Lost and Wanted

by Nell Freudenberger

  They called them “ruby slippers” in the ’70s—maybe you remember? That’s because Judy Garland is supposed to have used them, but so did Dinah Washington. Did you know the first song she ever sang in public was Billie Holliday’s “I Can’t Face the Music”? Isn’t that amazing? It’s like she knew what would happen to her from the beginning.

  I think this way is better for Simmi. I do it after we’ve had a good night, so she can remember that later. I choose.

  One request. I didn’t want to ask this of Terrence—I don’t want to make things any sadder than they already are. But I’d like there to be a photo of me at her graduation. A real one on paper, if possible. If it seems like you might not be around at that point either, could you pass this request on to Iphigenia? I have her in mind specifically, not just because I trust her to carry it out (even if she won’t approve) but because I’d like her to be there that day, if I can’t.

  I say “if” because Terrence and I have been reading this book. The author thinks that our consciousness must live on after we die, because all we are is consciousness anyway. And so the photo is my own take on it. I have this crackpot notion that it could be a kind of window, that I could look out and see her.

  I’ve started and stopped this note so many times. Today I’m going to finish it. I love you. I am terrified of

  I scrolled down, and then panicked. Had I somehow erased a part of it?

  “Where’s the—”

  “That’s what she meant,” Terrence said. “Unfinished.”

  I read it through again, as if something might change, and again.

  “Terrified of—”

  “Not the actual dying,” he said. “Just not being here.”

  There was a catch in my throat. As far as I could remember, Charlie and I had never talked about that fear. “Yeah,” I said. “I know.”

  “Simmi used to look at our wedding pictures a lot before it happened. When she was little she would ask where she was, why weren’t there any pictures of her? Then one day Simmi said: ‘That was when I was dead.’ Very matter-of-fact. We tried to explain to her the difference—that not being born yet isn’t the same as being dead—but she couldn’t understand.”

  We were quiet for a moment.

  “Could you forward this to me?” I asked him.

  “Yeah. I would have anyway—you didn’t need to break in.”

  “I’m really sorry.”

  Terrence shrugged. He had picked up a pink rubber ball from the kitchen counter and was squeezing it, first one hand and then the other. His forearms tensed and relaxed.

  “I should go back upstairs,” I said. “Jack never wakes up, but if he did and I wasn’t there, he’d freak out.” I stopped, because I thought it sounded insensitive to Terrence’s situation, but he just nodded. I picked up my keys from the counter. I was almost at the door when he spoke.

  “You wrote back.”

  “What?”

  “To Simmi.”

  “Once or twice.”

  “Four times.” His voice was matter-of-fact: “Email and text. But you didn’t know it was her.”

  “Not until she sent me ‘Cottleston Pie.’ Then I knew.”

  “Who’d you think it was before that?”

  “The thief,” I said.

  “Not a ghost.”

  “No.”

  “Because you don’t believe in them.”

  “I’m a scientist.”

  Terrence shrugged. “Yeah, okay.”

  “Why—do you?”

  “It’s not believing,” Terrence said slowly. “It’s a physical thing.”

  “Your memories.”

  Terrence let out a breath.

  “Terrence, I—”

  He was suddenly fierce. “It’s knees—okay?”

  “Knees?”

  “In my back. She had really long legs, right? She liked to sleep all curled up. Sometimes they’re there when I wake up, sometimes not. Just like before.”

  “Like phantom limb syndrome. There’s a lot of research on that—it’s well documented.”

  Terrence shook his head. “Not like that.” He came around the counter suddenly, and pressed his fist against my back. “Like this.”

  His knuckles rolled off my vertebrae. Then he took his hand away, but we were still only a few inches apart. I was scared that if I looked at him, he would know how I felt when he touched me. I was scared he knew already.

  “You don’t have to believe me.”

  I tried to answer carefully. “It’s confusing enough for adults,” I said. “For kids—”

  “No kidding.” Terrence was leaning back against the kitchen counter. The sleeves of his shirt were still pushed up to his elbow, and I saw the new tattoo for the first time: three elaborate green-and-orange goldfish, like a Chinese painting, in a wheel on the inside of his right forearm.

  “Did they really believe in ghosts?” Terrence asked. “Those scientists?”

  I didn’t know what he meant at first. “Which ones?”

  “You know,” he said. “The ones who made the typewriter.”

  “Enough to build at least three machines.”

  He leaned forward, his forearms on the counter. “And these were real scientists?”

  “Some people think they were the best of their generation. That they saved physics.”

  “Saved it from what?”

  “Relentless calculation.”

  Terrence smiled suddenly.

  “You mean boring old math,” he said.

  10.

  Terrence and Simmi went to L.A. for spring break, two weeks at the end of March. I worked the first week, and hired Julia to take care of Jack. The second week I took Jack on a real vacation: we went to Costa Rica to see olive ridley turtles nesting on a black sand beach on the Nicoya Peninsula. Our guide let Jack, wearing rubber gloves, assist a newly hatched turtle down the beach and deposit it carefully into the Pacific.

  Jack and I got back on the Friday before school was to start up again. Terrence and Simmi had returned midweek, and Terrence had gone down to spend a few days at the new Brooklyn Zingaro, leaving Simmi with her grandparents. He texted me from the train on Saturday; Simmi’s grandparents were bringing her home at six, and he was running late. Would it be possible for me to give her dinner with Jack, since Carl and Addie had plans in the evening? I said yes and Jack was delighted. He wanted to make lasagna, and so we went to Trader Joe’s for the ingredients.

  I had been expecting Addie, but it was Carl who dropped Simmi off.

  “I saw turtles!” Jack exclaimed as soon as I opened the door for them. “I held one!”

  Simmi looked tanned from her trip, a little sunburned under her eyes; clearly they’d spent a lot of their time in L.A. at the beach.

  “We saw seals,” she said. “Way out.”

  “I can’t compete with that,” Carl said to me. “We saw a couple of squirrels in the backyard, but that was about it.”

  Simmi and Jack wanted to go into our backyard before dinner, and so I sent them around the side of the house; I felt funny now about using my spare key to the downstairs apartment. I stepped out onto the porch with Carl, closing the front door behind me. The sun was going down, and although the days were getting more spring-like, the nights were still cold. Carl was wearing a brown suede jacket, a newsboy cap, and a plaid wool scarf.

  “Would you like to come in for a drink?” I asked him.

  “I could use one, but Addie made me promise to be back by seven. We’re going out to dinner with friends.”

  “How is Addie?”

  Carl listened for a moment: we could hear the children faintly in the backyard. There was the repetitive whoosh of the Stomp Rocket, as they sent it flying again and again.

  “Not so good this week,” he said. “It va
ries. Thanks for asking.”

  However excruciating these months had been for Addie, the letter would have made it even worse. I wondered for the first time if she could’ve denied its reality in part out of apprehension—now justified. The familiar voice, alive for the thirty seconds it took to read. Then gone forever. The word “terrified,” then nothing more. The crying Terrence had heard through the wall, then a pill her husband prescribed, then the slow agony of waking up. Then her public face again. And again and again and again.

  Did I imagine it, or did Carl’s mouth tremble? He had one of those mouths that had settled downward in the corners, but not in a way that had ever made him appear sad in the past. Now he looked as if he were suppressing an unexpected wave of emotion.

  “Addie said something to me the other day. She said I’d been ‘working through it’—not in the sense of processing it, but that I had immediately ‘gone to work’ after it happened. I’ve been taking care of her, and my son, too—to some extent—telling them the same kinds of things I tell my patients.” Carl stopped, adjusted his cap to cover his ears.

  “I always talk about a scar: that the wound never goes away, but that it gets covered by some protective tissue, more and more each year. And then one woman says to me, ‘Yes, and then the tissue grows so thick you can’t see out.’ ” He looked at me: “You have some people who absorb everything you say, as if it’s all wise and useful. And then there are others who argue all the time—those patients are exhausting, but I think you learn more from them.”

  “It’s the same with students of physics.”

  Carl smiled for the first time. “Yes,” he said. “I imagine it would be.”

  As we were talking, a white taxi pulled up at the curb outside the house. We both watched as a light went on inside, and Terrence paid the driver. I saw him notice us both standing on the porch, and his reluctance was apparent as he got out of the car. As usual, he wasn’t wearing warm-enough clothes: the black down vest, with only a T-shirt underneath.

  “Boy doesn’t get dressed in the morning,” Carl said, under his breath. His tone surprised me a little, and I remembered what Terrence had said about Carl being the one to make them sign the prenup agreement. He seemed to make an effort to shift his affect, as his son-in-law came up the walk to us. “How’d it go down there?” he asked.

  Terrence nodded. “Good. They’ve had a great couple of weeks. People are gearing up for the season in Montauk. We have to see how it goes in the fall; it’s hard to keep a surf shop open year-round on this coast.”

  Carl made a sound demonstrating his agreement with that skeptical assessment.

  “How’s Simmi?”

  “I was working, but she and Addie had a great time. They went to afternoon tea one day, did some shopping.”

  “I hope not for clothes,” Terrence said stiffly.

  “Addie needed some distraction.”

  “Don’t we all,” Terrence said.

  “The kids are in the yard,” I said. The atmosphere was tense, and I tried to defuse it. I turned to Terrence. “We didn’t expect you back so soon—I haven’t even fed them.”

  “We can all eat, if you want,” Terrence said. “Pizza?”

  “Jack and I made lasagna.”

  Carl looked from me to Terrence. “I’ll leave you kids to it. And we’ll see you Thursday for dinner,” he confirmed with Terrence. He touched his son-in-law’s back in place of a hug. Then he kissed my cheek.

  “It’s always nice to see you, Helen,” he said, before he made his way down the steps. From behind he looked older, his shoulders slightly rounded, his midsection heavier than before. He paused to let some slow-moving evening traffic go by, before crossing our narrow street to his car.

  Terrence and I went into the front hall and closed the door. I could feel his relief now that the interaction with his father-in-law was over, at least for the time being.

  “Does it ever get warm here?” he said.

  “This was a warm winter,” I told him. “You were lucky. I remember one year it snowed in April—and that was before the climate went nuts.” I was aware that I was talking too fast; it was so nice to see him. “I can’t promise the lasagna’s going to be amazing,” I said. “But it’s ready—if you want to call the kids?”

  “Yeah,” he said. “Okay.”

  “It’s good to have you guys back.”

  “Yeah, no—it’s good to be back. L.A. was pretty intense.” He looked at me, and I thought he was going to say something else. I waited, halfway up the stairs.

  “I’ll see you in a sec,” he said, and disappeared into the apartment. I could hear the children’s voices, shouting in the gloom. I knew they would come in sweaty from running around in the cold, their faces flushed. The lasagna had come out well, and I secretly hoped Terrence might be impressed. I felt suddenly surprisingly happy, the way I sometimes do in my office, when I get a new and especially promising idea.

  11.

  The kids complained at dinner that we’d never made it to the aquarium, and Terrence offered to take them himself the next morning, if I had work to do. I did have some papers Neel had emailed me, related to the rotor project we’d been talking about in January, asking for my thoughts. It was the first time he’d written since returning from his honeymoon—a trip to some islands I’d never heard of, off the coast of southern India—as if nothing unusual had happened in his personal or professional life since we’d last spoken. After considering for a moment, I decided to go with everyone to the aquarium.

  I think the pleasure of aquariums has almost nothing to do with science, just like planetariums aren’t really about astrophysics. One moment you’re in the bright exterior world, and the next you’ve been transported to a dim blue one. The children felt it the minute we went inside; they ran toward the Giant Ocean Tank, and pressed their faces to the glass. Jack wanted to start at the top, with the coral reef, and so we took the elevator to Level Four. We descended slowly, from tropical to freshwater to temperate, and then to the marine mammals. I didn’t supply any facts about the rapid and probably unstoppable murder of the planet’s coral reef ecologies; I let us all just enjoy it in peace. The rays especially awed the children, gliding along like knives in the water, then suddenly tilting upward, revealing rhomboid swaths of white flesh.

  “Whoa,” Jack breathed.

  “Like Daddy’s tattoo,” Simmi said.

  I thought that made it okay to ask. “Why the stingray?”

  “It’s for my brother,” Terrence said.

  “And you have fish,” Jack said.

  “Those are for me and Simmi.”

  “And Mama,” Simmi added.

  I glanced at Terrence, who didn’t break his focus on the tank. “Yep.”

  That was why there were three.

  “You have so many sea animals on you, you could be a giant poster for the aquarium!” Jack said.

  “Are rays actually fish?” I asked, inanely.

  “Yeah,” Terrence said. “We sometimes see them in warmer water—when Ray and I went down to Nicaragua there were a ton of them. You have to sort of shuffle, getting into the water.”

  “What happens if they sting you?” Jack asked.

  Terrence ruffled his hair. “You don’t want them to sting you, dude.”

  “Hey,” Simmi said. “Do they really have a touch tank here with sharks?”

  “That’s my favorite thing,” Jack said excitedly. “Can I show her?”

  I nodded. It was Sunday and the aquarium was crowded. Terrence and I had to pay attention to keep the kids in view. When we got to the touch tank, Jack and Simmi waited their turn for a place among the small children and their parents at the edge of the exhibit. The tank hosted Atlantic and cownose rays along with the small grayish-green epaulette sharks. Terrence and I stood back a little from the crowd.

  “
I wanted to say sorry again about the phone,” I told him. “I don’t know what I was thinking.”

  “We’re cool on that front,” Terrence said.

  “But I should have told you right away. I was worried that it would be one more thing for you to deal with. And I also really wanted you to take the apartment. I thought it would be good for Jack,” I added quickly.

  “I think it was good for both of them,” Terrence said.

  “They just seem to get closer,” I agreed. We watched them jockeying for a place in the midst of the other children, rolling up their sleeves. The lights in the ceiling were like spotlights, picking up the shine in their hair.

  “The house is finally in contract,” Terrence said. He was leaning against the wall, hands in the pockets of a pair of loose, dark jeans. Today he was wearing an actual down coat, over a green T-shirt that said Dogtown.

  “In L.A.? That must be a relief.”

  “It is for me.”

  “Is Simmi doing okay with that?”

  “She wanted to go back and see it,” he said. “I tried to talk her out of it, but…”

  “Oh, no.”

  “Yeah,” he said. “It was awful. Our furniture’s still there, but the brokers had brought in all this stuff to make it easier to sell. The room we used for a den they turned into another bedroom—a nursery, with a crib and everything. And then in our room, there was a different cover on the bed.” He stopped for a minute. All those people in the enclosed space made the voices reverberate, as if we were underground. Everyone seemed to be shouting, but from far away.

  “It was like—I don’t know—a museum or something. A museum where everything’s for sale. We didn’t stay very long.”

  “That sounds really hard.”

  “Otherwise, we saw my brother, and hung with a bunch of his friends in Venice—that was great. The kids all go to the beach before school every day.”

  “Really?”

  “I saw some apartments there.”

  I was glad we were in the dark because I needed a moment to adjust my expression. I’d thought we were having a different conversation—not necessarily that they planned to stay in my house forever, but that the sale of the house in L.A. indicated their intention to put down stronger roots here in Boston.