Lost and Wanted(8)

In college I believed that Charlie simply came from a more interesting family than other people I knew. My own seemed to me almost comically dull by comparison. It took me a long time to see that although the Boyces were genuinely dynamic and accomplished people, it was Charlie who made them fascinating; she was able to tell a story in a way that appeared to impart information, distracting you with well-chosen details, but ultimately hid more than it revealed. This was maybe especially true of the way she presented her mother.

“The memorial is the eleventh,” Addie said. “You should get a card next week. That’s why I’m calling, actually—Carl and I wanted to ask if you would consider saying a few words. Her brother will speak, and one of her cousins. A friend from childhood. But we’d like it to remain informal.”

    I was overwhelmed and grateful that Addie still considered me a close-enough friend of Charlie’s to speak at the memorial. At the same time, I was well aware that this was an event planned by Charlie’s parents for their family and friends. As far as I knew, Terrence hadn’t been involved in any of the arrangements, including the decision about who would speak.

I struggled not to say the wrong thing. “Thank you,” I told Addie. “It’s going to be hard to—there’s so much I’d like to say about her.”

“Yes,” Addie said, a little impatiently. “I feel I should tell you something about her death, unless Terrence has already shared those details with you?”

“He said it was encephalitis, a complication of the lupus? And I know she was doing chemo—”

“Encephalitis was the official cause,” Addie said. “It should be what was written on the death certificate. It would be, if she’d been fortunate enough to die in Oregon, Vermont, or Washington State. There is actually legislation in the pipeline in California—but all of that will come too late for Charlie.”

As a child I’d had a habit of interrupting an explanation to say that I’d understood, until I noticed that it was a practice that endeared me to no one. In this case I kept quiet, although I did understand almost immediately that Addie was talking about assisted suicide. Something Charlie had said to me once made this easier to believe than it might have been otherwise.

“They have a new name for it—aid-in-dying. Forgive me if I’ve lost patience with the names we have for everything now. Terrence didn’t mention it, I take it?”

“No—he said it happened more quickly than they expected.”

“Well, yes—if you overdose on barbiturates, it does tend to be quite quick.”

I had a vertiginous feeling, the taste of bile in my throat.

“I have no problem with the legislation. I would vote for it myself—I will vote for it, when Massachusetts gets around to it. But you have to understand, we had decided on hospice-at-home. We’d hired a team. I had just come home to get things in order here, and then Carl and I were going back to L.A. There was going to be time for her friends—all of her friends—to say goodbye. Her brother would have come out and we would have been there with her when it happened. And Charlie never suggested that this wasn’t what she wanted. Terrence says that she changed her mind, that Charlie wrote to us about her reasons for this…change of plans. An email.”

    “He did say there was something—”

“A letter that we never received. And has since been mysteriously lost.”

“I guess they make it hard to access the account.”

“There is always a they making things difficult,” Addie said. “I did try to teach my children that. But the point is that you have to anticipate whichever obstacles that entity may choose to put up in front of you, and have a plan in place to circumvent them. Were those my daughter’s wishes, I am quite certain—”

Addie’s diction was always formal; Charlie would often imitate it. But now this manner was so heightened that it was as if Addie were doing an impression of herself. When she paused there was a silence into which, if I were a different kind of person, I would have known how to inject some kind of comfort. Instead I just waited until Charlie’s mother recovered herself.

“In any case, none of this is relevant to the memorial. Except that there are those among our guests who will have religious objections to the path Charlie took—the path she appears to have taken.”

“I don’t have any objections.”

“I assumed—but you understand that this isn’t something that can be mentioned, even obliquely.”

“I understand.”

“Well I’m glad, Helen. You’re still on Putnam Avenue?”

“Yes.”

“So you’ll have the invitation next week.”

When we hung up I remembered Jim, who was waiting for me in a conference room at the library. He wanted to talk about his upcoming summer research fellowship at Brookhaven. That day MIT was as quiet as it ever is, since most people had already left for the summer. The only sounds were footsteps on the linoleum outside my door, a pair of voices retreating down the corridor. The venetian blind threw a gridded shadow on the white wall. There was still enough time to meet Jim, if I hurried, but I just sat there, staring at the screensaver, onto which I’d downloaded an image one of my favorite colleagues, the chair of STS, had forwarded.