Lost and Wanted(108)

“Does it ever get warm here?” he said.

“This was a warm winter,” I told him. “You were lucky. I remember one year it snowed in April—and that was before the climate went nuts.” I was aware that I was talking too fast; it was so nice to see him. “I can’t promise the lasagna’s going to be amazing,” I said. “But it’s ready—if you want to call the kids?”

    “Yeah,” he said. “Okay.”

“It’s good to have you guys back.”

“Yeah, no—it’s good to be back. L.A. was pretty intense.” He looked at me, and I thought he was going to say something else. I waited, halfway up the stairs.

“I’ll see you in a sec,” he said, and disappeared into the apartment. I could hear the children’s voices, shouting in the gloom. I knew they would come in sweaty from running around in the cold, their faces flushed. The lasagna had come out well, and I secretly hoped Terrence might be impressed. I felt suddenly surprisingly happy, the way I sometimes do in my office, when I get a new and especially promising idea.





11.


The kids complained at dinner that we’d never made it to the aquarium, and Terrence offered to take them himself the next morning, if I had work to do. I did have some papers Neel had emailed me, related to the rotor project we’d been talking about in January, asking for my thoughts. It was the first time he’d written since returning from his honeymoon—a trip to some islands I’d never heard of, off the coast of southern India—as if nothing unusual had happened in his personal or professional life since we’d last spoken. After considering for a moment, I decided to go with everyone to the aquarium.

I think the pleasure of aquariums has almost nothing to do with science, just like planetariums aren’t really about astrophysics. One moment you’re in the bright exterior world, and the next you’ve been transported to a dim blue one. The children felt it the minute we went inside; they ran toward the Giant Ocean Tank, and pressed their faces to the glass. Jack wanted to start at the top, with the coral reef, and so we took the elevator to Level Four. We descended slowly, from tropical to freshwater to temperate, and then to the marine mammals. I didn’t supply any facts about the rapid and probably unstoppable murder of the planet’s coral reef ecologies; I let us all just enjoy it in peace. The rays especially awed the children, gliding along like knives in the water, then suddenly tilting upward, revealing rhomboid swaths of white flesh.

    “Whoa,” Jack breathed.

“Like Daddy’s tattoo,” Simmi said.

I thought that made it okay to ask. “Why the stingray?”

“It’s for my brother,” Terrence said.

“And you have fish,” Jack said.

“Those are for me and Simmi.”

“And Mama,” Simmi added.

I glanced at Terrence, who didn’t break his focus on the tank. “Yep.”

That was why there were three.

“You have so many sea animals on you, you could be a giant poster for the aquarium!” Jack said.

“Are rays actually fish?” I asked, inanely.

“Yeah,” Terrence said. “We sometimes see them in warmer water—when Ray and I went down to Nicaragua there were a ton of them. You have to sort of shuffle, getting into the water.”

“What happens if they sting you?” Jack asked.

Terrence ruffled his hair. “You don’t want them to sting you, dude.”

“Hey,” Simmi said. “Do they really have a touch tank here with sharks?”

“That’s my favorite thing,” Jack said excitedly. “Can I show her?”

I nodded. It was Sunday and the aquarium was crowded. Terrence and I had to pay attention to keep the kids in view. When we got to the touch tank, Jack and Simmi waited their turn for a place among the small children and their parents at the edge of the exhibit. The tank hosted Atlantic and cownose rays along with the small grayish-green epaulette sharks. Terrence and I stood back a little from the crowd.

“I wanted to say sorry again about the phone,” I told him. “I don’t know what I was thinking.”

“We’re cool on that front,” Terrence said.

“But I should have told you right away. I was worried that it would be one more thing for you to deal with. And I also really wanted you to take the apartment. I thought it would be good for Jack,” I added quickly.

    “I think it was good for both of them,” Terrence said.

“They just seem to get closer,” I agreed. We watched them jockeying for a place in the midst of the other children, rolling up their sleeves. The lights in the ceiling were like spotlights, picking up the shine in their hair.

“The house is finally in contract,” Terrence said. He was leaning against the wall, hands in the pockets of a pair of loose, dark jeans. Today he was wearing an actual down coat, over a green T-shirt that said Dogtown.

“In L.A.? That must be a relief.”

“It is for me.”

“Is Simmi doing okay with that?”

“She wanted to go back and see it,” he said. “I tried to talk her out of it, but…”

“Oh, no.”

“Yeah,” he said. “It was awful. Our furniture’s still there, but the brokers had brought in all this stuff to make it easier to sell. The room we used for a den they turned into another bedroom—a nursery, with a crib and everything. And then in our room, there was a different cover on the bed.” He stopped for a minute. All those people in the enclosed space made the voices reverberate, as if we were underground. Everyone seemed to be shouting, but from far away.