Lost and Wanted(4)

    I printed it out, and then didn’t know what to do with it. That “dare I say care?”—it was so Charlie. She didn’t pretend to care about things she didn’t care about, and she cared passionately about the things she did. It could be a seventeenth-century poet—Marvell was her favorite—or a TV show about aliens; if she loved it, she would defend it against any attack. She was the same way about people, especially her father and her older brother, William. With her mother, Adelaide, her attachment was more fraught. And for a while I was included in that charmed circle of loyalty. She might tease me: once she convinced nearly everyone we knew that I was a member of the Greek royal family, and that my real first name was Iphigenia, that I went by Helen only to remain incognito at school. (I learned of this several months later, from a Greek woman on my intramural soccer team, who said that she had to ask because she was actually a distant relation herself, through Princess Olga Isabelle, Duchess of Apulia.) Charlie made fun of me, but she also comforted my heartbreaks and disappointments, and encouraged my ambition in a way that made me feel I really could do the things I imagined doing when I was that age. People used to joke about Charlie and me being lovers, and maybe they really did wonder; it was something harder to describe than that. We were on each other’s side in a way that felt permanent, and so it hurt more than it might have otherwise, when she decided to shut me out.

In the days after Terrence’s phone call, I heard from college classmates. They wrote to me because they’d gotten the news about Charlie’s death and remembered how close we’d been. I directed those in the L.A. area toward a woman named Ellie, who was organizing a meal train for Terrence and Simmi, and the others to the scholarship fund I’d learned that her family was setting up in Charlie’s name. I was always anxious, in these correspondences, when I revealed the fact that I hadn’t seen Charlie during the last years of her illness, and that we had communicated only intermittently. I thought it would seem as if I’d abandoned her when she most needed friends; under the circumstances, I didn’t think I could explain that she was the one who had abandoned me, if only because she refused to talk about the illness that was increasingly taking over her life.

    As it turned out, no one even asked me. Was that because losing touch with one’s classmates from twenty years earlier seemed natural, or because it seemed natural to have lost touch with someone who was now dead?

I did get a call from Neel. He’d heard online, like everyone, but at least he’d picked up the phone.

“It’s a weird impulse,” he said. “The meal train.”

Neel’s need to dissect every bit of convention, to expose the contradictions in other people’s behavior, had always been exasperating.

“I think it’s pretty standard, across cultures. Don’t Indians bring food when someone dies?”

“Well, yes, but we’re always cooking,” Neel said. “You have to eliminate us from the data set.”

His sense of humor, on the other hand, was so perfectly calibrated with mine (we had all the same references) that I liked talking with him better than with almost anyone else.

“People need to eat,” I said.

“Yeah, but do you think we do this to avoid thinking about what happened?”

“Have you been thinking about her?”

Neel and Charlie had gotten along beautifully in college—unexpectedly, too, because their core beliefs were so different that it could easily have gone the other way. During the brief time Neel and I were dating, they acted almost like brother and sister, teasing each other and often ganging up on me as well. I’d meant to reconnect them once he moved out to Caltech, but I’d never done it.

“You remember that time we went to her house?”

“In Brookline?” I knew which house he was talking about, and it was possible that I asked that question just to stall. It’s hard for me to think about that weekend without losing my composure, even now.

“No, on the North Shore. To see Swift-Tuttle.”

“But it was too cloudy.”

“The first night was too cloudy,” he said. “But we saw it the second.”

    “Are you kidding?”

“No.”

“We didn’t stay two nights. We got drunk and went swimming.”

“It’s strange that you don’t remember the comet.”

That was another thing about Neel—he could never let a subject drop.

“I do remember it—we saw it at Harvard, at the CfA in January.”

“You’re thinking of Hale-Bopp in ’97,” Neel said. “After we both got back to Cambridge. It was Swift-Tuttle in Gloucester. I bet Charlie would remember.”

“Yeah, well.”

There was a long pause, and then Neel asked how Simona was doing. I told him briefly what Terrence had said about Simmi—I thought that Neel, who didn’t have any interest in children, could hardly understand—and then we shifted to the safer subject of Caltech LIGO, where Neel had been working for the past eleven years. The Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory, an international collaboration of more than a thousand scientists, was dedicated to detecting the gravitational waves that Einstein posited the existence of in 1915. People describe these waves as “ripples in spacetime,” with analogies about bowling balls on trampolines and people rolling around on mattresses, and these are probably as good as we’re going to get. The problem with all of the analogies, though, is that they’re three-dimensional; it’s almost impossible for human beings to add a fourth dimension, and visualize how objects with enormous gravity—black holes or dead stars—might bend not only space, but time.