Neel took the kids back to the control room to set them up at the computer. “They’re having a great time in there, mutilating digital fruit,” he said when he returned, a few minutes later. “They won’t be able to reenter the lab without an ID card. But I told them to knock loudly if they need something.”
“I’m sure they’ll be fine.”
Neel had exchanged the safety goggles for his regular glasses, and taken off his cap, and so I took mine off as well. I noticed he was wearing the same sweater he’d worn to his engagement party.
“That was completely my fault, by the way,” he said. “I should have warned them to be careful of the monocular hitting the viewport. I probably should have held it for them.”
“You’ve never given a tour for children.”
But that didn’t seem to reassure Neel. He looked even more upset than I would have expected, given that no harm had been done. “I’m not very good with kids.”
“Come on,” I said. “It’s like anything else—you just haven’t had any practice.”
“I guess. But that’s about to change.” Neel looked down at his hands, and in the instant before he said it, I knew.
“Roxy’s pregnant.”
I pulled my sweater around myself; the inside of the lab was several degrees colder than the offices had been. Neel’s expression was questioning, waiting for my reaction, and I had to look away. I focused on the oscillator bench across the lab, where Vlad’s outline was just visible behind hanging strips of plastic. It is often impossible to understand a concept in physics without an analogy, and used in that way I have no problem with them. What I dislike are scientific analogies for emotional states. Squeezing light from a filter cavity, for example, has nothing to do with what I felt in my chest, when Neel told me this piece of news.
“You’re having a baby?”
“I know,” Neel said. “I didn’t think I’d do it myself.”
You’re not going to do it yourself, I thought.
“That’s wonderful,” I said instead. “Congratulations.”
Ever since Neel had come back into my life, I’d been determined to keep my feelings under control—but they had never gone away. They were like the polished piece of glass inside the vacuum chamber, both powerful and contained. Now it was as if the chamber had in fact imploded, dropping its glittering cargo onto the metal floor. Scientific analogies for emotional states are imprecise, but recently I’ve been finding them difficult to avoid.
“But that actually isn’t what I wanted to talk to you about,” Neel said. “I have some great news about the rotor.”
“The rotor?” I asked.
“Someone just proposed installing DFGs for calibration, which could be great for our project. That means we wouldn’t have to get funding for our own rotor—we could just use LIGO’s.”
“You’re not going to have a lot of time for extracurricular projects,” I said.
“Don’t try to back out now,” he said. “We’ll make the time.”
“I’m sure you’ll find any number of people to help you with it.”
“People,” Neel said dismissively, and I had to admire the fact that LIGO’s success hadn’t gone to his head. He was just curious to see what he could do with it. “I can set up the experiment, but you’re the one who’s going to have to do the math.”
“We would definitely have to do the math together. Probably with other people helping us.”
“Granted. But you’re the only one who’s going to be able to explain it in a way that makes people understand how important it is,” Neel said.
We were quiet for a moment. “When is the baby due?”
“Beginning of June,” Neel said.
At the beginning of June, I thought, Charlie will have been dead two years. That blank fact seemed impossible.
“I’m not telling anyone about our project, at least not yet,” Neel said.
“Our project,” I repeated dumbly, but I wasn’t there. Time contracted, and I was running over wet leaves, an equation on a scrap of paper in my armband, to tell Neel what I’d discovered. I was stripping off my clothes, racing with him from the sand into the freezing sea. Then I was standing outside Aunt Penny’s house, watching through the window as Neel fed a log to the fire.
I rapped on the glass, but there was no sound. The night was wet and dark. Then there were footsteps, sharp, unmuffled ones, and the click of the lock on the inside of the door. The door opened, but instead of Neel standing there, it was Charlie. Her whole body was wrapped in a sort of long red cloak. Come in, she said to me. Poor thing, come in, it’s so cold. She took my hand and brought me in. We sat down in front of the fire and covered ourselves with the cloak, which turned out to be a blanket—Aunt Penny’s red wool blanket. The blanket was endless, less a covering than her body itself, unspooling. I looked up and saw the source of that terrible cold: the roof was gone and there were only stars above our heads. Are you warm, she said. Are you? I lied and said yes, even though my teeth were chattering. But she could see right through me. She took my chin in her hand and turned my face toward hers, made me look into her eyes. Because that’s all that matters, in the end.
I have to be very clear. I don’t mean that I stood in the lab with Neel and remembered something about my friend. What I remembered couldn’t have happened, because Charlie and I didn’t talk to each other that way at that time. Such an honest and tender exchange was impossible, but I remembered it so clearly that even now, it has a different quality than my actual memories of her, as if it happened under floodlights, perhaps in a theater, where I was a character in a play and a member of the audience at the same time. It was something that had never happened, but felt more true than almost all the things that had.
And then it was finished. Neel was still talking to me. He had moved on to the specifications for the rotor, a titanium and tungsten disc sixty centimeters in diameter, and the effects it would have on the lasers inside LIGO’s interferometers. “If we’re really installing rotors to calibrate the lasers, I think it’ll be no problem to get permission to use one of them for our experiment—as long as I time it right.”
“Okay,” I said.
He started to tell me the ideal position for such a rotor, exactly where it would be located in relation to the laser. At one point he left to get a pencil and a pad of paper from Vlad’s workstation on the other side of the lab, so that he could draw it for me. He had been talking passionately for nearly fifteen minutes, engaged by the profound implications of the rotor’s gravitational effects on the laser, when I heard Jack calling me. Strangely, his voice seemed to be coming not from the control room, where Neel had left the kids, but from inside the lab.
Neel looked startled. “How’d he get back in here?”
We hurried around the corner, and found Jack standing just inside the metal door.
“Can you come talk to Simmi?” he asked me.
“How did you open the door?” Neel asked, but Jack was tugging his ears.
“Mom, please—Simmi’s really upset.”
“Upset about what happened before, with the interferometer?” I asked.
Jack shook his head. “I don’t think so. She was fine, until a few seconds ago. We were just playing on the computer. But then she put her head down, and she wouldn’t answer me.”
I thought then that I understood: Simmi had been frightened by what happened in the lab, and it was only hitting her now. It was a normal reaction to such an unusual event.
“Okay,” I said. “Let me talk to her.”
“You go ahead,” Neel said, unlocking the door for us. “I’ll come in a second—I have to go find Vlad.”
“You think he’s the one who let Jack in?”
Neel made a skeptical face. “I doubt it. That would be against all our protocol.”
* * *
—
/>
Jack and I found Simmi sitting at one of the computers in the control room. When we came in, she swiveled around to face us and rubbed her eyes. Then she smiled.
“I guess I took a nap,” she said.
Jack looked incredulous, and I hoped he wouldn’t argue, especially since everything seemed fine.
“See,” I said, running my hand over the back of his head. “She’s okay.”
Jack still had too much reverence for Simmi to contradict her, but I could tell that her account of the ten or so minutes we’d left them alone in the control room didn’t coincide with his version of events. And I had to admit that it was hard to believe—a nine-year-old falling asleep in an unfamiliar environment, in the middle of the day.
“I’m fine,” Simmi assured us. “But I need some water.”
“I have a water bottle,” I said, feeling around in my bag for it. “I think it’s empty, but I can fill it up for you in the bathroom.”
“I can do it,” Simmi said.
I didn’t want to let either one of them out of my sight again. “I’ll go with you,” I said.
“I can go by myself,” Simmi said calmly, taking the bottle from my hand. “Really—I remember where it is.”
I gave in, but I opened the door to the corridor and pointed her in the right direction, just in case.
“She wasn’t asleep,” Jack said urgently, as soon as Simmi was gone. His face was determinedly flushed: it was important to him that I understand. “She put her head down, like this—” He demonstrated, sitting on the chair Simmi had recently vacated, hugging his knees and putting his forehead against them.
“Okay,” I said. “Maybe she was just recovering. That was pretty scary in there for a second.”
Jack shook his head, clasping the armrests of his chair and tapping a rhythm with his sneakers on the hard floor. “I asked her what was wrong, but she wouldn’t talk to me. She was all curled up. That’s why I came to get you.”
“Did Vlad let you in?”
“No—the door was open.”
“It couldn’t have been—you need an ID.”
Jack shrugged. “It was.”
“Maybe the tech—Eddie—let you in?”
Jack screwed up his face, considering. “I didn’t see anyone. I pushed the door and it opened—I was just looking for you.”
I thought it was possible that Eddie could have heard Jack knocking and opened the door from the inside. Jack, in his hurry to find me, might not have noticed him. But I couldn’t understand why the tech would let Jack into the lab—a child, alone—without alerting us. I was going to ask Jack to start again and explain from the beginning, but just then Neel came back into the control room. He looked perplexed.
“Vlad’s checking the vacuum pump,” he told me. “I asked him to do it, just to be sure everything’s working the way it should be.”
“And it’s okay?”
“Everything’s fine,” Neel said. “But he didn’t let Jack in.”
“It must’ve been someone else.”
“I didn’t see Vlad,” Jack agreed.
Neel glanced down at him. “Vlad’s the only one here, apart from us.”
“And Eddie,” I reminded him.
“No,” Neel said. “Eddie went home. He was on his way out when we saw him.”
“Is there another tech?”
“Not today,” Neel said. He looked around the room, alarmed. “Where’s Simmi now?”
“She went to the bathroom for some water,” I said.
Neel raised his eyebrows at me. “Please, no more excitement.”
“No excitement. I’ll just go check on her.”
“I can stay here with Jack,” Neel offered.
“He can come with me.”
“Hey, you’ll stay and hang out with me—right, buddy?” Neel insisted, and a part of me rebelled—was he trying to practice parenting? But then I saw the pleasure on Jack’s face.
“Do you like Fruit Smash?” he asked Neel.
“I don’t know,” Neel said. “I’ve never played.”
“I can teach you,” Jack said eagerly. “It’s really easy. The different fruits are worth different amounts of points. I can play against you—but maybe we should do one game together first?” He looked up, waiting for Neel to decide.
Neel pulled another chair up to the computer, and rested one arm on the back of Jack’s. “Together, definitely,” he said, and Jack beamed. “I’m a novice, though,” he continued. “So you’ll have to start from the beginning.”
* * *
—
Simmi was sitting on the floor of the corridor with her back against the wall. Her hair had sprung out around her head, mussed from the cap, and her cheeks were very pink.
“Hi,” I said. “There you are. You okay?”
“I was just waiting for you guys.”
I didn’t say that we were the ones waiting for her. I still thought she must’ve needed a moment to herself, in the control room and again here in the hallway. She didn’t make a move to get up, and so I slid down the wall, sat on the floor next to her. Simmi was playing with a green rubber band bracelet she’d taken off her wrist, stretching it between her fingers.
“I didn’t think I was that tired,” she said suddenly.
“Tired enough to fall asleep, you mean? It might be the traveling—sometimes that can be exhausting. And the time difference from California.”
Simmi shrugged, reminding me of her father. She worked both wrists into the rubber bracelet. “I had a dream.”
There was a metallic taste in my mouth; I’d been biting the inside of my cheek without realizing. “A daydream?”
“No.” Simmi was decisive. “A real dream.”
She was looking at me directly, waiting for my reaction, but I couldn’t say anything.
“It was too weird to be a daydream,” she insisted.
“You can have a weird daydream,” I said, but I sounded weak, unconvincing even to myself. Of course I knew exactly what she meant about the difference.
Simmi unfolded her legs and stretched them across the empty corridor, the toes of her boots turning outward on the linoleum. One of her laces had come undone.
“What was the dream about?”
“About my mom picking me up from school.”
I waited, as I do with Jack, and after a few moments, she continued.
“The weird part was, it wasn’t my school in L.A.”
“No?”
“It was BB&N—here. I usually don’t even think about that school.”
“Maybe it was in your dream because you’re in Boston right now,” I said. “Sometimes dreams mix things up that way.”
“It was like—” Simmi looked at me sideways, as if debating how much to reveal. “I mean, I wasn’t surprised to see her.”
“Just like you weren’t surprised to be in Boston.”
“Yeah. But then she said our word.”
I was confused. “Which word?”
Simmi smiled a little. “You know, our safety word—in Latin.”
“The one you said was your mom’s idea?”
“Right—but that’s what was weird. You don’t need a code word, when it’s a parent.”
I hesitated. “Sometimes people say things in dreams that they wouldn’t say in real life.”
Simmi nodded. “But this wasn’t exactly like she said it.”
“No?”
“More like I read it…on a screen.”
Simmi’s expression was serious, but she didn’t seem on the brink of any strong emotion. We sat with our backs against the wall, staring up at a poster-sized graph entitled: “Measured Noise Relative to Shot Noise as a Function of Sideband Frequency and Readout Quadrature.”
“I think I might have had a dream ab
out her, too,” I said.
Simmi looked down, picked at a frayed place in the leg of her jeans. She didn’t say anything but she seemed to be waiting for me to continue.
“We were just sitting and talking in a room. By a fire. She asked me if I was cold.”
Now Simmi looked up at me and frowned. Her thick brows contracted, almost meeting in the middle. “Was she cold?”
“No,” I said quickly. “No—she had a blanket.”
Simmi took a deep breath: “The room, with the fire—where was it?”
“Not far from here,” I said. “Near Boston—although that’s not weird in my case. Most of the time your mom and I spent together was in Boston.”
Simmi nodded slowly. Then she put one finger on the linoleum and traced a curving path between us, back and forth.
“When you were young,” she said.
16.
I went back into the control room, where Neel and Jack were playing the game.
“The pineapple!” Jack cried. “Get the pineapple!”
“Thanks for keeping an eye on him,” I told Neel. “We’ll get out of your hair now.”
“I’ll come out and say goodbye,” Neel said. He looked toward the door. “Is she okay? I hope that drama in the lab didn’t freak her out too much.”
“I don’t think so,” I said.
“Good.” Neel smiled at Jack. “And I hope these guys got something out of it. I know I’m definitely not going to forget this visit.”
Jack touched Neel’s sleeve familiarly. “Tell her about the log.”
I looked at Neel.
“Oh,” Neel said. “Right—the data log. We’ll have to ask Simmi if she made an entry.”
I didn’t follow. “Simmi made an entry in your data log?”
“I had the log open on this machine,” Neel explained. He indicated the computer next to the one he and Jack had been using.
“It couldn’t have been Simmi,” Jack said. “I was here with her.”
“But maybe when you came back into the lab to get us, when you were worried about her?” Neel suggested.
Jack shook his head, and I had to agree with him. “I doubt Simmi would touch any of the other computers,” I told Neel. “Especially after what happened in the lab.”
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