“What are you doing here?” she asked, even though we were in Cambridge, and she was the one who was well outside her Brookline neighborhood.
I said I was picking up my son from a playdate.
“I won’t keep you, then. But how are you?”
I’d mistaken Adelaide for her daughter (I saw now) because she’d styled her hair differently. I’d never seen Charlie’s mother with anything but straight hair, with a heavy fringe of bangs. Now it was short and natural (though without any gray), just the way Charlie’s had been in that photograph. It made her face look older, in spite of the fact that she was wearing a good amount of makeup, especially around her eyes.
I said that I’d been working a lot.
“What are you working on these days? I’m still recommending your book on cosmology to everyone.”
“Thank you.”
I had the strange urge to tell her that Neel was coming back to MIT. I thought she would remember him, but only from the article in Science that Charlie had shown her, when our model was published. I had received a handwritten note from her then, congratulating me on my achievement, and again when each of the books came out. Addie kept track of Charlie’s friends, especially the women; she bought my books for her own friends as Christmas presents. When our classmate Sarah, a cellist, first performed with the BSO, Addie bought a subscription.
“We’re doing some exciting work related to the Large Hadron Collider, in Geneva,” I said. “But the further along you get, the more meetings you have to attend—it sometimes seems like my whole life is meetings.”
“I can believe that,” Addie said. “I’m just coming from a meeting myself—my lawyer at Ropes and Gray. I’ve known him forty years. You realize whom you trust, at times like this.” Addie tilted her head and looked at me. “You have a will, don’t you?”
I must’ve looked startled, because she put her hand on my shoulder. “I know. I’m being a nosy old woman, but you have to do it, once you have a child.”
“I should.”
“I’ll email you Robert’s information. You don’t have to call him, but just promise you’ll call someone.”
I thought that if Adelaide had been driven mad by grief, this was the form it would take: the frantic organization of other people’s lives.
“Anything is better than nothing,” she said.
“Charlie didn’t have a will?”
“Of course she did—financially, her affairs are quite clear. Carl saw to that.” Addie laughed shortly. “I’m asking Robert to advise us about the family’s options regarding the other matter.”
I glanced at Addie. Was she testing me, or trying to ascertain how much Terrence had said? “About the letter?”
“I’m not sure there ever was a letter.”
“Terrence thinks there was something,” I said.
Addie looked grim. “As he’s told us many times. In which she explains everything. But I know my daughter—and however bad things may have gotten, I don’t think she would have gone so far as to obtain the drugs illegally for that purpose.”
“Terrence mentioned that there was a palliative care physician—at Cedars Sinai or UCLA?”
I saw an edge of doubt in Addie’s expression; suddenly the doctor was slightly more credible. Like my own parents, but probably for different reasons, Charlie’s put great faith in elite institutions. You only had to mention one, and suddenly everything you were saying became more legitimate.
“They’ve decided to stay on with us, at least for the time being,” Addie continued.
“Terrence and Simmi have?”
“It was very last-minute—a scramble to get her enrolled. Thank goodness there was space.”
“She’ll be in school in Brookline?”
“Cambridge, actually—at BB&N. It was too late for public school, and we thought a smaller environment might help her this year. It’s hardly convenient, but it’s the best school that had room. And Carl and I wanted to do it.”
I wondered what Terrence had wanted; I thought it was probably hard to turn down thirty-five thousand dollars in tuition for your child.
“It’s a lot for Terrence to manage at this point—her grief and his own.” Addie indicated the busy sidewalk. “You see people just going about their days, and—” The left side of Addie’s face twitched suddenly, a tic. She shaded her face and looked back into the sun for a moment, as if she were orienting herself. “Well,” she said, turning back to me.
“I can’t imagine what you and Carl must be going through.”
Addie’s face didn’t change, but I suddenly felt the hypocrisy in that familiar statement—the way it magnifies the other person’s pain, and at the same time seals the speaker off from it.
“Oh, no—you can,” she said. “Any mother can.” She put a hand firmly on my arm and kept it there. “You think about things.”
I nodded. I hoped Addie wasn’t noticing my discomfort. Under normal circumstances, neither she nor I tended to touch other people in conversation.
“The sun, for example.”
“The sun?”
“The sun aggravates the disease,” Addie said. “When she was diagnosed, we might have convinced her to move back east for that reason.”
“Her career was there, though.”
Addie looked at me thoughtfully. “That’s what Carl says. He’s very reluctant to assign any blame—which is of course a lovely thing about him. His responses to things are always…healthy.”
“I don’t think anyone could have convinced Charlie to move somewhere she didn’t want to move,” I said, “even if it would’ve been better for her.” I was trying to say something that would absolve Charlie’s mother of any guilt she might be feeling, however misplaced. I stopped because I had the feeling that Addie had been through every what-if scenario already, and that she was hardly listening.
She removed her hand from my arm. “Perhaps not—in any case, we’re concentrating on Simmi now. Charlie and I did talk about that before she died. Of all the friends she had, she said you were the one she hoped could become more a part of Simmi’s life.”
I felt almost ashamed of how happy this made me. It was like being asked by Addie to read at the memorial.
“Terrence mentioned that you got the children together.”
“It went well, I think.”
“It’s so important that Simmi has people in her life who were purely her mother’s friends.”
I nodded. The kind of closeness I’d had with Charlie was something no friendship since had replicated. But the next thing she said startled me:
“Terrence is young, and someday there will be someone else.”
“Not for a long time, I’m sure.”
Addie went on, dismissing this. “The point is who that person will be. Simmi’s only eight. You can imagine that, too, I think—knowing you won’t get to choose who mothers your child.” She looked as if she was going to continue speaking, then changed her mind. “You go get your boy. I know it’s a trip across the river, but Carl and I would so love to see you—you and Jack. I’ll be in touch.”
I told her that we’d love to come, and Adelaide kissed me once on each cheek. Then she turned away from me, merging with the stream of pedestrians headed for Kendall Square. I went into the shop, where I saw Jack, his friend Miles, and Miles’s mother, along with her three other children, seated at a wooden table next to the window.
“We saw you!” Jack said.
“I just ran into a friend.”
“The lady from the funeral.”
Miles’s mother looked alarmed. Evelyn was at least five years younger than I was, carefully made up and dressed in the sort of stylish exercise clothing that is now worn outside the gym as well, her blond hair pulled into a neat ponytail. Somewhat unconventionally for our Cambridgeport public elementary school
, she wore a large diamond cross around her neck.
“Jack and I went to the memorial of a friend of mine over the summer,” I explained. “That was her mother.”
“She was young, then.” Evelyn’s voice was sympathetic.
“My age—we were in college together.” I found that I wanted to talk about it, but that when I did there was a nagging uneasiness. Was I turning it into conversation—what Arty would call a “topic”?
The children were ignoring us, playing with the paper wrappers from their straws. They bunched them up and then dribbled water on the compressed tubes, watching them expand.
“She had children?”
I thought that Evelyn’s appearance—the wholesome prettiness coupled with the ostentatious display of faith hanging around her neck—belied the gentleness of her sympathy. It seemed real, without being at all intrusive.
“One.”
“It’s unbearable,” Evelyn said.
To my dismay, I started to cry. I’d hardly cried at all about Charlie and it seemed absurd, here among the people enjoying pesto and arugula sandwiches, with someone I hardly knew. It was maybe the fact that we didn’t know each other, and that she still bothered to go beyond ritualized sympathy, that moved me. Evelyn must’ve noticed that I was struggling to regain composure, because she looked away, wiping the face of the youngest child with a paper napkin.
“We have a group at church. Harper, be still. I joined after my mother passed. That was two years ago, and I’m still going.”
“Thank you—but I’m not religious.”
“It doesn’t matter. It’s congregational, very relaxed. We welcome everyone.”
“Well, and Miles should come for a playdate at our house soon.” I was thinking that it would have made Charlie laugh, how her death was getting me multiple invitations to events that took place in churches.
“I like Miles’s house better,” Jack said. “There are so many kids.”
* * *
—
I found myself crying more. It was as if, once it had started, it could happen at any time. I decided one night to make shrimp for Jack and me; he had seen them at the fish counter and been curious. I cleaned them, then followed a recipe carefully—I didn’t want to waste them—and as I put them in the pan I remembered a phone call from Charlie. This was when Jack was about two. She’d said she was coming up from New York, where she had gone to take a meeting about a possible feature, and I had bought groceries to cook for us. When she called to cancel, I told her about the shrimp in a joking way, but she knew I was annoyed.
“Shrimp!” she said. “Now I feel twice as bad.”
Shrimp! I thought, and suddenly the pan and the stove and the window to the right of the stove blurred and my shoulders started to shake. Jack was drawing at the linoleum table, and he looked up, alarmed.
“I’m just sad,” I told him, but it took several minutes for me to stop.
“I don’t want shrimp,” he said. “Yuck.”
“We have to eat them!” I turned them angrily, one by one with a pair of tongs as the recipe dictated, suddenly frantic at the possibility of overcooking.
“Why?” Jack asked, his eyes wide and frightened.
Another day I was blow-drying my hair. I don’t do this very often; I don’t have the patience to do a good job, and I tend to get dizzy from holding my arms above my heart. This time I gave up, sat down on the side of the tub. I left the dryer on so that Jack wouldn’t hear me. Charlie had been the one to show me how to separate my hair into top and bottom layers, and to do the bottom first, starting with the ends.
“You have this easy hair, and you can’t even blow-dry it,” she’d said to me once, the first time she’d seen me doing it. I said something to the effect that I thought it looked okay, and she had sighed and taken the brush and the dryer out of my hands.
“Me fixing your hair is like Einstein fixing my toilet.”
“You’re the Einstein of hair?”
“I have certain God-given abilities,” Charlie said.
I thought that if I hadn’t blown my hair dry, or decided to make shrimp, I would never have remembered those conversations. Was it just chance, what I got to keep of her?
I tell my students that cosmic background radiation, which is now giving us so much information about the origins of the universe, will be gone in a trillion years. The photons that we can see now with the help of satellites like the WMAP are slowly lengthening, and will eventually stretch beyond the wavelength of visible light. If there are astronomers still looking then, they’ll have to rely on other sources of data—hypervelocity stars, for example.
The photo on my desk sometimes seems to be alive, and is sometimes very flat, as if there is a glare on the plastic frame.
20.
Something kept me from calling my sister to tell her the news about Neel. I waited until Amy called me with a worry of her own. My sister is always happy to listen to me talk about my work, but in practice we use our weekly phone sessions mostly to compare notes about our parents or our children. Sometimes she talks about Ben, and their arguments about money. If I go on a date, she always wants to hear about it. This is true of my married friends in general: they revel in the details of any romantic interaction, in the way people who once visited the place you’re traveling enjoy comparing their memories with your contemporary snapshots.
When Amy called me I was in my office, but my postdoc Vasily had just left.
“I’m worried about Dad,” Amy said. My sister was in the car with the children, as she always seemed to be—I could hear “Let It Go” in the background. “He seems anxious.”
“Anxious?”
“He gets into a panic these days, especially about time. He’s always worried about being late.”
“What does Mom think?”
“That’s the thing—I don’t know if she even notices. It’s almost like they don’t hear each other anymore. Like Dad will say to Mom, ‘The check engine light is on,’ and she’ll say, ‘I’m taking Bess to buy sneakers.’ ”
Bess was my nine-year-old niece; her sister, Avery, was six.
“He says, ‘Don’t forget we’re going to see The Man Who Knew Infinity at seven-forty. We should be out the door by seven-ten,’ and Mom is like, ‘Did you see, I got your new kind of yogurt?’ It’s like there’s goodwill on both sides, but a complete lack of attention.”
“Did you see it, too?”
“I’m the only one who sees it!”
“I mean the movie.”
“Oh.” My sister paused and told one of the children that they couldn’t repeat the song again. “Yeah, on Netflix—I like Jeremy Irons, but the math was very vague.”
“You wouldn’t really expect them to go into detail.”
“Maybe that’s just the way it is after you’ve been married forty-five years.”
I’d been waiting for an opportunity: “Neel is getting married,” I said.
“Your Neel?”
“Yep. She’s a heart surgeon.”
“You just found out?”
“Arty told me—Neel told him first, which I still can’t quite…anyway, I had to email him and ask. She’s Indian, but her name is Roxy.”
“Roxy?”
“She’s from some kind of fancy family in Mumbai. She works for Doctors Without Borders.”
“That’s such an amazing organization,” Amy said.
“Yes, I’m aware.”
“Sorry.”
“Don’t you think it’s weird he would’ve told Arty and not me?”
“Well, I mean…”
“I was pretty hurt, actually.”
“How do you feel now?”
I was thinking about how I felt, trying to get it right, but Amy must have mistaken this analysis for emotion.
“Like someone�
�s cutting your heart out with a scalpel?”
“No.”
“That was a joke.”
“They’re going to live here. He’s coming back to MIT.”
“Oh god,” Amy said. “In your department?”
“Not teaching—but yeah.”
Amy hesitated. “What’s she going to do?”
“She’ll be at the Brigham. And also traveling the world to aid people in need, I guess.”
I could hear the specific sound of L.A. traffic in the background, both louder and more resigned than the Boston variety.
“You didn’t say how you felt,” Amy said.
“Excited.”
“Excited?”
“Like something’s about to happen.” There was a pause, some static in our connection.
“You worry me,” Amy said.
21.
At 9:30 on Saturday morning, the bell rang. It was about an hour before we had to leave for soccer, but Jack was already wearing his shiny yellow uniform, his black knee socks, and shin guards. I was upstairs and I called to him that he could answer the door.
“Hey, little man. You got a game?”
I recognized Terrence’s voice, but I was still getting dressed. Who showed up unannounced on a Saturday morning? I hadn’t done the laundry yet, and I ended up in a pair of not-totally-clean jeans and a plaid shirt. I was hoping that this might looked relaxed in a Hollywood kind of way, rather than just sloppy.
“Hey,” I said, coming down the stairs. “Welcome.”
“Sorry,” Terrence said. “We were right in the neighborhood, and Simmi wanted to see if you were home.” Terrence didn’t look much better prepared for company than I was. He hadn’t shaved, and the beard coming in had a lot of gray in it. The hair on his head was growing back dark and even, though; it made me think that cutting off the dreads had been a gesture of mourning rather than a defense against balding. There was a purple shadow at the corner of each eye, and he looked as if he’d lost weight, even since the last time we’d seen him.
Simmi, on the other hand, was full of energy. “Let’s go play,” she encouraged Jack, and started immediately up the stairs. Jack looked at me.
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