Time of My Life (21 page)

Chapter Twenty-two

I
’ve begged off a staff meeting to find a sliver of free time, and my mom has agreed to meet me at the south gate of Central Park at lunch. It’s an unseasonably mild day for early December, though it snowed earlier in the week, so the lawns are bathed in slush, and puddles threaten on every sidewalk corner. As at the tea emporium, she is there early, and I see her from my corner perch long before she sees me.

She is chewing the inside of her lip, and while I imagine this should endear her to me, it instead angers me all over again, shooting shards of her betrayal, of her plea for sympathy, of the news of my sister through me like hot lightning.

Henry, my old Henry, would be proud of me,
I think. He’d pushed me relentlessly, until his hints were no longer subtle or even all together padded with softness, to forge a reconciliation, and so, if he could see me here, toeing the literal line between my childhood self and my adult one, surely, he’d be proud.

But as I watch my mother glance through the passing crowds, searching strange faces for mine, a familiar one, it occurs to me that pleasing Henry,
making him proud,
has nothing to do with anything. Before, in my old life, I felt much the same, only it wasn’t really the same feeling at all. Before, back then, I was cocooned in hostility, the way that it’s so easy to be when the person closest to you isn’t telling you what you want to hear or isn’t taking the time to listen clearly to what it is that you
need
them to hear.

Instead of shutting down with Henry, I consider, I should have listened more. Listened to why this reconciliation with my mother mattered to him. Told him why it felt like too much to bear for me. Maybe then, instead of digging emotional graves for ourselves, we could have forged an understanding that would have pleased us both equally. Because the Henry I’ve come to know in this second chance would have preferred that, and I realize, as I see my mother check her watch once again, I would have much preferred that, too.

I start to move toward my mom, but still, something holds me back, like I’m trapped in a giant impermeable bubble that won’t allow me through. I freeze and exhale, trying for the first time in so, so long to listen to what it is that I need to do for myself, not what I think needs to be done for the future and not what I’m doing to escape my past. Just here and now. Me, myself, and I.

I’m not ready,
I say.
I’m not ready to let this all go. I wish that I were but it can’t be so easy. Stop pretending that it’s all so fucking easy. As if you should be able to forgive her just because she beckoned.

The words resonate within me, echoing and ringing clearly, and I know that they are true. So rather than cross the street and gloss over the scars that still lie within me, I pull my hood tight over my head, turn down the avenue, and, like a ghost, am gone.

“O
H MY
G
OD
, what is that smell?” Later that night, I hear Josie’s voice from the hall before I see her in my office.

“Chinese,” I say, gesturing to the spread in front of me. “You want? We ordered way too much.”

“Don’t be so sure,” Meg says, her chopsticks diving into her paper plate. “I’m eating for two.”

“Hey, congrats!” Josie kisses Megan on the cheek and grabs a dumpling with her fingers. “What are you doing here on a Friday night?”

Meg tries to answer but her mouth is too full, so mostly, she grunts and gestures toward me.

“Forgive her,” I say. “She’s nine weeks pregnant and this is the first time she’s eaten in about a month.”

“Morning sickness up the wazoo,” Meg chimes in after finally swallowing.

“Ugh, I had it with both of mine the entire pregnancy,” Josie says, committing to dinner by reaching for a plate. “Everyone swore that it would pass after the first trimester, but nope, kept vomiting right until I delivered them.”

“Yeah, but really, wasn’t the heartburn the worst?” I say. They both cock their heads in confusion, and I realize my mistake. “Um, I mean, that’s what I’ve read. That the heartburn can be the worst.”

“Oh, the whole fucking thing was the worst.” Josie waves her chopsticks in the air, and I notice she’s still wearing her wedding ring. She hasn’t breathed a word of her potential dalliance with Bart in nearly two months. “I don’t care what all those books out there say, pregnancy is
not
the best time of a woman’s life.”

Meg freezes for half a beat and stares at her, as if Josie has just told her that the world is flat. Then she dismisses it.

“Well,” she says carefully, “I think it’s pretty wonderful. I mean, it’s such a powerful feeling knowing that I’m growing a
human
inside of me.”

I smile and try to soften Josie’s cynicism. Because Meg, after all that she’s gone through, or perhaps, after all that I’ve seen her go through in my previous life, does not deserve even a flea nip of cynicism. Though, I note to myself, she does echo the sound bites from the dozens of books on mommyhood that I’d piled next to my nightstand in anticipation of Katie’s arrival.

“Sweetie, it is pretty wonderful,” I say. “And you’re going to produce the cutest human being ever.”
Second to Katie,
I catch myself thinking, and I can’t seem to shake her chubby cheeks from my mind.

“No, but seriously, Meg, what are you doing here on a Friday night?” Josie asks again.

“That would be my fault,” I offer, pouring the container of mu shu onto my plate, still seeing Katie behind my eyes. “Every year, Meg and I plan an afternoon of last-minute gift shopping, and this year . . .” I gesture to the debris and to-dos in my office, “I couldn’t leave. So she came to me. We’re doing it all online.”

“Not quite the quality time I envisioned, but eh, free Chinese food, so I’ll take it.” Megan laughs.

“Those Coke fuckers, right?” Josie sighs. “And I haven’t even started my shopping.” The Coke execs scrapped our planned copy for the new print ads at the last minute, which meant brainstorming anew.

“Speaking of pregnancy,” Meg says, then pauses, reaching down into her bag.

“Which we weren’t exactly,” Josie notes.

“Close enough,” she counters, then produces an envelope from her purse. “Here, I wanted to show you.” She navigates the envelope around the food cartons and slides it over my desk. I run my fingers under the flap and pull out grainy black-and-white snapshots. To an untrained eye, they might look like alien shots taken from a spycam in space, but to a mother, they are proof, palpable proof, of both the being and the love that are growing inside of her.

“Oh my God, Meg.” I move my hand to my mouth and feel my nose tingle. I look up and see that her eyes, too, are full.

“That’s our little one,” she says, and for the first time tonight, her pallid, pregnant skin flushes with blood, as if the thought of her baby literally brings her to life. “It was taken last week when we saw the heartbeat.” She shakes her head. “The most incredible thing I’ve ever seen.”

I stare at the little bean and remember my own appointment, just on the cusp of my second trimester. My stomach was just beginning to pooch, and the technician slopped cold gel onto my abdomen, such that I recoiled at the sensation. Henry held my hand as I lay on the exam table, and we both gazed up at the monitor, gazing in wait, as the tech moved her wand over and about until I felt her apply pressure and
bam,
there she was. Katie. Up on the screen. With tiny arms and legs and a bloated stomach and a perfect circle of a head. She somersaulted around inside of me, though I couldn’t yet feel her, throwing her own private party in my uterus.

“You’ve got a handful there,” the technician said to us, as we watched silently, too overcome with awe to answer. I wiped a stray tear off my cheek and caught Henry doing the same.

When we left, the tech printed out some snapshots of our baby, of our potential, and for hours after, I sat in our half-boxed-up apartment and stared at the images. So full of surprise and hope and disbelief. I just stared and stared, certain that I would love this baby more than anything I’d loved before, but less certain about everything else that came with it: the move to Westchester that was now barreling ahead, the job that I’d soon resign from, the mother I could be when my own mother’s shadow threatened at too many turns. But love this baby, that, I could do.

Tonight, Josie moves closer to my desk to gaze at the ultrasound, and then Meg inches in, too. The three of us huddle around the image of Meg’s future: Josie, the battle-weary one who feels shortchanged by it all; me, the desperate one who doesn’t know what to cling on to and what to let go; and Meg, the hopeful one who still has so much left to uncover. But as the lights of the city glow in the window behind us, we all look much the same: mothers who sit in wonder and wait for the children who will inevitably change their lives.

Chapter Twenty-three

T
he snow has fallen heavy and wet overnight, and when I wake up in my childhood bed on Christmas morning, I am, for a second, discombobulated, lost between my present and past, between my youth and the adult I’ve grown into.

The sugary scent of griddled pancakes lures me from my room, and I pad my way into the kitchen, where my father, in a forest green robe that still has a tag hanging from the sleeve, hovers over the stove.

“Merry Christmas, J-bird,” he says, stepping away from the oven and kissing my cheek. “From Linda. She ran into town for coffee.” He twirls around, and a droplet of batter flies off the spatula and lands on the refrigerator. “You like?”

“Uh-huh,” I answer, then cock my head at the sound of running water above us.

“Andy,” my dad says. “He got in from Singapore late last night.” He flips two pancakes off the griddle and onto the plate, then slides them onto the table. “Sit,” he commands. “And eat. You don’t look so great.”

I dump a liberal amount of syrup on top
(Sugar! Why It Will Suck Five Years from Your Life!)
and wrestle off a piece of the pan-cake with my fingers. I stare out the window of our dining nook, and it’s as if the world has frozen over. Icicles hang like chandeliers; tree branches sink under their own weight. My mother’s garden, which had long been overrun with unwieldy weeds and deadened plants, is covered in a blanket of snow, masking the joy and betrayal that once symbolized everything about how I defined myself.

My dad pulls out the chair next to me and plunks down. His plate rattles as he does so. He, too, focuses outside, and I wonder if he’s thinking about her, about her garden, about all of it, just as I am.

“I saw her,” I say finally. “I met Mom. Awhile back.”

His chewing slows as he ingests more than just his breakfast, and in the silence, I can hear him swallow.

“I’m glad for you,” he says finally. “If that’s what you want.” He clears his throat.

“It’s complicated.” I shrug. “I have a sister.”

My dad doesn’t flinch as I expect him to. Instead, he just nods his head. Eventually, he says, “I know.”

“What do you mean, ‘you know’?” A lone robin lands in the yard as I turn to face my father.

“I’ve . . .” He pauses, and his eyes shift downward. “I’ve occasionally been in touch with your mother.”

“What?” My surprise flares like a firework. “Why would you do that? Why wouldn’t you tell me?”

“Oh, Jilly.” My dad sighs. “You’ve just been so . . .” He searches for the right words. “Stoic or bitter, I don’t know . . . at her and the whole situation that I didn’t want you to be angry with me for forgiving her. It just seemed . . . easier to let you come to terms with it if and when you wanted to.”

I rub my temples and notice that the robin has moved on, gone as quickly as it came. I stuff a piece of pancake in my mouth, trying to hear, really
hear,
what my father is saying. About my anger at her, about how I tried to block it out, and about how instead, maybe I’ve let it consume me.

“Why did it happen?” I ask when I’ve finally swallowed. “I mean, why did you decide to let it go?”

“I don’t know if there’s any specific reason,” he says. “It’s just, well, you know that marriage is complicated.” He bites the outside of his lip. “After a while, I realized that she was the one who left, but maybe I didn’t do enough to make her stay.”

“That’s ridiculous!” I say. A piece of spittle flies all the way to the window and lands with a silent splat. “You were a wonderful husband to her.”

“I was,” he concedes. “At times. Other times, I don’t know,” he says, his shoulders offering a limp gesture.

“That’s just ridiculous,” I repeat. “
She’s
the one who left.
She’s
the one who made the choices that ruined us.”

My dad’s face quivers like I slapped him. “She didn’t ruin us,” he says softly. “And I’m sorry that you feel that way. I tried to preserve as much of your happiness as I could.”

I pause and reconsider my words, whether or not I still believed the mantra that I’d fed on for so many years, now that I’d abandoned my own child and now that I understood the loneliness that can eat up your whole life.

“I’m sorry; that came out wrong,” I say. “You’re right, she didn’t ruin us. I don’t even know why I said that.”

“You said that,” my dad says, “because you spent so many years believing it. Unwilling to see that even though she left us, she didn’t leave us in total wreckage. Some wreckage, but not total.” He manages a laugh. “Besides, I think I did a pretty okay job.”

“You did.” I smile. “You really did.” I lean over to kiss his unshaven cheek. “So let me ask you something: If you’ve forgiven Mom, why haven’t you ever asked Linda to marry you?”

“Ha! Are you kidding me?” My dad grins. “I’ve asked her at least half a dozen times. She’s just never said yes. Says I’m too old and too much of a slob.”

“Oh, I . . .” I’m breathless with the way that my understanding of everything has been turned on its head. “I guess I thought you never wanted to remarry. That’s always what I assumed.” I push out the clump of air in my chest and try to get a grip on my pulse.

“Nope,” he said, standing and running his hands over my hair. “I’d marry Linda in a heartbeat.” He pauses. “Jilly, don’t get so tangled up that you think that everyone will walk out on you like your mom did. And even though she did what she did, I suppose she had her reasons.” He kisses me on the top of my head. “It’s never easy, you know, marriage and all of that. You’ll find out soon enough.”

It’s true,
I think, running my finger through the syrup on my plate and mulling over my upcoming nuptials to Jack.
Everyone says it’s hard, but it’s hard in ways you don’t grasp until you’re in it. How hard can it be?
you say.
I mean, so he’ll leave his socks on the floor and he might be a little cheap about money and occasionally, he’ll fart at the dinner table, which will really, really annoy me, but come on, how hard can it be?

I hear the noise from the shower above recede, then my brother’s heavy footsteps reverberate on the ceiling. Linda bursts through the door with shouts of “Merry Christmas” and hot eggnog lattes for us all.

I watch my dad and Linda disappear into the den, him sliding his hand on the small of her back. I turn back again to the desolate, sleeping landscape out my childhood kitchen window and wonder how I could have gotten so much wrong for so long. And what’s more surprising than any of these revelations is who I now want to share them with most: Henry, the very man who set me off running, just like my mother did two decades earlier.

A
FTER YEARS OF
living without my mother, my father has finally mastered the art of cooking. I’ve tried to help all afternoon, but he just shushes me out of the kitchen, shooing me off with a “what do you know about fine cuisine?”

You don’t know the half of it,
I want to say, remembering the
Gourmet
s,
Bon Appétit
s, and
Cooking Light
s that I organized by season in my sprawling suburban chef’s kitchen.

My brother has trudged straight back into bed after guzzling his latte, and Linda has retreated to the bedroom. I flip through some football on TV, then glance over the newspaper headlines, and finally, with the house silent other than the clanging of pots and my father’s mutterings to himself in the kitchen, I slip out the front door and into the frozen world outside, which feels like another planet entirely. The snow crunches underneath my weighted steps as I wind down the street.

I replay my conversation with my father and blend it into my old life with Henry. How maybe we both failed each other in our own ways.

When Henry got promoted to partner, he called me from the office to break the news. I was seven months pregnant, bored and swollen in our new home, and was elevating my feet on the couch, with
Days of Our Lives
in the background, and a tower of parenting magazines on the floor.

“This will mean a lot more work,” he warned. “And before I accept it, I want to be sure that you’re okay with it.”

“Of course!” I practically squealed. “It’s incredible, and I’m so proud of you.” And I was.

“You sure?” He hedged again. “Because really, I mean it when I say that I’ll be traveling a lot. A lot.”

“I’m sure,” I reiterated, not hearing, not really listening to the veracity of his words.

“Good,” he said, and I could hear him break into a smile. “Because I already accepted it!”

Later, months later, when his nonstop schedule had torn him away from the family and when my resentment had festered and was rising into a slow boil, and when I clamped down even further on that resentment, as if putting a lid on a tea kettle can keep it from warming, I considered our exchange. And how, in those few short words, we’d equally betrayed each other: me, by pretending that I had everything that I needed, and him, by assuming to know what I needed in the first place, with no real understanding of that need at all.

Why didn’t I just say something,
I think today, panting as I ascend my neighbor’s hill, the same one Andy and I used to fly down, feet off our bike pedals, with gleeful abandon.
Why didn’t I just say, “Be here. Be present. Give me what I need.” Why was I so incapable of saying something so simple?
Despite the frigid temperatures, I feel sweat pool on the waistband of my jeans, as I consider how big a difference this tiny shift might have made in the scope of everything.
Maybe he would have heard me; maybe I could have started hearing him, too.

Finally, when my thighs are pleading for a reprieve, I loop back to the house, which smells like pumpkin pie and nutmeg, and gallop up the stairs to my room. Then I reach into my purse, extract my wallet, and tug out Henry’s business card.

He has scrawled his cell phone on the back, and so, before my nerves get the better of me, I poke his numbers into my pink phone that matches the wallpaper and bedding in my girlhood room.

I’m flipped into voice mail, and his message is familiar as always. It is, I surmise, from my perch on my strawberry-hued bed, the same message that he still has today. Or in the future. It’s all muddling together now.

“Er, Henry, it’s . . . Jill. Jillian Westfield.”
How weird is this?
I flip onto my stomach. “Um, for some reason I was just thinking of you. So, er, I just wanted to wish you a Merry Christmas.”
No, you didn’t! You wanted to say so much more.
“ ’Kay. Bye.”

I throw my arm around my ragged stuffed bunny that I’d slept with since I was four and lie still. Then, in one frantic movement, I reach for the phone again, redial, and press the receiver so closely to my ear, I can hear the crackling across the line as I’m connected.

“Henry! Hey, it’s me! Um, Jillian. Um, actually, you’re going to think I’m crazy, but um, I was thinking about it and wondered if you wanted to meet for coffee.” I pause and inhale. “Erm, not today, obviously, because it’s Christmas.” I emit a semipsychotic laugh, which, if he knew me better as he once did, would signal that I was nearly vomiting with anxiety. “But, uh, maybe tomorrow. I’m back in the city. Er, if you’re around. Not sure if you are. Oh, maybe you’re at Celeste’s.” I feel my face redden. It didn’t even occur to me that he’s at Celeste‘s.
Shit.
“Um, in which case, disregard this. Ha! Yes, just ignore me completely! Ha ha! Okay, good. You have my number. Oh, maybe you don’t. Well, it probably came up on caller ID. Great. Er. Um. Thanks, bye.”

I throw the receiver back into the base and feel my pulse spin like a loose grenade through my neck. I feel like I should want to regret it, like I should want to rewind the past few minutes and take the messages back. But surprisingly, I don’t. Surprisingly, though my heart might burst with frenzy, for the first time in a long time, something feels right about going after what I think I might need.

I roll over on my bed and let out a hyena giggle that falls into itself and turns into heaping, overflowing euphoria that doesn’t let up until my pillow is nearly soaked with mirthful tears. I sink into my childhood bed, into the literal home where I lost so much, and I realize that here, too, is where something—my voice, my needs, my groove?—just might be found.