In Twenty Years: A Novel

by Allison Winn Scotch

  10

  CATHERINE

  Owen is pawing at Catherine, his kisses sloppy, his breath pungent with beer and mustard. She wants to be enthusiastic, she tells herself to be enthusiastic, but he feels like a tranquilized bear on top of her, and she was never good at faking it. She turns her head to the side, and he moves to her neck. The bed groans unhappily beneath them, and Catherine thinks, That makes two of us.

  “You’re not into this,” Owen mumbles.

  Catherine’s surprised he notices.

  “You’re just too drunk.”

  “Jesus!” He barks and rolls off her. “Is it too much to just want to have sex with my wife without her criticizing me?”

  “Shhhhhhh! Be quiet!” Catherine sits up quickly. Owen has flung both arms over his face, and she’s unclear whether or not he’s lapsed into an immediate inebriated sleep. “I’m not criticizing you! You’re just really drunk,” she whispers.

  “Ugh,” he says. “Nothing I do is good enough for you.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she says, but actually thinks, Well, half the stuff you do isn’t good enough!

  “We agreed that I could quit, and now you resent me.”

  “I don’t want to talk about this right now. It’s three in the morning.”

  “You resent me,” he whines.

  “I don’t resent you. And can we talk about this when you’re sober? At home?” She sighs like a parent does during an epic toddler temper tantrum.

  He’s right, she does resent him—even if they did agree on it. It’s thornier than that now. It’s not just that she’s the sole breadwinner; it’s how he stopped asking about her day, about the complications of running her empire; it’s how his own complaints seem trivial—Ugh, I had to drive two different carpools today!—compared to hers. Try managing an inept designer who steals ideas from last year’s ideas! Try competing with a twenty-six-year-old decoupaging protégé who was just offered a book deal—on decoupaging!

  “When we were here, we were so happy,” Owen mumbles. “Then it went to hell. Why did it go to hell, Cathy? Why did it go to hell?” He flops an arm out toward her.

  “Stop it. It didn’t go to hell! Please, Owen, just go to sleep.”

  “I shouldn’t have quit,” he says. “I should never have quit. That’s where we started to go wrong.”

  “Oh, please, come on. Just . . . sleep.”

  His chest rises and falls, and then, as if because Catherine is the boss, he heeds her plea and within seconds, tumbles toward dreamland.

  Now Catherine can’t sleep because Owen is snoring so loudly. Honestly, he needs to see someone about this, she thinks. Like, a surgeon, because it’s fucking ridiculous. How can he possibly sleep through this? It’s like a goddamn volcano erupting next to her.

  She shifts and pulls the duvet up to her neck.

  How did they ever share this tiny bed? When they first met, before they moved into this house with the others junior year, they squeezed into a twin bed in her sorority room. Catherine doesn’t remember complaining, doesn’t remember being so uncomfortable she felt like she was breathing the same air as a stranger. Why does his leg keep twitching? How can he sleep so solidly, without worry, while her brain runs haywire, armed like a fuse to a grenade fueled with anxiety? She answers her own question: he sleeps without worry because he has none. Nothing to worry about, no shoulders on which a company rests, no creative well from which he must squeeze drops from arid ground.

  Owen emits a particularly annoying crescendo that culminates with the bed literally quivering, akin to the earthquake Catherine had the misfortune of experiencing when she was in Los Angeles two years ago shooting some spots for E! She pushes herself up on her elbows, and then onto her feet, grabbing a blanket and pillow off the bed. She finds the light in the closet, its glow casting shadows, half illuminating the room, and for a moment she worries this will rouse Owen. Until she realizes that nothing could rouse Owen. Then she steps inside and nudges the door a little bit closed.

  She stares at the ceiling in the closet, leaning back, buttressing the wall, then resting her head against it. Maybe it’s for the best that he’s snoring; at least it’s something to fill the quiet space. The house was never quiet back then: someone was always tromping down the steps, late for a lecture; or sneaking up the steps, with someone drunk in tow; or blasting Pearl Jam (Bea) out her third-story window, loud enough that it reverberated all the way down to the alley.

  But Bea was dead now, something that all these years later Catherine still doesn’t quite comprehend. Like, she’d remember the way Bea shimmied to “Let’s Go Crazy” at Smoke’s, or the way that she—with her slightly too-wide eyes and off-skew crooked smile that hung lower on the left side, and her billowy mahogany hair that mesmerized those Wharton boys—would disappear for a day unannounced, returning when the rest of them were winding their way home from the library (or Annie from her work-study job at the bookstore), with shopping bags sagging her arms, presents from Manhattan for all of them. She couldn’t have been shopping for the entirety of those trips, but they didn’t always ask where and how she’d whiled away the rest of those hours—inevitably, Bea was off restoring her adrenaline high. Or she’d remember the way she always devoured Catherine’s improvised recipes even when they were wretched—the types of recipes that The Crafty Lady’s readers would rate with one star and complain gave them diarrhea. (Users on The Crafty Lady message boards could be particularly eviscerating. Catherine chalked this up to the fact that many domestic goddesses were actually closet bitches. She’d met Martha Stewart, you know. Not an easy nut to crack.)

  Catherine would remember all these tiny moments with Bea—the moments of humanity, the slivers that made her her, indelible, unforgettable, invincible—and it was as if, for that brief bubble within the memory, Bea wasn’t dead, because dying at twenty-seven felt impossible, too strange to consider. Stranger still that it has been thirteen years now.

  Catherine stands suddenly and peers upward. She wonders if it’s still possibly there. She’d forgotten about it until a second ago. Their junior year, on the very last day, just before the airport shuttle pulled up to their front door to whisk Catherine home to Wisconsin and usher Owen off to an internship in Boston, they’d carved their names in the back corner. It had been Catherine’s idea. When you’re twenty and in love and about to be pulled apart for three months, this is the sort of thing you do. They’d already had sex twice that morning, and she’d double-checked that she had the right phone number for his apartment up there, and they’d both cried and wondered how they could accelerate time. How they could leap over the divide of those ninety days and reunite so their hearts (and loins) could be full again.

  Now, at nearly forty, Catherine wouldn’t mind three months apart—she’d sleep better for one, and for two, well, three months isn’t that long in the span of a lifetime, now is it? She almost laughs at their juvenile angst, almost laughs at the memory of the ache in the pit of her stomach when they parted like a wishbone at the airport.

  She cocks her head and cranes her neck and squints to make it out among the shadows.

  Owen had put a Toad the Wet Sprocket disk into his portable CD player, and they woefully listened to “I Will Not Take These Things For Granted,” and Catherine pulled out an X-ACTO knife she’d used to create rubber stamps. (She also used to write Owen love letters on homemade stationery. She’d slip them into his backpack on his way to a poli-sci class or leave one under his pillow if she couldn’t stay the night.) Catherine had etched her name, then Owen his, and then together, they each carved a half of a heart until the halves became whole.

  Oh my God. That was another life. Different people. A different sort of love.

  She rises on her tiptoes, checking the other corner of the closet. Maybe it was the right side, not the left. She hates that she’s so irritable these days, hates that she miss
es out on Mason’s hockey practices and Penelope’s gymnastics. Sure, she wishes something could give, but what?

  Owen told her last weekend that she should cut herself “a little slack,” which was so typical Owen. She still hasn’t told him about the downward projections, the faltering blog traffic, the speculation that advertising rates will have to be lowered, that once the board catches wind of this next week, the IPO might be delayed. Or that now she’s desperate for the HGTV pilot and to lock in the Target deal and reinfuse the nearly red bottom line with cash.

  And then there’s the fact that part of Catherine always wonders if this all wasn’t a spectacular mistake. She’s good at crafting, sure. She’s decent enough at it, but is she really something special? In college, she needed recipes to master her French toast. In her early years starting out, she had to rely on patterns to shape her clothing designs, craft magazines to inspire her holiday décor, online tips for all of those endless candles and potpourri jars and homemade scented soap. Bea used to tell her that no one made a better brunch than she did—that so what if she glanced at a recipe; that didn’t take anything away from the love she put in—but Catherine never quite believed that. A true creative revolutionary would spin something from nothing, and Catherine suspected, deep down, in a place she was too ashamed to share with Owen, that maybe she wasn’t the crafting visionary her fans hailed her to be, or worse, that she’s passed herself off to be for all these years.

  What would Owen say about that?

  She presses up a tiny bit higher on her toes, hoping something will make its way out to her in the dimness of the solitary bulb in the closet. She cranes her neck again and again and again. Then Owen’s snoring rattles the closet door, and Catherine’s toes give way, and just like that, she’s back on sturdy ground, back on her solid two feet.

  It was a stupid idea, she thinks. To try to find it. I’m sure it’s long gone by now. Sanded down by a carpenter. Painted over one summer when they spruced the place up. She shouldn’t pretend that old notions can be so easily resurrected.

  11

  LINDY

  The doorbell echoes in the living room. Catherine—wide awake—peers over the stair railing from the second-floor hall where she’s been pacing, but Lindy is already barreling past her, thundering down the steps, a wake of nervous energy quaking behind her.

  “Go back to sleep! It’s for me!”

  “I wasn’t sleeping. Who on earth is at the door at this hour?”

  “Owen’s snoring is outrageous.” Lindy races toward the entry, ignoring her inquiry. “I have a white-noise machine that I travel with—go use my bed.”

  Catherine doesn’t need a second offer and slinks into Lindy’s old room, locking the door behind her.

  Lindy flings the door open and for a split second prays that it’s her publicist, who’s pretty goddamn pissed at her for pulling “this disappearing stunt,” because her publicist is part of her staff, and her staff she can manage. But, as she already knows, it’s not her publicist.

  It’s Leon.

  She impulsively texted him her address when he first wrote—she was so delighted that he’d make the trip from New York in the middle of the night that she hadn’t even hesitated. Not many people who weren’t on her payroll or who weren’t looking for a favor would make their way all the way here just for the pleasure of her company. (In fact, not that many people these days—or in a long while—would even describe her company as particularly pleasurable. If Bea were here, then probably she would, because she was always up for an adventure, but Bea’s dead, so she doesn’t count. Probably Tatiana too, but Lindy’s been picking fights recently, ever since she started unintentionally sleeping with Leon, so perhaps not even Tatiana.)

  As soon as she realized what she’d done (fallen prey to a very un-Lindy-like notion of romanticism—a prince in a sports car on his way to rescue her!), which was almost immediately, she retracted her enthusiasm, texting him at least twenty times, imploring him not to come.

  “I texted you, like twenty times, telling you not to come,” she says, staring down the stoop, his tanned skin and shaggy goatee taking shape through the night shadows. A fire-engine-red Jaguar is parked crookedly in the street, a tire rubbing against the disgusting Philadelphia curb.

  Leon steps closer, his tattooed arm pushing him up along the railing, then leans in to kiss her, but Lindy doesn’t meet him halfway.

  “Well, hey to you too, babe.” He reaches for his phone from the back pocket of his dark denim jeans. He waves it in front of her. “No texts.”

  “What the hell? Well, I did.” Lindy peers down the block. “Whose is that?” She aims her chin at the Jag.

  “Mine.” A sheepish grin rolls across his face. “A present from Jay.”

  “Jay?”

  “Z.”

  “A present from Jay-Z.” Lindy makes sure she appears indifferent.

  He shrugs. “What? Am I not supposed to enjoy it?”

  “It’s a little on-the-nose.”

  “Like I give a shit? It’s a new Jag!”

  “Well, it’s basically a walking cliché.”

  Leon shoves his hands into his pockets and drops his head toward the top of his shoulders. “Are you playing hard to get?”

  “I’m just saying.” Lindy plops her hands on her hips.

  “OK, I get it. You’re completely unimpressed.”

  “Not completely. I guess.”

  “Noted. Semi-unimpressed.”

  “Are there any paparazzi around?”

  “Jesus. I don’t know!” He glances to his left and right down the alleyway. “It’s the middle of the night. I drove here from New York to see you. And you tell me that you texted me twenty times not to come, and you think the Jag sucks, and now you’re concerned that I call the paparazzi?” Leon is often stoned, so this is the closest Lindy has come to hearing him sound annoyed. He rubs his goatee and kicks his biker boots against the step. A truck’s axles grind somewhere a few blocks away. Horns follow, echoing down the deserted street to their front stoop. “Linds, you either trust me or you don’t.”

  “I’m still with my girlfriend.” Lindy needs to be sure she goes on record. As if going on the record excuses her.

  Leon shrugs. “And you’re still with your girlfriend. Adding that to the mental checklist.”

  Lindy glances around one last time, then grabs his belt buckle and ushers him inside.

  “So catch me up. You’re in Philly, why?” he asks, after she finally acquiesces to a kiss, which goes on longer than Lindy intends it to.

  He settles himself onto the couch by the back bay window just a few feet from the base of the steps. The old Philadelphia row houses are narrow and tall, a cascade of stairs leading up, with two bedrooms on each landing. One shorter stairwell heads down below the sidewalk level. Colin took the basement back then and did tonight again too; they’d all scampered to their old spaces like it was second nature, like steps so well worn, they already knew how to retrace them. The space feels compressed now to Lindy, claustrophobic, like she could stretch her arms wide, her fingers wiggling to extend her wingspan, and touch both walls. She tugs the neck of her T-shirt, trying to catch her breath, get some air.

  Leon sinks into the pillows as if he belongs there.

  “It’s too strange to explain,” Lindy says. She folds her arms awkwardly, then refolds them, then finally sits cross-legged on the floor a few feet away from him, which cajoles Leon into a howl.

  “I don’t bite, girl!”

  “I know you don’t bite!”

  “You look like you think I might. I only bite if you want me to!”

  “I don’t want you to.”

  Or maybe she does want him to. She doesn’t know. She stretches her shirt again, this time at the waistline, fully aware that her pulse is clanging loud enough to echo outside her body, that her usually steely nerve is cr
atering with each passing second. Shit.

  She hasn’t seen him since she realized her period was two weeks late, and then it took her another ten days to take the test. She took four tests, peed on four sticks, actually, because it seemed so ridiculous, impossible even. Though it wasn’t impossible: she’d been reckless, spur-of-the-moment impulsive, and they’d skipped the condom. She was almost forty, and it was just this once, so what harm could come of it?

  She hadn’t expected to see him again so soon, before she’d decided what to do, before she knew which lie she wanted to chase, which truth she wanted to follow. A baby. A baby! Lindy knows what a baby does to a forty-year-old woman who’s tenuously gripping a top spot in the music industry. It means she’ll shift from man-eater to mommy; it means she’ll kiss the low-cut catsuit good-bye; it means she’ll devote her days to diapers, not demos. Lindy’s never considered the former, not when her life has been so stuffed, so singularly focused on the latter.

  She needs to decide, she knows. She’s running out of time.

  Lindy cracks her knuckles one by one, buying some time, attempting to wrestle herself together. She hates feeling so out of sorts. She’s never out of sorts. At least half of her persona is that she never lets them see her sweat. She didn’t sweat when her mic dropped out on SNL; she didn’t sweat when Rihanna picked a Twitter fight with her, accusing her of sleeping with “my big-dicked man, bitch!” (Lindy hadn’t, but it was great publicity all the same.) If Lindy really considered it (which she doesn’t), the last time she truly sweated (figuratively, because she does sweat a fuckload at her concerts) was when Bea died. Maybe she sweated it all out of her that day at the funeral. She could take only so much: first she lost Annie at Catherine’s wedding, and then Bea. After that, maybe she sealed herself up, impenetrably, so no one could get close enough to nick her, draw blood again.

  She cracks both of her thumbs, feels the relief of the bubble of tension in the joint, and thinks of that little pea in her uterus and wonders how much it would change her. Should it change her? Does she need to be changed?