Wishful Thinking (16 page)

Shaking off her initial shock, Vinita sprang into action. First she ran into the apartment and grabbed the inside Dr. Sexton by the arm, examining her pulse, eyes, and reflexes with rough expedience, an examination Dr. Sexton patiently endured. Then she ran back into the hallway and did the same to the Dr. Sexton there. Then she stared at both of them, going from one to the other and back again.

At last, she spoke.

“Holy. Fucking. Shit.”

Jennifer, also looking from one Dr. Sexton to the other, was enthralled. She couldn’t believe her eyes. This was what
she
was doing. She was not simply “adding hours” to her day. She was commuting by wormhole.

Vinita returned to the Dr. Sexton in the living room, leaving Jennifer and the other Dr. Sexton alone in the hallway for a moment.

“Do you want to see yourself?” Jennifer whispered to the Dr. Sexton in the hall.

“Oh, no, I’d rather not,” Dr. Sexton answered, whispering too. “And I’d rather not hear myself, either. I find it most disturbing. This is an extremely imprudent thing to do, my dear.”

“I thought it was an impossible thing to do. The five-hundred-yard radius and all that.”

“The five-hundred-yard radius is a rule I put in place to prevent all possible interactions between a Wishful Thinking user in one space-time and the same Wishful Thinking user in another space-time, in order to avoid paradoxes and other unforeseeable catastrophes. It is not, however, prevented by the laws of physics.”

Abruptly, Vinita appeared in the doorway again, a little wild-eyed. Jennifer turned to her and put an affectionate hand on her arm. It was a lot, she knew, and this was a particularly jarring way to see it. But she was glad Vinita had.

The Dr. Sexton in the hallway produced her phone again. “I think I’ll end this now,” she said, “or begin it, depending on one’s point of view.”

“Home coordinates,” she said, instructing her phone and tapping the screen. “Thursday, October eighth, four thirty-four p.m.” Vinita looked at her watch. It was now 4:38. Dr. Sexton was about to go back in time and land in the living room— which, of course, had already happened four minutes ago.

“Since when can you use voice commands?” Jennifer asked. Dr. Sexton winked, obviously proud of this newest feature. Then, wearing a look of irrepressible triumph, the Dr. Sexton in the hallway vanished into the Wishful Thinking wormhole again, right before their eyes.

Still looking stunned, in Vinita’s case, and grinning ear to ear, in Jennifer’s, the two friends turned to face the only remaining Dr. Sexton, who was standing in the living room, arms crossed in front of her chest like a superhero.

“You invented time travel,” Vinita said. Dr. Sexton simply smiled—almost, Jennifer thought, though only almost— modestly.

Jennifer turned to Vinita. “I know it’s a lot to take in,” she
said. “And I know you think I’m crazy to risk it. But Dr. Sexton’s been using it for months now, and really, it’s perfectly safe.” Jennifer paused. “And I need it. You know that better than anybody.”

Vinita suddenly snapped out of the thrall in which the app’s dramatic demonstration had held her. She turned to Jennifer, not angry now but instead looking deeply worried. “One person has been traveling through space-time via wormhole for a few months, and you think this is
safe
? Yes, I’m impressed. I mean,
impressed
doesn’t begin to cover it. But just because this exists doesn’t mean it’s worth endangering yourself to use it. Sweetie. Are things really this bad? Can’t I help? Sean could help you pay for a nanny who could work nights, if you wanted, or—”

“I don’t want a nanny!” Jennifer burst out. “I want to be with my boys. I want to build this community center. I want your
help
.” Jennifer took a step toward her friend. “Will you help?” she asked. She placed her hand on Vinita’s arm.

“If I say no,” Vinita replied quietly, “are you going to stop?”

Jennifer didn’t answer. She wasn’t sure she could do it without Vinita. But she wasn’t sure she could promise not to, either.

“Because this isn’t a solution,” Vinita went on. “Setting the physical risk aside for a minute, you could argue, in fact, that doing this is an amplification of the problem. You’re spread too thin already, and now you’re going to spread yourself even thinner? You passed out at school today! The only thing crazier than that is that you decided to use the time from the app to volunteer for the school benefit committee!”

Dr. Sexton raised her eyebrows. “That is questionable, in light of the reasons we discussed for your use of Wishful Thinking,” she said. “And who would serve on a committee if she were not under extreme duress?” At this, Dr. Sexton and
Vinita exchanged their first sympathetic glance.

“I will totally resign from the benefit committee,” Jennifer said. “But that isn’t the point.” She sighed, her exhaustion catching up with her again. “It’s a simple question, Vee. Will you help me or not?”

“It is hardly a simple question,” Vinita said, resignation in her voice. She looked at Jennifer, then at Dr. Sexton, then back at Jennifer again. “At the first sign of any physical distress—and I mean
any
—I am pulling the plug. I don’t care if it’s a migraine or a foot cramp. Everything will stop until we figure it out. Okay?”

“Okay,” Jennifer said, nodding vigorously. “Whatever you say. I promise.” Vinita grimaced, but Jennifer could also see a spark of excitement in her eyes. Vinita was a scientist, after all—she had graduated at the top of her medical school class—and while Jennifer knew Vinita was doing this for her, she also knew that the mind-bending significance of Dr. Sexton’s discovery and the prospect of being part of their experiment was alluring to her too.

“We have your word you will tell no one?” Dr. Sexton said, stepping forward and extending her hand to Vinita.

“You have my word,” Vinita replied, taking Dr. Sexton’s hand and shaking it. Jennifer turned and hugged her tight.

“Thank you,” she whispered.

“Don’t make me regret it,” Vinita whispered back.

And then there were three.

T
WO AND A HALF
months later, Jennifer began what had become, since that fateful September day when she had first used the app, a typical Friday.

As in her life before the app, she awoke to the burble of Mr. Coffee, still perched like a loyal pet on the barstool next to her pullout bed. As in her life before the app, she rushed to get the boys ready for school, rushed to get them there on time, and rushed to the office to make it in by eight forty-five. Alicia was always there earlier than she; apparently her husband, Steven, whom Alicia had met when they were rookie teachers at a magnet school in the Bronx, dropped their two children off in the mornings. (
No fair!
Jennifer couldn’t help thinking when she arrived to see Alicia’s steaming cup of coffee and hour’s worth of work done, managing to forget that she was using
time travel
to secure her advantage as the one who always stayed late.) By the time she arrived, however, Jennifer could dive in completely, with a level of focus that was exhilarating. The ambitious—she would have said crazy—milestones Bill had set in order to
open the flagship One Stop community center in a year were beginning to be met, one by one, and with Wishful Thinking powering her efforts, she felt like an athlete with extra red blood cells pumping through her veins, doped and capable of anything. It helped, of course, that Bill had finally made official his directive to dispense with the usual protocol for vetting nonprofit partners, arguing as he had from the beginning that expediency, not bureaucracy, was in the best interest of the people the center would serve. Jennifer had made a last stand against this, opposing the involvement of yet another new nonprofit apparently founded by an FOB (Friend of Bill) solely for this project, but when she did, Bill bluntly informed her that unless she was prepared to take her concerns directly to the Office of the Inspector General, who would most certainly put their entire operation under review, she could either put her head down and cooperate or lose any chance of receiving her bonuses.

So she had let it go. It was not only the money that had swayed her. It was the progress they’d made. The community center, an unrealized dream for so many years, was becoming real: floor plans and artist’s renderings taking shape in the form of concrete, wires, and steel. She and Alicia had donned their Lego-yellow hard hats several times now, touring the site with guys in Timberlands, seeing many of the NYCHA residents Bill’s contractors had employed working overtime to complete the center’s foundation before winter set in. The two of them had not come to love each other these past couple of months, it was true. But the wisdom of their pairing was apparent, to Jennifer anyway. Alicia had quickly been able to establish trust in the community they worked in. She was a natural leader, easygoing and warm, able to listen carefully while steering a conversation in the direction she wanted it to go. Her ease with residents made Jennifer jealous, and
Jennifer’s private-sector pedigree made Alicia suspicious, but they tolerated each other and the work got done.

It helped that they didn’t often work directly together. There just wasn’t time. This Friday, however, they had agreed to spend the afternoon meeting with a few key residents in NYCHA housing in the Fort Greene section of Brooklyn, gathering feedback in order to fine-tune the center’s offerings. With all the labor necessary to get the center off the ground, neither of them had visited the residents in their apartments in a long time—Alicia, in fact, had not paid a visit since her first day.

It was a cold day in mid-December. By five o’clock, as Alicia and Jennifer headed for their last appointment of the afternoon, it was already dark, and a light snow had begun to fall. When they walked into the lobby of the north tower of the complex, however, it was light and warm. The walls were festooned with little white lights, and a cheerful-looking fake Christmas tree hung with plastic golden globes was tucked into the corner. (A tiny menorah was placed next to it, looking somewhat forlorn.) Alicia tensed up a little as they walked in, but only in the way in which any girl who grew up in the city and had some sense would. It helped that she carried herself with the authority of a woman who could assess a situation quickly; she had more than a bit of
just try it
about her. But her forbidding air was disarmed again and again as she caught sight of familiar faces and called out her hellos. (The school where Alicia had been a principal for ten years, earning every award the city had to give during her tenure there, was in the same district.) “It’s been a while,” she would say as she stopped for yet another chat.

They soon discovered the elevator was out. Alicia immediately phoned the maintenance department at NYCHA to report it, and the two of them huffed and puffed (or Jennifer
huffed and puffed; Alicia hardly broke a sweat) up seven flights of stairs.

Their last appointment was with a family Alicia knew well. Its matriarch was a seventy-three-year-old Dominican woman named Amalia Campusano, who greeted them at the door dressed to receive visitors, in a long black skirt and a white blouse tucked in around her ample waist, small gold earrings visible beneath the thinning, dyed-brown hair she’d pulled tightly into a bun. It was an unspoken truth that when a family stayed together in public housing, a matriarch was around, and these were the women whose support they needed most for the center to succeed. Three of Amalia’s fifteen grandchildren had been favorites of Alicia’s at the high school, and one of them, Noel, now twenty-eight, was in the kitchen now, scarfing down a late lunch of
sancocho
.

“These children,” Amalia said in her heavily accented English, gesturing to Noel as she and Alicia drew apart from their embrace, “always eating, and always at the wrong time of day!”

Alicia walked in and smelled the meaty stew simmering on the stove. “You can’t blame them!” she said. “Just smelling that makes
me
want to eat!”

Amalia laughed and squeezed Alicia’s upper arm, beginning the ritual of offering food that Alicia graciously refused. Jennifer introduced herself and trotted out a few lame bits of Spanish, to which Amalia simply nodded absently and smiled. Alicia, meanwhile, pressed Noel for details about the classes he was taking at community college and, when he told her he’d recently gotten his forklift operator’s license, encouraged him to check into the job opportunities available for people constructing the centers. Then she turned her attention to Amalia, switching to Spanish, which Alicia spoke fluently. Jennifer noticed that Amalia’s response to one of
Alicia’s questions seemed to upset Alicia a good deal. She couldn’t understand what was said but made a mental note to ask Alicia about it later.

After a few more bites of
sancocho
, Noel took off and Amalia, Alicia, and Jennifer got down to business.

Alicia and Jennifer sat on the couch, which was covered with a white sheet to guard against the excesses of grandchildren great and small. Amalia sat in her easy chair with her feet propped up, waving wearily at her swollen ankles. Alicia then began to tell Amalia about the center and its offerings. Jennifer listened intently, trying to follow in Spanish. But after a few minutes, tired at the end of a long day and straining to translate, her mind began to wander.

It did not wander long.

It was only a few minutes, in fact, before Jennifer’s brain was seized so jarringly, it was as if her head were riding in a roller-coaster car that had suddenly slammed right into a brick wall. One minute her brain was humming along just fine, processing the data streaming into the organic microprocessors of her eyes, ears, nose, and skin, planted firmly in the time and place her body occupied. And the next minute,
slam
—Jennifer’s brain was in two places at once. Or at least in one and a half places at once. She was undoubtedly in Amalia’s apartment. She could feel the scratchy-stiff sheet against the backs of her legs, hear the sound of Alicia’s and Amalia’s voices, see the wall of family photos, and inhale the smell of strong black coffee. But suddenly she also saw, heard, and felt another reality, too, as though it were projected on top of this one, sounds stuttering and snapping loudly through her ears as though she were listening to two radio stations jamming up the same frequency. And in that other reality she was seated in Vinita’s familiar home office, and Vinita was hovering in front of her, peering with a small handheld light into the pupils of
her eyes. Looking at Vinita’s face as it hovered ghostlike over Amalia’s, Jennifer tried not to react as she saw Vinita scowl and heard her say something in a worried tone. Jennifer didn’t know what, because Vinita’s voice merely skipped over the surface of Amalia and Alicia’s chatter and was lost to it completely.