Lost, Almost Read online

  I nodded.

  “They’ll have to punish you,” he said. “Testing a scientific theory on a classmate is a very poor idea indeed.”

  “I don’t know why I did it,” I said. “I wasn’t thinking about that. I was just thinking about the wind, and gravity.”

  “That in itself can be the crime,” Adam said. “But I suspect nobody will find that it is a mystery requiring hospitalization. Would you prefer a few days’ suspension from school and a note in your record?”

  “Yes,” I said. “I just want to go back to school. And I want him to be okay.”

  “If it ends up on your record, it’s something you’ll be able to explain,” he said. “I suspect some not insignificant group of the right people would find this story amusing, when you are a bit older and it is apparent that any shortcoming is only in a moment’s overenthusiasm for the laws of motion. An important lesson learned, anyway, at a young age and without too much damage. There are plenty of men five and six times your age who still haven’t learned it.”

  “I don’t have to go?” I asked.

  “I’ll let your father know when they return for you this evening, and then we can call the school. Are we agreed?”

  “Are they going to punish me?” I asked.

  “I suspect that they are.”

  “I won’t do it again,” I said.

  “You’d better not. Now grab me a piece of paper.” He pulled a mechanical pencil from the pocket of his checkered shirt. “Show me how you did your calculation.”

  I hadn’t wondered, at that age, how he was so certain that he could reverse the course I’d set off down, how he could undo the agreement, the recommendation, the referral that had been made, how he knew that my parents would agree, that Mr. Franks would accept the explanation, that no doctor would step in to say this child is obviously disturbed, and let’s not be so hasty. But he arranged it all, and I was back in class two days later. He had made some small corrections to my calculation, and had drawn his own version of the path the rock had taken. I took the two small sheets from the kitchen notepad where these drawings were done and tucked them in my pocket. I put them in the bottom of my dresser drawer, where they would be safe, where I could look at them in the years to come whenever I needed to.

  It was ten years before I needed him again. I had not seen much of him since I’d left for college, having decided not to make the trip back to New Mexico on any regular basis. I had gotten my degree and been accepted into a PhD program at MIT, had packed my things into boxes and been assigned an advisor: Dr. Lee Campanella. I had learned, via email, that my assigned office space would be in his lab, and I was to arrive for orientation on the fifth of August, where all the new graduate students in the department would gather before splintering off to our separate research areas.

  My parents must have called Adam and told him I’d been accepted the moment they got off the phone with me, because the next day a bouquet of flowers had arrived at the front desk of my dorm. I’d called him to say thank you, but I hadn’t thought to ask if he knew my new advisor.

  Dr. Campanella’s work was largely to do with neutrinos, which, with my thesis, was almost certainly why the department had placed me in his lab. I was eager for his return in three weeks from a trip to Italy, so that I could show him how much I already knew, and we could begin the process of figuring out what my own research would be, while I was here and going forward into my career. From the papers I’d read, I was optimistic that it would be an interesting and productive relationship, and I hated to feel the days ticking away. Two other students shared my office space and were assigned to his lab, Nathan and Samir. Both were eager too, though they had not read as much as I had, and were perhaps vaguer in their ideas of what they wanted from him when he arrived.

  He came into our office on the expected day. It was two in the afternoon; Samir and I were working out problems from our introductory course.

  “Hello, hello,” he said. “Lee Campanella. Hopefully I won’t be making any massive missteps to assume that you are Katherine and Samir.” He was tall, perhaps six foot three, significantly older than he looked in any photograph I’d seen of him. He was bald on top but the hair he did have was long, gathered into a gray ponytail.

  “Correct,” Samir said. “Good to meet you.” I wanted to tell him that I’d read most of what he’d published, that I’d been reading his work for years. I wanted to ask, or find some way to discern, whether he knew how closely my interests had tracked his. I didn’t know if the assignments were made by some administrator, or if the faculty themselves looked at the files, the credentials, the applicants’ undergraduate research. I wanted to know whether he knew of my grandfather. I wanted people to know about Adam, and didn’t want them to at the same time. I wanted them to know where I’d come from, to understand that this was my world, not some choice I’d made by flipping a coin in my sophomore year of college. But at the same time, I didn’t want to doubt that I had arrived on my own merits. My parents, of course, were not celebrities, but Adam was, or had been at least, in a way. I never knew if the name alone was enough; Brooks was not an uncommon name, and with the field ever-growing and the gap of two generations, it could well have been that no one would ever make the connection.

  “I’ll need to have all three of you in tomorrow. Class doesn’t meet tomorrow, does it? Katherine, I’ll have you first, at ten, and I’ll see you, Samir, at one, and somebody please tell the other fellow, Nathan, isn’t it, that he’s at three. All right?”

  We agreed, and he strode off. We could see him circling the lab from where we sat. It was a big cube, an open space in the middle with various desks and tables, offices all around the outside. He made his way to his own office in the back corner, where he closed the door.

  “And so it begins,” said Samir.

  “Are you nervous?” I asked.

  “No need,” he said. “You’re going first.”

  “So I am,” I said.

  That night I was excited as I lay in my narrow bed; my brain turned over and over the things I might say, how substantive a meeting this was to be. He had allowed two hours per student, which suggested that he wanted to discuss our work in detail. I had reviewed my thesis before bed, in case he had questions about it. By one-thirty in the morning, my mind was still churning over the consequences that could flow from this initial step, the path it might set me down that could dictate the rest of my life. I knew I needed to sleep if I was going to do well in the meeting, so I used a trick my father had taught me as a child for long nights lying awake, and began, in my head, to recite the laws of science, one for each letter of the alphabet. Ampere’s Law, I said to myself. The line integral of the magnetic flux around a closed curve is proportional to the algebraic sum of electric currents flowing through that closed curve. Boyle’s Law. The product of the pressure and the volume of an ideal gas at constant temperature is a constant. Carnot’s Theorem. No engine operating between two temperatures can be more efficient than a reversible engine.

  He was not there when I arrived in the lab. I had risen early and stopped at the bookstore on my way for a new notebook, half-page-sized and spiral bound with an orange cover. In my backpack were two blue, one black, and one red pen; my parents had taught me always to write in pen, the better to keep track of and learn from even the smallest mistakes. I waited in my office and, on the first page of the notebook, began a list of the things I might ask.

  It was three minutes past ten when Lee Campanella stuck his head in and apologized for being late.

  “No problem,” I said.

  “Should we go to my office or would you rather talk here?”

  “Samir and Nathan may come in,” I said.

  “My place it is, then.” His office was preternaturally tidy, his desktop clear, no piles of paper, no crumbs on the keyboard tray.

  “Is it always this clean in here?” I asked. I was thinking of my father’s home office, a tiny room upstairs that he would clean before he w
ent on trips, staying up late into the night to deal with the contents of all the piles, leaving it spotless for his return, a condition that only ever lasted two or three days.

  “I’ve got systems,” he said. “Have a seat.” The office smelled of lemon Pledge and tobacco. I looked down at the notebook in my lap, considering which question I might ask first.

  “I know your grandfather,” he said. “Or, at least, I assume he’s your grandfather. In Los Alamos.”

  “That’s him,” I said. “He got me started. I’ve been working in a different area entirely, though.” Lee Campanella swiveled his desk chair from side to side, then propped one loafered foot up on the desk.

  “New shoes,” he said. “Can’t leave Italia without a pair. They just don’t make them like this here. Of course, I had a look at your thesis. This is going to be grand.” He asked about the thesis, about how I’d liked doing it, about what I might have added if I’d had the time and resources, and then we talked about the projects he had going and where I might help, during my first year, and then about what might come after that, research of my own, the particular questions I might begin to formulate, which of them were and weren’t already being addressed, and at the end of the two hours, when I stood, half the new notebook was already filled with my neat black letters. He came around the desk and laid a big hand on my shoulder, leaned down, and before I even understood what was happening, landed a kiss on my right cheek, somewhat closer to my mouth than my ear, and whispered, “The future Dr. Brooks.”

  He was half Italian; I thought perhaps it was something he did with all women. The rest of the meeting had been so good, so normal, and until that moment I had been thoroughly excited about the work I would undertake over the next several years. I still was. But that night as I lay in bed, my mind wandered, not to the laws of science, but back to the kiss over and over—the closest thing to a real kiss anyone had ever given me—the smell of his skin, some kind of soap I had never smelled before, the weight of his hand on my shoulder. I imagined that hand sliding over my shoulder and into the middle of my back, and my whole body tingled the way I had always imagined it would, when, if, it ever happened in my life, that someone touched me that way. I knew I could not do it again, but that night I dreamed it, and the next night, too.

  Thanksgiving: Lee Campanella hosted a potluck for lab members. He had been friendly but treated me no different than anyone else since our initial meeting. I had no way to cook in my dorm room so I brought a bottle of wine, advised by the clerk at the package goods store on what would be appropriate and cost about twenty dollars. I had not seen Lee Campanella drink wine, but I felt sure that he did, that he would have opinions, refined tastes. He came to the door and took the bottle from me, studied it and smiled, then leaned down and kissed me hello, casually, on the cheek, closer to the ear this time. My heart began to beat wildly and I told myself again and again that it was a holiday, a kiss hello surely bestowed on every woman who came through the door. There was a small crowd, Samir there already, and Barbara, a fourth-year student, and three other students from the lab, older than I was, whom I didn’t know well, and several grauduate-student-aged people I didn’t know at all. The air was already thick with the smell of butter and poultry and the sound of Charlie Parker.

  “Bird,” I said. “While you cook a bird.”

  “Clever girl,” he said. “Your prize for being the first to spot my pun is a cocktail of your choice. I didn’t know you were a jazz lover.”

  “The best late-night study music,” I said. “Hard to get sleepy with all that energy.” I followed him into the kitchen, where he immediately set to work mixing a drink, the choice apparently having been a figure of speech. What he produced was sweet and strong: apple cider, whiskey, lemon juice.

  “I had a feeling,” he said, “when we met, that you would be one of my Thanksgiving guests. New Mexico is a long way.” I agreed. He excused himself to check on some dish or other and I joined Samir in the living room.

  I had, by this time, told my parents, who had told my grandfather, who my advisor was. My parents, of course, hadn’t recognized the name, but they had relayed from Adam not just recognition, but approval, a solid contributor with a clear head, a nice man, on the few occasions the two had met.

  I drank my cocktail slowly, sitting on a leather sofa, and at some point the glass was taken from my hand and replaced with a full one.

  “My family never did this,” Samir said. “Even after we’d been in America fifteen years.”

  “Mine never really did it either,” I said. “I guess it never really seemed important to them.” I had never thought of it as a deprivation; I hadn’t even really known or understood the holiday until I went to school, and then it became half a week at home, when I was free to read what I wanted.

  Later, after maybe half the guests had gone, I was beginning to feel overwhelmed by the people, the chatter, the laughter. My quiet, small room in the half-deserted dorm called. I was in the hallway, the one that led to the bathroom and beyond that a staircase, looking at a collection of framed photographs on the wall. They were all black and white, and most of them looked old, people alone and in pairs who must have been members of Lee Campanella’s family, parents and grandparents, aunts, perhaps, and even a dog, a German shepherd tall and noble on a rock.

  “Lots of Campanellas,” came his voice. I hadn’t heard him approach, his steps muffled by the carpet. I had learned, without specifically setting out to inquire, that there was no Mrs. Campanella, that there had been one, briefly, years ago, but nobody knew much of anything about her.

  “Who’s this one?” He drew up beside me and followed my gaze; the man in the photo was young, and looked like him but with a longer face. He was leaning back in a lawn chair, outdoors, a cigarette in his mouth.

  “My grandfather,” he said “Guido. In Umbria.” He was close enough that I could feel the warmth coming off him, feel him shift his weight from one foot to the other, and the first kiss replayed itself in my mind and sent its shivers through me, and before I could draw in a calming breath, he had turned me around, one hand on my back near my waist, the other on my shoulder just where it had been that first day in August, my back to the wall, him, kissing me, and there were no thoughts in my head, just the explosions of desire I had only ever felt in my sleep, as his slightly stubbled cheek slid over mine, as one hand slid up the back of my shirt. The part of me that knew this was wrong, that it could derail everything I had built for myself, was nowhere near loud enough to be heard over the roaring of need, of a voice that had been silenced for too many years.

  And then she saw us: Barbara, on her way to the bathroom. Lee Campanella stepped away, and looked from Barbara to me. Barbara said nothing, just stepped past us and into the bathroom. He leaned in to kiss me again.

  “No,” I said, “wait.”

  “God,” he said, “I’ve wanted to do that.”

  “She saw us,” I said. I had known girls like this, girls who couldn’t, or didn’t want to, earn their good grades, who put themselves in situations like this as often as they could. I hated them, and Barbara, I was sure, did too, and I wanted to go chasing after her to tell her I was not one of them.

  “Don’t worry,” he said. “Wait. Please don’t think—I never do this. Not with a student. I never have. You’re different, there’s something different. It’s you, it’s how you approach things, it’s something about you I can’t resist.” They were things no one had ever said to me before, and I knew it was wrong, but the words had a powerful effect on me. Barbara was still in the bathroom and no one could see us and it was a holiday and everyone had been drinking, and I leaned in and kissed him again, felt his lips part and parted mine.

  The lock unlatched on the bathroom door, and I said, I’ve got to go, and retreated toward the kitchen looking for my coat, unable to remember where I’d left it, but of course it was back the way I’d come, in the guest bedroom down the hall where he was just standing, from which Barbara wa
s now emerging. She fixed me with a look of such hatred that the currents of desire shooting through me turned to ice. I couldn’t go without my coat; I had to walk five blocks, then take the T, and even if it weren’t for the cold, the prospect of retrieving the coat at some future time from his house or even from his office was insurmountable. I had to get it now.

  I couldn’t see him from where I stood but I knew he was still in the hallway. More than ever before in my life, I wished for a friend, another girl who would be with me, who could see what I had gotten into and help me get out, who could go back there and get the coat for me, could listen to every detail and laugh at just the right moment. I had never had such a friend.

  I went alone. I spoke when he was still four feet way. “I need my coat,” I said. Then I added, “Dr. Campanella.” He clutched his chest as though he’d been shot.

  “Cruel formality,” he said. “Come on. Just stay a while.” He took a step closer and I pictured him sitting at the head of the long conference table where we had our lab meetings.

  “I have to go,” I said. Without another word, he stepped aside, allowing me to pass to the room where my coat, an army green field jacket, lay in the pile of coats I had seen come and go through the big double doors to our lab space, hanging on the backs of doors for the previous month or two.

  I stayed away from the lab all weekend, something I never did but which seemed reasonable given the holiday. I reassured myself as much as I could that in all likelihood it would just fade away. There had been whiskey and wine and far too much food and an air of festivity, and I would forgive him his advance and he would forgive me mine, and things would return to the normal procedure, and Barbara and anyone else she might have told would see and understand that I worked just as hard as anyone else for whatever meager praise I could garner.

  But that was not what happened. When I came into my office on Monday morning, steeled with resolve, there was a folded note on my keyboard. It said, “Katherine, Please see me. L.C.” It was not scrawled on the back of some photocopied page of an article or a printout of some discarded data set as his notes usually were, but was on a heavy half-sheet of fancy ivory stock. I couldn’t breathe. It could be a matter of punishment, of discipline, but I didn’t think so. The severe tone of the note was not intended for me; it was for anyone else who might lift it surreptitiously from my desk, and for all I knew, someone already had. Maybe that was what he wanted, why he hadn’t sealed it inside an envelope. I could’ve waited all day, and the next day too, but I knew I would have to go, and that the sooner I went the sooner I could get back to work, so I took a deep breath and walked around the corner to his office.