Lost and Wanted(28)

Jack had seated himself in his customary place at the kitchen table. He picked up the sandwich I put in front of him, but didn’t take his eyes off Simmi.

“Come anytime,” I said. “We’d love that.” I didn’t think Simmi would want me to hug her, and so I touched her shoulder. She seemed to tense under my hand.

I turned to Jack. “What were you showing Simmi upstairs?”

    Unaccountably, Jack looked nervous, and Terrence was suddenly attentive.

“Jack?”

“Your office,” he said in a small voice.

Normally my office is off-limits, but I held off getting angry for Simmi’s sake. “There’s not much to see there.”

“No telescope,” Simmi said.

“I don’t really use telescopes,” I told her. “But I know lots of people who do. If you’d like, I can take you to see one.”

“Simmi?” Terrence said.

“Thank you,” Simmi said.

The way she looked at me! They weren’t her mother’s eyes—they were almond-shaped and a much lighter color. It was the expression, almost as if she were daring me to do something. Or as if Charlie were, from inside there.

Terrence was collecting a backpack Simmi had been carrying with the most recent Disney princesses on it—the ones who were supposed to be Scandinavian feminists—with their waist-length hair and impossible proportions.

“Can I walk with Simmi to the sidewalk?” Jack said.

I nodded and the two of them went out of our apartment, down the steps to the front door together. Terrence and I followed them more slowly. We stood in the hallway outside my tenants’ apartment. The children had left the door ajar, and I could see our next-door neighbor, Marjorie, through the screen, scraping the sludge of mustard-colored pollen from the uneven sidewalk with a rake.

“I used to get angry at Charlie,” I said. “Why wouldn’t she call me back? And then I’d wonder why I cared so much.”

Terrence was looking at the messages on his phone. He seemed to have a lot of them, but when I said Charlie’s name, he looked up.

“That’s why she didn’t call you.”

“I know. I just—love her.”

Terrence put the phone back in his pocket, and left his hands there. He rocked a little on his heels, and looked past me to the children, who were talking to Marjorie. She had stopped raking and was showing them something in the elm tree outside her house—a bird’s nest, maybe. They were all three looking up.

    “You’re, like, the only person who’s said that.”

“What?” I asked.

“Daddy!” Simmi called. “Come look!”

“Without the e-d,” Terrence said.

Then he skipped two steps and hurried down to the sidewalk to look where his daughter was pointing.





15.


That night I opened the email that had come right after Charlie’s death. I looked again at the little pictures, and even pressed reply. Then I felt foolish. I decided to call my sister in L.A.

Amy teaches mathematics at a private girls’ day school in Pasadena that she hopes her daughters will someday attend at a reduced rate. Her husband, Ben, is an engineer for the city. As kids, Amy and I fought so much that our parents decided to give us separate rooms. Since there were only two bedrooms and I was older, I began sleeping on the enclosed porch that had always been my father’s workshop.

I made a fuss about being “kicked out” of my room, but everyone knew I was happy on the porch, with all the batteries, the rolls of copper wire, the slide rule, the coffee cans that were labeled to identify their carefully sorted contents: nuts, bolts, nails, washers. My sister, by contrast, demonstrated certain obsessive-compulsive behaviors that could be controlled only with absolute order and a strict routine. It was difficult for her to sleep anywhere but that dark little bedroom, where she performed various bedtime rituals: flipping the light on and off, executing twirling maneuvers (to “unwind her string”), touching the rows of stuffed animals arranged on whitewashed, plywood shelves my father had made when he was unemployed.

As adults my younger sister and I are as close as any siblings I know. There are certain facts we don’t discuss:

         Helen and Amy are both very smart.



     Amy is prettier than Helen, and has a husband and children.



     Helen is more successful than Amy and does more interesting work.



     Helen and Amy’s mother loves Amy and her children more than she loves Helen and Jack.



     Helen and Amy’s father is a little in awe of Helen and tends to brag about her to his friends.





Amy and I sometimes marvel at other siblings who let their differences get in the way. What, after all, is the point?

That night I told Amy about Terrence and Simmi’s visit. I said that they seemed more eager to befriend us than I’d expected.

“Why wouldn’t they be? I mean, if they’re planning on staying in Boston?”

“Just, I don’t know—Terrence and I don’t have that much in common. And Simmi’s older than Jack.”