Lindy isn’t sure she wants to know. Isn’t sure she needs to know.
Leon nudges his chin upward, inviting her again to the couch.
Lindy wishes he’d gotten her texts and hadn’t come. Lindy wishes she hadn’t slept with him in the first place. Or the second place. Or . . . she actually lost count of how many times it had been. She glances at him quickly, too quickly to linger, and tells herself that if she weren’t knocked up, she would never have invited him tonight, maybe after the record was done, never have seen him again. That maybe her transgression was a one-off and she’d forget about it (she is very good at forgetting about things) and remain true, or at least true-ish, to Tatiana. But even Lindy isn’t sure she believes this lie she tells herself. She’s pregnant, and she’s avoiding her team and avoiding her girlfriend, and she’s at her old house now owned by her dead friend, with a gaggle of people she used to call friends but are now mostly strangers. She has to acknowledge that she’s at least a little bit screwed.
Leon pats the cushion.
“Come on, babe. Don’t pretend you’re not happy to see me.”
“I’m semihappy to see you.”
“I know. It’s complicated.”
“Don’t speak for me.”
He nods.
I’m pregnant!
No, now’s not the time. It will never be the time. It’s her body and it’s her choice, and shit, what he never knows won’t hurt him.
She rises to the couch. A compromise. Enough to let him think he’s won.
Leon has fallen dead to the world asleep on the sofa while Lindy rests in the crook of his arm, her brain in hyperdrive, the rumble emanating from Catherine and Owen’s old room upstairs pounding its way into the roots of a headache.
“Jesus Christ, Owen! Shut the fuck up!”
She adjusts Leon’s arm, which is wrapped around her waist. He’s gotten uncomfortably close to spooning. She doesn’t want him noticing the roundness of her belly, the way her shape is slowly shifting. When they hooked up in New York, she was in, well, rock-star shape: lean abs, sinewy shoulders, legs that her mommy-fans would kill for. Now, with the convex swell of her stomach and the softness easing into her hips, who knows if he’d want her, still covet her, still find her desirable in the way that validates her.
Leon sighs in his sleep, and Lindy is surprised to feel the sting of tears behind her eyes.
She doesn’t coo at babies in strollers or make silly faces at the kid who’s wailing for the duration of a plane ride, doesn’t find Gap onesies with cutesy catchphrases like “Got Milk” impossibly adorable. Motherhood wasn’t something she craved, the way that Annie always did. The European tour was what she craved, what she needed. The entourage who come running when she calls; the deference of the hotel concierge at The Savoy in London, The Bristol in Paris, the Four Seasons in Milan; the explosion of applause—like a volcanic eruption—all the way up to the third tier of the arena in whichever city she was headlining that night.
The basement door creaks open, and the thump of Colin’s footsteps up the stairs announce his arrival.
His eyes are puffy, his hair a tousled bird’s nest, and he’s only wearing boxers, through which she can see his boner. He shields his eyes from the halogen light in the kitchen that was left on when they all scattered and passed out, and asks, “What the hell time is it?” Then he realizes his indecent exposure, drops a hand in front of his fly, and says, “Sorry.” He spies Leon and shoots Lindy a questioning glance.
“He’s an old friend, and it’s five-thirty.” Lindy grouses. Leon snorts and swaddles her belly once more. “Owen needs an intervention.”
“He didn’t drink that much. Give the guy a break. He never gets a night out.”
“For his snoring, you moron.”
Colin falls silent, and then they hear it—the reverberating in and out of air from Owen’s nasal passages. Colin, who seems entirely unperturbed by it, shuffles to the kitchen for some water.
More footsteps, this time from the second floor. Annie appears on the landing in her cotton floral pajamas, her hair pulled back in a low ponytail.
“This is awful,” she stage whispers. “I can’t survive on three hours of sleep! He’s right above me, and it’s shaking the walls.” She pauses, assessing the stranger on the couch. “Who’s that?”
Lindy ignores the question. “Go into Bea’s room. Try there.”
No one had yet gone into Bea’s room. Not when they arrived and explored their old spaces, not when they returned home from Pat’s, when the alcohol could have been their armor (at least for most of them). The door remains closed for now, securing the ghosts that no one was prepared to face.
“I’m not going to sleep in Bea’s room!” Annie barks. “God!”
Colin emerges from the kitchen—Annie hadn’t seen him there. His boner has died down for the moment, but if he feels exposed, in his preppy J. Crew boxers with little Scotties wearing bow ties, he doesn’t seem to care.
“Hey, Ann.” He nods his head up at her. Colin is the only one of them who calls her Ann.
He also doesn’t seem to notice Annie’s quick hiccup of a breath, the way her eyes grow wider, her cheeks illuminate, but Lindy does. For all of her bravado, for her open, flourishing nakedness, Lindy is an observer. A sponge. She had to be back when she crafted the sort of music that penetrated across all demographics: moms who amped up a song in their Honda Odysseys and blazed down their suburban streets with memories of an old boyfriend; their daughters who belted it out with no inhibitions, daydreaming about their future loves; husbands or boyfriends or pubescent teenage boys who cranked up the melody and considered how much they’d like to screw her. Just because her label isn’t using her own music these days doesn’t mean that she isn’t always subconsciously weaving a lyric, isn’t always reflecting on the finer details of life, of humanity, of the beautiful and horrible madness that comprises day-to-day life. She’s lost track of the way this used to soften her, humble her, ground her. But she hasn’t lost her skills in the art of observation.
So it is Lindy who once again detects Annie’s horrified delight or delighted horror that Colin is lingering, half-nude, in the living room, much as he used to when they were in college. Lindy never really liked Colin, meaning she never really had the hots for him like Annie did. She recognized, of course, that he was attractive in a way that was universal—a Malibu surf bum, a Ken doll—but generic was never her thing. She hadn’t even really considered sleeping with him until Catherine and Owen’s wedding, when Annie was still pie-eyed over him, and Lindy couldn’t take it for one more second.
Colin rose to make a toast at the reception, holding his champagne glass aloft, rambling on about some bullshit about first love, lasting love, forever love . . . and let’s raise a glass to Catherine and Owen, and Lindy glanced to Annie across the table, wondering if she could catch her gaze, wondering if finally Annie would see what she saw, feel what she felt, but all Annie saw was Colin. Her chin tilted upward, her eyes lit by stars, her skin flushed like he’d been speaking of her in his toast, not their old friends.
And that was that. Lindy knew. Lindy got it.
It would never be her.
Why wouldn’t Annie notice her the way she noticed Colin?
After so many years of friendship, shared spaces, shared secrets, why wasn’t Annie a little bit in love with her too?
They’d lived together for four years in Manhattan. How hadn’t Annie known? Why hadn’t she reciprocated her feelings? Wasn’t Lindy good enough, wasn’t she sexy enough, wasn’t she kind enough, talented enough?
So, fuck Annie. Fuck her stupid crush and her stupid view of love and her stupid inability to see Lindy in the ways she needed Annie to see her. And so, when Colin left to hail a cab back to the W, Lindy left to hail a cab back to the W too. And thus it only made sense that they share a ride, and since they were both
alone and intoxicated, and Lindy couldn’t find her key card to the room she was sharing with Annie, they wobbled back to Colin’s and ended up fucking.
Bea was in the elevator the next morning when they stepped in as a pair, as a couple, all of them late to the postwedding brunch. Bea assessed Lindy’s stubble-chapped cheeks and the shadows under Colin’s eyes and said nothing, but Lindy knew she was judging her, knew she’d crossed a line that she would judge herself for, if she judged herself for anything, which, perhaps from that moment forward, she no longer did. They stared up at the elevator lights in silence, ticking down floor by floor, and Lindy thought of a million excuses to absolve her role, to explain it to Bea, but mostly it was that this was Annie’s fault, and maybe she should have woken up and realized what was coming to her. Lindy was just giving as good as she got, giving Annie what she deserved. Reciprocating the hurt.
Annie figured it out piece by piece, or perhaps she knew faster than she let on. Maybe she caught a glimpse of them as the doors dinged open and the air still brimmed with intimacy; maybe she saw it in the way Lindy leaned in and stabbed Colin’s omelet for a bite after they surfed the buffet; maybe they still smelled of pheromones. Or maybe, actually, Annie was smarter than they all gave her credit for. Or, just as likely, it was that Lindy hadn’t returned to their room the night before. Probably a little bit of each.
Lindy wanted her to know. To show her what she could have had, what she was missing. She hadn’t showered that morning on purpose, hoping the scent of Colin’s sweat still lingered, that her bed-head hair betrayed her in exactly the way she wanted.
Lindy’s plan went as flawlessly as she could have hoped. Annie dabbed her lips with her napkin and pushed her chair back so abruptly that it toppled over, and then simply left. Bea called after her, even chased her down to the concierge desk. Lindy dropped her fork with a bit of uneaten omelet still stuck in its tines and refused to watch, wouldn’t even grant Annie that attention. She didn’t rise to say good-bye, didn’t wave; she didn’t do much of anything other than wonder why her immense sense of self-satisfaction was already ebbing from her veins, like someone had pricked a finger just microscopically enough to know there’d been a puncture, but not big enough to see the cut on the surface of the skin.
Catherine exploded on her just a few minutes later, and then Bea, who returned eventually and whom Lindy always thought of as an ally, said, “I can’t . . . I don’t . . . I need a minute with this, Linds.” She shook her head, like Lindy sometimes sensed her little sister did while on the phone with her.
And Lindy said, “Great, so let’s all just take Annie’s side!”
“This is pretty hard to defend,” Bea said, like she was reading a police report. “You knew there was a line there, Lindy. We all knew there was a line there.”
“So because poor little Annie wanted Colin, I wasn’t allowed to have some fun too?”
“Just . . . stop.” Bea held up her hands. “Stop talking. Stop making this worse.” She chewed on the corner of her mouth and said, “You have to make this right. If you don’t . . .” She dropped her shoulders and looked Lindy square in the eye. It wasn’t a threat; it was a revelation of disappointment, and Lindy felt her face flush. Bea was their collective conscience, their Northern Star, and in Lindy’s quest to hurt Annie, she hadn’t considered (of course she hadn’t) how much she’d bruise the others too, and how much it would hurt to bruise them.
So Lindy flew back to New York the next morning, springing into their apartment, poised to apologize, poised to repent, and maybe even offer an honest explanation for her betrayal. I wanted you. But Annie never showed up that night, and by the next morning Lindy’s regret was replaced with indignation. She’d had nibbles down in Nashville: some good gigs, an offer to work on a demo with a hot producer, so she stuffed a hodgepodge of ripped jeans and Doc Martens and flowy dresses and lacy bras into three suitcases, frantic to get out as quickly as she could. Then she hailed a cab to LaGuardia and charged a one-way ticket to Tennessee. She tilted her head against the window as the plane lifted higher, the sprawling concrete of New York getting smaller and smaller, farther and farther behind, and Lindy decided that she was done trying to charm Annie Eisley, done trying to love her. That she didn’t owe Annie Eisley one fucking thing.
This morning, at 5:30 a.m., Lindy detects the hint of the twenty-year-old Annie in the blush of her cheeks, as she sits atop the steps and folds herself over her knees. She sees her old friend, and for the first time since those weeks after Catherine and Owen’s wedding, wonders what might have happened if she’d made different choices. If she hadn’t screwed Colin. If she’d admitted aloud that she knew Annie was in love with him. If she’d also admitted that she was in love with Annie.
If she’d been honest, would that have changed anything? Everything?
“Colin can’t hear the snoring in the basement,” Lindy says to Annie. “Go sleep down there.”
She means it kindly—a peace offering almost, a gesture to say, “He’s not mine,” though she knows, of course, that Annie is married, and knows, as well, that Colin is complicated for her old friend. So maybe Lindy means it only a little kindly. Maybe it’s actually a taunt, really. Which isn’t a kindness at all.
Annie’s face goes slack, though she tries to quickly recover.
“Oh no. Oh no. I couldn’t.”
Colin shrugs. “We’re old friends now, Ann. It’s all good.”
Lindy narrows her eyes and wonders if this is Colin’s way of apologizing for his own behavior at the wedding. It does take two to tango, after all. That morning at brunch when Bea was done admonishing Lindy, she dragged Colin into a corner by his elbow, and Lindy watched his face morph from neutral to confusion to gloom. He hadn’t realized he’d devastated Annie the way Lindy had, but he’d done it all the same. Consequences. Colin was perhaps more adept at accepting them than Lindy.
“I just . . . that’s OK.”
“I won’t peek if you don’t.” Colin laughs.
“I wouldn’t peek!”
“I would peek,” Lindy says. “But I wouldn’t need to, thanks to your fly.”
Colin’s right hand covers his boxers again; his uses his left hand to flip Lindy off.
“I’m going back to sleep. Ann, come on if you want.”
Annie sits horrified, her face a frozen statue that reminds Lindy of some medieval gargoyle. Maybe Annie really can’t survive on three hours of sleep: it turns her into a gnome.
“It was a bad idea,” Lindy says. “Forget it.”
But then Annie does something that surprises Lindy completely (who frankly thought she was unable to be surprised).
Annie straightens out the wrinkles in her floral cotton pajamas and says, “Well, all right, then. We’re grown-ups. I can behave like a grown-up. Besides, I have Baxter. I don’t need to peek.” And she marches all the way down to the basement, shutting the door loudly behind her. An exclamation mark, a victory crow, her own middle finger.
Lindy frowns, then smiles, then frowns again.
If Annie Eisley, now Cunningham, can surprise her, then anything is possible.
12
ANNIE
Annie can’t believe she’s down here, in Colin’s basement, sleeping beside him. Well, sleeping is a figurative term, because she isn’t. Instead, she’s lying rigidly next to him, her body like a wood plank, listening to the steady sound of his breathing, thinking, I cannot believe that I’m down here, in Colin’s basement. OMG! Nothing good comes from being down in Colin’s basement!
Owen and Lindy used to joke about the parade of girls who would tiptoe up the steps, slink out the door—the tank tops and miniskirts and baby-doll dresses and high-waisted Levi’s disheveled from the hours spent in a ball at the foot of the bed.
“We should keep a Polaroid camera by the door,” Lindy once suggested. “Create a mural in the hallway with every last one of them. So av
ant-garde.”
“We should quiz him on how many names he remembers.” Owen laughed.
“We should hold a lineup, police-style, and see who he can identify,” Lindy howled.
And now Annie is down here—next to him! Not that she’ll be a Polaroid on the wall, another name he can’t remember.
She can’t believe she agreed to Lindy’s suggestion about the sleeping arrangement. She hadn’t thought about it clearly, really. What she actually thought of were those two stupid letters: xo, and in a brief fit of lucid rage, realized how idiotic she was being, enveloping herself in her naïveté, like she could discount Baxter’s indiscretions again when this time around she wasn’t at fault! No, those letters weren’t harmless, weren’t something silly and easily explainable, and weren’t something she could ignore. Well, maybe she could have ignored it if Lindy weren’t sitting on their old couch, eyes like lasers upon her, challenging Annie to a bit of a grudge match. None of this occurred to Annie consciously, but on some level it must have passed through her cerebral space, because before she had time to think about it, she was tromping down the steps, then down another flight, and opening and closing the door behind her. The Annie from before—wife to Baxter, mother to Gus, PTA ladder-climber—would never have done this. But then the Annie from before would have quietly disregarded that pesky xo too.
She pulls the navy duvet up to her neck and lets her head ease back on a pillow, and there’s no turning back from there. She isn’t about to give Lindy the satisfaction of retreating, and frankly, she’s a little bit electrified by this. A lot electrified. Maybe this is why Baxter is so casual with his fidelity! There’s something wholly titillating about the possibility of the unknown here, in this old room, and for an instant Annie forgives him, her husband, for being duped by this immediate, pulse-pounding gratification. That forgiveness evaporates quickly, but leaves enough space for Annie to forgive herself for lying here, to excuse herself from considering the notion of what could come next.
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