Time of My Life_ A Novel - Allison Winn Scotch [106]
“My ride . . . to work. Um, like every morning when Tyler picks me up and we take the train.” Henry’s face has shifted from confusion to alarm. “But I’m not going in. Hold on, let me tell him.”
“No, no, go.” I wave my hand in a flurry. “I’m fine. Just . . . groggy. I’m fine.”
He cocks his head. “You’re not.”
I inhale and try to absorb it all. Katie, Tyler, Henry. I’m back and yet something isn’t quite the same, something clearly has shifted. Something that feels welcoming, safe, and a lot like the place I call home.
“No, really,” I say, standing to meet Henry’s gaze. “I just need some time alone to clear my head.”
The doorbell rings again, more urgently this time, and I see him hesitate.
“Go,” I say firmly. “Go without a second thought.” And because he can hear the honesty in my voice, he does, kissing me before he leaves and promising to call to check in when he catches a break in his day.
“I’ll try to be home to tuck her in,” he says before he’s out the door, though I already know that he might not be, and I also know that it won’t be a slight against me if he isn’t.
I run my tongue over my lips, tasting Henry’s acrid coffee residue, and I watch him as he ambles down the sidewalk toward Tyler’s car, a minivan, the type you buy only when required due to multiplying offspring, and I see Henry turn back toward the window just before he ducks inside. I flash my shaking hand up in a form of a wave, and he smiles and does the same. Then I tug the blinds shut, and I wander back into the depths of the house, my house, and I begin to redraw the lines of my broken life.
I find Katie’s room tucked into what was once a den, back behind the kitchen, and it smells of banana bread. I sink into the rocking chair, the one in which I would sit to nurse and lull her to sleep. Slowly, now, my eyelids droop, too, as security washes over me like the warmth of a blanket fresh from the dryer.
I close my eyes and I rock and I rock, tumbling into a peaceful slumber, one with kind memories of the days gone by, but mostly with hopeful anticipation of those yet to come. Because I trust that Henry will go into the city and he will work as he always has, but this time, when he returns to me, I, the whole version of me, will be here waiting. Here and now. Then and before. Always.
JILLIAN
I should have known, I suppose, from all the early signs. But I’ve never been good at reading the signals, picking up the cues from the figurative tea leaves. Henry had taken Katie out to breakfast so I could go for a run when I finally realized that something was off.
The house was quiet but not nearly as neat as I’d have liked. I remember thinking this as I wound my way through the first floor to the master bathroom. Henry’s socks peeked out from underneath the couch, the morning paper was strewn every which way across the rug, and a lollipop wrapper from Katie’s dessert last night littered the coffee table. (Sugar! Why It Will Rot Her Teeth from the Inside Out!) But I fought the maniacal urge to clean, clean, clean, like I’d done in the past, and instead focused on the task at hand. That’s how I lived my life now. I would never come to full peace with my urges toward domestic fastidiousness, with my need to create a sparkly veneer of life, but I could accept these faults and move forward. Just knowing that they were within my control was enough to tame them. Most of the time, anyway. Like an addict, sometimes I still slipped up, but never was it so severe that I couldn’t talk myself down, that I couldn’t think of how prosperous my life was, how lucky I was to inhabit it, and how easy it would be for me to lose my footing all over again, Garland and my blocked chi or not.
I reached the bathroom just as another wave of nausea consumed me, and I grabbed a white plastic stick from underneath the