Wishful Thinking (17 page)

But it was real. So real that Jennifer could smell Vinita’s perfume.

And then it was over, just as suddenly as it had begun. Vinita—her smell, her sound, her face—was gone, and Jennifer was in only one place again. Or so she hoped. Jennifer glanced at Alicia, who didn’t seem to have noticed anything. She looked down at her hands and, as subtly as she could, pinched the skin on her right arm. Fear was coursing through her.
What was that?
In two and a half months of using the app, she had experienced nothing like it before, and Dr. Sexton’s guide had assured her it never would happen. (Part Three: Your Consciousness Is Not in Two Places at Once.) But just now her consciousness
had
been in two places at once, hadn’t it? Or, at the very least, one consciousness had bled into another. Remembering the concerned scowl on Vinita’s face as she’d peered into Jennifer’s eyes, she wondered: Had Vinita been able to tell that she wasn’t all there, that she was in fact cheating by using the app to be at Vinita’s with the boys and work late that Friday too?

She hoped not. Because Jennifer was not supposed to be using the app on Fridays, and if Vinita found out, there would be hell to pay.

When Vinita had agreed to take part in the experiment, she’d suggested that Jennifer stick to the twice-a-week usage she and Dr. Sexton had originally agreed to but use one of the two appointments to catch up on sleep, in order to combat the jet lag. Jennifer had quickly put the kibosh on that plan—only
one day a week of being able to be at work and at home? What was the point? And so reluctantly Vinita had consented to Jennifer’s proposal to add a third appointment to the schedule. But only reluctantly.

Jennifer had meant to stick to this twice-a-week-plus-one plan. She really had. But it had taken only a few weeks of using the app on a regular basis for her space-time commute to go from terrifying to humdrum, from sweaty, panicked ordeal to the
Star Trek
version of a subway ride. Which had made it seem such a small leap to use it, just once, on a Monday, to go on Jack’s class trip to the Met. And just once, on a Friday, to go to Julien’s guitar lesson and get a second look at the alluring Owen. And another time, on a Monday, when Melissa was scheduled to pick up the boys, to have one-on-one time with Jack while Melissa took Julien to a friend’s house, and on another to go to the dentist, where she hadn’t been in more than three years, and then on a Friday again for Julien’s guitar lesson (and Owen), and one-on-one time with Julien afterward while Melissa was with Jack. And soon she was going to guitar with Julien every Friday and spending one-on-one time with Jack every Monday, helping him work on his speech. Nobody was monitoring her use. Their tiny band of experimenters was operating on the honor system. And Jennifer, quite dishonorably, now used the app every day of the week but Saturday, Sunday, and Wednesday, with an occasional extra nap appointment thrown in for some much-needed sleep, as one extra nap a week was not sufficient to sustain her. It had been so easy—and hadn’t part of her always known, deep down, that it would come to this?—to fall right down the wormhole and into the two lives of which she’d always dreamed. Lately Jennifer was less awestruck by time travel than she was by the fact that with the app her life
worked
, on every level and in every way. Talk about a miracle.

That this life included deceiving her oldest friend, Vinita, and her newest one, Dr. Sexton, had not been lost on Jennifer. But as she’d begun to use the app more and more, she had assiduously armed herself with rationalizations. Central to these was that while she’d increased her use of the app considerably, as long as she’d kept up on her sleep, she’d felt no adverse effects.

Until now.

I
T TOOK A MOMENT
for Jennifer to realize that Alicia was calling her name.

“Jennifer?” Jennifer attempted to focus. “I’ve brought Amalia up to speed. Are you ready to start?”

“Oh, yes, of course. Forgive me.”

Alicia smiled, but it was a fake one.

“First of all, thank you so much for taking the time today,” Jennifer said to Amalia, who nodded amiably but a bit uncomprehendingly, as she’d done before. Jennifer wondered what she was doing wrong, because while Amalia was more comfortable in Spanish, she was perfectly fluent in English too.

“As I was saying a minute ago,” Alicia said impatiently, “Amalia’s hearing isn’t what it used to be.” Jennifer reddened. Of course. Amalia’s hearing aid was plain to see. “One of the things she’d most like to see in the community centers, in fact,” Alicia added, “are Medicaid clinics that offer basic services for elderly residents, like getting help with their hearing aids.”

“That’s great,” Jennifer went on, projecting her voice forcefully now, “because we are planning to do that! So. My first question for you is about education. Do you currently take any of the free classes the city offers?”

Jennifer couldn’t be sure of it, but she could have sworn
she heard Alicia, who turned away for a moment, emit an irritated sigh. Jennifer wondered what was bothering her; she’d gone from bubbly to snappish since they’d arrived at Amalia’s apartment. As Amalia began to answer her question, Jennifer took notes. She was just about to ask her next question when suddenly she felt a sharp, painful poke inside her right ear. “What the fuck!” she cried, leaping up, her notebook falling to the floor. A hard, pointy object had been jabbed into the tender flesh of her ear canal. It hurt so much that all pretense of
frack
and
freak
had left her—which was unfortunate.

“Jennifer!” Alicia cried, horrified.

“There’s something in my ear!” Jennifer said, sticking her finger in her ear, rooting around and grimacing.

Amalia knitted her eyebrows, looking at Jennifer with some combination of disapproval and concern as she winced and rubbed her ear.

“Not in here!” a voice suddenly said.

Jennifer turned to Alicia. “What do you mean, ‘not in here’?” she asked, but Alicia simply stared at her angrily. And suddenly she knew. Alicia hadn’t asked the question. It was Vinita talking. And Vinita must be checking her ears as part of her weekly exam—though more clumsily than she’d ever done before, that was for sure.

“
Lo siento
,” Alicia said quietly to Amalia, standing up and taking Jennifer, who was still squirming, by the arm.
“Perdone. Solamente un minuto.”

By the time Jennifer and Alicia had stepped out into the hallway and shut the door, the pain in her ear had stopped. Alicia, however, did not share her relief.

“What the
fuck
,” Alicia said, “to use a colorful word you just threw out in front of a seventy-three-year-old woman, was
that
?”

Jennifer was just getting her bearings. Alicia, however, interpreted her dazed expression as apathy.

“Do you have no respect? For her time? For mine? For the years she has spent on this earth being treated with
no
respect by this city, dealing with the shit that goes down in these buildings, in these projects, in these hallways? Do you think you can come in here and make everything okay with your notebook and your bar graphs and your stupid senior-citizen yoga classes?”

Jennifer was fully present now. “Wait a minute,” she began.

“No,
you
wait a minute,” Alicia said. “Being here today … seeing this family again … When we come in here, asking these residents anything besides ‘Is your faucet working?’ and ‘When was the last winter you had proper heat?’ I question what we are doing. We’re spending millions of dollars on this community center, and meanwhile these buildings are still falling down. Can’t you see that? Amalia’s granddaughter got bitten by a rat last week at Ingersoll.
Bit by a rat.
” Jennifer finally understood. It wasn’t her ear dance, or her yoga question, that had so upset Alicia. It was the conversation Alicia had had with Amalia before their interview had begun. “Noel is living in a one-bedroom apartment with his girlfriend, three kids, one of whom is asthmatic, and two other adults who come and go, and the hot water doesn’t work. How much of that federal stimulus money is going to infrastructure? To fixing the buildings that already exist?”

“I don’t know,” Jennifer answered honestly. “But I do know that the needs we are identifying here are real. And that our answers are real. I know it’s only one piece of the puzzle. And most of that federal money
must
be going to infrastructure, right? But even when the elevator works, you need somewhere to go. Some way to improve your life and move on from here, not just make life here more livable. Right?”

Alicia was silent for a minute. She let herself lean against the wall, a rare sign of fatigue in a woman who almost never let her guard down. She looked around, at the decrepit hallway, the peeling paint, the sagging ceilings. There was graffiti on the elevator door.

“I hate being in these towers,” she said flatly.

“I can’t imagine,” Jennifer said. “I admire you,” she added, going out on a limb.

Alicia took a deep breath and stood up a little bit straighter. “Let’s go back inside,” Alicia said. “Amalia will be wondering what happened to us.”

Jennifer nodded. “How do you say ‘I’m sorry’ in Spanish, again?” Jennifer asked. “
Lo siento
?”

“Wait a minute,” Alicia said, stopping her. “What
was
that? Your ear. Are you okay?”

“Just this really sharp pain,” Jennifer said, as nonchalantly as she could. “Out of nowhere! Weird.”

“Weird is right,” Alicia said. Then she laughed. “Maybe we’re just cracking up under all this pressure,” she went on. “Sometimes I feel like my mind is going too. I could have sworn I saw you on the street in the West Village with your kids Tuesday afternoon after I came out of a meeting with a funder, even though I knew you were on a site visit with Bill.” Jennifer turned white. Alicia, shaking her head at the memory, didn’t seem to notice. “Crazy. It’s like all I’m thinking about is work, work, work. I can’t get away from it. And you popping up like this little ghost, jumping out at me on the street when you aren’t even there.” She rubbed the back of her own neck. “Don’t you miss your boys?” she asked. “I miss my kids, even though they’re teenagers now and more interested in their friends these days. I never miss family dinner, but as soon as dinner is over, I go right back to work and Steven cleans up after everybody.”

Jennifer, still reeling from what Alicia had just said about seeing her in the West Village, merely nodded.

“And you, missing sitting down to dinner with your boys at night, getting home after they’re already in bed,” Alicia went on. “How do you do it?”

It hit Jennifer then. By using the app to make Bill’s “milestones” seem doable, instead of the impossible demands they really were, she was perhaps hurting Alicia, stuck trying to manage the workload in real time, the most.

“Alicia,” Jennifer said hesitantly, knowing she should slow down but seized by an irresistible urge. “There’s something … I’m thinking there’s a way I could help. Help you, I mean.”

Alicia was looking at her questioningly when a young girl, fourteen or fifteen years old, approached the door. “Ms. Richardson?” the girl asked.

“Luisa!” Alicia said, turning. “Oh my God, look at you! You’re so grown! Come here.” Alicia embraced the girl and immediately began peppering her with questions. Luisa opened the apartment door as she answered them, and before Jennifer knew it, all three of them were going inside. It was as though Jennifer’s nonsensical, unfinished sentence had never begun, and when they walked in, Amalia was on her feet, hugging her granddaughter but worrying over Jennifer, too, offering her a cup of hot tea and inquiring about her ear.

Jennifer accepted the tea gratefully, apologizing for her outburst. And then she took the opportunity to collect herself. Had she really been about to tell Alicia about the app? Dr. Sexton would be furious if Jennifer brought anyone else into their tiny circle without her permission. And it wasn’t only that. If she shared the app, she would lose the freedom to use Wishful Thinking however and whenever she liked. If she shared it with someone, that someone might experience an interspace-time brain meld like the one that she’d just had, and
tell Vinita and Dr. Sexton about it, in which case Vinita would almost certainly pull the plug. But the incident hadn’t been that bad. Had it? It had been brief. It had never happened before. Dr. Sexton had never mentioned having experienced anything like that. None of the tests Vinita had run had shown anything was physically amiss. And for now, nobody but Jennifer knew about it.
If something comes up in my checkup today,
she thought,
I’ll tell Vinita everything. If not, I won’t.

Sipping her tea as she watched Alicia, Amalia, and Luisa chat, she thought about how, in a few hours’ time, she would be with her boys again, drinking them in. And how, when she was with them, she would be
totally
with them, knowing that she had already put in a full and productive day at work.

Yes, what had happened this afternoon was a little bit bad. But it wasn’t bad enough to stop her.

B
ACK AT THE OFFICE
at 7:50 p.m., Jennifer was alone at her desk, dictating notes into her phone’s voice-memo app in the semidarkness, as she now did at the end of every “day.”

“Incorporate fresh data from residents into the services proposal. Finalize contract with Brooklyn Family Clinic. Schedule lunch for Tim’s birthday. Ask IT guy to look into slow network connection …” Jennifer trailed off and sighed, rubbing her temples. What else? Betty Friedan had once said that housework expanded to fill the time available. Jennifer, however, with more time now than ever, had discovered that
every
kind of work—housework, child-care work, work-work—expanded to fill the time available. Prior to that afternoon’s incident, in fact, her ballooning time commitments had been the most worrisome thing about her Wishful Thinking life. Yes, she had freedom she’d never thought possible to be both superworker and supermom, and yes, when she was in the thick of either role, it was mostly a good thing. She had noted, however, that the more time she had at work, the more emails
she felt she should answer within minutes, or check late at night and on the weekends, and the more others expected it of her too. The same went for parenthood. The more time she spent with her kids, the more she obsessed over all the things she should be doing for them and with them, from taking them to every museum exhibit
TimeOut New York
recommended (enrichment the boys had made clear they could do without) to constructing wildly creative Halloween costumes from scratch, instead of buying them at Party City, as she’d always done. Modern life, it seemed, abhorred any kind of vacuum. Jennifer often thought wistfully of a day a year before when she had proclaimed it “family sick day” and the three of them had played hooky at home and made couch forts and taken a three-hour walk along the Hudson in the sun. You couldn’t schedule that kind of time as a Wishful Thinking appointment—the kind of time you can find only by losing track of it. Moments like those had meaning only if they were spontaneous, snatched from the jaws of an over-scheduled existence. They had no place as another appointment on her smartphone’s calendar.