Chapter 48
Dimly she is aware of the warmth of her child’s body, her own weakness, her inability to hold him as tightly as she wants to. The room is out of focus, but sight no longer feels so important as smell and touch, the pleasant temperature of his skin, the clean smell of his head on her shoulder.
There is no more time. There will not be another autumn, another year to go to the fair, there will not be tomorrow and tomorrow.
There is only this, her precious, stupid little life and the man that she chose and the children that she made.
There behind her are all the hours of her experience, all the hours that counted and the hours she wasted, all of the TV ads and minutes spent waiting for trains and planes and sleeping in late and daydreaming.
There is everything she missed and everything she has yet to miss.
The room takes on the sense of a departure lounge, the empty chairs at odd angles as though they are waiting for something to happen, as though they don’t want to look directly at it.
Where are we going? she wants to ask, but her mouth is dry and not forming words.
She cannot escape the pervasive feeling that she has forgotten something at home, that she doesn’t know what she has forgotten, that there’s something she has not done or said, something just on the tip of her mind.
It’s an awful, itchy feeling. What was it?
Wasn’t there something that she was supposed to do?
Take Sebastian to swim class? Put a spoon under her pillow?
Watch her daughter fall in love? Outside, other planes are taking off, roaring into the blue.
People are filtering in now, they’ve called the gate and the destination is just out of reach, she is checking her bag for her passport, her ChapStick, some piece of paper that will say everything she needs to know, a script maybe, that’s the thing.
She has forgotten her lines! Or maybe it’s just that they haven’t given them to her yet, maybe that’s what she’s waiting for.
As the people around her start laughing and chattering and fading away she realizes, this isn’t a departure.
She has only just arrived. Of course, she can feel it now, the warmth hitting her skin, the sweet sense of somewhere new, of transforming—why didn’t she notice before?
That’s it, she has only just arrived, here in California, to film her first episode of Life and Times.
(Where is Al?) Oh, it all makes sense now, why he couldn’t be here, he’s somewhere on the other side of the country, going to work.
No—he’s already at work. That’s how time zones work.
Yes, Al has been at work for three hours.
Quietly shifting through old documents to find something interesting, or perhaps writing a caption on an old broken piece of ship that they will mount to the wall.
She clutches her Styrofoam coffee, and the early morning ballet begins around her: cameras sliding into place, makeup artists dashing powder onto actors reading and rereading their lines, the sense of an orchestra tuning up.
She steps forward to speak.