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

to her is like shouting into a void. It makes me feel sad and empty and restless.

ONE EVENING A TELEGRAM ARRIVES, AND EVEN WITH THE buzzing in my ears, I can hear the sound of Ève’s sobbing with a startling clarity. I know whatever news it brings, it is not good. We have recently lost Hela’s husband Stanislaw back in Poland, and now what else can it be? Bronia or Mier? I just left Irène at the lab and nothing was amiss there. In the foyer, Ève sits on the floor and howls.

“What?” I demand, my heart clenching in my chest. I’m remembering that terrible summer so many years ago when my baby died and Jakub died, and my dear sweet Pierre rescued me from my ocean of grief. I am too tired now to be pulled under by such a tide. I cannot survive it again.

“Cousin Lou has had a hiking accident,” Ève says between sobs. “Aunt Bronia says she is completely paralyzed. They don’t know if she will ever walk again.”

I close my eyes, put my hands to my ears to try and stop the buzzing. Bronia and I have achieved so much since we were girls. The war is over and Poland is free, and Bronia and Mier are finally talking about moving back home, to Warsaw.

And then this great tragedy befalls them. It is too much. It is just too much.

Oh, sweet Lou. I remember hiking with her that long-ago summer, ascending from my terrible fog, breathing in the air of her beautiful Carpathians. Bronia wished for her to go into science and she would not listen, she refused to listen. If only she had listened.

I open my eyes again. Ève’s tear-streaked face is but a shadow. “This never would’ve happened if she just would’ve undertaken a course of scientific study like Bronia wanted her to,” I say.

“Maman, are you serious?” Ève snaps at me. “Not everything is about science.”

She drops the telegram on the table, and runs out of the room. I close my eyes and wait for it. Not even a minute later there is the sound of her piano, far away, dark, like a growing storm.

Marya

Krakow, 1919–1920

I fell ill with a terrible case of grippe on my return to Krakow after moving Klara to Paris, and Kaz was so worried he summoned our niece, Lou, a physician herself now. After I had introduced her to biology in Loksow, she had gone on to study medicine in Paris, then returned to Poland to work alongside her parents in their medical clinic. She moved into Klara’s empty bedroom for a few weeks to watch over my health day and night.

I was so very ill and so very lonely without Klara. It was hard to breathe, I was delirious with fever, and I truly wondered if the grippe might kill me. I desperately missed the comforts of Klara’s noise, her piano that I’d grown so used to after so many years listening to it.

Play all the concert halls you dream of, my beautiful girl, I’d told her when I’d left her in Paris, feeling it was my last real chance to be her mother, to give her advice. And if you fall in love, make sure it is with a man who sees you as his equal, and that you love each other and that he does not hold you back.

Like you and Papa, Klara had said with a smile.

But was it, really? I had wondered, the whole way back on the train. If I had taken my own advice to Klara, perhaps I would’ve said no to Kaz, gotten on my own train to Paris so many years earlier.

But Kaz was still here with me now, somewhere, all these years later. My sickness held on and dragged me into darkness. And Kaz’s voice came in and out of my fever dreams, distant and hazy, calling for me as he had once at the train station so long ago: You can’t go . . . Wherever it is you are going, you . . . you can’t. Stay here. Stay with me.

Then I didn’t step on a train to Paris, or, maybe I did? In my feverish haze, I came out of the Gare du Nord, sunlight so bright I couldn’t see, all of Paris before me and yellow and blinding, melting. And burning up into the blue-hot fire in Professor Mazur’s lab. Everything was too hot to touch.

ONE MORNING, QUITE SUDDENLY, MY FEVER BROKE, AND I SAT up in bed, sweating and breathless. The December sun shone in through my bedroom window, illuminating Professor Mazur’s stack of journals on my dresser. “Lou!” I called out. “Lou!”

She came running into my room, her face drawn. Lou was a woman now, and barely anyone still called her by her childhood nickname but me. She was Dr. Helena Dluska, tall and serious, stern and motherly, just like Bronia. It was hard to find even a glimmer of that girl who once traipsed through the Carpathians. My chest rattled with a cough, and I struggled to catch my breath as she walked over to my bed. “Can I get you something, ciotka?” she asked, her voice thick with concern.

I nodded and pointed to the journals on my dresser. “Yes, bring me those.” Klara was in Paris; my head felt clear for the first time in months. I could not ignore science any longer. I could not ignore the legacy that Professor Mazur had left for me.

LOU RETURNED TO WARSAW A FEW DAYS AFTER MY FEVER broke, but I was still too weak to get out of bed and do much for weeks. I spent the time with Professor Mazur’s journals, carefully reading all of her notes, combing through her calculations, and then making notes of my own in the margins.

“She was so close,” I said to Kaz, one night after he’d come home from work, sat down on the farthest edge of the bed, the only spot free of scattered journals and papers.