Lost and Wanted(102)

Addie nodded mutely.

“Do you remember when they started?”

Addie got up and went to her purse in the hall. She was of a generation that didn’t keep the phone in arm’s reach at all times. I realized what I’d been hoping: that Addie had begun receiving messages right after Charlie’s death, at the same time I had. That what Jack had suggested to me in the closet was wrong—that Simmi had simply been writing to her grandmother in the same way she’d been writing to me.

    Adelaide came back into the room. “The first one was in November,” she said. “Just before Thanksgiving.”

Of course Thanksgiving was exactly when we had found Jack and Simmi in the closet, building a machine to talk to ghosts.

“Was that when you started getting them, too?” Addie asked.

“A little earlier,” I said.

Addie nodded. “I showed those to Carl, too, of course—he’s very forgiving, but he said that if someone was doing this to me…well, I thought if he found out who it was, he would have killed them. He thought we might be able to trace it. I talked to Robert, our lawyer, about that as well. Carl wanted to know if there was a way to prosecute a hacker like that.” Addie laughed miserably. “If only we’d known whom we were hoping to prosecute.”

“I didn’t know either. And the messages didn’t suggest a child—at first. They were about science. They were simple, but not so different from the questions many adults ask. I thought maybe an unsophisticated person…someone who’d seen my name somewhere.”

Addie nodded slowly. “But why didn’t she just come to me? She’s my granddaughter.”

“Maybe this was easier for her?”

Addie considered that. “They say the technology is having all kinds of negative effects on kids, with bullying and sexting and all of that. But I have a friend with a teenage son—she thinks he’s able to express himself better on his phone than in person. He and his friends talk about their feelings in a way that boys never would have done, when she and I were young.”

Addie had been looking out the window at the treehouse while she spoke, and for a moment she lost focus in the same way she had that day outside Darwin’s. Then she turned back to me.

“Carl told me not to reply to those messages—because it was a hacker. Who else could it be? But it’s the middle of the night, and I get a message with my daughter’s name on it. It says, ‘Dear Mama’—did you know Charlie called me that? Not William—he started with ‘Mom’ as soon as he was out of diapers. But her—it was always ‘Mama.’ ‘Dear Mama—I miss you.’ Addie frowned and pressed her lips together. She didn’t cry, or there were no tears, but her brow and her upper lip contracted into dry furrows. ‘Dear Mama, Where are you?’?” She covered her face with her hands.

    Charlie’s mother had never been someone who succumbed to ordinary pressures and reversals. She was almost supernaturally strong, and it felt wrong, almost presumptuous, to try to console her now.

“Why would she do it?” Addie said, looking up. “Why would she pretend?”

There was the sound of footsteps upstairs: Carl had finished his shower, and was talking on the phone. I could hear his voice very faintly.

“Jack loves to play with my phone. It’s a sort of talisman.” I tried to introduce the idea I had gently. It was the kind of idea that anyone would resist. “Sometimes he doesn’t completely understand that there’s a person on the other end.”

Addie looked blank.

“Does Simmi call you ‘Mama,’ too?”

“No,” she said. “That’s why I was confused. She always called me ‘Nana’—‘Mama’ is what she called Charlie.” Addie hesitated, then took a sharp breath, realizing. “Oh. Oh, Helen.”

I didn’t know if I’d ever seen true shock on someone’s face before. Her eyes were wet, and her mouth had dropped open in a kind of wondering agony. It was in frightening contrast to the way she normally presented herself.

“We can’t be sure what Simmi was thinking,” I began. “Maybe she knew she was really writing to you, but she wanted to imagine something more—metaphysical.”

Addie didn’t say anything.

“But Jack did say something to me—that’s why I wanted to talk to you.”

Addie’s makeup had smudged, but not run. She was sitting up straight in her chair. “What did he say?”

I thought it was best to be plain. “That she used the phone to talk to her mother.”

Carl seemed to have stopped talking on the phone upstairs. The only sounds were the hum of the appliances, a blue jay calling raspily from the feeder outside the kitchen door.

“And I responded.” Addie’s voice was very low. “I said—” But she broke off. She didn’t tell me what she’d written back, or whom she believed she was writing to, in the middle of the night. She looked at me now with new alarm. “I have to talk to Simmi.”

    I thought about it for a moment. “Do you think it would be better for Terrence to do that?”

Addie looked surprised, then she nodded slowly. “I’ll have to talk to him.”

“I could do that.”