“There aren’t any ‘buts’!” he says, aware that his voice is rising but unable to quiet it. “Why are there always ‘buts’ with you now?”
She stares at the ceiling, sips her Grey Goose, then sips it again.
“We haven’t seen them in years, Owen. After our wedding—”
He cuts her off. “You took sides after the wedding, not me.”
“I might have to work.”
“It’s a holiday weekend, Catherine. For Christ’s sake.” Owen interrupts her and sets his bottle down a little too hard, its echo clanging in the space between them.
“There are . . .” Her voice quavers. “There are fires at the office to put out now.”
“When aren’t there?” There are always fires to put out at her office. He doesn’t ask for details because it’s not like she’s sought his advice in years. He doesn’t need to feel irrelevant for one more second.
Catherine turns to him, pale.
“Oh my God,” she whispers. “I just realized. The Fourth of July. It would have been her birthday. She would have been forty.”
Owen swallows his beer. Three long sips. The taste of the hops in the back of his throat.
“I want to go,” he says finally. It’s not a question; it’s not a request. It could be considered a plea, but he says it firmly, and he hopes she’ll respect it.
She chews the side of her lip, then nods.
“OK,” she says, so softly he almost misses it.
Owen takes a long swig, polishing off the bottle, and listens to the clatter above them, the stampede of their freshly showered children reverberating above—Penelope, already eleven, and Mason, a gangly nine. The stampede of their lives plowing forward without her, without Bea.
“Jesus. Forty. How could we have forgotten?”
Catherine doesn’t answer. She pours herself another vodka. So Owen reaches for the phone to call for the pizza.
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.<
br />
“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 t
o 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:
JULY 4TH WEEKEND: COME WALK THE ROAD TO FREEDOM!
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.
In Twenty Years: A Novel Page 5
