Lost and Wanted(47)

“It wouldn’t work anyway,” Simmi said. “Obviously.”

Jack looked confused. “Then why did you say we might be able to talk to your mom?”

Terrence made a short sound, a strangled groan. Simmi looked at him, frightened, then turned back to Jack. “I didn’t,” she said fiercely. “I was just doing it because there’s nothing to do here. All we do is sit around inside, playing with Legos. I want to go home.”

“Okay, Sims,” Terrence said. “Okay.” He put an arm around her and she looked as if she would break free; then she made a sudden move and put her face against his chest. He wrapped both arms around her. She wasn’t audibly crying but her small body shook; he bent his head over hers, and for a moment I saw them again the way they’d been at the memorial—in the midst of a group of mourners, but also alone. The difference in their sizes seemed to emphasize her suffering as well as his ability to comfort her. Jack stood in the lit closet doorway, watching them with an unreadable expression.

    Terrence straightened up and gave me a questioning look. I shook my head, as if I were just as perplexed as he was. It struck me later that it is possible to lie without saying anything at all.

“Maybe we’re all hungry,” I suggested. “We could go down and eat—”

“I’m not hungry,” Simmi said immediately.

“I think we should probably just head out,” said Terrence.

“But the stew—”

“Don’t worry about it. Freeze what’s left and you’ll have another meal.” He didn’t sound angry, but he wouldn’t meet my eyes. The only light was from the closet and the street. Terrence put his arm around Simmi.

“It was his idea,” she said suddenly. “He wanted to find his dad. I told him you just Google for that. But…” Simmi shrugged, as if the ignorance of second graders was beyond her.

“Did not.” When Jack is trying not to cry, he pulls on his ears.

Simmi glared at him, and turned away on one foot in a way that momentarily undermined my sympathy for her. Whatevs, her mother used to say. I followed them down the stairs to our front hall, but Simmi had already gone out, and was heading down the second flight to the outer door.

“I’m sorry,” I said to Terrence, who was collecting their jackets from the Shaker-style bench just inside the door.

He gave me a half smile. “Not your fault—it’s like this all the time. Just usually in private.” He glanced down the stairs. “Hold up, Sims.” He put a hand briefly on my shoulder. “I’ll see you,” he said, before hurrying down the stairs after his daughter. The door downstairs locked automatically behind them, and I closed and locked our apartment door. Jack had come down from my bedroom, and was sitting three steps from the bottom of the stairs.

    “Like what all the time?” he said.

I went to sit with him, and he made room on the step.

“You understand why Simmi was upset?”

“Because of her mom.”

“Right—she really misses her.”

What would Terrence think if he found out that I’d known all along that my son believed in ghosts—that in fact he believed he’d seen Simmi’s mother in my office several weeks after her death—and that I’d kept that information from him, perhaps in an attempt to make him like me?

“That’s why you really can’t talk about things like ghosts, even if you’re just playing a game.”

“Okay.”

“You understand?”

Jack nodded, lifting the hallway carpet with his toe, a dark red runner with a pattern of yellow triangles, flipped over the edge to reveal the rubber mesh pad. It was clear that something else was bothering him.

“Simmi said you were trying to use the machine to find out about your dad.”

Jack scowled at me. “No.”

It wasn’t that I hadn’t thought about talking to Jack about his donor; if anything I’d overthought it. I’d been waiting for him to ask, not about the mechanics of his conception—we’d covered that years ago—but about the man himself. I was going to show him the profile with the childhood photo of “Papageno,” and explain what musicology really was. I thought we could go to the rock climbing gym in Somerville and learn about that passion of his father’s, too.

I looked at Jack’s face now, and I knew how naive I’d been. Any child his age would’ve started thinking about his father and longing to meet him. A career and a few hobbies were hardly going to satisfy him.

“We don’t have to talk about it now—”

“I don’t want to talk about it,” he said. “Not ever.”

“But we will have to later. Because I’m afraid you don’t understand—”

    Jack looked at me with such fury that I stepped back, startled.

“I do understand,” he said. Then he got up, slipped past me, and hurried down the hall to his room.





26.


Jack said he didn’t like the stew, and so I put on a movie to get him to eat. I watched half of it with him, and then let him stay up a little later while I cleaned the kitchen. I was just about to tell him it was time to get ready for bed, when someone knocked on our door.