Lost and Wanted Read online

  Once—this must have been soon after I joined the faculty at MIT—I came home from work and found the Germans passionately kissing in the front hall. The blond bulk of him obscured her narrow frame entirely, such that I thought for a moment he was leaning against the door in some kind of despair. He stepped back when he heard me, revealing his black-haired, blue-eyed wife.

  “Excuse us,” he said, and their expressions were as if I had surprised them in their house, rather than the other way around. They looked at me with barely concealed pity, as if I must feel so lonely. This surprised me, because at that time I was the furthest thing from lonely.

  (When a group of physicists publishes a paper, we will sometimes parenthetically note a related topic that we plan to explore later. After we published our model, Neel left to join the LIGO effort at Caltech, under Kip Thorne and David Reitze. For four years Neel and I emailed each other almost daily, a correspondence that ranged from particle physics to the incredible machines Neel’s team was building in Washington and Louisiana. We didn’t only talk about physics, but about the politics of his lab and my department, the politics of our country, the books we were reading, the people we were dating, what we ate for lunch. It was the most indirect and the most exciting conversation of my life, and by the time I finally asked Neel the two questions I most wanted to know—

  1) whether he was ever coming back to Cambridge, and

  2) whether he had changed his mind on the subject of children

  —I was thirty-six. There was a kind of relief in getting his answers. In general I like to know the facts.)

  That was when I decided to have a baby. People said I was crazy to give up so soon. Thirty-six was so young, and anyway, they all knew someone they hadn’t thought to set me up with until now. Was I interested in coffee, dinner, a hike? I smiled and nodded, but I had already picked out the father online. The number of PhD students in physics among the candidates was striking—a qualification that apparently signals intelligence to the general population—but I’d skipped over these quickly. I was familiar with the characteristic quirks of such people, and anyway, I was looking for genetic product that would complement rather than enhance my own strengths. The father I selected was a rock-climbing graduate student in musicology, cryobank handle “Papageno,” who had grown up on a farm in Washington State. Papageno was six feet two inches tall, with sandy hair and blue eyes. In his childhood photo (the only type the site permitted) he grinned at me as if he knew he’d done something wrong, and also that I would forgive him.

  I sat across from wasted, adult specimens in bars and restaurants—once, in a canoe—and tried to be polite, then went home and stared at the gorgeous boy on my screen. I wasn’t giving up; by having a child, I was releasing myself not only from these pointless encounters, but from the pressure to settle for someone who didn’t meet my standards. In the meantime, I would get pregnant. I’ve never waited so breathlessly for anything as I did for that package from California, vacuum-sealed vials that produced the love of my life.

  * * *

  —

  I don’t know whether this is something other parents feel—it’s not something you would bring up on the pavement outside the elementary school, where the conversation turns more naturally to the ways our seven-year-olds are unmanageable. I can participate in those conversations, complain about Jack’s baroque rituals at bedtime, or tell a story about the time he wandered off as a toddler and relieved himself on a stranger’s front porch, but all the time I’m doing it, Jack’s physical presence inside the building is exerting a kind of force on me, impossible to ignore.

  It isn’t so much that I’m excited to see him at the end of his day as that my body longs to be with his. The need to pick him up and caress him seems to be increasing just as it gets more difficult to do so. Sometimes, especially right after he wakes up in the morning, or when we’re reading together in his room at night, he’ll still sit on my lap, lean back against my chest, and allow me to put my face in his hair. In those moments there is a surge of contentment so intense that I can hardly see the page in front of me.

  I did worry about sex before I had him, whether I would ever have it again. The surprise was that for the seven years since his birth, this alternative physical intimacy has taken the place of the other kind. I’m still introduced to men, and twice this has led to brief, sexual relationships. (My sister refers to these people, who haven’t risen to the level of boyfriends, as persons-of-interest, or POI.) But I’ve never gotten to the point that I wanted to introduce any of these persons to Jack.

  The Germans have a child now. When I run into them in the hall, the father likes to tell stories about things the little girl has learned to do—climb the stairs, for example, or sing a German song about the moon—while his wife gently teases him for his pride. They tell me as a fellow parent, as if there’s no difference between us, but it’s now that I’ve begun to envy them. Some nights I see them sitting on my porch, drinking wine with the window open to the living room, keeping their voices low while she sleeps. I imagine they’re talking about her, their plans for her. I would like to talk with someone about Jack that way.

  5.

  I was surprised when Adelaide Boyce called me. I had considered sending Charlie’s parents a note when it happened, and even went into a fancy paper store—a place I thought Addie might herself patronize—to buy a card. But the very elegant and contemporary cards at that shop seemed ridiculous to me, and I couldn’t do it. What would I write? Something about condolences? About them being in my thoughts? It was true that they were in my thoughts, but in a haphazard way that had more to do with my own guilt than with Charlie. I daydreamed about accidents that might befall me, about Jack finding me dead.

  Addie apologized for calling me at work, said she didn’t have another number. She would be happy to call back if now wasn’t a good time.

  “Of course, now is fine,” I said, glancing at the clock. I was supposed to meet a graduate student in twenty minutes. “I’m so sorry—”

  “Yes,” Addie said crisply. “Thank you. We’re all trying to focus on Simona now—without her, I’m not sure what we’d do.”

  “Is Simmi…here in Boston?”

  “She and her father are staying with us while they wait for the house in L.A. to sell. Perhaps longer.”

  “It’s good that Terrence can take the time.”

  “He works for his brother’s business now,” Addie said. “Apparently they’re just getting off the ground on the East Coast, and his brother thinks he could be useful here. The Brookline schools are wonderful, and Simona could be registered from our address, even if Terrence decides to rent a separate apartment for the two them.”

  “That makes sense,” I said, although I thought that Charlie’s mother could have told me that Terrence and Simmi were going to live on the International Space Station and I would have accepted it just as readily. It had to do with the way she said things.

  I first heard about the Boyces in bits and pieces, the way we all exchanged information about our families in college. I knew Charlie’s mother had grown up in a socially prominent Philadelphia family, had been a model in Paris in the early sixties, and then an art student in New York, where she’d met Carl—a wounded Navy corpsman on his way home from Vietnam—at a concert in Washington Square Park. They married in Philadelphia, and moved to Boston so that he could go to medical school at Tufts. Addie got her PhD in art history while the children were small, eventually opening a successful gallery in the South End, specializing in contemporary African painters. She had run the gallery until Charlie’s older brother, William, a chess prodigy, began having discipline problems in school—at which point she sold it to stay home with the children. By the time William and Charlie were in college, she served as an advisor to the boards of two different museums, and ran an after-school art program for children in Roxbury.

  Carl was fro
m much humbler circumstances in Baltimore—his father was an orderly in a municipal hospital; his mother cleaned houses and took care of other people’s children. He had enlisted right out of high school and chosen hospital corpsman training; he shipped out after twenty weeks to South Vietnam, where he was assigned to a battalion of marines as a combat medic. He often said he was lucky to have been hit by shrapnel after eleven months, sent home to recover at the VA hospital at Wilmington, where he first became interested in psychiatry. He was in medical school in ’71, when Charlie was born, and eventually rose to become chairman of psychiatry at Tufts. In the eighties, he occasionally appeared as a “relationship expert” on television, once even on Oprah’s show.

  In college I believed that Charlie simply came from a more interesting family than other people I knew. My own seemed to me almost comically dull by comparison. It took me a long time to see that although the Boyces were genuinely dynamic and accomplished people, it was Charlie who made them fascinating; she was able to tell a story in a way that appeared to impart information, distracting you with well-chosen details, but ultimately hid more than it revealed. This was maybe especially true of the way she presented her mother.

  “The memorial is the eleventh,” Addie said. “You should get a card next week. That’s why I’m calling, actually—Carl and I wanted to ask if you would consider saying a few words. Her brother will speak, and one of her cousins. A friend from childhood. But we’d like it to remain informal.”

  I was overwhelmed and grateful that Addie still considered me a close-enough friend of Charlie’s to speak at the memorial. At the same time, I was well aware that this was an event planned by Charlie’s parents for their family and friends. As far as I knew, Terrence hadn’t been involved in any of the arrangements, including the decision about who would speak.

  I struggled not to say the wrong thing. “Thank you,” I told Addie. “It’s going to be hard to—there’s so much I’d like to say about her.”

  “Yes,” Addie said, a little impatiently. “I feel I should tell you something about her death, unless Terrence has already shared those details with you?”

  “He said it was encephalitis, a complication of the lupus? And I know she was doing chemo—”

  “Encephalitis was the official cause,” Addie said. “It should be what was written on the death certificate. It would be, if she’d been fortunate enough to die in Oregon, Vermont, or Washington State. There is actually legislation in the pipeline in California—but all of that will come too late for Charlie.”

  As a child I’d had a habit of interrupting an explanation to say that I’d understood, until I noticed that it was a practice that endeared me to no one. In this case I kept quiet, although I did understand almost immediately that Addie was talking about assisted suicide. Something Charlie had said to me once made this easier to believe than it might have been otherwise.

  “They have a new name for it—aid-in-dying. Forgive me if I’ve lost patience with the names we have for everything now. Terrence didn’t mention it, I take it?”

  “No—he said it happened more quickly than they expected.”

  “Well, yes—if you overdose on barbiturates, it does tend to be quite quick.”

  I had a vertiginous feeling, the taste of bile in my throat.

  “I have no problem with the legislation. I would vote for it myself—I will vote for it, when Massachusetts gets around to it. But you have to understand, we had decided on hospice-at-home. We’d hired a team. I had just come home to get things in order here, and then Carl and I were going back to L.A. There was going to be time for her friends—all of her friends—to say goodbye. Her brother would have come out and we would have been there with her when it happened. And Charlie never suggested that this wasn’t what she wanted. Terrence says that she changed her mind, that Charlie wrote to us about her reasons for this…change of plans. An email.”

  “He did say there was something—”

  “A letter that we never received. And has since been mysteriously lost.”

  “I guess they make it hard to access the account.”

  “There is always a they making things difficult,” Addie said. “I did try to teach my children that. But the point is that you have to anticipate whichever obstacles that entity may choose to put up in front of you, and have a plan in place to circumvent them. Were those my daughter’s wishes, I am quite certain—”

  Addie’s diction was always formal; Charlie would often imitate it. But now this manner was so heightened that it was as if Addie were doing an impression of herself. When she paused there was a silence into which, if I were a different kind of person, I would have known how to inject some kind of comfort. Instead I just waited until Charlie’s mother recovered herself.

  “In any case, none of this is relevant to the memorial. Except that there are those among our guests who will have religious objections to the path Charlie took—the path she appears to have taken.”

  “I don’t have any objections.”

  “I assumed—but you understand that this isn’t something that can be mentioned, even obliquely.”

  “I understand.”

  “Well I’m glad, Helen. You’re still on Putnam Avenue?”

  “Yes.”

  “So you’ll have the invitation next week.”

  When we hung up I remembered Jim, who was waiting for me in a conference room at the library. He wanted to talk about his upcoming summer research fellowship at Brookhaven. That day MIT was as quiet as it ever is, since most people had already left for the summer. The only sounds were footsteps on the linoleum outside my door, a pair of voices retreating down the corridor. The venetian blind threw a gridded shadow on the white wall. There was still enough time to meet Jim, if I hurried, but I just sat there, staring at the screensaver, onto which I’d downloaded an image one of my favorite colleagues, the chair of STS, had forwarded.

  It was his own photograph of the largest telescope at the Observatorio del Teide on Tenerife—the white dome with a yellow moon hanging behind it—which he and his team were planning to use in their tests of Bell’s Inequality. I’ve never worked on quantum entanglement, which Einstein once dismissed as “spooky action at a distance.” It’s a real phenomenon, though, one that has less to do with communication than with a shared history that causes a pair of particles, even once they’ve been permanently separated, to behave as if they knew what each other was thinking.

  6.

  PLEASE JOIN US TO CELEBRATE THE LIFE OF

  CHARLOTTE ADELAIDE BOYCE

  THE MEMORIAL CHURCH, HARVARD UNIVERSITY

  SATURDAY, JULY 11, AT 10:00 A.M.

  The invitation included a photograph framed inside a piece of heavy gray-blue card stock. It was a close-up of Charlie laughing: I recognized it as one of a series taken by a photographer before she went to L.A., when she still thought she wanted to act as well as write. It wasn’t that the laughter was fake; you could see Charlie had hit it off with the photographer, and was really amused by something he or she had said. (Something about her expression made me think the photographer had been a man.) But this was her social, extroverted persona, and more than anyone I’ve ever met, Charlie had two distinct selves, one private and one public. You had to come fairly close before you could see the other one, much less capture it on film.

  The card had been tucked into the corner of our dry-erase calendar for several days, but Jack hadn’t mentioned it. That in itself suggested to me that he understood. On the Thursday before the memorial, I picked him up from soccer camp, and we walked home from the park through the humid afternoon. At home I gave him peanut butter crackers and a banana. A Lego catalog had come, and he paged through it, leaving crumbs in the binding. There was something called a “hydroponic space station” that he’d been eyeing for months.

  “You can build all this,” he said. “You can buy it.�
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  “Remember I told you about my friend Charlie?”

  “Uh huh.”

  We were sitting at a green-and-yellow laminate table that I’d had since college, in our small kitchen, where I’ve hung two spider plants from the ceiling in rope baskets. Sun was coming in around their leaves, making patterns on the table.

  “There’s going to be a memorial.”

  “I remember.”

  “I don’t think we’ve ever talked about the memorial.”

  “I mean—I remember her.”

  “That’s right,” I said. “She came to visit when you were four.”

  “No,” Jack said, in a new wounded way he has. Now that he’s seven, all of a sudden there are times when he’s able to correct me, when he’s observed a physical object or a situation more carefully than I have. This is normally true of things that he’s more interested in than I am, such as the route of the ice-cream truck, or the progress of the new construction along Mem Drive.

  “I saw her,” he insisted.

  “Where?”

  “In your office.”

  I thought I understood. “Are you thinking of Rose in my office?”

  Rose was one of the Knight Science Journalism fellows this year, who was interested in an article I’d written on NASA’s Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe. She had come to talk with me on a day when Jack was hanging out in my office after school. Rose was both younger and less glamorous than Charlie in that photograph, but she was a tall Nigerian woman with short hair; I thought she was the only person Jack might have seen in my office whom he could have confused with Charlie.

  “Rose?” Jack said incredulously. “I know Rose. She got me the CMB with googly eyes.”