Lost and Wanted(53)

“When did you stop drinking?” I asked when Terrence returned. I was scanning the room for Neel and Roxy.

“I never started.”

“Never?”

“My brother went in for possession when I was eight, so.”

I had been listening with less than half my attention. Now I looked at Terrence.

“To jail?”

“I was eleven when he got out, and he was all into being clean. All I wanted to do was be like him. For a while we went to this church with a girl he knew. Then that didn’t work out, and that’s when we started surfing.”

“And he’s still okay?”

“Better than okay,” Terrence said. “He sent me to college. Community college, not Harvard.”

“It’s not necessary to go to Harvard.”

“Yeah, well—my brother didn’t go anywhere. But now I work for him.”

“He’s the one who owns the surf shop?”

    Terrence nodded. “He started by renting boards out of his truck. Selling weed, too, but only until he got Zingaro off the ground.”

“I was thinking that wasn’t the same brother.”

“Only have one.”

Vicky tapped me on the shoulder, and I introduced her to Terrence. Vicky can be a little overpowering—her voice is pitched high, and she has a habit of standing too close when she speaks—but she’s excellent at her job in the development office, which involves soliciting alumni and other donors to MIT’s endowment. Charlie sometimes had a tolerance for my very nerdy friends—she found them so awkward as to be charming—but I suspected Terrence wouldn’t feel the same way. Vicky, in any case, seemed more interested in talking to me. She clearly assumed I knew much more about Neel and his fiancée than she did, and started asking me questions about the wedding. She was interested to know if I planned to have my palms painted with henna, and whether Neel was going to ride a white horse.

It was while I was straining to hear Vicky, and Terrence was looking around the bar as if he wondered how he’d come to be there, that I saw Roxy for the first time. Naturally I had image-googled her. She was like those pictures, and also not. She was wearing a sweater with the sleeves rolled up, jeans, no makeup. She was talking animatedly to Mark from MIT LIGO, whose team Neel was now joining, holding not a drink but a package of tissues in her hand. Her long, wavy hair was pulled up in a rubber band. She looked like a student arriving for an early-morning lecture, except for her face, which was wakeful and bright, absolutely engaged in whatever she was discussing.

She must’ve felt me looking at her. She turned and gave me a smile of recognition, excusing herself from Mark immediately, and making her way to our side of the bar. Had she looked me up as well?

“You’re Helen!” she said. “I would kiss you if I didn’t have this rotten cold. Neel wanted to cancel, but I said no—everyone’s schedule is madness this time of year, and when will we ever manage to get all the people we love in one place again?”

Her voice was British in pronunciation but Indian in warmth and tempo. I introduced her to Terrence and Vicky, accidentally furthering the impression that Roxy and I had a preexisting relationship.

    “You’re from Mumbai?” Vicky asked. “Are you also a physicist?”

Roxy laughed. “God, no. I’m a doctor.”

“What’s your specialty?” Terrence asked.

“I’m a cardiologist,” she said. “I’ve been working with Doctors Without Borders for a bit now.”

“Oh, I know someone in the office in Delhi,” Vicky said. “I’m in development at MIT.”

It turned out that Roxy knew him. “He’s a Parsi,” she said. “Like my family. Do-gooders.” She managed to say this in a self-deprecating way, as if she were slightly skeptical of her own noble impulses. “There are hardly any of us left, so we all know each other. Speaking of Parsis, some of the few remaining on the planet have just arrived—my aunt and uncle from New York. I have to say hello.” She put a hand on my arm. “It’s so loud here—would you come to our place afterward? Please? We’re having just a few people, so we can actually talk.”

I glanced at Terrence, and said I’d have to check with my babysitter. As Roxy left us to greet her aunt and uncle, I saw Neel for the first time. He was crossing the room to say hello to his new relatives, wearing a dark green sweater with a collar sticking out of it. He looked as if he’d tried too hard, as I knew I had. His hair had been recently cut.

“That’s your ex?”

“Yeah.”

“Did he hang out with you and Charlie much? I mean apart from that time in Gloucester?”

“While we were dating, yeah. Then Neel and I worked together, but that was much later.”

Terrence was watching Neel, who was talking animatedly with an elderly Indian woman wearing a raw silk tunic and a great deal of jewelry. I couldn’t tell what he was thinking from his face.

“We built these two models,” I explained. “For some reason it’s what we’re both best known for, even though I’d say we’ve each done more interesting work since. That was when we were closest, actually—much more so than when we were dating in college.”