Wishful Thinking (30 page)

Jennifer was resolute too. There was no way her life could work anymore without the app. (At this point, she wasn’t sure how it had ever worked without it in the first place.) It was
awkward and painful for them both, saying curt hellos but otherwise avoiding each other at school. But they were at an impasse.
I just have to get to the end of the school year,
Jennifer thought,
and
then
I will stop using the app and take every test Vinita asks me to.
But then she thought about summer looming ahead, and juggling the boys’ cobbled-together summer-camp schedules during those long months when working parents are burdened with filling the inevitable gaps, on top of the pressure of completing her fourth-quarter milestones at work, and she revised.
I just have to get to the
fall, she told herself,
when the One Stop center is done and school starts again, and then I will stop using the app and take every test Vinita asks me to.
It was not lost on Jennifer that, even with the app, she was still chasing the moment when she could finally be in the moment, and it was a moment that never seemed to arrive.

To add to her isolation, things with Owen were strained too, namely because after her birthday dinner, and after the fight with Vinita—which she’d managed to avoid explaining to him but had not quite put him at ease about—Owen had finally, definitively, outed the elephant in their room.

“I want to have a baby,” he’d said.

It was the morning after her party. They were wrapped up together in bed like strands of a warm cinnamon roll, and Jennifer was only half awake. All she wanted to do was have morning sex and fall back asleep. So she was silent, hoping he’d let it drop. But he didn’t. “If you aren’t open to it,” he went on quietly, but without a hint of hesitation in his voice, “I need to know. Soon. Or … now.”

Now?

“Are you saying that if I don’t want to have another baby, you’ll break up with me?” She was lying with her back to him, in the spoon position, and turned to look up at him with a playful expression of mock surprise.

“I want to have a child of my own,” he said earnestly, tucking a strand of hair behind her ear. “You know that.”

And then Jennifer did a very bad thing. Turning away from him, she laughed.

“Wow,” Owen said. “Seriously?”

“I’m sorry,” she replied, attempting to diffuse her gaffe by pulling his arms more tightly around her, though trying to keep them above her belly, which hung from her ribs in a loose little heap of flab on the bed. (Jack had once written a poem called “Mommy’s Squishy Belly,” with lines like
Mommy’s belly is like a piece of mashed potato you can sleep on
. She shuddered to think of what it would take to recover what was left of her figure if, at forty, she blew up her baby-belly balloon again.) “I just know so many women my age who are dying to have children, and they have this conversation with a guy on the first date. You know, ‘If you aren’t interested in having children, I need to know so I can go find somebody else.’ I never thought a guy would be saying that to
me
. Guys aren’t supposed to have biological clocks!” Owen laughed, too, snuggling into her neck and making an ominous ticking-clock sound in her ear, followed by the theme from
Jaws
. She loved him for laughing in that moment. He had such a good sense of humor about himself, and a gift for knowing when to nudge her and when to back off.

She loved him. She did. But how could she be sure it would last? She had loved Norman so much she’d wanted to marry him, and at the time her love had been as true a thing as she’d ever known. Ten years later, she’d had to leave him to survive. It seemed impossible that both of those things could be true, and yet they were. Which made it hard, now that she was disabused of the romanticism of her youth, to imagine having a baby with someone else. What if the love she felt for Owen left her? What if Owen’s feelings changed? She could
not bear the thought of being separated from another child, of fighting over “access” to her baby with another adult who claimed her or him. And what would it do to her boys to take Owen into their hearts, only to see him go? They were already exposed to that risk with Dina. If Norman’s new choice of partner turned out to be unreliable, fine. Norman was unreliable anyway. If hers did, she feared it would shake the boys loose from the foundation she had worked so hard to construct.

She believed it was possible to love for life. It was getting harder and harder to imagine a world with Owen in it where she would not want to be by his side. But she also knew there were no guarantees in matters of the heart. Which meant that unless Owen could produce a crystal ball and prove to her without a doubt that they would never, ever part, her fear of their relationship ending very nearly exceeded her need for it.

Not to mention the fact that it was unlikely to be wise to be pregnant in a wormhole, with a uterus working on Wishful Thinking time.

She hadn’t said any of this to Owen that morning, of course. She’d just started kissing him, turning her naked body toward his and hoping, afterward, that he would let it go.

But he hadn’t. “We need to talk about this,” he’d said a few days later. She wasn’t ready to talk about it, so she’d been avoiding him instead. In the three weeks since her party, she’d seen him only three times, pleading that she was too busy with work deadlines and her kids. Which she was—especially if she didn’t use the app to make time for their time together.

Strangest of all, however, was another estrangement, or, in this case, an absence. In the three weeks since her party, Jennifer had not seen or heard from Dr. Sexton. Three Saturdays now, she and the boys had trooped to Dr. Sexton’s
door and knocked on it, despite Jennifer’s suggestion that if Dr. Sexton were around, she would have knocked on their door instead. The last Saturday Julien had insisted on bringing a bulky insect-collecting kit Jennifer had ordered for him online in anticipation of spring. Long after it was obvious that Dr. Sexton was not going to open her door, Julien stood stubbornly at her threshold, clinging to it and knocking.

“Come on, darling,” she’d said gently. “I’ll work on it with you, okay?”

“But I want to do it with Dr. Sexton,” Julien had said.

Jennifer had raised her eyebrows and smiled. “What am I, chopped liver?”

Julien had turned to her and rolled his eyes. “Whatever, Mom.”

“Really?” she’d said. “‘Whatever’?” He shrugged his shoulders and began to walk down the hallway. “That’s not respectful,” she called after him. “And you know it.”

He mumbled an apology. But as she trailed behind him on their way back to her apartment, Jennifer felt, as she had felt often lately, that for an eight-year-old he was acting an awful lot like a teenager. She couldn’t remember ever having talked to her mother that way when she was his age. On the other hand, she thought, at Julien’s age Jennifer had hardly ever been home. Every day after school she’d gone straight out to play with the kids in her neighborhood, riding bikes all over the subdivision if the weather was good, sometimes even playing on the railroad tracks near her house, leaving pennies for the trains to flatten and building forts out of the junk they found nearby. It was a world her mother had known nothing about, and that kind of freewheeling, unsupervised kid universe was unimaginable now—not just because they lived in New York. Modern parenting, it seemed, required witnessing, monitoring, and supervising every move your child made, and
while part of Julien expected this of her, part of him was driven crazy by it. Little wonder he sometimes exhibited a teenager’s need to differentiate himself from his mom, even at eight. Little wonder she sometimes felt that being able to be with her children all the time was better in theory than it was in practice.

Dr. Sexton’s sudden and unexplained absence wasn’t just worrisome to Julien, of course. Jennifer was worried too. She had tried to track her down by text, e-mail, and phone, and when she had asked the doorman if he knew anything, he said she’d asked him to hold all her mail and packages for an indefinite period of time. One day Jennifer saw Lucy out with someone she didn’t know and approached him hoping to find out what was going on. But the young man turned out to be a dog walker who said Dr. Sexton had simply told him she had personal business to attend to. What that business was, or when she would be back again, was a mystery.

Vinita had noticed Dr. Sexton’s absence too. In their only communication since the party—if you didn’t count Vinita’s e-mailed ultimatum about the app—Vinita had texted Jennifer to ask if she had heard from her.

Trying to tell on me?
Jennifer had texted back.

Aren’t you worried,
Vinita had replied, ignoring Jennifer’s jab,
that the woman who invented the thing you are hurling your body through multiple times a day has disappeared?

It did, a bit. But what was she supposed to do about it? Dr. Sexton was not a child, and she had clearly planned for her journey, making all the necessary arrangements, so there was no reason to send out a search party. Jennifer assumed that when she returned, she would explain everything.

She just hoped it would be soon.

* * *

J
ENNIFER HAD CHOSEN TO
cope with the sudden absence of the three most important people in her life by doing something she’d always excelled at: throwing herself into her work. It helped that it was an important, even fun, time to do this. The first phase of construction of the One Stop community center was complete, and to mark the occasion there was to be a ribbon cutting and an open house, showing off the building’s large, enclosed interior courtyard (the rest of the center was still under construction), where agencies, nonprofits, and other service providers would have their outposts all in one place. After the ribbon cutting, the mayor, with Bill Truitt at his side, would update the press on their progress, which was impressive indeed, so impressive Jennifer couldn’t wait to show it off. Alongside Alicia and Tim, she’d been working harder than ever over the past few weeks to prepare. She’d been working so hard, in fact, that even with the app she was having trouble keeping up.

Alicia, however, app-less and living in real time, arrived most mornings looking like she’d been run over by a truck. Her husband had recently taken on a new job as principal at an elementary school in Brooklyn, and the strain of two superhuman work schedules on one household was weighing heavily on her family. The morning of the event, however, Alicia arrived at the office rested and fresh, wearing one of her perfectly tailored ivory suits. She’d left early the day before when Jennifer had volunteered to take over the last items on her to-do list.

“Thank you so much for helping me out last night,” she said when she walked in, putting her bag on the table in the conference room where they’d agreed to meet and handing Jennifer a tall iced coffee. “I felt like I hadn’t seen my kids in weeks, never mind gotten any sleep.”

“Of course,” Jennifer said, feeling guilty for taking credit.

Tim approached, carrying two cardboard boxes in his hands. “One Stop tote bags for all the residents who attend,” he said. He made a face as he produced a sample. “Lemon yellow. Bill’s idea. Do you think they’ll be a hit?”

Alicia took the tote bag. “I don’t know,” she said, pretending to hunt inside the bag. “Is there a voucher in here for kitchen repairs?”

“Come on, Alicia,” Jennifer said, rising and attempting to rally herself and the troops. “Today we can finally show the residents that a promise from this agency, for once, has nearly become a reality!”

“
Nearly
become a reality,” Alicia repeated, sighing as she handed the tote bag back to Tim and hoisted her own heavy bag onto her shoulder. “It’s a little early for a press conference, if you ask me,” she said, as they headed for the door. “Given the history of this agency,
nearly
isn’t nearly good enough.”

Even Alicia’s spirits, however, couldn’t help but lift when they got to the site. Many residents had brought their families, several local schools had brought classrooms of children to attend, and the place was bustling. Around the perimeter of the site, food trucks from all over Brooklyn had gathered seeking some positive press and were handing out everything from doughnuts to tacos. Multicolored flags flew brightly in the chilly April wind, and various local street performers whom Tim had recruited, from bongo players to human statues, were scattered throughout too. A local first-grade class was on the stage behind the podium, preparing to sing for the mayor when he arrived, their thirty energetic little bodies mostly under the control of their determined teachers. This was Tim’s moment to shine, and Alicia and Jennifer both gave him a congratulatory squeeze for conjuring a lively happening out of a nonexistent budget, expertly using Twitter to rally parts of the city Alicia and Jennifer would never have known
existed. Print reporters and satellite trucks had begun to gather around the dais. It wasn’t big news, but it was news, and luckily for them not much else was happening in the city that day.

Because they were in Brooklyn, Alicia was in high demand, and soon began greeting old friends, chatting warmly with residents, and saying her hellos to the local press. With another twenty minutes to go before the press conference was scheduled to begin, Jennifer quietly excused herself. The community center she’d dreamed of for years was right in front of her, its vaulted glass skylights glittering in the sun. She wanted to stand inside it.

It was still a shell, of course. The floor of the hexagonal interior courtyard was unfinished concrete, and the offices where various agencies and nonprofits would have their outposts (like a philanthropic food court, Tim had said) were nothing more than skeletal structures, without walls or the large glass windows that would eventually encase them. But the space was airy and peaceful, and to Jennifer, who had spent countless hours poring over blueprints and flowcharts, it soared with a sense of purpose too. She could see it as it would look when it was finished, filled with social workers and government employees and nonprofit agencies, residents filing in to do business, pay their rent, or take a class, and seeing her vision so close to becoming a reality filled her with pride.