Time of My Life (10 page)

“Separated by only a ‘B,’ ” I offer, trying a little levity.

“If only,” she responds dejectedly while scanning the crowd in hopes of catching Bart’s eye all over again. “So what about you and Jack? Engagement anytime soon?”

No,
I think, then remind myself that this future is yet untold.

“Maybe,” I say instead. “We’ll see. I guess it’s up to him.”

“Why would you say that?” Josie tenses and turns toward me. “It’s up to both of you.”

Not really,
I want to burst.
Last time I gave myself to him for two fucking years and yet nothing, just more of the same old Jack, coasting along comfortably at cruising altitude. No ring, no hints, no squat, so when it finally became apparent that we were treading water rather than swimming toward something, I bolted. Because that was my only choice, my only say. I left him before he could leave me or at least until I wasted the better part of my misspent adult years, because I had no reason to believe that there was anything more he was willing to swim toward anyway.

Tonight, I shrug. “I just meant that he’s the one who proposes, that’s all.”

Josie shrugs back, a tacit admission that indeed I might be stuck, and then surveys the scene looking for her own lost ghosts. I glance around, swiveling my head in search of a familiar face, and then I see one.

We lock eyes, and he moves toward me, hacking through the thicket of partygoers, he moves right toward me.

It’s Henry, of course. Here and now, present and past. Why did I ever believe that I could stop the collision of time?

M
Y FEET ARE
seemingly made of lead. I want to move them. I so urgently want to raise them and flee, and yet, I cannot.

He is getting closer, and I’m starting to panic.
I’m not ready for this! I am supposed to have my sweet time with Jackson, figuring out the Henry question when I’m ready to figure it out!
I feel a flare of hives snare itself around my neck, marring my collarbone like a Jackson Pollock painting and clashing with the starkness of my silver strapless dress.

He is moving in slow motion, and I see the flop of his deep-sandy hair ride over his forehead, and he reaches up to push it back out of his eyes. As I learn to love him, I discover that this is his tell: the sign that he’s nervous or bluffing or, occasionally, lying. Not that I’d catch him lying all that often, but yes, sometimes, I’d trap him in one. That he had to stay late for work, when, in fact, he was golfing at our club; I’d hear about it two days later when Ainsley and I would take the kids for a toddler swim, and the valet might mention it in passing. Or that he hand-selected my ruby anniversary bracelet, which he’d present to me over merlot and candles at the finest restaurant in Rye, only to have his secretary ask, with her tongue so planted in her cheek it’s remarkable that she can speak at all, how I enjoyed the gift that
Henry
picked out. Wink, wink. Nudge, nudge. She’d emphasize the “Henry,” just in case I hadn’t picked up on the insinuation.

Tonight, he is nearly in front of me, again, swatting at his hair, attempting to tuck a strand that’s too long to hang properly yet too short to reach his ear, into place, when my brain finally connects to my legs. I turn to go, desperately, urgently, but there is literally no place to run. Around me, clusters of hobnobbers block my way, like brick walls on all sides, and the only viable exit is directly where he is coming from. I look to Josie beside me for help, but she has long since faded on me, wistfully sipping her rum and dreaming of her youth while scanning—still scanning—for Bart.

Too soon, and finally, he is here.

“You’re the girl from the bus, right?” he says, smiling and extending his free hand. The band has stopped playing, and a buzz of electric silence fills the dead space.

“What are you doing here?” I reply. It’s out too fast for me to take it back. But of course, Henry’s not supposed to be here. This isn’t where we meet. This isn’t how it all plays out. In a flash, I wonder how many near misses I’ve had with Henry in my former life . . . if he were someone whom I’d see around my neighborhood, at the grocery store, in the gym,
on the bus,
who just went unnoticed or to whom I’d occasionally nod, but who wasn’t meant to play any significant role in my life other than a familiar face with whom I would exchange glances from time to time in passing.

“Uh, excuse me?” He tries to take a step back, but instead, just elbow jousts with someone behind him, and finds himself on the losing end.

“I . . . just . . .” I find that I’m unable to speak. Henry.
Henry! This is what he looked like when we met,
I think. His eyes are still drowned with hope. His teeth seem whiter, his posture taller. No fine lines creaking into his forehead or around his eyes. Everything about his veneer seems glossier, more vibrant.
Was I the reason you lost that?
I wonder.
Or do I simply not notice anymore?

“Should I not be here?” he asks, perplexed.

“Er, no. I’m sorry.” My tongue feels scrambled. “It came out wrong.”
It came out exactly right! What are you doing here?

“Well, to answer your question, my company is a major shareholder in Coke, so, that’s why I’m here. And you?”

It occurs to me suddenly that Henry has every right to be here. He might have even been here seven years ago. It’s
me;
I’m the one who has changed things, who has inserted herself into places I haven’t previously been.
I’m
the one who is new here.

“I, uh, I do their advertising.” I stare at my hands rather than into his eyes, which feel like phantoms bearing down on me.

At this exact moment, Jack reappears, squeezing his way between two women who appear to be as bored as I am frantic.

“Finally!” he says. “I’ve been circling this place forever looking for you.” He pauses to assess the situation. “Oh, sorry to interrupt. Introductions are in order.”

“This is Henry,” I say before I realize my mistake.

Confusion floods his face. “How did you know my name?”

Shit.
“You told me a few minutes ago!” I bleat, my voice ringing like a siren. I feel sweat pool underneath my arms, and my blood pressure is exploding like a firework. “When you walked up! How can you not remember? And I said, ‘Yes, I’m Jillian, from the bus the other day.’ ”

He brushes back his hair and tries to rattle his brain. I can see him thinking, because I know him too well,
how could I have forgotten a moment from just a few minutes earlier,
but then deciding that he doesn’t want to be rude and acknowledge that he’s already misplaced my name, so he goes with it, just as I knew that he would because Henry is too proper to create a minimelee with a new acquaintance.

“It must be these drinks!” he answers, raising his martini and spilling it on his wrist. “I should obviously lay off—”

“I say that too much is never enough,” Jackson interrupts, shaking Henry’s free hand with vigor, as a way of introduction.

“It’s true,” I say. “He does say that.” Jack’s nights out with his editorial crew are legendary and, most often, regretted the morning following.

“Well, with that, I should get back to my friends.” Henry smiles, though it looks more like a wince. “Nice to meet you, Jillian. Or nice to
remeet
you, I should say. And I hope to see you around again soon.” He nods, then pushes past through the cluster of the crowd.
Not if I can help it,
I think, ignoring the palpable longing that sits like a bruise over me. But then I realize,
what if I can’t?

Chapter Eleven

S
lowly, the assured grip with which I once held my future is coming unraveled. When this endeavor began, I could foresee most, though certainly not all, of the events that were to rear their heads, like daffodils bursting out of spring soil. True, the little things—who would pop into my office, where Jack and I would eat for dinner—had long since fled my memory, but the bigger, more impacting things—an earsplitting argument over a dreaded and demoralizing weekend at Jack’s parents’ weekend home (this time, rather than endure the hysteria and the withering commentary that spouted from each of us, I simply agreed to the figurative jail time), a flare-up at work over misplaced film from the photo shoot (try calling the cab company, I suggested now)—have been easy enough to dodge. There is a reason, I suppose, that the cliché is a cliché: Hindsight truly is twenty-twenty.

But now, things have started to radiate like waves. Like a nearly imperceptible drop in a puddle that sets off a tiny ripple that shakes the entire pool of water. Eventually, these subtle shifts alter everything about what you’ve come to anticipate.

I know this because come Labor Day weekend, I’m sitting on the back deck of Megan and Tyler’s beach house on the Jersey shore, rolling the nutty taste of an Amstel over my tongue, and rocking on her wooden white porch swing while watching Jack and Tyler toss the football through the thundering ocean waves. I know this because six years ago, while I was here, Jack wasn’t. He was invited, yes, but I drove down without him when we’d become embroiled in yet another fight over his writing, or perhaps more accurately, his future.

“Stop trying to push me!” he screamed loud enough for the neighbors to hear. “I get it from my mom, I get it from you, I’m getting it from both ends. Jesus Christ! I’m writing when I can, and just
stop
!”

“So now you’re lumping me with your mother?” I yelled back. “Because I thought that your stupid fucking novel made you happy! I thought I was doing you a
favor
by suggesting that maybe you blow off a night out with your friends to stay home and work on it!” I paced the living room floor behind our (goddamn) couch.

“It
does
make me happy. It’s the pressure that doesn’t! So stop! Just fucking stop!”

“Fine,” I said flatly. “Send a memo to your mother because I was just trying to please you both.” Which maybe wasn’t true, when I thought about it now. I never tried to please Vivian, really, but I figured that saying that I did might score me points. What I truly hoped for, much more than pleasing Vivian, was that Jack might come into his own, stop muddling around at a job he took only because it was offered to him, stop wading around his late twenties like he was still in his early twenties.

And then Jack slammed the door and walked out, and I, relieved at both the silence and his absence, escaped to Meg’s summer house in the rental car.

This time, when Jack muttered that
he really probably maybe should get some writing done soon,
I merely smiled and curled my hand around his cheek, assuring him that he would write when he was inspired to and not to force something that wasn’t yet ready to come. He nodded, kissed my forehead, and soon enough, we were roaring down the highway to the shore.
Does it feel like too much? Not yet, no not yet. Jack was still so easy,
I told myself.
It’s better than the alternative, surely, it is better than that.

This afternoon, Meg brought me another beer, but skipped one for herself.

“Not drinking?” I ask.

“Don’t get your hopes up,” she says. “It’s a precautionary measure. I won’t know for another week. I can’t risk doing any damage right now.” I saw her visibly shudder, as if exorcising some sort of shadow that nevertheless slithered within her.

“Meg,” I say and place my hand on her arm, “you know that the miscarriage wasn’t about anything that you did. The doctor couldn’t have been more clear about this.”

“Can’t be too cautious.” She shrugs and sucks down a sip of lemonade.

“You sure you don’t need to talk about this? About what you’re dealing with?” I ask her again, just like I’ve asked her a dozen times since our emergency trip to the hospital. Just like I ask her every time I hear that tiny sliver of hope fill her voice.

“No,” she shakes her head. “I’m fine. It happens. It sucks. But I’m fine.”

I start to say something else, but chew the inside of my lip instead. I still haven’t quite adjusted to having Meg here, alive and thriving, even if emotionally, she’s wilting, curling at the edges like a piece of lettuce left in the fridge too long. So I tread lightly, not wanting to mar the incredible good fortune that comes with rediscovering a friend whom you had once lost. Permanently so.

A family of five and their golden retriever walk by, plopping down in the sand just to the right of the deck and spreading their blanket for an early-dinner picnic. The wind keeps sailing the blanket aloft, so the youngest, a redhead who couldn’t have been more than eight, runs around to each side and traps it into submission by placing flip-flops on each corner.

“So anyway,” Meg says, watching the family unload their cooler. “You and Jack seem good. Should I be on proposal watch?” She flashes a huge grin that’s devoid of happiness, one that I recognize from my old life, when I was the one topped off with plastic enthusiasm.

“Maybe,” I say. “Let me ask you . . . do you ever have any regrets with Tyler? I mean, you guys married so young, and not that you’re not perfect for each other, but . . . I dunno.” I swig my beer. “I’m not sure what I’m trying to say here.”

“I know what you’re saying,” Meg answers. “And not really. I mean, I don’t have many regrets. I guess I never in a million years imagined that we wouldn’t have a kid by now, but other than that, no. He makes being married pretty easy.”

I nod and stare back out at the family—the mom is now distributing sandwiches, and the older brother has the youngest in a headlock. Megan follows my gaze.

“I just know that I’ll be such a great mom,” she says. “It’s, like, all I can think about these days. How much a mother must love her child, and how it must feel to have that love returned. Like you’re finally not alone.”

I look at her with a start. “Meg, you’re
not
alone. You have me. You have Tyler. I hope that you don’t feel alone.”

“No, that came out wrong,” she says as she waves her hand. I notice bright splashes of pink along her cuticles where she’s gnawed them down to fresh skin. “I just mean, like, your child is tied to you forever, and nothing that anyone does can take that from you.”

I think of Katie and how, now, even when I try not to miss her, it’s impossible: Missing her is like a film over my skin that can’t be washed away. Then I try to think of my fondest memory of my own mother. A sign that at some point, she must have ferociously, uninhibitedly, ardently loved me in the way that Megan is so sure that mothers are bound, the way that I grew to love Katie, even if I wasn’t struck with it from the very second she was born.

The memory comes to me quickly, without too much effort. I was nine, and my dad was out of town on business, like he often was, running an import company that took him across the globe in search of new partnerships. Andy had been tucked into bed early—the summer heat had beaten him down, so he quickly spiraled into slumber after our grilled cheese and tomato dinner—and my mom had just finished tending to her garden in our backyard. It was only minutes after dusk, so the skies weren’t yet black, but there was only a faint glow of light, and fireflies were blinking on and off throughout the yard, begging to be caught. I grabbed two jelly jars from the cabinet and ran down the porch, tossing one in my mother’s hand and tugging her onto the grass. She giggled and followed me, and for the next hour—long after the sun had officially sunk beyond the horizon—we ran through the yard, capturing the fireflies then setting them free, over and over again. Finally, with dirt on our hands and sweat on our necks, we spilled into the kitchen and scooped out hulking heaps of ice cream, building sundaes larger than my nine-year-old self had ever imagined, and then devouring them in nearly one breath. When my eyelids grew too heavy for themselves, my mother carried me up to my bedroom, buried me under my sheets, and kissed me good night. Grime and all, which, for my mother, was a remarkable exception.

I’ve returned to that scene so often, too often, that I’m not even sure if I’ve concocted some of the details. Maybe they weren’t sundaes, maybe they were just scoops of ice cream. Maybe it wasn’t an hour in the yard, more like fifteen minutes. I really couldn’t say. Because it’s the one memory I have that reminds me that perhaps my mother wasn’t the monster I later crafted her to be; that yes, indeed, I was loved, and that her leaving, her abandonment had nothing to do with me, and so much more to do with herself.

“My mother sent me a note,” I say to Megan today, as we remain transfixed on the picnicking family on the beach. “Eighteen years of nothing, and now, she sends me a note. Wants to reconnect.”

Meg turns to me, her face a mix of hope and astonishment but also, because she knows the details that Jack doesn’t, and that maybe, even later, Henry doesn’t either, that I’ve never regurgitated wholly to him, I see pity. Meg was there at my high-school graduation, when my father sat by himself amid all the couples who, even if divorced, came to support their graduates. She was there on my twenty-first birthday when, because I was so drunk at a bar, I announced that earlier in the day, I’d trotted to my mailbox in hopes of a card from my mother, but got, I said at the time,
“Shit, nada, zilch, zero from that bitch!”
She knows the wounds my mother carved into me that have taken years to heal, and how hard I worked at healing them.

“Oh Jesus, Jill, I’m sorry.” She reaches over and holds my hand. “You okay?”

I nod and, for the first time since receiving the letter, find tears slowly leaking out. I wipe away a drop that’s weaseled its way down to my chin.

“I just don’t know what to do. Call her. Not call her. I’ve asked Jack but he’s not much help—”

“Well, who cares what Jack would do,” Megan interrupts.

“Oh, well, I mean, I guess I do.” I surprise myself in saying it.

“Aw, Jill, this has nothing to do with Jack and what he would do.” Meg stands and kisses the top of my head. “This has to do with you and what
you
need. Don’t confuse the two.” She pauses to nurse out the last sip of her lemonade. “If you
do
decide to call her—which you might—then let it be because it’s your needs, not because of what he thinks . . . or doesn’t think,” she adds in.

She walks into the kitchen, and I hear the screen door slam.

“So let me ask you,” I call over my shoulder. “Do you still think that a mother’s love trumps all?” I think of Katie, and how, though I love her enough to make my heart explode, splattering out of my chest like a smashed pumpkin, sometimes the burden of it, of motherhood, felt too much.

“I do,” Meg says, returning with a fresh beer and a refilled glass of lemonade. “Call me an eternal optimist, but I do.”

I
N MY OLD LIFE,
I often dreamed of Jack. He’d intrude at unsuspecting times—popping in occasionally to remind me of the life I’d left behind, or perhaps more honestly, the life I was leading now, the one plagued with what-ifs and self-doubt and festering resentment and sippy cups and bald-headed dolls and spoiled milk dumped in the back of my Range Rover. Invariably, in these dreams, Jack and I were always happy, with no gnawing, looming concerns that would eat us from the inside out.

These dreams were set against backdrops of fictitious realities—trips we’d never taken, stories we’d never told. I’d wake up and feel haunted from my very core, like a tick had wheedled its way into the pit of my stomach and was spreading a virus on out, and I would inevitably spend the rest of the day lingering in memories of our burned relationship, wondering where he was, how he was, and if he ever dreamed of me in return.

Tonight, wrapped beneath a quilted blanket at Megan and Tyler’s beach house, with the lapping sounds of the ocean filtering through the open window, and with Jack’s measured breath beside me, I am dreaming of Henry.

It is an early Saturday morning, no Saturday morning in particular, and Henry is still flooded with sleep, whimpering to himself every few minutes as he slumbers. We appear to be on a ship, and I peer out of a tiny sliver of a porthole to see dark blue, nearly black, water, and a cloudless crisp sky. I slip out of the bed, steadying myself under the rocking floor, and retreat to the bathroom, then emerge to shake him awake.

“I’m pregnant,” I whisper, my lips pressed to his ear. He grunts and snorts but doesn’t move. “Hen,
I’m pregnant.
”

His eyes whip open and in one quick movement, he pulls me down to him, throwing me over the bed, then looping on top of me. The boat rolls beneath us, and we’re nearly tossed onto the slats of stained oak beneath us. Quick as lightning, we both reach for the headboard like a life vest, until the crest below passes.