Time of My Life_ A Novel - Allison Winn Scotch [85]
I throw the receiver back into the base and feel my pulse spin like a loose grenade through my neck. I feel like I should want to regret it, like I should want to rewind the past few minutes and take the messages back. But surprisingly, I don’t. Surprisingly, though my heart might burst with frenzy, for the first time in a long time, something feels right about going after what I think I might need.
I roll over on my bed and let out a hyena giggle that falls into itself and turns into heaping, overflowing euphoria that doesn’t let up until my pillow is nearly soaked with mirthful tears. I sink into my childhood bed, into the literal home where I lost so much, and I realize that here, too, is where something—my voice, my needs, my groove?—just might be found.
HENRY HASN’T CALLED back by dinner. I try to remember where he spent his holiday that first year that we dated, but I’m stuck between Vail with his college friends and at home with his parents. I know that he did each during one of the years that we dated or before we dated or around when we dated, but they’ve all blended into one another. Now and then. Past and present and future.
I distract myself by calling Meg, then Ainsley, but no one is picking up. I consider diving into the pile of work that I’ve slugged home, but I can’t stomach the depression that accompanies trudging through copyedits on a snowy Christmas evening.
The front door slams as Andy heads out to meet some high-school friends. He will, no doubt, return just before dawn and sleep the day away. The better not to have to face his return home.
“We’re putting in It’s a Wonderful Life,” my dad calls up to me. “Linda’s popped the ’corn. Come on down.”
I’d forgotten all about it, about my father’s requisite tradition. He started it the year my mother left. I suppose it was, in his way, his attempt to show us how changed our lives might have been without our mother—even though we were seething with rage and I, at least, refused to even begrudgingly admit that what time I did have with my mother was precious indeed. So every Christmas, my father would gather Andy and me on the couch and pull an Icelandic blanket over our knees, and we’d recline and consider the story of George Bailey, who wanted to give up on his life until he saw how much his life actually mattered. Eventually, I stopped equating the movie with my mother, and Andy and I would race to fill in the dialogue before the actors said the words themselves.
And now, it’s come full circle: the man who has given up on his life and wishes to be absolved of it, my mother and her abandonment, and me and my own.
I heave myself from my twin bed and scurry down the stairs, my polka-dotted pajama bottoms dragging as I go. As I toss popcorn into my mouth and watch the lights of the TV bounce off the living room walls, I consider my decisions, my setbacks, and how I got here, literally here, seven years in the past, running from my choices, so ready to turn away from the path I’d opted for with my own free will.
It’s so easy to give up on it all, I think, as Clarence, George’s guardian angel, descends to earth to save George from himself. It’s so fucking easy to toss it in and call it a day.
But then I think of Katie, of our first Christmas together when she was nearly one and toddling through the house, her mind so determined to take those first few steps but her body not quite ready. I watched her and thought she was so brave—falling over and over again, but always getting up with a laugh and trying anew.
And now, I watch poor George and realize that Katie might have had it right the whole time: She wasn’t being brave, she was only moving