Half Life

is doing without me. He comes and goes with a kiss to me and Irène, and I say to him, “Should we call your father to examine her again? Maybe she’s sick?”
My love and worry for her is like nothing I can explain through any logical reasoning. It is an orchid, delicate and fragile. Beautiful and breakable. If anything happens to Irène, it will be my undoing.
Pierre summons his father, three evenings in a row. Irène cries and cries, and she is much too thin.
“Perhaps you should try a bottle instead,” Dr. Curie finally suggests gently, with the detachment of a doctor, not the attachment of a grand-père, who leans down to kiss Irène’s hollowing cheek after he examines her. “She is healthy, Marie, but I don’t believe she’s getting enough milk from you.”
As soon as I switch her to the bottle to feed, she begins to grow again, plumping up in days. Apparently, my body is not made for motherhood, the way it was not made for pregnancy. Once I accept this, a fact, the worry lifts, hovers above me, like lithium on water. My mind is open again.
“What a shame,” Bronia says, when she comes by to visit her niece and check up on us. “Feeding by breast is so much more convenient.”
But my breasts are also a tether, and once Irène only requires a bottle, which can be given just as easily by Grand-Père or Papa as by Maman, I begin to feel it so strongly: my deep and abiding love for science.
Then, when I awake each morning at dawn, it is the lab calling to me again—its cries now louder, more pressing than Irène’s.

Marya
Zoppot, Poland, 1897
In early February the Baltic was sparkling and cold: a cerulean gem. I stared at it from the upstairs guest bedroom window in the Zorawskis’ resort house, mesmerized by its breadth and depth and color, the deception of its beauty. Just before Kaz and I had arrived last week, a man drowned in the tug of the undercurrent. Or maybe it was that he froze to death—the water much too cold for swimming this time of year. Pani Zorawska had recounted it all to us with sheer horror and excitement upon our arrival, but I was exhausted from the long train ride, and I hadn’t really been listening. Her words buzzed above my head like flies, the way so much had these past few months.
It was remarkable the way my body returned to normal in such short time. Seven months had passed, and now my baby girl, my Zosia as I had named her in my own mind, had been deceased longer than she had been alive inside of me. My stomach was concave, empty. To look at me, one would never know that I’d carried a baby in my womb, then lost her. To look at me one would not see the emptiness I felt, nor the way, now, my body was a shell and I was a fragment of a real woman. Or that I could not stand any longer for my husband to touch me.
Pani Zorawska had disappeared again from our lives for a few months after my loss, and Kazimierz and I had gone back to at least the appearance of what we had been before. He returned to his studies with Hipolit, and if it was possible, was home even less than before. I returned to work at the Kaminskis and my Wednesday evening classes as a student, though I had not been able to teach again yet, which both Agata and Leokadia remarked on with concern. I told them I just needed time; I just needed to heal. But now months had passed; everything appeared to be as it once was. It was only inside that I felt the constant hollow, that I felt my friends’ and my husband’s voices buzzing around me all the time like flies, the conversations too hard to follow, too much to understand.
Then, Pani Zorawska had sent a letter: the Zorawski family would be going on a retreat to the Baltic for a week in February, when Kaz’s younger brothers and sisters had a break from school and university, and would we like to join them?
This is exactly what we need, Kaz had said. His eyes had lit up, and he’d clutched his mother’s letter to his chest. He’d kissed the top of my head. The sea air! Reuniting with my family at last, kochanie.
I smiled at him, but inwardly worried about why she had invited us now, when we were broken. But Kaz had not been with his family in so long. I could not deny him that. I bit back my doubts and agreed with him out loud: Yes, this is exactly what we need.
AND SO, HERE WE WERE. ZOPPOT. THE BALTIC SEA VILLAGE ON the northern tip of Poland was a playground of the wealthy and Russian royalty. I had never been to such an opulent place in all my life. The Zorawskis’ beach house was twice the size of their manor house in Szczuki, a world away from our small life in Loksow. But even here, especially here, I was as cold and empty as I was at home. Kaz, though—he was full again, alive: his cheeks reddened with excitement as he spoke to his siblings about his work at the supper table.
I heard the words, Hipolit, analytical geometry, buzzing around my head. I forced a smile and took a sip of the cold water Pani Zorawska had placed in front of me at the table. The voices of Kaz and his siblings rose and grew dim. I cut my meat in tiny pieces, but I did not eat them—I pushed them around on my plate with my fork, and I looked around the table.
My, had all the children grown since I had been their governess. Even little Maryshna who I had rocked to sleep many nights, a babe in my arms—she was nearly