Half Life by Jillian Cantor (easy to read books for adults list txt) 📕

I just know. It is his hand, and it still feels the same after all these years, all this time. I am twenty-two again, skating on the river, dizzy and laughing. Which is ridiculous, scientifically impossible. My bones are nearly dust. I cannot move out of this bed.

Why are you here? I think I say. Or maybe I don’t say anything at all.

The biggest mistake of my life, Kazimierz says, was ever letting you go. I should’ve married you.

I close my eyes, and I imagine it: the different choices I might have made, the ways I could have saved my family. I might’ve lived so much differently: an anonymous life, a happier life, a Polish life. A life without science.

I OPEN MY EYES AGAIN, BUT EVERYTHING IS STILL BLACK.

“Maman.” Irène’s voice is very far away, like it is coming for me through a deep, dark tunnel. I feel her hand on my hand, Ève’s hand on my other.

Kazimierz is gone, or maybe he was never here at all. Pierre is so close, I can almost feel his hand on my cheek, almost hear his voice calling out for me: Mon amour, slow down, you are pedaling much too fast.

I love our life together. How did I ever get so lucky?

But there is no such thing as luck. Only the choices we make. Only the work we undertake. Only the legacy we leave behind.

“My life might have been so much different,” I say.

“Sssh, Maman,” Irène says, not understanding. “I’m here now. Don’t try and talk. Just rest. The lab is safe, I promise you. Fred and I will take good care of it.”

When I close my eyes again, the blackness turns brighter, yellow and gold and ethereal, just the way the radium looked that night in our lab so many years earlier, as if Pierre had reached up into the sky, grabbed starlight, and put it in glass for me.

“Oh, Pierre,” I say. “Look what you have done!”

He climbs up onto our worktable to sit within the glow. His face illuminates green and gold. “No, look what you have done, mon amour. All these years, all your brilliant work. Look what you will leave behind.”

Radium has a half-life of 1,600 years, so it will exist on and on and on, long after I take my last breath.

Pierre disappears, and Irène and Ève have faded into the darkness. My radium glows before me now, bright and beautiful, powerful and healing. In the end, it is everything, the only thing.

Look what I have done.

Author’s Note

Marya Zorawska was not a real person, but she might have been.

The real Marie Curie was born Marya Sklodowska in Poland in 1867, the youngest of five children. She worked as a governess for the Zorawski family in Szczuki in the late 1880s, trying to earn enough money to move to Paris to study at the Sorbonne and also to help her sister Bronia get through medical school there. (Bronia, in turn, would help support Marya when she eventually moved to Paris.) But while working as a governess, Marya fell in love with the family’s oldest son, Kazimierz Zorawski. They got engaged, but Kazimierz broke the engagement off due to the disapproval of his mother, who said Marya was just a poor governess who would never amount to anything. Shortly after, Marya moved to Paris to live with Bronia, changed her name to the more French Marie, and began her studies at the Sorbonne.

Kazimierz Zorawski eventually did marry Leokadia Jewniewicz, a budding concert pianist and daughter of a prominent mathematician, Hipolit. They had three children together, and Kazimierz became a prominent mathematician himself, teaching at Jagiellonian University in Krakow and the University of Warsaw, after World War I. (Separately, his father in law, Hipolit, was working on the theory of elasticity before his death, and his work was published posthumously in 1910.)

I don’t know if the real Marie ever had any lingering regret over what happened with Kazimierz, and from everything I read, I believe Pierre Curie was her greatest love, her scientific equal and partner in every way. But Kazimierz reportedly spent the last years of his life sitting outside the Radium Institute in Warsaw, staring at the statue of Marie that had been erected out front after her death in 1934. It was reading that tidbit that first gave me the idea for this story.

The Marya chapters in this book are all completely fictional, a what-if, my own imagining of how Marya Sklodowska might have lived her life differently and become someone else, if she’d made one different choice. But the Marie chapters are all based on the real Marie Curie’s life. The tragic deaths and ups and downs and scandals of her personal life as well as the highs and lows of her scientific career are all based on historical facts. I have taken a few fictional liberties for my story. Namely, I don’t know whether Marie and Kazimierz ever saw each other again after 1891. Or what they might have said to each other if they did. And in that vein, the scene in the novel where he tries to stop her from getting on the train to Paris is completely fictional. As is the one where they meet again in a café in Warsaw in the summer of 1906.

I have also followed historical fact for the people surrounding Marie in her storyline: Bronia and Hela’s lives, Pierre, Irène and Ève, and even Jean Perrin and Jeanne and Paul Langevin (who did reconcile in 1914, though later Paul would go on to have another affair). The Curies and the Langevins did vacation together in the summer of 1908, and there was also an incident where Jeanne struck Paul over the head, though to my knowledge it did not happen during their summer vacation and I took some liberties with that timing. The details of the length and breadth of Marie and Paul’s affair are somewhat hazy and unknown now, though they did reportedly