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Lost and Wanted

A novel

Part of Vintage Contemporaries

Written by Nell Freudenberger
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$16.95 US
Knopf | Vintage
On sale Mar 31, 2020 | 336 Pages | 978-0-8041-7096-3
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  • English > Literature > American Literature – 21st Century
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As a professor of physics at MIT, Helen Clapp disdains notions of the supernatural in favor of rational thought and proven ideas. So it’s perhaps especially vexing when, on an otherwise unremarkable Wednesday in June, she gets a phone call from a friend who has just died.

That friend was Charlotte Boyce, Helen’s roommate at Harvard. The two women once confided in each other about everything: Helen’s struggles as a young woman in science, Charlie’s as a black screenwriter in Hollywood, their shared challenges as parents. But as the years passed, they gradually grew apart. And now Charlie is permanently, tragically gone. 

Drawn back into her friend’s orbit, Helen is forced to question the laws of the universe that have always steadied her mind and heart. Suspenseful, perceptive, deeply affecting, Lost and Wanted is a story of friends and lovers, lost and found, at the most defining moments of their lives.
 
“Beautiful. . . . Lost and Wanted is startling, affecting—a novel that teems with lives.” 
—The New York Times Book Review 
 
“Dazzling, ingenious. . . . A gorgeous literary novel about loss and human limitations.” 
—The Washington Post

“Absorbing. . . . Intelligent. . . . Touching. . . . [An] outstanding achievement.” —NPR

“Timely and delightfully observant of relationships, this novel is deeply heartfelt, amazingly intellectual, and beautifully thought-provoking.” —The Christian Science Monitor
  
“Intelligent and moving—astute. . . . Freudenberger is excellent in her account of female friendships.” —Los Angeles Review of Books
 
“[An] intellectually rich and soulfully deep novel by one of our most talented fiction writers.” 
—O, The Oprah Magazine

“There aren’t many novels that bring to mind both Middlemarch and Bridget Jones’s Diary—but Lost and Wanted is one of them. . . . Freudenberger’s willingness to accept human contradictions—and to lay them out with a combination of calm rigour and rueful comedy—triumphantly makes Lost and Wanted the real thing. . . . An endlessly rich novel.” 
—The Times (UK)
 
“Stunning. . . . A beautiful and moving novel. . . . The integration of ideas from physics sparks in the reader new ways of thinking about the nature of time and existence, as well as about human relationships.” —Publishers Weekly (starred review)

“Brimming with wit and intelligence and devoted to things that matter: life, love, death, and the mysteries of the cosmos. Nell Freudenberger is good at explaining physics, but her real genius is in the depiction of relationships.” —Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

“Compelling, seductively poetic; deeply involving, suspenseful and psychologically lush. . . . With daring, zest, insight, wit, and compassion, Lost and Wanted gracefully and thrillingly bridges the divide between science and art.” —Booklist (starred review)

“A magnificent novel: a warm and insightful look into human relationships and the mysteries of time.” —BookPage (starred review)
 
“A searching tale of grief and friendship. . . . Freudenberger employs her distinctive skills—her stylistic restraint, the unmannered quality of her prose. . . . Freudenberger [is] a major novelist.” —Entertainment Weekly
 
“[Freudenberger] takes up weighty themes such as grief and sexism in the worlds of academia and entertainment, peppering the narration with evocative asides on black holes and quantum entanglement. . . . The prose is enticing [on] friendship, that most unstable and mysterious of connections.” —Vogue

“Engrossing. . . . [This is] Freudenberger doing her best work.” —Vulture
 
 
 
Excerpted from Lost and Wanted:

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 spent 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 had 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.
Copyright © 2019 by Nell Freudenberger. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Nell Freudenberger is the author of the novels The Newlyweds and The Dissident, and the story collection Lucky Girls, winner of the PEN/Malamud Award and the Sue Kaufman Prize for First Fiction from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. A recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Whiting Award, and a Cullman Fellowship from the New York Public Library, she lives in Brooklyn with her family.
Photo © Elena Seibert Photography
Learn more about Nell Freudenberger

Nell Freudenberger: What I'm Reading (author of LOST AND WANTED)

About

As a professor of physics at MIT, Helen Clapp disdains notions of the supernatural in favor of rational thought and proven ideas. So it’s perhaps especially vexing when, on an otherwise unremarkable Wednesday in June, she gets a phone call from a friend who has just died.

That friend was Charlotte Boyce, Helen’s roommate at Harvard. The two women once confided in each other about everything: Helen’s struggles as a young woman in science, Charlie’s as a black screenwriter in Hollywood, their shared challenges as parents. But as the years passed, they gradually grew apart. And now Charlie is permanently, tragically gone. 

Drawn back into her friend’s orbit, Helen is forced to question the laws of the universe that have always steadied her mind and heart. Suspenseful, perceptive, deeply affecting, Lost and Wanted is a story of friends and lovers, lost and found, at the most defining moments of their lives.
 
“Beautiful. . . . Lost and Wanted is startling, affecting—a novel that teems with lives.” 
—The New York Times Book Review 
 
“Dazzling, ingenious. . . . A gorgeous literary novel about loss and human limitations.” 
—The Washington Post

“Absorbing. . . . Intelligent. . . . Touching. . . . [An] outstanding achievement.” —NPR

“Timely and delightfully observant of relationships, this novel is deeply heartfelt, amazingly intellectual, and beautifully thought-provoking.” —The Christian Science Monitor
  
“Intelligent and moving—astute. . . . Freudenberger is excellent in her account of female friendships.” —Los Angeles Review of Books
 
“[An] intellectually rich and soulfully deep novel by one of our most talented fiction writers.” 
—O, The Oprah Magazine

“There aren’t many novels that bring to mind both Middlemarch and Bridget Jones’s Diary—but Lost and Wanted is one of them. . . . Freudenberger’s willingness to accept human contradictions—and to lay them out with a combination of calm rigour and rueful comedy—triumphantly makes Lost and Wanted the real thing. . . . An endlessly rich novel.” 
—The Times (UK)
 
“Stunning. . . . A beautiful and moving novel. . . . The integration of ideas from physics sparks in the reader new ways of thinking about the nature of time and existence, as well as about human relationships.” —Publishers Weekly (starred review)

“Brimming with wit and intelligence and devoted to things that matter: life, love, death, and the mysteries of the cosmos. Nell Freudenberger is good at explaining physics, but her real genius is in the depiction of relationships.” —Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

“Compelling, seductively poetic; deeply involving, suspenseful and psychologically lush. . . . With daring, zest, insight, wit, and compassion, Lost and Wanted gracefully and thrillingly bridges the divide between science and art.” —Booklist (starred review)

“A magnificent novel: a warm and insightful look into human relationships and the mysteries of time.” —BookPage (starred review)
 
“A searching tale of grief and friendship. . . . Freudenberger employs her distinctive skills—her stylistic restraint, the unmannered quality of her prose. . . . Freudenberger [is] a major novelist.” —Entertainment Weekly
 
“[Freudenberger] takes up weighty themes such as grief and sexism in the worlds of academia and entertainment, peppering the narration with evocative asides on black holes and quantum entanglement. . . . The prose is enticing [on] friendship, that most unstable and mysterious of connections.” —Vogue

“Engrossing. . . . [This is] Freudenberger doing her best work.” —Vulture
 
 
 

Excerpt

Excerpted from Lost and Wanted:

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 spent 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 had 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.
Copyright © 2019 by Nell Freudenberger. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.

Author

Nell Freudenberger is the author of the novels The Newlyweds and The Dissident, and the story collection Lucky Girls, winner of the PEN/Malamud Award and the Sue Kaufman Prize for First Fiction from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. A recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Whiting Award, and a Cullman Fellowship from the New York Public Library, she lives in Brooklyn with her family.
Photo © Elena Seibert Photography
Learn more about Nell Freudenberger

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Nell Freudenberger: What I'm Reading (author of LOST AND WANTED)

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  • Lost and Wanted
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    Paperback
    Vintage
    Jan 08, 2019
  • Cockfosters
    Cockfosters
    Stories
    Helen Simpson
    978-0-525-56362-4
    $16.00 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Sep 04, 2018
  • Gork, the Teenage Dragon
    Gork, the Teenage Dragon
    A Novel
    Gabe Hudson
    978-0-375-71341-5
    $16.00 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Jun 26, 2018
  • The Misfortune of Marion Palm
    The Misfortune of Marion Palm
    A Novel
    Emily Culliton
    978-0-525-43262-3
    $15.95 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Jun 26, 2018
  • Saints for All Occasions
    Saints for All Occasions
    A novel
    J. Courtney Sullivan
    978-0-307-94980-6
    $16.95 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    May 29, 2018
  • Sweetbitter (Movie Tie-In Edition)
    Sweetbitter (Movie Tie-In Edition)
    Stephanie Danler
    978-0-525-56482-9
    $16.00 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Apr 24, 2018
  • Chemistry
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    A Novel
    Weike Wang
    978-0-525-43222-7
    $16.00 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Apr 03, 2018
  • Trajectory
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    Stories
    Richard Russo
    978-1-101-97198-7
    $16.00 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Apr 03, 2018
  • Living in the Weather of the World
    Living in the Weather of the World
    Stories
    Richard Bausch
    978-0-525-43185-5
    $17.00 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Mar 20, 2018
  • The Delight of Being Ordinary
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    A Road Trip with the Pope and the Dalai Lama
    Roland Merullo
    978-1-101-97079-9
    $17.00 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Mar 06, 2018
  • White Tears
    White Tears
    A novel
    Hari Kunzru
    978-1-101-97321-9
    $16.95 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Feb 06, 2018
  • The Girl at the Baggage Claim
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    Explaining the East-West Culture Gap
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    978-1-101-97206-9
    $17.00 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Jan 16, 2018
  • Celine
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    A novel
    Peter Heller
    978-1-101-97348-6
    $16.95 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Jan 02, 2018
  • Signals
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    New and Selected Stories
    Tim Gautreaux
    978-1-101-97251-9
    $17.95 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Dec 12, 2017
  • The Sleepwalker
    The Sleepwalker
    A Novel
    Chris Bohjalian
    978-0-8041-7099-4
    $16.00 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Oct 03, 2017
  • A Gambler's Anatomy
    A Gambler's Anatomy
    A Novel
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    978-1-101-87367-0
    $16.95 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Sep 05, 2017
  • The Tragedy of Brady Sims
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    Ernest J. Gaines
    978-0-525-43446-7
    $15.00 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Aug 29, 2017
  • Bridget Jones's Baby
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    The Diaries
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    978-0-525-43388-0
    $15.00 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Jul 25, 2017
  • Attic
    Attic
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    978-0-525-43406-1
    $15.00 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Jul 11, 2017
  • How to Set a Fire and Why
    How to Set a Fire and Why
    A Novel
    Jesse Ball
    978-1-101-91175-4
    $16.00 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Jun 13, 2017
  • Break in Case of Emergency
    Break in Case of Emergency
    A Novel
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    978-1-101-91193-8
    $16.00 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Jun 13, 2017
  • The Hopefuls
    The Hopefuls
    Jennifer Close
    978-1-101-91145-7
    $16.00 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    May 30, 2017
  • Bright, Precious Days
    Bright, Precious Days
    A Novel
    Jay McInerney
    978-1-101-97226-7
    $16.95 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    May 30, 2017
  • This Must Be the Place
    This Must Be the Place
    Maggie O'Farrell
    978-0-345-80472-3
    $17.00 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    May 16, 2017
  • The Pier Falls
    The Pier Falls
    And Other Stories
    Mark Haddon
    978-1-101-97013-3
    $16.95 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    May 02, 2017
  • Dear Fang, With Love
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    A Novel
    Rufi Thorpe
    978-1-101-91157-0
    $16.00 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Apr 18, 2017
  • Sweetbitter
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    Stephanie Danler
    978-1-101-91186-0
    $16.00 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Apr 04, 2017
  • Honeymoon and Other Stories
    Honeymoon and Other Stories
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    978-0-525-43504-4
    $11.99 US
    Ebook
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    Feb 22, 2017
  • Before the Wind
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    $16.00 US
    Paperback
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    Feb 21, 2017
  • Burning Down the House
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    A Novel
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    978-1-101-91119-8
    $16.00 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Feb 21, 2017
  • The Bed Moved
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    Stories
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    $15.95 US
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    Feb 07, 2017
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    978-0-307-45482-9
    $16.95 US
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    Jan 24, 2017
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    978-0-8041-7098-7
    $16.00 US
    Paperback
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    Oct 25, 2016
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    The Mare
    A Novel
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    978-0-307-74360-2
    $16.95 US
    Paperback
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    Oct 04, 2016
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    Sea Lovers
    Selected Stories
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    978-0-307-73955-1
    $16.95 US
    Paperback
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    Aug 23, 2016
  • California Bloodstock
    California Bloodstock
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    978-0-525-43304-0
    $11.99 US
    Ebook
    Vintage
    Aug 17, 2016
  • The Visiting Privilege
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    New and Collected Stories
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    978-1-101-87371-7
    $16.95 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Aug 09, 2016
  • The Captive Condition
    The Captive Condition
    A Novel
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    978-0-8041-6930-1
    $16.00 US
    Paperback
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    Jul 12, 2016
  • Days of Awe
    Days of Awe
    Lauren Fox
    978-0-307-38827-8
    $16.00 US
    Paperback
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    Jun 28, 2016
  • Our Souls at Night
    Our Souls at Night
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    978-1-101-91192-1
    $15.00 US
    Paperback
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    Jun 28, 2016
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    978-0-8041-7290-5
    $16.00 US
    Paperback
    Vintage
    Jun 14, 2016
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    $16.00 US
    Paperback
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    Jun 14, 2016
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    A Hand Reached Down to Guide Me
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    Paperback
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    $16.00 US
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    Feb 23, 2016
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    Jan 12, 2016
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    Paperback
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    Ebook
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