Lost and Wanted(85)

“You said you weren’t sure.”

“I just feel like there are enough people already,” I said. “If I really wanted a kid, I guess I’d adopt one.”

“But then you don’t know what you get,” Neel suggested.

“You don’t know what you get either way. Plus you can be older and adopt. It takes forever to get established in science.”

“Helen knows exactly what she wants,” Charlie said. She pulled a red wool blanket off the back of the couch, and tucked it around her knees. She was wearing a thick white turtleneck sweater that made her wrists look especially delicate, emerging from the sleeves, her fingers especially long. No one disagreed about Charlie’s beauty; it was an incontrovertible fact.

    “Penny didn’t have kids?” I asked.

“No,” Charlie said. “She was married, when she was young—but he was supposedly horrible. Now she’s with this really nice guy my mother calls ‘Penny’s gentleman friend.’ Gerald. But I think she’s sad about the no-kids thing.”

I had a sudden realization. “Aunt Penny’s the one who made that Winnie-the-Pooh sampler.”

Charlie nodded. “She did it when I was born. We’ve always been really close.”

“Winnie-the-Pooh?” Neel asked.

“She embroidered one of those nonsense rhymes,” Charlie said. “?‘Cottleston Pie.’ My mom says it took her a year.”

“?‘A fly can’t bird but a bird can fly,’?” Neel said.

Charlie looked pleased. “He knows it!” She winked at me. “I like him, Helen.”

“Phew,” Neel said. “And it’s all thanks to my parents’ British-colonial taste in children’s literature.” He got up and went to the window, parting one of the curtains. “Hey, it looks a little clearer out now—if you guys want to give the comet a shot?”

“You know what,” Charlie said, jumping up. “I should call Penny—just to tell her everything’s okay with the house.”

I was suddenly frantically nervous. “I’m sure it’s still too cloudy.”

Charlie winked at me. “You kids go on up and see. I’ll be there in a sec.”



* * *



—

I climbed the ladder to the loft bedroom first; Neel followed me. There were two single beds fitted with yellow-flowered spreads. The bedspreads were some sort of synthetic fabric with thick piping, more like dust covers than blankets, as if the room weren’t often used. The blue-and-white patterned wallpaper was sun-faded on one side, and an aged craft project, two wooden sticks wrapped in yellow and orange yarn, a God’s Eye, was nailed above one of the narrow beds.

Neel moved the optical tube to the side to crack the window. “You know we’re not going to see anything.”

I thought I’d never liked someone’s face so much for no special reason. There was something about the big eyes, shaggy hair, and slightly crooked nose that had appealed to me immediately. His shoulders were broader than you would expect for someone as thin as he was.

    “It doesn’t reach perihelion until December,” I told him.

“We’d still be able to see it—if it were clear.”

“Did you check the weather before you came?”

He raised his eyebrows at me. There was a faint stubble on his upper lip. “Did you check before you invited me?”

“It was Charlie’s idea. I think she wanted some company.”

I had often been indiscreet with Neel, but I couldn’t tell him why I thought Charlie had been so insistent about him coming up this weekend. She hadn’t wanted to come to Penny’s house alone, but she also didn’t want to spend the weekend talking with me about what had happened.

I glanced at the door, which we’d left open.

“Do you think she’ll come up?” Neel asked.

“No,” I said. “She’s going to give us a lot of time.”

“No faith?”

“She doesn’t think you can close the deal.”

“Why am I the closer?” As he said it, he stepped toward the telescope. There was just about a foot between the two of us, and another between me and the bed. From downstairs I heard Charlie’s voice—I wondered if she had called Kwesi long-distance.

I sometimes think that the words “electric” and “magnetic” have been taken over by their colloquial usage, so that they hardly retain their scientific meanings at all. When Neel kissed me, I felt nothing related to charge or its movement through a field. What I felt was a slow, spreading pleasure. Neel and I had been building to this for three years, and if not perfect—the kiss definitely included some fumbling—it left me short of breath.

Neel stopped. “Did you want this?”

“Doesn’t it seem like I do?”

Neel shook his head. “I mean before—when we were first-years.”

“Did you?”

Neel nodded, acknowledging that this was an interesting question. “Sometimes I did—definitely. But then I made this sort of promise to myself, that I was going to date nonscientists.”

I felt a little hurt. “Why?”

    “The lab gets kind of insular, don’t you think? I wanted an outside life, and I thought the most efficient way to do that was to date a Visual and Environmental Studies concentrator or something.”