Lost and Wanted(74)

“I don’t think I’d recognize him. He certainly wouldn’t recognize me.”

Simmi shook her head. “Super weird.”

I took the kind of deep, slow breath a therapist once recommended for challenging interpersonal situations. It had no immediate effect.

“Are you ready for me to take you back to bed?”

“I can go myself,” she said. But she didn’t. Instead she came farther into the room, leaned against the arm of the couch.

“Do you love him more?”

“I don’t know him, so I can’t love him,” I said.

Simmi straightened her arms, pushing off the couch and lifting her feet in the air. Then she dropped back down.

“Not him. I mean Jack.”

“Do I love Jack more than what?”

“Than if you had a husband,” Simmi said.

“I love Jack more than anything.”

“Why do parents always say that?”

“Because it’s true,” I told her. “Kids can’t imagine how much we love them.”

Simmi frowned. Then she sat down, not on the couch but on the armrest. Her back wasn’t toward me, but she was sitting sideways, so I was looking more at her shoulder than her face.

“Parents have their own parents. And they have husbands and wives”—she glanced at me quickly—“sometimes. And their jobs and stuff. Kids just have parents.”

“They have grandparents and other relatives. And school.”

“That’s not the same.”

“You’re right.”

“Parents forget everything.”

“We forget a lot.”

Simmi lifted her knee so that her foot was lined up on the arm of the couch, like a balance beam. She picked at the last remains of some light blue polish on her big toenail. It was hard to hear her, because her chin was resting on her knee.

    “They forget how much they used to love their own parents,” she said, “when they were kids.”



* * *



—

When Simmi had gone back to bed, I opened the electroweak paper to see if Vincenzo had added comments. He had, as usual, but I couldn’t focus. I tried my sister; it was three hours earlier there, and she was making dinner. She said she could talk anyway and put the phone on speaker. I could hear her clattering around the kitchen.

I told Amy about my conversation with Simmi.

“Maybe she was trying to connect with you,” Amy said.

“By interrogating me?”

“That must be a defense mechanism on her part,” Amy said.

“Yeah, it’s fine. It’s just—what if she says something to Jack?”

“Like what?”

“About not having a father.”

“Well, then he could ask her about her mother.”

“Right—it would be a total disaster.”

“Or exactly what they both need.”

Amy said something to one of her daughters in a firm, maternal voice. I thought of how much better my sister would be at dealing with Simmi than I was. She seemed able to keep her feelings on an even keel, whereas I was always fluctuating between these poles of emotion, frustration and passionate attachment. Was that because I was the only parent, or because I was who I was? Had Charlie been more like Amy, or more like me?

“I haven’t gotten one of those messages from Charlie’s phone in a while.”

“How long is a while?”

Like Jack, Amy requires precise answers, at least where numbers are concerned. “Almost a month.”

“She’s ghosting you.”

“Ha ha.”

“Sorry.”

“I had to help Simmi with her ears. She said Charlie wouldn’t let her pierce them, and then she did it with her dad. Now they’re a little infected. She said her dad got another tattoo at the same time.”

    “I guess everyone has them now. Where is this additional tattoo?”

“I have no idea.”

“I’m just getting the sense you might want to find out.”

“He’s my dead friend’s husband.”

“Yeah,” Amy said, clanging metal on metal. “There’s that.”



* * *



—

I went in later that night to look at them. Jack was completely inside the sleeping bag, only a bit of his hair sticking out the top. As an infant, he’d liked being tightly swaddled, and even in his own bed, he would often sleep with the covers over his head. Simmi, on the other hand, had pushed off the quilt and the sheet, and was lying on her back, one arm draped over the side of the bed. I thought of rearranging it, but I was afraid of waking her. The expression on her face was an extreme version of the way she looked during the day, which I had taken for aloofness, even conceit. But it had been transformed by sleep. What I suddenly thought of, standing in the dark room, were the plaster casts from Pompeii: the lidded, alarmed eyes, mouth slightly open, chin tilted up, as if her face had been fixed in a moment of suffering. Suffering, but in four dimensions—what you might call yearning.





11.


It always took me a couple of weeks to catch up after a trip, and this one was no exception. From P?llau, I’d gone on to see some of our colleagues at CERN in Geneva; those conversations had been useful, but I still had my own work to do on the electroweak paper, which I’d avoided in P?llau because I’d wanted to think about the kilonova book. Vincenzo was furious about the delay on my end, with some justification; two of my grad students had completed theses over the holiday, and my postdoc Bence needed an extensive job recommendation. Jack’s resentment about the trip also seemed of longer duration than usual. Whether this was because I hadn’t let him come along, because he’d decided it was more fun downstairs with Terrence, or because it was the nature of seven-year-olds to be angry at their mothers, I had no idea.