Lost and Wanted

by Nell Freudenberger

  Addie had been looking out the window at the treehouse while she spoke, and for a moment she lost focus in the same way she had that day outside Darwin’s. Then she turned back to me.

  “Carl told me not to reply to those messages—because it was a hacker. Who else could it be? But it’s the middle of the night, and I get a message with my daughter’s name on it. It says, ‘Dear Mama’—did you know Charlie called me that? Not William—he started with ‘Mom’ as soon as he was out of diapers. But her—it was always ‘Mama.’ ‘Dear Mama—I miss you.’ Addie frowned and pressed her lips together. She didn’t cry, or there were no tears, but her brow and her upper lip contracted into dry furrows. ‘Dear Mama, Where are you?’ ” She covered her face with her hands.

  Charlie’s mother had never been someone who succumbed to ordinary pressures and reversals. She was almost supernaturally strong, and it felt wrong, almost presumptuous, to try to console her now.

  “Why would she do it?” Addie said, looking up. “Why would she pretend?”

  There was the sound of footsteps upstairs: Carl had finished his shower, and was talking on the phone. I could hear his voice very faintly.

  “Jack loves to play with my phone. It’s a sort of talisman.” I tried to introduce the idea I had gently. It was the kind of idea that anyone would resist. “Sometimes he doesn’t completely understand that there’s a person on the other end.”

  Addie looked blank.

  “Does Simmi call you ‘Mama,’ too?”

  “No,” she said. “That’s why I was confused. She always called me ‘Nana’—‘Mama’ is what she called Charlie.” Addie hesitated, then took a sharp breath, realizing. “Oh. Oh, Helen.”

  I didn’t know if I’d ever seen true shock on someone’s face before. Her eyes were wet, and her mouth had dropped open in a kind of wondering agony. It was in frightening contrast to the way she normally presented herself.

  “We can’t be sure what Simmi was thinking,” I began. “Maybe she knew she was really writing to you, but she wanted to imagine something more—metaphysical.”

  Addie didn’t say anything.

  “But Jack did say something to me—that’s why I wanted to talk to you.”

  Addie’s makeup had smudged, but not run. She was sitting up straight in her chair. “What did he say?”

  I thought it was best to be plain. “That she used the phone to talk to her mother.”

  Carl seemed to have stopped talking on the phone upstairs. The only sounds were the hum of the appliances, a blue jay calling raspily from the feeder outside the kitchen door.

  “And I responded.” Addie’s voice was very low. “I said—” But she broke off. She didn’t tell me what she’d written back, or whom she believed she was writing to, in the middle of the night. She looked at me now with new alarm. “I have to talk to Simmi.”

  I thought about it for a moment. “Do you think it would be better for Terrence to do that?”

  Addie looked surprised, then she nodded slowly. “I’ll have to talk to him.”

  “I could do that.”

  Addie’s relief was apparent. “Would you, Helen?”

  “Sweetheart?” Carl was in the hall. “I’m seeing someone at three-forty and then four-thirty. I should be back in—” He came into the kitchen, stopped. He was dressed in a purple-and-white button-down checked shirt and trousers, and his bald head was smooth and shiny from the shower. His voice changed from the one people use only with their most intimate relations to another, more social register:

  “Helen—I didn’t know you were still here.” He smiled at me. “You had a nice, long chat.”

  “I should go, actually. I have a meeting at four.”

  Addie was still sitting on the stool, but her posture had changed radically. Even at the memorial, her straightness had been notable, early training that she’d never forgotten. But now it was as if gravity had suddenly taken a more powerful hold on her. She didn’t look at either one of us when she spoke.

  “We’ve all been a bit confused. Helen has clarified things.”

  Carl smiled at me. “Well, yes. That’s her strong suit.”

  9.

  I had promised Addie I would talk to Terrence, and I wanted to do it when I was sure he would be alone. That night I put Jack to bed, and waited until I thought Simmi would also be asleep. Then I went downstairs. I knocked quietly, so I wouldn’t wake her, and again with a little more force. I stepped back; there was a space under the doorframe, and I could see that at least the lights in the living room were off. It would be unusual for Terrence to keep his daughter out past nine on a school night, but the apartment was very still.

  I rang the bell, to be sure, but no one came. The key to Terrence’s apartment was silver, distinct from the other brass keys on my ring. The apartment was dark, except for a low light over the stove. The kitchen didn’t look as if it had been used that evening: everything was scrupulously neat, except for a piece of paper on the counter. For a moment, I thought they’d left me some kind of note. I imagined Terrence deciding he’d had it—with Boston, with Carl and Addie, with me. I imagined him and Simmi taking off for some remote surfable location: Hawaii, Indonesia, Peru. I thought that if the house in L.A. had sold, they could disappear for years on the proceeds from that alone.

  But when I got closer, I saw it was only a piece of mail for Andrea. Terrence must’ve saved it for me to forward; no one left paper notes anymore. If you wanted to leave something for someone to find, you did it digitally—other unfinished communication, Addie had called it. Terrence hadn’t told her what kind of communication, but I thought it had to be personal. Notes to family members, and friends. It was only the events of recent months that made me think it was possible Charlie could’ve written to me as well. Sometimes you could hope for an outcome so intensely that it led you to break your own rules in order to produce it; even very distinguished scientists sometimes saw a meaningful pattern in what turned out to be simply noise.

  Terrence had probably taken Charlie’s phone from Simmi once he found it. If that were the case, I would leave immediately; I wasn’t prepared to search his bedroom. There was a small chance, though, that he might have gotten what he needed from the phone, and then put it back wherever Simmi had hidden it, for whatever comfort it might supply her. I remembered that once, when he was in preschool, Jack had asked if I could leave my phone with him during the day. Only later had I had the unsettling realization that it must have seemed to him like a way of guaranteeing my return.

  Terrence had recognized the phone’s significance in the first conversation we’d had about it: a twenty-first-century transitional object, for a transition no one wanted their child to have to make. I looked now toward Simmi’s room, the door slightly ajar. I did think about what would happen if they came back while I was inside—but even then there were explanations I could give. I’d smelled gas, or heard a noise. I was the landlord as well as a friend, and Terrence knew that I kept a key.

  I went into Simmi’s room. This was less tidy, with clothing on the floor and books (the same type of graphic novels Jack preferred) in a pile by the bed. The nightstand was cluttered with the detritus of childhood: coins, a crystal rabbit, hairbands, pencils, a pink rubber caterpillar, a deck of UNO. There was a trophy with a golden gymnast balanced on her hands, legs scissored above her head; the lamp was decorated with satin award ribbons.

  But the wooden kitchen was gone. I looked around—maybe she’d finally gotten rid of it, now that it was no longer useful as a hiding place? As I was standing there, the room lit up suddenly; I whirled around, but it was only a car passing. Its brights swung across the ceiling and down the wall, illuminating for a second the little gold figure, the foil printing on the ribbons.

  I should have left then, but instead some instinct made me open the closet door. The kitchen was there in the back corner, shoved underne
ath a row of dresses. The hems rested on the four burners, with their rings of painted blue flame. I opened the oven door, and there was a shoebox full of old papers, schoolwork, drawings, a rubber-band bracelet; at the bottom, I felt it, the size and shape immediately recognizable. As a last layer of defense, she’d stowed the phone inside a sock—not her own, but a woman’s trouser sock: thin gray silk.

  The phone had been charged recently and had sixty-eight percent of its battery; the photo on the home screen was of Simmi when she was four or five, looking very seriously at something in her hand—a shell. The date and time were correct, February 25, at 10:20 p.m., but the top left-hand corner said “No Service.” The Wi-Fi, however, was connected.

  I put in the passcode—1234—and opened Charlie’s messages. The ones between Simmi and me I knew almost by heart, stretching back from “Luvya lady” to the most recent, just her name and a question mark, to which there had been no response. Above my name, the first one in the queue, was Addie, identified on the phone as “Mom.” The beginning of the message showed up on the next line: Dear Mama, It is the night time here…That was all I could see without opening the thread. It seemed wrong to read Addie’s responses—although it occurred to me these scruples were somewhat beside the point, when you were crouched on the floor of a child’s closet snooping in her dead mother’s phone.

  I opened Charlie’s email. There were four messages from today, all from mailing lists that hadn’t yet registered her as deceased. The previous days were similar; I had to scroll down to another page before I found one that looked like it was from an actual person. I hadn’t known (but might have guessed) that Charlie never bothered to erase email; she had 9,560 messages in her inbox. I clicked to the drafts, and it was the same: there were 595 messages Charlie had begun and failed to send. I put my name into the Search function, but it was as I’d expected—all my efforts produced zero results.

  That was when I heard them. They were coming in the first door from the street. I put the phone back inside the sock, shoved the sock where I’d found it, and closed the oven door. I came out of the closet as quietly as I could, and went into the living room. Then I switched on the light and hurried to the front door.

  “Oh,” Terrence said. “Hi. What—?”

  “Hi—I’m so sorry,” I said. “I thought I smelled gas. But it’s nothing…it’s fine.”

  “Christ,” he said. “Okay—are you sure?”

  “It had to be from the street. There’s no smell in here. I’m really sorry.”

  Terrence’s expression shifted from alarm to something more watchful. “Nuestra casa es su casa—right, Simmi?” he said, but kept his eyes on me.

  “It’s Daddy’s birthday!”

  “It is?”

  “Yeah.”

  “You should have told us.”

  “I forgot,” Terrence said, in a tone that could have convinced only an eight-year-old.

  “Can you believe it?” Simmi exclaimed. “We didn’t realize until Grandma called!”

  I glanced at Terrence.

  “My mother,” he clarified. “Simmi wanted to celebrate. So we went for sushi and Zootopia.”

  “We were defrosting veggie burgers! Then we just threw them away and went out!” She was clearly thrilled by the spontaneity of it all.

  “And now it’s way too late for you,” Terrence said. “You better be in PJs in no more than seven seconds.”

  Simmi giggled and disappeared into her room, where I hoped I’d left no sign of my intrusion.

  “You’re sure there’s no gas,” Terrence said.

  “Positive.”

  “Okay.”

  He didn’t seem thrilled by my presence, but neither did he seem as antagonistic as he had been the last time I’d seen him.

  “Do you have a second? Or I could come back after you put her to bed.”

  “Yeah,” Terrence said. “Hang on.” He disappeared into Simmi’s room, and I sat down on one of the stools at the counter. I looked at the email on my own phone to distract myself: a message from Vincenzo about visits from the accepted PhD candidates, who toured the department every February. This year five were from mainland China; five from the rest of the world; and five from the U.S. Everyone seemed most excited about a young man from Hefei working on astrophysical plasmas.

  Terrence returned after a few minutes, closing the door behind him.

  “Happy birthday,” I said. “You didn’t really forget, did you?”

  “No. But I’m not a big celebrator. Plus, you know, we have Charlie’s birthday coming up, and then the anniversary in June. So I was trying not to make an event out of it.”

  I hadn’t thought about the anniversary.

  Terrence had gone around to the other side of the counter. He took out a lunch box—a fancy metal one, with different compartments for different items. He was wearing the same thing he’d worn to Neel and Roxy’s party, a close-fitting black Henley shirt with two buttons at the neck. He pushed the sleeves up to his elbows and started to take food from the refrigerator for his daughter’s lunch: tomatoes, carrots, a block of tofu, a mesh bag of individually wrapped cheeses.

  “What did you want to talk about?” he said, without looking up.

  “I talked to Addie.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Did you know Simmi was writing to her, too?”

  “Not until you gave me the heads-up about the phone,” he said. “But, yeah.” He hesitated. “You think they’re rational—and then they do something like this. I think she saw ‘Mom’ and just—”

  I’d expected that he would have seen the messages, but I hadn’t known if he would understand what Simmi had been trying to do. I’d underestimated him, though. What it had taken Addie and me months to comprehend, he’d gotten right away.

  I watched him slice a kiwi, wash the knife, and then cut smoked tofu into neat squares. The veins on the back of his hands stood out prominently, and there were dry patches on the skin of his knuckles.

  “Addie said you sent them something.”

  “Of course.” He looked up. “But not to prove anything—I don’t care what they think.”

  “I think they think—”

  “I’m a pusher—a monster. Yeah, I know. Who got her the drugs so she could die without her parents there. That’s why I’m here in Boston, three thousand miles from my family, five hours from the only passable surf break on the East Coast, packing a lunch box.”

  “That’s not what I was going to say. I think they’re just worried about keeping up their relationship with Simmi.”

  “Why wouldn’t Simmi have a relationship with them?”

  “I think Addie thinks you might meet someone, eventually.”

  Terrence looked up sharply. “You didn’t tell her about seeing Nicki here?”

  “No,” I said. “Of course not.”

  He seemed to relax.

  “She thinks you’re grieving, and it’s hard to be alone.”

  “Yeah, well…”

  “And she’s going to miss Simmi so much if—when you guys go back to L.A. I think she wants to keep you guys close as long as possible. I think the letter helped.”

  “Did she show it to you?”

  “She just said it was unfinished.”

  Terrence looked frustrated. “Nothing satisfies that woman!”

  “Maybe nothing could, in this case?”

  He looked at me. “They were all unfinished.”

  “Were there—a lot of them?” How many friends had Charlie written to, to say goodbye? There could be a kind of jockeying for position around a tragedy, and I didn’t want Terrence to think I was doing that. I tried to keep the hurt out of my voice, but he could see it on my face.

  Terrence was watching me steadily. “You didn’t smell gas,” he said.

  “No,” I admitted
. I felt my neck getting hot.

  “Did you look for it?”

  “For what?”

  “A letter, for you.”

  “No.” I met Terrence’s eyes. “Yes,” I admitted. “But there wasn’t anything.”

  He latched the lunch box, then bent down to rearrange something in the fridge to make room for it overnight. Then he stood up. “You have to search in Sent. I sent it to myself.”

  “You mean, she did write to me?”

  Terrence indicated his computer, which was sitting on the counter next to a roll of paper towels and his keys.

  “Not to you,” he said. “But she mentions you, in her note to them.”

  “To Carl and Addie?”

  Instead of answering, Terrence opened the laptop and tapped a few keys. Then he turned it to face me.

  “Read it if you want,” he said.

  “Are you sure?”

  “I wouldn’t be,” Terrence said. “If you weren’t in it.”

  “But Addie didn’t say anything.”

  “Addie doesn’t know who Iphigenia is.” Terrence’s face came close to a smile, without actually arriving there. “She asked me, after I sent them the letter, and I said I didn’t know. But the other day I remembered Charlie referring to you that way, near the end. There were a couple of other things like that, words and names that she’d mix up, especially to do with the past. I wouldn’t point it out—I didn’t want to make her self-conscious.”

  Then he half turned away, giving both of us our privacy.

  Dear Mama and Daddy:

  I know you’re not going to be able to forgive me for this. And I’m so sorry. There’s so much I want to say to you, and I know you wanted to be here. It’s just—if you’re here, I can’t do it the way I want to do it. I have to wait to have it done to me. And I can’t stand that.