In Twenty Years: A Novel (5 page)

5

COLIN

Colin is flying down Pacific Coast Highway, the sun on his back, the centrifugal forces of the wind turning his hair wild, the radio on loud—too loud—for him to even hear his own singing. He shifts into fifth gear as Eddie Vedder wails, his gravelly voice screeching out of Colin’s Maserati convertible into the ocean air and then into nothingness. Colin’s hands play drums against the steering wheel; his head bobs along with Vedder.

“She lies and says she’s in love with him, can’t find a better man.”

Colin sings along—yells, really—the tune irrelevant.

He has a surgery to get to and needs to be at his office in an hour, which he’ll never make with afternoon traffic, but so what. He’s never late, and just this once he’s going to enjoy himself, fly through Malibu, pretend that the FedEx envelope on his backseat never arrived, that it isn’t a ticking time bomb.

He hadn’t known she’d do this, of course. Maybe he should have, but he didn’t.

He’d just been a stupid resident. What did he know? Why did she decide to confide in him? Part of him felt special: that he was the only one she confided in. The other part of him didn’t even think about what came next, what came after, what came via FedEx today, a ghost delivered right to his doorstep.

Bea had called him in August, two months after Catherine and Owen’s wedding. They’d fallen out of regular touch, as old friends sometimes do—mostly a quickie e-mail here and there, and she was in Honduras doing her charity work, with spotty phone service and unreliable Internet. They’d promised to be better about it at the wedding. But they hadn’t been, of course. In fact, they hadn’t spoken since, and so he didn’t even recognize her voice at first when she said, “Hey, it’s me,” then “Bea, you idiot.”

He figured she’d called to chew him out about Lindy, about the stupidity of the situation. It
was
stupid, but Jesus, people, can’t we all be grown-ups about this? We’re twenty-seven. This sort of shit happens. (In fact, it happened fairly often with Colin: with his fellow residents, with pretty—if boozy—LA girls he met at West Hollywood bars, with friends of friends of friends whom he promised to call, but never did.)

Catherine had been furious, and Owen looked a little peaked (mostly because Catherine was so furious), and then Annie split early, and Lindy stomped around, fiery like a volcano about to blow, and Bea had stood there with her hands on her hips in that magnificent canary-yellow dress without saying a word. So now, he figured, she was calling to say all of her words, even though chastising wasn’t Bea’s speed. But maybe now it was. Because he’d done something that had splintered them. And to Bea, that was the worst possible sin. In fact, there weren’t any other sins, really. Not to her. Just loyalty. Just preservation of their six-point star.

He remembers starkly, even now, that he’d just ordered a double espresso from the hospital lobby’s coffee cart because he was about to start rounds and he’d been out too late the night before on a fix-up that wasn’t going anywhere, but his date hadn’t gotten the hint.

He braced himself for her lecture, but was relieved, all the same, to hear from her.
Bea.
God, he always loved her just a little bit too much. Whatever she was calling to say, he would graciously accept it and then apologize. She was right, he thought as he waited for the barista and the double espresso. He was stupid, and he’d say so and repent, and figure out how to fix it. Because he would fix anything to make Bea happy.

He started in. “Bea, look, I know why you’re calling—”

But she interrupted. “Shush. I have to say this before I can’t. I don’t want to lose my nerve. You’re the only one I can call. The only one I’m telling.”

He remembers that he stopped then, so abruptly that a nurse ran into him, and the espresso bubbled out of the lid and onto his thumb. He knew something was wrong by her tone, immediately, certainly, without question. And it had nothing to do with him and his impulses at the wedding.

“The cancer’s back,” she said.

“What?” He squeezed his eyes shut, then opened them again, then shut. Like he was waking from a dream.

“My cancer. It’s back. From when I was eleven.”

“It can’t be,” he said, though he’d gone to medical school, and knew of course that it could be. “That’s impossible.”

“Anything can be. Nothing is impossible.”

“I just saw you. We just saw each other!” He jammed his eyes closed again, shaking his head furiously.
Wake up! Wake up!

“Well, I’m sick. I
am. I just am.
”

“But you weren’t sick! You were perfect. You were wearing that yellow dress, and you danced until the lights came on, and—”

“Colin.” She cut him off. He pictured her snapping her fingers, bringing him to, centering him because that’s what Bea did. Centered him.

“Bea,” he whispered. He knew how stupid he sounded, like one of those naïve patients who asked philosophical, senseless questions when the science had proved otherwise.
You were perfect!
Like anything on the outside determines what’s happening on the inside. He’d gone to Stanford Medical School, for God’s sake.

He puffed up his chest, though she couldn’t see this, of course. Regrouped, came out swinging. “You’ll fight it. Who are your doctors? Who are you seeing?”

She didn’t say anything for a long while then, long enough that Colin overheard the hospital intercom page an on-call resident twice.

“There’s nothing to be done,” she said finally. “I’ve been back in New York for a few weeks now.”

“There’s always something to be done!” he said too loudly, and a nurse turned and scowled at him.

“Colin,” Bea said, and he saw her curled up in an armchair in her apartment that came as part of her trust fund, feet tucked beneath her, eyes tired, probably closed, accepting the truth about things because Bea had never had a choice. Her parents, her accidents, her leukemia.

He reached for a wall to hold himself up.

“I need your help,” she said.

“Anything,” he replied immediately. “But I thought you said there was nothing to be done.”

“That’s not what I mean. That’s not the type of help I need.”

He didn’t understand.

“Bea, let me ask around, get you a referral, get you into Sloan Kettering. A guy I went to med school with is a resident. Let me make a call.”

“Colin!” she snapped. It was as close to exasperated as he’d ever heard her. He knew she was sitting up straighter now, agitated. “It’s done.”

“It’s not done, Bea!”

She quieted. “It’s terminal. I’ve been to Sloan. There’s nothing else they can do. And now I need your help.”

“Please don’t give up.” His voice broke.

“Don’t say that. Don’t say that to me. It’s an insult, and you know it. Like I’d ever give up on anything if I had a choice.”

He thought he was going to be sick, felt that espresso rising back up and swirling on the back of his tongue. He swallowed it down. Bea calmed down on the other end of the line. And then he listened. He already knew that he would say yes. He was never able to say no to Bea.

He shifts the Maserati into fifth gear, squinting behind his Ray-Bans in the California sun. Now there are going to be questions from the rest of them: the will, why she planned so far in advance, what she knew, what everyone else knew. He guns the engine fiercely around one of those treacherous curves around the rocky side of the mountain, and his back wheels spin too quickly. She did this that time they’d driven across the country: flown around curves too fast, recklessly. His heart would leap into his throat, and she’d cackle and call him a baby. Today, he overcorrects in time, but just barely.

He turns the music up.

Goddamn it, Bea!

Of course she couldn’t leave the past alone. Bea was obsessed with the past, with time, with all of that shit. He remembers how he had to deliver the news to them all: he called Annie first, Annie called Catherine, and so on. How Bea begged him to just say it had happened quickly, “a car accident,” and her grandmother pursed her dry lips and nodded her head and concluded that was for the best. He didn’t understand it, truly—there was no shame in cancer, he told her over and over again—but Bea didn’t want them to remember her as having suffered, didn’t want them to remember her as anything less than the vibrant, radiant firework she was. Born on the Fourth of July. Indeed.

“Goddamn it, Bea!” He shouts to the open sky. Vedder finishes his lament of a song, and Colin jabs the replay button on his Bose sound system. He paid an extra six grand for the upgrade when he traded up to his latest car.

Colin cares only about the future. Jesus, isn’t that why he got into plastics? Shifted off the neurosurgery track pretty soon after the funeral. Yeah, yeah, it doesn’t take a shrink to see why. Plastics aren’t about preserving time, molding better versions for the years ahead. You want new boobs, a firmer ass, a neck that doesn’t sag like unleavened dough? You got it—it’s not about who we used to be; it’s about where we’re going.

He eases the engine to a stop at a red light not far from the turnoff down Sunset back to Beverly Hills, back to real life. He quiets Vedder and his angst, and gazes up at the same cloudless, crystal sea-glass-blue sky he shouted into just a moment earlier.

“Shit, Bea.” He sighs. “Really?”

He wonders if the others have moved past the wedding, wonders if they’ve forgotten how it undid them. He’d rather do just about anything than reopen those old wounds, the sticky history between them.

But he has never said no to her, ever. He knows as well as anyone that he isn’t about to start now.

JULY

6

ANNIE

Annie nearly vomits twice on the Acela, and not from motion sickness. She swallows down another round of nerves in the cab from 30th Street Station to their old house on Walnut Street. She hasn’t slept much since receiving the letter from one David Monroe, Esq., and her exhaustion isn’t helping anything.

“You look . . . different,” Baxter said two nights ago when he caught her staring at herself in the mirror. “What’s with this?” His hands waved in front of him as he tried to pinpoint exactly what was different about her.

“I highlighted my hair,” Annie said. “And got a little new makeup.”

Baxter squinted like there was more, but maybe he hadn’t been paying close enough attention to say exactly what. There was, of course. There was plenty more. She had spent a full day at the Mandarin Spa last week, detoxifying and exfoliating until her skin was practically stripped down to cellular level, and yes, she’d stopped at Bergdorf’s to redo her wardrobe. Which may explain Baxter’s batting hands: five-inch platform stilettos and suctioned-on leather pants (the sales girl assured her stilettos and leather was very “summer 2016”) were not her usual PTA look.

“You really want to go?”

“I can’t
not
go, Baxter! They’re counting on me!” She’d eased down from one of the stilettos and felt off-kilter enough that she might topple over, like a wobbly cake ornament. “And this will be fun for you and Gussy! A boys’ weekend!”

“You’re . . . just . . . well . . . you’re a little hopped up.”

“I’m
excited
,” she said, hunching over, sliding off her other shoe, hoping Baxter didn’t notice her fingers shaking as she did so. “Don’t misinterpret.” And then, to ensure that she could in no way be misinterpreted, she logged on to Facebook and typed:

Can’t wait to catch up with old friends at Penn this weekend! Wow!! I don’t feel a day over twenty-five! #timeflies #lovinglife #oldfriendsarethebestfriends

Not that Baxter ever uses Facebook or even has a profile page, but if he did and if he saw that, he’d know there was no backing out now.

He wasn’t wrong, though: she did feel frantic, jittery, felt herself slipping into that uncertain fog from those years back when jitters like those were squelched with benzos; like this fog was ebbing in from the coast over the sunrise, creeping up slowly but creeping up all the same. So perhaps she should have been less surprised when she innocently eased out of bed last night to check on Gus, who was snoring underneath his Yankees sheets (Pottery Barn Kids had an entire MLB collection), and she discovered that patterns repeat themselves, after all. Always.

Baxter had drifted off to sleep on the couch in the den, some movie from the ’80s on HBO still bouncing shadows around the room, and his phone having dropped onto the Flokati rug. She wasn’t snooping. Really. She was innocently retrieving it from the rug. Being a dutiful wife! She was just going to flip off the TV, pull a chenille blanket over his feet and up to his shoulders, and pad her way back to her own duvet.

Still, though, the staccato pulse of her anxiety certainly felt familiar, and perhaps she sensed a familiarity about something else too: the way that dogs feel earthquakes before they happen. Perhaps she unconsciously knew something was brewing in the crevasses of her marriage simply because she’d felt the tremors before. Perhaps that’s why she
really
went to the den to check on Baxter. To check
up
on Baxter. She was a German shepherd who knew the earth was about to break.

She didn’t even have to try to snoop. The text was there, right on the locked screen.

Yes, around all weekend. xo Cici

Annie hovered over her husband, whose palms were folded across his chest, whose lips were imperceptibly parted, relaxed, content, at peace. She felt her nostrils flare, her eyelashes fluttering wildly, her mouth pursed to suppress a heart-piercing scream.

No.
No.

Maybe she was being crazy, delusional, even. Maybe she was reading all sorts of things into a harmless four words (and salutation) because they were skeletons from the past, echoes of the shreds of those years and their marriage and Annie’s bleakness. Maybe it was just a work associate, who happened to be a woman, who happened to be named Cici. That was plausible.

She pressed her eyes closed and curled her fists and told herself that it was perfectly plausible: Cici, a work associate, here all weekend in case Baxter needed her. She told herself this over and over until she was calm enough to slip out of the den, the television still on, and back to her own room, dragging the sheets up so high that she was buried beneath.

Today, she rubs her exhausted eyes—her left eyelid keeps spasming—and gazes out the dirty window of the taxi, which smells like a fake evergreen tree and turns Annie’s stomach just a bit faster, the roil of nausea cresting upward. The Philadelphia skyline and the Schuylkill River are fading behind her, the campus drawing nearer. A red, white, and blue sign hangs from the gritty overpass, rust stained and mildewed, welcoming guests to campus:

J
ULY 4TH
W
EEKEND:
C
OME
W
ALK THE
R
OAD TO
F
REEDOM!

Freedom. Annie hasn’t had a weekend to herself—really, an afternoon to herself—since Gus was born. She’s not complaining. She made those choices. To fire the full-time nanny so she didn’t miss a moment; to rise through the ranks of the PTA so she had a way to fill the endless hours while Baxter worked. She whipped up cakes for bake sales, volunteered for book drives, jumped in to help at science projects and art fairs, and put together an absolutely knock-your-socks-off teacher appreciation breakfast last May. She hoped all this would magically unlock the gates to those alfresco mommy lunches, the wine-pairing dinner parties she heard about at drop-off. Not yet, though. Maybe this year when she’s PTA vice president. She’ll work twice as hard. Maybe then.

xo

The pesky, too-cordial sign-off on Baxter’s text needles her brain.

No. Annie shakes her head as if shaking off the notion. She refuses to consider it. They were so good now, so much better now. The way concern washed over his face two nights ago, his posture upright and tense, his words tender and paternal. No. She must be misinterpreting.

“You going to the festival?” The taxi driver shouts over his shoulder, meeting her eyes in the rearview mirror.

“I’m sorry?” His accent is thick, and Annie hopes he’s not offended she can’t understand him. “I’m sorry,” she says again.

“Colonial festival. All weekend! Lots of fun.”

“Oh no, no festival for me.”

“Too bad, very fun. Good hot dogs. I’m from Pakistan. We do not have good hot dogs.”

Annie mindlessly fiddles with her phone and thinks about how much Gus loves hot dogs, how maybe she should have brought him along for these few days, shown him off. She bets the four of them would be enamored with him. How could you not be? She scrolls through some unbearably adorable photos of Gus to pass the last few blocks.

xo

No. No, no, no, no, no.

The cab deposits Annie on the corner of Forty-First Street and Walnut, and she stands there for a minute too long, frozen, lost in the drift of the eighteen years that have passed since she was a senior at Penn and this was her home and everything was different.

In those years, forty wasn’t even on her radar.
Forty is ancient! Forty is one foot in the grave!
Forty was a blip, like a myth, like a UFO sighting or the Loch Ness monster, like the story of the rabid wolves her mom used to tell her when she was just yay high, and they were uprooted from yet another dilapidated house, or she’d lost another waitress job, or been dumped by another lousy boyfriend.

“There are wolves here, dear,” she said. “We have to get going. We’ll be better off with a fresh start. It’s my job to keep you safe, and I can’t protect you from rabies!”

Every time her bedroom window would rattle in the wind, Annie worried it was the wolves, no matter how many times she rose to peek out into the dark, empty landscape, no matter if, rationally, she knew that rabid wolves didn’t eat people in southern Texas. But what if they did?

Wolves, it turns out, look nothing like you expect them to.

Her throat tightens, her stomach clenches. She is frozen on their old sidewalk in front of their old house, chased by their old memories.

“Lady, you OK?” the taxi driver finally yells out his window. “Wrong address?”

She worries that she hasn’t tipped him enough—she’s always worried she hasn’t tipped people enough—so she reaches into her purse to give him five more, but he waves her off, and then he guns his engine and he’s gone, and she’s still there, staring at the row house, trying to remember the girl who once lived here.

She adjusts her new haircut and wipes her palms on the leather pants she already regrets. The July heat is damp, unavoidable, sweltering, and the leather appears to have rubberized around her thighs. The stilettos are digging into her pinky toe, blisters ripe and pink on both feet and also developing on her heels.

Breathe.
This is what that therapist used to tell her, the one her OB-GYN insisted she see when she broke down on the exam table at her six-month postnatal appointment, her legs still aloft in the stirrups, the rest of her quaking so much the thin paper sheet beneath her shredded in two.
Breathe. In. Out. In. Out.

She collects herself and, though her hands are shaking, she holds her phone up to capture the moment. The sun is just starting to fade behind the front façade, which, she thinks to herself, makes the image all the more precious. Maybe she won’t have to toy with the pigmentation too much to shift it from a photo of a sort-of pretty, but nothing special, house with navy bricks and white shutters (they used to be teal bricks with purple shutters—no one was ever sure why, but they affectionately nicknamed it “Bruiser,” and the moniker stuck) to something magical. Something emotive. Something that the women from school or Pilates or spin class (none of whom Annie really thinks of as friends because, well, she doesn’t have a lot of real friends) will see and think,
OMG! Annie, I wish I was there with you, wherever you are! Xoxoxoxoxoxo!!!!!

She takes the photo four different times, satisfied with the last version, aware that the distraction has calmed her nerves, blocked out the dizzying noise clattering inside her mind. She posts it to Facebook. Filter: vintage.

The letter from David Monroe, Esq., implored them to convene for the full weekend. Annie would not like to convene at all, despite her protests to Baxter. She felt foolish about the way things had ended at the wedding, the way she’d fled like a spurned teenager. But also about the way that it still stung, like a slap that was still fresh, even though she was a full-fledged adult who was on her way to PTA vice president! It’s not like she didn’t recognize how childish her grudges were, not like she didn’t wish she wasn’t the type of person who let those grudges slip away like grains of sand in her palm.

She forgave Baxter for his indiscretions years back because he was her lifeline. But Lindy wasn’t. Lindy isn’t. Even if Bea implored them, all six of them, to be just that. Annie figured if Lindy were her lifeline, she’d never have betrayed her in the first place. So the grudge occupies a small but present place in her heart, dormant but ticking all the same. (She long since forgave Colin because, well, he was Colin. Easy to forgive, easier to hang the moon on. Also, she understood that he was too good for her in the first place.)

So, yes, Annie would have been perfectly A-OK skipping out on the weekend, dipping her toes in the Atlantic with her chiseled husband and doe-eyed son, boiling lobsters and melting butter on grilled corn, and admiring the fireworks from Georgica Beach.

But Catherine had e-mailed that she and Owen were flying in from Chicago, and of course, there was Lindy, who texted from Los Angeles (Annie never replied), but who later texted Catherine to say that she was in, even though the last Annie had heard, they weren’t much on speaking terms either. And rumor had it that the elusive Colin, plastic surgeon to the stars, was jetting in too. Annie fretted over what they’d think of her if she couldn’t even muster up the temerity to hop the train down from New York.