Lost and Wanted(48)

Jack looked up from the screen. “Can I open it?”

It was our tenant Andrea. Her stomach ballooned under a tight, red-and-black striped sweater. She was very pale, her eyes shadowed as if she hadn’t been sleeping, as if the baby were taking its health and vitality from her. She looked from Jack to me, smiling uncertainly.

“I hope it’s not too late? I have some questions about the lease, but maybe now is not so good?”

“It’s okay.” I turned to Jack. “Can you do your own shower?”

Jack nodded, but he was watching Andrea with uncharacteristic excitement, as if she’d promised him a gift of some kind.

“What time is it?”

“Nine,” I said. “Past your bedtime.”

“Nine exactly?”

“It’s eight-fifty-eight,” I told him. “Go take a shower.”

“I won’t take your time,” Andrea said, when Jack was gone. “Only some friends from Germany are moving to Brooklyn. They’ve bought a house—they would like to rent us half. We like it here, but New York is better for us, for our work, and this is a way we can afford to be there. And with the baby and Emilia, too, it will give us more room.”

Emilia was their toddler, now almost three.

“I know we’ve signed the lease already. Only you asked us if we are moving? So we thought, maybe she has some other tenant.”

“I’m not sure,” I said. “But if you’d like to get out of the lease, of course we can figure something out.” As soon as I said it, I wondered if the events of this evening had changed Terrence’s mind about the apartment.

    “Oh thank you!” Andrea said. “This is wonderful!”

“There is someone who might be interested. But in any case, it’s no problem. What a great opportunity for you guys.”

Andrea was nodding joyfully, as if it were all settled. “And so, in two months we can relocate?”

We talked for five, or maybe ten more minutes, and then agreed to meet on Saturday with her husband to finalize the details.

When I went upstairs I found that Jack was in the bath instead of the shower. His head was partially submerged, his eyes closed, and I had to tap his shoulder to get him to sit up.

“Why are you getting your hair wet?”

“I like the sound under there,” Jack said, rubbing his eyes. “Is she moving in?”

“Who?”

“Simmi!”

Whatever animosity there had been between them seemed to have evaporated over the course of the last hour, at least on Jack’s part. He was looking at me with barely concealed delight.

“You mean because of Andrea?”

“Aren’t they leaving?”

Of course he’d been listening in. “I think so.”

Jack beamed at me. “It worked,” he said. “It wasn’t the way we thought—but that’s what you always say, right? You do an experiment because you’re looking for one thing, but then you sometimes find something else.”

I laughed. “Sometimes, yes.”

“Like, we thought it would talk to us. But instead—”

I closed the lid of the toilet and sat down. “Jack, what do you mean?”

Jack looked away. He was old enough to understand when I told him he wasn’t supposed to have a certain idea, but not old enough to keep it to himself. His voice was quieter, a little coy. “The ghost made them leave.”

“Jack—there’s no ghost!” I struggled to modify my tone. “Andrea and Günter want to go live with their friends in New York.”

    Jack didn’t look at me. He was playing with a set of floating rubber vehicles in primary colors, toys he has outgrown but still refuses to give up.

“We know enough to know that magic things like ghosts aren’t possible in our world,” I said more gently. “It doesn’t mean they couldn’t be possible elsewhere, in a different kind of universe.” This is the explanation I normally give adults, when they ask questions about the megaverse or extra dimensions, concepts that have been (to my mind) irredeemably perverted by Hollywood.

“Of course they’re elsewhere,” Jack said.

I decided to let this go for a moment.

“But, Bug—we do need to talk some more about what Simmi said. About you wanting to find your dad.”

Jack stared at his own face, distorted in the stainless-steel dial underneath the faucet, which you turn to open and close the drain. His expression, as usual, was serious and older than his age, with his firmly defined brow and protruding upper lip. His head seemed especially large and heavy, held up by the thin, wet stalk of his neck.

“Do you remember when we talked about getting sperm from the cryobank?”

He nodded, but still didn’t speak. I had always used the correct words for body parts, as the books told me to do. In fact, it had been much easier to answer Jack’s questions about his origins without having to go into any of the details about conventional reproduction.

“And I said your donor was anonymous? That just means that we don’t get in touch with him, and he can’t get in touch with us.”

Jack mumbled something.

“What, sweetheart?”

“Some do. Simmi has a friend with two moms, and she said she met her dad.”