Lost and Wanted(49)

“Her biological dad—right. But that’s not the kind of donor I picked.”

Now he looked at me, startled: “Why not?”

I thought about several answers, and decided on the real one. In contrast to what my sister thought at the time, I didn’t choose an anonymous donor because I wanted to keep Jack from identifying his other parent.

    “The anonymous donors are the best. I mean, they have the best DNA. You remember what that is?”

“My recipe,” Jack said.

I thought he might ask why again, why did I think the anonymous donors were better than the ones who’d agreed to one visit. I was nervous about this, because I didn’t have what you would call experimental proof. It was just a theory. I wanted the kind of person who would complete the transaction and move on, rather than the type who wanted to see the results of what he’d done.

But if Jack wanted the answer to that question, he didn’t want it from me. He made a bridge with his legs, and floated the red rubber truck underneath it. His wet hair looked darker than usual, slicked down around his ears, and his vertebrae made a knobby ridge down the middle of his back. When I asked if he wanted help getting out of the tub and into his pajamas, he scowled and hugged his knees. And so I left him in the bathroom, closing the door behind me.





27.


I called Terrence as soon as I’d dropped Jack at school the following morning to apologize. I said it was my fault for telling him about the metaphase typewriter.

“No problem,” Terrence said. His voice was neutral, if not warm, not any different than usual. “She’s okay. Every day’s a new start with them, you know?”

“Yeah.”

“How’s Jack?”

“He was a little quiet this morning.”

“He didn’t want to talk about it,” Terrence guessed.

“I tried to be very clear with him last night—no ghosts. I think he gets it, but I’m so sorry if he suggested that to Simmi.” I didn’t go into any more detail. Assuming Simmi had kept Jack’s supernatural encounter from her father, I didn’t want to make things worse by bringing it up.

“Yeah, no—I’m sure the science project was a joint effort,” Terrence said. “But I was talking about the stuff with his dad.”

    I hesitated for a moment. I’d been worrying lately about the absence of men in Jack’s life, and had even made an effort to find him a male babysitter, without success. I would have liked for him to spend more time with my father and my brother-in-law, Ben, but they were all the way across the country. I’d even introduced him to Arty, who was willing but comically hopeless with children—including, he’d confessed to me, his own.

Now, suddenly, I was talking to a man who’d grown up without a father himself, who was easy and natural with children, interested in Jack, and who might be prepared to move in downstairs.

“We had a talk about it last night,” I said. “It was good, I think.”

“It’s kind of hard to know about those talks,” Terrence said. “You know?”

“Yeah.”

“You plan it all out in advance. And you think you’ve had this big moment together, like you’re all connected and they totally get it—and then they’re like, ‘So, can we get doughnuts?’ And you realize they haven’t heard anything the last ten minutes. The little brain in there is going: doughnut, doughnut, doughnut.”

I laughed. I’d thought the metaphase typewriter might scare Terrence away forever; instead he was joking with me in a way he never had before. I was uncomfortable, but this was the moment. I just had to blurt it out.

“Weirdly, the apartment just got free.”

“Yours?”

“The tenants are moving to Brooklyn.”

“Oh.”

“I didn’t know if you were still—” There was a long silence in which I felt as if I were in tenth grade again, asking Adam Hurwitz to the semiformal. He had said that his family was going out of town, and then shown up with Sophie Anastopoulus.

“Yeah,” Terrence said. “Yeah, we are.”

“Oh,” I said. “Okay. Great!”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah,” I said. “Jack’ll be thrilled. You should come see it, though, make sure.”

“The main thing is that it isn’t here,” Terrence said.

If not flattering, it was at least definitive.

    He came to see the apartment the following afternoon, while I was at work; I thought it was better for him to see it when I wasn’t home. Andrea showed him around, and he texted me afterward to say that it was perfect. He especially liked the backyard, which is bigger than it looks from the street. We agreed that they would move in just after the holidays, while I was in Europe.



* * *



—

Normally Jack and I spend Christmas at my sister and Ben’s, a ten-minute drive from my parents in Pasadena. The children, who see each other only once or twice a year, fall into a rhythm immediately; the cousin affinity I’ve heard described by other parents is maybe even more intense for him, as an only child. Bess, who is two years older than Jack, bosses him and her sister, Avery, around, and Avery and Jack happily obey her. I like going back to California, too, if not quite as much as Jack does; I’ve lived in Boston eighteen years now, but I still associate Christmas almost exclusively with the wide, palm-edged boulevards of my childhood, the terra-cotta-tiled roof of my parents’ church, where we would go for a carol service on Christmas Eve. The smell of the car’s heater, the first time we turn it on each winter, fills me with incredible nostalgia; it seemed to me that in Los Angeles, we’d only ever used it on that one evening.