If I Could Turn Back Time (27 page)

“Oh, god,” he’d moaned, upon realizing what he’d done.

“Yup.” I’d patted his hand. “Hell of a night.”

“I didn’t …
do
anything, did I?”

“You mean like call Curtis’s new husband a selfish bitch and accuse him of stealing your man?”

He’d winced, and I couldn’t blame him. “I said that, didn’t I? I remember saying that.”

I nodded. “But
fortunately
you only said it to me.”

“But I remember—”

“You were practicing your speech on me. You never made it over to him.”

I saw the relief relax all the muscles in his face, and I sympathized. I knew the feeling. Don’t we all?

“And the spastic dancing to Kelly Clarkson?”

“You did that.”

He’d sighed, heavy and ragged. “Of course I did. With the hand motions?”

I’d just shrugged. “Of course.”

I needed Sammy. I needed my sidekick, my confidant. Where the hell was he now?

Okay, okay, I didn’t
really
blame him for not being here holding my hand. He’d been drinking with me; maybe he felt every bit as crappy as I did. And even if he didn’t, I’d clearly gotten myself into this mess, and it wasn’t up to him or anyone else to get me out of it. I just had to thank whoever I needed to thank, write a check for whatever kind of damage I might have done, and get myself home and into a hot bath with a mug of coffee and the latest
Financial Times
.

I needed to feel normal again.

The bottom step spilled onto a slate foyer, and I heard a male voice talking in the kitchen. I assumed it was the kitchen anyway. These houses were all alike in some way—they all felt like home for some reason—and I was easily able to follow the voices into what did, indeed, turn out to be a decent-sized eat-in suburban kitchen.

I pushed the swinging saloon-style door open with great trepidation, having no idea who I was going to see there. Lisa and Larry, maybe? In their pregnant suburban life?

But no. They lived much higher on the hog than this. I’d seen their apartment on Key Biscayne; it was gorgeous. And, anyway, she was pregnant for the first time now. There wouldn’t have been a stuffed animal lying around Lisa and Larry’s house. No way.

I could be facing anyone.

I mean, I actually had that thought.
I could be facing anyone
. I couldn’t have imagined who that would be.

“Sit!” he commanded. “Stay. Stay … stay … Don’t look at Mommy—stay.
Stay
.” He wasn’t talking to me, but to a golden retriever self-consciously sitting before him, eyes darting toward me and back to the man in front of him, with a Milk-Bone on his nose.

Unsurprising scene, in a way.

Brendan had always loved teaching his dogs tricks.

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

“You finally got up!” he said to me, then glanced at the dog and quickly said, “
Okay!
” whereupon the dog shook his snout and caught the bone, crunching eagerly in case another one was coming.

“I … yes. I guess.…” I squinted at him a little, trying to make sense of him. Where were we? Why did he look different? I couldn’t put my finger on it.

His hair, I thought. It was shorter. Parted to the side, rather than the haphazard storm of brown waves it had always been when I knew him. But his face was the same. Maybe a little … I don’t know … older? No lines, really, but something about the set of his expression was more serious. Less goofy than the guy I’d known.

Then again, what had I known? A boy. In high school. Two years seemed like infinity then, but ten times that had passed and I’d grown enough to know that no one’s eighteen-year-old self tells you who they really are.

“Man, that baby’s really taking it out of you, huh? I haven’t heard a coherent sentence come out of your mouth in a month.” He laughed. “Even Barnaby makes more sense than you.” He nodded at the dog.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I’m just … confused.” I glanced around. Baby? Did we have a baby in this new old life? “What baby?”

He didn’t laugh this time. He tipped his head to the left and frowned. “What baby?”

“Well, you know…” Of course he didn’t know.
I
didn’t know. Whatever he was talking about, it sure wasn’t the kind of thing a person just completely forgets and has to ask about, outside of a Lifetime movie.
Do I have children? Are you my mother?
This was, to him, insane. “I’m so foggy. I just woke up and had so many weird dreams.”

He came over to me then and cupped my face in his hands. “You need to take it really easy. You know the doctor told you that. I don’t think you should go to work today. I’ll call the school and tell them you can’t.”

“The school?” I was echoing everything dumbly. I know it made no sense to him. “I work at a school?” Then an idea came to me that might just work. I smiled, sleepily, like I was just teasing him. I was hoping he’d play along.

And he did. “Yes, Mrs. Riley, you teach seventh-grade math at the local middle school, you’re twenty-six years old, I made you an honest woman five years ago, and now you’re pregnant with your first child”—he gestured at what I now realized was a slightly puffed-out and definitely queasy stomach; I wasn’t hung over, I was
pregnant
—“and Barnaby is going to be very jealous as soon as he is born.”

“He?”
Barnaby?

“Okay, or
she
.” It was clear we had no idea but that he was hoping for a boy and I was hoping for a girl. This was obviously a conversation we’d had more than once. “But Barnaby is going to be jealous, so can you please say hello to him? He’s been eyeing you pretty desperately since you walked in here.”

“Oh.” I looked at the dog with a sense of recognition, but I’d had golden retrievers growing up, and in my experience they all looked very similar. I’d seen L.L.Bean dogs who looked so similar to my beloved lost Bailey that I did a double- and triple-take.

So while Barnaby was looking at me with expectant familiarity, I wasn’t sure if I knew him or just knew dogs.

In either case, I found myself saying, “Hey, Barnaby. Hey, Barn.” He galumphed over to me, and I reached out and scritched him behind the ears. He smiled and turned his face up, leaning into my touch. Dogs. They were so easy. “Good boy,” I cooed.

“So what do you say?” Brendan asked me. “Want me to call the school? I think you should rest.”

Well, hell, whatever job I had wasn’t real to me now, so I didn’t see any point in going out of my way to protect it. Feeling like I could step back into my teenage “do-over” was one thing, but there was no way I could step into a twentysomething life I’d never lived. A life I had no feel for whatsoever. “Please,” I said to Brendan. “I really want to stay in today. Tell them I don’t know when I’ll be back.” Truer words were never spoken. At least not by me.

He nodded. “If you want to add anything to the grocery list, give me a call.”

He did the grocery shopping? How sweet he was. I guess I’d really lucked out in this incarnation.

“You know where to get me,” he said, and gave me a peck on the cheek. “Make sure you keep drinking water. We don’t want to go back to the hospital.”

“Right.” Better not to push my luck asking too many obvious questions. “I’ll do that. And … you know where to find me too.”

He gave me the thumbs-up sign and went out the front door. I stood there for a long moment, watching the nonexistent jet stream that followed his path. Then I turned to the dog.

“Well, Barnaby. What the fuck do I do now?”

*   *   *

WHAT I DID
was spend the next three hours rooting through every drawer, examining every picture on the fridge, every note on the desk in the den, and looking for every other clue to my state of mind in this life. I read a lot of inspirational books. Not religious, but encouraging, self-help with your self-esteem books. Titles like
Prayers for a Simple Life
,
The Path to Happiness
,
Three Easy Steps to Meditation
, and
What to Do When You Can’t Do Anything
.

There were also a few titles on getting pregnant, like
Getting Pregnant Naturally
and
Old Wives’ Remedies for Young Wives
. Actually I thought that was a pretty insulting title and I couldn’t imagine myself buying it, but when I opened it up and leafed through I saw an inscription:

Chin up, young wife! You’ll be a tired old wife

with a brood of brats before you know it! I know

you will hate this title but I think there might

actually be some good tips in here. Let’s meet

for some raspberry leaf tea soon! XO, Bonnie

So I had friends. I didn’t know them, of course, but at least I had friends. That was good. Disconcerting, too—a whole life, including histories with strangers, that I didn’t know anything at all about—but it was good.

It was also good that I knew myself well enough, and was consistent enough, to know I would have bristled at that title no matter what life path I had chosen. I felt a private pride. I might not be living my own life, the life I knew, but at least I was still me.

With that in mind, I went back to the bedroom and looked on my closet shelf. I had always kept a box of keepsakes—letters, ticket stubs, whatever—on my closet shelf at home, and it was something I’d continued doing even though the pieces of my life had changed significantly. So when I went to this Ramie’s bedroom closet and looked, sure enough I found an elaborate hatbox, with a T.J.Maxx sticker still on the bottom.

It was heavy and my body was a little awkward. Carefully, I carried it over to the bed and sat down with it. Barnaby clicked into the room and jumped handily onto the mattress beside me. I automatically reached over and ruffled his fur. “You probably understand more about what’s going on than I do, right, buddy?”

He sighed and rolled onto his side. There was not an ounce of fear that I was going to chastise him for being up here, so I guess he was a furniture dog. My mom would have hated that. I know that because I allowed
all
of our dogs to be furniture dogs.

“Okay. You do that and I’ll do this.” I had a vague sense of sneakiness about this, like I was trespassing on someone else’s life, rather than my own. But the fact that it
was
my own meant that, if this life didn’t happen or if I made another choice, this was
no one’s
life, so, basically, I could do whatever I wanted. If I could somehow be sure I’d get out of here, I might have felt free to make every stupid mistake I’d ever imagined. In fact, if I
really
knew there would be no consequences, or memories, I could even come up with a few more.

But life is uncertain, even—or especially—in the midst of great uncertainty. Even the most ridiculous and cartoonish of dreams seem real while you’re in them. Yes, that’s Sammy Davis, Jr., riding a camel sidesaddle and holding a sign for that Chinese restaurant that closed four years ago, what of it? If Napoleon and Erma Bombeck can sit and chat with him about sewing dog coats, it must be fine, right?

So here I was, in a life I’d never had, able to predict myself by how I’d always been, but unable to see my present beyond the scope of my past. What could I do, but hope that there was some reason for this, other than some wacky
Dr. Who
time-space continuum mix-up that would thrust me, permanently, into confusion?

I took the top off the box, which was so full that a few things spilled onto the bed. A car key—VW of some sort—and a heavy birthday card with one of those musical buttons in it, as well as a couple of coins I didn’t know the significance of, though it probably had something to do with the dates on them or the places I’d found them or the people who’d given them to me. I was like that. I’d pick coins up and read significance into them every time, so sometimes when I had some extra coins lying around, I’d just throw them onto the street or sidewalk for someone else to find and feel lucky for having.

I opened the birthday card on top of the pile. It was from Brendan. And Barnaby. I felt an impatient little sigh inflate inside of me but didn’t want to let it complain its way out. This was nice. It was a nice card. It had a recording of Elvis singing “You Ain’t Nothin’ but a Hound Dog”—another Barnaby reference, I gathered. I closed the card, but the tinny music kept playing. I frowned. Pressed it together harder. It still played. I felt an irritation I couldn’t quite name, but felt I knew well, surge inside of me, and I pinched the music button hard. It stopped. I set it aside for fear of starting it up again.

I hadn’t realized I hated those cards, but I do. I hate those cards.

Next there was a birthday card from my mom. Nice but totally unremarkable. Bless her, she was one who would just put
Ramie—
above the prewritten message, then,
Love, Mom
, beneath it. There was never anything more specific, more personal than that. It was always just basically,
This message is close enough to the mark for me to give it to you from me
, and I have always accepted it as just that.

Recently she’s gotten into sending e-cards instead, which drives me absolutely insane. They always go straight to the junk file, and if I don’t find them, they remind her I haven’t read them, which she always takes personally. And I feel guilty. It’s this dance we do.

So in that way, it was kind of fun to see her handwritten impersonal card to a twenty-sixish me.

But I wasn’t sure why I’d saved it.

The more I dug into the box, the more evidence I unearthed of a life that was very different from the one I’d created. A life in which I valued things like preprinted movie stubs and impersonal cards and a D.C. Metro ticket from a date that had no great significance that I could tell, but that was, for some reason, worth saving. Barnaby’s first collar and tag were in there—I gathered they were his first from the collar’s size and the fact that the tag had a different address from the one more recent correspondence told me I was in now; in Maryland, it turned out—as were his bill of sale and a computer printout of a picture of his litter from the
Washington Post
online.