Lost and Wanted(118)

“Do you like Fruit Smash?” he asked Neel.

“I don’t know,” Neel said. “I’ve never played.”

“I can teach you,” Jack said eagerly. “It’s really easy. The different fruits are worth different amounts of points. I can play against you—but maybe we should do one game together first?” He looked up, waiting for Neel to decide.

Neel pulled another chair up to the computer, and rested one arm on the back of Jack’s. “Together, definitely,” he said, and Jack beamed. “I’m a novice, though,” he continued. “So you’ll have to start from the beginning.”



* * *



—

    Simmi was sitting on the floor of the corridor with her back against the wall. Her hair had sprung out around her head, mussed from the cap, and her cheeks were very pink.

“Hi,” I said. “There you are. You okay?”

“I was just waiting for you guys.”

I didn’t say that we were the ones waiting for her. I still thought she must’ve needed a moment to herself, in the control room and again here in the hallway. She didn’t make a move to get up, and so I slid down the wall, sat on the floor next to her. Simmi was playing with a green rubber band bracelet she’d taken off her wrist, stretching it between her fingers.

“I didn’t think I was that tired,” she said suddenly.

“Tired enough to fall asleep, you mean? It might be the traveling—sometimes that can be exhausting. And the time difference from California.”

Simmi shrugged, reminding me of her father. She worked both wrists into the rubber bracelet. “I had a dream.”

There was a metallic taste in my mouth; I’d been biting the inside of my cheek without realizing. “A daydream?”

“No.” Simmi was decisive. “A real dream.”

She was looking at me directly, waiting for my reaction, but I couldn’t say anything.

“It was too weird to be a daydream,” she insisted.

“You can have a weird daydream,” I said, but I sounded weak, unconvincing even to myself. Of course I knew exactly what she meant about the difference.

Simmi unfolded her legs and stretched them across the empty corridor, the toes of her boots turning outward on the linoleum. One of her laces had come undone.

“What was the dream about?”

“About my mom picking me up from school.”

I waited, as I do with Jack, and after a few moments, she continued.

“The weird part was, it wasn’t my school in L.A.”

“No?”

“It was BB&N—here. I usually don’t even think about that school.”

“Maybe it was in your dream because you’re in Boston right now,” I said. “Sometimes dreams mix things up that way.”

    “It was like—” Simmi looked at me sideways, as if debating how much to reveal. “I mean, I wasn’t surprised to see her.”

“Just like you weren’t surprised to be in Boston.”

“Yeah. But then she said our word.”

I was confused. “Which word?”

Simmi smiled a little. “You know, our safety word—in Latin.”

“The one you said was your mom’s idea?”

“Right—but that’s what was weird. You don’t need a code word, when it’s a parent.”

I hesitated. “Sometimes people say things in dreams that they wouldn’t say in real life.”

Simmi nodded. “But this wasn’t exactly like she said it.”

“No?”

“More like I read it…on a screen.”

Simmi’s expression was serious, but she didn’t seem on the brink of any strong emotion. We sat with our backs against the wall, staring up at a poster-sized graph entitled: “Measured Noise Relative to Shot Noise as a Function of Sideband Frequency and Readout Quadrature.”

“I think I might have had a dream about her, too,” I said.

Simmi looked down, picked at a frayed place in the leg of her jeans. She didn’t say anything but she seemed to be waiting for me to continue.

“We were just sitting and talking in a room. By a fire. She asked me if I was cold.”

Now Simmi looked up at me and frowned. Her thick brows contracted, almost meeting in the middle. “Was she cold?”

“No,” I said quickly. “No—she had a blanket.”

Simmi took a deep breath: “The room, with the fire—where was it?”

“Not far from here,” I said. “Near Boston—although that’s not weird in my case. Most of the time your mom and I spent together was in Boston.”

Simmi nodded slowly. Then she put one finger on the linoleum and traced a curving path between us, back and forth.

“When you were young,” she said.





16.


I went back into the control room, where Neel and Jack were playing the game.

“The pineapple!” Jack cried. “Get the pineapple!”

“Thanks for keeping an eye on him,” I told Neel. “We’ll get out of your hair now.”

“I’ll come out and say goodbye,” Neel said. He looked toward the door. “Is she okay? I hope that drama in the lab didn’t freak her out too much.”