In Twenty Years: A Novel

by Allison Winn Scotch

  Annie rests the FedEx envelope on her immaculate marble counter and flattens her palms against it, inhaling and exhaling, trying to slow her breathing. The midtown law office on the return address is unfamiliar. Annie can’t think of anything that she and Lindy would share these days—no friends, no interests. There’s no reason why they’d each receive matching envelopes. Annie refuses to “like” Lindy’s fan page on Facebook or download even one of her songs. (She did buy one for Gus a few weeks ago because he was begging. But that was the exception. She makes all sorts of exceptions for the men in her life.)

  And yet, here Lindy is, polluting her tranquil kitchen, muddying her quiet afternoon while Gus is at day camp. All Annie wanted to do today was read a few cooking blogs, squeeze in a Pilates class, maybe do some online shopping. And now there’s this! Of course there’s this!

  Because Lindy never had any boundaries in the first place! Annie’s flattened palms curl into fists. Of course she would weasel her way into her serene afternoon. This is just so like Lindy!

  Before she can give it a second thought, Annie rides her crest of anger, shredding open the top of the FedEx envelope as if it’s actually the offending party.

  She regrets it immediately and wishes she hadn’t been so impulsive. Because now she has to look to see what’s inside. Something’s been opened, and it’s not like she can just pretend to seal it back up like it was never opened in the first place.

  If she could, she’d check Pinterest to see how to DIY this: how to seal something back up like it was never opened in the first place! Of course, if Annie could do that, then she’d bottle up those days of October 2003, stuff them right into a mason jar, tie a gingham ribbon around the lid, and throw it off a cliff. What she’d really do is bottle up Bea’s accident and breathe her dear back friend to life.

  Annie eyes the FedEx.

  No.

  Bea is dead. There will never be a Pinterest board for such things.

  From the desk of: David Monroe, Esq.

  To: Former Residents of 4120 Walnut Street

  Dear Ms. Armstrong, Mrs. Cunningham, Mr. and Mrs. Grant, and Mr. Radcliffe,

  I am writing at the request of one Ms. Beatrice “Bea” Shoemaker. She designated me as the executor of her will on September 15, 2003, and asked that this notice be sent to you in June of 2016.

  Ms. Shoemaker approached me at the behest of her grandmother, whose estate I have managed for forty years. I tell you this so you understand that this letter is not a joke, nor a prank, and our firm’s relationship with the Shoemaker family is easily verifiable. If you have doubts, please, by all means, feel free to ask questions.

  Shortly after your graduation, Ms. Shoemaker purchased your former residence, 4120 Walnut Street, on the campus of the University of Pennsylvania. At the time, and henceforth, it has been used as an investment opportunity. Since her death I have managed the row house, and per her will I have vacated the premises for the summer of 2016 and am officially extending an invitation (at Bea’s request) for the weekend of July 3–6, on the eve of Bea’s July 4th birthday—her fortieth. Bea has set aside something important for you all, and at her request you cannot receive said item until the five of you are together on her birthday.

  Your travel expenses will be covered via Bea’s trust. Please call my office to make travel arrangements.

  It was her deepest wish, expressed in her will, that all of you are able to return to campus and to the house on Walnut Street. If you are unable to do so, please let me know at your earliest convenience, and I will attempt to rectify any roadblocks. Though again, she reiterated that she hoped for and expected attendance. She expressed that she thought you would understand.

  At Ms. Shoemaker’s request, I am at your service to assist in any way.

  Yours,

  David Monroe, Esq.

  Webster, Monroe, and Proctor

  Attorneys-at-Law

  New York, New York

  2

  LINDY

  Lindy’s trying to find her groove but failing. It’s been this way for a couple of weeks, and though she’s suffered through occasional bouts of writer’s block before, she’s usually able to shake it off through her tried-and-true methods: tequila, casual sex, sometimes a decent three-mile jog (if she isn’t half-dead from the tequila).

  This time, though, she’s off tequila, and for all intents and purposes, she’s now committed to Tatiana, though there was that hiccup (hiccups, plural, if you want to be technical about it) with Napoleon a few months ago (and then again a couple of weeks ago) after the recording session in New York for her new album. So booze and casual sex are out, and she’s too exhausted to drag herself over to the treadmill, which stands dormant in her guesthouse/office/writing studio.

  She knows she has something here in the chorus. She rattles the pencil against her desk like a drumstick—trying to stir up the magic—but she can’t draw out the verses, can’t pin down the melody or the lyric that will elevate this song above the rest of her catalog. Not that it matters, really. The label sends over manufactured pop songs these days. No one is interested in a Lindy Armstrong original—not because she’s not up on her game, not because her compositions aren’t the best they’ve ever been, but simply because to stay relevant, they need her to be younger. Sales on her fifth album dwindled, and that was all the label needed to intervene: first they insisted on a cowriter; now she’s been erased from the process entirely.

  “Hipper, you know, hotter, sexier. Like everyone still wants to fuck you even though you’re forty,” one of the assholes on a conference call said when they were discussing her new record.

  But she’s writing her own stuff anyway. Gonna lay down these tracks anyway. They’ll never make it on the album, and she won’t argue with that: Lindy knows that what sells, what gets radio play, is what matters, and at her age she’s lucky not to have been pushed into adult contemporary or the alt-lite station that semicool moms listen to in their carpool. She still gets Top 40 play, but mostly because she’s singing songs intended for twenty-three-year-olds.

  She flips her pencil across her desk and checks her phone. Of course Annie hasn’t texted her back. No wonder she can’t write a fucking word! No wonder she can’t conjure up a decent chord arrangement. All she’s thinking of is goddamn Annie Eisley, and also occasionally about Tatiana, and then sometimes about Napoleon (“Leon” for short, thank God), and how maybe she should tell Tatiana about Leon, but maybe Leon wasn’t worth mentioning, but that things are a little more complicated right now, and why the fuck hasn’t Annie replied?

  Napoleon! Who names their goddamn kid after a tyrant with size issues?

  Lindy slides open her desk drawer and retrieves another pencil, pressing the graphite to her sheet music. Everyone writes electronically these days, but not her. Shit, she really is a dinosaur; she’d almost laugh if it weren’t so goddamn depressing. All those fucking twenty-three-year-olds. Hell, the eighteen-year-olds too. With their taut bellies and baby-voiced singing. None of them have as much talent in their entire lithe bodies as Lindy does in her left pinky, but so what? Talent doesn’t rule; talent doesn’t even necessarily sell. This is what middle age looks like in the world of rock: assimilation or extinction.

  Lindy’s gonna be around long after the cockroaches. She laughs to herself at this. Her four framed platinum albums on the wall behind her seem to laugh too. She’ll do what she has to do, even if it means selling herself down the river while still writing the best goddamn music of her life.

  Welcome to forty.

  This new pencil offers no help. She throws it across the room, where it skitters next to the previous one. She reaches for her phone again.

  Nothing.

  How hard is it for Annie to check her mail and text back?

  Lindy had impulsively texted her when maybe she should have chosen one of the others. But it’s been, what? Thirteen ye
ars since the funeral? She can’t possibly still be mad.

  Of course she could still be mad. Which is probably why Lindy impulsively texted her in the first place. To test the waters. Lindy was always testing something.

  Lindy rises, cracks her neck, and debates the treadmill. Then she catches a glimpse of her reflection in the window. She didn’t sleep well last night, not after the FedEx, and she doesn’t bounce back like she used to. Also, she looks bloated, puffy from her eyes to her hips, and she’s expected to pour herself into a low-cut catsuit for the show tonight.

  A leather catsuit! Megan, her costumer, had picked it out, and the producers had approved it, and it was hung in her dressing room, all without as much as a consult with Lindy. Sure, they’d asked casually, but it was already understood: this is why they paid for her trainer; this is what keeps her relevant. Of course she was going to wear the catsuit. Even if she was forty, which she’d just turned last month. People.com had devoted their top story to it—Lindy Armstrong Through the Years!—a portfolio of pictures from every year she’d been famous. It wrapped with a recent photo of her leaving a London nightclub with her fingers linked with Tatiana’s. Lindy didn’t linger on the spread, but she glanced quickly enough to recognize the very first shot—the one from when she’d just started out. When she was twenty-four and landed a one-off gig as the opening act for the opening act of a Tim McGraw charity concert in Nashville. Everyone—all five of them—had flown down to cheer her on.

  Forty.

  Her sister tells her that it’s time for her to figure out what she wants out of life. Lindy tells her sister that she’s a goddamn superstar—what else could she possibly want? Her sister sighs heavily and tells her to take care of herself. But her sister has two dirty-fisted toddlers and a minivan, so it’s not like she has any idea, not like she can relate one iota to Lindy’s life. And yet when Lindy hangs up the phone, she’s also semi-aware that her sister isn’t entirely wrong: that Lindy often has no clue what she wants—or wanted or should have wanted—and spends a lot of time regretting things she was sure she coveted (but didn’t) and things she was certain she should have left behind (and later wished she hadn’t).

  That’s what rock ’n’ roll is! Not having any fucking idea about anything other than the music! She’s long since forgotten that her first love was country music. And not that her music matters that much now anyway.

  She stares at her bloated, exhausted reflection and hesitates.

  This fuck-all sentiment used to be true for her, but now, just for this passing second, she wonders how honest it really is. If you were to make a graph on where Lindy’s truths lined up these days, you wouldn’t exactly get a straight arrow.

  She turns from the window and checks her phone.

  Annie still hasn’t texted her back, which, Lindy thinks, is so goddamn typical.

  Her text beeps just then, and she swipes immediately.

  It’s from Napoleon.

  Blow off the walls tonight at the show.

  She checks the time: two hours until the car picks her up.

  “Christ.” She exhales. “Like I need this right now.”

  Lindy has no idea what she actually needs right now, though a text from Annie would help, and the premiere taping of Rock N Roll Dreammakers surely seems like it won’t.

  When they’d approached her to be a judge, Lindy immediately said no.

  God, she’d said to Tatiana, a reality show? Have they ever found anyone remotely decent on a reality show? What happened to busking? What happened to earning your goddamn stripes? Everyone just shows up with an acoustic guitar and says, “I can sing ‘Hallelujah!’ so make me famous!”

  Tatiana, a seasoned publicist (though not Lindy’s—don’t shit where you eat, and all that), pointed out that plenty of remotely decent people had been discovered on reality shows and that Lindy herself had been helped by exploding on MySpace back when not everyone exploded on MySpace. Lindy saw her point but was only swayed when her manager informed her that they were offering her $4 million for the season. Also, it would really bolster the fall tour (thirty-two cities in six weeks—Lindy has no idea how she’ll have the stamina to endure it).

  Lindy ignores Leon’s text and instead Googles “Catherine Grant.” Maybe Catherine’s checked her mail, gotten the FedEx too. But if everyone’s checked their mail, she wonders, why hasn’t anyone called her?

  She taps her phone into her palm and debates whether she should be offended. She is offended, come to think of it. Catherine had been such a bitch at her wedding, after Lindy had endured mind-numbing phone calls and e-mails about calla lilies versus tiger lilies, about those hideous plum (“eggplant,” she remembers Catherine insisting) bridesmaid dresses, about first-dance ideas, about party favors. Sure, maybe Lindy’s attitude wasn’t exactly sparkling, but Jesus, could you blame her? Who wouldn’t want to jump off a bridge at the notion of another discussion about seating charts?

  Not to mention, Lindy wasn’t exactly in favor of marriage in general.

  But the way Catherine derided her at brunch the next morning?

  Lindy splays back into her Eames chair behind her desk and bounces eight times—like a beat, like a rhythm—to calm herself.

  She figured maybe they’d all just move the fuck on after the funeral. Jesus, Bea was dead; she figured they could at least forget the wedding. But no, she saw it immediately in Catherine’s stupid stoic jaw, in Annie’s weak eyes that refused to meet her own. So Lindy decided right then and there, even at Bea’s funeral, to screw that. It’s not her fault that their dinner that night went south, that what should have been an evening where they reminisced about their old friend, when they should have found their way back to one another, was instead the night things detonated for good.

  What had Catherine said to her? Lindy squints, focusing on one of the framed platinum albums on the wall.

  That Lindy “ruined everything.” Ah yes, that was it. That she’d wrecked their friendships, the bonds among the six of them. That everything was always about what Lindy wanted, that she was “take, take, take.” And she took, and then it ruined everything.

  What bullshit, Lindy thinks now, just as she did back then. A lot of things ruined them, like Bea dying.

  She bounces again in her chair.

  Bounce. Bounce. Bounce. Bounce.

  Bea is dead.

  Why did she send us a letter?

  Bounce. Bounce. Bounce. Bounce.

  When did she have time to buy our old house?

  In quarter time.

  Bouncebouncebouncebounce.

  Bea is really dead. Jesus, Bea is still dead.

  For the first year or so after the funeral, it plagued Lindy, it probably plagued all of them, but she was done with them all, didn’t stay in touch, so she couldn’t be sure. Still, though, she’d find herself awake at 3:00 a.m., staring into the darkness of a hotel-room ceiling or listening to the clattering of the tour bus’s wheels and wondering: Why is Bea dead? And not just in a metaphorical sense, like: “Why her?” but also: Really, how did it happen? Peeling around a curve too quickly? Asleep at the wheel? Drunk driving? That last one made sense: the just-so combination of reckless and animalistic that embodied Bea when she dialed things up. Over time, Lindy came to take this explanation as fact: when she thinks of Bea now (which she rarely does, if she’s being honest), her next thought is something akin to: Oh, my friend who died in a drunk-driving accident.

  This rationality provided solace. And solace meant that she could forget.

  So now, why all of this?

  A knock on her office door, then the hinges opening before Lindy can reply.

  “Hey, babe.”

  Tatiana.

  Instinctively, Lindy reaches for her phone and drops it in her lap, concealed. Like Leon’s text is a land mine that Tatiana might happen upon. No need to blow anything up.

&
nbsp; Lindy feels Tatiana’s arms wind themselves around her torso as she folds over her from behind. She kisses her neck, and Lindy detects a hint of mandarin orange, some new body lotion, a gift from one of her clients.

  “Hey,” Lindy says, dropping her head back against T’s shoulder, then righting herself as Tatiana does the same. “Just give me a second. Just . . . checking something.”

  Because she can’t help herself (she is very bad at helping herself, actually), Lindy clicks onto Catherine’s home page, The Crafty Lady. She’s built herself an empire, but Lindy’s not particularly surprised. Catherine was always more ambitious than any of the others gave her credit for: she was intent on selling the most baked goods for their sorority spring charity event; she was constantly toiling in their shitty little kitchen, testing and tossing recipes, trying to best the one before.

  French toast. That’s what Lindy remembers about Catherine. She’d make it for them every Sunday, tweaking the ingredients until finally, in April of their senior year, she declared it perfect. The rest of them thought it was close to heaven already: gooey and crunchy and honey and cinnamon tangled together. The house smelled like love the rest of the day.

  “Crafting? Please tell me you’re not interested in crafting.” Tatiana laughs like this is a foregone conclusion.

  Lindy laughs too, but skims through the how-to tips on Catherine’s site: How to Make Lip Balm from Scratch! How to Build a Country-Chic Birdhouse! How to Host Thanksgiving in July!

  “What do you think of Thanksgiving in July?”

  “Sounds like a lot of carbs.” Tatiana, a pin-thin publicist whose clients view carbs with as much disdain as Lindy does twentysomething songwriters, shrugs. “Also, who needs extra time with our extended families?”

  Lindy nods like T has a good point. “My sister is driving me crazy.”

  “And your parents?” Tatiana semi-snorts.