Wishful Thinking (19 page)

“I’ll do it,” she said. “I can even take a video.”

“Great!” Owen said. Jennifer took out her phone, swiped her thumb across the screen to bring up the video camera’s view, and tapped the red button. She nodded to Owen when it began to flash.

He nodded back at her, then began. Jennifer turned her phone horizontally to get the whole guitar. Which just so happened to be balanced on top of Owen’s thighs.

He’d been playing for almost a minute, occasionally talking Julien through what he was doing or naming a chord, when he began to sing. He sang in a whisper at first, as though to keep his place in the music, but his voice grew clearer as he went, and the sound of it, husky, deep, and steady, warmed her to her toes.

“So, so you think you can tell … ” he began, half singing the familiar lines, almost as though to himself.

She tried not to look at anything but his hands. But looking at his hands and listening to him sing in that soft, deep
voice was quite enough to make her wish that Julien had stayed gone just one minute more.

“How I wish, how I wish you were here,” he sang. She moved the camera up, just briefly, to capture his face, then dutifully back down again to the guitar. And then it was over. Owen gently placed a flattened palm across his strings to silence them.

“It’s a long song,” he said, looking up and smiling at her. “I think you got enough.”

She looked down and tapped the flashing red button with her thumb.

End of treat
, she thought.
But enough?
Of that, she wasn’t so sure.

A
LITTLE BIT BEFORE
five, it was dark (again) and the snow had begun to fall. Jennifer and Julien left the café where they often spent the hour between guitar and Vinita’s house and walked to Vinita’s, where they met up with Melissa and Jack outside. Remembering to hand Melissa cash for the pizza she’d picked up Monday, Jennifer saw her off, and she and the boys headed inside.

The doorman gave the boys high fives, and as they crossed the lobby on the way to the elevator, they passed a glassed-in Zen rock garden bounded by a shimmering wall of water, lit by floodlights dimmed to the frequency of candlelight recessed in the granite floor. The building was only a few years old, with an indoor pool and a spectacular roof deck Vinita and Sean sometimes used for barbecues or cocktail parties.

Sean and Vinita had met at a graduate school mixer at NYU, when she was in medical school and he was getting his MBA. Jennifer and Vinita had laughed, at the time, at the male business school students’ obvious preference for women going
into specialties like pediatrics, rather than the more demanding, macho field of cardiology or surgery. Sometimes, however, Jennifer couldn’t help feeling Sean had had the last laugh. He traveled ten or fifteen days out of the month, never remembered a birthday or picked up a sock, and had every one of his domestic needs cared for by Vinita (with help from Sandra and her housekeeper, to be sure). But with Vinita’s successful pediatrics practice, he got to enjoy the status of having a doctor for a wife too.

Outside the door, Jennifer and the boys removed their shoes and placed them in a pile beside the orderly rows of girl shoes, ranging from patent leather flats to embroidered boots Jennifer couldn’t help sighing longingly over. (Her boys’ daily uniform of sneakers and sweats was hard to get excited about.) The boys banged on the door, and when it opened, they all got a surprise: Sean. A fair-skinned man with reddish-blond hair; small, round, close-set blue eyes; fleshy red cheeks; and perfect, orderly white teeth, Sean looked more like a cherub than like a Wall Street shark. (One reason, perhaps, he was so good at it.) He also didn’t lack charisma, and Jennifer was always glad to see him—though seeing him home at five o’clock on a Friday was almost as startling as turning on
Dancing with the Stars
and seeing Tom DeLay doing the cha-cha.

“Jennifer!” he said, welcoming her with a hug and a kiss. “Boys!” he said, with even more enthusiasm. “What’s happenin’? Give me five!” He began the ritual of “down low, too slow,” to the boys’ delight.

“You’re home early,” Jennifer observed teasingly.

“It’s Friday,” Sean said lightly, ushering them in. Jennifer didn’t press it. Vinita would explain.

The loft’s floors were made of light, sanded pine, and track lighting hovered from the high ceilings above the open living room and kitchen. The couch was deep and welcoming,
covered in colorful throw pillows and cashmere blankets, and framed artwork hung on the walls. (Jennifer could not remember the last time she’d framed anything.) There was some evidence that three little girls lived there—a children’s table next to the long, rustic farmers’ table for adults, children’s books and art supplies allocated to clean white shelves, an errant plaything here and there. But with housekeeping help twice a week and Sandra ensuring every day that things were tidy, Vinita’s house always possessed an order Jennifer envied.

“Vee?” she called.

“In here!” Vinita replied, her voice coming from the bathroom. “The girls wanted to do baths before dinner.”

Jennifer walked into the bathroom to see three little girls, ages three, five, and nine, standing on the bathroom rug in pink hooded towels, all monogrammed with their initials, dripping as they waited in an orderly row to have their hair combed. “Oh, Vinita, your daughters are so
beautiful
,” Jennifer said fawningly.

“Shut up,” Vinita replied, smiling. It was a joke between them: a common response from many (white) people upon seeing mixed-race children was “They are so
beautiful
,” thinly disguised code for “Did you know they are half Indian and half white?” Vinita was crouched down on the bath mat, holding a comb in one hand and her youngest daughter, Preethi’s, arm in the other to prevent her from squirming away. “I am always envious of your having girls,” Jennifer said, “but I forget all about the hair.”

Vinita grimaced. Her oldest, Rani, was trying to comb out her tangles herself. Outside, Sean and the boys were crashing around the apartment in a game of tickle monster.

“I want to go play with Daddy and the boys!” Preethi yelled, yanking her head away from the brush.

“Fine,” Vinita said, rising. “But we have to finish before
dinner. The pizza is coming soon!” The girls took off. Vinita looked at Jennifer. “You ready for your exam?” she asked with a wink. They’d developed a routine in the past two and a half months, and Vinita’s weekly checkups had become far less stressful than they had been in the beginning. Every Friday evening Vinita gave her a basic exam in her home office, and every month Jennifer went in for an EEG and an MRI.

They walked down the hallway and into the office Sean and Vinita shared. Jennifer sat down on the edge of the ottoman as Vinita opened her heavy black doctor bag—a gift from her grandfather, who had been a doctor too. Jennifer tried to relax, but it was hard. It was nearing the time when, in her previous experience of this same moment, her mind had been in two places at once. Simply having to wait for it, wondering if it would happen here, too, was unnerving.
Does it go both ways?
she wondered. Was this the moment Vinita would examine her eyes and look inquiringly at her face? Or would she take her blood pressure first?

A blood pressure gauge came out of the bag.
Okay. Not yet.

“Sean’s home early today,” Jennifer observed.

Vinita strapped the black band to Jennifer’s arm and began to pump. “Sean has been in Tokyo for a week and had the balls to book a ticket to Amsterdam tomorrow night to see Radiohead,” she said. Radiohead was Sean’s great passion. He traveled all over the world to see them, often for just one night, as only an investment banker with platinum status on six different airlines could. “I was so pissed I almost neutered him.”

Jennifer laughed. “So he thought it wise to spend the afternoon at home?”

“He got here about an hour ago,” she said, reading the gauge and making a note in Jennifer’s file. “Whatever. I want to hear about
you
,” she said, reaching into her bag again. This time she took out the ophthalmoscope. She was going to shine
it in Jennifer’s eyes. “How was guitar? How was Owen?
Oh-when Oh-when Oh-when?
” Jennifer tried to smile. Maybe if she freaked out, she thought, she could mask it as excitement over Owen. She clenched her fists under her thighs, preparing herself for whatever was next. Would she start to see and hear Alicia now? Feel Amalia’s couch under her legs, the pen in her hand?

Squinting, Vinita shone the light into Jennifer’s eyes. Then she leaned in closely and scowled, just as Jennifer had known she would. But that was all. The other side, the other self, the other brain … it didn’t come through. Maybe it did happen only one way, Jennifer thought. Thank God.

“Your eyes didn’t dilate,” Vinita said. “That’s weird.” Jennifer wondered if her eyes had dilated at Amalia’s, but not here, which would be really strange. Vinita shone the ophthalmoscope into Jennifer’s eyes a second time, and this time she was satisfied. “Huh,” she muttered, making a note.

Jennifer drew in a deep breath as Vinita’s hands went back into the bag again. Now she was taking out the otoscope, fitting it with a sterilized cap, preparing to place it in Jennifer’s ear. It was all Jennifer could do not to pull away as she approached. The anticipation of that sharp pain was almost worse than the pain itself. She couldn’t imagine why Vinita would be so clumsy, but just as Vinita leaned down to peer through the scope, Jennifer got her answer. Jack burst into the room, squealing, and slammed into the back of Vinita’s legs. On impact, the otoscope jammed into her ear canal.

“Damn!” Jennifer said, even though she’d been waiting for it. At least she’d managed not to say
fuck
in front of Jack.

“Mama!” Jack yelped. “Sean is going to get me!”

“Not in here!” Vinita said sharply, removing the otoscope from Jennifer’s ear. “Sorry, sweetie.”

Jack went running out. It was over.

“Everything look okay?” Jennifer asked as casually as possible, rubbing her ear.

“Yes,” Vinita said, putting away her instruments. “You are the picture of health. Two and a half months now, and you haven’t even had a cold.”

“I know,” Jennifer said. “It’s good, right? Amazing!” She was filled with relief. No need to tell Vinita about the bleed-through. She was fine.

Vinita sat down on the couch and took out her iPad. “It
is
amazing,” she said. Then she patted the seat next to her, motioning for Jennifer to sit. “It is amazing. And hard to believe,” she went on. “I still find it hard to believe. I find it hard to believe that we are the only two people on the planet, aside from Dr. Sexton, who are sitting around being amazed by it right now.” Vinita was pulling up something on her screen. “I know you think Dr. Sexton hasn’t told anyone about this because she’s afraid of what would happen if she did. And that sort of makes sense. Sort of. But I keep wondering, what if there’s another reason for all this secrecy?”

Jennifer watched as Vinita typed
Dr. Susan Terry
into her search engine.

“Who’s Dr. Susan Terry?” Jennifer asked. The Internet soon supplied the answer. Dr. Susan Terry was a world-renowned physicist. As Jennifer looked on, Vinita pulled up a series of links. Dr. Susan Terry, recipient of the American Physical Society’s Julius Edgar Lilienfeld Prize; Dr. Susan Terry, named one of
TIME
magazine’s one hundred most influential people; Dr. Susan Terry, the third woman ever to be awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics. “Susan Terry is one of the most brilliant physicists on the planet,” Vinita said. “After I met Dr. Sexton, I thought it might be wise to set up Google alerts for certain terms she was using.
Quantum foam
was one of them. I wanted to see who else was working on this stuff.
This morning, something came up about Susan Terry and quantum foam. I didn’t see any connection between Dr. Terry and Dr. Sexton at first.” Vinita clicked the images link to the left of the search results. “But then I started pulling up pictures. And that’s when I saw it.”

“Saw what?” Jennifer asked. And then she saw it too. In the photos from these events, Dr. Terry was almost always accompanied by none other than Dr. Sexton, wearing, unfailingly, one black shoe and one red one.

“They’re friends?” Jennifer said. Vinita shook her head and pointed. “Look,” she said.
“Look.”
Jennifer looked. Dr. Terry was square-shouldered, with a confident, determined bearing; pale skin; thin, fair hair; and wide-set eyes that glittered with formidable intelligence. She was almost a foot taller than Dr. Sexton, and in almost every photograph of the two of them together, she stood with one hand placed on the small of Dr. Sexton’s back. It was subtle, to be sure, but in the photos where Dr. Terry was with Dr. Sexton, as opposed to those of her alone, something softened in her. She looked happier. More relaxed. And in the photos where Dr. Sexton was looking up at Dr. Terry, something seemed to shine livelier than ever in her eyes.

It wasn’t physics. It was chemistry.

“They’re a couple,” Jennifer said.

“Yes,” Vinita said. “I mean, there’s almost nothing online about Dr. Terry’s private life. She deflects every question about it. But for as long as there are records of these things online, every time Dr. Terry is honored or given a prize, Dr. Sexton is there. And the way they look at each other—they were a couple, I’m sure of it.”

“
Were
a couple?” Jennifer said.

Vinita pulled up more recent photos of Dr. Terry, dating back about a year, including some from a benefit at the
Institute for Strings, Cosmology, and Astroparticle Physics at Columbia, and Dr. Terry appeared alone in every one of them. Dr. Sexton, it seemed, had vanished. Jennifer thought about what Dr. Sexton had said the night they met, about having had to move into her new apartment quickly, and that it had been a lonely time for her.

“Dr. Terry just won the Nobel Prize for her work on
quantum foam
, Jay,” Vinita said, “though if you read about her work, or at least what the committee describes, it’s all strictly theoretical. My question is, what if Dr. Sexton stole Wishful Thinking from Dr. Terry? Doesn’t Dr. Terry seem more like the kind of scientist who could invent it? Dr. Sexton has never won anything, as far as I can tell. She’s totally obscure. Dr. Terry is the superstar.”