In Twenty Years: A Novel (6 page)

She told Baxter she had to come this weekend because she’d encouraged everyone else to—she was the cheerleader, Baxter! She couldn’t very well not show! She really came because she worried what they would say if she didn’t.

David Monroe, Esq., had e-mailed that the keys would be left under the front mat. Annie peers around. The street is dormant, sleepy, her taxi long gone, the remaining row houses silent. Twenty years ago, leaving the keys under the front mat would have been an open invitation to armed robbery—literal armed robbery—but now the neighborhood has shifted. Annie stares left, then right, then left again, dubious, as if there can’t be anything safe about returning, about these square blocks. She wills her legs to get going, and then, before she can think otherwise, she’s on her old front stoop, and then she’s crouching down and the keys are there. She wants to be the first one here—she
prays
she’s the first one here—but she raps her knuckles against the door to be sure.

Nothing.

So she clicks the latch, and then she’s inside.

It still smells the same. That’s what hits her first. An unmistakable blend of old wood, pine air freshener, and spilled beer. Annie gags—not because the scent is rancid, rather because it’s a time capsule. If she closes her eyes and slows her pulse, she could be twenty and on the brink of everything, the scholarship kid who found her way out of her Podunk Texas town: the girl who managed to shed her accent because it was the shadow that betrayed where she came from. Where she came from was a footnote to where she was going.

David Monroe, Esq., hasn’t changed the house all that much. Fresher paint, yes, but the walls are still a shade that skews closer to dull yellow than white, the banister still wobbly and faded pine. There’s a corkboard by the wall off the kitchen, blank and full of tiny holes, where they used to post fraternity-party invitations, flyers for charity drives, notes to one another on corners torn off notebook paper, saying things like “Studying in Van Pelt until forever.” Or “If you order froyo, get me a swirl.”

A couch still abuts the back bay window; a flea market dining table still resides just off the kitchen, where the six of them would gather on Sunday for Catherine’s French toast. Or where Annie and Bea would nurse cups of tea while the rest of them had gone out drinking (Bea often went out drinking too, to be fair), and Bea prodded her about what she was going to do with her life. Every once in a while, she’d pull out a self-help book she’d bought at the bookstore and ease it toward Annie—not because she was being didactic, but because that’s the sort of thing Bea did, and that’s the sort of kindness you accepted from her.

Annie brushes her hands across the dining table. It’s the first time in years, maybe since the funeral, that Bea’s death has felt so visceral. The first time that the five of them will be here. Without Bea. Her nose pinches, and she flutters back tears. This seems like an impossible thing. She wallows in this until she worries the others will be here any second, and she can’t be a mess, can’t be anything like who she used to be. She wearily climbs the creaky steps toward her past.

She’s upstairs staring at the ceiling in her old bedroom, lying on its Ikea bed, her mind spinning, calculating, racing with just how much longer she can bear to be here, when she hears the door unlatch.

Shoot.
She thinks.
Please don’t let it be Lindy. Please be Catherine. Neutral ground.
She sits up too quickly.

“Hello?” The voice echoes up the creaky steps and scratched bannister.

Colin . . . damn it!
She hasn’t even changed these ridiculous pants. She unbuttons them quickly, then realizes she’ll never make it in time—they may have to be suctioned off her—and flops down again, flummoxed by her idiocy. Her nerves rise up from her stomach to her throat, but she swallows them down and blows out her breath.

Then she shouts, “Colin! I’m here!” She stills herself and hopes that he comes to her so her anxiety-plagued, leather-clad legs won’t be forced to make the trip down the steps. She hears him clopping up the stairs—taking them two by two—and then the door swings open and he’s there, standing in front of her, smiling and wide-open, and oh my God, as handsome as he always was.

“Annie!” He jumps on the bed beside her, and she falls back, and he pulls her into a tight hug before they both sit upright and assess.

“You look like you’re twenty still,” he says.

She feels the heat rise up to her cheeks and lets her hair tumble over them to conceal the glow. Yes, this is why she didn’t nurse a grudge, this is why he was impossibly easy to forgive.

“No. I’m old.” She hopes he can tell that maybe she doesn’t mean it.

“We all fucking are.” He laughs, and his deep hazel eyes linger, and her face burns hotter. He could do that: make you feel like he was lingering on you for a reason, like you were a prize he coveted, even if it was only in your imagination.

His smile grows a little fuller, and he squeezes her hand.

Annie is a little nauseated, clammy at his grasp.

He takes a beat and glances around.

“Did Bea . . . or whatever, her lawyer . . . make this look like your old room, or am I just imagining it?”

She unbraids her fingers from his and runs hers over the floral duvet that resembles the Ralph Lauren one she’d saved up for from her waitressing job back home and then bought on sale at the outlet in Houston, and nods, partially delighted that Colin remembers her old room.
Why didn’t you spend more time in my room? Why didn’t you wake up in the predawn hours tangled in my Ralph Lauren sheets, brushing your fingers down my spine, along my cheeks, down my fluttering eyelids?

“It’s weird, right?” Colin says.

“I think it’s great, superfun, actually!” Annie chirps in a pitch that she loathes, a tone that sometimes emerges at dinner parties with Baxter’s blue-blood associates, and Annie tries hard—too hard—to blend in. “I mean, we haven’t seen each other in years! I’m so excited!”

He shrugs, then catches her eye in the mirror on the wall where it always was, where she’d paint on her eyeliner and flatten her bangs and think that maybe that would be enough to sway him her way. “You do look great, Annie. You really do!”

Annie has never been good at taking compliments, so she says, “I don’t know.” Then adds, “You too,” and looks away before she can betray the true honesty of her words.

And Colin does look great. Too great. Annie doesn’t know why she’s surprised; he lives in Los Angeles and probably dates, like,
Sports Illustrated
models and plays, she doesn’t know, beach volleyball for exercise. She wants to peel those leather pants off and chuck them out the window. Who does she think she is? Not a
Sports Illustrated
model. Not someone Colin would even consider.

“What do you think the surprise is? That we all have to be here for?” Annie asks.

It takes her a beat to realize that Colin looks worried. He never looks worried. “I dunno.” He peers out the window. “Have you kept up with any of them?”

“A little. Owen and I are friends on Facebook, so there’s that. I guess . . . well, Catherine and Lindy are so important, so not as much.”

She doesn’t add,
Lindy and I stopped talking years ago.
He must know this anyway. It wasn’t a secret, the way she stormed off, the way Lindy flew home and moved out, then went down to Nashville. She hopes she hasn’t offended Colin; he seems pretty important too. She’s well aware that he is the Boob King of Los Angeles, but she doesn’t dare make mention of that because that would imply she Googled him. Which she still does at least once a month when the apartment falls too quiet.

“Yeah,” Colin says. “Owen and I text every now and then. He seems pretty happy. I guess with those two, you always knew they would be.”

“Yeah.”

Colin laughs. “They suck!”

Annie says, based on nothing, “No, I think we all seem pretty happy. I mean, I am!”

Colin is silent. Then, “I dunno. It was hard, I guess, after Bea.”

“Being happy?”

“Staying in touch.” He looks out the window for a moment too long. “Maybe the other thing too.”

She doesn’t answer, so he says, “I guess it’s not like we didn’t try.”

“Being happy?”

Colin laughs, though there’s not much joy behind it. Annie doesn’t remember him sounding hollow when they were twenty. Annie remembers him full of life, vibrant, the magnet she couldn’t break an attraction from. He turns from the window, his beautiful, sculpted face with its just-so cheekbones, with its firm jaw covered in stubble and its strong chin with just a kiss of a tiny cleft, fragmented almost undetectably, but detectable to Annie, who studied that face for what felt like forever.

Annie wants to take his hand and clutch it to her racing heart, but she fiddles with a clasp on her bracelet and instead thinks,
We didn’t try, though. We didn’t try at all.

“Anyway.”

“Anyway.”

Then the front door unlatches, and there are “Hellos!” that echo upstairs, and Colin’s face morphs into something more buoyant as he shouts, “Lindy!” and Annie has no choice but to take his lead and barrel down toward her.

7

LINDY

Lindy could really use a drink, but since she’s attempting sobriety, she squelches the urge. Actually, what she could really use is something stronger—some sort of benzo—but that seems out too. She debates the harm of one drink. Just one. What sort of damage could that do? Not a lot, she tells herself. Anyway, she only has two more weeks to endure, until she knows what she’s doing, makes a plan for what’s coming next, and she thinks she can stay sober for that. Fourteen days. Then she’ll drink herself blind.

They’re all here now and gathered around the kitchen table, dodging eye contact and feigning friendliness as if bonds hadn’t soured like skunked beer. Owen is opening up Amstels that they’ve found in the fridge.

“I’m on antibiotics.” She waves her hand from her perch on the steps leading to the second floor. “Also, super beat with jet lag.”

None of them even bothers taking notice.

“I had the worst bronchitis,” she adds. “Off and on for two months. Killer to sing live.”

“That sucks,” Owen says.

“Thought they were going to have to perform surgery.”

“For bronchitis?” Owen asks.

“Yeah, I mean, for a node. It’s complicated. The doctors weren’t sure. Trying meds again. We’ll see. If we can’t lick it now, it could ruin my voice forever.” Lindy’s not sure why she’s elaborating, she could have stopped with “antibiotics.”

“Colin, I cannot believe you’re still single,” Catherine interrupts, passing out napkins.

“I was engaged for three months,” he says, and Annie, who has been incessantly uploading photos to Facebook, glances up, her face slackening.

“What happened?” she asks.

“Didn’t stick,” he replies, and her jaw eases, her eyes soften, and she returns to her screen.

My God,
Lindy thinks.
She’s still mooning over him.

Then, to Colin, “I can’t believe you’re in LA. I’ll have you over sometime. I have a sick view from the Hills.”

She watches Annie to see if this needles her, prods her in the ways that Lindy has grown used to prodding everyone. She thinks she notices Annie freeze for a split second, but she’s not certain. It irks her that she’s not certain, that Annie has learned to hide from her.

“Dude, I can’t believe you’re famous,” Owen says. “Remember how we took that songwriting class senior year?”

“Yeah.”

“Shit,
I
got the A. You practically tanked it.” Owen laughs. “Maybe I should have given a music career a go.”

Lindy does remember the class, how peeved she was that their professor didn’t find her special, didn’t think she was any more worthy than the other sad sacks in the seminar. Owen, for Christ’s sake! She basically kamikazed her grade just to be a dick.

“Fame isn’t everything.” She shrugs. She’s used to feeding this line to journalists, particularly lately, when she’s on a junket for
Rock N Roll Dreammakers. It’s about passing on your knowledge, breaking open doors for others!
She’ll sometimes say,
Fame is just a label other people put on you.

Lindy doesn’t believe a word of her own drivel. Because fame? Yeah, she does fucking love it.

Owen drills her with questions, apparently the only one who has really kept up with her career (“I have a lot of time on my hands,” he shrugs apologetically, as if there’s something wrong with being well versed in the life of Lindy Armstrong), and Lindy’s irritated that Annie hasn’t shown more of an interest, even though Annie has made it clear her interest level is hovering right around rage-hate. After graduation, when they lived in that hovel in the West Village that was, like, four hundred square feet between them, and Lindy would play some shitty show for drunk NYU students who would catcall about her boobs, Annie always showed an interest. It was Annie’s interest that gave Lindy hope. She would sell approximately four CDs, and drag herself home after, and Annie would wake up, even though she had to work the next morning, just to ask her if she got discovered that night.

It’s been thirteen years,
Lindy thinks.
When is she going to grow the fuck up?

“I don’t know how you almost failed that class,” Owen is saying. “The stuff you write now is amazing.”

“Thanks!” Lindy says too cheerfully, failing to mention that virtually none of her radio-worthy songs have been her own. “And now I have this TV show,” she adds.
TV!
She’d rather be playing gigs in dive bars across the Southeast, but gigs in dive bars don’t pay $4 million. And Lindy isn’t dumb enough to pretend that she doesn’t love all the stuff accompanying that cash. Still, Annie sits stone-faced. Lindy narrows her eyes. “Seriously, Col, I know lots of hot girls. You’ll see.”

Annie jabs something on her phone, then crosses her legs in those stupid leather pants, which Lindy actually adores and would probably wear, but which do not suit Annie at all.

“Nice pants,” Lindy says. “I think I own the same pair.”

“Mason and I are watching!” Owen interrupts. “I love that girl you chose for your team from, where was it, like, some small town in Wisconsin?”

“Kansas.” She doesn’t ask who Mason is, because she has a vague sense that she should know that he’s Catherine and Owen’s son, but she can’t for the life of her remember how old he is or if their other child is a boy or a girl.

“I’m never home,” Catherine says. Then, as if she realizes it’s time to bury the hatchet for causing a scene at the wedding, adds, “Or I’m sure I would.”

Lindy raises her eyebrows. Catherine didn’t give her much of a chance to explain after Annie fled the brunch, and then Bea chased after her, and Colin nursed three Bloody Marys. She marched over to the buffet line, where Lindy was eyeing the scrambled eggs and debating the bacon, and seethed, “How could you?”

“How could I what?”

“You know what you did, Lindy. Stop being so goddamn unaccountable. You knew how she felt. You knew what she wanted.”

“It didn’t mean anything.” Lindy tried to feign innocence, but Catherine was never anyone’s fool.

“Which makes it all the worse. And at our wedding. You did this at our wedding. You were my bridesmaids!”

“She’s a big girl,” Lindy said. “Everyone should grow up.”

Catherine scoffed, her bright eyes turning gray. “You should grow up, Lindy.” Then, “She’s your friend!
I’m
your friend. And you just made this weekend about
you.
Which, if I’m being honest, isn’t particularly surprising.”

Lindy thought she was being a little overdramatic, and Catherine
had
been a bit of a bridezilla, what with her insistence on those ridiculous plum-colored bridesmaid’s dresses that reminded Lindy of curdled pudding, and all of the peach-scented, hand-crafted candle favors they’d had to tie in twine on Friday, and home-pressed invitations Catherine had e-mailed them about, oh, a hundred times.

“Give me a break, Catherine.”

“Give you a break? I’m sorry that we can’t all be as important as your new cool friends, that you could barely bring yourself to wear the dress I picked out, that you being here feels like an inconvenience to your super-awesome life that is way cooler than mine! But this is the last straw, Lindy. I wanted you here, standing with me, because we were old friends. But you haven’t been acting that way at all.” She paused to take a breath, then kept on like a dam unplugged. “So I should give
you
a break? And then . . . and then this! With Colin! When we all knew how she felt! Jesus, he wanted Bea for years, and she would
never
, ever resort to this. There was an unspoken code.”

“There was no code! What code?”
Lindy stared across the buffet to see if Bea could come defend her, put a rest to all this code business, save her from the spiral this was quickly taking, but Bea was still chasing Annie, trying to abort her own emotional hemorrhage.
“What sort of bullshit is this code?”

Bea was nowhere in sight.

“Oh, you know what code. Don’t pretend for one second that you don’t know the code. You just didn’t care.”

“Fine.” Lindy flung her plate onto the buffet table, where it clanged against a carafe of orange juice, which promptly toppled to the carpeted floor. Catherine immediately dropped to her knees, grabbing wads of cloth napkins from the buffet, mopping up the orange stain like it was pooling blood.
“Fine! You’re right! I’m a shitty person, I’m a selfish asshole. But I gave up a gig at The Bitter End to be here, when, I’ll be honest, I couldn’t give less than one shit if you have calla lilies or tiger lilies, when I don’t give a rat’s ass about your stupid peach-scented candles. I don’t need this shit, you’re right, Catherine, and for that, I’m the worst friend in the world. Happy wedding! Congratulations!”
And then, because Lindy never felt safer than when she was running
away
from whatever obstacle lay in front of her, she fled out the same doors Annie had, though far enough behind not to catch up, not to feel the tremors from her wake.

Now, Lindy wonders if Catherine is sorry for the way she so easily blamed her, accused her, cast her out. Or maybe Catherine is waiting for Lindy’s own apology. Lindy almost snorts aloud. Like she should be sorry. It was sex. It was stupid sex, but Jesus!
Been there, done that.
She holds her chin high and waits for someone else to offer an olive branch, to grab hold and say,
“Let’s just all move on.”

“Listen,” Catherine says now. “Let’s just get this out of the way. What’s going on here?”

“You first,” Lindy tuts. “I’m waiting.”

Catherine cocks her head, like she has absolutely no idea what Lindy is talking about, which, Lindy quickly realizes, she doesn’t.

“What I mean is, why on earth did Bea own this house? Why would she have made a will with this directive in it?”

Colin clears his throat, and they all swivel their gazes toward him. He presses back against the sand-colored couch, the late-day light from the bay window shadowing his face.

“No . . . nothing,” he says. “I don’t know.”

“Who has a will at twenty-seven?” Catherine asks.

“Bea,” Annie suggests earnestly.

Lindy rolls her eyes.

“Was . . . something going on with her? Did anyone talk to her after the wedding?” Catherine says, “It’s strange. Like she was almost preparing for it.”

“The wedding?” Annie says.

“Dying.” Catherine shakes her head.

None of them says anything then.

“I spoke with her a little bit,” Annie offers softly. “Just . . . well, when
she
left. Moved out.” She raises her head toward Lindy. “But then she was back in Honduras. I tried to e-mail her, but she never got back to me.” She shrugs, a sad gesture.

Lindy debates whether she should be flattered that Annie finally acknowledged her or pissed that she can’t bring herself to say her name.

“She called me a few times,” Catherine says, like she’s just remembering. “Left me a few messages, but we were on our honeymoon . . .” She looks to Owen like maybe he can fill in the blanks. “And when we got back, I can’t . . . I can’t remember if we ever got around to talking. No. No, actually, we didn’t. That was it, the last time I spoke with her was at our wedding.” She sighs. “I mean, if something was wrong, like, if she had a will for a reason, I didn’t know.”

“She didn’t have a will for a reason!” Colin snaps. “God. You’re acting like, she was, like suicidal! She had a huge trust, and I’m sure she was told to be responsible about it. It’s not like she was a stranger to people unexpectedly dying.”

The other four consider Bea’s parents and nod.

“Well, anyway. Is there something here for all of us?” Catherine looks around. They all look around. The living room is empty, other than the odd furnishings and well, them. “Why else did we come back?”

“We came back because we got the letter,” Annie says.

“Please.” Lindy doesn’t mean to sneer like she does when she says this.

“Please, what?”

“
Obviously
we are here because of the letter . . . Hello!”

“Lindy!” Catherine says. “Please don’t start already, please. Let’s put our best faces forward.”

“This
is
my best face.”

Catherine sighs, too dramatically.

“You’re not happy with my face?”

Catherine pinches the bridge of her nose, like Lindy is a monster headache, a giant literal pain in her brain.

“OK, why don’t we start over?” Colin says. “Everyone is happy with everyone’s face.”

“No, please explain what exactly you don’t like about my face,” Lindy bleats. She knows she should drop it. God, why can’t she just let it go? Stop picking this fucking scab until it’s ripe and pink and bloody?

“Oh God,” Catherine groans.

“Catherine.” Owen steps closer. “Not now.”

“I’m fine,” she says, though spit flies a little from her mouth.

“Really?” he asks.

“Owen, please don’t start.” He sits down abruptly, dismissed, his chair squeaking, his skin flushed, his lips curled, as if he wasn’t trying to start anything before, but now very much may be considering starting something. Then, to Lindy, “Look. We’re all trying to get off on the right foot here. So let’s try that, OK?”

“Fine.”

“Great.”

“Fine,” Lindy says again, not sounding fine, not feeling fine. She thrusts her hands onto her hips, calculating how quickly she can get to the airport. The first flight probably isn’t until the morning.
Shit.
She juts her chin. “Fine, let’s talk about it then. Why the hell
are
we back here?”

“Bea asked us to,” Colin says, like this is the explanation that clarifies everything.

“And you did always do whatever Bea wanted,” Lindy replies.

“Lindy . . .” A long sigh from Colin.

“We all did,” Annie interrupts. “We all tried to do what she wanted. Not just Colin.”

“Well, she made us promise to be family, remember that?” Colin fiddles with his watch, his gaze fixed on the weathered wood floor. “So I guess we didn’t always do everything she wanted, after all.”