Wishful Thinking (2 page)

It was gone. She was sure of it. She’d lost her phone once before—about as expensive a mistake as you could make, aside from dropping a diamond ring down a grate—and even with the free upgrade she’d had coming, it had cost her $300 to replace. She didn’t want to think about what it was going to cost her to replace it now.

Julien was tugging at her sleeve. Crouching down, she took him by the shoulders and looked him in the eye. “I must have dropped it somewhere,” she told him. He let out a cry. “It’s a phone!” she said, attempting to be the grown-up, though she couldn’t help adding, “And losing it is much worse for me than it is for you.”

Julien raised his eyebrows skeptically, like,
Really?
She raised her eyebrows back at him.
Really
. “Sorry, Mom,” he said. “Can I have gum on the way to school?”

“No,” she answered. Jennifer sat back on her heels. The battery on her dirt-cheap cordless landline was dead (she’d left it off the charger, naturally, after hanging up with Vinita), so she couldn’t even try calling her phone until she got to work. She sighed. But part of her wondered, would a morning without her phone be so bad? Yes her phone kept
her life together. But sometimes its chimes, pings and never-ending emails weighed on her like a digital ball and chain.

Suddenly, Julien pointed to her laptop on the kitchen table. “Did you try that thing?” he asked.

“What thing?”

“That thing we installed last time. Find My Phone.”

Find My Phone!
How could she have been so stupid? Jennifer got quickly to her feet, trying not to be too hopeful but hopeful all the same, ran over to the table, sat down, and booted up her laptop.

She typed the URL and logged in. Julien stood expectantly at her side. A big green button appeared: F
IND
M
Y
P
HONE
. Most likely her phone was somewhere in Queens, being prepped for sale on Canal Street, she thought, having been hocked by her opportunistic cab driver. (
Bastard!
) But it was worth a try. She clicked. She watched the wheel spin. L
OCATING
…

A map appeared, and on it a blue dot. Jennifer did a double take. The dot was at 270 West Eleventh Street. “That’s our address!” Julien cried. “It’s here!”

Could it be? She had looked everywhere, and she could find a Lego head in a box of Playmobil. Maybe she had dropped it in the lobby?

Just then Jack came stumbling in, half crying. “Mama,” he said, climbing into her lap and rubbing his eyes. “Do I have school today?” Jack asked this every morning. Unlike his older brother, who had celebrated the first time he’d had “real” homework (though he was now considerably less enamored), Jack liked to cuddle, sleep in, and wear pajamas to the park. “Yes, darling,” she said. Glancing at the time on her computer, she saw that it was already seven fifteen. To get both boys to their respective schools and her to work on time, they had to be out the door by 7:40 sharp—a departure
time that was quickly receding from the realm of possibility.

“Play the sound, Mom,” Julien said, reaching over her to the trackpad. He clicked the button that read P
LAY
S
OUND
. “Do you hear anything?” he asked. She didn’t.

“Do you want to play a game?” Jennifer asked Jack, nudging him off her lap. “We need to listen for a sound coming from Mommy’s phone so we can find it!”

“You wost your phone
again
!” Jack cried.

“
Lost
,” Jennifer corrected him, deliberately pronouncing the
L
. Correcting Jack’s speech, which she, Jack’s speech therapist, and his preschool teacher worried over constantly these days, had become so automatic she probably would have done it even if he were saying, “Wook out!” as a steel beam fell on her head.

“Llllost,” Jack repeated, pressing his tongue dutifully against the top of his palate.

“Shhh,” Julien said impatiently. “Be quiet.” Julien began canvassing the living room, tiptoeing around it like Elmer Fudd in hunting season. Jack followed suit. Jennifer walked down the hallway into the boys’ room but heard nothing but the sound of her children, fighting in the living room over who would get to play on it first once the phone was found. They were making such a racket she couldn’t hear herself think, let alone hear her phone if it were bleating for help.

“Enough!” Jennifer barked, walking back into the living room. “Jack, get dressed! Julien, pack up your homework!”

The boys skedaddled posthaste. The room was quiet at last. Alone, Jennifer held her breath and listened. This time she heard something. Faint but distinct, it was a reverberating chime, like a prolonged submarine ping. Following the sound of it, she found herself hunching down in front of her own front door. The muffled ping was coming from the other side.

Jennifer fumbled with the locks, then flung the door open
and looked down. To her astonishment, a heavy, cream-colored envelope lay at her feet.
FOR MS. JENNIFER SHARPE, 270 West 11th Street, Apt. 19A, New York, New York, 10014.
There was no postmark and no return address. Jennifer bent down and picked up the envelope. The lettering was extravagant, like a wedding invitation, though on closer inspection she could see it wasn’t handwritten but had been printed somehow. She turned the envelope over and opened it, careful not to let the elegant object tear. Its interior was lined with what looked like gold leaf. Her phone, its chiming beacon still sounding, was tucked inside.

It was all Jennifer could do not to kiss it. Sliding her thumb across her phone’s smooth face, she silenced the chiming sound and allowed herself a moment of delicious relief, which was immediately interrupted by the boys, who’d heard the pinging and come barreling down the hall, lunging over each other for the phone. Jennifer was about to tell them to shut up and put their shoes on (though not in so many words), when she saw something strange on her home screen: an envelope, the same creamy color as the envelope her phone had been in moments before, addressed in the same elaborate, formal font, to her.

By now the boys were practically climbing up her legs. “Quiet!” she said. It was like screaming into the wind. “
Quiet!
” she roared. Startled, the boys exchanged a glance.

“What is it, Mama?” asked Jack, who had not made it past striped socks and a
Green Lantern
T-shirt in his interrupted efforts to get dressed.

Jennifer, not answering, tapped the envelope once with her thumb. It opened, and a piece of stationery glided out. She had just begun to register that a message was written on it when, at a volume Jennifer had not thought her phone capable of, a clear, ringing female voice filled the room. “Dear Ms.
Sharpe,” it began. The boys’ eyes went wide. “As you have undoubtedly deduced, your phone came to be in my possession last night. I am sorry not to have returned it to you immediately, but the hour was very late.” Jennifer turned her phone over and around, as though its exterior might provide some clue to the adventures it had been through during the night. Her boys stared too. The voice, sonorous and precise, had established a commanding presence in their little living room.

“I have taken a small liberty, however,” the voice continued. “I am an inventor, of sorts, and I have been working on an application designed, I now realize, precisely for a person such as you. Last night, in a fit of inspiration, I installed this application on your phone.” Upon hearing this, Jennifer held her phone away from her body. The boys took several steps back as well.

“It really is quite a miraculous application; I’m sure you will agree! A word of warning, however. If you choose to use it, please contact me first. It is a very powerful technology and requires some instruction if it is to be used safely. Again, please accept my apologies for any inconvenience this may have caused. I hope to hear from you soon. Ta-ta for now! Sincerely, Dr. Diane Sexton.” The message ceased its methodical scroll, slipped back into its envelope, and vanished.

“Whoa,” Julien said.

“Double whoa,” Jennifer agreed. Then she looked at the time: 7:29.
Seven twenty-nine!

Snapping out of the spell that had temporarily ensnared them, Jennifer knelt to activate her two still-somewhat-stupefied sons. “Seven twenty-nine!” she cried. “Julien, put on your shoes! Jack, pants, now!”

The boys scattered with shouts of assent, though Jennifer knew she’d soon be in Jack’s room, ensuring the execution of
the pants portion of his ensemble. Jennifer quickly crossed to the kitchen and threw turkey slices, an applesauce, and a squeezie yogurt into Jack’s Scooby-Doo lunch box (Julien ate lunch at school), then grabbed two breakfast bars for the boys to eat on the train. Gathering her own things, she ran through her mental checklist, grabbing each item as she thought of it: laptop, notebook, lipstick, wallet, keys, phone.
Phone.

She smiled.
How lucky to have it back
, she thought, as she slipped its slim frame into her coat pocket, the feel of it in her hand as gratifying as a shot of dopamine. The circumstances of its return could hardly have been stranger, to be sure. But it had been returned to her, and for now that was all she needed to know.

T
HE BOYS GOT TO
school on time, but not early enough for Jennifer to get to work when she was supposed to, which, in the new regime, was punishable by public humiliation by staff meeting. And so she was running through a fine fall mist, laptop bag slapping awkwardly against her left hip, the band that held her thick, shoulder-length brown hair sliding steadily downward toward the tip of her ponytail as her chunky heels clomped along the concrete.

This happened more often than she liked to admit: not “running” to an appointment or to work or to the boys’ schools in the metaphorical sense, but
literally
running, without a moment to spare. In the not-so-distant past, the only time Jennifer had run anywhere had been when she was training for a marathon. (Had that really been her, in a pre-baby, pre-divorce life, sailing through Central Park in a jog bra with the slightest hint of a six-pack?) Arriving at the offices of the New York City Housing Authority at 250 Broadway, Jennifer
stopped to catch her breath at last and, producing a Kleenex, dabbed at the sweat stippling her forehead. As she stepped into the hustle and bustle of the building’s vast lobby, however, taking her place among the ranks of neatly dressed adults holding cups of coffee and swiping ID badges one after the next at the turnstiles next to the elevator banks, nary a child or sippy cup in sight, her frantic dash gave way to a sense of purposeful calm. In the morning, work was a refuge. By the end of the day, she longed for home.

Riding up the elevator to her office on the twentieth floor, Jennifer shifted her focus entirely to her job, which, for all its headaches and despite her new boss, she loved. She had a boggling number of things to do,
but it’s morning!
she reminded herself. Anything was possible.

Then the elevator doors opened and Jennifer saw her eager, easily flustered, and very young assistant, Tim, standing there, evidently waiting for her. This had never happened before. She was a city employee, not Anna Wintour. But there he was, holding his phone and gesturing at her with it in a faintly accusatory way.

“Is your phone on?” he asked.

“Of course it is … oh,
Fahrvergnügen
!” she exclaimed, pulling a face and
grr
-ing with frustration. Tim made a face, too, though it was more of an eye roll. (He had never gotten used to the array of curse-word substitutes she had adopted since she’d had children.) She pulled out her phone and found it was set to silent—she must have forgotten to switch the sound back on after her last meeting yesterday. There were at least six messages from Tim from the last half hour, stacked up like little green planks eating up the surface of the screen.

“Bill is waiting for you,” Tim said as they began to walk toward her office. “He says he e-mailed you last night? There’s somebody here; she’s been here since eight thirty.”

“Who?” Jennifer asked.

Tim pulled up an e-mail on his phone. “Alicia Richardson?”

“Alicia Richardson? What’s she doing here?” Jennifer hadn’t seen Alicia Richardson in years. A former high school principal who had turned around one of the worst-performing schools in Brooklyn, Alicia had been running education programming for the department when Jennifer came on board. The two of them had overlapped only briefly, but it had been long enough for Alicia to make clear just how unimpressed she was with Jennifer’s credentials. “That MBA,” Alicia had once acidly informed her, “is about as relevant to what we’re doing here as an astronaut suit.” Alicia had left soon after to become a superintendent at a district in Brooklyn.

Once in Jennifer’s modest office, which had just enough room for her desk and a single chair for visitors sandwiched between the wall and a bookcase, Tim managed to sit down across from her, long legs bent, knees grazing the edge of Jennifer’s desk. Jennifer woke up her computer and began scanning her inbox for Bill’s e-mail.

“Don’t forget to punch in,” Tim said with singsong sarcasm.

“Oh, for Pete’s sake!” Jennifer said, minimizing her e-mail and opening up the Employee Time Clock application Bill had imposed upon them during his first week as department head. A window popped up.
You’re late
, it read. “I know,” she muttered. Then another message popped up. An IM from Bill.
Please join me in my office. Meeting with Alicia Richardson as per my e-mail last night.

Barely suppressing a groan, Jennifer grabbed a legal pad and a pen and stood up. Tim stood too. “Remember how it used to be?” he asked, following her out into the hallway, his
wide, bony shoulders slumping. “When it was just you and me, and I didn’t have to pick up anybody’s dry cleaning?”

Jennifer, despite her rush, stopped and put a hand on Tim’s arm. She knew that in many ways he’d gotten the rawest deal when Bill had taken over, having gone from being Jennifer’s assistant—doing grunt work, yes, but plenty of meaningful work too—to being Jennifer’s and Bill’s, which had turned out to mean mostly Bill’s, whose “private-sector work ethic” had come complete with the expectation that his underlings would serve him in the style to which he had become accustomed.