Wishful Thinking (41 page)

At last Dr. Sexton emerged from her office. She approached Jennifer, holding her phone out in her upturned palms. “I must confess it pained me to carry it out, if only a little bit. But there is no going back now. The deed is done.” She placed the phone into Jennifer’s hands. “Ms. Sharpe,” she
said ceremoniously, “I present to you your phone, restored to its status as a merely ‘smart’ phone—yet another insufferably silly name.”

Jennifer pressed the slim, rectangular button on top and watched as her phone blinked uneventfully back to life. A photo of Julien and Jack the morning of her birthday, when they made her pancakes, appeared. When her home screen was loaded, Jennifer swiped to the right with her thumb. She pressed on her calendar to open it. The familiar bars of color, stacked like Jenga blocks atop each day, were still there: orange for work, green for personal, red for the family calendar she shared with Norman, baby blue for the boys’ schools. But one calendar was no longer there: the calendar graced by that beautiful midnight blue.

Looking up at Dr. Sexton, Jennifer did her best to smile.

“I suppose I’m a little sad too,” she said.

“But it is the right thing to do,” Dr. Sexton replied firmly. “Our experiment was just that. An experiment. And I believe we both learned a great deal.”

“What about you, Diane?” Vinita asked, standing and going back into the kitchen to refill Dr. Sexton’s glass of wine. “Did you uninstall it on your phone too?”

“I did,” Dr. Sexton said, settling into a Victorian armchair. “Though my resolve was aided by the fact that I have not excluded the possibility of putting it back again. After Susan has recovered, of course.”

“Jennifer told me your partner has cancer,” Alicia said. “I’m so sorry.”

“As am I,” Dr. Sexton said, sighing as Vinita handed her the glass.

Vinita sat back down on the rug, across from Dr. Sexton. She looked up at her. “I hope it’s all right,” she said quietly, “but I just
have
to ask.” Dr. Sexton nodded, seeming to know what
was coming. “Did you ever think of it? Of going back? Of telling her earlier about the tumor?”

“You can only go back six hours,” Jennifer said. “The app won’t let you go back any further than that.”

Dr. Sexton cleared her throat slightly.

“What?” Jennifer said. “Is that not true either, like the future thing?”

“It is another ‘guideline’ I put in for your own safety, my dear,” Dr. Sexton said.

“How far can you go back? As far as you want?” Jennifer asked, her heart rising in her throat.

“You cannot go back to a time before the app existed,” Dr. Sexton said gently, seeming to intuit the meaning behind Jennifer’s question. Her mother. Could Jennifer have used the app to see her mother again? “And that was only a little more than a year ago.” Jennifer’s shoulders dropped, and she leaned her head back against the couch. Her mother had been gone for a year and a half now. Part of her was relieved. Going back in time to see her mother, who was gone now, would have been wrong, the way using the app to rescue Jack would have been wrong. But if she’d thought she could have, the temptation would have been nearly impossible to resist.

“A year would have been plenty of time to detect Susan’s cancer much earlier than it was discovered,” Vinita said.

“Yes,” Dr. Sexton replied simply.

“So why didn’t you,” Jennifer asked, “if you could have saved her? I mean, not that she needs saving—I know she’ll pull through this—but …” Jennifer did not finish her sentence.

“I thought about it a great deal,” Dr. Sexton said quietly. “And, at one point, I made the trip. I was standing on the sidewalk, ready to walk through the front door of our brownstone and tell her everything. But just as I was about to enter, I caught sight of Susan through the window.” Dr.
Sexton paused, remembering. “None of you has truly aged yet,” she said, looking at the three women around her. “You may think you have, Alicia, but you’ll see.” Alicia smiled ruefully. “It is a very surreal experience. When you reach a certain age, your body, even the contours of your face, can suddenly take you by surprise in the mirror, as though you have been replaced by someone not yourself, someone you don’t remember, or someone you have never even met.” Jennifer thought ashamedly of how rashly she had dismissed the idea that she would age faster than everybody around her: a Faustian bargain indeed. “That was what it was like when I saw Susan through the window. I saw her as I hadn’t seen her in many years, without the memory of our youth disguising the realities of our aging. She looked old! Her hair, which used to be so blond, is white and thinning now. The soft places on the undersides of her arms, where gravity has pulled her skin earthward, bear little resemblance to the arms that, when we played tennis together on Martha’s Vineyard during our courtship, were so tan and taut and fine. And while I’d like to think I’m aging well”—all three women cut in in the affirmative, but Dr. Sexton waved them off, laughing—“I am getting old too. Susan and I have grown old together. And it is in time that Susan and I are most profoundly bound. My body is not what it once was, but it is Susan who remembers me as I was before. And it is Susan to whom I owe courage, and even acceptance, in the face of time’s ultimate fate—the linear inevitability of our bodies. Death.”

The tips of the virtual logs were turning ashy in the fire. “Susan and I have been
in time
together,” she continued after a moment or two, in a voice so low the three women strained to hear it, “for so long now.” She paused. “And it seemed to me that if I used this technology to disrupt our shared experience of time, to alter the course of her life and
mine irrevocably, I would not only break with her but also with some part of myself. With some fundamental part of my humanity. And that act would separate me from her and everyone I’ve ever loved in a way more profound, perhaps, than dying will.”

Jennifer looked up at her. Looking down, Dr. Sexton met her eyes. “Do you understand?” she asked. Jennifer nodded.

Suddenly Dr. Sexton sat forward in her chair, her voice clear and animated again. “Do you know what the chances are of our being together, on this planet, alive, at this exact moment in time?” Dr. Sexton asked, looking from Jennifer to Vinita to Alicia and back again. “The odds against it are on a scale that is almost incomprehensible.
Is
incomprehensible, I should say. And yet it could not be otherwise. We are bound together by the incomprehensible, impossible coincidence that we are here, at this precise space-time coordinate in an infinite universe, alive in the same nanosecond of time in this galaxy, on this planet, in the same country, in the same city, and, at this moment, in the very same room.” The four women looked at each other. Vinita grabbed Jennifer’s hand. Jennifer grabbed Alicia’s. “Take that away,” Dr. Sexton said, “break with that … and you are lost.”

The fire crackled, and a log broke into pieces as its charred body collapsed farther into the virtual grate. “Forgive my speechifying,” Dr. Sexton said. “A bad habit, learned at my father’s knee.” She stood. “The fire is dying,” she observed. “I could restart it, but I’m expected at Susan’s home tonight. Soon to be my home again too.”

“What?” Jennifer asked, putting a hand to her heart. “You’re moving back in?”

“That’s wonderful!” Vinita said, standing, too, and hugging Dr. Sexton.

“Why do you have to live there?” Jennifer said. “Couldn’t
Susan move in here? After all the work you’ve done on this place? What about the virtual fire?”

“When I could have a real one?” Dr. Sexton said lightly, laughing. Jennifer wanted to laugh too, but her disappointment was too great. She felt like Julien, trudging down the hallway forlornly with his insect-collecting kit in his hands.

Alicia left a few minutes later, promising Dr. Sexton she would be in touch. Vinita walked into the hallway with the children and began to collect coats and shoes. Jennifer hung back.

“I’ll miss you so much,” she said to Dr. Sexton.

“I don’t plan on missing you,” Dr. Sexton said. “You will come visit me, and I you. Often. You must come, with Julien and Jack.”

At that moment, Jennifer’s phone went
ping
.

Where r u?
the text message read.
Waiting at costume party!

“Oh my God,” Jennifer said. “Owen!” In the mad dash that had been the last twenty-four hours, between thinking Jack was going to be run over by an SUV, discovering her boss was embezzling and using time travel to bust him for it, and drinking too much red wine, not to mention the Indian martinis of the night before, Jennifer had completely forgotten about her sweet, thoughtful, impossibly wonderful boyfriend.

“Owen!” Dr. Sexton said cheerfully. “Bring him over to visit Susan and me too!” Ducking her head into the hallway, she called to the boys, who were already beginning to make their way back to Jennifer’s apartment. “Ta-ta for now, you two!”

“Ta-ta for now!” Jack cried.

“Maybe Saturday I can show you my insect-collecting kit,” Julien said. “Will you be here?” Dr. Sexton nodded.
Not for long
, Jennifer thought ruefully. But there was no need to tell Julien that now.

A few minutes later, back in her apartment, Julien and Jack went to their room to put on their pajamas, and Jennifer took out her phone again. She reread Owen’s text. She couldn’t go to the party. But she wanted to see him. She wanted to see him, right now, more than she wanted anything.

Can’t make costume party
, she typed.
Boys are with me.
Then, her heart rate accelerating, she added,
Come here? We have ice cream.
She hit
SEND
. They’d been together long enough. It was time.

Ditching costume party now,
came the reply,
for officially the best invite ever.

Jennifer stared at her phone. It was no longer capable of producing wormholes. But she had used it to make a wish come true.

I
T WAS AN UNUSUALLY
warm night in early May, and Jennifer was opening windows. This was not something she could ever have done in her tiny apartment in the West Village—partly because the windows opened only a crack before window guards stopped them, partly because of the noise from Bleecker Street, which hadn’t been bad by Manhattan standards but had been bad enough that it was unpleasant to sleep through. But now she was in Brooklyn, in a house with windows that had screens. The pace of life was slower here—streets were residential for blocks and blocks and lined with leafy green trees. You could play football on the street and rarely have to yell, “Car!” Aside from garbage day, in fact, the world around her had gotten remarkably quiet for still being part of the breakneck city of New York.

What a difference,
Jennifer thought as she moved quietly through the hallways of the half brownstone she, Owen, Julien, and Jack now shared, turning off lights and readying the apartment for bed,
a year makes.

She poked her head into Julien’s room. The cat was curled up at the foot of his bed. Even the cat, Jennifer thought—if a marked decrease in cat vomit was any indication—seemed
happier in the more relaxed environs of Brooklyn. “Do you want your window open?” she asked him.

“Sure,” he said. He hopped out of bed and opened it himself. As he climbed back into bed and resumed reading, Jennifer looked happily around his softly lit room, and particularly proudly at the desk—Julien’s first—Owen had somehow managed to wedge into the corner. It was tiny, to be sure, but big enough to display his prized possessions: two soccer trophies, a guitar pick that had once belonged to Chuck Berry, and a framed photo of Norman, Dina, Julien, Jack, and their new baby half brother, Sam. Jennifer wished she could look at the picture without rolling her eyes a little, but she hadn’t gotten that far yet—Norman and Dina were so unfailingly pleased with themselves, with their organic steamed vegetables, cosleeping, and cloth diapers. Jennifer had taken secret delight in the fact that, according to Norman, Sam was more colicky than Jack had been, something she would not have believed possible—some consolation for the fact that Dina’s thirty-year-old body had almost instantly resumed its previous shape, perky butt and all.

She was still getting used to being without the boys half the time, from Sunday to Wednesday every week. (She might never get used to it completely, she knew.) But the nights without her boys were spent with Owen now, which made the separation from her children far easier to bear. And now the nights with her boys were nights with Owen, too, a transition they’d made relatively smoothly, albeit with some bumps along the way. Owen was out tonight, playing a show in Hoboken. But he’d slip into bed with her when he got home, and when he did, she’d marvel, as she did every night, at her great good luck in finding him.

“What chapter are you on?” she asked Julien.

Julien was rereading all the Harry Potter books. They’d
been like comfort food for him as he’d struggled with transitioning to his new school in Brooklyn. It helped that he’d ended up in a school where Alicia’s husband, Steven, knew the principal—particularly since Steven and Alicia lived upstairs. The brownstone belonged to them, purchased with a modest amount of money by the two schoolteachers twenty-five years before, when Park Slope had been a very different place to live. The previous tenants had moved out in August, and Jennifer, Owen, and the boys had jumped at the chance to move in and have a go at making a little village of their own.

“Twenty-one,” Julien said, barely looking up from his book. “Where Hermione tells Harry about the Time-Turner.”

At the mention of the Time-Turner, Jennifer suppressed a smile and quietly closed Julien’s door.

Jennifer had to turn only a half step to the left to be standing in the doorway of Jack’s room. She could hear him humming to himself, and, as her eyes adjusted to the low glow of his Winnie-the-Pooh lamp and crescent-moon night-light, she saw him sitting on his knees on his bed, carefully arranging his enormous collection of stuffed animals in an order that never varied by a paw or a whisker. (The orderly stuffed animals were his comfort, she thought, in the absence of his big brother, with whom he had always shared a room.) She was just about to enter and open his window, too, when he began to sing in his off-key, absentminded, little-boy voice. It was the song he’d sung that day at his kindergarten’s Spring Sing: “Puff the Magic Dragon.”