Lost and Wanted Read online

  I tried to focus on a grant proposal for a postdoc who’d just gotten a job at Harvey Mudd, and then opened my email. I wasn’t checking for anything; do we even “check” anymore? It was just a reflex, like rubbing my eyes or stretching. But there it was, incredible and absolutely real, in its narrow, rectangular box, slotted between a message from the PA at Jack’s school and a solicitation from Greenpeace—Charlotte Boyce. I stared at it for a moment to be sure. The time was 10:57 a.m., this morning. I clicked:

  That was it. It was in reply to a message I’d sent three weeks earlier, asking how she was, but there were no words, nothing but those tiny pictures. It was not impossible to believe that a message from Charlie might have been delayed for three days, and she was certainly capable of sending a goodbye like that. Or it might have been a fake, a hacker—except what motivation could such a person possibly have?

  If it were someone else, it would be better not to respond. But there was no “if,” I had to remind myself—whoever it was, was someone else.

  3.

  In my line of work, I do get asked about the paranormal; everyone who brings it up does so in the same shy, half-joking way, as if they assume they are the first. I’m always tempted to give a lecture about Newton: the debate among historians as to whether he belongs in the supernatural past of the Sumerians and Babylonians, or as a shock trooper of the Age of Reason. I come down with the latter group. The fact that Newton owned an enormous collection of alchemical and religious manuscripts has no bearing upon his invention of differential calculus or its brilliant application in the Principia. What I normally say instead is that it isn’t that magical things are necessarily impossible—only that they must be confined to environments we haven’t yet observed.

  I couldn’t bring myself to look at Charlie’s Facebook, but I did google the rules regarding deceased persons’ accounts:

  If Facebook is made aware that a person has passed away, it is our policy to memorialize the account.

  No one can log into a memorialized account and no new friends can be accepted.

  Depending on the privacy settings of the deceased person’s account, friends can share memories on the memorialized timeline.

  Anyone can send private messages to the deceased person.

  The last rule seemed the strangest to me: Facebook actually sanctioned the idea of private messages to the dead. The messages existed somewhere on the internet, but no one other than their authors were allowed to read them. Such letters to the dead must always have been written; it was just that in the past, the writers had nowhere to send them.

  I went through the emails I’d saved from Charlie. I generally erase personal email at the end of each year, and there were only a few that had wound up in permanent folders, including one in which we worked out the logistics for the last time we’d seen each other, the Christmas Jack was four. I had almost given up looking when I found another, in a folder I might have intended to discard. This one was older, from just after Simmi was born:

  I have currently checked into a hotel for a couple of days to try to finish my NBC pilot, the first draft of which is due this week. I am having a VERY tough time trying to write and be a mom—and also I’ve had all these weird health issues post-pregnancy (they first thought I had lupus but now hopefully just arthritis—typing that makes me feel ancient—along with an acute thyroid problem). We just hired a nanny, but somehow managing that, along with the constant mental checklist (is the baby eating enough? did she nap? for how long? is there enough food in the freezer? diapers? formula? etc.), seems to preclude the kind of sustained concentration it takes to invent the characters and world of this pilot. I have less than a month to write a script from an idea that wasn’t mine in the first place, and that takes place in another time period—New York City society in the “roaring twenties”—a period of American history about which I know (& dare I say care?) relatively little. No wonder so much of network TV sucks. Anyway, hoping that being away from the responsibilities of the baby will allow me to fall back on some of my old tricks—like pulling all-nighters, say?—so that I can at least crank out a draft.

  I printed it out, and then didn’t know what to do with it. That “dare I say care?”—it was so Charlie. She didn’t pretend to care about things she didn’t care about, and she cared passionately about the things she did. It could be a seventeenth-century poet—Marvell was her favorite—or a TV show about aliens; if she loved it, she would defend it against any attack. She was the same way about people, especially her father and her older brother, William. With her mother, Adelaide, her attachment was more fraught. And for a while I was included in that charmed circle of loyalty. She might tease me: once she convinced nearly everyone we knew that I was a member of the Greek royal family, and that my real first name was Iphigenia, that I went by Helen only to remain incognito at school. (I learned of this several months later, from a Greek woman on my intramural soccer team, who said that she had to ask because she was actually a distant relation herself, through Princess Olga Isabelle, Duchess of Apulia.) Charlie made fun of me, but she also comforted my heartbreaks and disappointments, and encouraged my ambition in a way that made me feel I really could do the things I imagined doing when I was that age. People used to joke about Charlie and me being lovers, and maybe they really did wonder; it was something harder to describe than that. We were on each other’s side in a way that felt permanent, and so it hurt more than it might have otherwise, when she decided to shut me out.

  In the days after Terrence’s phone call, I heard from college classmates. They wrote to me because they’d gotten the news about Charlie’s death and remembered how close we’d been. I directed those in the L.A. area toward a woman named Ellie, who was organizing a meal train for Terrence and Simmi, and the others to the scholarship fund I’d learned that her family was setting up in Charlie’s name. I was always anxious, in these correspondences, when I revealed the fact that I hadn’t seen Charlie during the last years of her illness, and that we had communicated only intermittently. I thought it would seem as if I’d abandoned her when she most needed friends; under the circumstances, I didn’t think I could explain that she was the one who had abandoned me, if only because she refused to talk about the illness that was increasingly taking over her life.

  As it turned out, no one even asked me. Was that because losing touch with one’s classmates from twenty years earlier seemed natural, or because it seemed natural to have lost touch with someone who was now dead?

  I did get a call from Neel. He’d heard online, like everyone, but at least he’d picked up the phone.

  “It’s a weird impulse,” he said. “The meal train.”

  Neel’s need to dissect every bit of convention, to expose the contradictions in other people’s behavior, had always been exasperating.

  “I think it’s pretty standard, across cultures. Don’t Indians bring food when someone dies?”

  “Well, yes, but we’re always cooking,” Neel said. “You have to eliminate us from the data set.”

  His sense of humor, on the other hand, was so perfectly calibrated with mine (we had all the same references) that I liked talking with him better than with almost anyone else.

  “People need to eat,” I said.

  “Yeah, but do you think we do this to avoid thinking about what happened?”

  “Have you been thinking about her?”

  Neel and Charlie had gotten along beautifully in college—unexpectedly, too, because their core beliefs were so different that it could easily have gone the other way. During the brief time Neel and I were dating, they acted almost like brother and sister, teasing each other and often ganging up on me as well. I’d meant to reconnect them once he moved out to Caltech, but I’d never done it.

  “You remember that time we went to her house?”

  “In Brookline?” I knew which house he was ta
lking about, and it was possible that I asked that question just to stall. It’s hard for me to think about that weekend without losing my composure, even now.

  “No, on the North Shore. To see Swift-Tuttle.”

  “But it was too cloudy.”

  “The first night was too cloudy,” he said. “But we saw it the second.”

  “Are you kidding?”

  “No.”

  “We didn’t stay two nights. We got drunk and went swimming.”

  “It’s strange that you don’t remember the comet.”

  That was another thing about Neel—he could never let a subject drop.

  “I do remember it—we saw it at Harvard, at the CfA in January.”

  “You’re thinking of Hale-Bopp in ’97,” Neel said. “After we both got back to Cambridge. It was Swift-Tuttle in Gloucester. I bet Charlie would remember.”

  “Yeah, well.”

  There was a long pause, and then Neel asked how Simona was doing. I told him briefly what Terrence had said about Simmi—I thought that Neel, who didn’t have any interest in children, could hardly understand—and then we shifted to the safer subject of Caltech LIGO, where Neel had been working for the past eleven years. The Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory, an international collaboration of more than a thousand scientists, was dedicated to detecting the gravitational waves that Einstein posited the existence of in 1915. People describe these waves as “ripples in spacetime,” with analogies about bowling balls on trampolines and people rolling around on mattresses, and these are probably as good as we’re going to get. The problem with all of the analogies, though, is that they’re three-dimensional; it’s almost impossible for human beings to add a fourth dimension, and visualize how objects with enormous gravity—black holes or dead stars—might bend not only space, but time.

  When Charlie died, LIGO’s massive gravitational wave detectors were about to make their first science runs. LIGO isn’t an observatory in the traditional sense, but rather a pair of L-shaped interferometers—detectors with concrete arms two miles long, down which beams of light bounce between the most high-tech mirrors in the world. The fifty-year-old project had been one of the most technically difficult in science; now that the machines were finally operational, no one knew how long it would take to detect a gravitational wave, but Neel believed it was only a matter of months. The interferometers were located in remote parts of Louisiana and Washington State (there was also one in Italy), and there were teams of LIGO scientists at universities all over the world: in the U.S., Caltech, Columbia, and MIT were the most significant. As LIGO got closer to a detection—which everyone predicted would earn them a Nobel—I was glad Neel wasn’t on the East Coast but three thousand miles away at Caltech. We’d been competitive from the moment we met each other, as college freshmen, and now that we weren’t working together anymore, I found that rivalry more distracting than inspiring.

  In our discipline, we’re taught to think about time with a flexibility that transcends the ordinary experience of it. The conventional wisdom was once that this kind of abstract thinking came more naturally to a twenty-year-old than to a forty-year-old. Einstein thought that a scientist who hadn’t achieved a breakthrough by age thirty never would, and that was basically true before 1905. But in the last century, the age that great scientists do their best work has steadily increased, so that the average Nobel Prize–winning physicist is now forty-eight. People give various reasons for this—students earn their doctorates later, rarely before twenty-five; there’s more to learn before you can do original work. I have sometimes wondered whether our more advanced age influences the science that is being done today—whether our conclusions, especially with regard to cosmological time, are different because we are older.

  * * *

  —

  I met Charlie on the first day of freshman orientation in 1989, when our proctor organized a game of “Two Truths and a Lie” for the students on our floor. The point was to get acquainted by offering three pieces of information about yourself, among which a falsehood wouldn’t be immediately obvious. We sat in the common room of a suite whose inhabitants had already decorated it with a rubber Bart Simpson, a lava lamp, and a velvet Elvis.

  I hadn’t visited Harvard before I arrived there from California. I’d seen plenty of pictures, but in my head the august professors I had read about were lecturing in front of green chalkboards in the hot, run-down classrooms of my public high school in Pasadena. I, a Harvard student, was still sitting at an undersized desk pushed together with others to accommodate as many students as possible, struggling to ignore the muffled shriek of Def Leppard or Poison from someone’s concealed headphones, the drone of a decrepit and ineffectual air conditioner. I knew Harvard was going to be different, but until I walked into the Italianate brick-and-sandstone freshman dormitory for the first time, right in the middle of Harvard Yard, it had seemed impossible that it would really look as perfect as it did.

  Our Freshman Proctor was an energetic grad student in biology named Lynn who had sought me out the moment I arrived, and kindly invited me to the first meeting of a group she was starting: Women in Science at Harvard (WISH, naturally). I knew better than to join a group like that (at the time I couldn’t even see the need for it) or evince any enthusiasm for her game. As it happened, though, Lynn called on me first, and so I didn’t have much time to think. I pretended a sort of world-weary patience, and began:

  “I like the Pixies.” (This was true, although I liked several less respectable bands more.) “I’m from California. And…I’m a witch.” I thought this was clever, since it revealed nothing important, and made it clear that I wasn’t even trying to play the game, telegraphing my disdain for the kind of enforced socialization that I thought I’d left behind in high school. Harvard wasn’t any more inclined toward this type of activity than most of its students, and after a week of word games, trust falls, and ice-cream socials, we were left to fend for ourselves.

  A skinny white kid in a dog collar and Doc Martens gave me a knowing look. “You’re not really from California,” he guessed. “Otherwise you would’ve said where.”

  Charlie went next. She said that she had lived for a year in Paris, that her mother had been a model, and that she didn’t like to lie. Her tone was calm and self-possessed, not bragging but simply stating a series of facts.

  Lynn the proctor contributed something to the effect that honesty was a wonderful quality, but that for the purposes of the game, Charlie needed to give one false statement.

  “I did,” Charlie said.

  The proctor was confused, and so Charlie looked around the room.

  “Are you people going to guess?”

  “You didn’t really live in Paris?”

  Looking at Charlie, it was hard to believe someone in her family wasn’t a model. She was nearly six feet tall, with skin the color of— Charlie once pointed out the way brown skin is described almost exclusively in relation to food or spices, things you can eat, and so I won’t use that type of analogy. She was a medium-skinned black woman, thin, and at that age, gangly. Her eyes were large and far apart, and her mouth was perfect, as if she’d drawn around it with pencil, even on the rare occasions when she hadn’t. On that warm September day, she was wearing flared white jeans and a sleeveless top, of a sort of lime-green brocade, with leather, cork-bottomed sandals. Her hair was pulled back into a smooth chignon, and her ears were decorated with square diamond studs.

  “I did live in Paris,” Charlie sighed. “But it’s not true that I hate to lie. I love lying. It’s so liberating.”

  In our era at Harvard, there were various, distinct types: the international students; the children of immigrants; the scattering of anonymous valedictorians from all across the country, like me, the only ones from their high schools. And then there were the kids from New York: the rich ones, nearly all white (with some Saudi royal
ty thrown in), whose fathers and grandfathers had gone to Harvard, who belonged to the final clubs and the Hasty Pudding. Having begun in public school in Brookline, spent the year in Paris, and then finished high school at an elite boarding school in Connecticut, Charlie managed to have friends from this set without belonging exclusively to it. Then there were the graduates of the specialized New York City public schools, brilliant math and science grinds from Stuyvesant, Bronx Science, and Brooklyn Tech—mostly Asian, with a smattering of black and white nerds—and the culturally sophisticated, mostly Jewish crowd from Hunter and LaGuardia.

  I would have said then that Charlie and I—an upper-middle-class black girl from Brookline and a work-study white science nerd from Pasadena—didn’t fit into any category, and that that’s why we were eventually drawn to each other. Now I think that the twenty-some eighteen-year-olds in the room that day must have been equally uncategorizable, each with their secret, disjunctive parts. I think that the boxes we used to sort them were nothing more than comforting fictions, like Bohr’s atomic model, which is so pretty and so sensible—its particles orbiting the nucleus like a miniature sun and planets—that it’s still the definitive representation. This is in spite of its incompatibility with everything we now know about the very tiniest pieces into which the world can be broken.

  4.

  It was about a month after I got the news about Charlie that Jack said he’d seen the ghost. Our house is more than a hundred years old. I bought it in 2005, with the money my grandmother left me. A narrow blue Victorian in Cambridgeport, a five-minute drive from MIT, it had a front porch, a hexagonal tower, and a German couple already installed in the rental unit downstairs. The Germans rode off together every morning on their bicycles to their studio, where together they were making a documentary film about the few remaining Wampanoag tribespeople on Chappaquiddick.