I double-back at the date, then grab the ticket and stuff it into my purse. October 3. Now that dates and times have lost all meaning, so, too, I tell myself, can this one.
Chapter Sixteen
Allie, it turns out, was a supermodel in training.
“I practice every night in front of the mirror,” she confides to me when we take a break for the photographer to reload his film, and she munches on Fritos. The grease on her fingertips shines under the glare of the studio lights.
Leigh’s eyes widen in horror. “Allie! You do not.”
“Yeah, I do, Mom, so? No biggie. I want to be in Victoria’s Secret.” She shimmies her shoulders like, I imagine, she’s seen glistening, half-naked, nearly inhuman women do during prime time.
“That’s it,” Leigh sighs. “We’re losing the TVs in the house.”
Allie is called back to the set, and as she strikes her pose, a makeup artist darts in the frame to touch up her lip gloss and smooth off the crumbs from her chips.
“Easy with the makeup!” Leigh calls from the side. “Good Lord,” she says to me. “If I wanted her to look like a pageant girl, I would have entered her in Little Miss New York.”
I shrug. In fact, back in my old life, I’d considered sending in Katie’s picture to the Parents child-model contest, so I wasn’t entirely sure why Leigh is so disgruntled. Don’t all parents want the world to coo over their offspring, as verification that their genes are the literal picture of DNA perfection, enough to make other couples froth with envy that their tots don’t measure up?
Leigh’s cell phone rings, and just as she excuses herself to the corner of the white-walled studio, Josie steps through the door. She glances around, then waves.
“Hey, what are you doing here?” I say, as she strides over in hip-hugging blue-rinsed jeans and a crisp pink oxford. “I’ve got everything under control.”
“I know,” she says, her eyes darting. “I just wanted to check in.”
“He’s not here, Jo,” I say.
“What? What are you talking about?”
“Bart,” I say firmly. “He’s not here.”
“What does that have to do with anything?” she says unconvincingly, as color spreads across her neck. “I’m here to make sure that the shoot goes okay.”
Before I can answer, Leigh rushes back over.
“So there’s a problem,” she exhales. “My neighbor just called and, evidently, the basement pipes exploded and our house has flooded. Shit.” She stares down at the phone, as if she’s intuiting it will ring. “I called Liam, but I can’t reach him. How much longer do you need Allie for?”
“Oh God, at least another hour. Maybe two? They want to shoot her in different wardrobes so they can use her for the winter campaign, too.”
“Shit,” she repeats, then looks at me intently. “Well,” she pauses. “What about if she stays with you?”
“Yeah, no, that’s fine,” I say. “Just sign the waiver that I’m her guardian, and you can pick her up after the shoot.”
“No, that’s not what I meant.” She shakes her head. “It’s already 4:30, and by the time I get home and deal with the plumbers and the cleanup, it will be hours . . . and well, Allie adores you, and I trust you, so could she just sleep at your place tonight?”
“Sleep there?”
“Well, yeah, turn it into a sleepover of sorts. I’ll pick her up first thing in the morning and take her to school.”
“Um, okay, I-I guess,” I say with a stutter. “Jack’s in Philadelphia for work, and I had dinner plans with a friend, but . . .” I mull it over: maximum bonding time with Jack’s niece. This can’t be a bad thing. “No, definitely. Let’s do it.”
“Thank God. Okay, look, you have my cell, call me if anything comes up, and I’ll buzz you as soon as this mess is taken care of.” She inhales and bats her bangs out of her eyes. “I’m so sorry about this.”
“No, no, don’t be silly.” I wave her off.
Leigh calls out to Allie and explains her good-byes, and then she’s off like a clap of thunder—one second here, the next she’s gone.
“Good luck with that,” Josie says, after we hear the heavy metal doors to the studio slam shut.
“How hard can it be?” I think of Katie and how I’d nearly mastered the art of domesticity.
“Harder than you think,” she replies dryly. “You’re not a mom.”
I start to disagree but then grasp that she’s not incorrect: for all intents and purposes, I’m nobody’s mother. I’m saddened by the realization more than I expect to be.
“Well, I’m out of this blowhole,” Josie sighs, and looks at her watch. It’s impossible not to detect her bitterness.
“Jo,” I start but am then unsure what else to say. Because I know that in the future, in the real future, she’s happily content with Art, and that whatever life choices she made, whatever hard choices she made, she seems satisfied with them. And I also now know that if I hadn’t come back, we never would have landed this print campaign, and she never would have been thrust so thoroughly back into her fantasy life with Bart. He never would have swirled around her head, like an escape hatch from her mundane doldrums, from the San Jose Opera, from a husband who now seemed to be a second-best choice.
Before I can speak, however, Bart walks in the studio, with the same nervous glance that Josie had cast about when she arrived earlier. The two lock eyes, and Josie erupts into a near-lunatic grin and then shuffles over to greet him with a peck on the cheek.
I watch her for a moment, then turn back to Allie, who has mesmerized both the crew and the photographer with her flawless charisma. She catches me staring and winks, then blows me an air kiss. I reach up to grab it, and she squeals in delight. Long after she’s returned to posing, I can still feel the kiss on my palm, like a seared scar that, try as I might, just won’t seem to fade.
MEGAN MEETS US at Serendipity for dinner.
“Of course I don’t mind,” she says, when I explained our change of plans. “It gives me good practice.”
“News to report?” I asked on the phone. I tried to remember when Meg announced that she was pregnant for the second time, but nothing jiggers in my brain.
“I can’t test for a few more days,” she responded, with either hope or nervousness: In both of our lives, the two are knotted so closely, they’re nearly indistinguishable.
The restaurant is a throwback to a tea shop from my grandmother’s era. Vivid blue and red and yellow and purple Tiffany lamps hang from the ceiling like stained-glass windows, elegant wire-backed chairs cushioned with blooming pastel fabrics are tucked under marble-topped tables. The unmistakable scent of chocolate envelops the space, and around us, families clutter booths, toddlers sitting on top of their older siblings, moms leaning into fathers and laughing in their ears. This sort of laughter crops up when you’re ensconced in something so quaint, so innocent, that it’s easy to forget that outside the glass doors, another world exists entirely.
“Can I order a hot chocolate for dinner?” Allie asks. Serendipity is famous, after all, for their hulking sundaes and their frozen hot chocolate.
“Absolutely not,” I tut. “Healthy dinner, then dessert after.” I grab a napkin and dip it into my ice water, then rub down her hands.
“Come on,” she whines. “Please?”
“Not even with a cherry on top.” I glance at the kids’ menu and twinges of the old me emerge; I’m more than a little horrified at the offerings: fried chicken fingers, (undoubtedly processed) hot dogs, pasta and butter. I’d never allow this crap past Katie’s lips. Never!
Megan nudges me in the booth. “What’s the big deal? Let her have the frozen hot chocolate for dinner.”
“Yesssssssssssssssss!” Allie shrieks. “Lemme, lemme, lemme, lemme!”
“No,” I say firmly. “Dinner first. Sorry, Al.”
“Aw, come on, Jill. She’s celebrating her first big shoot. She’s a near star!” Megan grins at Allie who is now standing opposite
us, perched on the sparkly red leather cushion, as if she’s about to conquer the world. Or pounce on us like waiting prey. Whichever comes first.
“Uh-uh,” I say. “Nutritionally, it’s important that she get a mix of protein and fiber at dinner. It helps her sleep at night and ensures a deeper REM.”
Megan rotates her head to cast a suspicious sidelong stare. “And you know this how?”
“Parenting magazine.” I shrug.
“And you’re reading this why?” Megan says slowly.
It’s only then that I realize I have absolutely no excuse for amassing the knowledge that I’ve amassed, so, as a distraction, I cave.
“Fine, Allie, you can have the hot chocolate for dinner,” I say, but Megan is still looking at me with peculiarity. “What?” I ask her finally.
“You’re not pregnant are you?”
“Oh God, no!” I laugh.
“Then what’s with the kid-knowledge and the parent magazines?” For reasons unclear to me, she appears bruised.
“It’s nothing . . .” I race for an explanation. “I was in an office the other day, waiting for a meeting, and saw it on the table. So I flipped through it, you know, to kill time.”
Meg doesn’t respond but returns to reading her menu. After a minute, she says, “Why are you lying to me? I’ve known you since we were kids. You think I can’t tell that you’re lying to me?”
“Meg, Jesus Christ, it’s nothing!” I wave my arm and try to hail down a waiter.
“Seriously, are you pregnant?” She stares at me, her eyes unavoidably welling.
“Oh my God, Meg. NO.” I place my hand on top of hers. “Really. You’re overreacting. It was just a silly article that I noticed in passing.” I turn to Allie. “I tell you what, Al, not only can you have frozen hot chocolate but I’ll let you order a banana split, too.”
“EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!!!” Allie screams, still standing on the seat of the booth, and throws her fifty-pound body through the air.
“At least bananas are healthy,” I say with a guilty look to Megan.
“Hey, I’m not judging,” she answers, holding her hands in the air, just as the waiter weaves his way over. “I say give the girl what she wants. That’s my motto. God knows I’m going to be over-the-top with my kid.”
She says this, and it strikes me violently, ruthlessly that this might never come true. That, unless something else has shifted in this new altered-reality, that sundaes and frozen hot chocolate and having the choice to say yes, or even no, won’t be on Megan’s future landscape. I watch her cajole Allie down from the booth and into a game of patty-cake and try to reassure myself. So much is different this time around. So much and everything. So, too, might this be.
Later, after we’d taken a horse and buggy ride through Central Park and after Allie had crashed from her sugar high, in which she demolished my apartment in under ten minutes, Meg and I gently strip off her pink plaid dress, tugging it gingerly over her head, and slip her white leather sandals off her tiny feet. I carry her to my bed, tuck her under the covers, and watch as her eyelids droop lower and heavier, as if weighted down with sand. I click off the nightstand light, but neither Meg nor I turn to leave. Instead, we are transfixed.
“I’m sorry about before,” she says. “It’s just this whole thing.”
I don’t answer; I just listen to Allie’s lilting breath slide in and out.
“I’m just so focused on it, you know?” Meg continues. “Getting pregnant, staying pregnant . . .”
I reach over and clutch her hand.
“Sometimes it seems like too much.” Her voice cracks. “Like it’s the only thing in the world that I want.”
I squeeze her hand harder, firmer, a tacit, wordless admission that I get it, and that she wasn’t alone.
Eventually, we slip out of the room, not because we want to but because after a while, you feel strange to watch over a sleeping little girl who isn’t your own. Even if she looks like an angel. And even if she reminds you so much, too much, of the angel you once had or the angel whom you so desperately hoped for.
After Megan leaves and I settle on the (scratchy goddamned) couch, I will myself to sleep, hoping to dream of nothing, but instead, dreaming over and over again of Katie. An angel no longer at my door.
Chapter Seventeen
The muggy October air in Miami shocks my system, such that nearly every pore declares mutiny with profuse and unstoppable sweating. By the second day, I’ve all but camped out in the resort pool in an effort to offer my body some relief. After my fingers have pruned, I slink out of the water onto my waiting lounge chair and reach for the SPF. Always with the SPF.
“You’re not going to get any color down here?” Jack asks, setting down his book on the mini–patio table that sits between our loungers.
“Of course not!” I furrow my face and zealously rub the lotion into my forearm.
“But . . . you love a nice tan,” he says, as I flip over and hand him the bottle to slather more block on my back. “That’s part of the reason I chose Miami.”
“The sun is terrible for you!” I exclaim, reaching for my linen hat, whose circumference outsizes a watermelon. And it’s true: I’d learned all about the horrors of the sun via my diligent magazine reading in my old life. Wrinkles. Lines. Melanoma. I’d flip through the pages, then assiduously examine every mole on my body, holding up a mirror to peek at the ones on my back, and compare them all with the gruesome, gnarly pictures in the articles. And Katie never left the house without a full coating of SPF 50. Even in the rain. “You could never be too careful,” a renowned Stanford professor was quoted as saying in the latest piece I’d perused in Allure.
“Um, okay,” Jack answers with confusion, still rubbing. “But you spent all of last summer laying out in the park.” Don’t remind me! My skin nearly crawls at the thought of the damage I’d wrought in years past.
I turn my head away from him, pressing my face into the chair, and grunt a response. Slowly, I feel his fingers veer from my shoulders into the edges of my armpits and then slightly on the cusp of my breasts.
“Not now!” I try to sound serious, but mostly, I giggle.
“Now,” he says, leaning into my ear.
“It’s the middle of the afternoon!” His hands weave farther underneath my bikini.
“And that’s a problem, why?”
He’s right, I tell myself. Just because you and Henry never had sex in the middle of the afternoon, or if you did, it was because it was your only window while Katie was napping, doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t run up to your suite and screw Jack’s brains out.
I push myself off my stomach, tie a towel around my waist, and grab his arm, then we race to our room, tugging, pulling, clawing at each other until twenty minutes later, I’m curled naked in bed, inhaling the sweetly cloying scent of suntan lotion and sex, and finally, it seems, blessed by a too-cold blast of air-conditioning, my body ceases to sweat. Just as I’m drifting into unconsciousness, that deep haze brought on by a great orgasm and strong sun, I hear Jack rustle in the sheets next to me.
“God,” he says. “I could lie here with you forever.”
Forever, I think. What’s that?
But rather than answer him, I place my hand over his beating chest, and then soon, I am spent.
THE RESTAURANT that Jack has chosen for dinner is impossibly hip, with smooth granite walls and towering bamboo shoots and models whose faces I double take because I wonder if I know them personally or have just seen them in one of my many magazines.
We’re seated in the back, away from the pulsing bar and the even-more pulsing music, and though I’ve been back in my old life for nearly three months, I am struck with an overwhelming sense of surrealism. Sort of like déjà vu, only not really, since I know that I haven’t been here here before. Because seven years ago tonight, not only was I not in Miami but also it was the fateful night that I, armed with the security of having met Henry, untied my anchors to Jack for good.
In the weeks leading up to the breakup, we’d spiraled from ailing to critical, and when he announced, yet again, that he was heading to visit his mother for the weekend, and failed to invite me along, I erupted. In retrospect, now with my neutered temperament, which clamped down on my niggly comments about his under-achievements and overbearing gene pool, it seemed like I could have taken steps to prevent the blowout. Maybe I overreacted, I tell myself now, sipping a mojito and glancing at Jack, whose tan had brought out the blue in his eyes and whose hair had grown two shades lighter in just a few short days.
Back then, Jack asked me to rethink things. “This is ridiculous!” He shouted, loud enough that our neighbors could hear. “She’s my mother! It’s a weekend!”
“It’s not about your mother!” I cried back. “It’s about . . .” I shook my head and flitted my arms in a circle. “This! It’s just all of this!” I didn’t mention the kind-eyed man whom I’d met at the bar who seemed to interlock with me in the way that puzzle pieces might.
“Do you want me not to go see her?” He slammed a suitcase shut on our bed. “Is that it? Do you want me not to go, because then I won’t fucking go!”
“That’s not it,” I said quietly. “It’s so much more than that.”
“Because we fight?” he asked. “Is this because of our stupid fights? Because everyone has goddamn fights. Everyone!”
“It’s not about the fights, Jack,” I said, then reconsidered. “Well, it is about the fights. Sort of. It just feels like we don’t fit anymore.” I thought again of Henry.
“This is bullshit,” he said, though he stopped screaming and now seemed poised to explode into tears. “Fucking bullshit. Two years of my life, and then this. Out of nowhere.”
“It’s not exactly out of nowhere,” I said, sitting on the bed.
“It’s completely out of fucking nowhere,” he answered, lifting his suitcase and heading for the front door. “Just like your goddamn mom. One day here, the next day gone.”
Time of My Life Page 14
