Wishful Thinking (4 page)

B
ACK IN HER OFFICE
, Jennifer closed the door behind her and sat down, already weary. She had two hours to prepare for a noon meeting she should have spent twice as much time getting ready for. It would take her all day to answer the e-mails that had come in just since the night before. Placing the contract from Bill on her desk, she sighed. Melissa, her babysitter and life linchpin for so many years now, had recently done something about her lack-of-direction problem and enrolled in night school, and had suggested wanting to reduce her hours, a request Jennifer had already been unable to imagine accommodating. How could she work harder than she’d been working already? She couldn’t rely on Norman for anything more than his one day a week. And she had no family to call upon—not anymore.

A little more than a year ago, Jennifer had lost her mother to cancer. That was the blow she still couldn’t bear, the aching sadness and fear that woke her up in the night, the thing she
never would have believed could happen. When she and Norman had split, her mother had begun traveling to the city every weekend from Rockland County, where Jennifer had grown up, to help her with the boys. For her mother, who had battled depression on and off her entire life, and whose marriage to Jennifer’s father had never been much more than tolerable, the boys were just the right kind of medicine. For Jennifer, having her mother’s help had felt like the difference between sinking and swimming. This had been especially true during the first two years after the divorce, when Norman had routinely disappeared at a moment’s notice, pursuing second-rate acting gigs or attending singles’ meditation retreats to help him “heal.” Having her mother around had meant that if Jennifer needed to go to a work conference or even get away for a few days at a spa with Vinita, the boys would be not only taken care of but also as happy as they were when they were with her. Having her mother around had meant that there was someone in the world she didn’t have to pay to take care of, much less love, her children. And having her mother around had meant she wasn’t alone. When her mother had died, it had been hard to feel anything but, and Norman’s reappearance a year ago as Saturday-night dad had done little to make her feel less so. To make matters worse, within months of her mother’s death her father had moved to Arizona with the hospice nurse who had cared for her mother when Jennifer couldn’t manage it anymore. Jennifer had never been close to her father, but she’d hoped that in the wake of her mother’s loss, her dad might stay close to her and the boys. Instead he’d gone west, and she’d been left feeling as if she had lost not just one parent, but two.

It takes a village
, she thought. She could fit her village into a telephone booth. Her mind flashed to Julien’s face that morning when she’d told him she couldn’t come to his guitar
recital. She’d hated having to tell him, again, that she couldn’t be there; she hated saying Mommy can’t come, Mommy has to work, Mommy wishes she could, but she can’t.

Jennifer gave her head a little shake and pinched herself. “Stop it!” she said out loud. She needed a laugh. Jennifer began to compose an e-mail to Vinita. She counted her lucky stars every day that the two of them had ended up living in the same neighborhood in New York (their kids even went to the same public school), though with Vinita raising three daughters under the age of ten and running her pediatrics practice in the West Village, too, the two women provided each other with moral support more than anything.

Somewhere there is a woman,
Jennifer typed,
who woke up this morning before her children did, practiced ashtanga yoga while standing on her head in a sweat lodge, showered and shaved her legs, prepared gluten-free pumpkin pancakes to usher in the fall season, and got her children and herself to school and to work on time. I, on the other hand, woke up in a sofa bed with an empty bottle of white wine rolling around under it, fed my kids breakfast bars on the train, and got to work so late I almost missed a meeting I didn’t even know was happening.

That, of course, was the least of her morning’s drama. Jennifer thought about losing her phone, the bizarre way she’d gotten it back, and the message from the woman who had returned it to her.
In addition to the usual failures,
she typed,
which include the fact that I am missing Julien’s guitar recital today (again), I lost my phone last night and got it back with a weird message about some kind of miracle app.
Jennifer paused, eyeing her phone on her desk.
Call me?

She hit
SEND
. She picked up her phone.
An app
, the voice had said. She should look for it. If nothing else, it would be a diverting way to procrastinate. She’d just begun scrolling through the apps on her phone, however, when there was a knock at her door. Tim.

“How’d it go?” he asked, poking his head in.

“Alicia Richardson may be working here soon,” Jennifer said, “though it isn’t for sure yet.”

“Am I going to have to be her assistant too?” Tim asked, his voice rising. “Remember what Bill said when he started? That I was going to have to ‘expand’ to assist you both? I can’t just keep ‘expanding’! I’m a human being, not a rubber band!”

Jennifer chose not to respond, and Tim, chastened, switched back to business mode. “I came to check in with you about your schedule,” he said. “What do you have today?”

“Let me look,” Jennifer answered. She launched her calendar on her phone. And when she did, an unfamiliar screen appeared, filling the surface of her phone with a dark blue, velvety, starry sky. Jennifer blinked, caught in a cognitive double take.
Is this it?
she wondered. As well trained and habituated as a hamster when it came to navigating new apps, she was about to tap her screen, when, against the midnight-blue background, a sparkling wand appeared. Bright and white, it was very like the wand that the plump, grandmotherly fairy godmother in
Cinderella
wielded. Mesmerized, Jennifer stared as the wand began to move. Gracefully, at an almost leisurely pace, it spelled out the words
Wishful Thinking
. Below them materialized the most alluring tagline Jennifer had ever seen in her life:
An App for Women Who Need to Be in More Than One Place at the Same Time
.

This was it, Jennifer thought. Wishful Thinking was the miraculous app Dr. Diane Sexton had taken the liberty of installing on her phone.

She was about to flip it around, show the screen to Tim, and relate the whole story. But something stopped her.

“Give me a minute?” she asked, looking up at him. Nodding, Tim left. Alone again, Jennifer bit her lip and tentatively touched the wand hovering on her velvety-blue
screen. Like a shot, her tiny office was filled with the ringing, resonant voice she’d heard earlier that morning.

“Have you ever needed to be in more than one place at the same time?” the voice asked.
Obviously!
Jennifer thought as she cranked down the volume, praying Tim hadn’t heard. “With Wishful Thinking, you can be. Simply enter the time, date, place, and Google Maps coordinates for the second appointment you wish to keep—the place you
wish
you could be—and through the magic of Wishful Thinking, you will be able to be in both places at once.” Then, on the screen, the word
warning
appeared. “This app utilizes a powerful technology,” the voice continued sternly. “Prior to use, please contact me, Dr. Diane Sexton, for further instructions.”

Dr. Diane Sexton’s name was hyperlinked. Jennifer’s finger was poised above it. Should she contact this woman? Or should she wipe the entire thing from her phone? Clearly, this was crazy. Dr. Diane Sexton was clearly crazy.
Clearly
(she found herself wanting to use the word
clearly
as often as possible), this was a lifestyle app, a game for desperately overtired and gullible women like her, and as soon as she typed
Guitar recital, the West End School for Music and Art, 4:00 p.m.
, she would be delivered ads for children’s guitar lessons and the latest Dan Zanes album and invited to share her Wishful Thinking calendar with friends on Facebook, where they could all “wish” to be together in a virtual coffee shop and max out their credit cards buying imaginary lattes.

Which made it hard to understand why on earth she would e-mail a perfect stranger for “further instructions.” She had no idea who this woman was or what she was after. Typing a Wishful Thinking calendar entry, however, was tempting. An app that let a woman be in two places at the same time? It was mommy porn, to be sure. But she couldn’t see the harm in fantasizing.

A small white arrow pulsed in and out of view in the lower right-hand corner of the screen. She swiped it.

A window appeared:
CREATE AN EVENT
.

Guitar Recital
, she typed.
West End School for Music and Art, 55 Bethune Street, Tuesday, September 22, 4:00 p.m. to 5:00 p.m.
After saying yes to the app’s request to use her current location and confirming the Google Maps coordinates for the West End School, she hit
ENTER
, and that was that. Her old, familiar calendar returned to the screen, with its legion of entries already eating up every minute of the day—but now with one intriguing addition: the midnight-blue Wishful Thinking entry pulsing subtly in and out of view, like a tactful dinner hostess hovering over the table without quite taking a seat.

Despite herself, Jennifer smiled.
Guitar recital, 4:00 p.m.
She knew it was impossible. But even though it was only wishful thinking, typing the details of Julien’s recital so confidently into her calendar had given her a distinct feeling of happiness. Closing her eyes for a moment, she imagined it: that she really could be in two places at the same time, both front and center at Julien’s concert
and
at the staff meeting scheduled for four o’clock that day, missing neither an occasion nor a beat. And for that fleeting feeling of transport, Jennifer permitted herself a moment of gratitude to the clearly crazy Dr. Diane Sexton.

I
T WAS A LITTLE
bit before four when, after an exhausting two-hour meeting, the majority of which involved Jennifer’s refereeing between an officer from the Administration for Children’s Services and a group of angry parents from the Walt Whitman Houses, Jennifer told Tim she was going downstairs to get a coffee. He reminded her—unnecessarily, as the Employee Time Clock periodically flashed reminders of department meetings—that the staff meeting had been pushed
back to four thirty, then asked her to get him a skinny pumpkin-spice latte. Rather than immediately taking the elevator down, however, Jennifer walked to the stairwell. She was going to get coffee, but she needed to make a pit stop first. She was headed to her secret bathroom.

The secret bathroom was on the eighteenth floor. Two months ago, the tenant—a private company that did something in insurance—had filed bankruptcy and departed ignominiously, vacating the entire floor’s office space in less than a week. Jennifer still remembered watching as its employees glumly filled elevator after elevator, boxes and picture frames in hand. The first time she and Tim decided to walk down and see what it looked like, both of them found the vast, empty space depressing. But then Jennifer discovered something. While the offices on the eighteenth floor had been padlocked and papered over with threatening signs from creditors, the women’s bathroom had been left wide open and, better yet, relatively well kept. It had only taken a few goings-over with cleaning supplies brought from home for Jennifer, who hated to use the NYCHA bathrooms, where a private moment could turn into a chatty meet-and-greet and her colleagues routinely engaged in cross-stall conversation, to turn the secret bathroom into a sanctuary. Only Tim, who had been with her when she found it, and who she felt should know her whereabouts in the event of an emergency, knew of its existence.

And so, at 3:54 p.m., Jennifer was in the secret bathroom, doing her business. She was idly scrolling through
New York Times
articles on her phone when, noting that 4:00 p.m. was approaching, she decided to take a second look at her Wishful Thinking appointment.

It was easy to spot, in what she was coming to recognize as the app’s trademark midnight blue:
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 before, it seemed to float above the screen like a mist, utterly distinct from the solid, color-coded calendar entries she was so used to seeing there: orange for work, green for home, baby blue for the boys’ school schedules, and on and on. As she turned her phone this way and that, the Wishful Thinking entry, Jennifer thought, was
shimmering
—that was the only word to describe it. Trying to understand how this effect was achieved, she brought her face closer and closer to the screen, eventually drawing so close her nose was practically touching its surface, when suddenly an earsplitting
PING!
nearly sent her down the plumbing.

In a jam in every way, Jennifer did not even attempt to get off the toilet. To her surprise, in fact, she found that she was shaking. Surely she didn’t believe there was something to this craziness—that the app, after all, might be real. Taking a deep breath, she willed herself to look back down at her phone. And then she laughed. It was not a teleport or a wrinkle in time or even a message from Wishful Thinking that had caused her to startle like that. It was a plain old text message from Vinita. Ten years ago, text messages had seemed like magic. Now the familiar green thought bubble was as reassuring to her as buckwheat pancakes.

Hey J,
the text began,
got your email. Will def call later. Do NOT stress about recital. Yoga chick spent an hour this AM shitting out excess kale. xoxox, V.
The text was punctuated by a very funny-looking emoticon of a tiny pink creature break-dancing, from a Japanese app Vinita was currently obsessed with.