Lost and Wanted(107)

I had been expecting Addie, but it was Carl who dropped Simmi off.

“I saw turtles!” Jack exclaimed as soon as I opened the door for them. “I held one!”

Simmi looked tanned from her trip, a little sunburned under her eyes; clearly they’d spent a lot of their time in L.A. at the beach.

“We saw seals,” she said. “Way out.”

“I can’t compete with that,” Carl said to me. “We saw a couple of squirrels in the backyard, but that was about it.”

Simmi and Jack wanted to go into our backyard before dinner, and so I sent them around the side of the house; I felt funny now about using my spare key to the downstairs apartment. I stepped out onto the porch with Carl, closing the front door behind me. The sun was going down, and although the days were getting more spring-like, the nights were still cold. Carl was wearing a brown suede jacket, a newsboy cap, and a plaid wool scarf.

“Would you like to come in for a drink?” I asked him.

“I could use one, but Addie made me promise to be back by seven. We’re going out to dinner with friends.”

“How is Addie?”

Carl listened for a moment: we could hear the children faintly in the backyard. There was the repetitive whoosh of the Stomp Rocket, as they sent it flying again and again.

“Not so good this week,” he said. “It varies. Thanks for asking.”

However excruciating these months had been for Addie, the letter would have made it even worse. I wondered for the first time if she could’ve denied its reality in part out of apprehension—now justified. The familiar voice, alive for the thirty seconds it took to read. Then gone forever. The word “terrified,” then nothing more. The crying Terrence had heard through the wall, then a pill her husband prescribed, then the slow agony of waking up. Then her public face again. And again and again and again.

    Did I imagine it, or did Carl’s mouth tremble? He had one of those mouths that had settled downward in the corners, but not in a way that had ever made him appear sad in the past. Now he looked as if he were suppressing an unexpected wave of emotion.

“Addie said something to me the other day. She said I’d been ‘working through it’—not in the sense of processing it, but that I had immediately ‘gone to work’ after it happened. I’ve been taking care of her, and my son, too—to some extent—telling them the same kinds of things I tell my patients.” Carl stopped, adjusted his cap to cover his ears.

“I always talk about a scar: that the wound never goes away, but that it gets covered by some protective tissue, more and more each year. And then one woman says to me, ‘Yes, and then the tissue grows so thick you can’t see out.’?” He looked at me: “You have some people who absorb everything you say, as if it’s all wise and useful. And then there are others who argue all the time—those patients are exhausting, but I think you learn more from them.”

“It’s the same with students of physics.”

Carl smiled for the first time. “Yes,” he said. “I imagine it would be.”

As we were talking, a white taxi pulled up at the curb outside the house. We both watched as a light went on inside, and Terrence paid the driver. I saw him notice us both standing on the porch, and his reluctance was apparent as he got out of the car. As usual, he wasn’t wearing warm-enough clothes: the black down vest, with only a T-shirt underneath.

“Boy doesn’t get dressed in the morning,” Carl said, under his breath. His tone surprised me a little, and I remembered what Terrence had said about Carl being the one to make them sign the prenup agreement. He seemed to make an effort to shift his affect, as his son-in-law came up the walk to us. “How’d it go down there?” he asked.

    Terrence nodded. “Good. They’ve had a great couple of weeks. People are gearing up for the season in Montauk. We have to see how it goes in the fall; it’s hard to keep a surf shop open year-round on this coast.”

Carl made a sound demonstrating his agreement with that skeptical assessment.

“How’s Simmi?”

“I was working, but she and Addie had a great time. They went to afternoon tea one day, did some shopping.”

“I hope not for clothes,” Terrence said stiffly.

“Addie needed some distraction.”

“Don’t we all,” Terrence said.

“The kids are in the yard,” I said. The atmosphere was tense, and I tried to defuse it. I turned to Terrence. “We didn’t expect you back so soon—I haven’t even fed them.”

“We can all eat, if you want,” Terrence said. “Pizza?”

“Jack and I made lasagna.”

Carl looked from me to Terrence. “I’ll leave you kids to it. And we’ll see you Thursday for dinner,” he confirmed with Terrence. He touched his son-in-law’s back in place of a hug. Then he kissed my cheek.

“It’s always nice to see you, Helen,” he said, before he made his way down the steps. From behind he looked older, his shoulders slightly rounded, his midsection heavier than before. He paused to let some slow-moving evening traffic go by, before crossing our narrow street to his car.

Terrence and I went into the front hall and closed the door. I could feel his relief now that the interaction with his father-in-law was over, at least for the time being.