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

In all these years, I have changed the entire course of science; why have I not been able to save my family?

“It is all my fault,” I say. “Everything is my fault.”

Irène clings to me. “Maman, how could this be your fault? What could you have possibly done?”

“I could’ve stopped them; I could’ve done things differently.”

“Maman,” Irène whispers and strokes back my hair, like I am the child and she is the mother. “Lou was in terrible shape when we saw her in Chicago. There was nothing to be done.”

I hold on tightly to Irène, breathing in the scent of her: flowers and sunshine and the lab. “You will never leave me,” I say. “My darling girl, promise me that.”

“I promise,” Irène says.

Marya

L’Arcouëst, 1922

I spent the summer of 1922 at Hela and Jacques’s house in L’Arcouëst, and even Bronia agreed to come for a few weeks so all of us sisters and our children could be together again. Our husbands mostly stayed behind to work, except for a few weekends here and there. But the three of us and all our children were together for the first time in so many years. It was glorious.

I’d spent the past year writing up Professor Mazur’s research and my results into a paper. I no longer had use of the lab at Jagiellonian, as the dean had hired a new chemistry professor for Professor Mazur’s job, an older man who had no interest in continuing with me on my mercury research, in spite of all the arguments Kaz tried to make to him on my behalf. Still, I had months of results, a paper to prove it now. I brought my paper with me to L’Arcouëst for Hela to look through, and I hoped that she would agree that applying her electromagnetic theory to mercury was highly exciting. That she might even want to endorse my findings about using mercury to ignite an electrical switch, and that she might help me get it published in a scientific journal.

“Marya,” she said, after she was finished reading my words. Her cheeks were pink, her voice effusive. “This is brilliant. Your research could be revolutionary. If ever there were another Great War, imagine how this device could help with precision in bombs, and . . . aircraft.”

I smiled, but Hela was getting ahead of herself. I’d gotten mercury to ignite in an electrically charged tube, and theorized the rest, that this could work as a detonation device, or in a switch. That seemed far off still from controlling bombs, and another war? God forbid. I said all that to Hela, and she laughed.

“Well, every large idea is a small idea, first.” She paused for a moment, as if to think, and I remembered a Latin phrase I’d learned once at my Flying University in Loksow: omnium rerum principia parva sunt. The beginnings of all things are small. “Why don’t you come to Brussels with me in October, Marya, and we can present this paper at the Solvay Conference, together? Perhaps someone there would want to undertake more of this research with us.”

“Solvay?” I remembered how Professor Mazur had attended, how she had met Hela there once, just before Hela had won her Nobel Prize. I was almost entirely self-taught. I could not imagine I would fit in with scientists like Hela who had advanced degrees from top schools. “I don’t know,” I said.

“I will pay for your ticket,” Hela said. “You have no reason not to go.”

“Oh, you two.” Bronia rolled her eyes. “Can we stop talking about science for five minutes and go enjoy this beautiful view, hmmm?”

“You should talk, Bron,” Hela retorted. “You are always working.”

“I have taken this entire month off,” Bronia retorted back, sounding uncertain, like she could barely believe her own words. “Lou and I both have.”

“I’ll stop talking about science, if Marya will agree to come to Brussels with me,” Hela said. Both her eyes and Bronia’s fell squarely on my face, staring at me, waiting for me.

“Yes,” I finally said, feeling both excited and terrified. “I’ll go to Brussels with you.”

THEN I SAT OUT ON THE BEACH IN BETWEEN MY SISTER-MOTHER and my sister-twin, and all of us, with our wrinkled faces and graying buns now, we forgot about science for a little while. We watched our grown children swimming, racing each other in the water, laughing and teasing one another, cousins and comrades. Lou was the fastest one, with Jakub coming in second. (Of course Bronia’s children were the best and fastest, just like their mother.) Marie beat Klara—my beautiful, musically inclined child always came in last, the least athletic of all her cousins.

Out on the beach, Hela reached for my hand, and I reached for Bronia’s hand, and we all sat there like that together, three old women, forever connected to one another by blood and by love. And yes, by science, too.

“Look at all we have become, all we have done,” Hela said, a smile in her voice as we stared out at our children and onto the great expanse of water. I’d grown used to its size, so I no longer feared it. I still didn’t like to go in, but I enjoyed taking in its enormous beauty. Bronia squeezed my hand in response, and I squeezed back.

My sister-twin had won science’s biggest prize, and she and Jacques had patented their discovery, making them flush now with royalties and allowing them to construct a three-story lab of their own in Paris where they were continuing with their work. Marie was finishing up her degree in chemistry to work alongside them.

My sister-mother and her Kazimierz had run a successful sanatorium in Zakopane for years and were making plans to move back to Warsaw and open their own hospital there, where Lou planned to work too. Jakub was studying medicine at Jagiellonian, and one day no doubt, there would be an entire hospital staffed with a full line of Dluski doctors.

And me? I had raised my beautiful and