In Twenty Years: A Novel (28 page)

33

CATHERINE

Catherine can see that Owen is trying to get her attention. Annie and Colin are neck-deep in each other, googly-eyed and intoxicated, which irritates Catherine for no reason at all, and Owen keeps twisting his head around them, trying to catch her eye, murmuring her name, imploring her to
stop working
, and like, she doesn’t know, what? Party? Is that his way of apologizing?

This is so Owen!
Minimal effort, maximum expected reward.

She gazes, instead, at her phone. Her team is keeping her abreast of the continued fallout from her outburst today: the memes are still coming, the YouTube hits growing by the hour. Her apology is the top story on People.com, but there’s no further word from Target. Most likely they’re strategizing on how to distance themselves from the absolutely catastrophic implosion of the nondomestic domestic goddess, Catherine Grant.

Stop working. He wants her to stop working when what she really needs to do is scramble harder, faster, to try to fix this.

My God, her husband has no clue about the complexities of her life, about how hard she’s tap dancing to salvage the company she’s sacrificed the past five years for. That might be the most insulting part of this whole mess—that she once loved all the things her company stood for. Loved testing homemade baby-food recipes for the kids. Loved inventing a toxin-free lemon cleanser. Loved mixing and melting a rainbow of hot waxes and molding them into lavender-scented candles for teacher gifts. That she might be thought of as a fraud, an interloper? Surely, yes, that is the most wretched part. Her mistake, she realizes, is that she had to be the
best
at all this, rather than simply enjoy it. In her quest to be on top, she turned into the biggest fraud of them all: someone who didn’t revel in the joy of it, someone who didn’t practice what she preached. That, she thinks, is the worst fraud of all.

Her chin quivers, but she holds it steady. It’s hardly the most difficult thing she’s done today.

Owen glances over one more time, and that’s it. She’s on her feet, sending him a clear signal. (She thinks.) She digs her heels in next to Leon.

Try harder.

She tries hard, for God’s sake! Maybe not with Owen, she realizes. But with everything else! Wouldn’t it be nice if he could carry her this one time, with this one thing?

“Something you want to talk about?” Leon leans in.

She folds her arms. “Does it look like there’s something I want to talk about?”

He shrugs, then rises to his tiptoes in his unending search for Lindy.

“It seems to me, since you’re out here chasing
her
, that you’re not the best one to give advice.” Catherine’s phone buzzes in her palm, and she can’t bring herself to look at it.

“I never said I was the
best
one. Just one.”

Catherine considers this and hates, then loves, then hates, that it makes so much sense.

“I like being the best one, the most perfect.”

“That much is obvious.” Leon smiles.

“I don’t know how to do it any other way.”

“Listen, I admire my artists who are balls-out a hundred percent of the time.”

“But?”

“But what?” Leon looks at her, genuinely curious.

“There’s a ‘but’ coming.”

“No buts.”

“But ‘perfect’ is a moving target.”

Leon smiles, and Catherine can see why Lindy is drawn to him. The way his whole face opens up into kindness in the folds around his eyes. She thinks again of Bea, that maybe she sent him because she couldn’t be here herself. She knows this is crazy—Catherine doesn’t do spiritual juju—but she thinks it all the same.

“I mean, I’m just saying that sometimes the bar keeps getting higher, and that’s enough to make the hurdles impossible for anyone.”

“I don’t know how to do it any other way.” She’s ashamed of this admission. Not because working balls-out is anything to be ashamed of, but because if she were truly the best, she wouldn’t have to find another way in the first place. That’s why she keeps that notebook full of other people’s ideas; that’s why it was almost inevitable that she’d be exposed eventually.
She is a fraud!
In more ways than just one. How long did she think she could keep it secret?

The emcee steps onto the stage, asking the crowd to hush. They’re about to begin.

“I don’t know how to change,” Catherine says quietly. Then she remembers who she was twenty years ago, how far she’s come since then, and considers that it’s not that she doesn’t know how, it’s that she’s choosing not to.

34

LINDY

Lindy can’t decide if she’s relieved or not that Mr. Pearson remembers her.

“Of course I remember you,” he says, distracted by the first band’s opening number, an off-kilter headbanger, which ensures that they certainly will
not
be winning this battle. “I didn’t think you’d become anything other than a waitress who sang at bad open-mic nights.”

“Yeah, I think that’s pretty much a direct quote.” Lindy presses her lips into a thin line and falls quiet while the lead guitar plays a particularly disharmonious chord arrangement. “I couldn’t have been worse than these guys.”

“Works in progress.” Pearson grimaces. “Works in progress. And obviously I was wrong about you. I’m not too proud to admit it.”

“Well, I appreciate that,” Lindy says, because she does. Because it’s the acknowledgment she seeks, after all.

“I’m not above admitting I was a bit of a dick. But it’s not like you weren’t a pain in the ass too.”

Lindy nods, conceding. She was. She still is. She’d like to be less of one, though.

A kid who looks like a skinny freshman and who should seriously rethink the mustache he’s growing thrusts a clipboard at Pearson.

“The full lineup,” he says, then notices Lindy. “Like, whoa.”

Will, the hipster dude from before (full name: Will Overland—he tells Lindy this three times), waves him away. “Give her space, Brandon, give her space!”

“I don’t need space. It’s fine.”

“She certainly doesn’t need space,” Pearson agrees.

“So you’re still keeping me in line?”

“If I didn’t, who would?” He grins, and Lindy can see that maybe he was never the enemy, that with his calloused guitar hands and slightly graying temples, and his Sex Pistols shirt that somehow doesn’t look too trying-too-hard, maybe they could have been friends back then. She’d been too busy trying to buck the system, stick it to the man, to realize it.

“I’m trying to be less of a pain in the ass,” she says.

The lead singer introduces the band as Strange Fiction, and a smattering of applause spreads throughout the lawn. The singer looks mildly embarrassed to be there, but gamely continues, counting down—
three, two, one
—he jumps into a semisplit and lands on his feet—to the next disaster.

“I put them on first so that no one could compare them to any of the better guys,” Pearson says. “God bless them, they want it so badly. Maybe with some time . . .”

“You’d never have even put me on,” Lindy says. “I mean, if you’d done something like this. Which you never did. I firmly remember you being absolutely no fun.”

“Oh God.” He rolls his eyes. “I was young and inexperienced and wanted to ‘prove myself.’ You guys had to take me seriously.” He hesitates. “But you’re right. I probably wouldn’t have put you on anyway.”

“Twenty years later and you still suck.”

Pearson laughs easily. “Not as much.”

“So you really didn’t think I’d make it?” Lindy’s not sure why his answer matters so much to her, but it does.

“It wasn’t my job to tell you that you’d make it. It was my job to teach you enough so you could.”

“So you take credit for my success?”

He smiles. “I take credit for nothing.” He gestures to Will, who pops over like a lapdog. Pearson tells him to cut the band’s third song. Will trots toward the stage to deliver the message:
Sorry, you suck.
“But, listen, you
were
a pain in the ass. Just to be one. Maybe I was a dick just to be one back. But you weren’t standing on principle; you just wanted to get under my skin for the sake of it. You were a pain in the ass for the sake of it.”

“But that’s what made me successful.”

He checks something off on the clipboard. “I doubt that’s what made you successful. That might just be what you
think
made you successful.”

“Well, you already told me it’s not my talent.”

“I didn’t say that.” He looks at her now, and she can tell it’s not because she’s Lindy Armstrong, but because she’s some kid he used to know, some kid who maybe had potential but who was too pigheaded to recognize that artistic integrity and asshole-like behavior were not synonymous.

“I could have sworn I heard you say that,” Lindy mutters, the levity of the conversation gone.

“That was the problem with you, Armstrong. You always heard what you thought people were saying, and never paid close enough attention to actually hear the truth.”

Will has taken to the spotlight like a cat does to milk. He’s lingering too long up there, soaking it in, bantering with the crowd.

“He’s just supposed to introduce the next band,” Pearson says. “He’s become a bit of a stage whore.”

“All right,” Will says, his voice echoing over the lawn. “Before we bring out the next band, I have a
huge
surprise for you.”

Some guy shouts, “I hope it’s not that they suck dog shit like the last band!” And then a few people clap and holler.

“Quiet down, quiet down. I want everyone on their feet for this.” No one moves except for three drunk girls down front. “Come on, everyone up!” Reluctantly, like a slow wave, people slink upward.

Lindy looks at Pearson, who appears befuddled.

“Ugh,” she says. “Shit.” She had hoped Pearson had quietly nixed Will’s unbridled enthusiasm for a performance when her back was turned.

“We have a grade-A superstar here tonight!” Will yells, too loudly, the mic too close to his mouth.

“Shut up!” the same heckler bellows.

Will ignores him. “Seriously, folks! Who watches
Rock N Roll Dreammakers
? Come on, don’t be embarrassed to admit it!”

At least half the crowd claps now, a buzz building, a rumbling like an oncoming train.

“OK, who owns her last album,
Don’t Make Me
?”

The screaming starts in the back and begins to build to a fever pitch.

“Jesus,” Lindy says. “I’m not here for this! Did you approve this?”

“Do you seriously think I approved this?” Pearson replies.

“Well, shit.” She chews her lip, blows air out of her nose.
Shit.
She wanted to find Leon, have a private moment to tell him the truth.

“I don’t remember you ever wanting to be inconspicuous.”

Everyone is on their feet now, clapping and hooting, and Will, to his damn credit, has handled the crescendo perfectly.

“Well,
all right
! That’s what I thought! Because we have
Lindy goddamn Armstrong
here tonight!”

The three drunk girls down front start shrieking—real, honest-to-God shrieking.

“I don’t want to go up there,” Lindy whispers. “This isn’t what I came here for!”

“Really?” Pearson raises an eyebrow.

“Welcome her, everyone! She’s a good old alumna, and she’s back to show us how it’s done!” Then he adds, shaking his free fist toward the blinding stage lights: “Screw you, Mom and Dad! I’m not applying for that internship! Yeeeeeeeeeaaaaaaaaahhhhh!”

The lawn has ignited now, yelling and howling and exploding with applause that until maybe yesterday, Lindy thought was everything. Validation, triumph, acceptance, happiness. Somehow happiness had gotten tangled up with all the rest, so skewed and jumbled in the mix that she wasn’t able to parse it out, distinguish it all on its own.

Lindy stands immobile on the side stage, paralyzed, her legs unwilling to surrender, torn between what she
thought
mattered since she lost track of her old friends, and what she realized actually
does
matter in the hours since they’ve been reunited.

“You’d better get out there,” Pearson says. “Do what you do best.”

“What’s that?”

“I’ve kept tabs,” he says. “Even caught a show two years ago.”

“Really?” Her stomach spins. “So, then what? What is it that I do best?”

“Fake it.” He shrugs. “I have no idea how you didn’t know that until today.”

35

ANNIE

“Oh my God!” Annie shouts, covering her ears like Gus used to when he didn’t want to be told it was bedtime. “Oh my God, does it always have to be about her?” She looks at Colin. “Seriously? Why is it always about her? Why am I sitting here listening to a Lindy Armstrong concert instead of enjoying my perfectly fine evening with crappy college bands?”

“Shhhh,” the undergrad next to her hisses. “I’m videoing!” Her phone is held aloft, her face aglow with the bliss of stumbling on a real superstar in their midst.

“Oh, shut up!” Annie says. “She’s not all that special.” Then to Colin, she says, “Seriously, what is so great about Lindy goddamn Armstrong?”

Annie’s on her feet quickly, marching down the lawn, weaving in and out of the throngs of fans who are pulsing to the beat of one of Lindy’s new singles, something about female empowerment and girls’ nights and no men allowed. (Annie recalls that might be the name of the song: “No Men Allowed,” because she thinks Gus was singing along to it last week on his iPhone.) Annie finds this particularly ironic, not only because she’s now downed several of those beers that Colin toted along, but also because Lindy knows
jackshit
about girls’ nights and friendship and female empowerment.

“This is crap,” she says to two girls who have their arms flung around each other’s shoulders, nearly tearful with reverence.

“She’s the worst,” she says to another threesome, who gape at the stage with doe-eyed admiration.

“She didn’t write a word of this!” she hisses, as she passes by those crew guys, the very ones who beckoned Annie here in the first place.

She wedges her way through the drunk girls up front.

“Excuse me. Excuse me.
Excuse me!
”

“Ann, Annie, stop!” Colin is two steps behind her, Leon, one step behind him. Catherine and Owen pull up the rear somewhere.

Colin reaches for her shoulder. “Come on, Ann. Come on. Whatever you need to say, don’t say it here.”

“Why are you so forgiving of her? Why are all of you so forgiving of her?” Annie cries. “You!” She points at Leon. “She stranded you with a group of strangers when you came all this way for her!”

Leon stares at his feet.

“And you!” She pokes Colin in the chest, hard enough that he winces. “She slept with you knowing it would break my heart!”

Annie can feel the blood rushing to her face, and even though she’s well past tipsy and also pretty sure that Colin is into her tonight, she regrets the jealousy, the shrillness in her voice. She is not that woman! She lived with Baxter’s infidelity for years, for God’s sake. Why is she dragging this up now?

So she adds as a means of distraction, “Bea didn’t like it either.”

“You’re right, Bea didn’t like it, OK? I’ve felt guilty about it ever since. But she forgave me, and we moved on, and can we please stop keeping score, all of us? All of you? She just . . . she wanted us to be
happy
. She made me promise to be happy.”

“When did she make you promise this?” Catherine asks.

“I don’t know. Sometime!”

“I’m confused,” Catherine says. “Like, this was part of a philosophical discussion that you guys had while she was in Honduras after the wedding? I thought she was barely reachable in Honduras?”

“No,” Colin says.

“No, what? It was not part of a philosophical discussion that you guys had while she was in Honduras?”

Leon, who knows nothing about any of this, says, “Well, I’m sure they had some private conversations every now and again, right, dude?”

Catherine narrows her eyes. “When did she tell you this, Colin? I’m unclear on the timing.”

“I don’t know! Years ago. What are you, the Bea police?”

“Years ago, when?” Annie cries. “I tried to reach her for weeks before she . . . for weeks before we got the news, and she never called me back. Was she mad at me? Oh God, I shouldn’t have thrown such a fit at the wedding.” She eyes Catherine. “I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have. I was so stupid!”

“She wasn’t mad at you, Annie.” Colin’s voice has turned brittle. “My God! Will everyone just stop and shut up for a minute? It was when she was sick, OK? She told me this when she was sick. Her cancer came back. Quickly.” He shakes his head like he still can’t believe it. “She was too sick to call you all back after the wedding, with all of that crap, and then she was gone. OK? None of this is about you . . . or you . . . or you.” He points to all of them. “It was about Bea. What she wanted, how she wanted it, so stop turning this into drama that it’s not.”

Lindy wails in the background. Annie’s hand covers her mouth, her eyes wide and round and bright with shock.

“What?” she says.

“What?” Catherine says.

“Fuck,” Colin says. “
Fuck.
This isn’t . . . this wasn’t how you were supposed to find out. You weren’t supposed to find out.”

“What?” Catherine’s shoulders are curled up near her ears. “What are you talking about? Cancer? I don’t . . .” She pauses, like the news is broadcast from Mars, taking a moment to catch up with her brain, with the reality. “Wait . . . you knew she was sick this whole time? You told us it was a car accident! It came from you—all of this! It started with you . . .” She spits out the words. “You let us sit around and wonder about the details. Wonder exactly what happened. Do you know how many times I’ve replayed Bea slamming into a tree or swerving off the road? Or . . . dying by herself, all alone?”

“I wasn’t letting you sit around!” he says. “I just . . . she was dead, OK? She was already dead! Would it have been better to imagine her going through chemo?”

“That’s bullshit! If we’d known, maybe we could have helped save her! Done . . . I don’t know . . . but
something
. I cannot
believe
the lie started with you.”

“We couldn’t have saved her,” Colin snaps. “You can’t just go around saving people just because you want to! I’m a doctor. I know!”

“That’s ridiculous!” Catherine yells. “I cannot
believe
this. What did she used to say? That we were her family. Well, we obviously weren’t family. You don’t do these sorts of things to family! Lie to them forever.”

Lindy hits a high note.

“SHUT UP, LINDY ARMSTRONG!” Annie screeches toward the stage. “And by the way.” She jabs Catherine. “That’s exactly what I’ve been saying! Family! What crap. Look at her.
Look at her!
” She flaps her arms toward Lindy. “We’re not family! She was the first to leave. She’s always leaving us. She never wanted to be part of
us
for a second longer than she had to be!”

“God, Annie, will you please just let it go!” Catherine raises her hands in the air. “She’s only acting this way because she was in love with you and doesn’t know any better. Christ! It’s been forever. Can we get it together already? Move on?”

Annie feels something run cold, then hot, then cold again, through her. But then she’s marching once more—the others falling in line behind her like an army of ants, toward the stage, onward, with no idea what she’s doing exactly, or why she’s doing it, only that she’s
had it up to here
with Lindy Armstrong. After she stormed off from the hospital, the rest of them were wondering whether Lindy was OK (well, they were half wondering whether she was OK, but it’s easy to pretend they were swelling with concern), and here Lindy was, preparing for a surprise performance! Looking to boost her notoriety! Hoping to relive her glory days!

“This is just crap. Crap, crap, crap.” Annie says. “That she made this weekend about
her.
This weekend was about
Bea.
”

“I thought this weekend was about you guys,” Leon interjects.

“Why are you even talking?” Annie shouts, mostly because Lindy is howling the chorus, and no one can really hear anything if they don’t match their own voices to decibel level ten. “Why are you even here? Did Lindy invite you? Did Lindy call you and say, ‘Baby daddy, come down and play house with me?’ Did she? Did she do that?” Annie doesn’t even realize what she’s said until they’re all frozen, heads tilted, jaws agape slightly more than they should be. Finally. One secret slithers out that’s impossible to ignore. Annie doesn’t dare breathe.

“Crap. Crap, crap, crap,” Annie repeats.

Leon has gone pale; the rest of them hover with quiet alarm, doing the math, putting the pieces together that Annie did just hours ago. Catherine looks particularly put out, her face folded into a permanent scowl with the rapid-fire admissions of the last five minutes, like they’d all somehow decided to purge themselves of the shadows of the past decade.

Annie resolves not to apologize. The world owes
her
an apology, so too bad if she’s screwed up someone else’s day. Welcome to her life for a minute!

She nudges her chin higher, self-righteously aimed directly at Leon. “Well, now you know.”

Lindy croons out the final trill, and the crowd explodes like early fireworks.

“Well, now I do,” he says.

“You’re welcome.”

Catherine glares at Colin. “We’re not done discussing this.”

Before he can answer, Annie flips off Lindy’s general presence, yanks Colin’s elbow, and marches toward home.

There’s so much to say between the two of them. Colin is angry, flustered; Annie can feel it in the heat emanating off his neck when he closes the door behind her, and she lingers too close. She should ask him about it, what really happened with Bea, but if she speaks, if she ruins this moment, she might lose her nerve. And the last thing Annie wants to lose is her nerve. So they say nothing. Colin latches the door, and Annie stretches out her arm to clasp his, and then together they descend the steps to his old room. Annie tries not to breathe. If she does, she might wake up from this; she might come to and discover that none of it is real.

Now Annie finally breathes.

Colin runs his fingers over her collarbone, down through the crease in her breasts to her belly button. His fingers feel nothing like Baxter’s, even though they’re just hands, limbs, extensions of one’s body, and Baxter has probably felt her collarbone and belly button a thousand times.

He shifts on top of her, and his old bed squeaks, then lurches an inch lower. Colin laughs, low, deep in his throat, and Annie wonders if it always used to lurch like that, if he’s laughing because of an old memory, or if it’s because they’re both a little awkward, even though sex is so much more casual now in middle age, now that it’s not some sort of contract like it could have been back then.

He kisses her neck and she inhales, her chest rising, and refuses to think of Baxter and how he probably did this all weekend with Cici. Instead, she finds her mind drifting to Lindy. She tells herself to focus.
Focus, Annie, focus!
This is what she’s dreamed of forever; she wants Colin to kiss her neck forever. She remembers all the moments she dawdled on this bed, sitting, feet flat on the floor, full of excuses to stay.
Have you studied for chem yet? Maybe we’ll order in a late-night pizza?
Lingering another moment in his room, waiting for him to notice her. But she
had
heard Catherine back on the lawn, heard what she said about Lindy, and now she replays it:
“She’s only acting this way because she was in love with you.”
Even as Colin’s fingers trail down her belly button and around her back and under the edge of her black lace underwear, sliding them lower, then off entirely.

Annie sighs, and he asks, “Is this OK? Should we not be doing this? Is this not OK?”

“It’s OK; it’s more than OK.” She links her hands behind his neck and pulls him down to meet her lips so he won’t ask again. She’s still woozy from the booze; she doesn’t want to stop and think about what they’re doing. She doesn’t want to stop and talk about it. If they do this right, if they do it well enough, she won’t be thinking about Lindy or Baxter or Cici much longer.

But she does. She does think about Lindy at least for another moment or two. She plays back that kiss from way back in their dump of an apartment, when they lived together, separated only by that putrid green sheet. She plays back Lindy’s loyalty for so many years, her sisterlike possessiveness that went a step beyond kindhearted friendship; she plays back Lindy’s betrayal too, in taking the one thing she knew Annie wanted. But then Annie considers that perhaps she also betrayed Lindy in her own way; she wasn’t as naive as she pretended to be; she wasn’t just some dumb poke from Texas. Maybe she knew, knew enough, noticed how Lindy sometimes sang toward her at her shows, how Lindy never thought any of Annie’s suitors were good enough. (They usually weren’t.) Maybe Lindy should have told her, but also, Annie didn’t make it easy. She didn’t want to know. Didn’t want to lose the friendship when Lindy’s feelings went unreciprocated, at least romantically. Annie loved Lindy, sure, but not in the way Lindy needed her to. So instead, Annie behaved as if Lindy’s feelings were never there to begin with, imaginary, an apparition.