Time of My Life

by Allison Winn Scotch

  I flop my arm over Henry’s stomach, fingering the gentle loft of hair that floats just below his belly button, and then a foghorn sounds loudly, bleating like a laboring cow, in the distance. The cacophony stirs me, and I shudder, then glance down to discover that my belly has already expanded, that it is morphing even before my eyes, growing like an alien puffer fish, like a balloon filled with a rush of helium. I try to raise myself up, but I’m flattened, paralyzed in the bed, and I can only watch in agonizing horror until my body is so ripe that I’m nearly bursting with child, and that at any moment, I am poised to explode.

  “Henry!” I scream with a shrillness that could puncture our miniature glass window. “It isn’t time! I only just found out! It isn’t yet time!”

  I reach for him, but my hand grasps nothing but air. Frantically, I will myself to move, pushing frozen, unheeding muscles, commanding them until they relent, and nearly sitting up and lumbering under the new weight of my stomach, I scream again. “Henry! Get over here now, Henry!”

  But he doesn’t answer. There is nothing but silence, even the horns from the passing boats and the sizzle of the sausage have fallen away, and just before I shake myself awake, in the last few gasping seconds of my dream, I find myself weighted to the bed, bulging and terrified, and realize that I am utterly alone. Henry is gone, vanishing into the blackened waters that push against us at every turn, as if he were never there in the first place, as if he were never there at all.

  EVENTUALLY, AFTER STARING at the ceiling fan and listening to gulls on the beach, I fall back asleep. I dream of nothing, or at least nothing that I choose to remember. I am wasted in slumber when a ringing phone jolts me awake.

  Jack’s hand flashes toward the nightstand, and he gropes for his cell.

  “Urg,” he manages, before he pushes out, “hello.”

  I look at the bedside clock. It’s 5:15 A.M.

  “Is she okay?” I hear Jack saying. He reaches for the lamp and clicks it on.

  “Oh, come on!” I hiss and throw myself under the covers.

  “Why didn’t you call me earlier?” His voice is giving way to increasing urgency. “No, of course not. I would have been there in a second. I’m just here with Jill! No, no, it’s just a weekend vacation. It‘s not a problem.”

  I pull the blanket back and shoot him a look to let him know that while I have no idea what his comment was in reference to, I’m considering being deeply offended.

  “No, no, I’m leaving now. I’ll be there in a few hours. Okay. Yes. See you then.” Jack stands and pulls his jeans off a wicker chair in the corner of the room.

  “What’s going on?” I ask. My voice croaks with sleep, and I can taste my sour breath.

  “My mom,” he answers, tossing a T-shirt over his head. I’ve never seen him dress so quickly. Clothes are flying through the air at superhuman rates.

  “Is she okay?” I prop up on my elbows and scan my brain. I have no recollection of any heart attacks, car accidents, or other brutalities that might cause such panic.

  “She broke her hip,” he says. “Last night, trying to string lights on the tree out back for their Labor Day party. Fell off the ladder.”

  Ah yes, that’s right.

  “I have to head to the hospital. I’m sorry, babe, to cut the weekend short.” He is shimmying his feet into his sneakers, trying to weasel them in without untying the laces.

  “Well, I’ll come,” I say. “I’m happy to come with you.” I swing my legs off the bed and feel my back crack in two places. My body is begging for a few more hours to be dead to the world.

  “No.” He shakes his head. “No, no. It’s fine. You stay here and enjoy the next few days.”

  “Jack, don’t be silly. I want to come. Keep you company. It’s what girlfriends do.”

  “Really, baby, don’t worry about it. I’m fine on my own. I’m just trying to get out of here as fast as possible so I’m there when she wakes up this morning.” He moves over to kiss me, as if that will blunt the fact that my company isn’t warranted for a family emergency, his family emergency. “My dad said that she was asking for me last night. My sisters have their hands full with their kids, so, I’m the only one who can come.”

  “But, Jack . . .” I start, then pause, biting back any shards of offense that I might have taken in my old life with him, blunting them instead with openhearted, concerned girlfriend overtones. “I’d really like to go—”

  “Jill, please, really, I appreciate it,” he interrupts. “But my dad and I can handle this.”

  “Of course you can handle it,” I say mutedly. “I didn’t want to come to handle it, I wanted to come to show my support.”

  “Oh, well, that’s very sweet,” he says, too distracted to put any meaning behind it. “But I’m good.” He pecks me again on the lips and runs his fingertips over my cheeks and down my collarbone, then grabs his overnight bag and bolts out the door. “I’ll call you this afternoon,” he says, just before I hear the thud of his footsteps plodding down the stairs, and then the slam of the front door.

  I ease my way back into bed and flip off the light, clamping a lid on any disappointment, the way that my mother might have jarred up jam fresh from her garden, sealing it tightly so it could last the winter through.

  Well, you weren’t there last time, either, I remind myself. So really, nothing to worry about. Nothing’s changed.

  Slowly, I slip into sleep, dreaming of neither Henry nor Jack, not realizing that I seem to have missed the point entirely.

  Chapter Twelve

  On Labor Day, my office is quiet. Everyone else has fled the city and their desks for literal greener pastures. Meg and Tyler asked me to stay on at their beach house, but after Jack’s departure, I couldn’t muster the spirit for the sandy walks or the margarita mixes or anything that would come along with what was supposed to be the quintessential weekend with my rehabilitated relationship. So instead, I begged off their offers of homemade pancakes and sank into the rental car that reeked of stale cigarettes and floral air freshener, and headed back to the deadened enclave of my office. Storyboards, print layouts, copyedits I could do. I’d already done, in fact, half a decade back. There were no worries that, despite my best efforts, I’d still be spurned.

  It was like it always was at work, both before and now, and today, I meditated over my loupe and the sketches and tried to forget that even though I was a chameleon with Jack, changing tiny parts of myself until I blended in completely with his environment, somehow it might not be enough. And I tried not to consider that even though I’ve been in my new life for nearly two months, still, at times, it feels like I’m shoving puzzle pieces into slots that are too narrow or too jagged for a proper fit. It should be seamless this time, I stop to think before flushing my mind clear. That’s the whole point. You have the game plan already, you know the moves. You simply have to follow them. It should be seamless, I reiterate to no one but myself. And yet in so many ways, it is not.

  I am huddled over my desk, peering at a “woman on the street” frame, when I hear my cell phone buzzing from the depths of my bag. A nerve in my neck flares ruefully as I hurl my torso over the arm of my chair to reach the phone in time.

  “Hello?” I tuck the phone underneath my ear and stand to stretch. I’ve been cocked over the images for two hours, and my shoulders are palpably pulsing.

  “Jillian? Er. Hi, it’s Leigh.” She pauses. “Jack’s sister.”

  “Oh, hi!” My voice molds into some sort of squeal, and I try to ratchet it back, hoping I don’t sound desperate both for the interruption and for the fact that she, Jack’s sister, is calling. She never called me in my old life.

  “I hope it’s okay that I’m calling. . . . Jack told me that you’re on your own this weekend because of my mother’s accident.”

  “Oh, well, yeah, you know. Things happen. Jack told me that she’s recuperating just fine, though.” I coo with understanding. Even though I don’t fucking understand at all! Yes, you do, I reassur
e myself. Yes, you do.

  “She is,” Leigh affirmed. “Though you know my mother. She might be recuperating, but it’s the rest of us who suffer.”

  I allow a nervous laugh, unsure about Leigh’s motivations, more unsure because I’ve never heard a child of Vivian’s deign to say something less than revelatory about her. I grab a Coke-flavored stick of gum and fold it under my tongue.

  “Anyway, I was calling because Allie and I are headed to the city in a few minutes, and she was hoping we might see you. Would you be interested in meeting us at the zoo in an hour or so?”

  “Of course!” I say without hesitation and worry if I might come off as needy, or worse, pathetic. Lonely girl sitting in deserted office waiting for phone to ring so she can prove herself to aloof boyfriend. Not exactly a classified ad to woo Jack’s family.

  “Allie, get down from the windowsill right now!” Leigh shrieks, and I hold the phone away from my ear. “Sorry,” she sighs. “Okay, great. She’ll be thrilled. We’ll see you at the front gate of the zoo in an hour.”

  Leigh clicks off but, as I turn back out toward the window and stare down at the sidewalk at the strolling pedestrians and moms and dads and families and people who have lost their way, her voice sticks like taffy in my ear. It’s hard not to recognize it, of course. Her quiet and frantic desperation, fleeting though it may have been, sounds exactly like me, back in my old life, back before I was granted a chance to know better and a chance to wash myself clean of that desperation for good.

  THOUGH THE CITY has emptied for the long holiday weekend, the Central Park Zoo teems with families who weren’t lucky enough to escape the filmy air and the blaring horns of taxis. I see Allie before she sees me. Her white-blond hair is pulled back into low pigtails, her yellow capris are dotted with imprints of watermelons, and her ivory tank top is splashed with a giant icon of the fruit. She is clutching Leigh’s hand and half picking her nose, and I can’t help but stare: Though Katie inherited my own deep mahogany locks, she would be, I intuit, the very vision of Allie come four and a half years.

  Before I can examine these implications, Allie spots me.

  “JILLIAAAAANNNNN!” She rushes over at me in a frothing frenzy, and torpedoes her body at my legs, then attempts to climb up me like a spider on a vine, until I lean over to heave her up in an encompassing hug.

  “Allie! Come on, get off her.” Over Allie’s shoulder, I see Leigh jogging to catch up with us. “Jillian doesn’t need you all over her.”

  “I don’t mind.” I place Allie on her own two feet and grab hold of her hand. “That’s as good a welcome as I’ve ever gotten.”

  We amble through the iron gates and, tugged by Allie, make our way into the penguin house. In the darkened exhibit, which smells like damp seaweed and kosher salt, Allie presses her face against the partition that separates us from the birds, close enough that we can see her breath fogging up the glass, and gazes in rapture as two penguins dive below the surface of the frigid water, pushing their bodies through as if they were merely moving through air, and swimming together until finally, after what feels like an eternity, they glide toward the other end of the rocks and scurry back to the pack.

  Leigh and I watch from the back wall, silent and equally mesmerized, as various penguins continue to plunge in, for seemingly no reason at all, other than to submerge themselves in the waiting water and to, I imagine, taste the relief or even the joy that this moment—that of taking the leap—brings. I watch the birds dive over and over again, and somewhere inside of me, I feel the heat of jealousy. To be that free. To take that plunge. Until, at the very moment I realize how overwhelmingly silly it is to envy a penguin, a penguin trapped at a zoo no less, Allie whips out of the exhibit, bored in a flash, in the way that six-year-olds can be, and Leigh and I are left to chase her wake.

  Once outside in the sharp glare of the midday sun, I squint to adjust my eyes and, for a second, am struck with a sharp pang of vertigo, which leaves as quickly as it comes.

  “Hey, Allie,” I say to her back, as she heads toward the polar bears. “Did you know that penguins mate for life? That makes them pretty unusual for animals.”

  She stops and turns my way. “So you mean that it’s like they get married? Like Mommy and Daddy?”

  “Something like that,” Leigh answers.

  “Though I don’t know if there are actually weddings!” I grin. I find myself unconsciously playing with the bare space on my ring finger. Though it has been empty for two months, I’m still always surprised when my thumb reaches over and finds the rings gone.

  “Well, they’re already wearing tuxedos if they need them!” Allie says, and we all laugh, though I pause before doing so, so astonished at what a little person she has evolved into. Katie. The pang lingers this time rather than fleeing my body like an unwanted chill. I watch Allie rush toward the polar bears, and I’m nearly drowned in nostalgia of my own precious girl.

  “They grow up fast,” I hear Leigh saying, as if she had a map of my brain. “Sometimes I can’t believe that she’s as wise as she is. I mean, shouldn’t she still be in diapers?” She sighs, but it’s not a sigh of lament or remorse. Just a sigh of a mother who can’t pin down time, who can’t shake it to a stop and say, Don’t let my baby get old, don’t let it all get away from me before I have a chance to inhale it all in.

  “Thanks for inviting me today,” I say, trying to dust off the memory of Katie. “It was a welcome surprise.” I pause, unsure of what else to add. Jack’s family had excavated such an emotional moat that I find myself off balance when a bridge has finally been lowered.

  “Well, Allie fell a little bit in love with you at her birthday,” Leigh says. “And Jack mentioned that he left you halfway through your weekend, so . . .” She stops, too. New territory for both of us, I suppose, as I watch her consider how to continue. “Look, Jill, I know that my family isn’t always the easiest lot. My mother alone is enough to make you bananas . . .”

  “So you see that, right? It’s not just me?” I hear the relief flood my voice, in the knowledge that finally, someone, anyone, might be an ally.

  “No, it’s not just you,” Leigh laughs. “She never quite learned how to find the balance between being a mother and having her own life outside of us. I was the youngest of the girls, so I got the least attention, which, I suppose, was a blessing—I survived the smothering. But Jack, well . . .”

  “Behold the prodigal son,” I inject.

  “Something like that,” she answers, as we sit on a bench and watch Allie stand rapt at the polar bears who remind me of oversized marshmallows.

  “Do you ever worry? You know, that you’ll turn into her?” My breath accelerates, and I hope that I haven’t crossed the line, cracking the new, fragile foundation that we’re tenuously erecting.

  “Sometimes, I guess, sure,” Leigh answers, unfazed. “You know, motherhood is the best thing that can happen to you, but it can also be the thing that can drain you completely. I mean, I know that sounds weird, and I hope it doesn’t sound awful, especially to someone who doesn’t have kids, but it’s the truth.”

  “It doesn’t sound weird to me at all,” I say, and I think of how many pieces of myself I lost when Katie was born, how much I missed having a purpose other than pressing my breast into her mouth and singing her to sleep and swapping out dirty diapers for new ones. All of which were wonderful, truly wonderful, but there were other pieces I left behind that were abandoned too quickly and too thoroughly; it almost felt like they had been physically cut from my being.

  Six months after Katie was born, Henry, who perhaps sensed my listlessness, or perhaps had just grown bored with a wife who had nothing else to contribute to nightly dinner discussions other than reports on poop-filled diapers or sales at BabyGap, suggested that I consider volunteering somewhere. Getting out there and away from the stifling routine I’d fallen into.

  “Why don’t you call one of the homeless shelters or a cancer organization or something and see if they c
ould use some help with their marketing?”

  “I don’t think we have homeless shelters in Rye,” I answered, blowing on my postdinner tea.

  “I was speaking metaphorically,” he said.

  “Why would I do that? I’m perfectly happy taking care of Katie.” I hoped that my voice sounded less hollow than the truth behind it.

  “I just thought that you might want to do something else, too, you know, with your free time.” He rose from the dinner table to clear the plates.

  “Free time! I don’t have any free time! Do you think that this mommy thing is a vacation?” I plunked my cup down harder than I’d intended, and the tea swirled near the top, then over the edges and onto the table. I mopped it up with the ribbing from my sweatshirt sleeve and hoped that Henry didn’t notice. “I’m nursing her or changing her or bathing her or entertaining her, and when the nanny comes, I have errands to run! I don’t have a single second of freaking free time! Thank you very much.”

  “Jesus, Jill, I was just making a suggestion. Sometimes space away from the baby can be healthy.”

  “So now I’m unhealthy?” I could feel tears perching themselves on the ledges of my eyes.

  “Oh good God, calm down. It was just a thought.” He plodded into the living room and grabbed the remote.

  “If it’s so important to you that I get space, then why did you make me quit work?”

  “What are you talking about?” Henry said, returning to the door frame to face me. “You wanted to quit work! I didn’t make you!”

  “How can you say that? You packed me up and shipped me off to the suburbs, and now you’re telling me that I’m unhealthy and need space and that I should get out of the house, blah, blah, fucking, blah!”