Time of My Life

by Allison Winn Scotch

  Still, I cannot speak, so I squeak out something that sounds like “eep.”

  Jack steps back and looks me square in the eye. “Seriously, Jill, what’s wrong?”

  “Not feeling well,” I manage. “Sick.” My throat feels like flypaper. I move to one of the (hideous) wicker chairs and sit.

  “You look . . .” Jack cocks his head to assess me. “You look high.” He furrows his brow with concern. “What’s going on?”

  “Sick, I’m sick,” I repeat. “Took some DayQuil. Maybe that’s why I look this way.”

  “We have that? I thought you were on an antimedication kick.” Jack heads to the bathroom to check.

  Oh shit, that was true. I was. My team had decided to represent a naturopathic client who claimed that just about everything could be cured by everyday foods found in your pantry, and in one fell swoop, I gutted our medicine cabinet.

  “Ooh, no, changed my mind. As is my right! Right?” I bite into the cuticle on my thumb. “I ran out and bought some this morning.”

  Jack pops back into the living room. “Yeah, you were all sweaty when I woke up this morning. Your pillow was soaked. I guess you had one shot too many last night. Sorry. That was my fault.” He laughs and leans over to kiss my forehead.

  I have no idea what shot or which party he is referencing—Jack and I were always darting from one event to the next—so I just bob my head like a parrot and hope that I look convincing.

  “So . . . I was there when you woke up this morning?” I ask pointedly.

  “Sweetie? Go back to bed. You’re delirious. You’re there every morning when I get up. Dead to the world until the alarm goes off at 7:45, but yes, you’re there.”

  “Interesting,” I mutter, more to myself than to him.

  “Okay, well, if you’re this sick, I’m calling Megan and Tyler to cancel dinner. No way can you make it like this.”

  Dinner. Dinner with Megan and Tyler. I try to think back to it, and reach for the Filofax, hoping Jack won’t notice, to jog my mind. Yes, that’s right! Tonight’s the night that she’s seven weeks pregnant; “too early,” they’ll say, “to tell anyone, but we couldn’t help ourselves with you guys.” Six days later, she’ll miscarry, and I’ll be the one she calls for rescue.

  “No, no,” I say to Jack, standing to kiss him, as if that’s an assurance that I’m well on my way to healthfulness. He recoils at the scent of my rancid breath. “We’re going. Where is it again?”

  “Café Largo? You picked it. You got pissy when I suggested somewhere else . . .” Jack’s voice drifts off. “Are you sure you’re okay?”

  I try to recall the fight we had over the restaurant. Vaguely, it comes to me. Jack silently seething that I’d chosen a spot that I knew he detested, me screaming into his voiceless void that he should have suggested somewhere else when I asked for his input but that “it was so damn typical of him to cruise along while I did all the work,” him responding “that it was only fucking reservations and not exactly a big deal” and then slamming the door to our bedroom, and me left wondering how we ever imagined we could coexist under the same roof.

  Now—after years of knowing what real problems were, after living with a man who was cautiously loving but no longer fawningly committed, a man who was rational and smart but not quite passionate or spontaneous, after slowly spinning away from the person I vowed to be true to for the rest of my years, after feeling like I lost myself in his shadows and goals—the arguments over restaurants, over who took the trash out last seemed futile, silly, and so much easier than the hurdles that Henry and I would come to face in the road of the future.

  “I’m sorry that we’re going there,” I say softly, cupping his stubbly face in my right hand. “I know that you hate it.” I can’t remember why I insisted on Café Largo so many years back, but I suspect that it was done to retaliate to some wrong that I thought Jack had inflicted on me. That was how we worked, Jack and me. Do to me what I have done to you; an eye for an eye, and all of that.

  “Uh, don’t worry about it. We resolved it.” His eyes are still searching, awash in confusion and worry. “Okay, I have to get back to work, but get back into bed for a while . . . you look . . . not right.”

  He takes my arm and ushers me to the bedroom, pulling back the covers with a flourish and watching as I crawl inside. He leans down to kiss me. “Okay, see you tonight. I love you.”

  I gnaw again on the inside of my cheek. What was I supposed to say in response? I’d spent the past seven years squashing out any reminders of lingering emotional ties to Jackson, ensuring that his fingerprints weren’t still marked all over my body, that when I walked away, there were no regrets, no take-backs, and certainly no look-backs.

  And now here he was. With his love and his hope and, yes, his imperfections, that, in a few months if everything mirrored the events of my prior life, I’d soon trade in for the love and hope of another man who was equally imperfect, though in far different ways. So, rather than turn the moment into something that it was not, I simply respond as I would have seven years back, back when my younger self did love him, back before my older self stopped allowing myself to wonder if I still did love him, and before my masseuse liberated my chi, which seemed to have liberated something else entirely.

  And so, I say, “I love you, too,” as he makes his way out the door.

  It ain’t no lie. *NSYNC echoes over and again in my mind. Baby, bye, bye, bye, bye, bye.

  AN HOUR LATER, I have handed the taxi driver a wad of bills—I always kept a stash in my sock drawer for emergencies and this, certainly, constitutes an emergency, though not the type that I ever saved for—and am holding my hand in front of my face to ward off the glare of the late-morning sun. I stare at my house. My future house. My current house. I don’t know.

  It looks different, indistinguishably different, but different all the same. Like one of those educational games that I’d do with Katie: All but one element of a picture remains the same, and the trick is pinpointing the teeny, tiny thing that’s been swapped out. Maybe a briefcase has been tilted or maybe the leaves on the trees are a different hue of green. Sometimes, she’d see the change before I did—my eighteen-month-old outsmarting me!—and we’d clap our hands and sing aloud and deem her just about the most brilliant creature known to humankind.

  I cock my head and search for what’s shifted. Maybe the paint on the shutters is fraying a bit more? Maybe the flower beds out front hold irises, not the daffodils I’d nurtured the past two years? I can’t tell. “Is this my house? Is it the house of my future?” I mutter to myself as I wind down the brick pathway and burrow into my purse for my keys. It seems futile, insane, to come back here, after what I’ve just encountered with Jack. But Katie! I can’t just leave Katie! What if she’s here? What if I’ve fallen down some mind-bending rabbit hole, and this is all an LSD trip gone bad? What if I didn’t try to come back for her?

  Katie! My fingers shake as I push the key into the lock. I jigger it but the latch refuses to turn. I shake it and wrench it in a bit more, furiously pushing and noticeably starting to sweat, when I hear footsteps behind the door. I try to wiggle it out, losing all sense of composure, and realize that my keys are most definitely stuck in the front door to my potential home, when the giant black door swings open to an alarmed-looking late-thirtysomething who appears to be dressed for tennis. I recognize her almost immediately: Lydia Hewitt. And in five years, she and her husband, Donald, would sell us this house when Donald took a promotion in Nashville, and Lydia would blink back tears, urging us to enjoy the home, barely disguising her rancor at being uprooted for her husband’s mildly flourishing career in sales at a cell phone distributor.

  “Can I help you?” Lydia looks exactly how you’d expect someone to look when you open your door to find a stranger attempting to unlock it. Alarmed, frightened, armed with her racket and a mean forehand.

  I take a step back. “I’m . . . I’m sorry,” I stutter. “I must be confused. I thought this was
my house.”

  Her grip on her racket noticeably loosens, as she realizes that I’m not here to attack or rob her dry. Just, perhaps, a delirious neighbor who seems to have lost her way.

  “Er, no,” she says, still somewhat on guard, but softer. “Are you sick? Lost? Should I call someone?”

  I peer over her shoulder into the foyer with lavender wallpaper that Henry and I would immediately strip and replace with a coat of cool beige paint, and run my eyes into the kitchen, where Katie would first learn how to crawl. But there are no signs of life here, not signs of my life here, anyway. This is Lydia’s home, not mine. And not Katie’s. Certainly not Katie’s.

  “I’m sorry to disturb,” I say quietly, turning back down the walkway to the cab that lingered by the curb because I’d asked the driver to keep the meter running. “It won’t happen again.”

  “Are you sure?” she shouts to my back. “I’m happy to make a call.”

  But I don’t answer. I only slam the door of the taxi and direct the cabbie back home, back to my former home, that is. Because what I can’t tell Lydia is that there is no one to call. There is only me, my past, and the holes that I now have to fill in between.

  Chapter Four

  I arrive early at Café Largo, a characteristic from my old life that I could never shake. Henry, though so fastidious and meticulous in nearly every aspect of his life, ran perpetually late—an anomaly that only pure human quirk can explain. I’d learned to adjust to it—waiting in restaurants, waiting at home for him to come to relieve me so I could finally, desperately, have a girls’ night out, waiting for him to get out of the house while Katie and I were already parked in the car—but my personal clock never matched up with his. Most couples do. Most couples acclimate so that a year into the relationship, the early one is almost always constantly running a good twenty minutes behind or vice versa, but Henry and I, well, we just never clicked.

  I’m ensconced in a back booth, my fingers keeping time on the citrus-colored tiled table to the saxophone that soared in the background, when I look up and see Jack coming straight toward me.

  “Hey,” he says, leaning down to brush my lips against his, his lavender tie skimming the tabletop. He surveys me, his brow furrowing. “How do you feel? You look . . .” He tilts his head to the right and pauses. “You look different. Did you do something with your hair?”

  I scoot over, and he slides into the sparkly red leather booth beside me. I peer over at him rather than answer. Jack! I want to clamp onto his shoulders and shake him to make sure that he is real.

  Instead, I press my palm over his sweaty hand.

  “No,” I say. “I haven’t done anything with my hair.” I smile. “But it’s nice to see you.”

  He scrunches his face as if I’d just told him that the world was flat.

  “But I’m feeling better, much better, so don’t worry. Maybe I just needed a good day of rest.”

  “Maybe,” he mumbles, unconvinced, and reaches for a menu, pulling his hand from under mine.

  If I looked lighter, different, it might have been because of how I spent my day, because I felt lighter, different, too. After the cab had deposited me back at our apartment and after it became permanently clear that there were no take-backs, that this wasn’t some sort of fluke or sick joke or eccentric dream gone bad, and after I plopped on my couch and tried to breathe and breathe and breathe, I made a decision. A shaky one at first, but then I carved it into my soul and swore to abide by it: This was my second chance, this was what I’d been fervently hoping for. So I opted to embrace it rather than run. It was, after all, all I could do, anyway. And with my decision planted, I looked up my old number at work, which, after finding it, came rushing back to me. How could I ever have forgotten it?

  My career, right up until we packed it in for Westchester, was the one place I slid into the comfort of my skin. There were no reminders of a mother who ditched her family, no hints that I might be mired in a stagnant relationship with a boyfriend who loved me, yes, but who lacked a certain ambition and who might be a tad too worshipful of his own mother, no loneliness that plagued me even when I cuddled with Jackson underneath our IKEA headboard or drank merlot with my equally up-and-coming friends at the latest restaurant written up in Time Out New York. At work, I came into my own, as if I were inhabiting another person entirely, thriving on the creative highs and camaraderie of building a campaign from the ground up.

  So, with a clearer head, I redialed Gene and assured him I’d be back tomorrow, in time for the meeting with Coke. Only this time, rather than spending the twenty-four hours leading up to the meeting in a frantic flurry trying to nail the quintessential pitch, I spent the afternoon rereading old e-mails, revisiting old photographs, reacquainting myself with my former life. A life, which viewed from wiser, well-worn glasses, didn’t look so bad to begin with. Besides, I already had the perfect pitch for Coke, the one that would launch my career like a rocket ship, on a course that even I couldn’t have anticipated. A course that would slam into a brick wall when Henry’s sperm collided with my egg, and we’d produce the delicious Katie, who was born the color of spring calla lilies and who, though I’d sacrificed just about everything for her, I loved more wholly than anything else I’d ever touched my life through.

  “Hellooooo!” I look up to see Megan, Megan!, standing by our booth.

  “Meg!” I shout, and dig my elbows into Jack to push him out of the booth. “Meg! Oh my God, it’s good to see you!” I throw my arms around her neck, and out of the corner of my eye, I can see her shoot a perplexed look at Jack, who just replies with an “I have no idea what the hell is wrong with her” shrug.

  “Er, Jill, I saw you three days ago,” she says, breaking our embrace, even as I try not to let go. That’s right, we did! God, how I missed my single life, when Jack and I painted the city, out every night, the rush of undiscovered opportunity always beckoning.

  “I know, I know,” I say. “But you just look . . . you look glowing.” Her eyebrows dance downward, and my own eyes widen. Have I given anything away? Crap. I usher her into the booth, and plop back down on the other side of Jack.

  “So . . .” I rub my hands together. “Let’s order! And then let’s share. What’s going on with you? How have you been? Where’s Tyler? I’ve missed you.” I reach my hands across the table to clutch hers and smile.

  “Seriously, Jill, what’s going on? You’re starting to freak me out.”

  “How so?” I ask, and take a deep gulp of water: I’m suddenly parched.

  “Well, for one, you’re talking very, very fast. For two, you’re acting like we don’t do this every other week. For three . . . ,” her voice drifted. “You look different. Did you self-tan or something?”

  “I know!” Jack chimes in. “I said the same thing.”

  “I did nothing,” I reply, as my blood rushes to my chest, and I hope that my hives don’t run flush the way they’re prone to during fits of anxiety. “You guys are ridiculous!” But even as I say this, I can hear my pitch is off a decibel and the words come out like race cars.

  “It must be the meds talking then,” says Jack, just as Tyler makes his entry, and I bound from my seat to nearly tackle him. After Megan’s death, Tyler spiraled downward into an abyss of steely blankness, as if Megan were the only color in his life, and without it, there was only white, black, and gray. He numbed his pain with booze, and slowly, wrenchingly, pulled away from all of us, isolating himself in an angry cocoon where none of us could reach him and he didn’t want to be reached.

  But now, here he was, so vibrant with his ruddy cheeks and his strawberry hair and his paunch that Megan playfully rubbed when she (re)broke the news about her impending pregnancy, and said, “Pretty soon, I’ll actually be bigger than him.”

  I try to feign surprise at their announcement. I push glee into my voice and ask the waitress for another round of beers (“None for her,” I kid, as if the poor struggling actress who bused tables for a living was in on the joke)
, and I imitate the revelry that imbued our lives that night years ago, even though I knew that it would be so short-lived, too short-lived. But why not? I think. Why not savor this moment and drink it in as it’s meant to be swallowed? Let Megan and Tyler taste this happiness because soon enough, in six short days when she’d find blood in her underwear and cramps that haunted her from the inside out, they’d be stripped of all that. And then, four years later, when Meg is asleep at the wheel, they’d be stripped of so much more.

  So I drink like there is literally no tomorrow, as if I don’t know what that tomorrow would bring, and I bask in the glow of finding my second chance. I slip my hand under the table, and I weave my fingers into Jack’s, and I try to forget that what happens next might already be fated, that we might all be fated to make the same mistakes over and back and over again, and that my coming back, my second chance might not be a second chance at all.

  FIVE HOURS LATER, I stare at the ceiling, long after Jack has passed out beside me, and listen to his gentle wheeze of air—in out, in out, in out. I roll my thumb over my ring finger, an unconscious habit, and am struck by its nakedness. My rings, my signs of devotion to Henry and to my family, are no longer there, taken, gone, just like everything else from my future self.

  I watch light bounce off the walls from the cars on the street below. Henry. Where was he now? There was no way of knowing. We weren’t set to meet for another three months, if I choose to meet him again, I remind myself. Jack rolls to his side, lets out a sigh, and flings an arm around me.

  It had only been a day, but still, I didn’t miss Henry. I should; I knew that I should, but what I felt wasn’t the ache of a wife who might have lost her husband. What I felt instead was relief. Relief from the mundanity of our lives. Henry provided so many things—security, warmth, a round, solid partner—but zeal, fire, no, not them, and now, free from the suffocation of my seemingly claustrophobic relationship, I only felt free.