Lost and Wanted(35)

H: I feel like I owe you an apology, though you’re hardly the last to know. I’ve told basically no one about things with Roxy, including my brother—admittedly, I try to make that a general rule where my family is concerned. I’ve only just broken the news to my parents, who are thrilled, of course. She’s not a Telugu Brahmin, but I think they’d lost hope that I would ever get married at all. Roxy’s family is Parsi—a tiny minority in India, famously successful in business. There’s also a strong tradition of service, and that’s what she’s generally been up to since medical school. (She got her MD at Stanford—we were both in California for years, but didn’t meet until last year in Mumbai.) She’s been on a two-year stint with Doctors Without Borders, running a clinic in eastern India, but now she’s ready to come back to the States.

Meanwhile, how are things in the infinite corridor? Am I throwing myself to the lions with Mark and his group? I have to admit, I’ve gotten used to the weather and am a little trepidatious about coming back to Cambridge. (Roxy’s a baby about the cold, which I find funny given her general steeliness. We’re getting married in February in India—short notice, but I hope you’ll come.) I have something else to discuss with you, which I’ll keep to myself until I see you in person. Both interferometers should be up and running anytime now, and recent developments have made me especially optimistic. As it is, 2016 is shaping up to be a momentous year for me and for the universe in general, and I’m glad we’ll be in closer proximity to exchange notes.

Xo

Neel





19.


A few days after I received that reply, I went to retrieve Jack from a playdate. It was a beautiful fall day, and so I took Arty’s advice and walked. The air smelled like burning leaves. I wasn’t thinking about Charlie at first, but about my graduate students Jim and Chendong, and their analysis of the latest Planck satellite data. I walked from my office in Building 6 out to Mass Ave., where the mother of Jack’s playdate had asked me to meet them at Darwin’s, the popular sandwich shop. There was a plate-glass window, and a glass door that kept swinging open and closed in the lunchtime rush.

That was when I saw her. In profile, through the glass, dressed in white, gesturing to the girl behind the counter. And this was in character, because Charlie would never pass up an opportunity for conversation with a stranger. I sometimes thought she enjoyed talking to people she didn’t know more than those she did. The girl was laughing. She passed Charlie a brown paper bag; then she moved, reflections shifted, the window was a pattern of light and dark shapes. I took a step back—it was not like what you sometimes heard, people mistaking a stranger for a lost loved one in a crowd. This was real and I was frightened.

The door opened, and I was standing in front of Adelaide Boyce, blocking her path. I almost laughed, I was so relieved. Charlie’s mother was wearing white, more of a knitted cape than a sweater. She was alive and very real, buying bread from a store. Nothing could be more normal.

“Helen!”

I almost said that I’d thought she was Charlie. I might have said it in the past, even if it wasn’t true, just to please her.

“What are you doing here?” she asked, even though we were in Cambridge, and she was the one who was well outside her Brookline neighborhood.

I said I was picking up my son from a playdate.

“I won’t keep you, then. But how are you?”

I’d mistaken Adelaide for her daughter (I saw now) because she’d styled her hair differently. I’d never seen Charlie’s mother with anything but straight hair, with a heavy fringe of bangs. Now it was short and natural (though without any gray), just the way Charlie’s had been in that photograph. It made her face look older, in spite of the fact that she was wearing a good amount of makeup, especially around her eyes.

    I said that I’d been working a lot.

“What are you working on these days? I’m still recommending your book on cosmology to everyone.”

“Thank you.”

I had the strange urge to tell her that Neel was coming back to MIT. I thought she would remember him, but only from the article in Science that Charlie had shown her, when our model was published. I had received a handwritten note from her then, congratulating me on my achievement, and again when each of the books came out. Addie kept track of Charlie’s friends, especially the women; she bought my books for her own friends as Christmas presents. When our classmate Sarah, a cellist, first performed with the BSO, Addie bought a subscription.

“We’re doing some exciting work related to the Large Hadron Collider, in Geneva,” I said. “But the further along you get, the more meetings you have to attend—it sometimes seems like my whole life is meetings.”

“I can believe that,” Addie said. “I’m just coming from a meeting myself—my lawyer at Ropes and Gray. I’ve known him forty years. You realize whom you trust, at times like this.” Addie tilted her head and looked at me. “You have a will, don’t you?”

I must’ve looked startled, because she put her hand on my shoulder. “I know. I’m being a nosy old woman, but you have to do it, once you have a child.”

“I should.”

“I’ll email you Robert’s information. You don’t have to call him, but just promise you’ll call someone.”