Time of My Life_ A Novel - Allison Winn Scotch [60]
“Fine, Allie, you can have the hot chocolate for dinner,” I say, but Megan is still looking at me with peculiarity. “What?” I ask her finally.
“You’re not pregnant are you?”
“Oh God, no!” I laugh.
“Then what’s with the kid-knowledge and the parent magazines?” For reasons unclear to me, she appears bruised.
“It’s nothing . . .” I race for an explanation. “I was in an office the other day, waiting for a meeting, and saw it on the table. So I flipped through it, you know, to kill time.”
Meg doesn’t respond but returns to reading her menu. After a minute, she says, “Why are you lying to me? I’ve known you since we were kids. You think I can’t tell that you’re lying to me?”
“Meg, Jesus Christ, it’s nothing!” I wave my arm and try to hail down a waiter.
“Seriously, are you pregnant?” She stares at me, her eyes unavoidably welling.
“Oh my God, Meg. NO.” I place my hand on top of hers. “Really. You’re overreacting. It was just a silly article that I noticed in passing.” I turn to Allie. “I tell you what, Al, not only can you have frozen hot chocolate but I’ll let you order a banana split, too.”
“EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!!!” Allie screams, still standing on the seat of the booth, and throws her fifty-pound body through the air.
“At least bananas are healthy,” I say with a guilty look to Megan.
“Hey, I’m not judging,” she answers, holding her hands in the air, just as the waiter weaves his way over. “I say give the girl what she wants. That’s my motto. God knows I’m going to be over-the-top with my kid.”
She says this, and it strikes me violently, ruthlessly that this might never come true. That, unless something else has shifted in this new altered-reality, that sundaes and frozen hot chocolate and having the choice to say yes, or even no, won’t be on Megan’s future landscape. I watch her cajole Allie down from the booth and into a game of patty-cake and try to reassure myself. So much is different this time around. So much and everything. So, too, might this be.
Later, after we’d taken a horse and buggy ride through Central Park and after Allie had crashed from her sugar high, in which she demolished my apartment in under ten minutes, Meg and I gently strip off her pink plaid dress, tugging it gingerly over her head, and slip her white leather sandals off her tiny feet. I carry her to my bed, tuck her under the covers, and watch as her eyelids droop lower and heavier, as if weighted down with sand. I click off the nightstand light, but neither Meg nor I turn to leave. Instead, we are transfixed.
“I’m sorry about before,” she says. “It’s just this whole thing.”
I don’t answer; I just listen to Allie’s lilting breath slide in and out.
“I’m just so focused on it, you know?” Meg continues. “Getting pregnant, staying pregnant . . .”
I reach over and clutch her hand.
“Sometimes it seems like too much.” Her voice cracks. “Like it’s the only thing in the world that I want.”
I squeeze her hand harder, firmer, a tacit, wordless admission that I get it, and that she wasn’t alone.
Eventually, we slip out of the room, not because we want to but because after a while, you feel strange to watch over a sleeping little girl who isn’t your own. Even if she looks like an angel. And even if she reminds you so much, too much, of the angel you once had or the angel whom you so desperately hoped for.
After Megan leaves and I settle on the (scratchy goddamned) couch, I will myself to sleep, hoping to dream of nothing, but instead, dreaming over and over again of Katie. An angel no longer at my door.
Chapter Seventeen
The muggy October air in Miami shocks my system, such that nearly every pore declares mutiny with profuse and unstoppable sweating. By the second day, I’ve all but camped out in the resort pool in an effort to offer my body some relief. After my fingers have pruned, I slink out of the water onto my waiting lounge chair and reach for the SPF. Always with the SPF.
“You’re not going to get any color down here?” Jack asks, setting down his book on the mini–patio table that sits between our loungers.
“Of course