Time of My Life_ A Novel - Allison Winn Scotch [47]
“Oh Jesus Christ,” I say. “Calm down. I never said anything of the sort.”
I could already see this spinning into a fight from our earlier days, the kind that ended with bitter silences and halfhearted apologies and residual blame that would nip and ding and gnaw their way into our relationship until one day, we woke up and saw scars, real scars, and then I’d flee to a bar and meet Henry, who was supposed to be my salvation.
“Look, I’m sorry; what I said came out wrong.” I backtrack though I’m not sure how sorry I am. “All I was saying is that just because your mom might want you to become the next great writer doesn’t mean that you have to take it up as your calling. You should figure out what your passion is, not her.”
“So now you’re telling me that I’m doing this just because of my mom?” Jack sits flatly on the windowsill, and I can see the sun quickly slipping behind the horizon. Echoes of my fights with Henry bounce around my mind; how quickly one can misinterpret and skew and let it all get away, like an eel from a fishing line.
“No,” I say, so anxious to put this behind us, just like I always am. “I’m just saying that you’re responsible for your own life, that’s all. Not her, not me. You.”
He purses his lips. “As if I didn’t know that,” he says.
“Good,” I answer, kissing him lightly but avoiding his eyes, then heading out the door, running, running, running as if Jack is the only one who needs to take a closer look at responsibility and ownership and what role we each have in claiming our own.
FOUR DAYS LATER, it is a rainy Friday afternoon, one that has ushered in a temperature nosedive, such that in the office, we’re all caught off guard in our tank tops and still-summery dresses, and we spend the duration of the day shivering and rubbing our arms or clutching chalky hot chocolate that someone dug up in the back of the office pantry. The weather forecast warns of flooding, which people use as an excuse to head out early, and by 4:30, my office hums in near silence, the walls bouncing with gray from the clouds perched impossibly low just outside my window.
My mother’s note, though tucked away in my top drawer under pens and Post-it notes and DMP letterhead, cries out to me daily, as if it is emitting some sort of sonar alarm that only I can hear. Finally, I relent.
I dig underneath the paper clips and the uncapped highlighters and the month-old invitation to the Coke party, and wrestle her letter to the surface.
Could she really have been here this whole time? I think, as I stare down at the handwriting, which is as familiar to me as my own. I’d asked my father this very question when I called to tell him about her correspondence, but he had no answers. He just hung mutely on the phone, stuttering his responses, as surprised as I was, I suppose, that my mother hadn’t needed a true escape; she just needed an escape from us. Growing up, when I’d thought of her, which I had tried to do as infrequently as my psyche would allow, I’d always assumed that she’d gallivanted to Paris or had set up a seaside shop in St. Lucia or had owned a restaurant in Madrid. Never once did it occur to me that she’d hover so close. If you wanted to flee your life, after all, why wouldn’t you run as far as possible, so there was no chance of ever looking back?
Tenuously, I type her name into my browser. I feel my heart quicken as I push “Enter,” knowing that what I turn up will open new doors, doors that I’ve slammed shut for nearly two decades, doors that my first time around, I was perfectly okay with—no, more than okay; I was completely at peace with keeping them locked for good. I remember explaining all of this to Henry on our third date over spaghetti Bolognese in a tiny Italian joint decorated with colored Christmas lights in Little Italy, right before we went home and slept together for the first time. And how he seemed to absorb my angst, how he deflected my bitterness and didn’t judge me for it, how it felt like I finally purged