Lost and Wanted(58)

“Not to mention the atomic bomb,” Neel said.

“What I’m saying is that you do the science for its own sake, and things develop from there.”

“How much does it cost?” Terrence asked.

“The interferometers?” I asked.

“All of it,” Terrence said.

LIGO’s total expenditures to date was a number I happened to know, and I thought it might sound less preposterous coming from someone who wasn’t directly involved. “One-point-one billion.”

“So far,” Neel added.

Terrence looked at us. Then he exhaled sharply and shook his head.

“Okay, it’s a little nuts,” Neel admitted. “But what’s so cool—at least to me—isn’t the detection. It’s the future. It’s like until now we only had one sense—we could look up at the stars, but that was it. Then we learned how to measure X-ray and radio waves. And now all of a sudden we have ears, too. We can hear gravity.” Neel looked around at all of us in wonder. “All of this means that instead of building these really expensive and time-consuming machines on Earth, we can let the universe do more and more of the work for us. Black holes are actually the biggest particle accelerators in the universe—they’re spinning these tiny pieces of matter around and around faster than anything we could ever build at CERN. And they’re totally free.”

Terrence looked at Roxy. “Imagine what her organization could do with that much money.”

“True,” Neel said. “But I just read that they spent 445 million making The Force Awakens, and our government’s defense budget was 601 billion this year. So, you know, money doesn’t always flow to the noblest cause.”

    Terrence nodded, as if in agreement. “Sometimes it flows into black holes,” he said.





5.


I drove Terrence back to Charlie’s just after midnight. In college I’d gone home for Thanksgiving my first year, and then saved money by spending the next three with Charlie’s family. My father was an only child, and my mother had a half sister; sometimes our paternal grandmother would come from St. Louis, but in general when I was a kid, the meal was a quiet affair, very much focused on the food. I had been amazed by the long table and tall, elegant chairs—rented, I learned later—the garlands of gold leaves, the bottles of red wine on the sideboard, and the catered meal. The Boyces were upper middle-class, but with two children in college they didn’t normally behave this extravagantly. The Thanksgiving meal was a significant occasion, a long-standing tradition with extended family and friends, and I felt honored to be included. “I love a holiday that has nothing to do with God,” Addie would say. And then add breezily: “But I don’t cook for more than ten.”

She would spend time in the dining room on Wednesday night though, laying the table and “doing the cards.” There was one year—our junior or senior—when she seated me next to a television producer who was doing a segment on female scientists and wanted to ask me some questions. Charlie sat beside the editor of a well-known literary journal. Even when we were undergraduates, Addie treated us not only as adults, but as women with a certain value to add, and I think we both strived to justify that confidence.

“Thanks for coming,” I told Terrence as I turned off the car. “I know that was all kind of nerdy.”

“It was different.”

There was a light on in the living room, but otherwise Charlie’s house was dark. “They’ll be asleep, right?”

Terrence shrugged. “Doesn’t matter. We don’t really speak unless we’re around Simmi.”

“It’s that bad?”

    Terrence gave a short, unamused kind of laugh. I’d never noticed how far his brow extended over his very deep-set eyes; it made his profile even more striking than it would otherwise have been.

“Do you know why?” I asked.

“Same deal.”

I had more questions, but it was unclear how much I could ask. Terrence made no move to get out of the car.

“About the letter she wrote her parents?”

“And where she got the drugs—yeah.”

“Was it hard to get?”

He looked surprised. “The Seconal?”

“I didn’t know what she used.”

“Her doctor prescribed it for pain. We just hoarded it until she had enough. He knew, though. He once gave us the name of a doctor in Oregon, when she asked about it. But it wasn’t like we were going to pick up and move Simmi, just so the death certificate would say something else.”

“What would it have said?”

“Complications from lupus—that’s what it was.”

“What did it actually say?”

“?‘Acute overdose of Seconal. Took own life.’ That’s what they have to call it, everywhere except the aid-in-dying states.”

“Oh.”

“Who cares, though, right? She sure as hell didn’t.”

“But Addie does.”

“She thinks someday Simmi will look it up.” Terrence gestured dramatically with his right hand. “So she looks it up. And we tell her her mother was dying, and she was in pain. Simmi will be an adult then, and you know—she’s already like her mother. They’re not sentimental.”