Time of My Life Page 20

  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.

  HENRY HASN’T CALLED back by dinner. I try to remember where he spent his holiday that first year that we dated, but I’m stuck between Vail with his college friends and at home with his parents. I know that he did each during one of the years that we dated or before we dated or around when we dated, but they’ve all blended into one another. Now and then. Past and present and future.

  I distract myself by calling Meg, then Ainsley, but no one is picking up. I consider diving into the pile of work that I’ve slugged home, but I can’t stomach the depression that accompanies trudging through copyedits on a snowy Christmas evening.

  The front door slams as Andy heads out to meet some high-school friends. He will, no doubt, return just before dawn and sleep the day away. The better not to have to face his return home.

  “We’re putting in It’s a Wonderful Life,” my dad calls up to me. “Linda’s popped the ’corn. Come on down.”

  I’d forgotten all about it, about my father’s requisite tradition. He started it the year my mother left. I suppose it was, in his way, his attempt to show us how changed our lives might have been without our mother—even though we were seething with rage and I, at least, refused to even begrudgingly admit that what time I did have with my mother was precious indeed. So every Christmas, my father would gather Andy and me on the couch and pull an Icelandic blanket over our knees, and we’d recline and consider the story of George Bailey, who wanted to give up on his life until he saw how much his life actually mattered. Eventually, I stopped equating the movie with my mother, and Andy and I would race to fill in the dialogue before the actors said the words themselves.

  And now, it’s come full circle: the man who has given up on his life and wishes to be absolved of it, my mother and her abandonment, and me and my own.

  I heave myself from my twin bed and scurry down the stairs, my polka-dotted pajama bottoms dragging as I go. As I toss popcorn into my mouth and watch the lights of the TV bounce off the living room walls, I consider my decisions, my setbacks, and how I got here, literally here, seven years in the past, running from my choices, so ready to turn away from the path I’d opted for with my own free will.

  It’s so easy to give up on it all, I think, as Clarence, George’s guardian angel, descends to earth to save George from himself. It’s so fucking easy to toss it in and call it a day.

  But then I think of Katie, of our first Christmas together when she was nearly one and toddling through the house, her mind so determined to take those first few steps but her body not quite ready. I watched her and thought she was so brave—falling over and over again, but always getting up with a laugh and trying anew.

  And now, I watch poor George and realize that Katie might have had it right the whole time: She wasn’t being brave, she was only moving forward. Stumbling and getting back up. Falling and refusing to be cowed. Why, as her mother, didn’t I see this? Why did I tuck my tail under and run? Why didn’t I consider, I think now, with my dad half-asleep by my side and a deserted popcorn bowl on the coffee table, that maybe Katie was my guardian angel all along?

  Chapter Twenty-four

  Henry hasn’t returned my call. I’m trying not to consider the implications of this fact two days after Christmas, as I hover over my desk, feigning busywork but mostly bored and listless. And by trying not to consider the implications, all I have done is further obsess about the silent, lifeless, why won’t you fucking ring? phone.

  It’s a dead zone, this time between Christmas and New Year’s. Jack is in Antigua with his family, a vacation I gracefully declined months back, before our engagement, and my apartment is so quiet that it leaves me nothing to do but think, so I’ve returned to the office as a default.

  I have clicked through all of the online holiday sales, looked up the weather in both Vail and Antigua, and added some stemware to my registry, when out of nowhere, a silly banner ad with an unusually well-endowed bride and her barely aging mother sends my mind flashing to my own mother and how maybe it’s time to start saying something real in the conversation toward healing. How I’m the only one who is going to be able to set aside my baggage and how I’m responsible for owning that. Really, I think, maybe this is what Henry was trying to push me toward, with all of his nagging about reconciliation. I just wasn’t able to see it that way, so his words always seemed to come out wrong. Maybe his intentions were always pure, and that has to count for something.

  I close my office door, hearing the latch snap shut, and uncover a pen and pad in my top drawer. I might not be ready to wash it all clean, but I am ready, I know, to begin to try.

  Dear Mom,

  I’m sorry that I wasn’t able to meet you last week. I shouldn’t have promised something that I couldn’t deliver. It wasn’t my intention to disappoint you. I understand why you want to get to know me now after so many years. And I want you to know that part of
me is grateful for that desire. But another part of me feels like, felt like, I should say, it’s all too much, too soon.

  I want to forgive you, I do. I’d even like to say that I’m ready to forgive you, but this isn’t a blackboard that can just be erased with one fell swoop. Every day, I’m reminded of what you did to me. For years, I pretended that I wasn’t, but now, it’s clear that nearly everything about who I’ve become has been defined by learning to live with the belief, and the isolation of that belief, that my mother didn’t love me.

  I am a chameleon, Mother. I sell myself out to the person who bids high enough with his love. If he gives me enough, I can become whomever he needs me to be. As long as he promises devotion, I’m his, blocking out my instincts to become who I want, to say what I want to say. Because, I’ve long feared, if I expose my true self, if I speak up and say no, he might leave, just as you once did nearly two decades ago.

  And even now, with your request to start anew, I feel myself doing it all over again: giving myself over to you because you show up, ready and heady with your love. A chameleon never stops trying to blend in, it seems.

  It’s time, however, for me to start sinking into my own skin, not just that of what others want to see. To start facing who I am, who I need to be. I can’t blame you forever, and I don’t want to. I’d like to become an adult who is responsible for her own path and for her own happiness. And I do hope that one day, we can be fully enmeshed in each other’s lives.

  But on my terms and at my own pace. And for now, it’s enough for me to know that you’re out there, ready and waiting. I hope this is enough for you, too.

  All best,

  Jillian

  I lick the inside flap of a DMP envelope and taste the stale gum on my tongue. Then I press the seal closed, carefully pen her address on the front, and drop it into my outbox where it can be ushered out into the world. It isn’t everything, I know, but it is something. I know that, too. And for me, a small step is victory enough.

  AN HOUR LATER, I’m still high on the euphoria of saying what I finally needed to say, when Josie buzzes over the intercom and convinces me to tag along while she battles the post-Christmas crowds and returns some of her gifts. I grab my army green puffy down jacket, my fisherman’s hat and matching mittens, and meet her in the lobby.

  “Wow, you look well rested,” I say. I haven’t seen her in a week; she and Art had bused the kids down to Naples for the holiday.

  “It’s the sun,” she says dismissively, waving a leather-gloved hand, then picking up her shopping bags and moving toward the revolving glass door, which normally spun around nonstop with employees, but today, sat still.

  “So how was vacation?” I ask as we hit the street, the biting winter air nipping at my neck like termites. I tug my jacket zipper as high as it allows, but still, air sneaks its way in.

  “Good,” she says without much conviction. “No, it was good,” she reiterates, more forcefully this time.

  “And Art?” I ask. A deliveryman nearly mows me down on the sidewalk, and I dart aside just in time to avoid collision.

  “Still hell-bent on San Jose.” Her face contorts into a wistful smile.

  “And you? How are you?”

  “Still faithful.” She lets out a grotesque laugh that sounds more like a howl of a dying seal. “Still faithful,” she says again more softly.

  “Well, that’s good.” I push open the glass door to Saks, but neither of us can get through: too many tourists rushing out in a wave. Finally, we edge our way in, and the pumped-in heat rises over my cheeks, warming them in an instant. We tug our hats off together, in sync.

  “I suppose it’s good,” she answers, as we weave our way through the cloying, perfumed air of the cosmetics department. “Bart is back in San Francisco.”

  “Oh,” I say with surprise and maybe relief. You are happy in seven years, goddammit! “For good?”

  The escalator whisks us up and Josie shrugs but doesn’t respond. It occurs to me for the first time that this wasn’t just a dalliance in her mind, that, perhaps, just like when I came back for Jack, there was something real behind Josie’s desire, the thought of a rescue from her current life, even if it wasn’t a perfect fit, even if there weren’t any reassurances that she’d be any better off this time around. It was the illusion that she might be that fed her, the knowledge that she didn’t think she could be any worse off, at least, than where she found herself now.

  Don’t be so sure, I think. Instead, I say, “I’m sorry, Jo. I am.”

  “It would have been nice to have the option,” she answers, as we step off into the women’s department.

  “You don’t have to tell me that,” I say.

  She cocks me a sidelong look. “What are you talking about? You have this amazing guy who is gainfully and well employed, who placed a fat rock on your finger, whose family seems to adore you . . .” She trails off, as if she needs to provide no further explanation.

  “You’re right,” I say. “Though I bet that at some point, Art had a checklist of strong points, too.” Funny how everyone’s life always appears shiny on the outside.

  Her face goes blank, and I’m unsure if she’s lost in a moment of trying to remember what those attributes were or if she’s realizing that a checklist is meaningless, like a flimsy piece of paper left too long in the elements that erodes over time.

  Before she can answer, my cell rings, and I root in my bag to grab it. Josie heads toward the counter, and I snap the phone to my ear. Henry? Oh please let it be Henry!

  The static crackles on the other side of the line, and I repeat “Hello, hello” two times until I finally hear Jack. His voice sounds as if it’s underwater.

  “Hey! I finally got a signal!” he shouts so I can make him out. Only there’s a delay and gap between Antigua and Saks, so mostly, I hear, “Ey . . . Inally ot ignal.” It’s like Pig Latin for rich tourists in the Caribbean.

  “Hey,” I say, my voice raised three decibels, my finger wedged into my free ear.

  “Only have a second,” he says. Ly ave econd. “I was talking to Mom and she wants to throw an engagement party in a few weeks. Sound okay?” Ound kay?

  I hesitate and wander over to the shoe section, plunking down on a leather couch and staring at myself in the mirror. Does that really sound okay? The pomp and circumstance of Vivian’s friends, tornadoing around us with their air kisses and their Hermès scarves and their catered pâté-covered crackers, reminding me of the carbon-copied image of my old Westchestered self. Do we really need to turn our nuptials into more of a public spectacle? As if the four-hundred-person ceremony isn’t enough, isn’t exactly what I didn’t want to do in the first place?

  “No,” I say quietly, with an air of authority that feels unfamiliar yet not unwelcome. A tiny beadlet of sweat trickles down my neck. “No, it doesn’t sound okay.”

  “Can’t hear you!” Jack shouts, and a burst of static clogs the line. “So it’s okay?”

  “No,” I say louder, and three shoppers turn to look at me. “I don’t want to do it.” My confidence accelerates like a gassed-up engine. “Please tell your mother that I don’t want to do it!”

  But we’ve been cut off, my fiancé and I. I am speaking into a black hole, a void, empty air, and I stare at my phone, willing him to call back so I can set him straight. But the phone doesn’t ring, not from Henry, not from Jack, so eventually, Josie waves at me from the counter, and we shuffle to the office, shoulders sagging, morale low, and all we can do is wait for the cold breeze to usher in the winds of change.

  HENRY

  What I remember most about my husband was the ease with which he moved through life. I’d watch him sometimes, just shaving in his boxers or lying on the living room rug with Katie, and wish that I could absorb even a sliver of his confidence. It was as if he decided, maybe because the world to him worked in almost mathematical ways, that this was how his life would hum along and therefore, all would be well. No need for unnecessary worrying or seco
nd-guessing.

  I don’t know if Henry knew how unraveled we’d become. Or maybe we hadn’t become that unraveled. Maybe I just didn’t know any better, and, like my mother, maybe all I knew was how to flee rather than to dive into the foxhole with my husband and wait out the missiles.

  Two weeks before I found myself back in my old life, Henry snuck up on me in the kitchen. Katie was asleep and rather than join Henry in the den, I was wiping down the cabinets. I can’t remember why I felt so compelled to clean just then, only that I did. That it seemed like an easier alternative than making small talk with my husband. I was standing on the step stool, trying to rub out the greasy smudges around the handle of my upper cupboard, when, out of nowhere, he was behind me.

  “Come on,” he said. “Come to the couch and watch something with me. You choose. I’ll throw in a foot rub.” I could hear him smiling.

  “I can’t right now,” I replied without turning around. My right arm never stopped scrubbing.

  “Jilly,” he said softly, placing his hand through my belt loop. “Come down. These don’t need to be cleaned right now. I’m finally back home for a few nights, and I want to spend time together.”

  But I just shook my head and pressed back out-of-nowhere tears. So he padded out of the kitchen and, I presumed, retreated to the couch where he listlessly flipped through TV channels alone.

  What I should have told Henry, I realize now, is that he felt like a stranger. That his efforts, which I suppose I should have appreciated, felt like efforts from someone who inhabited my house but not my home. That his touch felt like the touch of a man whom I barely knew.