In Twenty Years: A Novel (10 page)

11

LINDY

The doorbell echoes in the living room. Catherine—wide awake—peers over the stair railing from the second-floor hall where she’s been pacing, but Lindy is already barreling past her, thundering down the steps, a wake of nervous energy quaking behind her.

“Go back to sleep! It’s for me!”

“I wasn’t sleeping. Who on earth is at the door at this hour?”

“Owen’s snoring is outrageous.” Lindy races toward the entry, ignoring her inquiry. “I have a white-noise machine that I travel with—go use my bed.”

Catherine doesn’t need a second offer and slinks into Lindy’s old room, locking the door behind her.

Lindy flings the door open and for a split second prays that it’s her publicist, who’s pretty goddamn pissed at her for pulling “this disappearing stunt,” because her publicist is part of her staff, and her staff she can manage. But, as she already knows, it’s not her publicist.

It’s Leon.

She impulsively texted him her address when he first wrote—she was so delighted that he’d make the trip from New York in the middle of the night that she hadn’t even hesitated. Not many people who weren’t on her payroll or who weren’t looking for a favor would make their way all the way here just for the pleasure of her company. (In fact, not that many people these days—or in a long while—would even describe her company as particularly pleasurable. If Bea were here, then probably she would, because she was always up for an adventure, but Bea’s dead, so she doesn’t count. Probably Tatiana too, but Lindy’s been picking fights recently, ever since she started unintentionally sleeping with Leon, so perhaps not even Tatiana.)

As soon as she realized what she’d done (fallen prey to a very un-Lindy-like notion of romanticism—
a prince in a sports car on his way to rescue her!
), which was almost immediately, she retracted her enthusiasm, texting him at least twenty times, imploring him not to come.

“I texted you, like twenty times, telling you not to come,” she says, staring down the stoop, his tanned skin and shaggy goatee taking shape through the night shadows. A fire-engine-red Jaguar is parked crookedly in the street, a tire rubbing against the disgusting Philadelphia curb.

Leon steps closer, his tattooed arm pushing him up along the railing, then leans in to kiss her, but Lindy doesn’t meet him halfway.

“Well, hey to you too, babe.” He reaches for his phone from the back pocket of his dark denim jeans. He waves it in front of her. “No texts.”

“What the hell? Well, I did.” Lindy peers down the block. “Whose is that?” She aims her chin at the Jag.

“Mine.” A sheepish grin rolls across his face. “A present from Jay.”

“Jay?”

“Z.”

“A present from Jay-Z.” Lindy makes sure she appears indifferent.

He shrugs. “What? Am I not supposed to enjoy it?”

“It’s a little on-the-nose.”

“Like I give a shit? It’s a new Jag!”

“Well, it’s basically a walking cliché.”

Leon shoves his hands into his pockets and drops his head toward the top of his shoulders. “Are you playing hard to get?”

“I’m just saying.” Lindy plops her hands on her hips.

“OK, I get it. You’re completely unimpressed.”

“Not completely. I guess.”

“Noted. Semi-unimpressed.”

“Are there any paparazzi around?”

“Jesus. I don’t know!” He glances to his left and right down the alleyway. “It’s the middle of the night. I drove here from New York to see you. And you tell me that you texted me twenty times not to come, and you think the Jag sucks, and now you’re concerned that I call the paparazzi?” Leon is often stoned, so this is the closest Lindy has come to hearing him sound annoyed. He rubs his goatee and kicks his biker boots against the step. A truck’s axles grind somewhere a few blocks away. Horns follow, echoing down the deserted street to their front stoop. “Linds, you either trust me or you don’t.”

“I’m still with my girlfriend.” Lindy needs to be sure she goes on record. As if going on the record excuses her.

Leon shrugs. “And you’re still with your girlfriend. Adding that to the mental checklist.”

Lindy glances around one last time, then grabs his belt buckle and ushers him inside.

“So catch me up. You’re in Philly, why?” he asks, after she finally acquiesces to a kiss, which goes on longer than Lindy intends it to.

He settles himself onto the couch by the back bay window just a few feet from the base of the steps. The old Philadelphia row houses are narrow and tall, a cascade of stairs leading up, with two bedrooms on each landing. One shorter stairwell heads down below the sidewalk level. Colin took the basement back then and did tonight again too; they’d all scampered to their old spaces like it was second nature, like steps so well worn, they already knew how to retrace them. The space feels compressed now to Lindy, claustrophobic, like she could stretch her arms wide, her fingers wiggling to extend her wingspan, and touch both walls. She tugs the neck of her T-shirt, trying to catch her breath, get some air.

Leon sinks into the pillows as if he belongs there.

“It’s too strange to explain,” Lindy says. She folds her arms awkwardly, then refolds them, then finally sits cross-legged on the floor a few feet away from him, which cajoles Leon into a howl.

“I don’t bite, girl!”

“I know you don’t bite!”

“You look like you think I might. I only bite if you want me to!”

“I don’t want you to.”

Or maybe she does want him to. She doesn’t know. She stretches her shirt again, this time at the waistline, fully aware that her pulse is clanging loud enough to echo outside her body, that her usually steely nerve is cratering with each passing second.
Shit.

She hasn’t seen him since she realized her period was two weeks late, and then it took her another ten days to take the test. She took four tests, peed on four sticks, actually, because it seemed so ridiculous, impossible even. Though it wasn’t impossible: she’d been reckless, spur-of-the-moment impulsive, and they’d skipped the condom. She was almost forty, and it was just this once, so what harm could come of it?

She hadn’t expected to see him again so soon, before she’d decided what to do, before she knew which lie she wanted to chase, which truth she wanted to follow. A baby.
A baby!
Lindy knows what a baby does to a forty-year-old woman who’s tenuously gripping a top spot in the music industry. It means she’ll shift from man-eater to mommy; it means she’ll kiss the low-cut catsuit good-bye; it means she’ll devote her days to diapers, not demos. Lindy’s never considered the former, not when her life has been so stuffed, so singularly focused on the latter.

She needs to decide, she knows. She’s running out of time.

Lindy cracks her knuckles one by one, buying some time, attempting to wrestle herself together. She hates feeling so out of sorts. She’s never out of sorts. At least half of her persona is that she never lets them see her sweat. She didn’t sweat when her mic dropped out on
SNL
; she didn’t sweat when Rihanna picked a Twitter fight with her, accusing her of sleeping with
“my big-dicked man, bitch!”
(Lindy hadn’t, but it was great publicity all the same.) If Lindy really considered it (which she doesn’t), the last time she truly sweated (figuratively, because she does sweat a fuckload at her concerts) was when Bea died. Maybe she sweated it all out of her that day at the funeral. She could take only so much: first she lost Annie at Catherine’s wedding, and then Bea. After that, maybe she sealed herself up, impenetrably, so no one could get close enough to nick her, draw blood again.

She cracks both of her thumbs, feels the relief of the bubble of tension in the joint, and thinks of that little pea in her uterus and wonders how much it would change her.
Should
it change her? Does she need to be changed?

Lindy isn’t sure she wants to know. Isn’t sure she
needs
to know.

Leon nudges his chin upward, inviting her again to the couch.

Lindy wishes he’d gotten her texts and hadn’t come. Lindy wishes she hadn’t slept with him in the first place. Or the second place. Or . . . she actually lost count of how many times it had been. She glances at him quickly, too quickly to linger, and tells herself that if she weren’t knocked up, she would never have invited him tonight, maybe after the record was done, never have seen him again. That maybe her transgression was a one-off and she’d forget about it (she is very good at forgetting about things) and remain true, or at least true-ish, to Tatiana. But even Lindy isn’t sure she believes this lie she tells herself. She’s pregnant, and she’s avoiding her team and avoiding her girlfriend, and she’s at her old house now owned by her dead friend, with a gaggle of people she used to call friends but are now mostly strangers. She has to acknowledge that she’s at least a little bit screwed.

Leon pats the cushion.

“Come on, babe. Don’t pretend you’re not happy to see me.”

“I’m semihappy to see you.”

“I know. It’s complicated.”

“Don’t speak for me.”

He nods.

I’m pregnant!

No, now’s not the time. It will never be the time. It’s her body and it’s her choice, and shit, what he never knows won’t hurt him.

She rises to the couch. A compromise. Enough to let him think he’s won.

Leon has fallen dead to the world asleep on the sofa while Lindy rests in the crook of his arm, her brain in hyperdrive, the rumble emanating from Catherine and Owen’s old room upstairs pounding its way into the roots of a headache.

“Jesus Christ, Owen! Shut the fuck up!”

She adjusts Leon’s arm, which is wrapped around her waist. He’s gotten uncomfortably close to spooning. She doesn’t want him noticing the roundness of her belly, the way her shape is slowly shifting. When they hooked up in New York, she was in, well, rock-star shape: lean abs, sinewy shoulders, legs that her mommy-fans would kill for. Now, with the convex swell of her stomach and the softness easing into her hips, who knows if he’d want her, still covet her, still find her desirable in the way that validates her.

Leon sighs in his sleep, and Lindy is surprised to feel the sting of tears behind her eyes.

She doesn’t coo at babies in strollers or make silly faces at the kid who’s wailing for the duration of a plane ride, doesn’t find Gap onesies with cutesy catchphrases like “Got Milk” impossibly adorable. Motherhood wasn’t something she craved, the way that Annie always did. The European tour was what she craved, what she needed. The entourage who come running when she calls; the deference of the hotel concierge at The Savoy in London, The Bristol in Paris, the Four Seasons in Milan; the explosion of applause—like a volcanic eruption—all the way up to the third tier of the arena in whichever city she was headlining that night.

The basement door creaks open, and the thump of Colin’s footsteps up the stairs announce his arrival.

His eyes are puffy, his hair a tousled bird’s nest, and he’s only wearing boxers, through which she can see his boner. He shields his eyes from the halogen light in the kitchen that was left on when they all scattered and passed out, and asks, “What the hell time is it?” Then he realizes his indecent exposure, drops a hand in front of his fly, and says, “Sorry.” He spies Leon and shoots Lindy a questioning glance.

“He’s an old friend, and it’s five-thirty.” Lindy grouses. Leon snorts and swaddles her belly once more. “Owen needs an intervention.”

“He didn’t drink that much. Give the guy a break. He never gets a night out.”

“For his snoring, you moron.”

Colin falls silent, and then they hear it—the reverberating in and out of air from Owen’s nasal passages. Colin, who seems entirely unperturbed by it, shuffles to the kitchen for some water.

More footsteps, this time from the second floor. Annie appears on the landing in her cotton floral pajamas, her hair pulled back in a low ponytail.

“This is awful,” she stage whispers. “I can’t survive on three hours of sleep! He’s right above me, and it’s shaking the walls.” She pauses, assessing the stranger on the couch. “Who’s that?”

Lindy ignores the question. “Go into Bea’s room. Try there.”

No one had yet gone into Bea’s room. Not when they arrived and explored their old spaces, not when they returned home from Pat’s, when the alcohol could have been their armor (at least for most of them). The door remains closed for now, securing the ghosts that no one was prepared to face.

“I’m not going to sleep in Bea’s room!” Annie barks. “God!”

Colin emerges from the kitchen—Annie hadn’t seen him there. His boner has died down for the moment, but if he feels exposed, in his preppy J. Crew boxers with little Scotties wearing bow ties, he doesn’t seem to care.

“Hey, Ann.” He nods his head up at her. Colin is the only one of them who calls her Ann.

He also doesn’t seem to notice Annie’s quick hiccup of a breath, the way her eyes grow wider, her cheeks illuminate, but Lindy does. For all of her bravado, for her open, flourishing nakedness, Lindy is an observer. A sponge. She had to be back when she crafted the sort of music that penetrated across all demographics: moms who amped up a song in their Honda Odysseys and blazed down their suburban streets with memories of an old boyfriend; their daughters who belted it out with no inhibitions, daydreaming about their future loves; husbands or boyfriends or pubescent teenage boys who cranked up the melody and considered how much they’d like to screw her. Just because her label isn’t using her own music these days doesn’t mean that she isn’t always subconsciously weaving a lyric, isn’t always reflecting on the finer details of life, of humanity, of the beautiful and horrible madness that comprises day-to-day life. She’s lost track of the way this used to soften her, humble her, ground her. But she hasn’t lost her skills in the art of observation.