Wishful Thinking (5 page)

Jennifer was typing
yes call later
when out rang another
PING!
This time she didn’t flinch. But this time her whole screen went midnight blue.

She froze. Slowly retracting her thumbs from text position, she cradled the phone in both hands. Then she watched, transfixed, as the gleaming white wand appeared. It
hovered a moment on the screen and then, with the subtlest flick, freed itself of the constraints of two dimensions and rose out of her screen to hover above it in midair. Jennifer, suit pants still around her ankles, emitted the tiniest of gasps.
The wand was in 3-D
. She couldn’t help thinking that it was reveling in her amazement, pausing to twirl around. At last it tipped back slightly and then snapped forward, pricking the surface of her phone and sending its surface rippling. As the screen settled, these words emerged:
Reminder: Guitar Recital, West End School for Music and Art, 55 Bethune Street, Tuesday, September 22, 4:00 p.m. to 5:00 p.m.

As clearly crazy as Dr. Diane Sexton was, Jennifer thought, she had to admire her style.
Guitar Recital.
She closed her eyes, and for a moment she was there, basking in the glow of her beautiful little boy. Once again, with its tasteful reminder—in 3-D, no less!—Wishful Thinking had briefly transported her from the city offices she’d ducked out of, with their stale smell of cheap mustard and decades-old carpet, to the place she dearly wished to be.

Remember!
the reminder continued, the wand straightening up suddenly and assuming a crisp, authoritative air as it tapped each word of warning.
At the appointed hour, find a place where you can travel unobserved. You must be physically in contact with your phone at both the beginning and the end of the appointment time. When your appointment has concluded, you will be transported back to the place and time where you began it. For further instructions, please contact
Dr. Diane Sexton
. Safe travels!

With that, the wand disappeared with a faint
pop
.

The spell broken, Jennifer let out an irritated sigh. A harrumph, more like it.
Safe travels?
Jennifer thought as she pulled up her pants.
This lady really
is
batty
.

At 3:58, however, Jennifer was standing with one hand on the bathroom door, staring at her phone.

She really should get going if she wanted to get coffee before the staff meeting, she thought. But still she stood unmoving. Was it possible? Could she “travel” to the West End School, go to Julien’s recital, then “travel” back to four o’clock in the secret bathroom, and no one would be the wiser?

Three fifty-nine.

Only one more minute. She was certainly unobserved. The staff meeting wasn’t for another half an hour. Her hand was on her phone.

Why not wait?

Then Jennifer did something silly. Clicking her heels together lightly, she shut her eyes like Dorothy and whispered a single word: “Julien.”

“Julien, Julien, Julien.”

Four o’clock.

Hand on her phone, Jennifer felt a jolt. A powerful jolt. And in an instant, a flash of heat emanated from where her fingertips touched her phone. For a moment her skin seemed to adhere to the surface of the now-superheated screen, as though the pads of her fingertips were welded there, but in the split second it took her mind to register the heat and send her hand the signal to pull away, the current spread and shot through the rest of her body. She was melting. Watching as her phone gave rise to a portal, a whirling tunnel materializing before her eyes like the narrow end of a tornado, Jennifer wanted to scream. But while her mind was one big, guttural cry for help, her mouth could not make a sound. Her hand and her phone were one now, and, even stranger, this was becoming true of the rest of her body too. It was as though she were being collapsed and drawn into a tiny point, sucked into a hole that was expanding, opening to take her in … and the hole was her phone. Her magical, marvelous smartphone, which, she thought, just as everything went black, was about to do her in completely.

* * *

I
T STOPPED AS QUICKLY
as it had begun.

Jennifer blinked. It was dark. The dark was so complete at first that she wondered, for a minute, if she had gotten lost somewhere in space. Her heart was ramming in her chest, and her armpits and the middle of her back were dripping with sweat. Her fingers were clenched so tightly around her phone, she was amazed that neither it nor her fingers had cracked in two. Despite the phone-related trauma she had just been put through, however, she was comforted to feel the device intact in her hand. For years she had reached instinctively for her phone whenever she felt scared, threatened, or lonely, searching it for the distraction, the connection, or the message that would calm her. The fact that her phone might now be the threat didn’t seem to matter. Or perhaps that was more than she was ready to think about.

The roaring in her ears was gradually beginning to subside. Jennifer, however, remained paralyzed.

PING!

Yelping with fear, she hurled the phone from her body, stumbling slightly and banging into something when she did, causing multiple objects to fall to the floor with a clatter.

Oh my God,
she thought,
what have I done?
Shaking, she got down on her knees and began to search madly in the dark, groping desperately until she heard the
ping
again. Then she saw it: a faint glow emanating from under a set of what were apparently metal shelves. Reaching underneath them, she managed to make contact with her fingertips and drag her phone toward her, scraping a bit of skin off the top of her right hand as she did. Exhausted and shaking, she raised her phone hand—she was beginning to think of it as such—level with her face. And there it was, in that distinctive Wishful Thinking
script:
Guitar Recital, West End School for Music and Art, 55 Bethune Street, Tuesday, September 22, 4:00 p.m. to 5:00 p.m. Arrived.

Arrived?

The cool light from her awakened phone began to awaken her senses too. Slowly she started to look around. She was able to make out the outline of a door in front of her, fluorescent light visible around its edges, and there was something plastic and yellow next to her that moved a bit when she nudged it. A mop bucket? She put her phone in flashlight mode, swung it around to her left, and saw brooms and shelves full of cleaning equipment—some of which was now on the floor.

She was not in outer space. She was in a broom closet.

She stood up. Reaching out, she placed her hand on the cold metal door in front of her. Should she open it? She was in a broom closet, yes, but she could be anywhere. She was probably in a broom closet on the abandoned eighteenth floor of 250 Broadway, having temporarily lost her mind, blacked out, and stumbled into one somehow. Could she have made her way from the bathroom to a broom closet without even being aware? Was the door locked, she wondered, or would she be trapped until it occurred to Tim to look for her here on the secret-bathroom floor—if it ever occurred to him? Her clock read 4:01 p.m. She’d already been gone at least ten minutes. Nobody would miss her, most likely, until the staff meeting. She had to find out where she was.

Jennifer turned the knob slowly, carefully, to the right, opening the door a tiny crack.

That was when she heard it: Julien’s voice, as clear as day.

“I wish Mommy were here,” he said.

“Mommy works very hard to take care of you, Julien,” a male voice replied, “and I know she would have been here if she could have.” Norman? Jennifer felt almost as shocked to hear Norman talk about her like that as she did to have been
sucked into her smartphone and spit out halfway across town. The voices faded. Could it be? Was it possible that she was at the West End School for Music and Art, just as the app had said she would be?

Peeking out of the closet to make sure the coast was clear, she saw them: Julien, Jack, Norman, and Melissa, filing into the recital hall.

She did not know how she’d gotten there, and she couldn’t imagine how she would get back—not to mention what was happening right now, at 4:00 p.m., in the building where she had just been standing. But she could still see the top of her son’s head as a stream of parents and children pushed past her, and, knowing he was so near, she didn’t care. Something miraculous had happened, and she, Jennifer Sharpe, was going to make the most of it.

“Julien!” she called, her whole body still reverberating with shock but quivering with a kind of triumph too. “I’m here!”

A
T THE SOUND OF
her voice, Julien whirled around and then came running. She bent forward, weight on her front leg, and pulled him upward as he leaped into her arms, nuzzling her nose into his neck. At eight he was heavy now, but this was a way of greeting each other they’d perfected during the years when Norman had made only the occasional appearance in their lives. Now, however, she was faced with Norman, who was here, looking at her with a mixture of surprise and, she thought, quizzical irritation.

“I thought you couldn’t make it!” said Melissa, smiling warmly at her.

“I changed some things around,” she said, putting Julien down. She kissed Melissa hello as Jack wrapped himself around her legs, nestling his face into her stomach. “This was more important!” She was a little startled by how easily she lied—not only lied, but milked the lie for mommy points.

“It’s great that you’re here,” Norman said. He tried to meet her eyes, but she quickly looked away.

“Let’s go!” she enjoined. Motioning to the four of them to file ahead of her, she hung back a bit, surveying her body to make sure everything was still put together right. So far so good: no signs of scrambled parts or teleportation skid marks.

Was
she in two places at the same time, she wondered, as the app had said she would be—here and at the office? She couldn’t be, she told herself. Clearly she couldn’t! But as soon as she had soaked in Julien’s delight and Jack’s kisses (delivered with a faceful of chocolate from a cookie Melissa had brought along—
Too many sweets!
Jennifer thought), sent Julien backstage, and taken her seat in the front row with Jack in her lap and a program in her hand, her heart, the one that had miraculously continued beating as she had traveled through space via phone, began to pound anew.

I’ll text Tim
, she thought.
Or, no, I’ll call Vinita.
She took out her phone, and a message appeared, in midnight blue.

While on a Wishful Thinking appointment,
it read, as polite and civilized as ever,
the receipt or transmission of data is strictly prohibited. Your phone is currently in airplane mode and will remain so until your Wishful Thinking appointment is over.

Why wouldn’t she be allowed to use her phone while on a Wishful Thinking appointment? She could think of some good reasons—but only if she really was at her office right now, and at the West End School at the same time.

Norman leaned over and touched her arm. The sudden sensation of his hand on her skin caused her to jerk backward so abruptly, Jack almost tumbled out of her lap.

“Easy there,” he said. “I was just going to ask if it was hard to get away from work. You’ve been so busy lately.”

“A little. Not really,” she added, backtracking. “How great that
you
could be here!” she said, hoping to distract Norman from searching her face too carefully—not that he would be able to read anything there. For an actor, Norman was
remarkably inept at reading other people’s nonverbal cues. “I was here the last time,” he said. He looked at Jennifer’s hand. “What happened?” he asked. “Fisticuffs at the office?”

Before she could answer, however, something over her shoulder caught his attention. She recognized an eager look she knew too well.

“Hey, did you see Scott Spencer is here?” Norman asked, rising from his seat and dusting the cookie crumbs from his pants. “He was in that show
Notorious Minds
? I have a pilot idea I’ve been wanting to pitch him.” Jennifer remembered another way she depended heavily on her phone—she pretended to study it at moments like this, when Norman was trying to impress her. She stared at her wounded hand instead. “Jennifer, did you hear me? I’m going to go talk to Scott Spencer about a pilot.” Nodding, she smiled. Running a hand through his thick, dark hair, still his greatest asset, Norman headed toward Scott, who immediately took out his phone and started typing on it, apparently employing a similar defense against Norman’s advances. Jennifer sighed. Now Norman would be a kiss-ass, Scott would blow Norman off, and Norman would think it had gone well. Even worse, Scott would probably steal his idea, as Norman actually was a talented writer. Norman was a starfucker who got fucked by stars.

Melissa and Jennifer exchanged a knowing look. After all their years together, Melissa knew Norman almost as well as Jennifer did. It was hard to believe Melissa was in her late twenties now. Jennifer had found her nearly six years before through a West Village mommy message board, a girl from Long Island with four older brothers who showed up for her interview wearing too much perfume, tight-fitting sweats that rode dangerously low on her hips, and a glaring addiction to tanning booths. Julien had immediately fallen for her, and she for him.

Jennifer looked at a clock on the wall. It was already ten after four, and there were no signs of the recital starting. “How long will this take?” Jennifer asked Melissa. “I mean, what time will he go on?”

“Just a sec,” Melissa said. She was texting somebody on her phone. Jennifer stared at it hungrily. She had an overpowering urge to ask if she could borrow it to call Vinita, but she resisted. If she wasn’t supposed to use her phone, maybe she wasn’t supposed to use other people’s phones, either.

Melissa put away her phone and took out the program. “So what time?” Jennifer asked her again, anxiously. Jack had begun covering Jennifer’s scratched hand in chocolaty kisses. “He’s playing close to the end,” Melissa replied, yawning. “Maybe five or five fifteen?”