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

the way his hand had felt holding mine, about the way everything had felt a little easier when it was just between the two of us.

“The truth?” I questioned Bronia, though somewhere inside of me, I felt a new red-hot terror rising through my veins, pooling in my stomach, nausea hitting me quickly again.

BRONIA PUT HER STETHOSCOPE TO MY EARS, UNBUTTONED A button on my dress, and put the cold end against my belly. She implored me to listen to the sounds that she was positive would come through. I heard them, a steady thump, thump, thump. But even then, I told her it was not proof of anything. What about the doctor who said my body could not hold on to a baby, deliver it into the world, living?

Kaz took the stethoscope for his own ears. Then, after he heard the sounds too, he exclaimed: “A baby!” His face erupted with a joy I hadn’t seen in him since we were very young, and so in love, and I felt it sharply inside my own chest, an ache, a wanting.

He kneeled down on the ground, kissed my belly. I wanted to continue to be mad at him. I wanted to insist that I had all I needed right here in Paris, on my own. I wanted to stay with my head in the clouds and my feet on the bicycle pedals on the cobblestone streets of La Villette. But there was a heartbeat inside of me, and suddenly that was more important than anything I needed or I wanted.

The day after Hela’s wedding, Kaz and I took the long journey back to Poland, together.

Marie

France, 1904

Pierre’s magical heart is right. 1904 changes us.

For one thing, from the very start of the year, there is the money. Seventy thousand francs from Sweden, and more from England for the Davy prize. We install a modern bathroom in our house, and I send twenty thousand Austrian crowns to Bronia and Mier to help with their sanatorium in Zakopane, and also gifts to Hela in Warsaw and Jacques in Montpellier.

Bronia writes to thank me for the money, and I suppose it is strange the way neither one of us mentions this cloud that still hangs over us, the darkness that continues to embrace us, or the way that money, even money, which we have needed and needed for so very long, does nothing to ease that. Jakub and Val are still dead. It is almost hard to remember a time back in Szczuki and in Warsaw when I believed that, if only I had money, surely happiness and everything else I ever wanted would follow.

Then with our new money comes more money: Pierre is finally admitted into the Academy and hired as a professor at the Sorbonne. So we have not only our prize money but his steady and good salary. And we can, for the first time, afford to hire a research assistant for our lab.

But strangest of all is our new notoriety, our sudden fame. The press clamors on boulevard Kellerman outside our home, snapping photos of us as we leave for the lab in the morning. Jeanne Langevin makes her way through the garden, into my kitchen, to complain how they are waking her baby with their noise and disturbing the entire street. Paul walks in behind her, shushing her, saying, It is not their fault the press won’t leave them alone.

“Believe me,” I tell Jeanne, throwing my hands up in the air in annoyance. “I do not want them here. I cannot make them stop.”

We go to work, but then there is another bunch of them waiting for us at the lab, shouting at us to grant them an interview, to answer their questions. I begin receiving fan letters in the mail, and hundreds of requests for autographs. I throw them all away, unanswered. Or else I would spend my entire day wasted, signing my name instead of continuing with my work.

“They are enamored of you,” Pierre says with a chuckle, as if it tickles him. “The first woman to win a Nobel Prize.”

But it is not me they want exactly, it is us. They want to write us a great romantic love story. And when we refuse to grant interviews, they write their stories anyway. I am a genius and great light to my husband, or I am a shackle to my husband’s genius and his success, depending on where the story is printed, who has written it. No one cares that it was my idea to extract the radium. No one cares that I was born poor and Polish. One of the dailies calls me France’s Greatest Living Gem. Another one makes up a quote of me saying that everything I do, it is in deference to my great husband.

“Perhaps we should just grant a few interviews,” Pierre says. “They might realize how dreadfully hard and tedious our work is and leave us alone.”

“It would be a waste of our time,” I say. “Let them write whatever they like. What do I care?”

Pierre has his classes at the Sorbonne to prepare for now, and I still have my classes to teach at the girls’ school in Sèvres. And there is so much more to be done in the lab. We are trying to assess the atomic weight of radium, and in the bustle of everything, we have mistakenly misplaced some materials; we are dreadfully behind. The committee in Sweden gave us only six months to come in person to make our acceptance speech, but Pierre has been struck with his most violent attack of rheumatism yet, and neither one of us can imagine making the journey to Sweden in that time frame.

When spring semester ends, Pierre and I are both aching and exhausted, and who cares that we have money now? Happiness feels so far out of our reach.

But Pierre has an idea. He has found us a secluded little cottage to rent in Saint-Rémy to