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

“This is not at all what we told them.” I wave the paper around at the dining table in Missy’s elegant Greenwich Village apartment, nearly knocking over my china coffee cup.

Ève steadies my cup, takes the paper, reads the article, and looks up. “They call me the ‘girl with the radium eyes.’” She laughs, delighted.

“That’s preposterous,” I snap at her. “If you had radium in your eyes, it would blind you.” Though even as I am saying it, I understand how apt it is. How beautiful, how phosphorescent my youngest daughter is. I should tell her that, but I don’t. That’s not the point.

I try to remember now my exact words about radium and cancer at the dock, but it wasn’t this. I’d only said that I planned to use my new gram of radium to experiment with new cures for cancers, never promising I can cure them all. “I’m here one day and already the press is lying about me. I need to go back to France. Irène, buy us tickets for the next boat!”

Irène sits perfectly still, frozen, like she is trying to decide what to do, how to temper her own joy of experiencing New York City and my anger. She opens her mouth to speak, then closes it again saying nothing at all.

“Marie.” Missy stands, walks to me, puts her hand calmly on my shoulder. “I’ll call them and we’ll get them to print a retraction, all right? It is not done with malice, simply excitement. America adores you, that’s all. And people are excited about a cure for cancer! You did this. You’re saving so many people’s lives.”

I soften at her compliment, and agree, that yes, a retraction might do.

The following day, they do indeed print one: RADIUM NOT A CURE FOR EVERY CANCER. But Missy and I have to flip through to page sixteen to find it.

THERE ARE SO MANY SPEECHES AND COMMITMENTS OVER THE next weeks, and I tire so easily, feel so dizzy, that Irène and Ève stand in for me more and more as we travel across the country, from east to west, New York City, and upstate, and then on to Pittsburgh. We stop in Chicago and the festivities are larger than in New York. Missy says it’s because many Poles live here, and they all come out, cheering for me. But what they are cheering for exactly, I don’t know.

I feel like an exhibit, a commodity, and I am itching to flee, back to Paris, my lab, back to the science. I am doing what I must to get my radium—smiling, waving, speaking when I can. But it is harrowing and painful. I despise every minute of it. It is not what I want, never what I wanted.

Lou is in a facility in Chicago, trying to regain sensation in her legs, and we schedule a visit with her into all the busyness. It is a shock to see her in her wheelchair, crippled and despondent, staring out her window at the steely Chicago sky.

“Your color is so good,” Ève lies, kissing her cousin on the head. Irène nods eagerly in agreement.

Lou turns to look at me, and I go in close to her face so I can see her, really see her. Her eyes are round and large and vacant. I hold on to her shoulders in an awkward hug. “It is too hard to live this way, ciotka,” she says softly to me.

Her voice sounds flat, and it is hard to remember that girl who took me up in the Carpathians, once. But she is in here somewhere, I know she is. “You are a strong woman,” I tell her. “Like me. Like your mother. We have all endured so much. You will get through this.”

She pulls away from me, frowns, and turns her gaze back out the window.

She worries me, and I hate to leave her like this. But she cannot walk; I cannot bring her with us westward. And Missy has us scheduled for two weeks more.

THE FOLLOWING YEAR, BACK IN FRANCE, EVERYTHING IS looking brighter.

I have my new gram of radium, new work underway. I’ve had surgery for my cataracts in both eyes, after the doctor Missy set me up with in America diagnosed that as my problem. And I can see again now, with the help of my magnifying lens.

When the urgent telegram arrives from Bronia, I pull it from Ève’s hands this time, wanting to read it myself.

Lou is dead.

I read the words, and they sink inside my body, a weight.

“What is it, Maman?” Ève asks, alarmed. “Is it Lou?”

I am surprised by Ève’s perceptiveness, but perhaps I shouldn’t be. She had been cheerful in Chicago, but she had been there. She had seen Lou’s vacant stare and terrible crippled legs. “She took her own life,” I say, reading through the rest of the telegram, breathless.

Ève puts her hand to her mouth, and her eyes well up with tears, and she runs out of the room. I don’t realize my own hands are shaking until Irène pulls the telegram from them, places it down on the table, and sits down on the floor with me, putting her arms around my shoulders.

This can’t be right. This can’t be true. My chest aches for my sister-mother, both her children gone too soon. Why must death hover around my family? I try to breathe and my lungs burn, as if I’ve run and run for days. So many people gone; so much loss surrounds us.

What if I had done things differently in my life—could I have stopped this all from happening? Perhaps I could’ve talked to Lou that summer in the Carpathians, tried to convince her to give up hiking for science. Or I could have gotten a doctor to heal Jakub if I’d convinced Bronia to stay in Paris just one summer longer. And Pierre. What if I had stopped him from going out that one afternoon into the rain?