Lost and Wanted(29)

“About a year, right?”

“That makes a big difference when the girl is older.”

Amy acknowledged that. “What did they play?”

“They kept going up to my office. Simmi was looking for a telescope—she’s interested in stars.”

“That’s cool.”

“Adelaide said something about her mother looking down from a star.”

“Oh dear.”

“Yeah.”

“But she doesn’t really believe that—at eight?”

“I’m not sure. Jack thinks he saw Charlie.”

“What do you mean?” Amy asked.

“Just before the memorial. He saw the photo on the invitation and said he remembered her.”

“That’s possible, right?”

“He said he’d just seen her—in my office, upstairs.”

“Could he be remembering a visit or something?”

“He’s only met her once. He was four—they were here for Christmas. I doubt he remembers.”

“So you think he told Simmi that?”

“What?”

“About seeing her—in your office.”

    I was silent for a moment. “I didn’t think of that.”

“She might have been talking about telescopes, but maybe she just wanted to go up there, see the ghost for herself.”

I didn’t want to be guilty of manufacturing a comforting fiction, like the one Addie had told, or of allowing Jack to do it. On the other hand, I wasn’t sure that Jack thought of what he’d told me as a story about ghosts—or as a story at all. He had said only that he’d seen the woman in the picture, upstairs in my office.

“There’s a photo of her on my desk—now. Not when he said he saw her, though. Maybe they were just playing a game.”

“Maybe,” she said. “Have you gotten any more messages?”

I had told Amy when I got the call from Charlie’s phone, as well as the email and text message. She hadn’t suggested an explanation, but like Terrence, she refused to countenance that anything out of the ordinary was going on. That annoyed me, but I didn’t know why. What did I want her to say? That there was a ghost who was trying to contact me? I didn’t believe that either. I just wanted her to admit that it couldn’t be a string of coincidences.

“No—but I got three of them. What are the chances they aren’t connected?” I meant it rhetorically, but Amy wrote her thesis on probability, and she doesn’t get many opportunities to talk about it with people who understand her.

“Very high, I think. Just assign variables to each independent event and you’re in business.”

“Thanks. But they’re not independent. I would use a PBA.”

“Nooo—you would use a Poisson distribution. It’s exactly like the classic analogy with postal mail.”

Amy was warming up. I sometimes think about how infrequently my sister must find a high school senior who is genuinely interested in probability or statistics. By contrast, my students are the best in the country, and have already determined that they hope to make a life in physics. It’s a question of sorting the merely capable from the ones who are extraordinary.

“You receive about four letters a day from different sources. Some days more arrive, some days fewer—occasionally you may not receive a letter—but the probability mass function will peak at four.”

“If they’re independent events,” I said.

    Amy sounded impatient. “Of course they’re independent.”

“Luvya lady?”

“Was there a link to nymphosonlinenow.com?”

“Why, yes—there was! Now why didn’t I think of that?”

“I’m just saying—it’s possible you see a pattern that you wouldn’t otherwise,” Amy said. “Because you’re grieving.”

“I think the word ‘grief’ is sort of like the word ‘diversity.’ It just flattens out the problem.”

My sister sighed.

“And how do you explain the emoji?” I continued. “There was a flower—a tulip—a wink, a syringe, and a Swedish flag.”

“A series of random digital images?”

“Not random—Charlie’s a big winker. And she was sick, and she was always very into fresh flowers.”

“What about Sweden?” Amy asked.

“I don’t know.” I had an idea about what the flag meant, but I couldn’t say it out loud to anyone, least of all my sister.



* * *



—

Amy would say I’m more competitive than she is. I would say that she has given something up. I still think about the fact that my undergraduate thesis was beaten out for a Hoopes Prize by Krzysztof Kapusniak’s “Angular Analysis of D+—Op+ Decay” and Jonathan Lieberman’s “Gamma Rays as Standard Candles.” I didn’t work with Arty for my undergraduate thesis, but with a quantum field theorist, Emre Aksoy, who reassured me at the time that it was his fault I hadn’t won the prize. He’d gotten a better offer from Princeton and was leaving, and Harvard wasn’t giving him any parting gifts.

I followed Emre to Princeton for my PhD, in spite of the fact that string theory was really the only game in town there at that time. Emre said it kept us humble, and on the defensive, and that those were good positions from which to do science. I think there’s a part of me that likes being in the minority—a particle physicist at Princeton in the nineties, a woman in this field at all. This is simply a personal preference, in the same way that I prefer running or swimming to team sports, and has no bearing on my genuine desire for more equity in the discipline.