Lost and Wanted(39)

Simmi, on the other hand, was full of energy. “Let’s go play,” she encouraged Jack, and started immediately up the stairs. Jack looked at me.

“Jack’s room is down here, honey.”

Simmi seemed as if she was going to argue, and I thought of what Amy had said. If Jack had told her about seeing Charlie in my office, it would explain Simmi’s eagerness—not only to play upstairs, but to be in our house at all. Today she was wearing navy-blue joggers with a sparkly tuxedo stripe, red Converse high-tops, and a T-shirt that read J’aime Paris. She’d stopped midway up the stairs, her feet on two different steps, looking down at her father and me.

    “I’m sorry,” I said. “But it’s a mess up there—you’d better stay downstairs.” Simmi descended reluctantly, and followed Jack into his room. I offered Terrence coffee.

“I just had one.”

He seemed as if he’d had several. He stood in the open entrance to our small living room, hands in his pockets, bouncing slightly on his toes. His clothes, from the thin blue surf sweatshirt—the style self-consciously retro, the logo in Japanese—to his gray suede sneakers, seemed to come from another time, when he had had the leisure to pay attention to them.

“You decided to stay for the school year,” I said.

“The semester, at least.”

“That’s good.”

“We were actually just at an open house, on Trowbridge. That’s why we came over here this morning.”

I tried not to look too surprised. Addie hadn’t mentioned anything about Terrence and Simmi moving out.

“You’re not staying in Brookline?”

“No.”

I waited, but no other information was forthcoming. I thought I should use this opening to bring up what Jack may or may not have said to his daughter.

“I think Jack may have been a little confused about the memorial. Because he didn’t really know Charlie. She was here once when he was four, but that was the last time. I’m not sure he remembers.” When I’m nervous, I tend to circle around a subject. “He recognized the photo on the invitation, though.”

Terrence nodded, but he looked distracted. “What’s up with the people downstairs?”

“What?”

“In the apartment—are they friends of yours?”

“No—I mean, not from before. I like them well enough. They’ve lived there since I bought this place.”

“Oh, okay.”

“Why?”

    “I was just thinking about the apartment.”

I looked at Terrence. “You mean…for you and Simmi?”

“But it sounds like they’re dug in, so—”

Addie had said she hoped I would be involved, and I couldn’t help wondering if this was her idea. Charlie used to say that it had been a mistake for her to choose Harvard, that she should’ve gone farther from home, where her mother would be less able to meddle in her life. At the time I’d thought that was a little unfair to Addie—who clearly did everything she did for Charlie out of love—but I had to admit that sending Terrence and Simmi to ask about the apartment qualified as meddling. At the same time it flattered me that Terrence would entertain the idea. Did he really think we should live in the same house?

I waited for him to explain, but instead he went to the window, looked out at the street in an appraising way.

“Addie…,” he began.

I waited, but he didn’t continue. “I ran into her, actually.”

“Where was that?” Terrence turned from the window to look at me, but there was nothing accusatory about his tone or his expression. It was true that he looked very tired, but the stubble that extended down his sideburns to his beard, and shadowed his upper lip, gave him a rougher, more grown-up kind of beauty than he’d had in the photos Charlie used to post of him—with his stylish hair and washboard stomach, looking like an advertisement for his brother’s store. Now he was handsome in a way that was more approachable; I thought later that might have been what made me speak without thinking:

“She said she was seeing her lawyer downtown.”

I knew it was a mistake as soon as I’d said it.

Terrence expelled air through his teeth. “And I could’ve told her what he was going to say for nothing. It’s technically still illegal, yeah, but it’s on the fucking ballot. California’s going to go for aid-in-dying next month, just like Washington and Oregon.”

I offered Terrence a chair—he had perched on the window ledge—but he shook his head impatiently. In contrast to the last time he’d been in my house, when he was measured and a bit aloof, he now seemed eager to talk, albeit in a manic way. I’d seen my students in the same state, usually from lack of sleep.

    “If she thinks her daughter wouldn’t have chosen it on her own, then maybe she didn’t know her as well as she thought she did.”

“She thinks you were—influencing Charlie?”

“I was the one who kept her from doing it, for months!” Terrence glanced toward the hallway that led to Jack’s room, then lowered his voice: “It’s against everything—I mean, that’s not how I was raised—okay? My mom’s full-on Irish-Catholic. But you know Charlie. Not even God’s going to get in her way.”