Wishful Thinking (34 page)

“Enough!” Alicia roared, causing Jennifer to shrink back and cringe. “First of all,” Alicia began, placing one hand on the bathroom counter and leaning in, “none of this makes one bit of sense. I don’t even know where to start, it sounds so crazy. You got a wormhole on your phone from a physicist who lives in your building? Like,
Here’s a time-travel app and a cup of milk
?” Jennifer began to respond, but Alicia kept going. “Second of all, if this
is
true, you haven’t been sacrificing time with your kids, or sacrificing anything, for that matter, to be Little Miss Office Superstar for the past six months. Is that right? Have you also been picking your boys up from school every day, playing supermom on top of it all?” Jennifer nodded weakly. “And meanwhile, for the last six months
I
have had to compete with
you
, and be judged next to you, to sacrifice time with my husband and my children, never mind my health and
my sanity, while you have been running around with your new boyfriend too? And then—this I truly can’t believe—you have the gall to suggest that this would be a good thing for the women in ‘the community’?” Jennifer dug her nails into her palm. What had she been thinking, suggesting to Alicia, of all people, that a time-travel app was the solution to the problems of women in poverty? “Are you talking about
my
community? You didn’t even think highly enough of me to let me in on your little scheme, and now you think it will be God’s gift to throw a bunch of poor women through a wormhole every day so they can take care of their children and collect their welfare checks at the same time? That’s your solution?
Time travel
is easier than passing affordable child care?”

Jennifer said nothing. Alicia, of course, was right. Years ago she had chosen to name the center It Takes a Village because, from the beginning, she had hated the every-person-for-herself attitude that isolated and blamed so many of the residents the agency worked with. Yet she had just suggested that the answer to the multiplying burdens faced by single mothers, in particular, was not for the village to gather around them, but for these women to multiply themselves instead.

The same answer, she thought, that she had applied to herself when her own burdens had seemed too much to bear.

“I have never trusted you,” Alicia said, stepping toward Jennifer now, the last traces of fear long gone. “I have always known something was not right about you. My husband thought I was playing into Bill’s hand, letting him set up a competition between us when we’d be better off as a team. So I tried to let it go. And I did. Or at least I started to.” Alicia shook her head, looking sadder now than she did angry. “I started to believe you. That you were the real thing. That maybe I had found a colleague who could truly be a partner.”

“I
am
the real thing, Alicia,” Jennifer said. “And I
have
been
a partner. I know I’ve broken your trust. But I have to believe your gut would still tell you that.”

“My
gut
?” Alicia shot back derisively. “When Tim told me you had a secret bathroom, I thought maybe there was something in here you were trying to hide. I guess I was right, but I thought it had to do with the payroll. I would never have guessed it was some wacko Harry Potter type of shit like this.”

“I have nothing to do with the embezzlement, Alicia,” Jennifer said. “The only secret I’ve been keeping is the one you just found out about.”

Alicia put two fingers to her temples and massaged them. She had been suffering from migraines lately. The stress she was under was enormous, Jennifer knew, and Jennifer felt awful about the role she’d played in it. As ill-timed as this revelation was, Jennifer was glad it was over. She’d been deceiving Alicia long enough. What she didn’t know was what to do now that her secret was out.

“I’m going to go now,” Alicia said at last. “I’m going to get those pay stubs and payroll reports from Tim, and tomorrow morning I’m going to fax them to Bill’s hotel in London.”

“You can’t trust him, Alicia,” Jennifer said firmly. They stood only inches from each other as Alicia placed her hand on the bathroom door.

“Maybe not,” Alicia said. “But Bill is the devil I know. And in that phone, and in what I just saw it do … well, that’s a devil I don’t know at all.”

W
HEN
J
ENNIFER GOT BACK
to the conference room, she found Tim with his cheeks so splotchy he looked like Prince William after a polo match in Bermuda. She could not imagine why. Had he seen her use the app too? Her brain was so scrambled by the events of the afternoon, she would not have been surprised.

“I’m sorry I told Alicia about your bathroom!” he burst out.

“Oh, please,” Jennifer said, sitting and letting her body slide down into a deep slouch in her chair. “Don’t worry about it.” Tim looked at her dubiously. He’d seen a lot of strange behavior from her today.

“Alicia took all the paperwork,” he said uneasily. “She’s going to fax it to Bill at his hotel.”

“I know,” Jennifer replied.

It was six o’clock. Two hours from now, she would have to travel back to 5:15 p.m., first to her apartment, and then to meet Norman and the boys at the park. Two hours from now, she would have to do what she had already done all over again,
exactly as she had already done it. A shudder went through her.

“Alicia has taken everything we could be looking at,” she said to Tim, managing a smile. “Bill is gone, and the event this morning was a huge success, thanks to you. It’s six o’clock. Why don’t you go home early? Or not exactly early. More like at a humane time.”

“I won’t say no,” Tim said, rising. “But are you sure there isn’t something else we can do?” Jennifer shook her head. She was already thinking about how she was going to put several conference-room chairs together to make a nap bench. The only way she could imagine getting through the next couple of hours was by being unconscious, if she could manage it.

Tim slung his messenger bag over his shoulder. When he got to the door, however, he hesitated, patches of pink creeping back into his cheeks.

“Do you think Bill has something to do with this?” he asked.

Jennifer shut her laptop and began to gather what remained of the paperwork on the table. “I don’t know,” she said honestly. “But Alicia seems to think that once she talks to him, this will all be cleared up and we can get on with our lives.”

“And if she’s wrong?” Tim said quietly.

“For now,” Jennifer said, “I’m going to hope that she isn’t.”

A
T
7:45
P.M
., Jennifer’s alarm went off. To describe the fitful, sweaty, anxious hours she’d spent tossing and turning on her makeshift bed as a nap was beyond an overstatement, but at least now the waiting was over. At 7:55 p.m., she was in the secret bathroom again, preparing to travel, and at five fifteen Jennifer landed in her own bathroom, at home, and changed into her park clothes. As she did, she couldn’t help thinking:
What if I wear a different pair of pants? Would that be the beat of the butterfly’s wings?
But she changed nothing, doing it all exactly as she’d planned—and as she had promised Dr. Sexton she would.

When Jennifer entered the playground at five thirty, however, she had already started to sweat. She did her best to act normal as she walked up to Norman, Tara, and Josh and said her hellos. Jack, Julien, and Frank were playing together on the jungle gym. The football was under a park bench—in a prime position to be left behind. The temptation to pick it up and throw it in a garbage can was enormous, but she forced herself to let it be. Her heart did stop for a moment when the seven of them began to head toward the park’s exit and the football remained under the bench. Could Dr. Sexton have been wrong? Then Julien, ever vigilant, called out, “The football!” and ran back to retrieve it. “Go long!” he said to Frank, who was already beginning to run. They headed out onto the sidewalk.

“
Guys!
” Jack cried after them, always the little one trailing behind. “Throw it to me!” Jennifer was just about to say something to the boys, or to Norman, about tossing the football on the street—she knew she would have said that, in any time or place—when Tara, grabbing her by the arm, pulled her back and away from the rest of the group.

“You are not going to believe,” she said, “the story Elizabeth just told me about the gym teacher and Dr. Kate.”

So that was how it happened.

Doing her best to concentrate on Tara’s story as they walked, Jennifer felt her body tensing as they approached the intersection of West Eleventh and Greenwich. This, she knew, was where she would begin to remember, and as her foot hit the sidewalk on the east side of the street, she did. Crossing over from a single, integrated reality into a realm where her
memory of the moment began, she entered a discomfiting double reality—a waking nightmare of déjà vu. The sky was darkening, just as she knew it would. The chilly, damp breeze pricked her forearms as the drizzle began to fall. In a kind of daze, she put her rain jacket on, just as she had before. And at exactly the same moment in Tara’s story, she complained briefly to her about Norman’s lax attitude as the boys ran around playing catch. Tara, on cue, rolled her eyes, disparaged Josh, and continued to talk. It was coming, and then they were upon it—the entrance to the parking garage. Seeing it, however, Jennifer did something she couldn’t have done before but couldn’t stop herself from doing now. She clenched her hand into a fist, digging her fingernails into her palm so hard she thought she might draw blood.

“Julien!” Frank yelled, cranking his arm back.

“I got it!” Julien said, running down the sidewalk as Jack chased after him. Frank launched the football in a high, arcing spiral. Watching as it flew through the air, Jennifer froze. Julien and Frank stopped obediently at the threshold of the parking garage, letting the ball go. But Jack, his four-year-old legs scrambling beneath him as he surged ahead, desperate to get the ball away from the bigger boys, pursued it directly into the driveway. In the convex mirror hanging at the entrance of the garage, Jennifer saw the reflection of the gleaming black ton of steel hurtling out of the cavernous garage, briefly airborne from its forward thrust, heading straight for her child. But just as she thought she could not stop herself from running to him, cosmic consequences be damned, a feeling overtook her—a feeling she never could have believed she’d have in this moment, not in a million years. It was a feeling of calm. Profound, peaceful calm. Her balled-up fist relaxed. The adrenaline racing through her bloodstream receded, dissipating. And, standing there on the sidewalk as the ball hung in
the air, she almost smiled. Jack was going to be all right. She knew it. If she hadn’t known, she thought, she would have interfered with events even if she’d thought it would cause the moon to crash into the Empire State Building.

First there was Norman calling, “Jack!” just as she had, impotently, in the hallway of her office that afternoon. Then there was Norman acting fast—so fast, in fact, it was as though he had seen it all before too. He lunged forward and reached Jack in an instant, pulling him into his body and lifting him up and back and out of harm’s way, rebuking him as he cradled him in his arms. He even got the SUV to come to a full stop just short of where Jack had been, delivering a few choice words to the driver before rescuing the football from the middle of the street too.

It was a moment, and then it was a memory. It was over.

“Jesus,” Tara said, still wide-eyed. “What an asshole!” She was referring to the driver of the SUV. “I swear, sometimes I want to lock Frank up in a box and keep him under my bed until he’s twenty-five. Thank God Norman was watching.” Jennifer nodded. “Josh never seems like he’s watching, but he usually is, in his way.”

Turning to Tara, Jennifer smiled. “Finish your story?”

As Tara began to talk, Jennifer looked ahead at Norman, thinking he would look back at her, proud of himself. But he didn’t. Instead the men and the boys kept walking, Norman waving them off when they clamored for the ball back, Josh admonishing the big boys for ignoring Jack when he’d called for the ball before.

They reached the corner. Tara, Frank, and Josh peeled off, saying their good-byes. As Jennifer, Norman, Julien, and Jack waited in their little group for the light to change, Jennifer felt Norman’s hand on her shoulder. “You didn’t think I was watching,” he said. “Did you?”

“I knew you were!” she said, and she meant it. But Norman didn’t believe her.

“Oh, ye of little faith,” he said teasingly.
“Oh, ye of little faith.”

M
OMENTS LATER
,
FEELING LIGHT
and spontaneous for the first time that day—maybe for the first time since her fight with Vinita three weeks ago—Jennifer found herself asking Norman if he wanted to join her and the boys for dinner. Surprised but pleased, she thought, he said yes (after a quick text exchange with Dina, who was apparently out with friends), and the four of them ducked into a diner.

“This is so cool,” Julien said as they scooted into a booth together, Julien and Norman on one side, she and Jack on the other. “We never have dinner together like this, with Mommy
and
Daddy.”

“I know!” Jack said, snuggling up against Jennifer. “It’s the whole family.”

Jennifer and Norman exchanged an awkward glance and, just as quickly, looked away. It was true that they were very infrequently in each other’s company like this with the boys, but, Jennifer realized, she had convinced herself that it was the boys (not she) who preferred it that way. In the past that might have been true, when the boys preferred having her to themselves and griped about having to be with Norman when he was in town. But something had undoubtedly changed between Norman, Julien, and Jack. Seated in the booth with them, watching him interact with the boys in a way she didn’t often have the occasion to observe, it was impossible to deny. First Julien pulled some math homework out of his backpack and began to discuss it with Norman—evidently it was an assignment they had worked on together over the phone
earlier in the week. (Had Julien called Norman on his own?) Then Jack, after being informed of his choices on the menu, mentioned that Dina always made fried chicken on Saturdays, and that fried chicken was his favorite food in the universe. (Since when?) Then Norman asked Julien about a girl in his class, and if there was any update on the “carrot incident.”