Lost and Wanted(104)

I put in the passcode—1234—and opened Charlie’s messages. The ones between Simmi and me I knew almost by heart, stretching back from “Luvya lady” to the most recent, just her name and a question mark, to which there had been no response. Above my name, the first one in the queue, was Addie, identified on the phone as “Mom.” The beginning of the message showed up on the next line: Dear Mama, It is the night time here…That was all I could see without opening the thread. It seemed wrong to read Addie’s responses—although it occurred to me these scruples were somewhat beside the point, when you were crouched on the floor of a child’s closet snooping in her dead mother’s phone.

    I opened Charlie’s email. There were four messages from today, all from mailing lists that hadn’t yet registered her as deceased. The previous days were similar; I had to scroll down to another page before I found one that looked like it was from an actual person. I hadn’t known (but might have guessed) that Charlie never bothered to erase email; she had 9,560 messages in her inbox. I clicked to the drafts, and it was the same: there were 595 messages Charlie had begun and failed to send. I put my name into the Search function, but it was as I’d expected—all my efforts produced zero results.

That was when I heard them. They were coming in the first door from the street. I put the phone back inside the sock, shoved the sock where I’d found it, and closed the oven door. I came out of the closet as quietly as I could, and went into the living room. Then I switched on the light and hurried to the front door.

“Oh,” Terrence said. “Hi. What—?”

“Hi—I’m so sorry,” I said. “I thought I smelled gas. But it’s nothing…it’s fine.”

“Christ,” he said. “Okay—are you sure?”

“It had to be from the street. There’s no smell in here. I’m really sorry.”

Terrence’s expression shifted from alarm to something more watchful. “Nuestra casa es su casa—right, Simmi?” he said, but kept his eyes on me.

“It’s Daddy’s birthday!”

“It is?”

“Yeah.”

“You should have told us.”

“I forgot,” Terrence said, in a tone that could have convinced only an eight-year-old.

“Can you believe it?” Simmi exclaimed. “We didn’t realize until Grandma called!”

I glanced at Terrence.

“My mother,” he clarified. “Simmi wanted to celebrate. So we went for sushi and Zootopia.”

    “We were defrosting veggie burgers! Then we just threw them away and went out!” She was clearly thrilled by the spontaneity of it all.

“And now it’s way too late for you,” Terrence said. “You better be in PJs in no more than seven seconds.”

Simmi giggled and disappeared into her room, where I hoped I’d left no sign of my intrusion.

“You’re sure there’s no gas,” Terrence said.

“Positive.”

“Okay.”

He didn’t seem thrilled by my presence, but neither did he seem as antagonistic as he had been the last time I’d seen him.

“Do you have a second? Or I could come back after you put her to bed.”

“Yeah,” Terrence said. “Hang on.” He disappeared into Simmi’s room, and I sat down on one of the stools at the counter. I looked at the email on my own phone to distract myself: a message from Vincenzo about visits from the accepted PhD candidates, who toured the department every February. This year five were from mainland China; five from the rest of the world; and five from the U.S. Everyone seemed most excited about a young man from Hefei working on astrophysical plasmas.

Terrence returned after a few minutes, closing the door behind him.

“Happy birthday,” I said. “You didn’t really forget, did you?”

“No. But I’m not a big celebrator. Plus, you know, we have Charlie’s birthday coming up, and then the anniversary in June. So I was trying not to make an event out of it.”

I hadn’t thought about the anniversary.

Terrence had gone around to the other side of the counter. He took out a lunch box—a fancy metal one, with different compartments for different items. He was wearing the same thing he’d worn to Neel and Roxy’s party, a close-fitting black Henley shirt with two buttons at the neck. He pushed the sleeves up to his elbows and started to take food from the refrigerator for his daughter’s lunch: tomatoes, carrots, a block of tofu, a mesh bag of individually wrapped cheeses.

“What did you want to talk about?” he said, without looking up.

    “I talked to Addie.”

“Yeah?”

“Did you know Simmi was writing to her, too?”

“Not until you gave me the heads-up about the phone,” he said. “But, yeah.” He hesitated. “You think they’re rational—and then they do something like this. I think she saw ‘Mom’ and just—”

I’d expected that he would have seen the messages, but I hadn’t known if he would understand what Simmi had been trying to do. I’d underestimated him, though. What it had taken Addie and me months to comprehend, he’d gotten right away.