“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.
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 wo
uld 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.”
Non
e 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.
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