Wishful Thinking (33 page)

She crossed Greenwich. She crossed Washington, pedestrians and traffic cops cursing her. She was about to cross the West Side Highway, wondering if she would eventually have to dive into the Hudson River to make it stop, when her phone fell silent at last.

There was a bench at the corner. Jennifer sat on it. She could barely catch her breath.

Why hadn’t she thought of this before? There was no way for her to get to Jack—with her other self only half a block behind—with her phone in hand. There was only one thing she could do: hide her phone somewhere and come back for it later. The idea of being separated from it terrified her—she had not let it out of her sight for more than a few minutes in the last six months. But it had to be done.

Jennifer was looking for a planter she could stash it in, when the phone rang. “Dr. Sexton!” Jennifer cried, picking up. It was 5:25 now. She had only ten minutes left. “Thank you so
much for calling. Something has happened, or I think something has happened—”

“Jennifer,” Dr. Sexton replied, cutting her short. “First of all, I am sorry I have not been returning your calls of late. Please forgive me.” There was a pause. There was something about the tone of Dr. Sexton’s voice—both weary and resigned—that frightened her.

“Are you all right?” Jennifer asked.

“No,” Dr. Sexton said, her voice dropping to an uncharacteristically low register. “Susan has cancer. We found out just after your birthday.”

“Oh no,” Jennifer breathed. “I’m so sorry.”

“It’s very serious,” Dr. Sexton said. “She went into treatment immediately, and she has needed all my care.”

“What kind?” Jennifer asked. “What stage is it?” The questions she had been asked again and again when her mother had been ill.

“I will tell you everything when we see each other, and I promise it will be soon,” Dr. Sexton said. “I gathered from your message, however, that time is short, so perhaps we should focus our attention on the crisis at hand. Where are you now?”

Jennifer explained as quickly as she could. The bleed-through, the everything-at-once horror of what she had seen, and how, just as Jack had leaped into harm’s way, the transmission had suddenly stopped. “So you see,” she said. “I had to come.”

“No,” Dr. Sexton replied brusquely, “I do not see. I did not write the Wishful Thinking guidelines for your entertainment. I wrote them for your safety, and for the safety of everyone around you. You must schedule a return appointment to your office now, to leave immediately. Once you are back, you must then do everything exactly as you had planned.”

“How can I?” Jennifer asked. “What if the bleed-through happened because something was about to happen to Jack and I was trying to tell myself to come, to rescue him?”

“Nonsense! What you have experienced is nothing more than a coincidence. Your actions in response to this coincidence, however, have the potential to be catastrophic. What has happened has happened. If you interfere, it is possible you will make things much worse. What if you distract Norman, who otherwise would have rescued Jack? What if Julien sees you and is so shocked—knowing you are also walking behind him—that he attempts to run to you and he is hurt? What if you are the one who is hit? The scenarios are endless, but they share one commonality: they disrupt the relationship between cause and effect.”

“But what if I don’t go, and Jack is … is …” Jennifer fell silent. She couldn’t say the words. She let out a little cry, and her eyes filled with tears.

“Jennifer,” Dr. Sexton said gently. “Search your heart, my dear. Do
you
believe that Jack is gone?”

Dr. Sexton had said what Jennifer could not, and it was almost unbearable to hear it said out loud. The cars on the West Side Highway whizzed past, their indifferent drone sickening her. Soon a drizzle would begin to fall. How many times had she had a scare with one of her boys like the one she’d witnessed? In New York, walking down the sidewalks and crossing busy streets, it happened more than she liked to admit. But this time she had seen it start to happen, and then she had screamed, and then—nothing.
Nothing.
In that moment, the moment the vision had left her, she did not recall a feeling of relief. But she did not recall a feeling of her heart breaking, of being ripped into pieces that would never mend, of dying a little death of her own.

“Are you saying I would know?” she asked. She stood.
Time was running short. She needed to hang up. She needed to go.

“Susan’s brain tumor was discovered,” Dr. Sexton said, “because one evening while she was running water for a bath in our upstairs bedroom, she fell. Fainted dead away. She did not hit her head, or fall into the water unconscious, or otherwise injure herself too badly. But it was a terrible scare.”

“And you were there?”

“I was in the house, yes, but downstairs. I heard nothing. The running water muffled the sound. It was not until I observed that the bathwater had been running for a strangely long period of time that I went upstairs and discovered what had happened. I, too, however, had had an experience like the one you have described. Earlier in
my
day, while on a Wishful Thinking appointment at the same hour in Paris, I had experienced bleed-through, as you call it—though the proper term, I believe, is
entanglement
.”

“You saw her fall?”

“I could not have seen that, as I wasn’t there. I saw myself discover her on the bathroom floor. I was in the middle of a performance at the Palais Garnier, when suddenly I was also climbing the stairs of the house and then finding Susan unconscious. But before I was able to see whether she was all right or not, the signal stopped.”

“But don’t you see?” Jennifer cried. “This means it
isn’t
just a coincidence. It
is
you, in one time, trying to signal to yourself, in another, that something bad has happened!”

“Not a conscious signal,” Dr. Sexton said, “though the traumatic event may explain why the entanglement was so pronounced. It has happened to me, however, at other times, when there was no significant event to trigger it.”

“It happened to me once before too,” Jennifer said. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

“I didn’t think it would happen to you,” Dr. Sexton replied, “since you are using the app so infrequently.” Jennifer winced. Caught in her lie, again. How reckless she’d been! “When we have more time, I will share my theory regarding what causes it. All you need to know now is that I am absolutely convinced of two things. One, I would have known if Susan’s fall had been bad enough to kill her. I would have
known
that she was dead. There is no science behind that, but I believe it all the same.” Jennifer looked at the clock on her phone: 5:28. Very soon, she would have to decide what to do, or she would not have any choice left. “Two,” Dr. Sexton continued, “whatever action you take, it cannot change the outcome.”

“How can that be? What if I took the football before they even left the park?” Standing up, convinced by her own argument, Jennifer began hunting again for a hiding place for her phone.

“The only solutions to the laws of physics that can occur locally in the real universe are those that are globally self-consistent!” Dr. Sexton barked, exasperated. “This principle allows one to build a local solution to the equations of physics
only
if that local solution can be extended to be part of a global solution, which is well defined throughout the nonsingular regions of space-time!”

Jennifer sat back down again.

“I don’t know about all that,” she said. “But
you
are being inconsistent. On the one hand, you are telling me that if I go to Jack, I could put everyone in more danger. On the other, you are telling me that if I go back, I can’t change anything.”

There was another pause. “I didn’t want to say this,” Dr. Sexton said cautiously, “when you are in such a fragile state. But I suppose I must.” Jennifer waited. “You are correct in the contradiction you just described. The Novikov self-consistency principle is, at best, untested theory, and, at worst, scientific
gobbledygook. I truly do not know which. We have ventured into territory that goes beyond my knowledge—beyond, I believe, the meager cognitive capabilities of any human being. When I saw Susan fall, everything in me wanted to rush back in time to her side, to arrive before she fainted or at least to catch her in my arms. But somehow I knew—or at least I believed—that if I did, the consequences could be far worse than anything I could imagine. I am asking you to accept something very difficult here, Jennifer,” Dr. Sexton continued. “I am asking you accept the limits of knowledge, of our ability to control events. I’m asking you to let go of your belief that you have a choice. Because you don’t. You must let things unfold as they have, and recognize that you are part of a design far beyond your, or my, understanding.”

Jennifer tried to imagine doing what Dr. Sexton was asking her to do. Return to her office. Wait there until eight o’clock and keep her Wishful Thinking appointment to go home at five fifteen. Change clothes and go meet Norman and the boys at the park. Listen to Tara’s story while keeping one eye on the boys. Lamely express her frustration at Norman’s less-than-rigorous approach. And then watch, from a distance, as the football shot into the air, Jack ran to get it, and the SUV lurched forward with her child directly in its path, all while doing nothing but screaming his name, because to do more— to run to him, to take the football away, to interfere with events as she had already seen them—would be to put Jack and everyone around him in a kind of danger she couldn’t begin to comprehend.

“I don’t know if I can,” Jennifer said in a whisper. Tears filled her eyes.

“You must,” Dr. Sexton said.

I would know
, she told herself, trying to believe it.
I would know.

“Go back to your office, my dear,” Dr. Sexton continued. “And tomorrow, we will talk about it over tea.”

“All right,” Jennifer said weakly. She wiped her eyes with a tissue, just as the light rain began to fall. “Though something pretty bad is happening at work too,” she added, remembering for the first time what she was walking back into.

“All the more reason,” Dr. Sexton said, “for you to go back to where you are supposed to be.”

A
T
5:42
P.M
., with the usual fireworks, Jennifer arrived back at the secret bathroom.

Standing in the doorway, openmouthed, was Alicia.

Alicia had found her secret bathroom. And Alicia evidently had just witnessed what she did there.

Her dark skin was as pale as Jennifer had ever seen it. “What on earth,” Alicia said quietly, breaking the silence at last, “was that?”

Jennifer tried to remember what it looked like—what had Alicia seen? She’d seen Dr. Sexton do it only once, months ago, when she had demonstrated the app for Vinita. A tunnel of blue light? A human body being sucked into it and spit back out again? Was there an excuse she could make? A way to convince Alicia she was seeing things? Staring back at Alicia, Jennifer thought not. Alicia was not the type of person to doubt her own senses.

“Alicia,” Jennifer began cautiously, “I can explain.”

“Do,” Alicia said, trembling slightly but steely too.

“It’s an app,” Jennifer said. “A time-travel application that a
physicist invented. It lets me, or anybody who uses it, be in more than one place at the same time.”

“A time-travel application?” Alicia repeated. “Like, from the app store? That nobody else on the planet has ever heard of? Just how dumb,” she asked, venom in her voice now, “do you think I am?”

“I know it sounds crazy,” Jennifer said, taking a step toward her. Alicia put out a hand, motioning for her to stay right where she was. “I didn’t believe it either, not at first. But it’s real. As for my having it and your never having heard of it—it’s a long story, but I can explain that too. And if you don’t believe me, I could show you; I could demonstrate it. …” Jennifer held up her phone.

“No!” Alicia said, taking a step backward. “I don’t want to be anywhere near that, ever again.”

“I understand,” Jennifer said, putting the phone down on the bathroom counter. “But it’s safe, I promise. It’s called Wishful Thinking. I’m telling you the truth, Alicia. Just think about it. How do you think I’ve been doing what I’ve been doing the last six months? The whole superwoman thing? Working every night till eight, without seeing my boys before they go to bed, paying for all those hours of child care, which even with our bonuses I’d be struggling to cover?” Alicia raised her eyebrows. Clearly she had been wondering that for some time. “Being at every single work meeting, never leaving the office, available at any time, day or night? The answer is: I haven’t. I’ve been using this”—she held up the phone again, and again Alicia made a gesture for her to stay back, as though it were a weapon—“to be in two places at once. Sometimes three. How else would I be able to have a boyfriend on top of it all?” Alicia seemed to consider this.

“But what
is
it?” she asked. “That blue tunnel—how does it work?”

“It’s a wormhole,” Jennifer said. “By traveling through it, you can go to one set of coordinates in space and time and then travel back, or forward, to another one.”

“And I’ve never heard of this because …?”

“There’s a physicist—her name is Dr. Diane Sexton. She lives in my building. That’s how we met. She’d been keeping her discovery to herself because she was afraid of how it might be used. But we agreed to see if I could use it safely.” Alicia had balled one hand into a fist, looking very much like she’d like to punch Jennifer in the gut. Desperate, Jennifer decided to share something she’d been thinking about lately, something she thought Alicia might warm to. “And, Alicia, I’ve also been thinking—can you imagine what this could do for women in the community?” Alicia was silent. Jennifer went on. “With Wishful Thinking, a single mother could attend GED classes
and
be with her children at the same time. Or get job training
and
go to a doctor’s appointment. Can you imagine? Think of what it could do!”