Lost and Wanted(25)

He shrugged. “It’s her grandmother. She said that maybe Charlie was ‘smiling down on us’ from a star.”

“Oh—”

“You have no idea, the conversations we’ve had about that one.”

I agreed with Terrence that the idea of Charlie smiling down from a star—in addition to sounding vaguely out of character—was unlikely to comfort a child who had just turned eight. On the other hand, there are all kinds of platitudes I’ve heard myself repeating to Jack that I never would’ve expected, comforting banalities I must’ve been told so many times that they had been hardwired in there.

“I can imagine,” I said.

Terrence expelled a breath, said nothing. He sat down, not on the chair itself, but on one upholstered arm. He ran his hand over his head, as if feeling for the missing hair, then interlaced his fingers. On his left hand was the simple platinum wedding band.

Apart from the few words we’d exchanged at the memorial, we hadn’t spoken since the phone conversation when he’d first told me about Charlie. That was two days after she died, the day after I received the wordless phone call, which he’d dismissed as a pocket dial. I didn’t think he would be able to do the same with the symbols that had come over email the next day, or the text on the morning of the memorial itself—but sitting across from him, I felt it would be wrong to bring those things up.

    “I made some coffee, if you want?”

“I’m good, thanks.”

There was a ridiculously long silence, in which Terrence seemed to be studying his fingernails. They were either clipped or bitten very short.

“What’s Zingaro?”

Terrence looked up. “Oh, it’s our company—mine and my brother’s. We make wooden surfboards.”

“What does it mean?”

“Gypsy,” he said. “It’s a British word for an Italian Gypsy.”

“I’ve never heard it before.” There was the sound of the children’s voices from Jack’s room. They at least had overcome the initial awkwardness.

“Charlie would be glad we’re doing this,” Terrence offered suddenly. “I mean, a playdate. She’d talk about you.”

“Really?”

“Yeah. Like when there was an article or something—I think she had a Google Alert on your name. She told Simmi how you were a famous scientist and everything.”

“I don’t know about that,” I said, but I was pleased. It was one thing to hear it from Charlie, who tended to flatter people, another to think that Charlie cared enough to follow my career remotely.

“I think she also wanted Simmi to know there’s another kind of famous,” Terrence said. “Not just pop stars and actors—you know?”

“It’s impressive that Simmi remembered.”

“She’s something,” Terrence said. “She could read when she was three.”

“Me, too,” I said.

Terrence glanced at me, but didn’t say anything. Was I trying to impress him? And even if I were, would this be the way to go about it? I know better than to bring up the spooky stuff my parents have told me: that my first words were a full sentence, spoken at eight months—“Candle makes light”—and that I seemed to read from a book ten months after that, a Jane Austen novel that was lying open on the bed. The parson is coming to dinner, I supposedly said, startling my mother, who was ironing. In third grade, Mrs. Katz made me stand in front of the class while she threw addition and subtraction problems at me. I’d been rude, she said, claiming that I “already knew how to add and subtract,” and she wanted to teach me a lesson. I got them all, up to four digits, and was surprised when it turned out I had to sit through addition anyway.

    Jack does not manifest the unusual abilities I displayed early. His report card, which doesn’t yet have letter grades on it, is always good; although he professes to dislike math, his evaluations in that subject and in science are often excellent. His teachers’ most frequent complaints are about the sloppiness of his homework, and his disinclination to speak up in class. These are issues I struggle to help him with, since I had the opposite problem as a child; I was so eager to please, not only to show what I knew but to be allowed to move on to whatever was coming next, that I couldn’t shut up.

Terrence walked in a circle around our small living room, then paused at the shelves to look at my books.

“Do you know the author Robert Lanza?”

“I don’t think so.”

“He’s a scientist, too, more of a biologist. He has this theory about where the energy goes when someone dies. Because of the Second Law of Thermodynamics.”

“Mm,” I said. It’s strange that people are often moved to make the most far-fetched nonscientific arguments to scientists, rather than to the type of audience that might be more receptive.

Terrence became more animated, gesturing with his left hand: “He says that we all exist in our own bubbles of spatiotemporal reality. And that when we die, all that happens is that the bubble pops. The people left behind experience your death, but you don’t. Or another way to think about it is that the universe is like an infinite collection of shows on cable, and when you die, you just start a new series.” He came the closest I’d seen to a smile. “Charlie liked that.”