Wishful Thinking (15 page)

“I want to meet her,” Vinita said, leaning back in her chair again and motioning for the check.

“She won’t like that,” Jennifer said, “and she’ll probably deny everything.”

“Do you know how you sound?” Vinita said, whispering. “You sound like someone who has joined a
cult
!”

“Fine,” Jennifer said. She was too tired to argue, and the incident at the benefit committee meeting had scared her. “You want to meet her? Let’s go.”

Twenty minutes later, Jennifer and Vinita were standing outside Dr. Sexton’s door. Part of Jennifer prayed Dr. Sexton wasn’t home. Part of her prayed that she was. It had been crazy to think that she could do this for a year without telling Vinita, though she had thought she could manage it for more than two days.

Vinita eyed the plethora of locks. “Paranoid much?” she asked drily.

Jennifer rolled her eyes and knocked. “Dr. Sexton?” she called. “It’s Jennifer.” A few seconds later, Jennifer heard the
click of heels on a hardwood floor. Then came the small sound of metal scraping against glass. Dr. Sexton, Jennifer knew, was peering out at them through the peephole.

“You’re not alone,” Dr. Sexton observed, her voice projecting easily through the metal door.

“She’s my best friend,” Jennifer said. “And she’s a doctor.” Dr. Sexton, apparently, did not find this compelling. “I passed out in a meeting today,” Jennifer added, gesturing to the fairly dramatic bump that had sprouted on her forehead. “See? Vinita saw it at pickup. I had to tell her. But she doesn’t believe me. She thinks I’m crazy. Could we come in? You can trust her. I promise. She’s my best friend. And honestly, Dr. Sexton, I can’t do this for a whole year alone. I should have realized that before.”

There was a pause. “I’m sorry, Jennifer,” Dr. Sexton replied, “but I can’t let you in. You shouldn’t have brought a stranger here. Come back alone, and we can talk.”

“Dr. Sexton!” Vinita interjected forcefully. “I’m not leaving here until you answer some questions.” There was no reply. Vinita was clenching and unclenching her jaw, as she always did when she was wrestling with her temper. “Please. Jennifer is my best friend, and she’s, she’s … This is very frightening. I’m deeply concerned.” Jennifer looked at Vinita and shrugged. It was no use. But Vinita was not giving up. She placed a palm against the door. “If this is real,” she said, choosing her words carefully, “and you are testing the app with the idea that others might use it someday, shouldn’t a medical doctor be involved? What if Jennifer is being affected physically in ways you can’t detect? Your taking her temperature and her pulse every week isn’t sufficient or safe.” Jennifer regretted having told Vinita that this was the extent of her and Dr. Sexton’s plan to “monitor” her health. Vinita paused. “As a woman of science, I’m sure you would agree.”

In the silence that followed, neither Jennifer nor Vinita
moved. “I can help,” Vinita said. “And I’m not leaving.” After what seemed like an eternity, the locks began to turn.

They turned so slowly that every click was a rebuke, but one by one they opened. Standing there, waiting to be let in, Jennifer felt terrible. What had she done? Why had she acted so impulsively when she’d seen Vinita in the yard? What had she been thinking, bringing her here without asking Dr. Sexton first?

At last the door opened, and the brilliant physicist Jennifer hoped would serve as irrefutable proof that Wishful Thinking was real was dressed not like a professor, but like a telenovela star about to go to a South American singles bar.

“What kind of doctor are you?” Vinita blurted bluntly, staring at Dr. Sexton’s skintight black leather pants, pumps (one black, one red), cat-woman eyeliner, and low-cut shirt.

Dr. Sexton ignored this. She looked right at Jennifer. “I do not appreciate being ambushed,” she said. “This clearly contradicts our agreement.”

“I’m so sorry,” Jennifer said, “but …” She trailed off, pointing to the bump on her head as though that explained everything. “Dr. Sexton, Dr. Kapoor. Dr. Kapoor, Dr. Sexton.” The two women nodded at each other with the barest measure of civility. Dr. Sexton, stony-faced, stepped back and gestured for the two of them to enter her apartment.

“Excuse my appearance,” she said with the slightest hint of embarrassment. “As you can see, I’ve just returned from an … appointment.”

“Was he handsome?” Jennifer asked, hazarding a smile. The joke fell spectacularly flat.

As they entered the living room, Jennifer was struck by how dark the apartment was even on such a bright, sunny day. The curtains were drawn, and throughout the cavernous room were the objects, enclosed in glass cases and illuminated by
very low light, that Jennifer had registered only as pieces from Dr. Sexton’s “collection” on her previous visits. Vinita, however, who would not be one to gawk over the apartment’s size, given that Sean’s multimillion-dollar income paid for a West Village loft that rivaled—or surpassed—Dr. Sexton’s in square footage, immediately walked over to one of the glass cases and peered over the top. When she saw what was inside, her eyes opened wide.

“Oh, wow,” she breathed. Dr. Sexton smiled. This awestruck utterance apparently pleased her far more than Jennifer’s stupefaction at the apartment’s size had. Dr. Sexton joined Vinita at the case. Jennifer, curious, approached as well.

“You’ve seen them before?” Dr. Sexton asked Vinita.

“Florence Nightingale’s rose diagrams,” Vinita said reverentially. “An original?”

“Yes,” Dr. Sexton said. “The coxcombs, as she more aptly called them, that she presented to Queen Victoria herself.”

“I can’t believe you have these,” Vinita said. “She was my hero when I was a little girl. I read every book about her I could find, but I didn’t hear about the rose diagrams until I was a medical student. Nobody talks about them. Or about her as a mathematician. They’re so beautiful.” Vinita turned to Jennifer. “Aren’t they?”

Jennifer drew closer to the case. Inside was a worn book, its pages edged with age, opened to reveal the heading “Diagram of the Causes of Mortality in the Army of the East.” Below this were two graphs that resembled pie charts, but pie charts with a twist, as the slices of the pie were of varying sizes in terms of not only width but length, with some pieces extending far outward on the page and others so small they barely reached beyond the center of the circle. Each wedge was divided into three colors: pale red, pale blue, and black.

“What does it mean?” Jennifer asked.

“Florence Nightingale was an accomplished mathematician,” Dr. Sexton said. “And one of the first people to display statistics graphically to further the cause of social reform. Her hope was to convince the government of the United Kingdom that sanitation would save lives on the battlefield.” Dr. Sexton pointed to the neat, handwritten text in the bottom-left-hand corner of the page. “The blue represents the number of deaths from infection in infirmary tents; the red represents deaths from actual war wounds.” In the first diagram, the blue wedges were much larger than the red. “Here,” Dr. Sexton said, pointing to a second diagram, “Nightingale showed what happened once she was able to improve hygiene in the field hospitals.” The blue wedges diminished drastically with each passing month, like a pinwheel being trimmed successively shorter as you spun it around. “If Nightingale had merely illustrated her findings by handing over reams of documents and charts, it is very unlikely any of her reforms would have been implemented, much less made the law of the British Empire.”

The three of them stood staring for a moment. Vinita, however, was the first to turn away.

“No great fan of women, Florence,” she said, taking a seat on the couch after Dr. Sexton gestured to it. “I found that out when I read a less-than-admiring biography a few years ago.”

“Would you have been a ‘fan of women,’ as you put it, if you had lived amongst the women of Victorian England?”

“I’m no great fan of Victorian England,” Vinita answered, gesturing briefly to her brown North Indian complexion, “for obvious reasons.” Following Vinita’s lead, Jennifer sat down too. Dr. Sexton took a seat across from them. Leaning forward, she studied Jennifer’s forehead.

“Are you all right, my dear?” Dr. Sexton asked. “That’s quite a bump. You fainted after a journey?”

“I worked till eight o’clock,” Jennifer said, “and then I went back, to go to a meeting at the school at two o’clock—a six-hour appointment, I know—and the whole time I could barely keep my eyes open, and then at the end, I couldn’t do it anymore; my brain felt like it was going dry …”

Dr. Sexton took a pen and paper out of a side table and began to take notes. “Were there other symptoms?” she asked. “Dizziness? Sweating?” Jennifer nodded.

Glancing over at Vinita, however, Jennifer saw her regarding Dr. Sexton and her notebook with wry disdain. “You can put that notebook away,” she said. Dr. Sexton ceased writing, but not before fixing Vinita with an icy glare. “Not that I believe any of this is real,” Vinita said, leaning forward. “But if it were, her symptoms are easy to explain. She has jet lag.”

“What?” Jennifer said.

“Think about it. If the app works the way you say it does, transporting you to another space-time and then having you go right back and add the additional hours to your day, it’s jet lag.”

Jennifer thought about it. Of course! The way she’d used the app that week was like flying from Moscow to New York two times in three days (with a poor night’s sleep in between, thanks to the boys), putting in full workdays and full afternoons with her kids, and never taking a nap. She had jet lag. Unpleasant, to be sure, but nothing to be overly worried about.

“You see?” she cried, turning to Dr. Sexton. “We need her!”

“To tell us what?” Dr. Sexton asked tartly. “This is somewhat short of illuminating, though I ought to have anticipated it. But sleep holds so little appeal for me, lack of it hasn’t been an issue in my use of Wishful Thinking.” Jennifer tried to imagine sleep holding little appeal. Since she’d had
children, sleep was more appealing to her than an all-expenses-paid vacation to a five-star hotel in the Bahamas—a vacation she would sleep through.

“I agree,” Vinita continued, “which is why I would argue that you are actually feeling the aftereffects of some kind of drug this ‘doctor’ is administering through your phone. I can run some tests, Jay,” she said, turning to Jennifer and away from Dr. Sexton. “Your phone could be emitting some kind of psychotropic drug. And if it is, we should report it to the police.”

“That is quite enough,” Dr. Sexton said sharply. Setting her notebook down on the coffee table, Dr. Sexton pinched the bridge of her nose and closed her eyes for a moment. When she opened them, she looked at Jennifer. “This must
never
happen again,” she said. “If it happens again, I will do as I planned to do before we met: destroy the app and cut off all ties with you. Do you understand?”

Jennifer nodded. Dr. Sexton seemed to relax a bit. “I agree that having a medical doctor involved would probably be helpful,” she said. “But we’ve got to be able to trust each other,” she added. Jennifer nodded again. She was about to act on her impulse to hug Dr. Sexton, partly as an apology, partly as an expression of relief, when she felt Vinita’s hand on her arm, pulling her back sharply and staying there across her body like a shield.

“Who
are
you?” she asked Dr. Sexton, seeming almost as unnerved by Jennifer and Dr. Sexton’s intimacy as she was by the idea of the app. “And what have you done to my friend?”

Dr. Sexton was silent. She was clearly trying to decide what to do.

“Dr. Kapoor,” she said, “would you like to try the app for yourself?” Dr. Sexton picked up her phone and held it out to Vinita.

Vinita stared at Dr. Sexton’s phone. “It’s a wormhole?” she asked. Dr. Sexton nodded. “And you travel through it from one set of space-time coordinates to another, and then back?” Dr. Sexton nodded again. Vinita shook her head. “A) I still don’t believe you; b) even if I did, I like my technology government-approved. Unlike some people,” Vinita added, shooting Jennifer a look.

“Interesting,” Dr. Sexton replied, “as the government is the last institution I’d trust to do that.” She stood up. “I am left with only one other way to show you,” Dr. Sexton said. “Jennifer, please do not consider this license to violate the parameters I have given you.” Dr. Sexton typed something quickly into her phone. “Please stand back,” she commanded. Jennifer jumped up, grabbed Vinita’s arm, and pulled her off the couch into the farthest corner of the room. She had a guess as to what was going to happen next.

Dr. Sexton, gripping the phone in one hand, closed her eyes. And then, right there in front of them, it happened. The wormhole—a fiery blue tunnel of light whipping outward from the phone as it took shape with a dull, muted whir, no louder than a noisy microwave—enveloped Dr. Sexton. The whole thing happened in an instant, faster than Jennifer, who had experienced the journey but never witnessed it, had realized. Dr. Sexton was gone. And Vinita, for the first time in the nearly twenty-two years Jennifer had known her, was speechless.

A second later, there was a knock at the door. Jennifer hung back and waited while Vinita approached the door cautiously, like the girl in a horror movie who can’t help herself from letting in whatever is on the other side. Slowly, Vinita turned every single lock. Slowly, Vinita opened the door. Jennifer moved to stand next to her. And sure enough, just outside the door, stood Dr. Sexton.

“Cheap parlor trick,” Vinita managed, though her voice was unsteady. “You’re a magician. So what?”

“Not a magician,” came a voice from behind them, inside the apartment. “A
physicist
.”

Vinita and Jennifer turned around to see, standing in the living room … Dr. Sexton. “Hello, Dr. Kapoor,” that Dr. Sexton said quietly. When Vinita turned back to look at the Dr. Sexton in the hallway, she was met with a bright smile.

“Ever wanted to be in more than one place at the same time?” the hallway Dr. Sexton asked cheerily, though in an equally low voice, as though she did not wish to be heard by the other Dr. Sexton inside. “With Wishful Thinking, you can be!”