Lost and Wanted(112)
“Contaminated with what?” Jack asked.
“Well—nuclear waste, mostly. You remember I told you about the Manhattan Project? Those scientists made the plutonium at Hanford for the bomb we dropped on Nagasaki.”
“Fat Man or Little Boy?”
“That was Fat Man.”
“Pyoo, pyoo,” Jack whistled, under his breath. Then he stopped making bomb sounds and put both fists in the pockets of his sweatshirt, stretching it out.
I glanced through the glass doors to the street, and saw Simmi and her grandmother turning into the courtyard. Simmi was looking at the ground as they walked, listening to something Addie was saying. She was wearing the same silver parka from last year, a little small now—she wouldn’t have needed a new one in L.A.—and her hair was shoulder length, styled in tight ringlets, more grown-up.
I opened the door for them, and Adelaide kissed me once on each cheek. I hugged Simmi, who hugged back a little shyly. She was still taller than Jack, but only just barely now.
“Hey,” she said, punching Jack gently on the arm.
“That’s the way you say hello, after half a year?” her grandmother said.
Simmi glanced at her grandmother, opened her eyes wide at Jack, then dropped a curtsy, holding out an imaginary gown. Jack laughed, but I marveled: it was so perfectly Charlie. Simmi had taken off her coat and was wearing black jeans and a gray sweater, along with patent leather Doc Marten boots.
Addie shook her head. “We have ascended several degrees on the fresh-o-meter since we saw each other last,” she said, but her expression was wistful, not scolding. If Simmi had stayed in Boston, I thought it would have been much easier for her grandparents, seeing her on a daily or weekly basis, to think of her as her own person. After a hiatus of several months, they could hardly help but be struck by the similarities, the moments of uncanny synchronicity in Simmi’s looks and manner, which would only increase as she grew into a woman both like and unlike her mother.
The children had wandered across the lobby to look at the photographs of the interferometers.
“How are you?” I asked Addie.
She was wearing a dark red coat, black leather gloves, and a round, vaguely Russian fur hat. We exchanged the kind of despairing remarks about the election that were standard that winter in Cambridge.
“The bright spot is that William and Caroline and the boys spent the summer with us.” She glanced at Simmi, who had gotten very close to the Livingston photo, as if she were trying to see the individual pixels. “I wish we could’ve had all three of the grandchildren in one place, of course. But very few modern families get that.”
“My parents say the same thing.”
Addie nodded. “And so there are good days, and very bad ones. People used to ask me, when I had the gallery, whether I had ever wanted to be an artist—and I always said, Oh, no—that wasn’t my inclination at all. I confess that this is the only time I’ve ever wished to have that talent. So there would be somewhere to put all of this.” She gestured to her chest, where a black cashmere scarf was expertly draped. “If someone had described art to me in those terms then, I would have dismissed them out of hand. Art isn’t therapy, I would have said.”
I drew in a breath. “I’ve sometimes found science a little therapeutic,” I suggested.
“I can imagine,” Addie said. “A whole other world.”
“If you’d like to join us for the tour—”
Addie glanced at her watch. “Will you promise me a rain check? I’m meeting a friend nearby. And then I thought I could come back for Simmi whenever you’re ready.”
We arranged for me to call her when we were finished. After she left, I buzzed the keypad on the second set of doors and the department secretary let us in. We walked through the recently renovated common area, with peripheral glassed-in offices. I pointed out Rainer Weiss’s office to the kids.
“Rai built the first version of those machines in the pictures. That was in the seventies, when I was a baby.” Jack was distracted by Simmi’s presence, and both children only nodded. I might as well have said that Rai had built his prototype during the Crusades. “Hardly anyone thought that detecting gravitational waves was possible back then. But now everyone thinks Rai’s going to win the Nobel Prize.”
“Oh,” Jack said. Then he turned to Simmi. “What were you for Halloween this year?”
Rai wasn’t in, but we found Neel on his computer around the corner. He had just changed offices, and this was the first time I’d seen it. The new space was almost empty, dusty sunlight pouring in from two rectangular windows just below the ceiling. There was a whiteboard on the wall behind his desk, covered with notes in red, a couch with metal arms, and a coat tree in one corner. Neel and I had been working steadily on the rotor project since the spring, making progress, but most of our communication was over email or on the phone. When we met, it was usually in my office. There was something slightly different about our interactions since his marriage; I had expected it, but the change seemed to take Neel by surprise. Sometimes I would find him looking at me in a strange way, as if I were the one who’d done something that had caught him off guard.
This new office was nothing like Arty’s—like most of MIT, it felt efficient and intentionally unadorned compared to Harvard—but I could remember coming upon him just this way in the past, when he was concentrating, one hand resting on the keyboard, the other twisting a piece of his hair between thumb and forefinger. He tended to rock very slightly back and forth in his chair, as if to some rhythm in his own thought.