Lost and Wanted Read online

  ALSO BY NELL FREUDENBERGER

  The Newlyweds

  The Dissident

  Lucky Girls

  THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF

  Copyright © 2019 by Nell Freudenberger

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York, and distributed in Canada by Random House of Canada, a division of Penguin Random House Canada Limited, Toronto.

  www.aaknopf.com

  Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

  Grateful acknowledgment is made to Random House, an imprint and division of Penguin Random House LLC, and Curtis Brown, Ltd. for permission to reprint an excerpt of “This Lunar Beauty” from W. H. Auden Collected Poems by W. H. Auden. Copyright © 1934 and renewed in 1962 by W. H. Auden. Reprinted by permission of Random House, an imprint and division of Penguin Random House LLC, and Curtis Brown, Ltd. All rights reserved.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Freudenberger, Nell, author.

  Title: Lost and wanted : a novel / by Nell Freudenberger.

  Description: First edition. | New York : Alfred A. Knopf, 2019. | “A Borzoi Book.”

  Identifiers: LCCN 2018017575 | ISBN 9780385352680 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780385352697 (ebook)

  Subjects: LCSH: Domestic fiction. | BISAC: FICTION / Literary. | FICTION /

  Contemporary Women. | FICTION / Family Life.

  Classification: LCC PS3606.R479 L67 2019 | DDC 813/.6—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/​2018017575

  Ebook ISBN 9780385352697

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Cover image: Nebulae in the constellation Cygnus by Haitong Yu/Getty Images

  Cover design by Abby Weintraub

  v5.4

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  Contents

  Cover

  Also by Nell Freudenberger

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  ENTANGLEMENT

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  GRAVITY

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  UNCERTAINTY

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Acknowledgments

  A Note About the Author

  For Michael Friedman

  The past has no existence except as it is recorded in the present.

  John Archibald Wheeler, “Beyond the Black Hole”

  ENTANGLEMENT

  1.

  In the first few months after Charlie died, I began hearing from her much more frequently. This was even more surprising than it might have been, since Charlie wasn’t a good correspondent even when she was alive.

  I should say right away that I don’t believe in ghosts—although I’ve learned that forty-five percent of Americans do—at least not in the sense of the glaucous beings who appear on staircases, in abandoned farmyards, or on the film or digital records of events that absolutely did not include, say, a brown dog in the lower left-hand corner, or a man standing behind the altar in a black hood.

  Charlie died in Los Angeles, on a Tuesday night in June. I was in Boston and I didn’t know; we hadn’t spoken for over a year. People talk about a cold wind, or a pain in the chest, but I didn’t feel anything like that. On Wednesday at about noon, my phone rang. Or rather, I happened to be looking through my bag for my wallet, and I saw that the screen was illuminated: “Charlie.” I grabbed the phone and answered before I could think any of the obvious things, such as why pick up right away or it’s been more than a year or what are you to her anymore?

  “Charlie?”

  I heard a shuffling, something lightweight falling to the floor. Empty boxes, maybe.

  I said her name again, and then I lost the call. I called her back, but no one picked up. I felt foolish and unaccountably disappointed. I vowed that if she tried again, I wouldn’t pick up. I would wait a few days before deciding whether I even wanted to call her back.

  2.

  I became Frederick B. Blumhagen Professor of Theoretical Physics at MIT in 2004, just after I turned thirty-three. This was the year after Neel Jonnal and I published our AdS/CFT model for quark gluon plasma as a dual black hole in curved five-dimensional spacetime. I was subsequently invited to every physics conference and festival from Aspen to Tokyo to Switzerland, and accepted as many as I could get away with, at least of those that didn’t ask me to speak on the subject of Women in Science.

  Five years after Neel and I gave birth to our eponymous model, the Clapp-Jonnal, I gave birth to Jack. I’m what is called a single mother “by choice,” which means that I decided to give up on the fantasy that a man with the intelligence and ambition required to interest me in the long term would arrive at the perfect reproductive moment, and be willing to give up a certain measure of professional success to contribute to the manual labor involved in raising a child. (Charlie’s solution—finding a man who seemed to have no ambition other than to be with her and raise the child—struck me as workable, if you could be attracted to a person like that.)

  Before Jack was born, I published two books for a general audience on topics related to my research: the first a collection of essays on quantum cosmology, and the second, more successfully, on black holes. Both books were published internationally, and Into the Singularity even sp
ent a brief moment on several best-seller lists. It sometimes amuses me that the people who seem to envy the small amount of name recognition I’ve accrued—because I have the ability and the inclination to put what we do into words the nonscientist can understand—are the same people who dismiss that work for its lack of seriousness. I would much rather talk to laypeople who read the books and get excited about primordial black holes or the potential of the Large Hadron Collider than to Vincenzo Goia down the hall, and so I tended to do a fair amount of speaking about the books, at least before Jack was born. I am, as people are always noting, extremely busy. All of which is a long-winded way of saying that I didn’t need Charlie.

  I didn’t need her, but when I got a call the next morning from an L.A. landline, all my resolutions melted away and I picked it up immediately. I believed it was my old friend finally calling me back.

  “Helen?” It was Charlie’s husband, Terrence.

  “Oh—hi! Charlie called yesterday, but it was a really bad connection, and I tried her back, but—”

  “Charlie’s dead.”

  I’m ashamed to say that I laughed. I’m told that this isn’t an uncommon reaction.

  “What?”

  “It happened late Tuesday night.”

  Tuesday, I thought, Tuesday, and was relieved to discover that it was impossible. This was Thursday, and Charlie had called me yesterday.

  “We knew it was coming. But this was how she wanted it—no drama.”

  The idea that Charlie would want to do anything—least of all dying—without drama was ludicrous, as was this sudden phone call in the middle of the morning. It was eleven o’clock and I was in my office, peer reviewing an article for Physical Review Letters on ultrahigh-energy debris from collisional Penrose processes. I thought of how Charlie used to laugh at the titles of my papers. I always said it was just a matter of getting past the unfamiliar language. If she could read Shakespeare, she could read physics. This particular paper suggested that subatomic particles orbiting near a spinning black hole might collide more forcefully than previous calculations showed, possibly even powering ultrahigh-energy cosmic rays.

  “What do you mean?”

  I knew Charlie was ill. Charlie had lupus. They had diagnosed it eight years ago, just after her daughter was born, when her suppressed immune system allowed the previously dormant disease to flare. But even before that, for as long as I’d known her, Charlie had believed something was wrong with her. The diagnosis, when she described it, wasn’t a tragedy. It was a relief to know what it was, and to be able to get treated. She’d been waiting her whole life to find out. There was no question of dying.

  “I got a call from her phone yesterday,” I told him.

  There was a pause.

  “What time?” Terrence asked, and for a moment I thought there was a note of hope in his voice. As if it might be possible for me to convince him.

  “At about noon.”

  “Because her phone is missing,” Terrence said. “There’ve been a lot of people in and out—the health care aides especially. The coroner and the men from the funeral parlor. And then a few different sitters for Simmi, and our housekeeper—but she’s absolutely trustworthy.” Terrence sounded fierce, as if I had accused the housekeeper. He took a breath and continued. “We sleep—we’ve been sleeping—together, and Simmi fell asleep next to her mother on Tuesday as usual. I moved her to her own room, and I think she knew when she woke up. I was sitting there, and she didn’t cry when I told her. We had breakfast. She didn’t ask about the body. It was only when I started looking for the phone, and couldn’t find it, that she went crazy.”

  “Terrence,” I said. “I can’t—”

  “Yeah.”

  I was the maid of honor in their wedding ten years ago, on the beach in Malibu. I thought then that Charlie’s parents, an art dealer and a psychiatrist who still lived in the Georgian house in Brookline, where Charlie grew up, felt the same way I did about Terrence. Still, they didn’t show that they were disappointed to find their daughter marrying a surfer whose brother had served a three-year sentence for possession with intent to distribute, whose mother smoked menthols behind the catering truck before and after the ceremony, whose father was nowhere to be seen.

  The couple was blindingly attractive. Terrence had his Irish mother’s green eyes and his black father’s hair, twisted into short, beach-friendly locks. Charlie had her mother’s incomparable bone structure. There was a lot of talk about how beautiful the children would be. There was no talk about Charlie’s disease, because at that time no one knew she had it.

  “I didn’t cancel her phone service until this morning,” Terrence said. “We wanted to trace the phone, but she never set that up. She said she’d do it. It takes, like, three minutes.”

  Terrence hesitated, and other noise took over. In my office there was the whir of dry heat being forced through the empty ducts. On Terrence’s end, the hysterical rise and fall of children’s television.

  “There’s something I need—from her email. They make it almost impossible to get into email on the computer, if you don’t know the password. But the passcode on the phone is 1234. I once showed her an article about how it’s everyone’s first guess—but she never changed it. Maybe she figured she didn’t need to email it to me, since I could always get in on the phone.”

  I was having trouble following Terrence, but I didn’t want to ask him to repeat himself. What was it he needed? At first I thought of a will, but the only copy of a will wouldn’t be locked in a deceased person’s email account.

  “I might have to hire an actual lawyer.”

  “That’s crazy.”

  “Yeah, so…whoever has the phone—they must’ve pocket dialed you.”

  “That makes sense.” I said this to be kind to Terrence. I didn’t believe it. What were the odds of being called accidentally by a thief who stole a phone, even if the passcode were easy to guess? You didn’t keep a stolen phone and start using it. You wiped it clean and sold it right away.

  Terrence coughed. “Charlie wanted me to—reach out to you. She didn’t want me to get into the medical details with everyone, but since you understand this stuff—it was the encephalitis that did it. She was doing chemo.”

  “Charlie was?”

  “Chemo’s not just for cancer.”

  “I know that.”

  “Yeah, so, we stopped that three weeks before—we decided to stop it, because it wasn’t helping. She was worried about her hair.”

  “She would have looked fine without hair.”

  “She didn’t lose any.”

  “That probably made her happy.”

  “I think it was her chief concern.” Terrence let out a sound between a sigh and a choke, and I was sorry I’d ever thought badly of him.

  “Terrence, I don’t—is there anything I can do? I know it must be…with Simmi and everything.”

  I hadn’t seen Simmi since she was a baby, but I thought that if she were anything like her mother, she would survive. In fact, that was the piece of it that made the least sense, because the central fact about Charlie was her resilience. It wasn’t so much that Charlie couldn’t die, but that the Charlie who was dead couldn’t be Charlie anymore.

  “She’s lucky to have you, though.” I didn’t mean to relate it to me and Jack, or to suggest that just because Simmi had two parents, it was okay that she had lost one of them. But I’m still afraid Terrence might have taken it that way.

  “Me?” He sounded incredulous. “I’m no substitute.”

  “No, of course, but—”

  “She’s just waiting for her mother to come back. Now I think that’s why she didn’t ask about the body. If she saw a body—”

  There was a pause in which I heard the television again. It was so loud. Had he put it on to distract his daughter while he called their friends? Or h
ad she turned it up herself, to drown him out?

  “There’s going to be a memorial in Boston next month,” he said. “Her parents will let you know.”

  I asked if there were anything I could do to help, and Terrence politely declined—naturally, he was eager to get off the phone.

  “People are posting on her wall,” he said.

  “Okay.”

  “You can memorialize her fucking Facebook. But you can’t get what you actually need.”

  “I’m so sorry.”

  “Yeah,” he said. “Thanks.” And hung up.

  I went to the missed calls from yesterday: one incoming, followed by two outgoing in quick succession. I touched the number and the screen obligingly responded: “Calling: Charlie…”

  But it was as Terrence had said. The mobile customer I was trying to reach was no longer at this number. No further information was available.

  I was alone in my office. I got up and locked the door. I put on my wireless headphones, clicked on the German Requiem, and turned off the lights. I sat with my back against the couch and put my head on my knees. This is what I did when my grandmother died in 2005, and it had helped. But this time I felt as if I were watching myself do it, as if it were a performance. I couldn’t cry. I got back up, turned off the music, and sat down at my computer. If tears came, fine; if not, I would work until my 1:00 p.m. seminar.