Time of My Life Read Free Page B

but you weren’t in yet. Calling about our plans. Buzz me.”
    Megan. Oh my God, it’s fucking Megan. I walk over to the machine and stare at it, playing the message again, and then over again once more.
Not possible. Not in any way possible.
Three years ago, Megan drove off the road late one night and collided with a steel pole. She was out in California for business and heading home from dinner and fell asleep at the wheel. At least that was what the police supposed; they never found skid marks and there were no witnesses, so we got a few “Sorry for your losses, ma’am,” and her husband, Tyler, got a bloodied wallet, an engagement ring, and a wedding band, and that was it. They said that the best they could tell, she died instantly. I clutched Henry’s hand at her funeral on a damp day in October, just before all the leaves plunged from the trees.
    I fall onto the cheap beige couch, the one whose fabric scratched your back and that I’d begged and pleaded and whimpered at Jackson to toss out to no avail because, as he told me, “I’m not good with change, babe, and I love this couch and have had it since college, so come on, you can deal,” and surveyed the landscape.
    I was, unquestionably, back here. Back in the land of my future self’s what-ifs.
What if I hadn’t tossed aside my former life like it wasn’t a life preserver that I might one day need? What if I’d done it all differently when I had a chance? What if, what if, what if?
    The better question is, it seemed, what now?

    T HE PAPER ON the front hall table says Thursday, July 13, 2000. The headlines trumpet the race for the White House: Is George Bush’s record in Texas strong enough to win over voters and can Al Gore select the right vice president to give him a boost? The entertainment section sings about a little movie called
X-Men,
opening the following day, which I knew would skyrocket an Aussie named Hugh Jackman to near superstardom and spawn two sequels. I toss the paper on the floor, run to my desk in the living room, and pick up the cordless.
    1-914-555-2973.
    I dial my home number. Nancy, my nanny, might pick up.
    “Please pick up, please pick up,” I whisper fervently as I press the buttons with zealous intensity.
    I’m greeted with a high-pitched recording: “The number you requested is not in service. Please check the number you are calling and try again.”
    I slam down the phone and stare blankly out the window. Shit. I don’t know what else to do.
    Without warning, my neighbor appears in the window directly opposite and only five feet away, and turns to stare. I offer a frantic wave, and only then realize that I’m still stark nude. I feel my eyebrows dart to my hairline and rush to the bedroom to cover myself.
    My closet is crammed and stuffed and bursting, and I wonder how I ever lived like this—in a state of controlled chaos—but then I remember that for years, it provided me comfort: that when my mom left the family, I picked up the literal slack, cleaning up for my little brother, organizing the kitchen so that my dad was never reminded that my mom ditched out, folding and fussing and keeping everything
just so,
as if a linear material life translated to a linear emotional one as well.
    When I got to college, when I finally fled the suffocation that I’d built around myself—because, to my father’s credit, he’d never asked me to captain our plagued family’s ship—it all collapsed. You couldn’t walk through my dorm room without stumbling on a week-old pizza box or a marketing textbook from the previous semester or a bra that desperately needed to be washed but was instead peeping out from underneath my twin bed.
    So now, trapped in the closet of my former self, nothing is too different from how it used to be. T-shirts drip from shelves, mismatched shoes are stacked atop one another, pashminas, which were everywhere the past few seasons, are balled and tossed into the back left corner.
    I pick up a