got up close and saw that the blooms themselves were actually made of raw meat. I had a residual feeling of excitement, entering Charlie’s house, as if I were still a student, eager to prove to her parents that I was worldly enough to have a place at their table.

  The hallway opened up into the kitchen, a long, rectangular room with a bow window opening to the backyard. Somewhere was the faint but steady drone of television news. The kitchen I remembered had white cabinets with blue-and-white china knobs, a tiled countertop, and the same mottled white appliances my parents had owned. At some point in the last twenty-three years, the Boyces had replaced those with stainless steel, the counters with granite. The cabinets had glass fronts and you could see the orderly towers of china inside, the wineglasses hanging upside down from their stems. I complimented Addie.

  “I’ve always liked glass,” she said. “When the children were young, I needed to hide the mess, but now it’s much easier to stay organized.” She offered me coffee and I accepted. The television in the other room switched off, and Carl emerged from his office. There was a dark V on the front of his T-shirt, and he was wiping his face with a towel.

  “Helen!” he said. “It’s wonderful to see you. I won’t hug you.”

  “I bought him a Peloton bike,” Addie said. “He pretends not to like it.”

  “I don’t pretend,” Carl said. He turned to his wife. “You look beautiful—are you two going out?”

  It had been many years since Carl’s infidelity, and the year Addie had spent in Paris with the children, but there was still a note of deference in the way Carl spoke to his wife. He sounded more like a n
ewlywed than a husband of nearly half a century. Addie didn’t dismiss this attention; nor did she really seem to notice it. Charlie once said that what her mother had gotten in exchange for taking him back was absolute confidence in his loyalty, not only sexual but in every other matter as well. That might have been true, but there was nothing pragmatic or dutiful about the way he looked at her. I wondered if a betrayal would be so much to pay, if you could have someone who loved you like that.

  “Later,” Addie said. “Helen and I are going to chat first.”

  Carl turned to me. “I saw the news last week. Are you involved with LIGO?”

  “Not directly, but I have some good friends there.”

  “What is LIGO?” Addie asked.

  Carl explained about the detection. He described the black hole inspiral and merger, the rippling effect of the waves, and the basic mechanism of the interferometers. He even knew where they were located. Then he turned to me. “I’m ninety-nine percent sure I have all that wrong.”

  “No,” I said. “That’s exactly right.”

  “Ripples in spacetime,” Addie said. “I’m afraid that’s beyond me.”

  “It’s beyond pretty much everyone,” I said. “Most people don’t understand as well as Carl does.”

  “She’s being kind to an old man,” Carl said, patting my arm. He wasn’t handsome, or even especially distinguished-looking, but I could understand why women might have responded to him. He had a way of really looking at you while he was talking, as if he were choosing each word based on subtle shifts in your expression. I was sorry when he declined coffee and said he was going upstairs to shower. It might have been a trick of his profession, but it seemed more difficult to talk as soon as he left the room.

  Addie put some cookies on a flowered plate. We sat on stools on either side of the marble-topped island.

  “I have to apologize for not having you here sooner,” Addie said matter-of-factly. “Things have been very hard.”

  “No, of course.”

  “But it sounds like you’re doing well,” Addie said.

  “Well—”

  “I hear from Terrence that Jack and Simmi are becoming close.”

  “They are,” I said. “It’s wonderful.” But this conversational line seemed unlikely to lead to where I wanted it to go. I needed to ask whether Addie had been receiving the same kinds of messages I had. Did she know their source?

  I turned on my stool, and noticed an elaborate wooden treehouse, prefabricated and almost certainly new, in an old elm near the fence.

  “Carl ordered that for Simmi,” Addie said. “He thought he could put it together himself—happily there are people you can hire through Amazon to redo it.”

  I laughed. “I would’ve loved that as a kid.” Actually, I thought that I would love it now: the rope ladder, the walkway around the perimeter, between the leaves, the enclosed cabin into which no one on the ground would be able to see.

  “She did,” Addie said. “She does, although she doesn’t get to use it as much now that they’re at your house.”

  “That’s part of what I wanted to talk—” I began, but Addie held up one hand, ringed and manicured, and shook her head.

  “We couldn’t be happier about them renting from you. It was never going to work with Terrence living here. Just Simmi, yes—but not the two of them. Frankly I was surprised it lasted as long as it did.”

  “But things are better between you and Terrence, now that—” I stopped, because I didn’t know for sure what Terrence had found on Charlie’s phone, nor what he’d shared with Addie.

  “Now that we have the letter,” Addie finished.

  I nodded. I couldn’t ask about the contents of the letter. If she wanted to tell me, she would. Addie paused and touched the woven gold choker resting against her clavicle.

  “It’s a difficult letter to read,” she said. “To write, too—she didn’t finish it.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  Addie took a breath and steadied herself on her stool, but she maintained her composure. “What Carl says—it shows that she wanted to explain, and that she loved us. He thinks that’s all that’s important.”

  I was going to agree with that, but I could see that Charlie’s intentions weren’t enough for Addie. She wanted information, an explanation. She wanted to know how a catastrophe like this could have happened at all.

  “Terrence said she left other unfinished communication in her drafts. Part of that was her illness, of course,” Addie continued. “She had trouble focusing, and her mind wandered. The letter’s evidence of that.”

  The letter I had been imagining was an excruciating goodbye. Or maybe it was a set of instructions—but it wasn’t any further mystery. If Charlie’s mind had wandered during her last weeks on Earth, where had it gone?

  Addie passed a plate across the island. “Have one.”

  She seemed to be trying to shift the conversation to safer territory, but I couldn’t make myself eat, even to be polite. The cookies sat untouched on the plate between us.

  “Carl and I are so glad you’ve become friends with Terrence. We would never want to put you in an awkward position, or jeopardize an arrangement that has clearly been beneficial for Simmi.”

  “It’s been beneficial for Jack and me, too. I’ve explained to him that it isn’t permanent—but I think he’ll be devastated when they eventually go back to L.A.”

  “You never know,” Addie said.

  I was surprised by how hopeful it made me to hear her say it.

  “For now we want to make Simmi’s life here as stable as possible,” she continued. “That’s why Carl and I are sending her to school. And her cousins from New York—William’s family—may come up here for the summer. We thought they could all go to camp together.”

  I thought about the L.A. I’d seen in pictures, Terrence’s surfing and his family there. “Do you think he might really want to stay in Boston?”

  “I don’t think he knows what shape his life is going to take—he’s still quite young. You are all still quite young.”

  “I don’t feel it.”

  “But you are. So much happens.” Addie tilted her head slightly to one side. “I don’t doubt that he loved our daughter. I think he was destroyed by this. You can’t understand the power of people’s emotional needs. At my age I’ve seen it again and again: divorce, illness. A person loses a partner—this is especially true of men who lose their wives—and they become like ducklings, imprinting on the first person who is kind to them. I want to be prepared for whatever happens—though of course it could be someone wonderful.”

  Did I imagine the way she looked at me? But I thought even Addie knew she couldn’t go so far as to make her son-in-law fall in love with someone she chose.

  “But if it was someone we thought was inappropriate in any way—” Her voice descended suddenly in pitch: “we’d fight with everything we have.”

  This burst of passion was followed by an uncomfortable silence, in which I examined the blue flecks in the Boyces’ granite countertop. What I’d come to do was even more delicate than I’d expected.

  “I think Simmi’s been—reaching out a little.” The canned phrase sounded absurd, even to me. “I’ve been getting some messages.”

  Addie’s whole demeanor changed suddenly. She was completely attentive. “What kind of messages?”

  “Texts.”

  Addie put both hands on the countertop, as if to steady herself. “From?” she said.

  “From Simmi, I think. I think she’s been using Charlie’s phone.”

  “Simmi!”

  It was the only time I’d ever seen Addie struggle to keep up. Ordinarily she seemed to be several steps ahead of everyone else.

  “It shocked me,” I said. “Terrence told me the phone was lost. I thought what kind of crazy person wo
uld—”

  Addie was nodding slowly. “That’s exactly what Carl said! What kind of crazy person…”

  “You’ve been getting them, too?” I tried not to sound as if I’d suspected it.

  Addie nodded mutely.

  “Do you remember when they started?”

  Addie got up and went to her purse in the hall. She was of a generation that didn’t keep the phone in arm’s reach at all times. I realized what I’d been hoping: that Addie had begun receiving messages right after Charlie’s death, at the same time I had. That what Jack had suggested to me in the closet was wrong—that Simmi had simply been writing to her grandmother in the same way she’d been writing to me.

  Adelaide came back into the room. “The first one was in November,” she said. “Just before Thanksgiving.”

  Of course Thanksgiving was exactly when we had found Jack and Simmi in the closet, building a machine to talk to ghosts.

  “Was that when you started getting them, too?” Addie asked.

  “A little earlier,” I said.

  Addie nodded. “I showed those to Carl, too, of course—he’s very forgiving, but he said that if someone was doing this to me…well, I thought if he found out who it was, he would have killed them. He thought we might be able to trace it. I talked to Robert, our lawyer, about that as well. Carl wanted to know if there was a way to prosecute a hacker like that.” Addie laughed miserably. “If only we’d known whom we were hoping to prosecute.”

  “I didn’t know either. And the messages didn’t suggest a child—at first. They were about science. They were simple, but not so different from the questions many adults ask. I thought maybe an unsophisticated person…someone who’d seen my name somewhere.”

  Addie nodded slowly. “But why didn’t she just come to me? She’s my granddaughter.”

  “Maybe this was easier for her?”

  Addie considered that. “They say the technology is having all kinds of negative effects on kids, with bullying and sexting and all of that. But I have a friend with a teenage son—she thinks he’s able to express himself better on his phone than in person. He and his friends talk about their feelings in a way that boys never would have done, when she and I were young.”