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

air is cool, and the darkness feels dangerous, but I cling to my husband, happy for a moment to feel free, of the science, of our household obligations, even of Irène’s little shouts for me each night as she tries to fall asleep.

When we reach the lab, Pierre unlocks the door and says, “Mon amour, don’t light the lamp.”

“But it’s very dark, we won’t be able to see what we’re doing.” We walk inside, and I reach for the lamp in spite of his words.

He gently tugs me away. “No, Marie, look.”

He points to our worktable, where, since I left, hours ago, he has lined up all our samples of extracted radium inside glass. They line the table now in rows, and in the absolute blackness of this night, they glow, making our dark, small shed of a lab alive with an ethereal light. I gasp, put my hand to my mouth.

How many days in the lab had I said to him that it felt we were working so hard for nothing tangible, that if only radium were beautiful, striking in its color, I might feel more encouraged.

And now here it is, right in front of my very eyes: our radium. Glowing so brightly it feels alive. Or otherworldly. As if Pierre has reached up into the sky, grabbed starlight, and put it in glass for me in our little lab. “Oh, Pierre,” I say. “Look what you have done!”

He climbs up onto the worktable to sit within the glow. His face illuminates green and gold. I go to him and he embraces me. “Look what we have done, mon amour. All this work, all these years.”

“It’s the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen,” I tell him. And it is.

THE GLOW OF OUR RADIUM BURNS BRIGHTER THAN THE DIFFICULTY of the work, the years of aches and pains in our bodies. It is everything. It is worth the higher-paying jobs we turned down in Geneva so that we could stay here in Paris and not interrupt our research by moving. It is worth the time and the distance away from my family, and from my country, and the long hours away from our daughter.

But then, only weeks later, an urgent telegram arrives from Warsaw from Hela, and suddenly the glow of the radium dims. Papa has been ill, has recently had surgery for gallstones. In her last letter Hela told me all was well, he was recovering nicely from the surgery, on the mend. But then her urgent telegram: all at once, he is dying. And I must get to Warsaw as soon as I can.

I am wrapped inside my own panic, my disbelief. This can’t be real. This can’t be happening. Not when I am so far away.

I throw a few dresses into a valise, and Pierre hovers, saying he wants to go to Warsaw with me. But someone has to stay here, look after the lab and the household and Irène. “No,” I tell him, resolutely. “I will go to Poland alone.”

“At least let me get you to the train,” Pierre says. And I agree to that much.

A few hours later, I offer him and Irène a quick kiss goodbye before I board the train. “Send a telegram with any news,” Pierre calls after me, a worried look on his face. I can see him standing there, looking gloomy through my window, even after I take my seat on the train. I reach my hand up to the glass, partly to wave goodbye, partly to try and hang on to this moment, where my life is still whole.

THE LAST TIME I WENT BACK TO POLAND, IT WAS THREE YEARS ago, and our exhaustion from the work had only just begun to set in. Bronia and Mier and Lou and Jakub moved to Zakopane in 1899, opened their sanatorium, and a few months later my whole family reunited there for a holiday. Hela and Stanislaw, their daughter Hanna (just about the same age as Irène), and Papa all came together from Warsaw. Pierre and Irène and I came from France, and for a few glorious weeks we were all together. It was Pierre’s first time in Poland, and how he had enjoyed it so. I see why you love your country so much, he’d said to me as we’d taken a hike together on a mountain trail in the sunshine of the Tatras. And I had felt a glimmer of joy, of hope. One day my whole family could be together again in Poland. Pierre would love it enough, just like the rest of us.

When we returned to Paris, I got caught up in our work. Everything else felt so far away, that now, on the train, it is hard to believe it has been years since I’ve last seen Papa and my sisters, not weeks or months. And I spend the long hours on the train from Paris to Berlin praying to a God that I don’t believe in that Papa will hang on longer, that he will make a miraculous recovery. Perhaps now that Pierre and I have extracted our radium we will have more time, and we can make more frequent visits to Poland.

But when I change trains in Germany there is an emergency telegram from Hela, waiting for me at the station. It is too late. I am too late. Papa died in the middle of the night.

THE TRAIN ROLLS ON FROM BERLIN TO WARSAW. SO MANY hours and hours and hours. They are excruciating. Guilt curls into my chest like a lion, roaring and hurting, but I am too stunned for tears. My body is cold and numb, from grief, or the shock. Papa was doing fine just last week. How has this all happened so fast?

When the train arrives in Warsaw at last, I have not eaten nor slept for days, and yet I do not feel tired or hungry. I am only angry now. Why didn’t Hela write sooner? Why did she