She did call for the appointment next week, to terminate, she reminds herself. She gave herself that out, the exit door, if she opts for it. She was sure she wanted to opt for it. Why is she even doubting this?
Leon groans, stands, and kisses her forehead.
“I’ll go. I was just trying to have some fun.”
It’s because of him that she has this doubt, she realizes, her chest tightening like she might blow an artery. He is here, and now nothing is as easy as she expected it to be.
“Fine, go.” She flings open her door but stares at her boots. Her palms feel clammy, her underarms sticky. This really might be the onset of a heart attack.
“No sweat. I get it. Bad idea. If I leave now, I can still hit a Fourth party in Tribeca.”
Lindy stomps her right foot, then huffs and swings the door closed before he can leave. His nonchalance bothers her, pricks her like a mosquito. No one is nonchalant about Lindy Armstrong. He plops back onto the bed and tosses his hands up while she scowls and chalks her bruised ego up to the pregnancy hormones. After all, he’s the father of her pea seed. Evolution must prove that she can’t entirely spurn the father of her pea seed.
“I’m sorry,” she mutters. “You can stay.”
“I can stay? Because you texted me five thousand times telling me not to come in the first place.” He rests his high-tops on the floor by the bed, his hands against his knees now, casual but ready to rise, to leave, at any moment.
“You should stay,” she acquiesces.
She drags the toe of her boot along a crack in the floor near the window ledge. The fissure was there back then too. She’d discovered it in the early dawn hours when she couldn’t sleep, so instead she’d pluck her guitar strings, sitting cross-legged underneath the window as the morning light slowly warmed the campus. After a while it became the only spot where she could really write. Something about the weathered, imperfect wood and the promise of a new day.
She laughs to herself now at the cliché.
“Something funny?”
“Do you ever think about who you were at twenty? Christ, we weren’t even legal.” Lindy eases onto the unmade bed, back against the headboard, wrapping her limbs into a knot, her dirty boots atop the duvet. Not too close to him, but not so far either.
“Honestly? Not really.” He leans back on his elbows.
“Me either. I used to. I think I used to write about it a lot,” she clarifies.
“What do you write about now?”
She shrugs like it’s not important. “The label doesn’t use my songs anyway; no one’s interested.”
“I am.”
Her eyes find the ceiling, consciously avoiding his gaze. “I guess I outgrew all that stuff.”
“What stuff?”
“Thinking about all the ways things could have been different. At twenty, didn’t it seem like life could go anywhere?”
“Twenty was not my shining moment. I barely made it through USF alive.”
“You’re from San Francisco?”
Leon nods.
“I didn’t know that about you,” Lindy says. Though they only recently started screwing, they’d worked together at least a dozen times. “I’m from Berkeley.”
“Never came up, I guess,” Leon answers, kind enough not to point out that she’d actually never asked. “Anyway. It seems like life came out exactly how you wanted it. Lindy fucking Armstrong, man.”
She rolls her neck across her shoulders, considering this for longer than she thought she would, how it penetrates. How really, it should be true.
“My dead friend. Bea. She would have been forty today.”
“Born on the Fourth of July,” Leon says. He reaches across the bed to cup her chin in his hand. Lindy feels the burn behind her eyes, then the dampness on her cheeks.
“Hey, now,” Leon says, which snaps Lindy to.
She hides her face in her palms, wiping away the tears, wiping away her weakness.
“Forget it,” she says, already standing, already pulling her phone from her pocket, seeking protection behind its glow. Tatiana has texted her three times.
Shit.
“Ignore me. I’m acting like a fucking baby.”
She hates that she used that word, hopes she didn’t flinch when she said it.
Baby.
Leon shrugs like he doesn’t mind. Doesn’t mind taking care of her one bit.
There’s a crash downstairs, and then a high-pitched squeal from Annie.
“We should get out of here. This is ridiculous: it’s a goddamn circus here. How did I ever live here? These people are animals.”
“We’re not getting out of here,” Leon says. “It’s Bea’s birthday.”
Lindy chews the bottom corner of her lip.
She says, “Why is it that we casually had sex and now you’re my spiritual guidepost?”
He looks at her plainly, like how should he know? So he offers: “I smoke a lot of weed?”
Lindy stares at that crack in the floorboard and wishes she could seal it up. Call a carpenter who would plug it and secure it together until every last ounce of the vulnerability that she left here, that she wept here, that she exposed on this floor, in this room, in this place, could be cordoned off and forgotten. She knows this isn’t possible. She knows that she should lean in, not away, from this spot on the floor, which maybe helped shape her into the artist she was once (but isn’t now).
But Lindy has never been one to listen to everything she knows. So she kisses Leon perfunctorily and pulls away when his hands reach for more.
16
ANNIE
Annie, Colin, and Owen hover over the box, peering at it. The banister rattles, and then Lindy is there too. Then Leon.
“This is it,” Colin says. “This is what she had for us.”
No one moves; no one is particularly inclined to delve into the unknown, a time capsule that’s akin to a time bomb, really.
“Let’s wait for Catherine,” Annie suggests, her pulse racing. Let’s just wait forever.
“No, she might be a while.” Owen looks like he’s used to waiting for Catherine, looks like he’s not particularly interested in waiting another second for her.
Colin spears a knife from the kitchen into the packing tape and peels back the wrapping, gently opening the flaps of the box, making Annie wonder what he must look like in surgery. He plunges his surgical hands inside, beneath the packing peanuts, and pulls out his first, then Lindy’s. Their letters to their younger selves. Framed, preserved forever.
“Oh my God!” he says. “I’d forgotten!” He looks closer. “They’re all here. Wow.”
Annie had forgotten too, and now her stomach plunges, like an elevator dropping from a penthouse, straight into her guts.
“But it hasn’t been twenty years,” Annie protests. “She said twenty.”
“Close enough,” Lindy scoffs. “Don’t be such a stickler.”
Annie barely hears her. Instead, her guts rumble, and she swallows hard and excuses herself to go to the second-floor bathroom.
Her hands are clammy, her breathing too fast. She lowers the cover on the toilet, then sits and drops her head between her knees.
She’s certain that she threw hers out. She has no idea how Bea got ahold of her copy, and why she encased it behind glass and sterling silver. And further, why Bea now (or then) packaged it into this messengered box and delivered it smack in the middle of the afternoon of what would have been her fortieth birthday.
Bea had made them do it. The last night of senior year before they all journeyed to different corners of the country (though Lindy and Annie pushed off to the same tiny corner apartment in New York City), the last night before they would have to juggle schedules and new friends and random lovers and career commitments and, well, more important priorities. The last night th
ey’d all slept under the same roof.
Write down what you hope for your life in twenty years.
Colin laughed like this was the most ridiculous thing, and he was also probably already drunk in preparation for the evening’s pregraduation revelry. But Bea shot him a look that said, This matters, and he abruptly stopped laughing and picked up one of the pens she’d set out on the table. Annie still remembers this obedience, this understood language between the two of them. Annie also still remembers how much that moment gutted her. How Bea had something she wanted—his dutiful attention—and for a moment, it felt like she had everything Annie wanted. Colin. A trust fund. An adventurous spirit. A full heart. Lots of things, really.
Annie didn’t covet much, wasn’t the envious type. She’d made do with not a whole heck of a lot back in Texas, and when you make do without a whole heck of a lot, you tend to be more grateful for the good fortune you stumble into. But still, though she’d never tell the others, sometimes Annie loathed Bea. Just for slivers of seconds. Just quickly enough that she wasn’t even entirely aware of the odious seeds of hatred. Because Annie could never actually hate Bea! Bea, who was so good to her; Bea, who never treated her like she was any less than the rest of them. But sometimes Annie hated Bea just for homing in on the one thing Annie wanted to hide: who she really was.
Write down your hopes for the next twenty years. Where you think you’ll be. Where you want to be.
“Go on, Annie. This isn’t that hard!” Bea had urged her. “Think about what’s next. And what’s next after that.”
“I can’t do that.” All Annie had really thought about was the day-to-day, getting through this, about who she could be today, and how far that was from the person she was yesterday.
Bea sighed. “You can do anything.”
Annie’s cheeks blazed, and she’d wished the whole stupid idea away.
The others scribbled easily, as if each of them already had the foresight to know exactly where they’d be, who they’d be, two decades from now. Annie clicked the top of her pen over and over and over again and wrote in fits and starts, snippets of generic dreams—a handsome husband, a happy marriage, fragments of nothing that would ever come true—a life that makes a difference! When she finished, while Bea collected the other papers, Annie balled hers up and stuck it at the bottom of the trash in the kitchen.
Bea must have seen this, and must have fished it out, smoothed over the wrinkles, and one day, when they had cast their wings out into the wicked postgraduation world, she must have had them all framed for posterity.
A crash echoes from the living room, and Annie rights her head from between her knees, finds stability in her feet, then unlocks the bathroom door and stumbles back downstairs. A clutter of glass and packing peanuts are littered across the floor.
“I was trying to move it off the table.” Owen shrugs. “The box slipped.” He grimaces like he’s expecting to be chastised. He’s on his knees, gingerly setting the broken frames back inside.
“It’s all right,” she says, hoping he can’t detect her relief, that maybe she won’t have to read this thing just yet.
Lindy is already poring over hers, of course. She is sprawled on the couch with Leon, and she is cackling—cackling!—at whatever wisdom her younger self left for her current self.
Typical, Annie thinks. How cavalier she is. How this old box of skeletons wouldn’t rattle her one bit. Leon is nibbling on Lindy’s neck while Lindy laughs and laughs, and Annie finally looks away—uncomfortable at their open affection. Baxter never does PDA. Sometimes he holds her hand when they’re entering a cocktail party, or places his palm on the small of her back, and she never knows if his touch makes her more or less lonely: more because it doesn’t quite feel natural anymore, less because he’s doing it all the same. Usually she’ll clutch his hand, their fingers intertwined so tightly that eventually he’ll say, “Babe, let go, I have to go say hi to so-and-so.” And Annie bats her eyelashes and kisses him on the cheek and says, “Of course,” trailing him to so-and-so, tuning out of Baxter’s conversation with so-and-so as soon as it begins. She never has much to contribute anyway.
She thinks of that stupid xo and realizes that maybe he’s entirely comfortable with PDA with someone else.
Cici.
Bile rises in the back of Annie’s throat.
She unlocks her phone and checks her texts. Nothing from Baxter.
Maybe he’s working. Maybe he’s out with Gus. Maybe he’s sleeping on the hammock in the Hampton’s rental or at the farm stand buying ears of corn for a barbecue.
Or maybe he’s fucking Cici-whoever-she-is.
Lindy starts reciting her letter aloud, reading with an overdramatic flair. Colin and Owen grin moronically at her theatrics. Then Lindy has a better idea. Set it to music! She sings her letter like this is some sort of hip open-mic night, but stops abruptly in the middle of a sentence about playing at the Grand Ole Opry when she spots Annie, arms crossed, lips askew, eyes narrow.
“What?”
“Nothing.”
“What, Annie, what?”
“I just don’t think that, you know, Bea would want you treating this like a joke.”
Lindy laughs. “Bea would want me to treat it exactly how I wanted to treat it. Stop trying to make something out of nothing.”
Annie thinks the problem might be that she never makes something out of anything. That this Cici and her xo are exactly the sort of nothing that maybe should be turned into something.
“I just think you’re acting like a jerk,” Annie goes on. “I don’t think you not acting like a huge jerk is too much to ask.”
Lindy laughs, actually laughs at this. “Don’t be so uptight. They’re just words. No one said they had to be taken as holy.”
A handsome husband. A happy marriage.
Annie didn’t think these things were too much to ask. In the scheme of a life, those weren’t big reaches, aim-for-the-stars requests. But maybe for her they were. Annie was never the type to ask for much, and this is exactly why. Her mom always used to say, when she would catch her daydreaming up at the expansive Texas sky, “Stop wishing on a star, silly girl. Dreams are nothing but make-believe.”
Lindy starts up again with her stupid singing, flooding Annie’s brain with white-hot anger. She stomps up the stairs to her room and flops on her old bed, never stopping to reciprocate Lindy’s gaze, which, if Annie had, she might recognize as tender, as something someone might even call love.
17
OWEN
When Lindy is done with her performance art—which actually takes a while, because once Annie disappears upstairs, Lindy becomes particularly manic, and then that dude she’s with starts beat-boxing, then videotaping so they can upload it to some site that Mason and Penelope probably use but that Owen has never heard of . . . but when all of this subsides, Owen rises wearily to his feet. He stays there for a few seconds, just standing, immobile, because he realizes he has nowhere to go.
“You OK, guy?” Leon says.
“I should go check on Catherine.” He doesn’t move.
“Maybe Catherine should come check on you,” Lindy says.
“Stop stirring the pot, Lindy.” Leon elbows her and checks the upload on his phone.
“Yeah,” Owen says. “Yeah, maybe she should come check on me. For all she knows, I hurt myself down here.” Lindy cocks her head. “From the broken glass. It’s not like she didn’t hear that.”
“I meant for how she treated you on the walk. With that emasculating bullshit,” Lindy says.
Owen considers this. It was pretty emasculating bullshit.
“I just thought it would be fun! The butter churning. Jesus, who is she to treat it like the goddamn Olympics?”
“She’s Catherine,” Lindy says. “Of course she treated it like the goddamn Olympics.”
Owen digs into a jagged cuti
cle on his index finger.
“Linds,” Leon says. “Stop.”
“No, she’s right, dude. You should see it in my house: I didn’t unload the dishwasher, I didn’t load the dishwasher, I order pizza too much, I—”
Lindy interrupts. “See? I’m not stirring the pot. The pot is already boiling.” She shakes her head. “But you two, man. If you can’t make it . . .”
Owen doesn’t hear her. Instead, he only hears his rage filling him up to his ears. So what if he orders pizza three times a week? So what if he promised, like, homemade lasagna when they agreed he should stay at home. Homemade lasagna sounded thrilling, like a goddamn vacation, when he first resigned from the law office. But then there was the kids’ homework and their schedules, and he’s practically a goddamn taxi service now! Homemaking proved much less enchanting than he realized: monotonous, dull, lonely. There weren’t a lot of stay-at-home dads, not a lot of opportunities to make friends. So he does what he wants now to make himself happy. Does Catherine ever stop to ask what it is that makes him happy?
He marches up the steps two by two, a little winded by the time he reaches the third floor, near the ladder to the trapdoor to the roof. He loiters outside their bedroom, and he can hear Catherine’s voice—clipped, officious—through the door. He scales the ladder upward.
No, he thinks as he heaves the trapdoor open, his already sore shoulders shaking under the weight. She never stops to ask me.
She didn’t used to be this way. She used to love the entirety of him. He used to love the entirety of her too. Now, if he’s being honest, who knows? You wake up every day and you’re still married, and so you assume that because you’re both still there, that it’s still love. Is it? Owen doesn’t consider himself an expert.
The afternoon sun hammers down on the roof, and Owen adjusts his baseball cap lower to shield his eyes. He’s hungover, man, really hungover, though he did his best acting job this afternoon because he didn’t want to hear it from Catherine. So he pretended he was just fine, basically pretended he was astonished that they thought he was so completely obliterated last night that he wouldn’t be just fine today. Pretended he wasn’t a little concerned that he might literally die out there, churning butter. Owen wonders if there’s anything sadder than keeling over dead in a mock–colonial times butter-churning contest.
In Twenty Years: A Novel Page 16
