Time of My Life (3 page)

It hits me suddenly, brutally and instantly. If I am here, if I am stuck in this wasteland from 2000, then there is no Katie. Not yet. Maybe not ever. She’s not rolling around in her crib or working on pushing out her nineteenth word or gazing blankly at the Wiggles while a look that can only be described as lobotomized washes over her face as they sing about their (fucking annoying) Big Red Car over and over and over again. She’s nothing but a memory trapped inside of me, an ephemeral, intangible glimpse of where I’m supposed to be headed.

Only now, as I survey the contents of my former life, I’m not sure which direction to go.

Chapter Three

A
cell phone is ringing, and I can’t find it. I’ve flipped over the tan fleece blanket that (slightly) covers our (horrid) couch, I’ve run into the kitchen and cased the counters, and I’m now burying my hands into a purse that I find on one of our wicker chairs (bought on the same outing to Pier 1 as my desk chair) in the dining area.
I remember this purse! I loved this purse!
My father had bought it for me when I got my summer job at DMP after my first year at business school.

What the hell happened to this purse? Did I toss it when we moved?
I think, as I finally clasp the vibrating phone that is clanging to the tune of
^*
NSYNC’s “Bye Bye Bye.”

“It ain’t no lie, baby, bye, bye bye,” I hum underneath my breath, flipping the phone open and bringing it to my ear.

“Hello?” I pause. “Er, this is Jillian speaking.” I freeze, allowing only my eyeballs to move, as if somehow I’m getting caught doing something terribly illicit. I hear air move through my nose as I inhale.

“Uh, Jill? It’s Gene. Where are you?” Gene, my intern at DMP who occasionally poses as my assistant, is whispering into the phone.

“I’m here! I’m
here,
” I say with emphasis.

“Er, are you okay? You sound . . . strange.” I hear a phone ring in the background of the office.

“Fine, fine! I’m fine! What’s up? Where are
you,
Gene? Where are
you
?” I open the front door and peek out of it, as if he might appear on the other side. The hallway is empty, so I close the door firmly shut.

“I’m here, Jill. I’m at work!” He speaks very slowly as if I might not understand English. “You’re missing the big brainstorming session for Coke, and I was worried. Everyone is asking for you.”

“Oh,” I answer. “Uh, no, I’m feeling sick today.” My brain is spinning. “I, uh, just woke up and forgot to call. Sorry!”

“Okay,” he answers with hesitation. “You sure you’re okay?”

There are so many questions I want to ask him, drain from him, but just as I’m about to, I hear the front latch click open.

“Yes! Yes,” I hiss. “I’ll call you later!” I slam the top of the phone closed and toss it onto the pillows of the couch, where it lands with a bounce. Frantically, I spin around, just in time to see Jackson stepping inside.

My spine shoots up straight like I’d been plugged into an eight-volt, and the mere sight of him literally causes my breath to leave my body. I feel my chest tighten.

The humidity from the July air had pasted his wavy blond bangs onto his forehead, so they almost appear painted on, and black circles cloud his naked blue eyes, but he is still handsome in the way that causes girls to turn and look when he walks by, handsome enough that when we met at a campus party two years back, I’d given him, no, I’d pushed on him, my number without hesitation, even though we were both falling-down drunk and I was in no condition to impress anyone. Nor was he.

“Hey,” he says, tossing his messenger bag on the floor, and looking up at me. I am standing with my mouth agape, unable to form audible words. My eyes most certainly bug.

“Hey,” he says again, moving closer, eventually close enough to plant a kiss on my forehead. “I called you at work and no one knew where you were, so I tried your cell, but you didn’t answer. I wanted to come home to make sure you were okay.”

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.

A
N 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.