Wishful Thinking (42 page)

A dragon lives forever, but not so little boys …

Her boys were not little anymore. They were growing, and that was what she wanted, of course! But she couldn’t help wondering: Would it be so bad to slow time down, just a little bit? Wishful thinking, she knew. The app had added hours to her day. But what she really wanted, she thought, was to hold
on a little bit longer to her boys as they were now, to freeze the frame a few more hours, a few more minutes, a few more days.

I’m happy
, she thought. And it was her happiness, too, that she wanted to bottle and, most of all, to last. There was the urgently romantic love she still felt for Owen, which she knew would mellow and change, hopefully in ways that would sustain them over time. There was the balance she’d found in her new job, continuing her work with One Stop but now as cohead of Dr. Sexton’s foundation. Alicia was her counterpart there, just she had been when they’d worked for Bill, but the two women were now free to set workplace policies and goals and did not require themselves or their employees to put work above all else, or reward participation in the who-stays-latest-at-the-office-for-no-reason contest. (Tim, whom they’d brought along with them, appreciated this too.) They worked hard, of course, but made time for family too—Alicia having noted that her last child at home, a teenage daughter, needed more from her than her teenage sons ever had.

Things weren’t perfect, of course. The One Stop community center, which Dr. Sexton’s foundation was now largely responsible for funding, wasn’t improving residents’ lives as much as they’d hoped—infighting and territorial disputes among the participating government agencies had made Jennifer’s vision of putting all of them under one roof impossible to achieve. They’d also faced an array of unanticipated challenges in getting residents to use the center in the first place. They were still forging ahead with the plan to build a second One Stop, in the Bronx, however, and the prospect of expansion was thrilling. At home Owen was still messy and sometimes idiotically optimistic about everything, and Julien had dealt with some of his anxiety at his new school by getting into fights. But all in all, life was better for Jennifer than it had been in a very long time.

Somewhere there is a woman,
she’d written to Vinita recently,
who is done trying to do everything all of the time.

I like her
, Vinita had written back.
Let’s not talk about that other woman anymore.

It was time for bed. “Jack?” she said softly, reluctant to interrupt his reverie.

“Mama!” he said, patting his bed and beckoning her to join him.

She sat down and helped him get settled as he nestled under his covers. At the foot of the bed, he had carefully folded his blue baby blanket, its edges now frayed and filled with holes. She picked it up and began to wrap it around his shoulders.

“No,” he said decisively, sitting up a bit. “I’m not a baby. That blanket is for Pooh. Pooh-baby.”

“Oh,” Jennifer said, “excuse me.” She placed the blanket gingerly over Pooh.

“Maybe the new baby could have that blanket when she’s born,” he said tentatively.

“You think so?” Jennifer said. Smiling, she ran a hand over her taut, six-months-pregnant belly.

“Maybe she could just borrow it for a little while,” Jack said, settling down on his pillow again. “Pooh might want it back someday.”

That was the other thing. Jennifer was pregnant. When she’d said yes to Owen, she’d said yes to that, too. If she was going to make a leap of faith, she’d decided, she had to make it with both feet, leaving nothing behind her. Part of her still couldn’t believe she’d done it, but a swift kick to the ribs was an effective reminder, as was the simple silver band she’d been wearing for the last four months on the ring finger of her left hand.

Jack turned onto his side. “Cuddle?” he asked.

“It’s getting harder!” she answered, lying down on her side next to him in his narrow twin bed, her bulging belly barely fitting up against his tiny tummy.

“Tell me the story again?” he asked.

“About the two tiny particles of light?”

“Yes,” Jack said, taking one of her hands and placing it on his head, a mutually understood request that she run her fingers through his hair and pretend to cut it, something her mother had done to her hair when she was a little girl.

“Okay,” Jennifer said. Every night for weeks now, Jennifer had told Jack this story—the story that Dr. Sexton had written for the boys, but really for herself, not long after Susan died, five months before. It was a story based—though quite loosely—on the quantum theory of entanglement.

“Once upon a time,” Jennifer began, “there were two tiny particles of light, so tiny no human being could ever see them. The two particles were happy, living in the universe and going everywhere they pleased, shooting around outer space in ways that nobody, not even they, could predict. One moment they might be spinning up and down as they hurtled through space; another moment they might spin around and around. But they were so tiny and fast that nobody knew for sure. These particles of light were called photons. Aside from that they had no other name, and both of them were very lonely in the vast, infinite emptiness of space.

“One day, however, something amazing happened. The two photons, who had never collided with each other or even been in the same room together for longer than it takes a fly to beat its wing, found themselves trapped inside the same beautiful diamond.

“Well, neither of these photons had ever been inside a diamond before! It was full of strange crystals, and shapes like towers, only they were towers turned upside down, and
sideways, and hanging from the ceiling at every angle you can imagine. For a while, the two tiny photons bounced all around inside the diamond, feeling alone, as usual. But suddenly something that had never happened to either of them before happened to both of them at exactly the same time.

“They crashed into each other!” Jack cried.

“That’s right,” Jennifer said. “And just as they began to get up to say ‘excuse me,’ and ‘my apologies,’ and ‘oh my, are you all right?’ they realized something. When one of the particles tried to go on her way, spinning and careening as usual, the other particle was pulled along with her. ‘Oh no!’ the first particle said. ‘What are we going to do?’ the second particle asked. They didn’t know. But where before they had been all alone in the universe, suddenly they were coupled. Where there had been only one particle, there were now two. And whether they liked it or not, from that point forward, everything they did, they did together.”

“So they needed names,” Jack said. “So they could tell who was who.” Jennifer nodded. “And one was named Diane,” Jack said, “and one was named Susan, like Susan who died.”

It was so simple and direct, the way Jack said it.
Susan who died.
Jennifer wondered how Dr. Sexton was getting along just now, packing up the brownstone she and Susan had shared for more than thirty years, and where they had been married in a quiet ceremony in the garden just a few months before Susan passed away. Dr. Sexton had decided to donate most of her scientific treasures to the American Museum of Natural History, as part of a
Women in Science
exhibition she was helping to curate in Susan’s memory. The collection was too big for the small apartment she’d chosen to live in, just blocks from where she’d grown up on the Upper East Side.

Jack yawned loudly. “Tell the next part, Mama,” he said.

“From that day onward, Susan and Diane traveled all over
the universe together. Everywhere one of them went, the other went too. At first it was hard. Neither one was used to traveling with somebody else. But after a while they learned how, and soon they were good at it. If one of them spun around and around, the other one spun up and down, so they were always in balance. The best part was that even though it was hard at first, traveling together turned out to be much better than traveling alone.

“Then, one day, after many years had gone by, something terrible happened. The photons were separated. Neither one of them understood how it had happened. One minute they were traveling along as usual, and the next minute they were torn apart, sent in two entirely different directions, hurtling away from each other at the speed of light. What had disjoined them? How would Diane know which way to spin if Susan wasn’t there? And how would Susan know which way to spin without Diane to guide her? Light speed is the fastest speed there is, and the black and empty space between them grew infinitely vast in one irrevocable instant.

“But then another very strange thing happened. A spooky thing. Even though they were so far apart they could not see or hear or reach each other, when Diane spun up and down, Susan spun around and around. And when Susan spun around and around, Diane spun up and down. Stranger still, if one of them tried to do it differently, she couldn’t. It didn’t matter how far away they were. It didn’t even matter if Diane was on Earth and Susan was on some other planet, a planet Diane could not begin to imagine. The two tiny particles of light were connected forever. They were entangled, and once they had been entangled—which is a way of being enchanted—not even the vastest distances in space could part them ever again.

“The end.”

“That’s a true story, right, Mama?” Jack said sleepily.

“It’s based on a true story,” Jennifer said. “Someday I’ll explain what it means.” Propping herself up on one elbow, she prepared for the enormous effort that had become sitting up. She hated being pregnant. She had never been one of those women who loved it. But when she stood up she felt the baby move, and she stood still for a moment, watching in wonder as an elbow, or a knee, swept across her belly. She placed a hand on her stomach. “Good night, Elizabeth,” she whispered. Owen had agreed to let her do the naming. Her baby—her
daughter
—would be named Elizabeth, after her mother. Her middle name would be Susan.

Turning out the light, Jennifer thought of something Dr. Sexton had told her when she had explained entanglement— the quantum theory that two particles, once entangled, will be affected by what is done to the other, no matter how great the distance that separates them (a theory Einstein himself called “spooky” but accepted as fact). “It’s a bit wacky, and unlikely, perhaps, but it is possible that when we used the app, the particles in our bodies, bound together by a particle yet unknown to us, may have remained connected somehow, entangled despite being separated by two different points in space-time.” She had then eyed Jennifer’s growing belly, which to Jennifer’s dismay had already blown up to the size of that of a full-term mother of triplets. “And if that is true, my dear,” she’d added, “imagine the connection between the particles in a mother’s body and her baby’s!”

Jennifer didn’t know about all that. What she did know was that while she had managed to strike a remarkable equilibrium in her life at that moment, it was about to end, for a little while, at least. Nothing blew up balance, she kept trying to tell the hopelessly naive Owen, like a newborn.

Having kissed a sleeping Jack good night, she hurled herself out of his bed and stood. She was so tired already. How
was she going to do it? The breast-feeding, the working, the pumping, the sleeplessness, the exhaustion, the poopy diapers, the endless neediness and crying—not to mention dealing with the demands of the children she already had and attending to Owen’s needs too? And then a thought popped into her head before she could stop it.

Maybe,
she thought,
there’s an app for that.

There are so many people to whom I am grateful for supporting me, in ways great and small, in the writing of this book. First, the teachers, editors, and friends who contributed most directly to its creation: Alexandra Shelley and the members of the Jane Street Writing Workshop, who read its first pages and encouraged me to carry on; Amy Fox, who remains my most trusted editor and who is perhaps most responsible for the fact that my first novel, while still imperfect, is as sure-footed and well structured as it is (and whose abiding friendship means even more to me than her editorial talent, which is saying a lot); Melissa Kantor, who, in a few quick conversations—often during stolen moments at baseball practices or other activities our sons were attending— gave me invaluable advice about how a novel actually gets finished; JillEllyn Riley, who gave me spot-on editorial feedback when I needed it most; and Karen Sherman, who was the best copy editor ever.

No one, however, spent more time or dedicated more energy to the creation of this book than my friend, editor extraordinaire, and cofounder of She Writes Press, Brooke Warner, who talked me down off cliffs when things were progressing slowly—or not at all—and celebrated with me at every breakthrough. Brooke is fair, patient, hardworking, and visionary, and I am so honored to have her as my partner in the exciting publishing venture of which this book is a part. Same goes for Crystal Patriarche, who has made She Writes Press a part of the SparkPoint family, and whose leadership I know will take us far. I will also be forever grateful to my agent, Erin Hosier, who believed in me years ago when I
brought her the manuscript for my first book, the publication of which truly changed my life. Erin enthusiastically championed
Wishful Thinking
in the marketplace and landed me a deal with a major publishing house. It says a lot about her unselfish commitment to her authors that when I chose to publish with She Writes Press instead, she supported my decision completely.

Writing is a lonely endeavor, requiring hours of solitude and the willingness to write even when it seems nobody in the world cares that you are writing but you. (Which is pretty much true.) I would never have finished this book without the communities of writers I have either founded or been invited into; from them, I got the inspiration, advice, friendship, and wisdom I needed—and will always need—to sustain me. Thank you, first and foremost, to the passionate, generous, indefatigable members of SheWrites.com, who have cheered me on and guided my path from my very first “Gone Writing” post through to the end. Thank you, too, to the New York, London, and San Francisco Salons of Women Writers, the authors of She Writes Press, my fellow residents at the Hedgebrook writers’ colony, and my fellow board members at Girls Write Now. It is impossible to individually list all the women who have impacted my life through these organizations, but I would be remiss if I didn’t single out Deborah Siegel, my cofounder at SheWrites.com and a consistently loving, intelligent presence in my life; Nancy K. Miller, my cofounder of the New York Salon of Women Writers and one of my most cherished mentors and friends; and Maya Nussbaum, whose tireless advocacy of the girls of Girls Write Now reminds me daily that writing is hard precisely because it is so important.