In Twenty Years: A Novel (30 page)

38

ANNIE

Annie is floating in a state somewhere between dreaming and consciousness when the shouting brings her to. She raises her head from Colin’s pillow, and beside her he does the same. Lindy. Lindy is screaming at someone—no surprise. The doorbell blares.

BEEEEEEEEEEEEEP.

Lindy shouts again over the buzzer.

BEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEP.

“Ugh,” Colin says, his hand worming its way over her stomach. “What the hell?”

“I don’t know. More drama.” Annie sighs, trying to relax back into his touch.

But then another voice. She sits up abruptly.

Oh no. Oh nooooooo.

Her hand floats across the floor, seeking her clothes. Instead, she finds Colin’s shirt, crumpled beside the bed. Annie hesitates. Then she grabs it and tugs it over her head. She scampers barefoot up the steps. To her back, Colin says, “What? Hey. Hang on!” She hears him scurry to his feet.

Annie already knows who will be waiting for her when she flings open the door, but she’s shocked all the same.

Baxter has his finger on the doorbell, like the president on the nuclear button, poised to blow it again at any moment. Behind him, Lindy is working herself into a fit.

“You have no right to show up here! How audacious can one person possibly be?”

“Annie.” His voice craters. Annie barely recognizes him, this broken version of her husband. His polo is disheveled (and she thinks she sees a mustard stain), his shorts are unironed, his wild hair nudges north, and his skin is splotchy and pink.

She’s so stunned, she says nothing. She and her husband stand in the doorway, eyeing each other, staring without words.

“You don’t deserve to speak with her!” Lindy yells from the street.

“Lindy,” Leon says, “this isn’t about you.”

“It’s about me, Leon!”

“For Christ’s sake, Lindy! You have a kid inside of you that you failed to mention. You have a girlfriend and you have me and you have a shitload of problems, so stop making
this
problem all about you!”

“So the kid
is
a problem,” she says.

“Jesus,” he says. “Do you ever hear what anyone else is saying?”

“Annie,” Baxter tries again.

“Can you not take the hint?” Lindy says from behind him. “What do guys like you need to take a hint?”

“You don’t know anything about me.” Baxter swivels toward her, angry now. Annie can’t remember the last time she saw him anything less than placid. Annoyed at her sometimes, yes, when she posts on Facebook or whatnot. But not angry. Not actually up in arms, prepared to fight. She wonders if he thinks that he’s here to fight for her. If he thinks he can win.

“You don’t know anything about her!” Lindy yells.

“Lindy, please,” Annie says finally. “Stop screaming.”

“I’m sorry.” Baxter returns to Annie. “I’m so goddamn sorry!” He retrieves a bag resting at his feet. “Here, this . . . I got the owner of the store you love on Main Street to open up tonight. Just for you.” He thrusts the bag forward.

Annie takes it as if she’s in a dream, without glancing inside, without really registering exactly what is happening.

“I-I . . .” she stutters.

“It’s that necklace you’ve wanted. With the three diamonds.”

“Oh.”

“Here, let me open it, put it on you.” He takes the bag back.

“No.” Annie shakes her head, feeling a bit like she’s mired in quicksand. “No . . . I . . . a necklace won’t fix it this time, Baxter.”

A vein bulges in his forehead, the same one she sometimes sees when she pokes her head into his home office and he’s mired in a deal that’s going south. She watches the vein pulse, a light shade of purplish-blue, and Annie knows he understands.
This time.
She knew about the last time too. Last time he assuaged her with a bracelet and better behavior. This time, shiny jewelry isn’t enough.

He shuffles his flip-flops. Baxter is wearing flip-flops! He must have rushed out of the Hamptons rental in a whirlwind. He recalibrates. “I was stupid. I was . . . I just . . . I miss you . . .”

“I’ve been gone for a day.
A day!
”

“No, no.
You.
You were gone for a long time.”

Annie inhales sharply at the accusation. Not an accusation, actually. The truth. Her hand flies to her neck. After so many years, this is the moment they’re finally going to start telling the truth? She swallows, her mouth suddenly dry. She’s not sure they’re ready to peel back everything, expose everything to each other. She’s not sure
she’s
ready.

“You’re only here because you got caught,” she says.

Before Baxter can reply, Annie hears Colin’s footsteps behind her, then feels his presence next to her. Baxter’s eyes shift from Annie to Colin to Annie’s oversize gray V-neck to Colin once more. His face drops. She thinks she should cower, be ashamed of the obviousness of what has occurred, but Annie is tired of being ashamed. She is so very, very tired. If Baxter wants to air their dishonesties, their battle wounds, then let’s start now.

She bites her lip and doesn’t apologize, doesn’t pretend it’s anything other than exactly what it looks like.

Finally, Baxter says, “I screwed up.” Plainly. Honestly.

She thinks he’s going to add,
So did you
, but something stops him. She isn’t sure what, because it’s not as if he’s wrong. Perhaps it’s because he understands his penance. That you can’t go around casting off responsibility for falling into a trench when you were the one who helped dig it. “I can’t lose you now,” he adds. “Please. There’s Gus.”

“Don’t you dare. You should have thought about Gus before—”

“It’s a midlife crisis,” he interjects. “Like that Porsche or that stupid raw-food diet! Oh my God. No, you’re right, I shouldn’t have brought up Gus.” He starts weeping then.

Annie hasn’t seen him cry since his dad died, and a small part of her splinters. Not really for Baxter. Maybe a little bit for him, yes. But for both of them. How wrong they’ve gotten it, how wrong they’ve gotten each other.

“Jesus, you have never looked more beautiful than right now,” Baxter manages.

Colin sighs, and Annie glances over at him, as if she’s just remembering he’s there.

“You have to forgive me,” Baxter stammers. “I mean . . . you don’t have to . . . I mean . . . please. I’ll get you anything . . . necklaces, bracelets, rings. Anything.” He sputters to a stop. “Sorry, sorry. I know you don’t want that crap.” He sighs. “I just . . . please tell me how to fix this.”

“Annie,” Lindy says from the sidewalk, “you don’t have to settle.”

Annie gazes over Baxter’s shoulder to her old friend, and she feels herself soften. There is something in Lindy’s tone, something about her sympathy, that reminds Annie of something else. Love.

Love.

“You just . . . don’t.” Lindy nods, as if she understands that it has come to this, that Annie finally sees it. “I told you that forever ago. It’s still true.”

“Annie, please,” Baxter pleads. “She’s right. I don’t deserve you. But I’m asking anyway.”

But Annie is still processing Lindy, struggling to focus on Baxter, struggling to grasp all this. She has never been good in a crisis, never been the sturdy one who keeps a cool head. It’s why she started with the pills, why she loses herself in the distortion of the posed, filtered, reassuring images of her Instagram feed.

She breathes in, breathes out.

“Please,” Baxter repeats.

She finds a reserve that she didn’t know she possessed, refocusing on him, steadying her voice, her resolve.

“Not tonight,” she says, hoarse. “You don’t get to come here and do this tonight.”

“But . . . I drove here straight from the beach . . .”

She doesn’t budge. Another surprise to them both. Annie budged so often that she usually couldn’t even sense when her footing was giving way.

“I’m staying downtown,” he manages. “Please. Tomorrow?”

Annie considers this and then nods. Then she closes the door slowly, gently, as if it might shatter if she’s too forceful. Her white knight arrived. But it turns out maybe she didn’t need him to rescue her after all.

39

LINDY

Lindy wants to punch that asshole’s lights out.

“I just want to clock him square in the nose!”
she spits, once she’s regained her composure and Baxter has fled in his Escalade. She’s not even sure why she lost it in the first place. Actually, she is. She thought she was over it, this,
her
. She
is
over it, she tells herself. But she’s still allowed to care. After two decades of not caring, it’s OK to let that in again, just for a bit, just for a gasp.

She sits back on their front stoop. She beckons Leon to sit next to her, but he will not join her. He keeps his distance a few feet away, pacing in the street. The alley in front of their old house is wrapped in darkness again, the fireworks done for the night—all of the hoopla, the Fourth of July hubbub snuffed out for another year . . . the Maps to Freedom folded-up dead ends. She rolls the toe of her boot over an old cigarette butt, shredding it apart.

“Is her husband an asshole or what?” she mutters, and Leon throws his hands up and then slaps his thighs.

“Jesus Christ, Lindy, is there anyone you’re not angry with? Other than yourself, of course.”

“What the fuck does that mean?”

He stops short, every muscle clenched, and Lindy thinks he’s about to scream to the sky. Instead, he blows out his breath slowly, like a deflating tire, until he has nothing else to give.

“I don’t know what to say right now.”

“Because I’m pregnant?”

“Not because you’re pregnant!” He starts pacing again. “Well, sure, fuck, yeah. Maybe because you’re pregnant.”

“Well, this is exactly why I wasn’t going to tell you.”

“So you
weren’t
going to tell me.”

“I didn’t mean it like that! God, I have a girlfriend, Leon. So don’t absolve yourself. You knew I was with her!” She stands now, ready once again for a fight.

“Well, I regret it!”

Lindy drops back to the steps abruptly.

“So you regret this. Well, great. Fucking A. Gee, grand surprise that I wasn’t like, signing up for a baby registry as soon as I took the test. Should I have sent you pink-and-blue balloons instead?”

“God, Lindy. Come on. I regret
my part
in it. I’m a grown-up, so I can admit when I fucked things up.” He pauses. “I don’t regret . . . this.” He gestures toward her, but she’s staring at the pavement and misses it. “You are just . . . you are such a pain in the ass. Why?”

Lindy thinks about Tatiana, how, finally, her actions will have absolutely irreparable consequences. There’s the baby now. There’s no hedging, no excuses, no manager or publicist who can clean up the mess she made of things. Pearson was right—she’s a pain in the ass for no reason at all. Just because she can be.

“So this is how it feels to be a grown-up,” she says.

“Yup.”

“It sucks.”

Leon’s laugh cuts through the air.

Lindy drums her fingers on the stoop, a beat, a rhythm, to calm her. Grown-ups face regret; grown-ups own their culpability; grown-ups try to do better.

“I’m sorry. I should have told you sooner. That I was pregnant. I didn’t know how. I didn’t, if we’re confessing things, know if I wanted to. I . . . I guess I’m not known for perfect etiquette.”

“All true statements.”

“I don’t know what kind of mother I’ll be.” Her fingers slow, the beat now lost.

“None of us really knows who we’ll be until we get there.”

Lindy gazes upward. She thinks she hears Catherine and Owen on the roof. She wonders if Annie’s OK inside, wonders if Annie finally understood what had simmered inside of Lindy for so long. She thinks she saw it in Annie’s face over Baxter’s shoulder: the recognition of the truth, of what really splintered them all those years ago. Lindy’s surprised to discover that this calms her, that she no longer has to run from the secret or the rejection or the tiny hope that maybe Annie loved her too. Lindy wonders if Colin is comforting her now instead, or if Annie even needs to be comforted.

She eases back against their old stoop and realizes she’s ready to let it go. It’s been long enough, it’s weighed her down long enough. She realizes this is a gift, and she realizes further that it’s a gift from Bea.

“Happy birthday, lady,” she says aloud.

And she smiles because it’s fitting: that even on her birthday, Bea is the one who gave something back.

40

ANNIE

After the ruckus, Colin pours himself a glass of water, then climbs the steps to Annie’s old room and tumbles into her bed. They were always doing this back then: waking in someone else’s room after wandering around at ungodly hours. She smiles at the memory but doesn’t follow him up the creaky wooden staircase. Instead, she retreats to the basement for a bit of cool air, a bit of space.

She wanted this night with him to last forever, but even as she wished it, she knew it wasn’t what she truly wanted. Wasn’t how she wanted it, anyway. Maybe it’s what she needed, though, she considers, after all those years, all that pining. But more than that too; maybe after Baxter, after their carefully edited life that she was culpable in creating, maybe she needed this with Colin to recognize that she’d spent twenty years editing him too, choosing the good parts, filtering out the rest.

It was fun.

It was wonderful.

It was what she hoped for after so many years of loving him.

It was different, and he made her feel beautiful and coveted and cherished.

But it was also less than she expected too.

It didn’t feel indelible; it didn’t feel like something she couldn’t rinse away if she tried. She never expected that: to both get what she wanted and also realize it wasn’t what she thought it would be. She’ll have to be OK with this uneasiness, with the gratification of the reward along with the discovery that it wasn’t what she’d hoped. Annie has never quite been OK with this—she’s always too busy chasing the carrot to contemplate whether or not she likes carrots to begin with. So now she’ll have to accept the uncertainty that comes with unexplored territory, of sincere vulnerability, of all the things she ran away from while chasing her carrot.

She falls onto Colin’s bed, the comforter puffing up around her.

She thinks of Lindy tonight, protective and pregnant, and wishes she’d confessed her feelings back then. Even though Annie had her suspicions, it would have been nice to have known the truth. Annie presses her eyes closed: she knows she shouldn’t expect the truth from Lindy when she’s concealed plenty of her own truths from just about everyone. Besides, what would she have done with it anyway? Run from it, probably. Annie ran from a lot of things, another reason she and Lindy probably felt secure with each other. They were both experts, of sorts, in escapism.

She thinks of how Gus went through a phase when he was three, when she was up to, she didn’t know, five or six pills a day. Everything was a haze, her parenting to Gus no exception. She gave him her time, all of her time, but her eyes were glassy, her brain static-y, her attention short and hiccup-y. Seemingly overnight, Gus grew destructive: crayons on their linen wallpaper, food strewn across the walls, epic wailing tantrums in quiet museum observatories. At the time, Annie read posts on CitiMama and worried something might be psychologically wrong; he was so stubborn and so angry and so intent on challenging her that it was almost unbearable. And then, when she finally flushed the pills, he came back to her, her old Gussy, and she realized that maybe he just wanted her attention, the entirety of her.

Annie folds her arms over her face. Maybe that’s all Lindy wanted too. That’s why she took Colin from her. It was the only way to get her attention completely.

She rolls to her side and tugs a pillow over her head. It smells like him, Colin, down here in the basement. It smells like it always did. Like it did twenty years ago. She breathes it in over and over again. She lets herself enjoy this, the easy nostalgia from so long ago, until it’s time to stop.

She pulls her phone from her back pocket, its fake glow the only light in this old cave of love. She scrolls through her photos, all tweaked and highlighted and filtered such that, looking at them now, they’re unrecognizable. Nothing like real life. Nothing like
her
real life anyway. Probably not anyone else’s either: not Cici Fitzgerald’s, not the PTA president’s, not Lindy’s, or even Catherine’s.

She finds that shot of her and Gus on the beach that day, when he looked constipated and she looked happy. Neither one of those things was particularly true. She wanted Baxter to stay on the beach with them until sunset, but she made it hard for him that day too—all she did was pace the beach looking for people they knew or arranged their blanket and umbrella so they were picture-perfect, or demand that he return to the house with a different set of board shorts (she’d already taken some photos of him in the pair he had on yesterday). It was no wonder he didn’t last until sunset.

Not that this excuses him. He went and fucked Cici Fitzgerald! Years ago, evidently, and then again now. She thinks of Lindy’s strident plea on the stoop, and she nods in the dark. She won’t excuse it. She won’t manipulate herself into believing she’s to blame. But she has plenty to blame herself for too. Like how she didn’t stop taking those pills, couldn’t stop taking those pills, even when Baxter was begging for a second kid. They started trying, but Annie’s heart wasn’t in it. It’s not that she didn’t love Gus—she loved him more than anything. But that first year was so wretched—the darkness, and the self-doubt, and Baxter wasn’t around to help. No one was around to help. The idea of enduring that all over again after the baby came . . . well, she knew she should dump the pills down the toilet, but they felt like home to her then. She couldn’t imagine living without them, how they armed her with more confidence, how they made her shinier, happier, made everything sparkle like an Instagram filter, really. She was taking too many, admittedly.

So it was her own fault when it happened, the miscarriage. They saw the heartbeat at six weeks, and she thought she could pull it off and be all things—the Annie she needed for herself, the dutiful, perfectly pulled-together wife for Baxter, and the mother that Gus and her new baby needed to thrive—and so she didn’t dump those pills down the toilet. And then they didn’t detect the heartbeat at ten weeks. And Annie had a D&C, and Baxter went back to work the next day, and then they halfheartedly tried for another nine months to get pregnant again, but nothing took. Still, she didn’t quit. She knew it was her fault that the baby had died, slipped out of her in her doctor’s office.

She didn’t know if Baxter blamed her—they didn’t discuss it, really—but she wouldn’t hold it against him if he did.

So it’s not like Baxter’s the only one who’s done something unforgivable. Maybe this is her penance. For not flushing the five-pill-a-day habit when she knew better. Maybe if she’d stopped
trying so damn hard
, she could have just enjoyed their life, enjoyed
her
life, and maybe it would have changed everything. Or maybe Baxter would have still e-mailed that penis picture; maybe it wouldn’t have changed anything. But she’ll never know now. She only knows she didn’t quit until she realized she might lose him for good, and that was enough to startle her straight.

She deletes them one by one, all the old photos. Savoring them with a tightened chest, like her heart might actually stop, then unwinding with each click.

She thinks it will feel better than it does. It’s supposed to be an exorcism, after all. Of the years she was someone else, of the memories that weren’t really memories—they were what she projected them to be. That’s not life, that’s not memory. That’s fiction.

What she remembers, honestly, of Baxter, is that once, way back when, he was a good man. Maybe not today. But it wasn’t like this always. She was looking to be saved, after Texas and after Colin and Lindy and Bea, and after the day-to-day life she’d found to be so overwhelming. It wasn’t actually overwhelming, though. It was just life. How did she never see that? Why did she never see that?

Everyone does that, she considers. Everyone should be forgiven for that, at least in their youth. At forty, it’s probably time to start living with your eyes wide-open. At forty, it’s time to stop being rescued.

After a while, her eyelids are heavy and tug her toward sleep. She’s deleted nearly all the images by now.

She’ll wake up tomorrow with the pictures of their old life gone. She can’t go back to that. Baxter drove here tonight thinking he could finally be her white knight. How could either of them have known that she’d finally realize she no longer needed one?

A fresh start.

She’ll rise tomorrow and meet him for breakfast and say, “I’ve erased everything. Maybe you too. Maybe not. I don’t know.”

She’ll say to Lindy, “I’ve erased everything. So let’s be OK now.”

She’ll say to Colin, “I’ve erased everything. It’s OK to let it go.”

She’ll say to herself, “I’ve erased everything. But found a piece of myself while doing so.”

She’d forgotten about her letter, that old letter to herself that Bea insisted on salvaging. The next-door neighbor is igniting late-night fireworks, and they shake her from her rocky sleep. She tiptoes through the living room, which still smells a little like Catherine’s French toast. Owen’s passed out on the living-room couch, so she’s careful because she wants to do this alone.

The letter is still in the box, the last one left. The others were gutsier than she was, more willing, more ready to tackle their failed ambitions, the ways their dreams had diverted from reality. (Well, maybe all of Lindy’s had come true.)

Annie removes the letter from the box gently, like delicate heirloom china.

Her hand flies to her throat, the gasp of air audible.

She’s confused at first, turning the frame over, then over again.

She’s certain she’d scratched everything out, that it had been an illegible, amorphous blob of blacked-out aspirations.

But then, gradually, she gets it.

Bea.

Annie runs her fingers over the glass, the heat of her body leaving streaks that are there for a moment, then disappear into nothing.

The letter is blank. The page is blank.

Bea knew from the start. Bea brought her back here because she always knew, always cared, always promised to watch over them.

Annie took a little longer to catch on.

There is only a vast white space onto which Annie can pen her future.

Annie smiles now.

She had to come all the way back here to figure out where she needed to go.

There’d been a time when she’d post those musings online—she had a bookmark on her computer that turned cute little quotes into gorgeous works of art. Annie liked to post them on Instagram. They made her feel wise, made her think others would find her wise too.

Now she keeps this for herself.

Later, when she’s ready, she rests the frame back in the box, back where that blank page belongs. It’s only then that she notices the envelope flattened against the very bottom of the cardboard, nearly undetectable.

Her brow furrows as her fingers graze the bottom of the box, then the envelope, and then she lifts it.

The handwriting is Bea’s.

The letter is Bea’s.

Of course Bea wrote her own letter twenty years ago too.

What did Bea hope for in twenty years? Who would she be? What did she dream of?

Annie stills her shaking hands and then presses the envelope to her chest.

She won’t open it yet, not here, by herself.

They’ll do this together; they’ll do this as one. They’re a six-point star, after all. They’re family.