Wishful Thinking (7 page)

At 4:58, Jennifer reached the unit and found it blessedly empty. She took out her wallet and pulled out a quarter. For a moment she paused to marvel at the fact that her purse had traveled with her, too, something she hadn’t given much thought to until now. The fact that she had a quarter, when she rarely used cash anymore, seemed almost equally miraculous.

Once Jennifer was inside, it took a full twenty seconds for the doors to close—she’d forgotten about that. But by 4:59, she was safely ensconced in the APT, another sort-of-secret bathroom, though not nearly as nice as the one on the eighteenth floor. (Despite the best efforts of the Little APT That Could Clean Itself, wads of soiled toilet paper littered the floor.) Defending herself against the stench and trying not to gag, Jennifer bent one arm across her face and wedged her nose into the crook of her elbow. With the other hand, she gripped her phone tight.

The phone struck five. Jennifer felt a powerful jolt.

“Here we go,” she managed to say as the crackling tornado yawned open to envelop her.

And off she went.

I
T WAS JUST LIKE
the last time—the same superheated sensation, as though her fingertips were fusing with her phone; the same feeling of being scrambled and squeezed to the size of an atom and then being pumped full of weight and mass again, like a tiny balloon dunked into Niagara Falls. But this time, when she found herself once again in her secret bathroom, standing in front of the sink with one hand on the door handle, exactly as she’d been when she left it, Jennifer did not panic or curse. Instead, she laughed.

Except she didn’t just laugh. She laughed like crazy, or like she’d gone crazy—she laughed so hard she cried. Tears fell from her eyes and made a mess of her mascara. Her stomach muscles cramped with hilarity. She laughed so hard she hardly recognized herself, goofy and gasping for breath. It had been years since she’d laughed like that, and she let it wash over her and run through her with pleasure. Laughing like that, she felt as alive and free as she had when she was a little girl and would jump so high on her next-door neighbors’ trampoline she
could pull handfuls of leaves off their sycamore tree’s branches.

After a minute or two of this, however, she glanced at the mirror and, seeing the damage she was doing to her appearance, forced herself to take several long, deep breaths. Then, still giddy but with some measure of self-control, she looked at the clock on her phone: 4:02 p.m.

“Four oh two,” she said aloud. It was astonishing, and confirmation of what she already knew. Wishful Thinking had worked again. She’d gone from 5:00 p.m. to 4:00 p.m. She had traveled backward through time.

And now it was 4:02! Which meant that she had time. Time to clean up her smudged makeup. Time to get Tim his skinny pumpkin-spice latte, even if the afternoon coffee-break line was long. Time to get to the staff meeting with time to spare. And she had gone to her son’s guitar recital without Bill Truitt or his Employee Time Clock having the slightest idea she’d ever left the building.

Was she really at the West End School right now, too, trying to get her bearings in a broom closet?

And then she saw it. The scratch on her right hand, and next to it the faintest trace of a chocolaty kiss.

Smiling, Jennifer took out her lipstick and, as she applied it, began to hum.
Somewhere there is a woman,
she thought,
who went to her son’s guitar recital in the middle of a workday without missing a meeting, and who will never have to miss anything, anywhere, ever again.

I am that woman,
she thought.
I am a time traveler. Forget the time traveler’s wife.

J
ENNIFER TOOK HER SEAT
in the conference room five minutes early, coffee cup placed neatly above the upper-right-hand corner of her legal pad, photocopies of the meeting’s
agenda in hand, collated and ready for distribution. All she needed was a couple of freshly sharpened number 2 pencils, and she would have rivaled the overachieving overpreparedness of her sixteen-year-old self, seated in the first row of trigonometry class.

Only a few agenda items into the meeting, however, Jennifer’s time-traveler euphoria was gone, replaced by medium- to low-grade time-travel panic. What had she been thinking, cavalierly ignoring Dr. Sexton’s instruction that she contact her before using the app? Could she safely go home to her children without knowing what she had just put her body through? What if her phone was dangerous somehow? In the sobering light of the conference room, the question she asked herself most was: How could she have been so reckless? The first time was understandable. She hadn’t believed the app was real. But to put herself through it a second time without having any idea how it worked or what it was had been crazy.

Vinita
, Jennifer thought.
I have to talk to Vinita.

Possessed by this new resolve, Jennifer began hurrying the agenda along—so much so that Bill asked her sharply if there was someplace else she needed to be.

“Doctor’s appointment,” she found herself saying. “I made it for the end of the day, but five thirty was the latest I could get.” Bill frowned and Tim raised his eyebrows. It was 5:20. “So if we could wrap this up?” she asked. “I’d be very grateful. I’m already going to be late.”

She felt bad lying to Tim (though not to Bill), but it was only partly a lie. Vinita was a doctor, and she needed to see her badly.

Back in her office, Jennifer opened the Employee Time Clock and logged out. A window popped up.
You’re leaving early
, it read. Six o’clock was her official quitting time, though she knew Bill thought she should stay later.

“And I went out for a whole hour this afternoon,” Jennifer replied, sticking her tongue out. “So there, dummy.”

As she rode down the twenty floors to the lobby, squeezed in between a man whose suit jacket smelled like a dirty sock sautéed in curry sauce and a woman reeking of tobacco, Jennifer felt woozier and woozier. Trapped in the stale air of the subway platform a few minutes later, she leaned against a column and fanned her face. Jennifer had always had a sensitive stomach, and suddenly she knew she had to find the nearest garbage can. She lurched toward one, barely making it before emptying her stomach into its overstuffed insides. A man offered his handkerchief to wipe her mouth with, but the sight of it—yellowing, wrinkled, damp—only made her want to throw up again.

Isn’t nausea a symptom of being exposed to radioactivity?
she worried.
What was that blue light, anyway?

After what seemed like an eternity on the train but was really less than ten minutes, Jennifer emerged from the subway at Christopher Street and called Vinita.

It was 5:35. Jennifer was put on hold. She could hear a small child screaming in the background, most likely a toddler who had just gotten a shot. Vinita took two afternoons off every week to be with her girls, so her workdays were long, with her office hours often extending until 7:00 p.m. Jennifer never ceased to be amazed by her friend’s calm in the presence of other people’s sick children—or, more specifically, her calm in the presence of sick children’s parents, who were by far her most difficult patients.

“Hey, you,” Vinita said when she picked up. “It’s a total nightmare here; pneumonia’s going around, some Charles Dickens type of shit. Can I call you tonight?”

“Something
really
weird happened to me, Vee,” Jennifer said. She was still shaking a little from being sick on the
subway. “The weirdest thing that has ever happened to me in my life. Can I come by the office?”

“Where are you?” Vinita asked, switching crisply to what they both referred to as her “doctor voice.” Jennifer must have sounded worse than she knew.

“Christopher Street. I’m afraid to go home. I need you to check me out. Physically. Just to see if I’m okay.”

“What do you mean?” Vinita asked. “Are you hurt?”

“I don’t think so,” Jennifer said, turning in the direction of Vinita’s office. “I promise I’ll tell you everything when I get there, okay?”

“Melissa’s with the boys?” Vinita asked.
Melissa!
Jennifer thought, her heart sinking. Melissa had reminded her yesterday that she needed to leave right at six for school tonight. But Jennifer couldn’t go home yet.

“She can stay a little bit late,” Jennifer lied again, hating herself for it.

“Okay,” Vinita said, “come now. I’ll make it work.”

Heading toward Vinita’s office, Jennifer breathed a sigh of relief. Just the sound of Vinita’s voice reassured her. From the day they had first met, as freshman roommates at Amherst, Vinita had been the reassurer in Jennifer’s life. Vinita was the smartest, most competent, and most no-nonsense person Jennifer had ever known, a perfect foil to Jennifer’s often impulsive, sometimes forgetful, and passionate personality. Vinita had known what to do (or at least whom to ask) when you were nineteen and got vaginal warts. Vinita would know what to do now.

A few minutes later, Jennifer walked into Vinita’s cheerful, pale-yellow waiting room. It was the usual chaotic scene, crammed with coughing kids, stoic nannies, distracted parents, and a lot of beat-up books and plastic toys. Choosing a seat as far removed from everyone as possible, Jennifer tucked
herself in behind a plastic toy refrigerator she knew well. It had been one of Jennifer’s contributions to Vinita’s waiting room—her mother had given it to Julien years ago. Her mother had always insisted on giving both her boys what she called “gender neutral” toys, though generally they were “gender statements” for boys, from Barbies to baby strollers. Julien had never warmed to most of them, but Jack still sometimes pushed his baby doll around in its plastic pram. The refrigerator had been a hit with both boys, but it was too big for her apartment.

Jennifer was about to push a familiar button on the refrigerator, when she thought,
Pneumonia
and pulled back her hand. She took out her phone and texted Melissa.
Running a little bit late at the office
, she wrote guiltily.
Will get there as soon as I can and put you in a cab!

Just then Vinita appeared, and, as always, Jennifer couldn’t help marveling at the sight of her. Even with a pneumonia strain ripping through her clientele, Vee looked more like a star of
Grey’s Anatomy
than a harried pediatrician, her shiny black high-heeled boots accenting her white lab coat, her dark hair swept back into a neat French twist, her plum-colored lipstick complementing her light brown skin. (Vinita was Indian, by way of New Jersey, where her parents had immigrated in the sixties from New Delhi.) Vinita would have looked put-together in a Civil War tent, Jennifer thought. Suddenly she wondered what a sight she must be. She had just puked on a subway platform, after all.

“You look like shit,” Vinita said, after closing the door to the exam room behind them. This time Jennifer didn’t laugh. Instead her face—her whole body—crumpled into a sob.

“Oh, sweetie, I’m sorry!” Vinita said, hugging her, then pulling away to search her face. “You’re scaring me. What happened?” Jennifer shook her head and took a deep breath,
stopping her tears. Vinita locked the door with one hand while using her other to find Jennifer’s wrist and check her pulse. “Do you want me to give you something to calm you down?” Vinita asked.

“No,” Jennifer said. Having been sucked up by her smartphone earlier that afternoon, she thought it seemed inadvisable—at least until Vinita had checked her out—to add even the most anodyne of mood-altering medications to the mix. “I’m sorry I’m scaring you. But can you give me a quick checkup? You know, vital signs and all that? Then I’ll tell you everything.”

Vinita motioned to Jennifer to get onto the examining table. There was a loud crinkle as Jennifer’s butt hit the Elmo-printed paper. The two of them then sat in silence as Vinita did one of the things she did best: examining a nervous and emotionally fragile patient. She palpated. She peered. She listened, looked, and measured. She pulled back.

“Your eyes are a bit dilated,” she pronounced. “And you have this look—it’s funny, because you don’t have a fever, but you have the look of someone with a high temp, a little glittery and feverish in the eyes. And you’re flushed. And you have a little vomit on your sleeve. You threw up?”

Jennifer nodded, looking at her sleeve and making a face.

“Since you still haven’t told me what’s going on, I might be missing something. But in my professional opinion, physically, anyway … you’re absolutely fine.”

“Thank God,” Jennifer said. “Now let me tell you what happened.”

And so she did. The missing phone. The mysterious envelope. The app, and Jennifer’s certainty that it was a gimmick to exploit pathetic mothers on the verge of a nervous breakdown. Booking an appointment anyway and getting sucked into the tunnel of blue light. Landing in the supply closet. The recital, the return trip to the office, and what
happened then. Vinita listened with her head cocked back slightly. She looked deeply concerned, which sent a fresh wave of panic over Jennifer.

“Are you thinking what I’m thinking?” Jennifer asked. “That maybe I was exposed to something? Radioactivity, maybe? What would it be? I have no idea how it works. …”

Vinita didn’t reply. “Can you show it to me?” she finally asked quietly. “The app?”

Jennifer took out her phone and woke it up. She launched her calendar, but Wishful Thinking did not appear. She went to
CREATE AN EVENT
, but when she scrolled down the list of available calendars, there was no sign of Wishful Thinking there, either. She did a double take. She looked again. There was her home calendar. There were the boys’ school calendars. There was her work calendar. But the Wishful Thinking calendar, and the entry for the guitar recital?

Gone.

There was nothing on her phone, in fact, even approaching midnight blue.

“What the … ?” Frantically, she scrolled through every screen. She turned it off and on. She shook it like a Polaroid picture. It was no good. The app had disappeared—
poof
—for real.