Time of My Life_ A Novel - Allison Winn Scotch [50]
The days when Katie was a newborn dragged on endlessly. I would sit on our front porch and try to urge the sun to go down; the sooner that nightfall came, the sooner we would be putting this wretched day behind us, I’d think, ignoring the obvious fact that I’d have to wake up and do it all over again. I would rock on our porch swing and think, No one tells you that it’s going to be like this. No one says that this will be the hardest thing you’ve ever done. That it’s not just puffs of pink and baby coos and sweet rosy cheeks. Why didn’t anyone warn me? But then, when Katie would quiet herself, and I’d rub her back while she dozed in her crib, I’d palpably feel it—the absence of loneliness that too often plagued me—and my face would flare with shame, as if crawling with tiny fire ants, that I ever had moments of regret. And then I’d push all of it aside and wrap myself into the package of a perfect mother. Above everything, that is what I did best.
So now, whether or not a therapist would blame my own mom for my feelings of alienation, part of me just knows that this is how I came out. That the damage she did to me had its impact, sure, but that wasn’t the beginning, and now, I’m not sure where it ends. How it ends.
It ends here! I want to tell myself. With your second shot. Get out there and do something about it, with this good fortune and this second chance and the knowledge that you have to repair yourself and Jack.
I stare out into the monsoon and will this to be the truth.
Finally, for a brief moment, the skies shift from angry gunmetal gray to a whitewash, and energized by the turn, I frantically lace up my sneakers and head for a run. It will be, I realize with surprise, the first time I’ve left the apartment all weekend.
I amble out into the downtown streets, unsure of a particular destination. Though I normally head straight to a running path near the river, today, inexplicably, I head east, winding through the sloshy city streets, nodding at the lone passerby who has also seized this rainless window to rush from his or her apartment and gasp in some fresh air. I fly past dilapidated delis and hipster boutiques and coast over puddles that threaten to break my stride but never do. My legs are crying out for pumping blood and coursing adrenaline, like a baby colt who needs to break free, and refuse to be thrown off their rhythm. I tread through the East Village and up the avenues, until it becomes clear where I’m headed, where my body was leading me this whole time, even if my brain pretended that it wasn’t so. Denial. No one ever accused me of being anything less than an expert.
I stop suddenly on the street opposite the building, her building.
The awning reads 120 fifth avenue. It’s a looming white limestone structure that, even just peering in from the outside, reeks of wealth, the sort of building that you can’t move into without lofty tax returns and a cushy job on Wall Street. At the entrance, a uniformed doorman sweeps aside some leaves that have fallen in the storm, then snaps to attention and tips his hat as a blond woman, elegant in an olive overcoat and knee-high boots, exits the glass doors. I watch her turn the corner of the street and wonder, even though I know that my mother is raven haired, if it could have been her. If, perhaps, her hair color is just one of many things that she’d changed about herself. I watch the doorman as another song cycles through my earphones but then am literally jolted from my stance by a loud clap of thunder. With seemingly no warning, the skies unfold themselves, and within seconds, I’m soaked all the way through.
“Shit,” I say under my breath, as I flick drops off my forehead and pick up my pace to a near sprint. Three blocks down, I spot a Starbucks and throw myself inside, my shoes slopping and my clothes ready to be wrung dry. I am standing in the entrance, shaking water off my arms, like