Lost and Wanted(94)

    I thought back to last June, the day after Charlie died. Simmi had been watching television while her father made call after call, alerting their friends—was it possible that she’d wanted to call someone, too? And what had she thought when I immediately called back—just as if her mother were alive? Was that what had prompted her to send the tiny pictures by email? Once the phone service was turned off, she’d had to use the Wi-Fi to send email, and then text. The first message was nonsensical, perhaps in imitation of a greeting Charlie would have used with tongue firmly planted in her cheek (“luvya lady”), but once Simmi actually met me, science would have seemed like a natural topic. The questions had been simple not because the person on the other end was unbalanced, but because she was eight years old.

Could she have written to multiple people, and I was the only one to respond? It was possible that she hadn’t considered the fact that her messages would appear under the name “Charlie”—that in fact she hadn’t been playing any kind of trick. Instead she had simply been asking the same type of question she’d asked the first day she came to the house, about stars. Both her father and I had immediately shut that down, and so it made sense that Simmi had taken the conversation to another medium. Maybe it was less about a need for answers, and more about the connection—about getting to know a person who had been important to her mother before anything terrible had happened, in the radiant but increasingly insubstantial past.

The front hall had been painted robin’s egg blue by the previous owners, and I had left it that color. There was an anodyne watercolor of a sailboat in a wooden frame. I stood in front of it, and felt a creeping guilt. I’d been using all my adult faculties to try to outsmart a child—Charlie’s child, who had wanted something from me. Whatever it was, I’d failed to give it to her. I thought of the arch tone I’d adopted: Are you interested in physics? Did it say something about me, that I had immediately suspected some kind of intentional provocation or foul play? Was I especially suspicious, liable to take offense, unapproachable? Was that the reason Simmi had adopted this strategy in the first place?

    Even if all of those things were true, I couldn’t understand why the messages had stopped suddenly, or why they’d started again tonight. Had she sent me something so personal, something only family and close friends would recognize, because she was finally ready to reveal herself? And if so, why now?

Across from the sailboat was a row of hooks with Simmi’s silver parka hanging at the end of it, rainbow-striped knit gloves spilling out of the pocket, her scooter parked underneath it with an iridescent green helmet hanging off the T-bar. The other hooks held a collection of sweatshirts, canvas tote bags, and Terrence’s down vest and leather jacket. I couldn’t say anything to Terrence until I’d talked to Simmi; whatever I did, I had to let her know, now, that she could trust me. I allowed myself to think that it might not be too late, that there might be something I could do for her. She had come up with an ingenious way for us to talk, and I had to find a way to use it, before I was obliged to tell her father what I’d figured out.

I scrolled through my own photos, the ones I’d collected of Charlie, but I was worried about making Simmi sad. Instead I sent one I’d taken of her and Jack in his room, in a fort they’d constructed from the sheets and pillows on his bed. They had called me to come see. It was a long, thin structure, a tunnel, and they had used it to create an optical illusion. Simmi’s head was sticking out the front and Jack’s legs out the back—as if they were one child, stretched in two directions.



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I wasn’t wearing my coat, but I didn’t want to go back upstairs. I took my sweatshirt from a peg in the hall and went out. It was forty-five degrees: warm for February—I thought I would walk just to the river and back to clear my head. I hurried past the quiet side streets, the rows of shabbily genteel, hundred-year-old houses, most of them filled with people like myself, obsessively committed to one obscure subject or another, the importance of which we communicated in books we passed among ourselves. It was exactly that insularity that Charlie had been eager to escape when she’d left home for L.A.

    I knew Charlie didn’t want to talk about being sick, but what if I had insisted? I had respected the boundaries she put up around her disease so carefully that our friendship had been squeezed out into the shrinking margins of her life. There was the body and there was the brain. Eventually there had been nothing but the body to talk about, and so we’d stopped talking. And I’d been self-involved enough, stupid enough, to take that as a rejection of me.

The thoughts were painful, but there was something freeing about having them, as it is when you’re working on a difficult calculation and suddenly realize why your method is wrong. Charlie loved me, but it was too late; it was too late, but Charlie loved me. I felt closer to her than at any time since she’d died. It was almost as if a real ghost was nearby. When I heard someone behind me, I didn’t turn around. I was alone on the sidewalk, but I wasn’t afraid anymore. Our two sets of footsteps made a staccato rhythm on the cold pavement. Ask me a riddle, and I reply.

Come on, I thought, and it was as if someone else was talking inside my head: If you’re going to come, come now.

A man in a dress coat and shiny shoes passed me on the sidewalk, walking fast. A stranger.