Lost and Wanted(81)

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I left a message with Neel’s roommate with the phone number at the house, and then Charlie and I went to the grocery store. When we got back it was noon; the sun was pale and very far away, and the gulls called frantically to each other. The air was surprisingly cold and you could smell the ocean. We ran from the car to the house without our coats, bringing in the bags; when we got inside, we pushed Aunt Penny’s plaid draft-catchers against the gap at the bottom of the door and blew on our hands to warm them.

“We’ll have a fire tonight,” Charlie said, as we brought the groceries into the kitchen. “And hot toddies—ooh, look!” She indicated the phone, where a red light was flashing. Neel had left a very brief message, letting me know when I should call to reach him.

    Charlie wrote the number on a pad, and handed me the phone.

“I can’t.”

“C’mon,” she said. “It’ll be fun.”

“No,” I said. “Honestly. It’s too obvious.”

“What about that comet?” Charlie said.

“What?”

“Isn’t it streaking across the sky, or whatever, this weekend? You said we could see it from here.”

“Swift-Tuttle. I thought so, but look out the window—it’s too cloudy.

“It might clear up.”

“It’s probably still too close to the sun.”

“The sun’s not going to be out at night!”

“I mean, too close in its orbit. I don’t think the conditions are ideal.”

“But the conditions are ideal for you to get it on with Neel.”

“Did you seriously just say, ‘Get it on’?”

“You’re impossible,” Charlie said, glancing at the number on the pad. “And yeah, I sure did. I’m calling.”

“You better not.”

Charlie keyed in the number and held it over my head, out of reach.

“Charlie!”

Charlie widened her eyes and pointed at the receiver; it was ringing. She put the phone to her ear, and when she spoke, she sounded perfectly serious and slightly exasperated, as if she’d been interrupted in the middle of something important.

“Yes, hi—I just got a call from this number.”

In spite of the fact that Neel couldn’t see her, Charlie frowned—as if she really weren’t sure who was on the other end.

“Oh hey, Neel,” she said. It sounded as if she were surprised, as if she hadn’t heard his name for months. It was the kind of thing Charlie pulled off better than anyone.

“She is, but she went for a run on the beach. Yeah, I know—it’s like, arctic down there—she’s crazy. Anyway, I think she was going to ask if you wanted to come up to see—a comet or something? You guys would know better than I do.” Charlie winked at me. “The town is Gloucester. You can take the commuter line from North Station.”

    Neel said something, and Charlie started to laugh silently. She looked at me, straightening her face with effort, and then nodded gravely.

“I definitely think you should bring it,” she said. “We have an attic bedroom with a very high window.”

I listened in disbelief as she reassured Neel about his welcome—he was really coming—and gave specific directions about where we would pick him up outside the station. She managed to encourage him without sounding as if she cared much either way. When she hung up, she looked at me.

“He wants to bring his telescope,” she said. “The two of you are going to stargaze.”

“People confuse comets and meteoroids with stars—but they’re different. They’re just balls of ice and rock; they get close to the sun and then they heat up. Comets have more ammonia and gases than other space rocks, and that’s why they have the coma—sort of like a halo around a rock. The evaporating gas is what makes the glowing tail.”

“Mmm,” said Charlie. “Fascinating. I told him he could set his instrument up in the attic room. Do you think you’re going to see it?”

“No,” I said. “I don’t. Because it’s way too cloudy.”

“Oh,” Charlie said. “That’s too bad. So what are you guys going to do up there?”



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Whether it was because Neel was coming, or just because we were away from school, the weekend seemed especially exciting. It was an adventure to stock the kitchen, an adventure to get firewood from the pile behind the house. Charlie had said she was going to make boeuf bourguignon, and she delivered; she cooked without a recipe, a skill she’d learned from watching cooking shows with her nanny while her parents were at work. Like me, my mother was indifferent to food—you ate, and then you moved on to more important business—but my father loved being in the kitchen. One of the first things he and Charlie had bonded over, when Charlie came home with me for spring break junior year, was a recipe for homemade chocolate truffles. In my father’s case, cooking was a kind of tinkering: the more complicated and esoteric the recipe, the better. For Charlie it was about pleasure, her own and other people’s, as generous as the smell of meat and oil and herbs saturating every room of the house.