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

France, or I’m going to kill you,” Jeanne says. Her voice is so calm, so quiet, her demeanor so still now, that her words wash over me with a slow and chilling clarity. Then, just like that, she walks away.

ONCE, I TOLD PIERRE THAT I WAS MARKED BY DEATH. MY ENTIRE life, it has hovered and held on to me. Whenever I believe I am well and life is good, there it comes again: my mother and my sister, my baby, my husband, my dear, sweet father-in-law. But I have not before ever been threatened so directly, considered my own fleeting mortality. I have never believed that my own life might be in danger before the very moment Jeanne Langevin stands before me outside my lab in the darkness, clutching Paul’s letter.

After she leaves, I find it very hard to breathe. I wonder, for a fleeting moment, if I imagined the whole encounter. But I am still holding on to Paul’s letter—the evidence is right here, in my very shaking hands. You are going to leave France, or I’m going to kill you. Jeanne said those very words to me.

What would happen to my work, my lab, if I were to die? And the children? They’ve lost their father and recently lost their grand-père. What would happen if they lost me too?

And then I don’t know what to do. I can’t just go home to Sceaux, forget this happened, can I? I can’t go to the gendarmerie. I don’t even know what I could possibly say. This man I’m in love with . . . his wife threatened to kill me. Can you help me? Oh, how the press would love that if it got out.

I check Pierre’s pocket watch, running my fingers over the smooth surfaces.

What am I supposed to do now, Pierre?

The watch ticks on in my palm, unknowing, uncaring. It is half past eleven, and despite the late hour I find myself walking toward boulevard Kellerman. The familiarity of my old neighborhood courses through me, filling me with regret, longing. Once, in what feels like another lifetime, Pierre and I sipped coffee in our garden here with the Perrins and the Langevins. Jeanne and I were friends; we talked about the children. She brought me lemons from her own garden.

You took her husband, mon amour, I hear Pierre’s voice in my head. What do you expect?

But their marriage is already over. She doesn’t even love him anymore. And he loves me!

I find myself standing on the Perrins’ doorstep. Jean and his wife still live on boulevard Kellerman, and he remains a close friend to both me and to Paul and Jeanne. I put Pierre’s pocket watch back in my pocket. It does me no good to wallow in a pretend conversation with a dead man. Instead, I ring the Perrins’ bell.

Jean answers the door in his dressing grown, looking alarmed. And it is not until he says, “Marie, you’re crying,” that I realize I am. That my face is wet with tears.

“I can’t die,” I say to him. “I don’t want to die.”

“Calm down,” he says to me gently, ushering me inside his house. “No one is about to die.”

JEAN SPEAKS TO JEANNE AND HE NEGOTIATES AN AGREEMENT with her. She will leave me alone if I stay away from Paul. We will not speak, or write letters, or even work together in a professional capacity.

I agree, and so does he, and yet, for weeks, I go to our pied-à-terre and wait for him each afternoon during our lunch hour anyway. But he keeps his end of the bargain; he does not come to me, and I lie on the bed waiting for him, feeling cold and lost and empty.

Summer comes, and we leave the city for vacation. We go to L’Arcouëst after all, and Hela comes with Hanna and meets us there. I ache for Paul, and I write him a very long, very detailed letter and send it to our apartment. This agreement we have made is absurd, I tell him, and it must be temporary until we can figure out a better plan, a way to be together.

I don’t know, he writes back, a week later. I am too busy with work now for a detailed response. I will write more soon when I can.

It is short and terse, but it is a response, and it is telling in and of itself. If he has received my letter, read my letter, he must’ve gone to our pied-à-terre in my absence. He is thinking of me, loving me still, wanting us to be together. And he is in the lab, working, not on vacation with Jeanne. When I return to Paris in the fall, we will find a way.

“What are you smiling about?” Hela asks, walking into the house, her cheeks aglow from spending the morning with Hanna and Irène and Ève by the water. In all these years, she has almost gotten over her fear of it, though I still have not seen her go in farther than her ankles.

“I’m working on writing up my findings on achieving radium in a metallic state,” I answer her. Which I truly had been doing before Paul’s letter arrived.

“Hmmm,” she says. “Working, working, always busy working. Why don’t you join us at the beach this afternoon? Your daughters tell me they hardly ever see you.”

Hardly ever see me? But I am charting their growths in my notebooks in spectacular detail as I have done since they were born. Irène’s body has begun to develop this summer, and Ève has grown two inches, started lessons in maths and sciences at my insistence, piano at hers. I tell Hela this now, and she laughs. “I’m not talking about their growth and development,” she says. “They just want to spend time with you, enjoy your company,” she says. “Come, sit by the water with us.”

I don’t understand the point of going to sit with them simply for the sake of sitting there, when