Time of My Life

by Allison Winn Scotch

  Meg’s room is silent, except for the sound of two beeping heart monitors that echo each other, and when I enter, I think she is sleeping, so I slowly start to creep back out. But then she opens her eyes and turns to me and smiles.

  “Come in,” she says. “I’m up.”

  “Oh, sweetie.” I try to say more but choke on the swell of emotion. I move to the bed and clutch her hand.

  “I’m fine,” she says, squeezing mine harder. “Just a few bruises and bumps.”

  “The baby . . .” I say.

  “Look at that.” She nods her head toward a monitor just beside us. “Look at my baby’s heart. Thriving. This baby will be fine.” Meg’s eyes are bright with promise.

  “I hope so.” It sounds flimsy, disbelieving.

  “I know so.” She doesn’t let go of my hand.

  “How can you?” I ask, though I suspect that I shouldn’t. After all, I know how her pregnancies end. All four of them the last time around.

  Meg sighs and shakes her head. “I have to. I have to.” Her voice catches. “When I miscarried . . . I just . . . I don’t know what I would do if I can’t be a mother. Truly. I don’t know what I would do.” Tears streak down both cheeks.

  Her words bounce inside of me and something resonates, sticking hard, something that I missed the last time around when I wasn’t present enough to notice the finer details. Meg’s fog after her miscarriage, her fevered obsession with her fertility, her pure belief in the power of motherhood, the way she cocooned further into herself and away from the rest of us. Looking at her now, I know that she didn’t fall asleep late at night on a Los Angeles highway. That Meg was far too conscientious for such an error, and that the accident had never fully made sense to anyone who knew her well. But now it did. Because I hear it in the desperation of her voice. That truly, she didn’t know what she would do if she couldn’t become a mother, and so, when frustration turned to despair and despair melted into burrowing depression, Meg, devoid of hope, opted out of life rather than trying to find a new outlook on it. And now, this time, she had her chance to change all of that. And yet, my coming back created different wreckage, new wreckage that might lead to the same result after all.

  Meg and I are quiet except for the beeping of the monitors, ensuring us that yes, there is life inside of her, fighting to keep going, fighting to be heard. I clutch her hand and think of Katie, and hope that this time around, I leave more than destruction in my wake, that I leave a bit of altered destiny in it, too.

  Chapter Twenty-seven

  The hours ebb into days and the days ebb into weeks, and soon, I’m starting to forget all of the nuances about Katie that I once couldn’t live without: the ring of chubby skin around her neck, the way her arms locked around me for a hug, her warm feet that I would lean over to kiss when she’d just awakened. And as I lose a grip on these details, I begin to wonder if I haven’t made up this journey entirely. Like Katie and my life with Henry and the discontentedness that came along with it weren’t all just some strange flash-forward, a glimpse of what might be if I don’t leap down the aisle with Jack and avow myself to him.

  Late one January night, after Jack has fallen into a heavy slumber, I am racked with fitful sleep, and so I rise, pull on my sweatshirt and boots, and make my way downstairs into the frigid night air. The streets are nearly empty, an aberration for New York, but the subarctic temperatures have pushed everyone inside, and so other than the occasional dog owner, anxiously waiting for his beast to relieve himself, I am alone, the shadows of the streetlamps my only company.

  My hands lose sensation—I’ve forgotten my gloves—and I duck into a twenty-four-hour drugstore. Fluorescent lights glare overhead, and Muzak attempts to mute their harshness, and I wind my way toward the back, shaking my fingers to encourage blood flow. I don’t realize where I am until I’m there—in the baby section—and with still-numbed hands, I reach for the lotion, Katie’s lotion, and pop open the lid. I inhale and the scent of lavender overtakes me, and my head spins so quickly that I reach for the shelf to ensure that I don’t topple over.

  In a rush, like a montage, I remember slathering on the lotion every night after Katie’s bath, toweling down her hair and giggling together when she’d shake it like a wet dog. I remember tugging on her jammies, then reading her books, then pulling her in so close that the lavender, this lavender, would linger on my neck the evening through, gone only when I rose the next morning.

  No, she isn’t imagined, I think when I finally regain my breath and the sting of my tears has slowly abated. She is as real as I am. She is as real as I need her to be.

  Only now, trapped in my time warp and with my future so altered, I don’t know how to make that so, how to get Katie back and how to get what I need.

  JOSIE IS IN my office, running through a list of her contact names who will become my contact names when she leaves in three weeks, when Leigh unexpectedly drops in with Allie. My future niece bounds over the piles of paper and cardboard boxes that litter my floor and wraps me in a smothering hug.

  “Can I steal you after work?” Leigh says.

  Josie shrugs a compliant shrug and gives me an off smile, so I say “sure,” and agree that I’ll meet Leigh at the tearoom in the Plaza.

  Hours later, before I shut down for the night, I call Meg, as I do daily now, to see what I can bring her and how she is coping with bed rest, which she has been placed on through her twentieth week. While so much is tumbling out of control in this new old life, I am determined to ensure that at least one thing—Meg and this baby—do not. Not on my watch, I think nearly every day. Armed with my hindsight, not on my watch.

  Tonight on the phone, Meg is as she always is: listless but satisfied. She has all she needs, with her burgeoning tummy and her hope for her future, and sometimes, when I drop by with groceries or DVDs or just to chat, I’m envious of my friend who is so close to losing so much. Because despite that risk, she is content. I see this when she rubs her belly, and her eyes shine bright, and she talks about baby names, even though I wish that she wouldn’t because I somehow think it’s a curse.

  I log off for the day and navigate my way through the crowds to the Plaza. The lobby smells of expensive, floral perfume and carpet cleaner, and guests come and go, the elevator button ringing in beat with their pace. I amble into the tearoom, but Leigh and Allie are nowhere to be found, so I wave over the hostess, a lanky, blond six-footer who is undoubtedly an aspiring model.

  “Excuse me, I’m looking for a mother and her daughter. They might have put their names down. Leigh and Allie?”

  “Oh, right this way,” she says with a wink. “They’re in the private room.”

  That’s odd. I wrinkle my forehead and follow her through the parlor. She pushes open a door, then moves aside and allows me through.

  “SURPRISE!” The volume of the welcome overwhelms me, and I stagger back two steps in dazed confusion.

  Jack rushes forward from the crowd and kisses me.

  “I knew you would protest, so we did it in secret,” he says, smiling like he is the smartest man in the world.

  “Wh-what are you talking about?” I stammer, trying to pin this down. Is it my birthday? Have I so lost track of time that I forgot my birthday?

  “Our engagement party!” he says, then kisses me again. “I didn’t want you to worry about it, so Mom and I thought this would be the perfect solution!”

  I pull away from him, and unwrap his arms, like a twist tie on a bread bag, from my waist.

  “This is an engagement party?” I say with disbelief, trying to contain my irritation, knowing that guests are watching. “I specifically asked you not to do this!”

  “No, I asked you to think about it . . . you didn’t answer,” he offers. “Oh come on, it’s fun,” he says, either not detecting or purposefully ignoring my rancor entirely. He turns around to look at the hundred-plus guests. “Everyone is here.”

  I scan the crowd and mostly see Vivian’s well-tailored country club
set. I notice Josie in the back, alone and nursing a drink, and my father awkwardly making small talk near the buffet, but no one else with whom I need to share the supposed joy of my nuptials is here. Meg isn’t here. Henry isn’t here. Nothing is different here and now than it used to be: The people whom I need most are gone, and the ones who remain do nothing to help me get to where I need to go. Different names, different faces, but the end result is still the same.

  Suddenly, it feels like too much, this party, this life with Jack—all of these people who are so similar to the me that I’m set to become in seven years, the me I’ve grown to loathe and have tried to outrun in vain. It doesn’t have to be this way, I finally hear myself say. There’s more than one choice in whatever road you choose. Flats instead of heels. Nurturing Katie instead of constant mothering. Gray instead of black and white. I feel Jack’s hand pressed into the small of my back and an angry bruise grows inside of me. I told him what I wanted and still, he didn’t listen. I finally found my voice, finally stopped pretending to be what I thought he needed me to be, and still, it wasn’t enough.

  I spin around and fly out the door of the room and through the cushy tea salon and down the steps in the front of the hotel. I hear Jack calling me back, tailing me through the lobby, but he stops when I reach the sidewalk, unwilling to chase me to whatever destination I flee to. Then I hear another voice, and turn to see my dad, nearly at my heels.

  “Don’t do this,” he says, between gasps. “Don’t run because you feel like you’re out of options. You’re better than that. I should have told you that years ago, but talking was never my thing. You’re better than that.”

  I shake my head at him. “I’m not like her. I’m not leaving because I’m out of options. I’m leaving because I have them.”

  He pauses, and I see something shift inside of him, then a wry smile turns his worrying face into a kind one. He looks back at Jack, then pulls me into an embrace.

  “Then go,” he says, pushing me away from him. “Go to wherever those options take you.”

  I nod, then sail down the streets, down the avenues, breathless and cold and sweaty all at once. I run and I run and I run, as I always seem to do, only this time, for once, there is a tiny seed in me that knows that I’m running toward something, not just running from it.

  Chapter Twenty-eight

  I pace the streets endlessly, unsure of where to go, what to do. I can’t go home—I can’t face Jack and his passivity. He’ll hold his hands up and say, “Whoa, babe, it’s not a big deal, can’t you calm down,” and then he’ll try to wash it all away by kissing me or distracting me or pretending that he’s not complicit in creating the ruins of our relationship. As if by leaning in and watching my mouth move, he was actually listening to who I was and who I needed to be. Maybe that’s why he never pushed me toward my mother: Maybe he simply didn’t love me enough to understand what was best for me, even if I didn’t know what was best for me in the first place. And maybe that’s why I never pushed him harder in his aimlessness; maybe I didn’t love him enough, either. Maybe it was all a lot simpler than it seemed, like one of Henry’s mathematical life solutions. The thought stirs something, and for the first time in seven years, it’s as if our undoing might finally make sense, that this wasn’t a relationship worth saving. It was a relationship that was a stepping-stone to something better.

  I wander until I find myself outside of Henry’s, to maybe where I should have been all along. Because now, with freezing air on my ears and the debris of my relationship on my shoulders, I can’t ignore that this whole thing, that being back here, trying to undo the past might have been a horrid, wretched, and irreversible mistake. Not because things might turn out differently, though yes, there’s that, too. But because what I needed to change seven years in the future had nothing to do with Jack or Katie or my mother or even Henry. Now that the patterns of my future life have replayed themselves in my past one, the thing that seems apparent is the only person I need to change is, in fact, me.

  I reach for a garbage can outside of his building and vomit. Two pedestrians whisper to themselves as they pass me by. But for once, for the first time really, I ignore those whispers and those judgments and everything that comes with them, and I try instead to stop the waves of regret that now manifest themselves in nausea as they rip through me.

  How could I not have considered how this all might end? I hurl again, spewing out slimy bile now that my stomach is entirely purged. How could I have been so focused on reinventing both myself and my life that I never mulled over how much I had to lose? Risk and gain. Katie. Katie. Katie. I can’t shake her name from my mind, where it spins on repeat like a bad pop song.

  I ring Henry’s buzzer three times, but he doesn’t answer. Either asleep or with Celeste, I realize as my insides drop all over again. I sink onto his front stoop and try to remember my old life, what made it so abhorrent that I might have permanently leapt from it with no hope of getting it back.

  I get caught in a memory of when I was newly pregnant with Katie.

  I had been ill with morning sickness and called into work to take the day off. Henry, before he rushed into the office, ran to the corner deli to buy me Saltines and ginger ale.

  When he returned, he pressed a cool washcloth to my forehead and rubbed my back and then he said, “Why don’t you take the rest of the week off? You’re running yourself down.”

  “Why don’t I take the rest of my life off,” I answered. “It’s not like we need the money.”

  “You’d want to quit?” I could hear his surprise.

  I flipped over to face him. “Would you care?”

  “Er, no, I guess not,” he said. “As long as you feel fulfilled.”

  “Why wouldn’t I feel fulfilled?” I asked, without a trace of foreshadowing. “I think I’d like it—being a full-time mom.” Even as I said it, I knew that part of me didn’t believe it and wasn’t sure why I suggested it in the first place. But Henry couldn’t have known that. Truly. I threw it out with such hope and conviction, that even the best of partners couldn’t have seen through something so opaque.

  “So do it,” Henry said, leaning down to kiss my forehead. “Quit. Whatever makes you happy.”

  From the cold stoop in front of my future husband’s deserted apartment, I’m flattened at the memory: both at how Henry hadn’t coerced me into my decision and how wrong I’d gotten it for so many years. Time can play that trick on you, I realize. Obscure some of the good things and skew some of the bad, such that they blend together and you can’t get your bearings on which is which and on what to hold on to as you wade through the muck.

  I wipe the mucus from my face and the mascara from my numbed cheeks, and I pull myself upright. It is still dark, though I know that dawn will come soon, and I have to hurry, I have to be on my way. I’m not sure how and I’m uncertain where, but try I must—I have to make my way back home.

  Chapter Twenty-nine

  The train to Westchester is nearly empty. It’s too early for the reverse-commute crowd, and no one else needs to head to the suburbs before 7:00 A.M. I listen to the clanking of the wheels and the hum of the engine, and try to catch some sleep, but none will come.

  At the station, I hail a cab, and we wind through the hushed streets, with their looming arbor trees and their shingled houses and their garages stuffed with SUVs and minivans. I remember touring our own home for the first time. Our real estate agent was lukewarm on the place, but as soon as I saw the pink nursery and the granite kitchen, I swooned. My high heels clicked on the hardwood floors as Henry tagged after me, and I turned back to him and said, “This is it, this is the one.” He was less certain but he wanted to do right by me, so we put in an offer and moved just a month later. It had been both of our doing, I realize now, staring out the window at the houses whizzing by. No one person was guilty, no one person can be blamed. Henry just wanted to please me, and I him. And we rotted ourselves in trying.

  The taxi deposits me at Ainsley
’s front door, which she answers with confusion, still in her pajamas and sipping a steaming mug of coffee. She shivers from the air that blows in.

  “It’s 8:15 in the morning, Jill! What are you doing here?” She surveys me, disheveled and unshowered from the day before.

  “I need your help.” I push my way past her and into the kitchen, where in six years, Katie would say her first word, “Mama.”

  She pauses before following me in. Then I hear her slippers shuffling behind me.

  “Coffee?” She raises the carafe.

  “Sit down, I’ll help myself,” I say, moving toward the cabinets, grabbing a mug, then opening another drawer for the sugar, and finally, yet another for a spoon. I do all of this without effort, without thought, gliding around the kitchen as if it’s my own.

  “How do you . . . ?” Ainsley starts, then shuts her mouth abruptly. I can see that I’ve given something away—I’ve only visited Ainsley’s twice before, at least in this new life—but now, it’s irrelevant. The guise doesn’t matter.

  “Look, I need some information,” I say, sitting down opposite her. “Don’t ask me why. It’s too hard to explain.”

  “Is Jack cheating on you?” Her eyes grow wide. “I don’t know anything about it!”

  “What? No! Wait, what?” I scowl. “What are you talking about?”

  “Oh, nothing. I just . . . you look like you do . . . so I assumed you had a fight . . . and now you’re here.” She waves her hands in the air. “I figured you were trying to track down some dirt on him or something.”

  “No,” I mutter. “No, nothing like that.” Though part of me is disturbed at the idea of Jack’s unfaithfulness. Even though I’m desperately running back to Henry, part of me still hangs like clinging lint to Jack. I try to shake it loose but it loiters. Maybe that’s just how it will be, I consider. Maybe part of me will always be tied to him, no matter and irrespective of how much I love Henry.