Lost and Wanted(3)

“Me?” He sounded incredulous. “I’m no substitute.”

“No, of course, but—”

“She’s just waiting for her mother to come back. Now I think that’s why she didn’t ask about the body. If she saw a body—”

There was a pause in which I heard the television again. It was so loud. Had he put it on to distract his daughter while he called their friends? Or had she turned it up herself, to drown him out?

“There’s going to be a memorial in Boston next month,” he said. “Her parents will let you know.”

I asked if there were anything I could do to help, and Terrence politely declined—naturally, he was eager to get off the phone.

“People are posting on her wall,” he said.

“Okay.”

“You can memorialize her fucking Facebook. But you can’t get what you actually need.”

“I’m so sorry.”

“Yeah,” he said. “Thanks.” And hung up.

I went to the missed calls from yesterday: one incoming, followed by two outgoing in quick succession. I touched the number and the screen obligingly responded: “Calling: Charlie…”

But it was as Terrence had said. The mobile customer I was trying to reach was no longer at this number. No further information was available.

I was alone in my office. I got up and locked the door. I put on my wireless headphones, clicked on the German Requiem, and turned off the lights. I sat with my back against the couch and put my head on my knees. This is what I did when my grandmother died in 2005, and it had helped. But this time I felt as if I were watching myself do it, as if it were a performance. I couldn’t cry. I got back up, turned off the music, and sat down at my computer. If tears came, fine; if not, I would work until my 1:00 p.m. seminar.

I tried to focus on a grant proposal for a postdoc who’d just gotten a job at Harvey Mudd, and then opened my email. I wasn’t checking for anything; do we even “check” anymore? It was just a reflex, like rubbing my eyes or stretching. But there it was, incredible and absolutely real, in its narrow, rectangular box, slotted between a message from the PA at Jack’s school and a solicitation from Greenpeace—Charlotte Boyce. I stared at it for a moment to be sure. The time was 10:57 a.m., this morning. I clicked:





That was it. It was in reply to a message I’d sent three weeks earlier, asking how she was, but there were no words, nothing but those tiny pictures. It was not impossible to believe that a message from Charlie might have been delayed for three days, and she was certainly capable of sending a goodbye like that. Or it might have been a fake, a hacker—except what motivation could such a person possibly have?

If it were someone else, it would be better not to respond. But there was no “if,” I had to remind myself—whoever it was, was someone else.





3.


In my line of work, I do get asked about the paranormal; everyone who brings it up does so in the same shy, half-joking way, as if they assume they are the first. I’m always tempted to give a lecture about Newton: the debate among historians as to whether he belongs in the supernatural past of the Sumerians and Babylonians, or as a shock trooper of the Age of Reason. I come down with the latter group. The fact that Newton owned an enormous collection of alchemical and religious manuscripts has no bearing upon his invention of differential calculus or its brilliant application in the Principia. What I normally say instead is that it isn’t that magical things are necessarily impossible—only that they must be confined to environments we haven’t yet observed.

I couldn’t bring myself to look at Charlie’s Facebook, but I did google the rules regarding deceased persons’ accounts:

         If Facebook is made aware that a person has passed away, it is our policy to memorialize the account.



     No one can log into a memorialized account and no new friends can be accepted.



     Depending on the privacy settings of the deceased person’s account, friends can share memories on the memorialized timeline.



     Anyone can send private messages to the deceased person.





The last rule seemed the strangest to me: Facebook actually sanctioned the idea of private messages to the dead. The messages existed somewhere on the internet, but no one other than their authors were allowed to read them. Such letters to the dead must always have been written; it was just that in the past, the writers had nowhere to send them.

I went through the emails I’d saved from Charlie. I generally erase personal email at the end of each year, and there were only a few that had wound up in permanent folders, including one in which we worked out the logistics for the last time we’d seen each other, the Christmas Jack was four. I had almost given up looking when I found another, in a folder I might have intended to discard. This one was older, from just after Simmi was born:

I have currently checked into a hotel for a couple of days to try to finish my NBC pilot, the first draft of which is due this week. I am having a VERY tough time trying to write and be a mom—and also I’ve had all these weird health issues post-pregnancy (they first thought I had lupus but now hopefully just arthritis—typing that makes me feel ancient—along with an acute thyroid problem). We just hired a nanny, but somehow managing that, along with the constant mental checklist (is the baby eating enough? did she nap? for how long? is there enough food in the freezer? diapers? formula? etc.), seems to preclude the kind of sustained concentration it takes to invent the characters and world of this pilot. I have less than a month to write a script from an idea that wasn’t mine in the first place, and that takes place in another time period—New York City society in the “roaring twenties”—a period of American history about which I know (& dare I say care?) relatively little. No wonder so much of network TV sucks. Anyway, hoping that being away from the responsibilities of the baby will allow me to fall back on some of my old tricks—like pulling all-nighters, say?—so that I can at least crank out a draft.