Wishful Thinking (32 page)

“Give me a minute?” Jennifer heard herself to say to Alicia and Tim. “I just need to think.” Alicia accepted this, though clearly only for a minute. She and Tim returned to the paperwork, casting glances her way as they chatted quietly.

Grateful, Jennifer turned to face a blank wall in the room and closed her eyes, letting the city block fully occupy her vision. She saw that it was West Eleventh, her street. They must be walking back to her place from the park, she thought. But where were Julien and Jack? She tried to look in front of her, but she had to wait until the Jennifer walking down that block looked. She could see only what her other eyes were seeing, apparently, not choose where to point them. Finally her self on the sidewalk looked away from Tara, who was serving up some delicious gossip about a teacher and the psychologist at the elementary school, and peered up the block, her eyes searching and finding the boys, a habit as ingrained in her as breathing. They were at least half a block away, running around on the sidewalk with Tara’s son, Frank. Who was watching them? Then she saw Norman and Tara’s husband, Josh, ambling nonchalantly a few paces behind. The boys were tossing a football. How many times had she told Norman never to let them do that on the street? She heard herself say something to that effect to Tara, who rolled her eyes, muttered something about how useless Josh was, and kept on telling her story. Norman and Josh were on boy duty, evidently, while she and Tara were bringing up the rear.

“Jennifer?” Alicia’s voice was like an insistent tapping on her buckling brain. “
Jennifer!
” Alicia repeated, upgrading from tapping to pounding. “Are you done ‘thinking’ now?”

Jennifer nodded, willing herself to open her eyes. She turned to Alicia, made eye contact, and smiled, albeit weakly, as Tara’s face and voice continued to sputter and snap over Alicia’s visage. She had to make this stop, she thought. She had to be at work now. This was far too important. As she struggled to respond, however, she saw the boys again. And then she saw the football, sailing into the air as Julien pursued it dangerously close to the curb. He caught it like a wide
receiver, on his toes, just barely keeping to the curb’s edge. Why wasn’t Norman saying anything?

“
Stop it!
” she yelled, loudly enough for them to hear her over the city din.

Unfortunately, however, the voice she found was not the one the boys could hear. Instead she had yelled at the top of her lungs right there in the conference room.

“Stop what?” Alicia said. “Asking you tough questions? And why are you
yelling
?”

Gingerly, Tim put a hand on her arm. It felt incredibly strange, as, just in that moment, it had also begun to rain, and her forearm felt chilly and wet even underneath his warm, dry touch. She had to leave the room, she thought. She would tell them she had to go to the bathroom. She had just begun to rise when another boom pushed her back down into her seat again. And then, just like that, it was gone. The boys, the drizzling rain, the sidewalk, Norman and Josh walking ahead—all of it switched off like a light, disappearing from view.

She was in the conference room again, all of her.

Alicia repeated her question. “What do you want us to stop, Jennifer?” Still reeling, Jennifer could do nothing but give her a blank look. “I thought about this all afternoon,” Alicia continued levelly. “Nobody has had more time with those books than you. Especially at night, after the rest of us are gone. I have never been able to understand the hours you keep here, or why you spend so much time in the office alone. Something isn’t right, and Bill is too easy for you to blame.”

Jennifer tried to concentrate. The last thing she needed right now was to seem evasive. But why,
why
hadn’t she asked Dr. Sexton about the bleed-through when she’d had the chance? Especially now that Dr. Sexton was nowhere to be found? Was it over now? Was it going to start again?

She couldn’t think about it. She had to focus on the reality at hand.

Squaring her shoulders, Jennifer met Alicia’s gaze. “Of course something isn’t right,” she said, finding her ground. “But the foundation is in the middle, not me. The checks aren’t cut to me. They’re cut to BTE for Good. I know it’s the last thing any of us wants to believe, but it happens. In New Orleans after Katrina, a nonprofit took government money to rebuild houses and pocketed it. The San Francisco school district was defrauded by an education charity in 2010. It’s always the same. A charity takes city money, and a bad apple siphons chunks of it off before it gets where it’s supposed to go.”

“I understand that,” Alicia said, barely masking her impatience. “But I hope you agree that we should examine the entire process, from bottom to top.
And
that we should take this to Bill. Now.”

“No,” Jennifer said. “We should take it to the Office of the Inspector General. Not to Bill. The payroll company we are using was forced down our throats by Bill, too—don’t you remember that? Even though BTE for Good had been using a different one for years?”

“You’ve already convicted him,” Alicia said, emotion in her voice. “Which would be an excellent way to detract attention from yourself.”

Jennifer was just about to protest when she felt her head slammed sideways again. This time the force of the signal was overwhelming, the invading images and sounds even stronger than before. There was nothing she could do but give in to them.

They had crossed Washington Street and were headed toward Greenwich. The football continued to be tossed around close enough that she could see it, but not close enough for her to interfere. And the story Tara was telling was juicy
enough to keep her hanging back and letting it slide.

Suddenly Tim’s voice was in her ear. She was so immersed in her other reality, she almost jumped out of her chair.

“Are you okay?” he was asking. “Do you want me to get you some water or something?” His question came as if over a great distance. She felt him rub her arm, saw him peer into her face, but she couldn’t shake the other inputs enough to answer him. Her arms were pricked with goose bumps from the wind. She could feel the rain in her hair.

Alicia looked concerned now, too, though she was clearly struggling to balance her concern over Jennifer’s odd behavior with her suspicion regarding its timing.

“Jennifer?” Alicia said. “You look pale.”

Pushing back her chair, Jennifer got to her feet.

“I’m sorry,” she managed. “But you have to excuse me.”

“Now?” Alicia said, standing too.

“Yes,” Jennifer said. “I’m sorry. But I have to … go to the bathroom. I’ll be back.”

She lurched for the door and willed herself into the hallway. And then it happened. Standing on the carpeted floor, staring down the featureless office hallway that seemed to extend into eternity, she saw it. The ball, lofting into the air just as the boys approached the driveway of a busy parking garage. The image, reflected in the fun-house mirror meant to serve as a warning to pedestrians, of a massive black SUV, lurching over the steep incline out of the garage and accelerating toward the street. And Jack, desperate to get the ball away from Frank and Julien, seizing the opportunity to run after it when, for a reason he obviously hadn’t registered, the two older boys suddenly stopped short at the entrance to the garage. And Norman, leaping into action, only a few feet away from Jack but not there yet, not to where little Jack, her baby boy who was hardly the size of a fire hydrant—distracted,
off-balance, and seeing only the ball—would be. Then she heard the terrible sound of brakes, screeching.

She screamed, or thought she did. The hallway was strangely still. Her scream had been like the scream in a dream, the one you labor to extract from yourself but can barely manage to whisper. The stifled scream that wakes you up from a nightmare.

Then, suddenly, like a nightmare, it was gone. Norman, Jack, the SUV, all of it. “No!” she cried out, reaching for the vision, clawing at the air, trying to bring it back.
Jack!
What happened next? What was happening now? Had the driver seen him? Had Norman gotten to him in time? Was Jack all right, or … ?

Or?

Right there in the hallway, she began to run.

“Jennifer!” she heard Alicia call after her. “That is not the way to the bathroom!”

My boy ran in front of an SUV after a ball!
she wanted to yell. She was calling herself to come. That was why the signal was so strong. That was why the bleed-through had happened. Something terrible had happened. She had to go. She had to go.

She had to go.

“Jennifer!” Alicia repeated, in full high-school principal mode. “You come back here right now!”

But Jennifer didn’t answer her. She just ran faster.

M
OMENTS LATER
, J
ENNIFER WAS
safely inside her secret bathroom. The problem was, she had no idea what to do there.

One thing was clear: she had to get herself to West Eleventh Street. She had to warn Norman or throw herself in front of the oncoming SUV. Could she change something that had already happened? What
had
happened? She didn’t know, but she couldn’t wait to find out.

Hands shaking, she opened up her calendar. As always on Wednesdays, she had scheduled a Wishful Thinking appointment to leave work at 8:00 p.m. and arrive at her apartment at five fifteen, which gave her time to walk to the park (where Norman and the boys always went when the weather was nice) and pick up the boys at five thirty. Was it as simple as changing the appointment to leave now, rather than at eight, and going back with the knowledge of what was about to happen? But the guide Dr. Sexton had given her had been very specific: Wishful Thinking appointments, once made, could never be altered. This was made plain when she opened the entry and searched in vain for an
EDIT
button.
That appointment was set. Of course it was. She had already kept it.

There was only one person who could help her now.

Jennifer dialed. The phone rang five times, as usual, and then Dr. Sexton’s voice mail picked up, just as it had for weeks. Jennifer let out a wail and slapped the counter with her fist. “Dr. Sexton!” she said after the beep. “Where are you? Jack’s in danger and I have to go back, or go there, now, to where he is. But I’m already there. I was already there, and I didn’t do anything.” A sob caught in her throat. “I
have
to go to him. Please call me right away. Please.” The image of the black SUV hurtling out of the garage, and of Jack racing toward the ball in its path, kept running through her head. Her breath was coming faster now. Panic whipped through her nervous system, needling her blood. She knew she had time—she could manipulate time, for Pete’s sake; there wasn’t
actually
a rush— but she couldn’t bear another second of not knowing what had happened to her little boy. What if, at that very moment, he was being rushed into an ambulance? Better to summon the wormhole than to wait. But better
not
to land in her bathroom in her apartment, so close to her arrival at the same location at five fifteen. So where? As always, she accessed her mental map of bathrooms in New York.

There was an APT across the street from the park, she remembered, a five-minute walk from where she needed to be by 5:35, outside the parking-garage entrance on West Eleventh Street between Washington and Greenwich. She had used the APT once to travel to an appointment with Owen while Melissa played at the park with the boys. If she arrived there fifteen minutes ahead of time, she should have plenty of time to get to the parking garage before the boys did. She searched her saved locations in Google Maps and pulled up the coordinates.

Fingers trembling, she began to type.
Neighborhood Park APT, Wednesday, April 6, 5:20 p.m. to 6:00 p.m.
Once she’d either intervened to rescue Jack or seen that he was okay (she didn’t want to consider any other alternative), she’d travel back to the bathroom at the time she’d left it, and Alicia and Tim would never know she’d been gone.

The seconds ticked by. Jennifer wished she had a watch with a second hand. It would be much less startling when her appointments began if she did. “Jack,” she whispered to herself, just as she had whispered Julien’s name the first time she used the app. “Jack, Jack, Jack.”

Then she felt it. Her body heating up, almost seeming to liquefy. The roaring in her ears, like her blood had turned into jet fuel. Her fingers adhering to the screen and the wormhole opening, its swirling, crackling tunnel of blue light enveloping her.

And then she was gone.

T
HE
APT,
THANK
G
OD
, was empty. Because the instant Jennifer materialized there, her phone began to screech.
EEEK! EEEK! EEEK!
It was the warning that had gone off the only other time she had wandered within five hundred yards of herself, and it was blaring now at an ear-splitting pitch.
STOP! STOP! STOP!
the phone’s screen flashed in red.

WHEN USING WISHFUL THINKING, YOU MUST MAINTAIN A DISTANCE OF FIVE HUNDRED YARDS FROM THE ORIGIN OF YOUR WISHFUL THINKING APPOINTMENT. REPEAT: YOU CANNOT GO WITHIN FIVE HUNDRED YARDS OF
NEIGHBORHOOD APT,
OR A CAUSALITY VIOLATION MAY OCCUR.

“I know,” Jennifer shouted at her phone, “but this is an emergency!” Her ears were smarting from the unbearable, stabbingly shrill sound. How could she have been so dumb? She had arrived early, fifteen minutes before the incident occurred on the street. But that had also placed her squarely within the five-hundred-yard radius that her other self, walking to the park at that very minute, was bound to occupy. When she walked out of the APT, she would be making such a commotion it would be impossible not to attract attention. What if Norman saw her? The boys? How was she going to get anywhere near Jack without ditching her phone?

Pulling her jacket over her face like a white-collar criminal avoiding the paparazzi, Jennifer squeezed out of the APT as soon as its door had opened wide enough to permit it and began to run—out of the park and in the opposite direction from her apartment—as fast as her legs could take her.