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

pallor was gray, his eyes tinged with yellow. I wondered how long he’d known he needed surgery, and whether now it might already be too late. I sighed and I took a sheet of paper from Papa’s desk, knowing I needed to write out a telegram to send to Bronia and Hela right away. They needed to come from Paris. Papa looked terrible. Thank goodness I’d come here when I did.

“You’re quite lucky, you know,” Leokadia said. Her knitting needles clicked and clicked, a fast and steady rhythm. “You have two men who both adore and respect you.”

I had told her before about Papa’s desire to teach my sisters and me as we were growing up. About how he read us banned books as bedtime stories, how he wanted us to leave Poland to get a real university education, and how he believed that as intelligent women, we were just as capable, if not more so, to grow our minds as any man. But there was something in her voice that made me uneasy now, something about what she was saying about Kaz, too, and it was the same thing I felt when I realized she might have told him about our encounter with the police, that they had some sort of relationship outside of me.

But I was grateful for her friendship, too, and that she had come here with me, so all I said to her instead was, “I’m not ready for him to go, Kadi. Maybe I am greedy? I want more time with him.”

She put the needles in her lap, reached out both her hands for mine. “How good that he has you, that we are here,” she said. We sat like that for a few moments, and then I went back to the stationery, to compose a telegram for Bronia and Hela, to tell them to come on the train from Paris at once, before it was too late.

LATER, WHEN IT WAS VERY DARK, THE MIDDLE OF THE NIGHT, I could not sleep, and I got up and sat by Papa’s bed again, held on to him. His hand was cool and dry, the skin around his fingers loose and wrinkled. I stroked his fingers softly with my thumbs and hummed the melody of a long-forgotten lullaby, “Śpij Laleczko,” that came back to me only now. Mama had sung it to me and Hela and Bronia and Zosia once, when we were very young, and all ill, before Zosia succumbed to her sickness.

I sat there holding on to him until morning, until he opened his eyes, saw me there, smiled. “Papa,” I asked him. “What did you mean yesterday . . . you started to say you always thought I would . . . what did you mean?”

“Marya, my youngest, my brightest.” He spoke slowly, his voice trembling with the effort it took him to form the words. “I always thought you would be the one to change the world.”

“And I have disappointed you,” I said quietly.

“Disappointed me . . . no, not at all. Look at you, still learning, teaching young women in Poland. Education changes everything, does it not?”

“You taught me that,” I said. Papa had been a teacher himself, before the Russians took over Poland, and he’d always told us our entire lives how important education was. I squeezed his hands softly between my own.

“I wanted to teach you more,” he said, breathless.

“You taught me everything,” I told him.

TWO DAYS LATER HE TOOK HIS LAST BREATH, WITH ME SITTING by his bed, holding his hand. I was not ready to let him go, but he was ready to leave, and so I had no choice.

Bronia and Hela arrived on the train from Paris, three days too late.

Marie

Paris & Warsaw, 1902

Mon amour,” Pierre says into the darkness of Irène’s bedroom, waking me with a gentle shake of my shoulder. Irène likes me to sit with her while she falls asleep each night, and perhaps she is insecure because she barely sees me during the day. Tonight I must’ve fallen asleep myself in here. “Come with me,” Pierre says softly in my ear.

I peer out Irène’s window toward our garden. It is the darkest of nights, not even a sliver of moon. “Pierre, what time is it?”

“Just about nine.” Only nine? I stretch and my body aches. I fell asleep in a strange position in the rocking chair, and I have been so tired as of late, the work we’ve undertaken so hard, so painstaking, that often I even dream about my own exhaustion. Pierre, too—sometimes he awakens me in the middle of the night, half-asleep, crying out in agony over the pains in his legs. But tonight his voice is soft, happy. Different.

“Come,” Pierre says. “Get your coat and come with me to the lab. I have a surprise for you.”

I rise, suddenly feeling dizzy, and Pierre puts his arm around me to steady me. We’ve been working so hard and so long with the pitchblende, and finally, finally, we’ve extracted enough radium and will be able to present it to the Academy. They asked for us to isolate the element to prove ourselves worthy, perhaps believing we never would. And at long last, we have. But these have been long, grueling, exhausting years, so many days when we are not feeling well in body or in spirit.

Yet in spite of the work and all the illness that has befallen us, Pierre always finds a way to look for the best in everything, and he brings me to see it too. Though it is late, I trust in his surprise, and I get my coat.

We tiptoe out to the front door, not wanting to wake Irène, or Dr. Curie, who is asleep in his own room down the hall. Pierre races out to boulevard Kellerman, forgetting for the moment all the pains in his legs, and I follow, suddenly giddy, or maybe I am just overtired, delirious.

We hold on to each other and proceed to walk, arm in arm. The night