Lost and Wanted(13)

Charlie stretched out her arms to the baby, but Simona sank down to her bottom and crawled.

“Walk to Mommy.”

“Hey,” Terrence said to me. And then to Charlie: “She knows when you’re showing off.”

“Of course I am,” Charlie said, picking her up. “How could I not?”

    Simona’s hair, what there was of it, stuck out in a little cloud around her head. Her eyes were giant, a variegated hazel color somewhere between her mother’s and her father’s, and she was wearing an expensive-looking playsuit with a pink crocheted top and creamy linen bloomers. It was clean, too—maybe Terrence had just changed her into it? Jack never went more than an hour without spitting up on whatever I’d put on him.

“Hat,” she said suddenly.

“She can talk!”

“That’s her big word,” Charlie said.

“She has seventeen words,” Terrence put in.

“Who’s showing off now?” Charlie smiled at her husband. “Is it okay if we catch up a little?”

“Sure,” Terrence said. “We have major plans. We’re going to the farmers’ market. Want to take a ride in the car, Sims?”

The baby made a sound like “heh,” assenting.

“Hopefully she’ll nap on the way back,” he said, taking Simona from her mother with one practiced arm.

Charlie leaned over and kissed him. “Thanks.”

“Nice to see you,” Terrence said, holding up his free hand.

“Can I make you a latte or something?” Charlie asked.



* * *



—

We sat outside and dangled our legs in the pool. It was close to eighty degrees in September, desert heat. The smell in the air reminded me of being a kid in Pasadena, sitting on the curb of our suburban block with my sister, our feet in the runoff by the drain. There was the same insect drone. You could hear the cars going by Charlie’s house outside, but the hedge gave it a separate, protected feel. A vine of brilliant pink bougainvillea began in a clay pot and grew over the wrought-iron fence.

“It’s beautiful here.”

“Terrence did most of it,” Charlie said. “He loves plants and all that—I keep telling him he should go back to school for landscape architecture. You can make a fortune doing that out here, and I’d be able to help him make a lot of connections.”

“What does he think?”

“Honestly?” Charlie said. “He doesn’t really want to work. His brother’s starting this surf company, and he may get involved in that.”

    “He’s still really into the surfing?”

Charlie glanced at me. “You sound like my parents.”

“That’s not a criticism! It’s just—I don’t know anything about surfing.”

“He once told me that he wasn’t white enough for the white kids at his high school, and he didn’t sound black enough for the black kids. He said the beach was the only place he ever felt like everything about him was right.”

“That makes sense.”

“And when he’s not surfing, he just wants to take care of Simmi and cook. I get it, because that’s exactly what he didn’t have. His mom was single—I mean, not by choice.” Charlie hurried on: “They never had enough money, and they were always moving. That’s why he’s obsessed with the house, keeping everything so perfect. Which is better than the alternative, I guess. But sometimes I feel like he’s like a nineteen fifties housewife—a fifties housewife who surfs. It’s a huge stress for us. Or for me, anyway.”

“Because of money?” I was surprised that Charlie was confiding in me right away, and also ashamed in the same way I’d been in the kitchen. For me this visit had been loaded with anxiety about how I would appear to her, but Charlie wasn’t thinking of it as a competition; she was treating me as a friend. She actually seemed desperate to talk to me.

“Not really,” Charlie said. “I moved up a peg to co-producer on this new show—the one about Vegas—and I make enough, at least for now. It’s more like, what’s he going to do when she goes to school? And counting on me as the breadwinner is risky, at least long-term. The schedule when we’re shooting is really punishing. I feel fine now, but…”

“Because of the arthritis?”

Charlie shook her head. “It’s lupus now, officially.”

I looked at her. “You didn’t tell me.”

“I only found out a few months ago—I haven’t really told anyone, except my parents.”

I didn’t know what to say. I put my hand on hers, on the warm stone tile. She squeezed mine and let go.

    “It’s kind of a relief to know. The treatment is clearer, for one thing.”

“Do you feel okay?”

“I do, yeah. It’s called a flare, with lupus—that’s what happened after I gave birth. I was so sick—rashes all over my body, fever. And the steroids blew me up like a bicycle pump—really disgusting. But then it went away, and I’ve been basically okay.”

“Is it an issue if you get pregnant again?”

Charlie nodded. “I’d have to go off the methotrexate, first of all. And even though some lupus patients actually do better when they’re pregnant, that wasn’t true for me. A second pregnancy could make things a lot worse. It’s probably not going to be possible, my doctors say.”