Lost and Wanted(2)

“What do you mean?”

I knew Charlie was ill. Charlie had lupus. They had diagnosed it eight years ago, just after her daughter was born, when her suppressed immune system allowed the previously dormant disease to flare. But even before that, for as long as I’d known her, Charlie had believed something was wrong with her. The diagnosis, when she described it, wasn’t a tragedy. It was a relief to know what it was, and to be able to get treated. She’d been waiting her whole life to find out. There was no question of dying.

“I got a call from her phone yesterday,” I told him.

There was a pause.

“What time?” Terrence asked, and for a moment I thought there was a note of hope in his voice. As if it might be possible for me to convince him.

“At about noon.”

“Because her phone is missing,” Terrence said. “There’ve been a lot of people in and out—the health care aides especially. The coroner and the men from the funeral parlor. And then a few different sitters for Simmi, and our housekeeper—but she’s absolutely trustworthy.” Terrence sounded fierce, as if I had accused the housekeeper. He took a breath and continued. “We sleep—we’ve been sleeping—together, and Simmi fell asleep next to her mother on Tuesday as usual. I moved her to her own room, and I think she knew when she woke up. I was sitting there, and she didn’t cry when I told her. We had breakfast. She didn’t ask about the body. It was only when I started looking for the phone, and couldn’t find it, that she went crazy.”

    “Terrence,” I said. “I can’t—”

“Yeah.”

I was the maid of honor in their wedding ten years ago, on the beach in Malibu. I thought then that Charlie’s parents, an art dealer and a psychiatrist who still lived in the Georgian house in Brookline, where Charlie grew up, felt the same way I did about Terrence. Still, they didn’t show that they were disappointed to find their daughter marrying a surfer whose brother had served a three-year sentence for possession with intent to distribute, whose mother smoked menthols behind the catering truck before and after the ceremony, whose father was nowhere to be seen.

The couple was blindingly attractive. Terrence had his Irish mother’s green eyes and his black father’s hair, twisted into short, beach-friendly locks. Charlie had her mother’s incomparable bone structure. There was a lot of talk about how beautiful the children would be. There was no talk about Charlie’s disease, because at that time no one knew she had it.

“I didn’t cancel her phone service until this morning,” Terrence said. “We wanted to trace the phone, but she never set that up. She said she’d do it. It takes, like, three minutes.”

Terrence hesitated, and other noise took over. In my office there was the whir of dry heat being forced through the empty ducts. On Terrence’s end, the hysterical rise and fall of children’s television.

“There’s something I need—from her email. They make it almost impossible to get into email on the computer, if you don’t know the password. But the passcode on the phone is 1234. I once showed her an article about how it’s everyone’s first guess—but she never changed it. Maybe she figured she didn’t need to email it to me, since I could always get in on the phone.”

    I was having trouble following Terrence, but I didn’t want to ask him to repeat himself. What was it he needed? At first I thought of a will, but the only copy of a will wouldn’t be locked in a deceased person’s email account.

“I might have to hire an actual lawyer.”

“That’s crazy.”

“Yeah, so…whoever has the phone—they must’ve pocket dialed you.”

“That makes sense.” I said this to be kind to Terrence. I didn’t believe it. What were the odds of being called accidentally by a thief who stole a phone, even if the passcode were easy to guess? You didn’t keep a stolen phone and start using it. You wiped it clean and sold it right away.

Terrence coughed. “Charlie wanted me to—reach out to you. She didn’t want me to get into the medical details with everyone, but since you understand this stuff—it was the encephalitis that did it. She was doing chemo.”

“Charlie was?”

“Chemo’s not just for cancer.”

“I know that.”

“Yeah, so, we stopped that three weeks before—we decided to stop it, because it wasn’t helping. She was worried about her hair.”

“She would have looked fine without hair.”

“She didn’t lose any.”

“That probably made her happy.”

“I think it was her chief concern.” Terrence let out a sound between a sigh and a choke, and I was sorry I’d ever thought badly of him.

“Terrence, I don’t—is there anything I can do? I know it must be…with Simmi and everything.”

I hadn’t seen Simmi since she was a baby, but I thought that if she were anything like her mother, she would survive. In fact, that was the piece of it that made the least sense, because the central fact about Charlie was her resilience. It wasn’t so much that Charlie couldn’t die, but that the Charlie who was dead couldn’t be Charlie anymore.

    “She’s lucky to have you, though.” I didn’t mean to relate it to me and Jack, or to suggest that just because Simmi had two parents, it was okay that she had lost one of them. But I’m still afraid Terrence might have taken it that way.