Lost and Wanted

by Nell Freudenberger

  Terrence walked in a circle around our small living room, then paused at the shelves to look at my books.

  “Do you know the author Robert Lanza?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “He’s a scientist, too, more of a biologist. He has this theory about where the energy goes when someone dies. Because of the Second Law of Thermodynamics.”

  “Mm,” I said. It’s strange that people are often moved to make the most far-fetched nonscientific arguments to scientists, rather than to the type of audience that might be more receptive.

  Terrence became more animated, gesturing with his left hand: “He says that we all exist in our own bubbles of spatiotemporal reality. And that when we die, all that happens is that the bubble pops. The people left behind experience your death, but you don’t. Or another way to think about it is that the universe is like an infinite collection of shows on cable, and when you die, you just start a new series.” He came the closest I’d seen to a smile. “Charlie liked that.”

  “I should check it out.”

  “You should.”

  There are different degrees of fringe science, usually undertaken by the kind of person who begins with a real career and goes off the rails: people who post their unconventional ideas on the alternative preprint server viXra all the way down to the unhinged, profanity-fueled climate-change-denying blogger. I once spent some time answering a sociologist’s questions about what made these propositions non-science. One clue is that in pseudoscience, every piece fits neatly inside a theory and the scientist is never wrong.

  “I think you’re doing such a great job with all this,” I said. “Simmi really does seem okay.”

  Terrence made a skeptical noise.

  “As okay as could be expected.”

  “In public,” he said.

  I was sorry then that I hadn’t been more receptive to whatever it was—popular science, literature, or quackery—that had gotten him through the last few months. Why did I have to be so critical, Marshall, my most recent POI, would demand. When I’m honest I have to admit that he wasn’t the first person-of-interest to mention it.

  “I guess I’d have some coffee,” Terrence said. “Just black.” He stayed in the living room while I got it, scrolling through his messages. But he thanked me genuinely when I handed him a mug.

  I realized I hadn’t heard the kids in a while. “They’re quiet.”

  “I’ll check on them,” Terrence said immediately.

  I went back to the kitchen. I hadn’t thought of lunch, but luckily there were apples and bread. I started to make peanut butter sandwiches.

  “They’re upstairs,” Terrence said when he returned. He retrieved his coffee from the living room, and joined me in the kitchen. “He’s giving her a tour.”

  “It’s pretty much what you see. I don’t think Simmi’s going to be impressed.”

  Their most recent house in L.A. was white stucco. I’d looked it up online when they bought it. There was a gunite pool, outlined in blue-and-white ceramic tile. Charlie had sent me a picture of the living room, which she’d decorated with mirrors and patterned fabrics, Moroccan in character. Her taste in home décor was dramatic and over-the-top, what she liked to call “barococo.”

  “Simmi spends time with my mom,” Terrence said.

  “Where’s your mom?”

  “Where she always was. Palms—near Culver City.”

  “I know right where that is. We were all the way out in Pasadena.”

  “Private school?”

  “Nope. But the high school there is pretty good, especially for science and math.”

  “Mine wasn’t. But we had a gifted and talented program—it was called GATE. I tested into it, actually.” Terrence glanced at me. “But then things weren’t so great with my mom, and I basically stopped going.”

  “She’s okay now, though?”

  “She married a cop, this retired guy with a pension. Now she paints dolphins and sells them at a craft fair in Altadena. That’s what she’s been doing for twenty years.”

  “That sounds okay.”

  “I just mean, Simmi’s not spoiled.”

  “I didn’t think that—I just—Charlie sent pictures of your house. It’s beautiful.”

  “I hope someone else thinks so—we’re selling it. It was always too much space for us, and now…” Terrence’s voice trailed off.

  “Yeah.”

  “We left all the furniture, because the broker says it’s easier that way. She’s saying the owners are ‘relocating to Europe.’ ”

  “Why?”

  “It sounds better than ‘Someone died here.’ ”

  “Oh—right.”

  Terrence eyed the sandwiches on the counter. “I don’t think we can stay,” he said. “I promised Addie.”

  I felt a kind of panic. Should I mention the messages? It was possible this would be my only chance. Terrence had said Charlie would’ve wanted them to play together, but he might consider once to be enough. And who knew how long they would end up staying in Boston? Wouldn’t it be better to say something now?

  “Addie said you might be in Boston for a while.”

  “That’s the plan.” Terrence’s tone was gently ironic. “She had a plan beforehand, too.”

  “The hospice care at home?”

  Terrence looked surprised. “Yeah. But, you know—that was exactly what Charlie didn’t want: everyone parading through our house. And then getting in their cars—that’s what she said. That everyone would come, and then they’d get in their cars and put on their headsets, and call other people to say how hard it had been to say goodbye. How guilty they’d felt for actually wanting to get out of there. And then the other friends, the people they’d called, would be like, ‘Yeah—don’t blame yourself. It’s so hard.’ And then they’d all go out for drinks to comfort themselves. And all the time she would be there, dying.”

  “She said that about me?”

  Terrence swallowed the rest of his coffee. “With you it would’ve been on the phone.”

  “She thought I wouldn’t come?”

  He shook his head, in frustration rather than denial. For a second he looked like he was going to throw the mug against the wall. It was a mug my friend Vicky had made in a pottery class, which I now saw clearly for the first time. Painted a speckled turquoise color and heavily glazed, it was hideous.

  “I’m sorry.”

  Terrence put the mug down lightly in the sink and shrugged. “She said that’s how she would act, too, if it were someone else. She just didn’t want any of it.”

  “I get that.”

  “We’d just seen Carl and Addie—they were out in May and the visit almost killed her.” Terrence laughed humorlessly. “Charlie felt like she’d said goodbye then, but she knew they’d be devastated. Her idea was that she’d write a letter—to try to explain.”

  “And that’s what you can’t get.”

  He gave a sharp, affirmative nod.

  Maybe because of Terrence’s reticence, or Addie’s formality, the full force of Charlie’s decision hadn’t hit me until now. She had denied her parents the opportunity to be with her in her death. She had written a letter to explain—but the letter had gone missing. If I were Carl or Addie, that would undo me, too. I would have all kinds of doubts, and I wouldn’t hesitate to blame anyone who could have borne responsibility, especially if that person had been the one who had taken my place at my child’s deathbed.

  “She didn’t show you the letter.”

  “She said she’d email it.” Terrence was leaning back against my kitchen counter. Now he closed his eyes and pressed his thumb and forefinger into their sockets. “We didn’t have time. It was—it was crazy. We would start things, and then there would be something else to talk about. Money, or the different palliative care doctors
. The one at Cedars versus the one at UCLA. What we were supposed to say to the nurses. And then everything for Simmi, keeping it as normal as possible—which wasn’t very normal. I kept making lists, and then starting them over. She was going to handle her parents on her own, and so I let her do it.” Terrence looked at me, almost imploring. It was like my usefulness as a potential ally had just occurred to him. “She did do it—I’m sure. It must be in her drafts.”

  “And if you had the phone, you could get it.”

  “It would be easy.”

  “Someone has it,” I blurted out.

  Terrence looked at me as if I were a little simple. “Yeah,” he said. “I told you—it was stolen.”

  “But I mean, they’re using it. I got an email, too.”

  “You mean, after that phone call?”

  I picked up my own phone from the table, and searched for the message. My hands felt slower and clumsier than usual; I could feel him watching me as I looked at the screen. When he took it, though, it was with less urgency than I would’ve expected. He looked at the screen, and sighed, as if it confirmed what he’d expected. He scrolled down to be sure.

  “That’s all there is,” I said.

  He handed back the phone. “This is common, as hard as it is to believe. I run the website for Zingaro, and so I read a lot of tech blogs. A spammer can spoof the ‘from’ address without even having access to the account.”

  “Except that it was right after you told me—the same day. And then I got this, a few weeks later.” I showed him the text—Luvya lady—but didn’t mention which morning it had come.

  Terrence was nonplussed. “It’s possible someone’s screwing with you, whoever took the phone. But it could also just be standard-issue spam. It may have gone to a bunch of people in her address book, and you’re the only one who told me.”

  “But if a spammer can get in—”

  “Not in. It’s the difference between holding a book open in front of you and actually reading. Getting in officially is another thing.”

  “There’s a lot of security?”

  “I’m still on part one of the process,” Terrence said drily. “Google needed my driver’s license, her death certificate, a copy of an email she sent to me—so I got to, you know, go through lots of our emails—that was fun. Part two involves a court order. If I even get that far.”

  “Jesus, Terrence.”

  Terrence shrugged. “It’s not Google’s fault. They have to do it, or people would break into accounts this way all the time.”

  “They could make it easier for you, though. Given the circumstances.”

  “So could her mother.” He shifted his weight from the counter and faced me. “That’s the thing about this family—you know? Birth plans, life plans, estate plans—they can’t even fucking die without a plan.”

  There was a pounding on the stairs, and then the children were in the kitchen.

  “We’re hungry!” Jack said. “Is Simmi staying for lunch?”

  Simmi looked at her father. “Can I?”

  “Not this time.”

  “Please,” Simmi said.

  “We’re having lunch at Nana’s.”

  “Okay,” said Simmi, “but I want to come another time.”

  “Okay, sweetheart,” Terrence said, not looking at me.

  Jack had seated himself in his customary place at the kitchen table. He picked up the sandwich I put in front of him, but didn’t take his eyes off Simmi.

  “Come anytime,” I said. “We’d love that.” I didn’t think Simmi would want me to hug her, and so I touched her shoulder. She seemed to tense under my hand.

  I turned to Jack. “What were you showing Simmi upstairs?”

  Unaccountably, Jack looked nervous, and Terrence was suddenly attentive.

  “Jack?”

  “Your office,” he said in a small voice.

  Normally my office is off-limits, but I held off getting angry for Simmi’s sake. “There’s not much to see there.”

  “No telescope,” Simmi said.

  “I don’t really use telescopes,” I told her. “But I know lots of people who do. If you’d like, I can take you to see one.”

  “Simmi?” Terrence said.

  “Thank you,” Simmi said.

  The way she looked at me! They weren’t her mother’s eyes—they were almond-shaped and a much lighter color. It was the expression, almost as if she were daring me to do something. Or as if Charlie were, from inside there.

  Terrence was collecting a backpack Simmi had been carrying with the most recent Disney princesses on it—the ones who were supposed to be Scandinavian feminists—with their waist-length hair and impossible proportions.

  “Can I walk with Simmi to the sidewalk?” Jack said.

  I nodded and the two of them went out of our apartment, down the steps to the front door together. Terrence and I followed them more slowly. We stood in the hallway outside my tenants’ apartment. The children had left the door ajar, and I could see our next-door neighbor, Marjorie, through the screen, scraping the sludge of mustard-colored pollen from the uneven sidewalk with a rake.

  “I used to get angry at Charlie,” I said. “Why wouldn’t she call me back? And then I’d wonder why I cared so much.”

  Terrence was looking at the messages on his phone. He seemed to have a lot of them, but when I said Charlie’s name, he looked up.

  “That’s why she didn’t call you.”

  “I know. I just—love her.”

  Terrence put the phone back in his pocket, and left his hands there. He rocked a little on his heels, and looked past me to the children, who were talking to Marjorie. She had stopped raking and was showing them something in the elm tree outside her house—a bird’s nest, maybe. They were all three looking up.

  “You’re, like, the only person who’s said that.”

  “What?” I asked.

  “Daddy!” Simmi called. “Come look!”

  “Without the e-d,” Terrence said.

  Then he skipped two steps and hurried down to the sidewalk to look where his daughter was pointing.

  15.

  That night I opened the email that had come right after Charlie’s death. I looked again at the little pictures, and even pressed reply. Then I felt foolish. I decided to call my sister in L.A.

  Amy teaches mathematics at a private girls’ day school in Pasadena that she hopes her daughters will someday attend at a reduced rate. Her husband, Ben, is an engineer for the city. As kids, Amy and I fought so much that our parents decided to give us separate rooms. Since there were only two bedrooms and I was older, I began sleeping on the enclosed porch that had always been my father’s workshop.

  I made a fuss about being “kicked out” of my room, but everyone knew I was happy on the porch, with all the batteries, the rolls of copper wire, the slide rule, the coffee cans that were labeled to identify their carefully sorted contents: nuts, bolts, nails, washers. My sister, by contrast, demonstrated certain obsessive-compulsive behaviors that could be controlled only with absolute order and a strict routine. It was difficult for her to sleep anywhere but that dark little bedroom, where she performed various bedtime rituals: flipping the light on and off, executing twirling maneuvers (to “unwind her string”), touching the rows of stuffed animals arranged on whitewashed, plywood shelves my father had made when he was unemployed.

  As adults my younger sister and I are as close as any siblings I know. There are certain facts we don’t discuss:

  Helen and Amy are both very smart.

  Amy is prettier than Helen, and has a husband and children.

  Helen is more successful than Amy and does more interesting work.

  Helen and Amy’s mother loves Amy and her children more than she loves Helen and Jack.

 
Helen and Amy’s father is a little in awe of Helen and tends to brag about her to his friends.

  Amy and I sometimes marvel at other siblings who let their differences get in the way. What, after all, is the point?

  That night I told Amy about Terrence and Simmi’s visit. I said that they seemed more eager to befriend us than I’d expected.

  “Why wouldn’t they be? I mean, if they’re planning on staying in Boston?”

  “Just, I don’t know—Terrence and I don’t have that much in common. And Simmi’s older than Jack.”

  “About a year, right?”

  “That makes a big difference when the girl is older.”

  Amy acknowledged that. “What did they play?”

  “They kept going up to my office. Simmi was looking for a telescope—she’s interested in stars.”

  “That’s cool.”

  “Adelaide said something about her mother looking down from a star.”

  “Oh dear.”

  “Yeah.”

  “But she doesn’t really believe that—at eight?”

  “I’m not sure. Jack thinks he saw Charlie.”

  “What do you mean?” Amy asked.

  “Just before the memorial. He saw the photo on the invitation and said he remembered her.”

  “That’s possible, right?”

  “He said he’d just seen her—in my office, upstairs.”

  “Could he be remembering a visit or something?”

  “He’s only met her once. He was four—they were here for Christmas. I doubt he remembers.”

  “So you think he told Simmi that?”

  “What?”

  “About seeing her—in your office.”

  I was silent for a moment. “I didn’t think of that.”