Time of My Life_ A Novel - Allison Winn Scotch [42]
“Oh, well, yeah, you know. Things happen. Jack told me that she’s recuperating just fine, though.” I coo with understanding. Even though I don’t fucking understand at all! Yes, you do, I reassure myself. Yes, you do.
“She is,” Leigh affirmed. “Though you know my mother. She might be recuperating, but it’s the rest of us who suffer.”
I allow a nervous laugh, unsure about Leigh’s motivations, more unsure because I’ve never heard a child of Vivian’s deign to say something less than revelatory about her. I grab a Coke-flavored stick of gum and fold it under my tongue.
“Anyway, I was calling because Allie and I are headed to the city in a few minutes, and she was hoping we might see you. Would you be interested in meeting us at the zoo in an hour or so?”
“Of course!” I say without hesitation and worry if I might come off as needy, or worse, pathetic. Lonely girl sitting in deserted office waiting for phone to ring so she can prove herself to aloof boyfriend. Not exactly a classified ad to woo Jack’s family.
“Allie, get down from the windowsill right now!” Leigh shrieks, and I hold the phone away from my ear. “Sorry,” she sighs. “Okay, great. She’ll be thrilled. We’ll see you at the front gate of the zoo in an hour.”
Leigh clicks off but, as I turn back out toward the window and stare down at the sidewalk at the strolling pedestrians and moms and dads and families and people who have lost their way, her voice sticks like taffy in my ear. It’s hard not to recognize it, of course. Her quiet and frantic desperation, fleeting though it may have been, sounds exactly like me, back in my old life, back before I was granted a chance to know better and a chance to wash myself clean of that desperation for good.
THOUGH THE CITY has emptied for the long holiday weekend, the Central Park Zoo teems with families who weren’t lucky enough to escape the filmy air and the blaring horns of taxis. I see Allie before she sees me. Her white-blond hair is pulled back into low pigtails, her yellow capris are dotted with imprints of watermelons, and her ivory tank top is splashed with a giant icon of the fruit. She is clutching Leigh’s hand and half picking her nose, and I can’t help but stare: Though Katie inherited my own deep mahogany locks, she would be, I intuit, the very vision of Allie come four and a half years.
Before I can examine these implications, Allie spots me.
“JILLIAAAAANNNNN!” She rushes over at me in a frothing frenzy, and torpedoes her body at my legs, then attempts to climb up me like a spider on a vine, until I lean over to heave her up in an encompassing hug.
“Allie! Come on, get off her.” Over Allie’s shoulder, I see Leigh jogging to catch up with us. “Jillian doesn’t need you all over her.”
“I don’t mind.” I place Allie on her own two feet and grab hold of her hand. “That’s as good a welcome as I’ve ever gotten.”
We amble through the iron gates and, tugged by Allie, make our way into the penguin house. In the darkened exhibit, which smells like damp seaweed and kosher salt, Allie presses her face against the partition that separates us from the birds, close enough that we can see her breath fogging up the glass, and gazes in rapture as two penguins dive below the surface of the frigid water, pushing their bodies through as if they were merely moving through air, and swimming together until finally, after what feels like an eternity, they glide toward the other end of the rocks and scurry back to the pack.
Leigh and I watch from the back wall, silent and equally mesmerized, as various penguins continue to plunge in, for seemingly no reason at all, other than to submerge themselves in the waiting water and to, I imagine, taste the relief or even the joy that this moment—that of taking the leap—brings. I watch the birds dive over and over again, and somewhere inside of me, I feel the heat of jealousy. To be that free. To take that plunge. Until, at the very moment I realize how overwhelmingly