Lost and Wanted(71)

It was already past Jack’s bedtime, and I knew I should take him upstairs. I was postponing it, not only because he would fight, but because it was comfortable here with Terrence and Simmi, the pop music playing in the other room. When we went up to our apartment, I would have to start all over again with the loud cheerfulness I often employ to make it feel as if there aren’t only two of us there.

“I’ll try it,” I said.

Terrence poured the fizzy brown liquid into clean mugs. “Charlie thought this was a better place for kids to grow up,” Terrence said. “She didn’t always think that way, though, not when Simmi was born. She used to talk about how great Southern California was: the beach, and being outside year-round. But then the more successful she got, the more she’d complain—about the values out there. I was like, we don’t have Hollywood values on the beach…but Charlie was just in the thick of it. She started to talk about Boston all the time—that’s the main reason I thought we’d try it now.”

    “I guess we have our own set of problems.”

Terrence laughed, and his expression showed his agreement a little more readily than I would have liked. “But I think Charlie thought everyone here was like you.”

“Like me?”

Terrence nodded. “Because you don’t care about all the nonsense that’s such a big deal in L.A.—money and style and all that.”

I was wearing a long sweater over leggings, which had taken me some time to select. I moved slightly, so that the lower half of my body was concealed by the kitchen counter.

From the bedroom, the children were shouting happily over the music. Five seconds, Simmi yelled, and Jack counted down: 5-4-3-2-1!

“And even the way you had him on your own—on purpose. She really admired that.”

“Tons of women do it,” I said. “More and more.”

“Okay.” Terrence leaned back against the counter, one leg crossed over the other. He took a drink of the sour, heavily carbonated tea, which I was getting down only a little at a time. “But your career, too. She said you’d given a lot up for it.”

Where had they had this conversation? Sitting in traffic? Over dinner just the two of them, or just before they fell asleep at night?

“You don’t give a fuck what people think,” Terrence said.

“Thanks?”

“Yeah, man,” he said. “It’s a compliment.”





10.


Terrence went to New York that Friday morning after dropping Simmi off at school. I skipped a department meeting in order to pick her up, but I had to put Jack in aftercare so that I could get to Simmi’s school on time. I had considered asking Jack’s sitter to do both pickups, but Simmi had only met Julia once or twice. I worried that she would be uncomfortable, and I wanted the first time she stayed with us to be perfect. The mania to perfect things that are by their nature imperfectible is one of those areas in which I most frequently make a wrong turn.

    I just made it to Simmi’s school by three, and I was waiting in the car on the school’s circular drive when she came out. I had imagined that she might exit alone, even dejected: she’d been at the school only four months, and I remembered girls her age as especially nasty to newcomers. Instead she came out an alley alongside the brick building with two other girls, one with an arm draped over her shoulder, and the other trying to get her attention. Simmi was ignoring both of them; she was scanning the line of cars, looking for me.

I leaned out the window and waved, and she detached herself from her friends, came through the gate.

She came to the passenger window first, and smiled in at me. “Do you notice something different about me?”

She was wearing the silver parka, with hot pink trim, sweater leggings, and a popular brand of furry blue boots. Her mood seemed buoyant. Otherwise I couldn’t see anything different, except maybe that the backs of her hands were covered with scrawled writing. The temperature was only in the twenties, but she wasn’t wearing gloves.

“You wrote on your hands?”

Simmi got into the backseat and glanced at her hands, surprised. “I always do that. No—look!”

I pulled up a little, and then turned to face her. She had pushed her braids behind her ears to reveal a pair of earrings, gold studs with red rhinestone centers.

“Oh,” I said. “Nice! It’s going to be cold this weekend, though—do you have gloves, or a hat?”

“I can’t because of my earrings—it hurts.”

“Bye, Simmi!” a child called, a different girl than she’d come out with, and Simmi gave a casual wave out the window.

“I don’t think they’re supposed to hurt,” I told her.

“They’re infected,” Simmi said. “So. I’m supposed to be putting stuff on them every night, but sometimes I forget.”

I felt a moment of annoyance toward Terrence, who hadn’t said anything to me about ear care.

    “I’ll remind you this weekend.”

She looked up at me. “Yours aren’t pierced.”

“I played soccer when I was your age.”

“You couldn’t tape them?”

“You could, but it seemed like too much trouble.”