In Twenty Years: A Novel

by Allison Winn Scotch

  “Hey,” Colin says. “Hey.” Like he can sense the approaching crest of tears.

  She blinks them away before any glimmer of her accountability can penetrate her armor.

  “It’s nothing,” she says, facing him.

  “It can’t be nothing.”

  “It’s nothing worth discussing.”

  Colin nods, used to her hardened exterior by now, and exhales loudly—a punctured, deflating balloon. “God, I don’t think I’ve ever felt older.”

  “Life sucks and then you die.”

  He shakes his head and smiles. “You used to say that all the time.”

  “It’s true.”

  “It’s not true,” he says. “It’s not even close.” He drops the bag of corn into the trash. “Look at you, look at your life. It doesn’t even come close to sucking.”

  Lindy shrugs.

  “Fine, then, look at Bea’s.”

  Lindy doesn’t have a quippy reply to this—no snark, no bite, no sarcastic, undercutting retort. She sits on the windowpane, trying to find the unfamiliar space in her emotional landscape for honesty.

  Finally, “You asked me, back at the house, why I came back,” she says, then falters. She inhales and winds up her nerve. It’s too exhausting to keep up the façade when he knows her so well, when he could sense, just moments ago, that she was on the brink of vulnerability, on the edge of holding it together. “So here’s the truth, and it seems ridiculous because she’s dead. I mean, she’s dead, Colin.” Colin glances away to the filmy floor. “But I came back because I didn’t want to be the asshole who wouldn’t show up for Bea.”

  He peers up at her, and now she’s the one who has to look away.

  But it’s true. Maybe she initially wanted to show up to stick it to Annie, or maybe she wanted to seduce Colin again for sport, or maybe she just wanted to come and have them all fawn over whom she’d become and how far she’d left them behind, how she left them in the rearview mirror when they kicked her out, deemed her a pariah. Not all of them, but enough of them. Catherine. Annie. Even Bea in her own way, not leaping to her defense, not assuring her that sleeping with Colin didn’t ruin her character irreparably.

  Nothing about Lindy’s life now connects with who they were then. And maybe she was a little resentful that when she left them—not just for Nashville, but left them behind—none of them tried to prevent her from going. That they chose sides, and not enough of them chose her.

  But perhaps her deepest motivation was simply that she didn’t want to let down her dead friend, even if she still nursed a sliver of a grudge. She admits this to Colin now and feels a strange, confusing, foreign tug in the guts of her soul.

  Reverence. Remembrance. Restitution.

  She feels all of these things for Bea.

  However they’re so foreign that Lindy can’t even recognize them, even if she truly tries (which, it should be noted, she does not).

  Instead, she says, “Want to get a beer?”

  Because one beer can’t hurt. One beer won’t kill her. One beer is just the antidote to wash this ridiculous sensation of nostalgia away.

  20

  OWEN

  Owen is certain he can take this guy. He is sizing up this douchebag who clocked Colin and thinking, I can totally take this guy. Colin absorbed the hit and shrugged it off, but Owen is up for the fight. He really wouldn’t mind punching someone right now, and lucky for him, this dude has marked himself as a douche.

  Said douche, in a yellow Delta Tau tank top and backward Yankees hat, is refilling his plastic cup on the weathered patio out back while Owen assesses his strategy. He hasn’t been in a fight, honest-to-God fisticuffs, in well, ever. In high school he played squash, which lent itself well to the lanky, late-puberty kids, but didn’t lend itself nearly as well to developing mad street-fighting skills. In college he wasn’t the meathead lug who spilled out of his fraternity door, wrestling some schmo to the ground over, say, a game of quarters. He did occasionally play Ultimate Street Fighter on his iPhone, and he’s gotten pretty decent, but real life hand-to-hand combat? Well, no.

  But so what? he thinks. So fucking what? He tackles those monster hills in spinning class; he used to take boxing classes at Equinox; he’s in pretty ass-kicking shape for a forty-year-old! Hell, he’s in pretty ass-kicking shape for a thirty-year-old!

  Owen grabs a red Jell-O shot off the bar, then three blue ones just for good measure. They slide down the back of his throat like he’d spent the past two decades perfecting his Jell-O shot technique. Behind him, the overzealous bass of some hip-hop song is blaring, shaking the remaining Jell-O shots on the tray. He notices now that they’ve been arranged to look like an American flag.

  How quaint. Catherine would totally dig that.

  Except that he ruined the design when he grabbed four from the upper corner.

  She would totally not dig that.

  But no matter. Catherine isn’t here to tell him what to do and what not to do, remind him how much he screws everything up when, please, are the kids fed and bathed? Do they make it to school on time? Are they reasonable, generally polite human beings who do not resemble Cro-Magnons? Yes? Yes? Well, then thankyouverymuch, what is the problem?

  The bass reverberates in the floor, and some guy also in a tank top (peach) and baseball hat (Red Sox) shouts something about booty shaking, and Owen nods his head, pumping his fist, swaying his shoulders, attempting to pulse his hips to the beat.

  Yeah, he’s totally got this.

  The douche has his back to him, waving his hands in the air, spilling his beer on his wrist, laughing like a tipsy hyena, completely oblivious, which bolsters Owen’s misguided confidence. By the way—he looks around—where is Colin anyway? Maybe he could use him for backup. That dude, Leon, is over in the corner with his eyes shut, swaying to the same inescapable bounce from the stereo, but Owen’s not sure he’ll be of much help. He’s not really sure how he’s standing, honestly.

  Oh well. What’s that hashtag Penelope always uses?

  YOLO.

  Yeah. You only live once.

  This gives him pause for a second, but not too long, certainly not long enough. He thinks of Bea, and how she only got to live once and it was too goddamn short. Why Bea? Why at twenty-seven? Catherine was better friends with her because they were girls. But he always admired her, both from afar and up close too.

  He remembers their junior year: Catherine’s parents were divorcing, and it wouldn’t be an exaggeration to say that she and her brothers (and Owen) were in a state of shock that careened toward denial/emotional paralysis. Catherine’s home had always been the cheeriest one imaginable, at least it appeared so whenever Owen trekked home with her. He’d spent two Christmases there in college. Theirs was the house in the neighborhood whose decorations went up the morning after Thanksgiving dinner, the strung-up white lights illuminating the windows, the mulled cider beckoning in neighbors, the stockings hovering in a perfect line over the fireplace mantel. Catherine and her brothers (and Owen) cherished their home, their family, and it was easy to see why: theirs was the Hallmark card wrapped in Catherine’s Martha Stewart dream. Until her mom evidently grew weary of her dad and unceremoniously dumped him on an average Wednesday in October. No one was really sure what happened; if there had been long-simmering problems, her parents had masked them entirely.

  “I don’t even remember ever seeing them fight,” Catherine said, shell-shocked and cried-dry. Owen, though he loved her, didn’t have the words to offer comfort. What could he say? He wanted to fix it, and he tried: he attempted to come up with a bunch of ways it could be fixed: Maybe she should plan an elaborate dinner for them both and lure them each there under false pretenses? Maybe she should suggest some therapists? Maybe she should stage an intervention with her brothers? Maybe she should put together a photo album of their happiest family moments and send it to her mom? But Cat
herine cocked her head and looked at him like he was speaking cyborg.

  He couldn’t fix it, and maybe he was dumb to try. After all, he’d bought into their Hallmark life as much as Catherine had.

  Late on one of those October nights, he overheard Bea and Catherine lingering on Bruiser’s stairs, their voices filtering through the just-ajar door to their bedroom.

  Owen peered out the sliver of door space with one eye and watched them. Bea rubbed her back, and Catherine rested her head on her shoulder, and for a long time, the silence was enough. He was struck by how Bea let her just be. It took a lot of guts, he thought, to just be. To intuit that the only thing she could offer was a strong arm and a warm shoulder, and that was OK. He was, he remembers now, even in his drunken, hazy state in the bass-thumping living room of Delta Tau, amazed that this was all Catherine needed, and all the more amazed that Bea understood this.

  Eventually, Catherine said, “I don’t know how my life will ever be the same.”

  Bea replied, “Who said it’s supposed to stay the same?”

  Catherine bounced her shoulders. “Me, I guess. I liked my life. My mom took that from me.”

  “No, she didn’t, not really. It’s still yours to live.”

  Catherine twisted her mouth. “But it’s different now. I feel a little lost.”

  “Everyone feels a little lost, Cath. There’s nothing wrong with that. You only lose if you let someone beat you.”

  Owen watched them from his perch by the door and felt his shame rise up, his cheeks burning, disappointment in himself lodging in the base of his throat. No wonder he couldn’t rescue Catherine: he’d led a perfectly cushy middle-class life. No one had died! No one had betrayed him! He grew up with a mom and a dad and a golden retriever and made the varsity squash team and got a used Toyota 4runner for his sixteenth birthday. He was ashamed, just for a minute, about how easy he’d had it, and doubted that he and Catherine could ever be as close. Not because Catherine had become a little shattered, but because he never had. Then there was Bea, who was triumphant in the face of loss, who literally scaled mountains to prove she hadn’t been defeated. No wonder Catherine turned to her, not him. No wonder she solved her problems, fixed them while Owen could not.

  He thinks of Bea’s indefatigable spirit and bobs his head. You Only Live Once.

  You Only Lose If You Let Someone Beat You.

  YOLIYLSBY. Too long for an anagram, but Owen wasn’t above trying.

  No, Owen was not going to let this jackass in his tank top and Yankees hat beat him today. He burps out a hiccup of air and steadies himself. No one punches my friend on my watch! In his peripheral vision, he spies Colin and Lindy emerging from the bathroom, which is the final snap of motivation he needs. They’ll have his back! His old dear friends! Surely they will lift him up and carry him on their wings to victory.

  Having never been in a street fight, Owen’s not exactly sure what happens next. It’s all a blur. He’ll tell the doctors this when he comes to. But witnesses claim he emitted some sort of primeval roar and charged across the living room, throwing himself down the two steps to the patio, lunging toward Robbie (he would learn his name later, when charges were being considered), who was still loitering by the keg. He tackled Robbie at the waist, leveling them both, but he miscalculated the depth of the abutting patio wall, and thus momentum tugged them both smack into the stone ledge, which simultaneously rendered Owen unconscious and dislocated his shoulder.

  Robbie, because he was nineteen, spry, on the football team, and therefore padded with muscle, bounced to his feet immediately, a cheek laceration his only battle mark. Owen, because he was forty (and surely for other reasons too) blacked out for at least ten minutes while the fraternity dudes gathered around, hovering over him like curious toddlers, wondering who the hell this lunatic was, and how the old guy got into their party.

  21

  ANNIE

  Annie is concerned that Catherine might kill Owen. Not without good reason. Catherine is pacing the waiting room of the ER, muttering things like:

  What the hell is wrong with him?

  I might kill him.

  I think I’m going to kill him.

  Annie was the one Lindy called, because Catherine’s phone was dead from her conference call, and Annie’s was always charged, always lying in wait. Not that she’d heard from Baxter today. Where the hell was Baxter? She was starting to panic that something had gone horribly awry at the Hamptons: that he and Gus had accidentally left the gas burner on and were dead on the floor of their summer rental. Or some terrible accident involving, oh, she didn’t know, a helicopter crashing into Scoop Du Jour on Main Street, just as the two of them were striding in for double-helping rainbow-sherbet cones. But she’s scanned Facebook a bunch of times, and none of her friends have posted anything alarming, so she’s trying to defuse her concerns (xo) and not go from justifiably a tad paranoid to completely shrill and crazy.

  Still, though! Why hasn’t Baxter texted her back? Or called! Would it be too much for him to pick up the phone and call?

  What the hell is wrong with him?

  Annie starts at the thought. Even through the thicket of their worst years, when she was drowning in her postpartum depression, then chasing that depression with pills (and then more pills), and when Baxter was finding comfort elsewhere, she hadn’t considered that something was wrong with him. Baxter was the gold she’d been lucky enough to stumble upon. Never once did it occur to her that she might want to kill him.

  She stares at her blank phone screen.

  She kind of wants to kill him now.

  But regardless, it was Lindy who buzzed her phone to say that they were on their way in an ambulance from Delta Tau, but not to panic because she’d seen worse before and that Owen would be fine, but he may or may not require shoulder surgery, and incidentally, he also knocked out his front tooth.

  Annie and Catherine ran here when they couldn’t find a cab (holiday hours). And now her hair is winging out behind her ears, her mascara is flaking, and her T-shirt is sticking to her stomach, the perspiration marks like a Rorschach imprint against her Pilates-flattened abs. She stands by an air-conditioning vent, but it’s no help. Then Colin turns the corner from the hallway, and her heat rash rises in the crease of her elbows.

  She glances around the waiting room in an attempt to avoid Colin and perhaps find an escape, but there’s nowhere to seek refuge. The ruby-red chairs are littered with all sorts of misfits from the holiday: at least a dozen drunk kids with various broken-ish-looking limbs, several guys with unfortunate facial hair that appears to have been singed by fireworks.

  Annie raises her phone and clicks on her camera app, finding her own refuge of sorts. She can already think of a million captions: Slice of real, red-blooded American life! Fractured arms, not fractured spirits! Hospital (red) (white) (and) blues.

  She likes the last one the best but, just before posting, remembers how much she hates hospitals, how she begged Baxter for a home birth because no good ever comes from the inside of these walls. She knew it was illogical; she knew it made her sound like the redneck hick she was deep down, where you soothed your licks with Band-Aids and an ice pack, and even if you wanted to see a doctor, no one had insurance, and they weren’t about to blow their weekly pay on a visit to the doctor no one trusted anyway. Annie thinks of Bea. They hadn’t saved her after the car accident, and if they could have saved anyone, with her money and resources and tenacity, surely it should have been Bea.

  And of course, the doctors hadn’t exactly fixed Annie either, after Gus was born and she wasn’t quite right. Gus was an angelic baby: he nursed easily, he slept through the night at two months, and he didn’t even mind a wet diaper. And yet, Annie couldn’t seem to appreciate it, couldn’t appreciate him. She knew it wasn’t normal, as she’d read enough of those mommy boards to understand postpartum depression, but that couldn’t have b
een what she was suffering from. She was just exhausted, even though Baxter had hired a night nurse; she just needed her hormones to stabilize. Still, though, after four months, her crying jags never subsided; her adoration for Gus was not at all what she’d anticipated—she’d been prepared to be the mother of the century! All she wanted to do was pass him off to the newly hired nanny and hide.

  She couldn’t tell Baxter. She didn’t tell Baxter. When he arrived home from work, she was showered and pulled together and sometimes, if it was early enough, she’d made something like a pot roast. She saved the breakdowns until the apartment was quiet, when the nanny took Gus to a music class or out to the park. Sometimes, if she was desperate and they were home, Annie locked herself in the bathroom and turned on the shower to conceal her cries.

  At her six-month checkup, her OB-GYN recognized the symptoms—the lethargy, the deadened eyes, the way Annie appeared to be sinking, even just sitting there on the stirruped exam table.

  “I do sometimes feel like I’m moving through quicksand,” Annie confessed. “But I’m sure it’s nothing.”

  Her OB-GYN was much less sure it was nothing, and promptly wrote her several prescriptions to ensure that the quicksand dried up. And it did. After just a few weeks, Annie felt almost like her old self. Almost, because her old self was a moving target, but close enough. The Xanax helped, and on bad days, like when the other moms were talking about milestones (none of which Gus had yet hit), a Klonopin too. And then, on other days, when the stretch of hours rose up and it was only her and Gus, and Baxter was barreling toward a partnership and made no promises about when he’d be home, and the swell of the empty apartment felt like it might drown her and she doubted all of her parenting instincts because she hadn’t exactly had a wonderful mother, and when Gus outgrew his angelic newborn phase and morphed into a fussy infant Annie couldn’t hope to understand: when she’d changed him and fed him and made a million silly faces, including eight rounds of peek-a-boo, and still he wouldn’t stop crying . . . well, maybe she’d take another pill on top of that.