Lost and Wanted(103)

Addie’s relief was apparent. “Would you, Helen?”

“Sweetheart?” Carl was in the hall. “I’m seeing someone at three-forty and then four-thirty. I should be back in—” He came into the kitchen, stopped. He was dressed in a purple-and-white button-down checked shirt and trousers, and his bald head was smooth and shiny from the shower. His voice changed from the one people use only with their most intimate relations to another, more social register:

“Helen—I didn’t know you were still here.” He smiled at me. “You had a nice, long chat.”

“I should go, actually. I have a meeting at four.”

Addie was still sitting on the stool, but her posture had changed radically. Even at the memorial, her straightness had been notable, early training that she’d never forgotten. But now it was as if gravity had suddenly taken a more powerful hold on her. She didn’t look at either one of us when she spoke.

“We’ve all been a bit confused. Helen has clarified things.”

Carl smiled at me. “Well, yes. That’s her strong suit.”





9.


I had promised Addie I would talk to Terrence, and I wanted to do it when I was sure he would be alone. That night I put Jack to bed, and waited until I thought Simmi would also be asleep. Then I went downstairs. I knocked quietly, so I wouldn’t wake her, and again with a little more force. I stepped back; there was a space under the doorframe, and I could see that at least the lights in the living room were off. It would be unusual for Terrence to keep his daughter out past nine on a school night, but the apartment was very still.

    I rang the bell, to be sure, but no one came. The key to Terrence’s apartment was silver, distinct from the other brass keys on my ring. The apartment was dark, except for a low light over the stove. The kitchen didn’t look as if it had been used that evening: everything was scrupulously neat, except for a piece of paper on the counter. For a moment, I thought they’d left me some kind of note. I imagined Terrence deciding he’d had it—with Boston, with Carl and Addie, with me. I imagined him and Simmi taking off for some remote surfable location: Hawaii, Indonesia, Peru. I thought that if the house in L.A. had sold, they could disappear for years on the proceeds from that alone.

But when I got closer, I saw it was only a piece of mail for Andrea. Terrence must’ve saved it for me to forward; no one left paper notes anymore. If you wanted to leave something for someone to find, you did it digitally—other unfinished communication, Addie had called it. Terrence hadn’t told her what kind of communication, but I thought it had to be personal. Notes to family members, and friends. It was only the events of recent months that made me think it was possible Charlie could’ve written to me as well. Sometimes you could hope for an outcome so intensely that it led you to break your own rules in order to produce it; even very distinguished scientists sometimes saw a meaningful pattern in what turned out to be simply noise.

Terrence had probably taken Charlie’s phone from Simmi once he found it. If that were the case, I would leave immediately; I wasn’t prepared to search his bedroom. There was a small chance, though, that he might have gotten what he needed from the phone, and then put it back wherever Simmi had hidden it, for whatever comfort it might supply her. I remembered that once, when he was in preschool, Jack had asked if I could leave my phone with him during the day. Only later had I had the unsettling realization that it must have seemed to him like a way of guaranteeing my return.

Terrence had recognized the phone’s significance in the first conversation we’d had about it: a twenty-first-century transitional object, for a transition no one wanted their child to have to make. I looked now toward Simmi’s room, the door slightly ajar. I did think about what would happen if they came back while I was inside—but even then there were explanations I could give. I’d smelled gas, or heard a noise. I was the landlord as well as a friend, and Terrence knew that I kept a key.

    I went into Simmi’s room. This was less tidy, with clothing on the floor and books (the same type of graphic novels Jack preferred) in a pile by the bed. The nightstand was cluttered with the detritus of childhood: coins, a crystal rabbit, hairbands, pencils, a pink rubber caterpillar, a deck of UNO. There was a trophy with a golden gymnast balanced on her hands, legs scissored above her head; the lamp was decorated with satin award ribbons.

But the wooden kitchen was gone. I looked around—maybe she’d finally gotten rid of it, now that it was no longer useful as a hiding place? As I was standing there, the room lit up suddenly; I whirled around, but it was only a car passing. Its brights swung across the ceiling and down the wall, illuminating for a second the little gold figure, the foil printing on the ribbons.

I should have left then, but instead some instinct made me open the closet door. The kitchen was there in the back corner, shoved underneath a row of dresses. The hems rested on the four burners, with their rings of painted blue flame. I opened the oven door, and there was a shoebox full of old papers, schoolwork, drawings, a rubber-band bracelet; at the bottom, I felt it, the size and shape immediately recognizable. As a last layer of defense, she’d stowed the phone inside a sock—not her own, but a woman’s trouser sock: thin gray silk.

The phone had been charged recently and had sixty-eight percent of its battery; the photo on the home screen was of Simmi when she was four or five, looking very seriously at something in her hand—a shell. The date and time were correct, February 25, at 10:20 p.m., but the top left-hand corner said “No Service.” The Wi-Fi, however, was connected.