Half Life

by Jillian Cantor

  I continue in my lab until I cannot stand any longer. I am struck by a terrible grippe, and then I cannot move from my bed for days. Ève sends in doctor after doctor to examine me.

  “I will find someone to make you better, Maman,” she insists, squeezing my hand too hard in the darkness of my bedroom.

  Ève is not a scientist. She does not know, does not understand the body the way I do. “It is time,” I tell her, and now I know that it truly is. “It is time to let go.”

  But I am very weak, very tired. Maybe I do not tell her this at all?

  Then, one morning, I awake in a sanatorium in Sancellemoz, and Ève sits by my bedside, crying, and I know. She understands now.

  I AM SIXTY-SIX YEARS OLD AND I CONVALESCE, MY BONES NO longer able to carry the weight of me out of this bed. Nearly all day I sleep, but still I dream. Pierre comes back to me most of all, and the pain of losing him catches again in my chest, and I stop breathing for a moment. Then I awaken, and I start again. I am not dead just yet.

  Ève does not leave me. She calls my name out in the darkness.

  Maman, is there anything you need?

  I can see the shape of her when I open my eyes again, more a shadow than my youngest daughter. The girl with the radium eyes. I wish I’d learned to understand her piano music more when I’d had the chance. I wish I’d held her closer to me, loved her better, enjoyed her talent. Maybe there is more than science for you, I want to tell her now. Play all the concert halls you dream of, find a man who is your equal and love each other. But the words don’t quite come out.

  Of course, I will play you a song, she says.

  So maybe that is what I have asked of her instead. Because then, there it is, the tinkling of piano keys, like raindrops on the metal roof of our laboratory the last morning I ever saw Pierre.

  MAMAN. ÈVE’S VOICE AGAIN.

  Hours have passed, or maybe just minutes? Or has it been days? My beautiful daughter, she is a shadow, hovering again. No, there are two shadows now. I wish for the second one to be Irène, my eldest daughter, my heart, my companion, my confidante. But it is not she. The shadow is much too large, much taller than Ève.

  Someone came to see you, Ève says. He says you were friends long ago, back in Poland.

  He?

  The shape becomes a memory, and my sense of smell has not left me yet. I inhale: peppermint and pipe smoke. And then the icy river in Szczuki; the pine cones and fir trees lining the road where we last walked together.

  Why is he here? He has lived his entire life without me, married Leokadia and became a well-respected mathematician in Poland, just as his mother dreamed he would.

  Marya, he says. He must’ve sat down in a chair by my bed, because when I open my eyes again, his shadow is smaller, closer to me. I feel the weight of a hand on mine, and I know. I just know. It is his hand, and it still feels the same after all these years, all this time. I am twenty-two again, skating on the river, dizzy and laughing. Which is ridiculous, scientifically impossible. My bones are nearly dust. I cannot move out of this bed.

  Why are you here? I think I say. Or maybe I don’t say anything at all.

  The biggest mistake of my life, Kazimierz says, was ever letting you go. I should’ve married you.

  I close my eyes, and I imagine it: the different choices I might have made, the ways I could have saved my family. I might’ve lived so much differently: an anonymous life, a happier life, a Polish life. A life without science.

  I OPEN MY EYES AGAIN, BUT EVERYTHING IS STILL BLACK.

  “Maman.” Irène’s voice is very far away, like it is coming for me through a deep, dark tunnel. I feel her hand on my hand, Ève’s hand on my other.

  Kazimierz is gone, or maybe he was never here at all. Pierre is so close, I can almost feel his hand on my cheek, almost hear his voice calling out for me: Mon amour, slow down, you are pedaling much too fast.

  I love our life together. How did I ever get so lucky?

  But there is no such thing as luck. Only the choices we make. Only the work we undertake. Only the legacy we leave behind.

  “My life might have been so much different,” I say.

  “Sssh, Maman,” Irène says, not understanding. “I’m here now. Don’t try and talk. Just rest. The lab is safe, I promise you. Fred and I will take good care of it.”

  When I close my eyes again, the blackness turns brighter, yellow and gold and ethereal, just the way the radium looked that night in our lab so many years earlier, as if Pierre had reached up into the sky, grabbed starlight, and put it in glass for me.

  “Oh, Pierre,” I say. “Look what you have done!”

  He climbs up onto our worktable to sit within the glow. His face illuminates green and gold. “No, look what you have done, mon amour. All these years, all your brilliant work. Look what you will leave behind.”

  Radium has a half-life of 1,600 years, so it will exist on and on and on, long after I take my last breath.

  Pierre disappears, and Irène and Ève have faded into the darkness. My radium glows before me now, bright and beautiful, powerful and healing. In the end, it is everything, the only thing.

  Look what I have done.

  Author’s Note

  Marya Zorawska was not a real person, but she might have been.

  The real Marie Curie was born Marya Sklodowska in Poland in 1867, the youngest of five children. She worked as a governess for the Zorawski family in Szczuki in the late 1880s, trying to earn enough money to move to Paris to study at the Sorbonne and also to help her sister Bronia get through medical school there. (Bronia, in turn, would help support Marya when she eventually moved to Paris.) But while working as a governess, Marya fell in love with the family’s oldest son, Kazimierz Zorawski. They got engaged, but Kazimierz broke the engagement off due to the disapproval of his mother, who said Marya was just a poor governess who would never amount to anything. Shortly after, Marya moved to Paris to live with Bronia, changed her name to the more French Marie, and began her studies at the Sorbonne.

  Kazimierz Zorawski eventually did marry Leokadia Jewniewicz, a budding concert pianist and daughter of a prominent mathematician, Hipolit. They had three children together, and Kazimierz became a prominent mathematician himself, teaching at Jagiellonian University in Krakow and the University of Warsaw, after World War I. (Separately, his father in law, Hipolit, was working on the theory of elasticity before his death, and his work was published posthumously in 1910.)

  I don’t know if the real Marie ever had any lingering regret over what happened with Kazimierz, and from everything I read, I believe Pierre Curie was her greatest love, her scientific equal and partner in every way. But Kazimierz reportedly spent the last years of his life sitting outside the Radium Institute in Warsaw, staring at the statue of Marie that had been erected out front after her death in 1934. It was reading that tidbit that first gave me the idea for this story.

  The Marya chapters in this book are all completely fictional, a what-if, my own imagining of how Marya Sklodowska might have lived her life differently and become someone else, if she’d made one different choice. But the Marie chapters are all based on the real Marie Curie’s life. The tragic deaths and ups and downs and scandals of her personal life as well as the highs and lows of her scientific career are all based on historical facts. I have taken a few fictional liberties for my story. Namely, I don’t know whether Marie and Kazimierz ever saw each other again after 1891. Or what they might have said to each other if they did. And in that vein, the scene in the novel where he tries to stop her from getting on the train to Paris is completely fictional. As is the one where they meet again in a café in Warsaw in the summer of 1906.

  I have also followed historical fact for the people surrounding Marie in her storyline: Bronia and Hela’s lives, Pierre, Irène and Ève, and even Jean Perrin and Jeanne and Paul Langevin (who did reconcile in 1914, though later Paul would go on to have another affair). The Curies and the Langevins did vacation together in the summer of
1908, and there was also an incident where Jeanne struck Paul over the head, though to my knowledge it did not happen during their summer vacation and I took some liberties with that timing. The details of the length and breadth of Marie and Paul’s affair are somewhat hazy and unknown now, though they did reportedly have a pied-à-terre in Paris by 1910, and the details about their letters, Jeanne’s threats and blackmail, and the fallout in the press are all reportedly true. Marie did use electrolysis to turn radium chloride into its metallic state around the time she was with Paul, but I fictionalized that it was Paul who gave her the idea.

  Bronia did tragically lose both her children much too young, as described here, and also outlived her husband and Marie. She was medical director of the Radium Institute in Poland when it first opened. Irène worked with her mother in the field during World War I and afterward at her Institute in Paris. She married Frédéric Joliot (against Marie’s wishes—Marie did make him sign a prenuptial agreement), but he did grow on Marie after they married. Irène and Frédéric went on to win their own Nobel Prize in 1935, a year after Marie’s death, for their work on artificial radioactivity. Ève became a concert pianist, then a writer (penning her mother’s biography after Marie’s death), and a war reporter during World War II. She married an American diplomat and later worked for UNICEF. She was the only member of her family not to win a Nobel Prize, though her husband, Henry Labouisse, did—he won a Nobel Peace Prize for his work with UNICEF. She also lived to be 102, untouched by the high amounts of radiation that would kill her mother and her sister at much younger ages.

  I made one notable omission to Marie’s family. In real life, there was one more living Sklodowski sibling in these years, a brother, Józef, a doctor, who lived in Warsaw and was a part of Marie’s, Bronia’s, and Hela’s lives. I left him out of this story for my own novelistic purposes.

  The city of Loksow is fictional, though all the other places in the book are real, from Zakopane (where Bronia did have a sanatorium) to Saint-Rémy, where Marie and Pierre did spend one last wonderful Easter weekend before his death, to L’Arcouëst, which was a summer playground for the faculty of the Sorbonne. Marya’s women’s university is fictional, but the Flying University was a real thing in Warsaw. And the real Marie did attend with Bronia before they both moved to Paris. In real life, the school became legal around 1905–1906 and later became known as the Society of Science Courses. After World War I, it became Free Polish University. Agata and the other women at the school with Marya are all fictional, with the exception of Leokadia Jewniewicz, who, in real life, was the concert pianist who married Kazimerz Zorawski in the years after he broke up with Marya. I wondered how her life would’ve been different too if Marya had married Kazimierz instead, and if she’d continued with her piano career instead of marrying and having children.

  For further reading about the real Marie Curie’s life, I suggest Marie Curie by Susan Quinn, Madame Curie by Ève Curie, and Marie Curie and Her Daughters by Shelley Emling. These books were enormously helpful to me for establishing the timeline of both Marie’s and Marya’s lives, and any errors or omissions here, intentional or otherwise, are all my own.

  Acknowledgments

  SOME BOOKS come to me easily, their plots fully formed. But with Half Life I struggled for months with how I wanted to tell the story, where and when to set it, and who the main characters would be. Over the course of a year I began (and scrapped) two different novels called Half Life, each connected in a different way to Marie Curie and each set in a different time, with different characters than the ones in this final book. It wasn’t until I was eighty pages in the second time that I realized that Marya Zorawska needed a voice, and that the real story I longed to tell was this one.

  I am always enormously indebted to my brilliant agent, Jessica Regel, and even more so this time that she not only trusted me to figure this out, but also that she didn’t think I was crazy when I called her and told her I was starting this book over, for the third time. I’m also so grateful that she read and encouraged me through the false starts to the final version, and that she never lost enthusiasm for me writing a novel about Marie Curie. Thank you also to the amazing team at Foundry who work so hard on my subsidiary rights and contracts, especially Claire Harris, Richie Kern, Sarah Lewis, Sara DeNobrega, Marin Takikawa, and Natalie Todoroff.

  Thank you to my wonderful editor at Harper, Sarah Stein, who was amazingly unfazed by me changing my mind early on, and whose wise advice and careful edits helped me make Marya’s and Marie’s stories shine. Thank you also to assistant editor Alicia Tan for helping with so many details throughout the process. I’m very grateful to the entire sales, marketing, and publicity teams at Harper for getting my books into the hands of readers. A huge thank-you to Doug Jones and Amy Baker for their continued enthusiasm and support for my work

  I’m grateful to have so many supportive writer friends who are always there to listen and read early drafts. Huge thank-you to T. Greenwood, Maureen Leurck, and Brenda Janowitz who kept me sane with text and email support and offered early feedback. I always call my friend Eileen Connell when I get stuck on a plot point and she talks me through it—this time, she helped me figure out what the final two chapters should be. An enormous thank-you also to Jean Kwok and Marie Benedict, who read and offered their endorsements and support (even during a pandemic). And to Andrea Katz, who is an amazing champion of my books, but I’m also lucky to count her as a friend. To my friends on the homefront, thank you for the mahj and the mimosas and the Facetimes and the endless love and support.

  Thank you to my family who always believe in my writing even when I’m struggling to figure it out myself. To Gregg for still being my best friend after all these years, and for always offering to be my first and most enthusiastic reader. And to my kids, who are amazingly wonderful teenagers and readers.

  Thank you to all the incredible booksellers and librarians who support my books and get them into the hands of readers. And last but not least, to my readers around the world who keep reading and discussing my books in their book clubs—an enormous thank-you for choosing to read my books and allowing me to keep doing what I love.

  About the Author

  JILLIAN CANTOR has a BA in English from Penn State University and an MFA from the University of Arizona. She is the author of award-winning and bestselling novels for teens and adults, including The Hours Count, Margot, and The Lost Letter, which was a USA Today bestseller. In Another Time, her latest historical novel, was an Indie Next pick. Born and raised in a suburb of Philadelphia, Cantor lives in Arizona with her husband and two sons.

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  P.S. Insights, Interviews & More . . .*

  About the Author

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  Q & A with Jillian Cantor

  About the Book

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  Reading Group Guide

  Read On

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  Excerpt from In Another Time

  About the Author

  Q & A with Jillian Cantor

  Why did you choose to write a novel about Marie Curie set in two timelines, a real and an alternate one?

  I knew I wanted to write a novel about Marie Curie and call it Half Life for a year before I figured out exactly what story I wanted to tell. After two false starts, I kept coming back to one detail about Marie’s life that fascinated me most of all: the fact that she had been engaged to Kazimierz Zorawski as a young woman in Poland, and that the only reason she didn’t marry him was because his mother thought she wasn’t good enough for him. So much about this intrigued me! There was the fact that this amazing, brilliant woman, who would later go on to change the course of science and win two Nobel Prizes, was deemed not good enough as a young poor woman in Poland. And then I read that in his later years, Kazimierz would sit in Warsaw and stare at a statue of her, erected after her death. All those years later, did he still regret not marrying her? But what if he had married her?
Her life would’ve turned out totally differently if she’d never moved to Paris to get her education or met Pierre.

  One of my favorite movies is Sliding Doors, and I’ve always been fascinated by that concept. How would life have turned out differently with one different choice? The train we missed, the job we didn’t take, the person we didn’t date or marry. I imagined that but on an even larger scalefor Marie Curie. What if Marie Curie hadn’t ever become . . . Marie Curie? I was fascinated by the way one choice would not only affect her and her family on a small personal scale but also how it would affect the course of science and history and the world in ways both good and bad.

  But the real Marie Curie also had an amazing life filled with personal triumphs and tragedies, and I wanted to delve into that too. So I decided to set her real story side by side with the fictional Marya’s.

  What was the most challenging part of telling a story in two timelines, one real and one fictional?

  There were so many challenging things! One big one was keeping the two timelines straight and remembering which characters lived (or died) in each. But also it was a challenge to remember how each character was slightly different in each timeline depending on the circumstances. For instance, Pierre Curie in Marie’s timeline is never the same man as Pierre Curie in Marya’s, so I always needed to remember those nuances and keep them straight as I wrote.

  Marie’s real life was so fascinating, and filled with so many highs and lows, that it was a challenge as well to stay true to and capture that while also trying to pace the story and make this work as a novel.

  But it was Marya’s storyline—the fictional story—that was my biggest challenge of all. I struggled awhile with the right ending for her and with figuring out a way to ultimately make science important in her story, even if it was on a smaller scale.