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

stood farther apart than we had from each other in months, since before Papa died.

Kaz stopped walking, took my shoulders gently in his hands. “I love you, kochanie. Only you. Always you.”

He tried to kiss me, but I pulled back. I put my hands on my hips. “But you betrayed me, with her. You both betrayed me.” I stared at him, waiting for him to deny it. But he didn’t say anything. I turned away from him, furious, and kept on walking, leaving him behind.

He ran a little to catch up with me. “Marya, wait. Stop. Please, let me explain.”

Kaz hardly ever called me Marya, preferring instead his term of endearment, kochanie. And the sound of my name in his voice startled me enough to make me stop walking. I turned and faced him.

“You pushed me away for so many years, and I just . . . needed someone. I was lonely,” he said. “It was . . . my body needed . . . it meant nothing.”

I felt as though I’d been struck solidly in my chest, and it was suddenly hard to breathe. Leokadia was my friend, and Kaz was my husband. Part of me wanted to know every detail of what had happened between them and how long this had gone on, and the other part of me wanted to throw up. My physical needs overtook all my senses, and the beetroot soup I’d eaten for supper came back up, violently, right there in the middle of the street.

“Oh, kochanie.” Kaz rubbed my back. “Breathe,” he said gently.

I listened, inhaled and exhaled until the wave of nausea passed. Then I pulled away from him. “I will go to Paris for Hela’s wedding alone,” I said. “I’ll make arrangements to leave in the morning. I’ll go now, stay for a little while, help her with the planning, too.”

“But you were just gone for all those weeks in Warsaw,” he protested.

I gave him a stony look. What right did he have to protest my absence? He had betrayed me. I could barely stand to look at him right now.

“I’ll talk to Hipolit, get the time off. I’ll go with you to Paris, as long as you need me.”

“I don’t need you,” I said. My words were sharp, and they cut him. I could see it in the pained look on his face. But I wanted to hurt him. Wanted him to feel pain. And most of all I wanted to finally, finally go to Paris on my own.

Marie

Paris, 1903

It is a strange thing to be back in Paris, knowing that in Poland, Papa lies rotting in the ground, Hela and Stanislaw and little Hanna exist in their small home in Warsaw without him, and Bronia and Mier and Lou and Jakub are isolated in the beautiful mountains of Zakopane. Even as the new year comes, I cannot shake this feeling of darkness. My constitution dims, I lose weight, as it is hard to make myself eat when I am never hungry. The photograph I have in my mind of Papa, gray and withered inside a box, overtakes all else. The darkness hovers over me, and even my sleep is disturbed—I awake many nights finding myself wandering around in a room in which I did not fall asleep.

Somnambulism, Pierre diagnoses me when I recount the episodes to him. Pierre has been to the doctor for his own nightly ailments, pains in his legs so bad that he often cries out. He’s been diagnosed with only a vague sort of rheumatism, and I wonder if his audible discomfort is what draws me out of bed to wander our house in my sleep. Then, in the mornings, I get pains in my legs too—and maybe it is from too much walking all night. Every day my bones are tired, my body aches.

Papa’s death is a shadow. It follows me and hovers over me, even as I begin to teach a course at the girls’ school in Sèvres. Even as I go back to the lab with Pierre to continue our experiments on radium. Even as I learn, early into the new year, that Pierre and I are going to have another baby.

Pierre is unable to contain his joy when I tell him the news. “A life ends, a life begins.” He grabs my cheeks and kisses them softly. “When Mama died, we got Irène. And now this!”

And then over a few weeks, his joy becomes my joy; the shadow slowly lifts. My stomach begins to grow, and I begin sleeping all night in my bed again. In the lab, our radium glows, echoing the way I feel: bright and happy and alive once more.

It is not like before, with Irène. I work through my condition with barely any trouble, barely any bother. I am so very busy and so very tired, but not more than I was before I went back to Poland.

Pierre is convinced that this baby is a boy, and he says we should name him Władysław, after Papa, and I suggest that perhaps Val would be more fitting, more French, but still with an acknowledgment to Papa.

And that is my first mistake, that I name him. That in my mind, he becomes a real living person, before he truly exists.

IT IS THE SUMMER OF 1903 IN PARIS, AND THE AIR IS HUMID, the sun too warm to walk, never mind to bicycle as I am always wont to do in the summer months. We spend evenings out in our garden on boulevard Kellerman, our neighbors also scientists and parents like us, and it is so good to have the company nearby. Jean and Henriette Perrin live next door, and Jeanne and Paul Langevin on the other side. Irène enjoys playing with their children, and they run back and forth from garden to garden, playing hide and seek just after dusk, while the adults spend the evenings outside, discussing work.

Jean Perrin, who once got the job Pierre was passed over for at the Sorbonne, is quite brilliant