Time of My Life

by Allison Winn Scotch

  But Jack, he wasn’t as funny, he didn’t make any sort of sense. Or maybe he made too much. Ainsley knew this; I knew this, which is why, I suppose, neither of us dug too deeply as we wound through our neighborhood in a fruitless effort to lose those last eight pregnancy pounds.

  And now, lying here with the eucalyptus oils and the hum of spiritual chants and Garland’s magical hands, there’s no one left to lie to, and I can’t help but reconsider.

  What if I’d chosen Jackson? What if Henry wasn’t supposed to be the one for me? What if I’d never married Henry in the first place? My whole body tenses, and I feel Garland’s fingers sink in farther in response. I exhale and push it away. No. I am happy. I am a loving wife with a beautiful daughter who speaks, count them, eighteen whole words, and whose husband has lit up Wall Street and who can still give me an orgasm, even if it is under duress. (For him, not me.)

  I press my eyes shut and will the thoughts away. But they refuse to comply, and instead, they lodge themselves in the crevasses of my brain, poking out just enough that I know they’re still with me, like a tiny splinter in your baby toe that gnaws away at you with every step you take.

  Garland rolls my glutes like Play-Doh, and I refocus my mind, letting it wander into blank space, into nothingness.

  “Your chi is blocked,” I hear Garland whisper in my left ear. “I’m going to work to unblock it, but you’ll feel some pressure.”

  “Okay,” I grunt.

  “Deep breath,” he says. “This might hurt.”

  His hands delve into my temples, then spider down the back of my neck, until his elbows torpedo into the hollow just below my shoulder blades. I let out a gasp that signals that fine line, somewhere between pleasure and pain, and in an instant, I’ve forgotten all about Henry and Jackson and rotten milk in the car seat and those stupid eighteen fucking words, and all I can do is bite the inside of my lip, breathe, and wish that every moment of my silly in significant life could feel as good as this one.

  Chapter Two

  I need to get up. I’ve been telling myself that I need to get up for at least a good five minutes, and yet I can’t move. A jackhammer seems to be beating on my brain, and the inside of my mouth tastes like rotten tangerine. I’m certain that it’s light outside, but my sleep mask has blocked out all the offending rays, so I can see only the flashes of yellow that reflect behind my closed eyelids.

  “Katie must be awake,” I mutter aloud to no one other than myself. She must be playing in her crib with her stuffed brown doggie that Henry’s mother bought her, and she’s probably hungry, so get your ass out of bed and go get her.

  Breakfast. The thought makes my stomach leap, and I feel like I might vomit. I raise my seemingly steel-weighted arm to my forehead and run my fingers along my hairline, pulling off a film of old sweat.

  Get up. Get up. I repeat to myself again.

  With my eyeshade still in place, I swing my knees up and over the side of the bed.

  “Ow, crap!” I yell, and frantically fling my sleep mask off my face. My knees have hit a wall, a literal wall, not the type of wall that my spinning instructor refers to when we have ten minutes left in class. I’m now left curled up in the fetal position facing a white plaster wall to which my bed is firmly pressed.

  I spin my head to the side.

  This is not my room. This is clearly not my room. Yet it’s inherently familiar. I know it somehow.

  I push myself up and my insides lurch. I’m hungover. Yes, I’m very clearly and certainly hungover. I try to scan my mind for hints of the night before. I can’t. I can’t remember anything other than my blocked chi and Garland’s elbows and how I felt like my body exploded when he pressed me with them.

  I propel off the full-sized bed, with its red plaid sheets and the pine headboard that is definitely from IKEA. A memory washes over me of the trip to the store, of bobbing and weaving in the bedding department until we settled on this one. We. I’m stricken. I’m ill. I rush toward the bathroom, which I instinctively know is just off to the right of the bedroom. I purge my insides.

  We. Jackson and me.

  Not possible.

  I close my eyes again and reach for the toilet paper to wipe my mouth, then pull up and trip my way to the sink. Under the soft glare of the mirror lights, one of which is burned out, I peer at myself. I pull back my highlighted brown hair that cascades down to the break below my shoulder blades—hair that the last I’d seen had been chopped into a bob that hung just above the nape of my neck and, surely, was at least two shades darker—and I stare. The slight wrinkles around my eyes have yet to seep in; the mole, the one I had removed because it was beginning to bulge, still resides just to the right of my nose; my double ear-pierce, which Jack’s mom deemed “slightly déclassé” the last time we had dinner, remains intact.

  I am a younger version of myself. Only not.

  I spin around, now frantic, and race to the living room, flinging open the walk-in closet door and planting myself inside. It is filled, packed, overloaded with my clothes, my student clothes, not the clothes of my mommy life that conceal the clothes from my business life that are now tucked and organized neatly by color scheme and necessity in my closet in the suburbs of my life.

  I stumble into the living room, first stopping to vomit again in the toilet, and see, perched above the fireplace mantel, a picture of Jackson and me celebrating my twenty-seventh birthday—it’s nearly impossible to make out the decorations on the cake due to the two dozen plus candles that illuminate it. Another frame holds a shot of Ainsley; Megan, my best friend from high school; and me ringing in the New Year in 1999. Prince instantly fills my head, a flashback to the song that played on a loop in the days leading up to the milestone night, as we ushered in the next decade.

  The phone rings, and I jump at least a good two feet in the air. It’s only then I notice that I’m naked. I never sleep naked, I think. At least not anymore. Now I sleep in silk pajamas that I buy at the Nordstrom half-yearly sale. I stock up on undies and jammies every July. I stopped sleeping naked when Henry and I moved in together because Henry never slept naked, and, well, it just seemed weird to sleep naked by myself.

  The machine clicks on.

  “Hi, you’ve reached Jillian and Jackson,” I hear myself say. “We can’t get to the phone right now, but we’ll call you back as soon as we can! Have a good one!”

  There’s a long beep.

  “Jill, it’s me. I tried you at work, but you weren’t in yet. Calling about our plans. Buzz me.”

  Megan. Oh my God, it’s fucking Megan. I walk over to the machine and stare at it, playing the message again, and then over again once more. Not possible. Not in any way possible. Three years ago, Megan drove off the road late one night and collided with a steel pole. She was out in California for business and heading home from dinner and fell asleep at the wheel. At least that was what the police supposed; they never found skid marks and there were no witnesses, so we got a few “Sorry for your losses, ma’am,” and her husband, Tyler, got a bloodied wallet, an engagement ring, and a wedding band, and that was it. They said that the best they could tell, she died instantly. I clutched Henry’s hand at her funeral on a damp day in October, just before all the leaves plunged from the trees.

  I fall onto the cheap beige couch, the one whose fabric scratched your back and that I’d begged and pleaded and whimpered at Jackson to toss out to no avail because, as he told me, “I’m not good with change, babe, and I love this couch and have had it since college, so come on, you can deal,” and surveyed the landscape.

  I was, unquestionably, back here. Back in the land of my future self’s what-ifs. What if I hadn’t tossed aside my former life like it wasn’t a life preserver that I might one day need? What if I’d done it all differently when I had a chance? What if, what if, what if?

  The better question is, it seemed, what now?

  THE PAPER ON the front hall table says Thursday, July 13, 2000. The headlines trumpet the race for the White
House: Is George Bush’s record in Texas strong enough to win over voters and can Al Gore select the right vice president to give him a boost? The entertainment section sings about a little movie called X-Men, opening the following day, which I knew would skyrocket an Aussie named Hugh Jackman to near superstardom and spawn two sequels. I toss the paper on the floor, run to my desk in the living room, and pick up the cordless.

  1-914-555-2973.

  I dial my home number. Nancy, my nanny, might pick up.

  “Please pick up, please pick up,” I whisper fervently as I press the buttons with zealous intensity.

  I’m greeted with a high-pitched recording: “The number you requested is not in service. Please check the number you are calling and try again.”

  I slam down the phone and stare blankly out the window. Shit. I don’t know what else to do.

  Without warning, my neighbor appears in the window directly opposite and only five feet away, and turns to stare. I offer a frantic wave, and only then realize that I’m still stark nude. I feel my eyebrows dart to my hairline and rush to the bedroom to cover myself.

  My closet is crammed and stuffed and bursting, and I wonder how I ever lived like this—in a state of controlled chaos—but then I remember that for years, it provided me comfort: that when my mom left the family, I picked up the literal slack, cleaning up for my little brother, organizing the kitchen so that my dad was never reminded that my mom ditched out, folding and fussing and keeping everything just so, as if a linear material life translated to a linear emotional one as well.

  When I got to college, when I finally fled the suffocation that I’d built around myself—because, to my father’s credit, he’d never asked me to captain our plagued family’s ship—it all collapsed. You couldn’t walk through my dorm room without stumbling on a week-old pizza box or a marketing textbook from the previous semester or a bra that desperately needed to be washed but was instead peeping out from underneath my twin bed.

  So now, trapped in the closet of my former self, nothing is too different from how it used to be. T-shirts drip from shelves, mismatched shoes are stacked atop one another, pashminas, which were everywhere the past few seasons, are balled and tossed into the back left corner.

  I pick up a sweatshirt from the floor and fling it over my head. It smells familiar yet distant, and I shake my head, trying to recapture the memory.

  Jackson. It smells exactly like Jackson.

  I look down and see that, indeed, it’s his. Or had been. Or maybe it still is now, if I could just fucking figure out what the hell is going on. But whoever possesses this sweatshirt now in the time-space continuum, it had, at one point, been my favorite. Graying all over and frayed at the wrists and with a stain from chocolate pudding right over the belly button, the front read xxx, and underneath it said u of m athletics: It had been Jack’s when he played for Michigan’s lacrosse team. I run my hands over the lettering and wrap myself up in my arms.

  It was hard not to admit that the sweatshirt felt a bit like home.

  IN THE LIVING ROOM, the clock glares 10:27 A.M.

  So if it is July 13, 2000, that means that, as Megan suggested on her message, I should be at work. I am, at present (or at past), an account manager at Dewey, Morris, and Prince, the leading advertising firm for consumer products.

  I notice a Filofax on my desk, and now, more appropriately clad so my neighbors don’t get a midmorning peep show, I make my way over and plunk down in the wrought-iron chair that we’d bought at Pier 1 when we moved in together last December: We’d apartment hunted for three months and finally discovered this modern, yet still-funky-with-prewar-details one-bedroom in the West Village.

  “To us,” Jack had toasted on Christmas Eve, a week after we’d wrestled a tree into the apartment, a match that left the tree nearly victorious and left both of us with swollen gashes from head (above Jack’s eye) to tip (I couldn’t type for three days due to gnarled fingers). “To living together, and to us.”

  I smiled sweetly and pushed up on my tiptoes, kissing him softly on his too-chapped lips, and agreed. “Yes, to us.”

  “Jack and Jill,” he chuckled, then moved toward the kitchen to refill his wine. “Everyone says that it was fated.”

  “Everyone does,” I agreed, and plopped down on the (itchy, stupid, I-hate-it-so-much) couch and waited for him to do the same so we could zone out to ER reruns and pretend that we didn’t regret declining my father and his girlfriend’s invitation to join them in Belize, even though it was subarctic in New York and we both felt nearly smothered from all the tourists.

  Now, I run my fingers through the pages of my date book until they land on today.

  Blank. Nada. No helpful reminders at all of what, precisely, I should be doing. I flip a day forward.

  Aha. A note to myself that tomorrow, my team at DMP is set to meet with the executives from Coke. I remember that, in my old (or current?) state, I spent hours and days and weeks crafting the perfect pitch, the pitch that would eventually shoot me on a trajectory toward the advertising stratosphere, the same trajectory that I’d abandon at the very hint of Henry’s suggestion that, now three months pregnant, we should “trudge” (my word, not his—I believe he said, with glee in his voice, “pack it in for greener pastures”) toward the suburbs to find more serenity for our yet-unborn child.

  Katie!

  I break from my nostalgia-filled mind trip and remember. Katie! Is she okay without me? Is she hungry? Is she in her crib clutching her doggie and screaming her face off because she hasn’t had her morning oatmeal and her daddy is in London and her mommy is stuck in her ex-boyfriend’s apartment from 2000? Katie!

  My eyes flood with tears, and I feel my pulse beat through the skin on my moist neck. I reach to call Nancy, my nanny, again, but realize it’s to no avail.

  It hits me suddenly, brutally and instantly. If I am here, if I am stuck in this wasteland from 2000, then there is no Katie. Not yet. Maybe not ever. She’s not rolling around in her crib or working on pushing out her nineteenth word or gazing blankly at the Wiggles while a look that can only be described as lobotomized washes over her face as they sing about their (fucking annoying) Big Red Car over and over and over again. She’s nothing but a memory trapped inside of me, an ephemeral, intangible glimpse of where I’m supposed to be headed.

  Only now, as I survey the contents of my former life, I’m not sure which direction to go.

  Chapter Three

  A cell phone is ringing, and I can’t find it. I’ve flipped over the tan fleece blanket that (slightly) covers our (horrid) couch, I’ve run into the kitchen and cased the counters, and I’m now burying my hands into a purse that I find on one of our wicker chairs (bought on the same outing to Pier 1 as my desk chair) in the dining area. I remember this purse! I loved this purse! My father had bought it for me when I got my summer job at DMP after my first year at business school.

  What the hell happened to this purse? Did I toss it when we moved? I think, as I finally clasp the vibrating phone that is clanging to the tune of *NSYNC’s “Bye Bye Bye.”

  “It ain’t no lie, baby, bye, bye bye,” I hum underneath my breath, flipping the phone open and bringing it to my ear.

  “Hello?” I pause. “Er, this is Jillian speaking.” I freeze, allowing only my eyeballs to move, as if somehow I’m getting caught doing something terribly illicit. I hear air move through my nose as I inhale.

  “Uh, Jill? It’s Gene. Where are you?” Gene, my intern at DMP who occasionally poses as my assistant, is whispering into the phone.

  “I’m here! I’m here,” I say with emphasis.

  “Er, are you okay? You sound . . . strange.” I hear a phone ring in the background of the office.

  “Fine, fine! I’m fine! What’s up? Where are you, Gene? Where are you?” I open the front door and peek out of it, as if he might appear on the other side. The hallway is empty, so I close the door firmly shut.

  “I’m here, Jill. I’m at work!” He speaks very slowly a
s if I might not understand English. “You’re missing the big brainstorming session for Coke, and I was worried. Everyone is asking for you.”

  “Oh,” I answer. “Uh, no, I’m feeling sick today.” My brain is spinning. “I, uh, just woke up and forgot to call. Sorry!”

  “Okay,” he answers with hesitation. “You sure you’re okay?”

  There are so many questions I want to ask him, drain from him, but just as I’m about to, I hear the front latch click open.

  “Yes! Yes,” I hiss. “I’ll call you later!” I slam the top of the phone closed and toss it onto the pillows of the couch, where it lands with a bounce. Frantically, I spin around, just in time to see Jackson stepping inside.

  My spine shoots up straight like I’d been plugged into an eight-volt, and the mere sight of him literally causes my breath to leave my body. I feel my chest tighten.

  The humidity from the July air had pasted his wavy blond bangs onto his forehead, so they almost appear painted on, and black circles cloud his naked blue eyes, but he is still handsome in the way that causes girls to turn and look when he walks by, handsome enough that when we met at a campus party two years back, I’d given him, no, I’d pushed on him, my number without hesitation, even though we were both falling-down drunk and I was in no condition to impress anyone. Nor was he.

  “Hey,” he says, tossing his messenger bag on the floor, and looking up at me. I am standing with my mouth agape, unable to form audible words. My eyes most certainly bug.

  “Hey,” he says again, moving closer, eventually close enough to plant a kiss on my forehead. “I called you at work and no one knew where you were, so I tried your cell, but you didn’t answer. I wanted to come home to make sure you were okay.”