Wishful Thinking (9 page)

“Yeah?” she said, her anger emboldening her. “Give me that little log.” She snatched it out of his hands and crumpled it. “Fuck you, Norman.
Fuck you.
”

“That’s really nice, Jennifer,” he said. She felt embarrassed. She uncrumpled the paper and offered it back to him. He shook his head. “You can keep that copy,” he said. Sighing, he stood. “I just wish you could think of them and what
they
need.”

It was pointless to respond to that. If she had learned anything from her divorce, it was that two people who had once shared a story of their lives could suddenly and irrevocably break with it, and where there had once been one story, two different stories, with two different sets of irrefutable facts, took its place. Norman thought Jennifer was selfish; he’d said it over and over again when she’d left him. Jennifer thought only a total narcissist could interpret her actions, and her life, through such a narrow lens. And there they stood. On two sides of a narrative chasm neither could cross.

“So what are you going to do?” she asked. She was beginning to look through the crinkled paper in her hand. The log was detailed. Worst of all, it was accurate. Days she’d worked late, things she’d canceled, meetings she’d missed. Her job already required her to make the fact that she was a single
mother all but invisible to Bill, and that was hard enough. But if she agreed to meet the milestones he’d set out in order to get the bonus (and, possibly, in order to keep her job at all), she wouldn’t just need to pretend not to have children; she would need to pretend to have a wife—the kind of wife even husbands didn’t have anymore. For three years now, Melissa had been the closest thing to a wife she’d had, though the kind who didn’t cook and never did the laundry. And now even her dependence on Melissa was being used against her.

Melissa.

How did Norman put this together?
she wondered. There was only one possible answer. He’d had help from the person she trusted the most. Could Melissa really have done that to her, after all they had been through together?

“Do you know that when you showed up at the recital today,” Norman said, “it was the first time you’d made it to something like that since you got that new boss?”

Jennifer was about to answer him, when she froze.
When you showed up at the recital today?

“You don’t have to do it all by yourself, you know,” Norman went on, though Jennifer was only half listening now. “Be everywhere all the time. Do everything for everybody. You just have to let people help. Let
me
help.” Then, gesturing with one hand to her tiny, messy apartment, he added, “And really, Jen. Would a little help be so bad?”

Jen. Only Norman called her that. Before she could answer him, he’d gotten up from the table, opened the door, closed it behind him, and was gone, without another word between them. She’d hardly been able to concentrate anyway. She had showed up at the recital. The app was real, and she had to get it back.

* * *

A
FTER PUTTING THE BOYS
to bed, Jennifer pulled out her springy lump of a sofa bed and booted up her laptop, her heart racing. She hadn’t had a minute to herself since Norman had confirmed her presence at the recital (as Julien and Jack also had, after he left), but as soon as she did, something told her not to call Vinita—not yet. She decided to track down Dr. Diane Sexton instead. If Dr. Sexton was real, she reasoned, she must exist online.
Find Dr. Sexton,
she thought, a
nd I will find the app. Find the app,
she prayed,
and I will be saved.

Finding Dr. Sexton online, however, was not as simple as Jennifer had assumed it would be. For a physicist of her apparent abilities, in fact, the search results were weirdly few. She had graduated from the PhD physics program at Caltech with honors in 1971. For many years she had been affiliated with the Institute for Strings, Cosmology, and Astroparticle Physics at Columbia. She had been only an adjunct there, however, and a year ago her association with the institute had ended. Her list of journal articles and publications was short and not very prestigious, at least as far as Jennifer could tell. The only explanation she could imagine for this was that Dr. Sexton’s work existed somewhere outside the physics establishment, which wasn’t entirely implausible: as Jennifer learned from her new physics boyfriend, Neil deGrasse Tyson, whom she’d watched on YouTube after searching
time travel physics real?
, the inventors of no less than the big bang theory and plate tectonics had been treated like quacks for decades. But it was more than a little unsettling, and enormously frustrating, to have so little to go on.

The image results also appeared to be a wash—there were a porn star and a motivational speaker of the same name (each calling herself “Dr.,” no less), and the two of them dominated the first page of results.

The first image on the second page, however, caused Jennifer’s mouth to drop.

It was a photograph, apparently taken at an institute event, of a woman in a pantsuit, standing with arms akimbo, regarding the camera with a daring, almost regal air. Her brown, spiky hair—dyed, Jennifer had always assumed, as the woman appeared to be in her mid-sixties—perfect posture, and overly large head balanced perfectly on her thin, elegant neck ensured that Jennifer would have known her anywhere. Dr. Diane Sexton was none other than the Shoe Lady.

As if Jennifer needed any further confirmation, she looked at the woman’s shoes. Sure enough, one black, one red.

The Shoe Lady also lived on the nineteenth floor of 270 West Eleventh Street, though in a different wing of the building, and Jennifer had no idea which apartment was hers. She’d moved in several months ago, and the boys (especially Jack) had quickly become enamored of Lucy, her Great Dane. They were a bit put off, however, by her “weird” habit of always wearing one black shoe and one red one. Suddenly it hit her.
Ta-ta for now!
The Shoe Lady, or Dr. Sexton, as Jennifer supposed she should refer to her now, often said “ta-ta for now” when waving good-bye to the boys. A few weeks ago, Jack had informed her that “ta-ta for now” was Tigger’s favorite way of saying good-bye, which had delighted her. It had been a hint, and a big one, and Jennifer had missed it completely.

Jennifer looked at the clock. It was 10:00 p.m. Should she run downstairs to the doorman, laptop in hand, and ask which apartment the crazy lady with the mismatched shoes lived in? Or should she simply hope to see Dr. Sexton in the elevator in the morning and say,
Excuse me, did you happen to put a time-travel app on my phone yesterday? And might I have it back?

It was a moot point. She couldn’t go running around the
building, knocking on doors, not to mention leave the boys alone asleep in their beds. Best to wait till morning and, with a clearer head (she was as tired as she could remember having been in a very long time, which was saying something), decide what to do. Plugging her phone into the charger for the night, however, Jennifer felt a frisson of hope. Not only might the app she so desperately needed be within her reach—it might be right down the hall.

J
ENNIFER SLEPT
,
BUT THERE
was a rub: rather than the blank oblivion of peaceful sleep she’d longed for, she was instead plunged into a sea of mind-wreckingly vivid dreams. During them her brain snapped jarringly from one image to the next, illuminating moments she had experienced that day with the abrupt starkness of a strobe light. Owen touching her shoulder. Julien plucking the guitar. Norman producing the time log from his pocket. Bill Truitt impatiently glaring at the staff meeting. And her hand gripping her phone as the crushing heat of the tornado of light engulfed her.

In the midst of reliving another moment of transport, however—the interior walls of the APT shredding into strips and being replaced with the preening gleam of Wishful Thinking’s wand gallivanting about in 3-D—she felt a tapping at the base of her spine, an irregular drumming, the pressure light at first but starting to mount.

“
Mama!
” she heard a voice call.

Jack!
Wake up!
she thought, trying to scrape the heavy sludge of images and sounds from her brain.

“Mama!” she heard again. And then: “
Wake up!
”

She did. And there was Jack, standing next to her bed, clutching his blue blankie and smacking her back firmly with his open palm.

She was soaked in sweat. It was 3:00 a.m. now. Wiping her brow, she sat up, pulling the covers back from the bed so Jack could climb in.

“You were talking,” Jack said sleepily. “You were talking, but you were asleep.”

“Shhhh,” Jennifer said, lying down beside him. He snuggled up to her, and she began threading chunks of his soft curls between her fingers.

Jack threw an arm across her and let his small hand rest at the base of her scalp. He began running his fingers through her hair too. He got caught on a few sweaty tangles but managed to extricate his fingers from them with careful tenderness, even though he was only half awake. It felt wonderfully good. After a moment, however, Jennifer pulled away, placing his hand back on his side of the bed as he drifted off. Years ago she’d resolved not to let herself rely on her boys’ physical affection too much, though it had been hard. In the months after the separation from Norman, especially, she had found herself powerfully drawn to falling asleep in one of their beds each night and staying there until morning, arms and legs intertwined. But she’d known she had to find other ways to fill her need for human touch. Not that she’d had much luck in that department. Hugs from girlfriends and pedicures went only so far.

With the sounds of Manhattan rumbling outside her windows, Jennifer closed her eyes. A few minutes later she opened them again. Pure exhaustion had knocked her out earlier, but now the Pandora’s box of her mind, overflowing with all that had happened that day, had been opened again, and she knew from experience that very few things could close it. Turning onto her side and cuddling up with Jack (
Screw it
, she thought; she needed his touch right now), she took one of his hands in hers and ran her thumb across its dimpled back,
fingering each tiny indentation where one day a grown man’s knuckle would be.

And then she heard it.

A knock—soft but firm—at her door.

Jennifer sat up on one elbow. She looked at the boys’ metal baseball bat, which she kept in the corner.

The knock came again, louder this time. Jennifer got out of bed, casting a quick look over her shoulder at Jack. He had not stirred. The cat sprang lightly up onto the bed and curled up next to Jack on the pillow, topping off his curls like a lady’s hat.

On tiptoe she made her way to the door. As quietly as she could, she put one eye up to the peephole.

And there she stood. Wearing an off-the-shoulder gray sweatshirt from the
Flashdance
era, black leggings, and two unmatched slippers: one black, one red.

Taking a deep breath, Jennifer opened the door.

“Dr. Sexton?” she said.

“Yes,” answered the woman, smiling. “I am.”

T
HE TWO WOMEN STOOD
facing each other.

“You used the app,” Dr. Sexton said.

Jennifer nodded.

“I am sorry,” Dr. Sexton said. “That must have been quite traumatic.”

Jennifer gave her head a little shake—
no worries
—as though Dr. Sexton had accidentally bumped into her on the street.

“It was unforgivably naive of me to expect that you would, as instructed, contact me first. I don’t know what got into me. And now knocking on your door like this. At this hour. Not that I’m quite sure of the time.”

Dr. Sexton tilted her head to one side, as though to examine Jennifer more closely.

There was a pause.

“There, now. You seem perfectly well. I am very sorry to have done something so careless. At this point, however,” she said with a curt nod, “I hope we can consider the matter closed.”

With that, Dr. Sexton turned to go.

“Wait!” Jennifer said. “You can’t just leave me with … I need to talk to you. I have a million questions!” From the impassive expression on Dr. Sexton’s face, Jennifer sensed that she might never have another chance at getting Wishful Thinking back if she let Dr. Sexton go now. “Like you said … what you put me through … it was the most traumatic thing that has ever happened to me in my life. ‘I’m sorry’ isn’t enough. Do you think it’s enough?”

Dr. Sexton seemed to consider this. She looked up and down the hallway, as though to be sure they had not been seen.

“I suppose you’re right,” she said. “A short interview. Now. Afterward, if we see each other again, I shall pretend we have never met. It’s the only way.”

Jennifer glanced back into her apartment, thinking of the boys. She couldn’t just leave them there alone, but she didn’t want to talk in her apartment, either. Then she remembered. When she had first moved into the apartment, and the ramifications of her decision to leave Norman had felt more and more like a noose around her neck, she had sometimes snuck upstairs for a glass of wine and some semifresh air on the roof of her building, where she could feel a little bit human again after wrestling the boys into bed. To do this, she’d MacGyvered a baby monitor of sorts by calling her landline from her cell phone, picking up the landline and putting it on speaker, then putting it in the boys’ room. From the roof, with her cell phone tethered to the landline by the invisible string of a wireless phone connection, she could hear them cough.

“One minute,” she told Dr. Sexton, leaving her door ajar as she went inside. First she picked Jack up and put him back in his bottom bunk. Then she dialed her landline, checked to see if the connection was clear, and set the receiver just inside the boys’ door. Suddenly self-conscious of her cotton pajama
bottoms and T-shirt, she opted for a pair of Uggs, sweats, and a hoodie, though when she caught a glance of herself in the hallway mirror, she realized all she’d done was upgrade her look from after-hours Liz Lemon to Britney Spears getting off an airplane circa 1999. Phone in hand, she opened the door. “Ready,” she said.