“For you two?”
Terrence looked at me. “I wanted to tell you first, but you and Jack were away. I already talked to Carl and Addie. They aren’t happy, but I think Carl at least gets it. All that stuff with the phone made me realize what I’ve been doing wrong.” He turned toward me earnestly. “I thought I was bringing her here to, you know, be together in all this—a family. But it was super confusing for her to just up and leave.”
“I don’t think you were doing anything wrong,” I said. “It’s an impossible situation.”
“But I think that if we’d been home—in L.A.—she wouldn’t have been able to…fantasize like that. Carl said that made sense.” Terrence sounded proud that his father-in-law, an expert, had agreed with him. “Until we went home, it was almost like she still thought there was a way around it.”
“She might have thought that anyway.”
Terrence shrugged. “Maybe.”
Jack turned around and waved at me, pointing into the tank.
“I think it would be good to be out there for the anniversary, anyway. There, but in a new place. I might even try to buy before we get there, now that we’ll have the cash. Save her having to move twice.”
“That sounds wise.”
“She can go back to her old school, her friends. And I can surf every morning, which will make me a seriously nicer person.”
“You’re pretty nice.” I felt the blood rushing to my face, that same uncomfortable separation between my thoughts and my physical self. I wanted to excuse myself and hurry to the bathroom, lock myself in a stall, and put my forehead against the cool metal of the door. But Terrence didn’t seem to notice.
“You know how there’s one thing you do that makes you feel like you’re ten years old? Like you’re just completely yourself while you’re doing it—no bullshit?” There was a note of pleading in Terrence’s voice; he really wanted me to tell him he was making the right decision.
“Yes,” I admitted. “I know exactly what you mean.”
The kids were making their way back toward us.
“I hope it’s going to be okay for you,” Terrence said, “finding someone else.”
“What?”
“We can pay rent until you do.”
“Oh,” I said. “It shouldn’t be a problem. I can probably find a tenant through the housing office at MIT, even. People are always cycling in and out of this zip code.”
“Great,” Terrence said, with relief.
The children reached us. “I’m so hungry,” Jack said.
“Can we get snacks now?” Simmi asked.
“Can we get astronaut ice cream from the shop?”
“And a souvenir? I want to remember this place.” Simmi smiled at her father, and then at me. “After we get home.”
* * *
—
That night I called my sister.
“It’s so late there,” Amy said when she picked up.
“I wanted to wait until your kids were asleep.”
“Almost,” Amy said. “In a minute Bess is going to call out that she can’t sleep, and then I say, ‘You don’t have to sleep, you only have to rest.’ We go through the same routine every night. Then she goes to sleep.”
“Kids are so perverse.”
“But predictable,” Amy said.
“Terrence and Simmi are leaving—they’re moving back to L.A.”
Amy was quiet for a moment. “Helen, I’m sorry.”
“It was never going to work long-term. I mean, I knew that. It was a fantasy—Addie’s fantasy, really.”
“But yours, too, kind of.”
“But not like that!”
“I read this article about how you can have anything going on in your head, as long as it doesn’t manifest itself. Like a reflection.”
I waited for my sister to expand on that, but she remained quiet.
“Like a reflection that’s different from what’s doing the reflecting,” I suggested.
“Exactly—hang on.” In a wearily cheerful voice, Amy called out: “You don’t have to sleep, Bess—you just have to rest!”
“They’re moving to Venice,” I said. “Or back to Santa Monica.”
“Now that sounds nice,” Amy said.
“They’re going to surf before school.”
“Don’t we all.”
“You do?”
“I still live in Pasadena, Helen, remember? Before school we pack lunches, argue about clothing, and then sit in traffic for forty minutes gnawing on toaster waffles.”
I laughed. There was a shuffle of papers in the background. Maybe Amy had been grading when I called.
“I think I know what the Swedish flag means,” my sister said.
“I think it was just random.”
“Charlie wants you to win the Nobel Prize. Wanted, I mean.”
“Yeah, right. You know who is going to win the Nobel?” I didn’t wait for her to guess. “Neel.”
“Neel Jonnal? Really?”
“Not him, specifically—but the chief scientists on his project.”
“Seriously?” Amy said. “Wow!” Then she tried to modulate her tone: “That’s really something. I read some of the press about the detection, but I didn’t know it was that big a deal.”
“Yep.”
“What are you working on these days?”
“Neel and I are thinking of starting a new project together. It would be a way of using Advanced LIGO—the same detectors, with the improvements Neel’s team is working on now—to investigate gravity at regular, Earth-sized distances. Meters and kilometers. We’d use these rotors—dynamic field generators, we call them—small, incredibly dense machines that turn around and around. The universe doesn’t usually make very small, very heavy things.”
“I don’t get it.”
“General Relativity is a perfect description of reality when you’re talking about very large masses—stars and black holes. And quantum mechanics describes the tiniest pieces of matter equally well. It’s the middle that’s tricky. But LIGO could be used to test gravity at those shorter, familiar distances, with much greater precision than we’ve ever done before. We could actually find deviations from General Relativity—modifications.”
“That’s really exciting.”
I thought Amy knew me well enough to guess how I was feeling, and that she was enthusiastic about the new project for that reason, more than any genuine interest. It disappointed me for a second, until I realized it was the whole reason I had called my sister.
“I’m going to be so sad when they leave,” I told her.
“I know you are,” Amy said.
12.
They left three days after school let out. Simmi came up that morning to say goodbye to us. She was dressed in her leopard-print leggings, a black hoodie—airplane clothes—and there was an almost manic excitement about her. She repeated information I already knew from Terrence: that they were in contract for an apartment five minutes from the beach; that they would stay with her uncle Ray until it was ready; that she was having a sleepover with her best friend, Clover, the night after they got back.
Jack didn’t understand that her behavior could be defensive, and so he was hurt by it. He said “bye” in a small voice, and remained inert while Simmi hugged him.
I bent down to give Simmi a hug. She smelled like whatever she put in her hair, a little like sunscreen. Her mother had always been delicate, bony almost, but Simmi felt solid and healthy in my arms. I told her I hoped we could come visit soon.
“Yes, come! We can go to Disneyland,” she said. She glanced back at Jack, a question on her face. “Are you afraid of roller coasters?”
Jack looked offended. “No.”
“Good—me neither!” Then she pounded down the carpeted stairs the way Jack d
oes, making enough noise for someone twice her weight. Her father came out of the apartment.
“The car’s here in three minutes,” he told her.
“I’ll watch for it,” Simmi said. She went out the front door without looking back. Terrence was locking the apartment door. I went down, but Jack stayed on the landing.
“It’s clean,” Terrence said. “You could show it anytime.”
“I’m sure.” I tried to keep my voice even. “I hope you guys have an easy trip.”
Terrence had knelt down and was binding the suitcase’s zippers with a miniature padlock, something my father always encouraged me to do.
He straightened up. I realized we’d never hugged or kissed each other casually in any kind of greeting. There was nothing casual about the way I felt while we were doing it now. My arms were around his neck, his around my waist, and for just one second I was in that other world, the reflection. Then I pulled away. I didn’t know what Terrence was feeling; he didn’t meet my eyes. Instead he looked up at Jack, who was watching us steadily.
“Hey—you want to come down here?”
Jack shook his head.
Terrence nodded. “Yeah, I hear you. I hate this goodbye stuff, too.”
He lifted the larger of the two suitcases, and I started to open the door for him, but Simmi was standing right outside. “Let me do it,” she said. She held the door while Terrence came back for the other suitcase.
“Take it easy, little man,” he said to Jack. “See you soon, okay?”
Simmi smiled unexpectedly at me and mouthed something so her father couldn’t hear. Then she closed the door.
Only then did Jack come down the stairs. He leaned back against me, and allowed me to put my arms around his chest. We watched Terrence and Simmi get into the waiting car. Their shapes were distorted by the mottled stained-glass panel in the door.
“What did she say?”
“Luv ya,” I said. “I think.”
Jack made a skeptical noise. “Girls are dumb,” he pronounced, before opening the door himself, so that he could better see the car disappearing around the corner.
13.
It was almost as if Charlie died again. I went to my office at MIT, but I hardly got anything done. I brought the photograph of us at her wedding from my desk at home, and I looked at it more and more. My teeth hurt. I thought it was all the coffee I was drinking—but I’d always drunk too much coffee. One day a white balloon floated by the window, and I watched it, transfixed. Where had it come from? It seemed impossible that it had originated from anywhere around Building 6. Vincenzo’s wind chimes—a source of conflict in the past—were beautiful in a way I’d never noticed. Differently sized metal cylinders struck a clay disk, producing a pentatonic scale. Next to those otherworldly sounds, the work in front of me was gray scratches on paper.
Jack and I didn’t talk much about Terrence and Simmi that summer after they left, but I knew Jack thought about them. Periodically he would drag me outside to weed the garden, according to Terrence’s detailed instructions. Neither of us was good at distinguishing between the weeds and the vegetables he had planted. Once he said, out of nowhere, but as if we’d just been talking about them:
“Terrence didn’t have a dad either.”
It was a hot July morning, and we were on our hands and knees, raking a dry bed that Jack swore contained carrots. The shoots coming up looked like chickweed to me, but I pulled out the grass around each plant anyway. Jack used the watering can.
“He had a dad, but his dad didn’t live with them.”
“Did he tell you that, or Simmi?”
“He did.”
“When they were living here?”
“When we were making chili that time.”
“How did he feel about that—I mean, having his dad live somewhere else?”
“He missed him,” Jack said. “But then he saw him, when he was grown-up.”
I waited.
“It wasn’t like he expected.”
“Oh,” I said. “What did he expect?”
Jack nodded, as if that had been his question, too. “He thought they would know each other already.”
“But they didn’t.”
Jack shook his head. “They were strangers.”
14.
Jack turned eight and started the third grade. Vincenzo and I finally published the electroweak paper, which was prominently cited right away, pleasing our department chair and our students. I had a full teaching load again that fall, but my busy schedule didn’t seem to upset Jack the way it had a year earlier; he was more self-possessed and more cheerful than he’d been when he was seven.
Early in December, Addie emailed me to say that Simmi was coming to visit. She was flying on her own, without her father, and Addie wondered if I’d like to set up a time when she and Jack could see each other. It seemed like the perfect opportunity to make good on the promise I’d made them last winter, and take the kids on a lab tour. For me it was also about the political events of that year, which made science education feel more crucial than ever. As I expected, Addie was enthusiastic about the idea, and so I arranged for her to bring Simmi to LIGO’s office on Albany Street, next door to the lab, a little more than a week before Christmas.
* * *
—
It was a cold, gray Tuesday afternoon, and the air had a wet bite that suggested snow. On Albany Street the telephone poles punctuated at regular intervals the brick façades of the labs, formerly warehouse and factory buildings. We waited for Simmi in the courtyard of Building 22, where there was a wooden bench and a few trees, just planted in the spring and now bare. Jack ran up the ramp to the entrance, then gave me an embarrassed smile, returning to the bench via the stairs. I could see him deciding that running up and down ramps was childish.
Simmi and Addie were late, and so we decided to wait in the lobby, where it was warmer. Jack admired the wall-sized posters of the interferometers, and I told him where they were located.
“Which is which?”
“Guess.”
Jack thought for a moment. “I guess that’s Louisiana and that’s Washington.”
“The other way around.”
Jack looked disheartened. “I thought the desert would be in the south.”
“That’s logical. But it’s the southwest where we have desert in this country; Louisiana is very green. Hanford is more barren, and still pretty contaminated—it was a nuclear facility before LIGO was there. The Department of Energy was working on cleaning it up.”
I thought about the recent changes at DOE, and decided not to mention them. In the past few months Jack has become exasperated with my talking back to the radio. You have to cheer up, he’ll say, or: You can’t be like this for four years! And so I’ve been trying to keep most of my feelings about the news to myself. I’m grateful for the trust and sanguinity Jack displays these days, which makes me feel I’ve done something right. It’s only that, as the world seems to become an increasingly dangerous place, I wonder if happiness is the point. Maybe passion, something that can keep you satisfied inside your own head, independent of other people, is going to be worth more in Jack’s lifetime.
“Contaminated with what?” Jack asked.
“Well—nuclear waste, mostly. You remember I told you about the Manhattan Project? Those scientists made the plutonium at Hanford for the bomb we dropped on Nagasaki.”
“Fat Man or Little Boy?”
“That was Fat Man.”
“Pyoo, pyoo,” Jack whistled, under his breath. Then he stopped making bomb sounds and put both fists in the pockets of his sweatshirt, stretching it out.
I glanced through the glass doors to the street, and saw Simmi and her grandmother turning into the courtyard. Simmi was looking at the ground as they walked, listening to something Addie was saying. She was wearing the
same silver parka from last year, a little small now—she wouldn’t have needed a new one in L.A.—and her hair was shoulder length, styled in tight ringlets, more grown-up.
I opened the door for them, and Adelaide kissed me once on each cheek. I hugged Simmi, who hugged back a little shyly. She was still taller than Jack, but only just barely now.
“Hey,” she said, punching Jack gently on the arm.
“That’s the way you say hello, after half a year?” her grandmother said.
Simmi glanced at her grandmother, opened her eyes wide at Jack, then dropped a curtsy, holding out an imaginary gown. Jack laughed, but I marveled: it was so perfectly Charlie. Simmi had taken off her coat and was wearing black jeans and a gray sweater, along with patent leather Doc Marten boots.
Addie shook her head. “We have ascended several degrees on the fresh-o-meter since we saw each other last,” she said, but her expression was wistful, not scolding. If Simmi had stayed in Boston, I thought it would have been much easier for her grandparents, seeing her on a daily or weekly basis, to think of her as her own person. After a hiatus of several months, they could hardly help but be struck by the similarities, the moments of uncanny synchronicity in Simmi’s looks and manner, which would only increase as she grew into a woman both like and unlike her mother.
The children had wandered across the lobby to look at the photographs of the interferometers.
“How are you?” I asked Addie.
She was wearing a dark red coat, black leather gloves, and a round, vaguely Russian fur hat. We exchanged the kind of despairing remarks about the election that were standard that winter in Cambridge.
“The bright spot is that William and Caroline and the boys spent the summer with us.” She glanced at Simmi, who had gotten very close to the Livingston photo, as if she were trying to see the individual pixels. “I wish we could’ve had all three of the grandchildren in one place, of course. But very few modern families get that.”
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