In Twenty Years: A Novel

by Allison Winn Scotch

  The five of them (Catherine had nudged Leon into coming) point themselves south, toward the stadium, wandering past the fraternities that Annie so diligently avoided her freshman year so she wouldn’t be taken advantage of by a predatory senior, past the bagel shop where Lindy’s bike was once stolen, past the bench where “Quarter Joe” resided (he sat there day and night and simply asked for quarters). Bea always stuffed her pockets with extra quarters, just for him. He died a few years back, and the college paper wrote a kind obituary. Annie read it online and thought about how the last vestiges of their friendships really were gone. She sent a hundred dollars in for the memorial fund.

  She runs her hand over her delicate collarbone, sweaty and exposed now, wondering when the last time was that Baxter noticed it, when the last time was that he kissed Cici’s collarbone. Or all of the other collarbones that came before hers.

  xo

  How long?

  Why?

  How many?

  Why?

  How could this happen?

  “I think I need to call Baxter. Ask him exactly how many collarbones he’s rubbed up against lately.” She jabs Colin. “My phone, please.”

  “Annie, let’s let this settle in,” Catherine says before Colin can retrieve her phone from his pocket. “It’s hard, I know.”

  “You don’t know at all!” Annie gestures toward Owen. “You’ve never had to know.”

  “I’m sorry? I’m just trying to help.”

  “Stop helfing,” Owen manages, through his gauze.

  “Spit that out!” Catherine holds out her palm. “You’re done bleeding by now, for God’s sake.”

  Owen spits the bloody gauze into her palm like Gus would spit a wad of gum into Annie’s. Spit that out, Gussy! You have to be proper! Don’t look like disgusting trash by chomping on that gum!

  “No! You don’t get it! You wouldn’t get it!” Annie’s voice is rising like a whistle on a slow-moving locomotive. “You two . . . my God . . .” Tears crest again with no fanfare. “Like either of you has ever had to fight for someone, like either of you would ever feel betrayed like this! Please! You’ve been together forever!”

  Annie strides ahead, wishing so much that she hadn’t listened to stupid Catherine, who insisted she leave the tequila at home. Not that it hasn’t done its damage. Her feet are weighted, her hands tingly, her brain an endless buzz of static like the black-and-white fuzz that would fill the TV screen late at night in their tract house in Texas, her mom out too late, Annie home keeping watch, drowsy but hopeful, illuminated by the glow of the screen.

  “This is my mother’s fault!” Annie shouts. She pumps a fist into the air, a non sequitur, but she does it all the same. Yes! Her goddamn mother! How was Annie expected to hold on to a man when her mother ran through them like water? How was she expected to know what a happy marriage looked like when she never had an example from which to learn?

  “This isn’t anyone’s fault,” Leon offers.

  “This is Baxter’s fault,” Colin states, speaking over him. He reaches for Annie, protectively, instinctively.

  “Yes!” Annie’s fist has morphed into a pointed finger. She pokes the air, then Colin’s chest. “Yes! This is Baxter’s fault! And my mom’s fault!”

  Two guys in Penn Crew T-shirts loiter in their path, just in front of the Road to Freedom tents, as a few of the proprietors pack up for the early evening. Each crew guy has a buzz cut and scraggly facial hair. The towering blond one, whose muscles swell through his shirt, offers them a flyer. “Battle of the bands later. Yo, you should come.”

  “I would very much like to come!” Annie replies, still too loud.

  “You should!” He grins. “Totally.”

  Back in college, the crew guys would never have invited Annie to a battle of the bands. Unless she was with Lindy or Bea, then maybe. It’s not that she wasn’t attractive; she was. It’s just that they wouldn’t have noticed her to invite her in the first place. She was so busy trying to blend in that she became like every other face in the crowd.

  “I totally will!” Annie says. “I will totally come! I’ve never been to a battle of the bands! What bands?”

  The crew guy shrugs. “Not sure. Some dudes on campus.”

  “Well, who cares anyway? I don’t care at all! First, we’re breaking into the stadium, though!”

  “I’m not sure that we’ll come,” Catherine tuts. “And we’re not breaking into the stadium.”

  “We will absolutely come!”

  “Well, all right.” The crew guy winks. “See ya there! Find me. I’ll be waiting.”

  Annie raises her eyebrows and twirls around, snapping her fingers, gyrating her hips.

  “Annie!” Catherine hisses, but Annie’s brain is spinning too quickly to hear her. When was the last time she felt coveted? When was the last time Baxter lay in wait for her? Annie doesn’t know, not that she’s giving it a heck of a lot of thought, but she does know that her Pilates and her spin classes and her personal shopper at Barneys have kept her in pretty damn fine shape. She might be (almost) forty, but she’s pretty sure this kid would do her. This kid would do her!

  Colin steadies Annie by her shoulders, then yanks her elbow and guides her onward.

  “What?” Annie says, swiveling her head, waving back toward the oarsman. “Ouch! Stop! Why are you doing that?”

  “I’m just looking out for you. It’s been a long day.”

  “I don’t need anyone looking out for me!”

  “Annie,” Catherine interjects, “it’s . . . a lot. This news.”

  “Fuck this news!” she yells. “I will not dignify this news today! I do not want to speak of this news for twenty-four hours! Do not speak of this news!”

  “OK!” Catherine’s palms face up, surrendering.

  “Say it,” Annie says to the rest of them. “Say it.”

  So they do. They swear they will not mention the news for a whole day. How that will happen, in the midst of this atomic meltdown, is anyone’s guess, but for Annie to use the F-word, she really must mean it. The others aren’t fools. They may not know her like they used to, but they know her well enough to know that she’s not like Lindy—rough around the edges, crass just to be crass, unladylike for the sake of making a point. Maybe she used to be rough around the edges, back in Texas, but no longer. My God, she has almost turned herself inside out to escape who she used to be.

  And why bother? Baxter didn’t care! Baxter didn’t notice that she’d practically killed herself to make herself over entirely, to leave behind the winds of South Texas and be someone. Really be someone. Not someone who anyone felt sorry for; not someone who still wore bootstraps on which to tug; not someone who in any way rocked the boat, demanded attention, or in any other form insisted on being different. Leave different to Lindy. Leave showstopping to Catherine. All Annie ever wanted to be was accepted, loved. Baxter was going to save her, and she never once, not for one second, did anything less than redo herself completely to give him everything he wanted.

  She stops short on the red brick walkway, next to a statue of Ben Franklin.

  “Ben Franklin seems like such a good guy,” she says. “Ben Franklin would never cheat on his wife.”

  But then she remembers that back then they all died of an STD of some sort, so maybe he would. Gus read a book about it once; George Washington died of syphilis, though Annie had no idea why they’d include that in a children’s book! But you learn new things every day, so on that day, Gus learned that George Washington would have benefited from the invention of condoms, and since Annie is feeling ungenerous right now, she’ll go ahead and lump Ben Franklin alongside George Washington.

  Screw you, Ben Franklin! You probably had syphilis! You probably did screw around on your wife too!

  Is it too much to ask for a little loyalty? For fewer secrets? Why must they all carry
the weight of these secrets? Why can’t they—Lindy, Baxter, Bea—all unburden themselves, or maybe never opt for the lies in the first place?

  She sinks onto the pedestal of the statue, dropping her head between her knees. She really shouldn’t have had so much tequila. She doesn’t drink much anymore, so the waterfall of liquor that she carelessly poured down her throat has done its damage. Her eyes droop; her tongue feels like sandpaper.

  But she has secrets too: the pills, the blame for the miscarriage. Further back too, obviously. Plenty. And maybe that’s what chased Baxter away, into the arms of some woman who likes receiving text messages of his penis.

  “Gus wasn’t supposed to be an only child,” she announces to no one, and yet to all of them. “I miscarried a few years ago. It was my fault.”

  Colin sits next to her, resting his hand on her knee, the ledge of the statue not quite big enough to accommodate his rear. “Ann, it couldn’t have been your fault.”

  Annie suddenly looks aghast. “Oh my God, what if I have syphilis?”

  “No one has syphilis,” Colin says.

  “George Washington had syphilis! Ben Franklin probably did too! Who knows who Baxter was sleeping with!”

  Her bravado from just five minutes earlier is fading. Annie can feel it seeping out of her like blood from a punctured artery: slowly, but urgently too. Who did she think she was? Like she could pretend, even for twenty-four hours, that this didn’t mean the end of her marriage, her life up till now. She might be excellent at kickboxing, but she’s not really a fighter, she’s not the brave one. She’s just the poor kid who never belonged here in the first place.

  “Well, we can be certain that Baxter was not sleeping with George Washington, so we know that you’re safe there,” Catherine says, in that tone she usually reserves for the kids, and sometimes her staff too.

  Annie is crying again, and Colin leans in, one arm around her shoulder, one arm slung over her chest. She wipes her nose on his upper sleeve and inhales and tries to slow her breath.

  Colin smells good, like the first few days of autumn. Or an overpriced vanilla/sage candle that Annie would buy for their living room. She inhales again, and then again, and then one more time.

  Yes, Colin smells so very good.

  “I don’t want to talk about this for the rest of the night,” she says. He rubs her back in reply. Indeed, Annie wants to have one night when she can pretend that everything and nothing has changed. That she might not have syphilis, and that her husband really had saved her, and even if he didn’t save her, he was at least decent enough to honor his promise.

  “No one keeps promises anymore.” She runs through her mental list: not Baxter, not Lindy. Probably none of the rest of them either.

  “That’s not true,” Colin says.

  “Please,” Catherine says. “Like you’re a shining example.”

  “I don’t make promises. That’s why I don’t break them.”

  “Well, I’m not sure that’s really any better,” Catherine replies.

  “I think it’s perfect,” Owen says, air whistling in the crater where his front tooth once lay.

  Leon says, “Men can be real dicks.”

  Colin replies, “Hey, man, don’t get personal!”

  And Leon waves his hand in apology. “No, man, not you. Her husband.”

  Colin nods and says, “Oh, yeah. Cool. True.” He untangles himself from Annie and rises, his knee cracking as he stands.

  “Shit, I’m getting old.”

  “I wish I were still twenty.” Annie’s face sags.

  “No, you don’t.” Colin offers her a hand, and she links her fingers into his, braiding them, intertwining them, sealing them together. “I promise.”

  27

  CATHERINE

  They’ve detoured toward the Quad, Catherine having convinced Colin that Annie is too drunk to break into the stadium, and besides, none of them have tools to crack the lock. If she were in her test kitchen, well, she would have a blowtorch and a crowbar and maybe even some shears for heavy-duty sunflower stalks that could do the trick on metal, but she is not there, she is here, and thus, the Quad it is. Besides, though she blames Annie’s intoxication, Catherine knows that if they were to get nabbed, even by some innocuous campus police officer, TMZ would have all the ammunition they need to nearly literally drive the final nail into her professional coffin. No, thank you. She’s not Owen, she’s not a streaker, she’s not reckless, and damn it if she’s not going to try to salvage what she can.

  She glances at Owen. His upper lip has swelled to the size of a Meyer lemon.

  “Does it hurt?”

  “I’ve felt better.”

  She nods. He winces.

  She remembers that time in Florida when they discovered that Penelope was allergic to bees. She’d been so fearless back then as a toddler. She was chasing one around the kiddie pool, happily clapping her hands together, trying to squash it in her palms. She was singing “Itsy Bitsy Spider,” and everyone at the pool thought it was perfectly adorable; no one really thought she was going to catch that thing. Catherine had been preoccupied changing Mason’s diaper and examining his diaper rash, and Owen was on the phone with a client who was having some legal crisis or whatnot. She remembers that he kept rolling his eyes and making the “blabbermouth” signal to her with his fingers. She probably knew back then how much he hated it—the law, his job, all of it—but one of them had to work, and she was just a start-up blogger. They never discussed it, really. She listened to his occasional complaints, accepting the intrusions on their vacation, and frankly, figured that this was life. Real, grown-up life. You’re not always happy; you don’t always get what you want. Catherine would have liked a kid who wasn’t colicky, whose butt didn’t look like raspberry jam, and a website that got more than 120 hits a day, but so what?

  Anyway, neither of them was paying attention when Penelope finally got close enough to make her kill, only the bumblebee took aim first, like a kamikaze pilot: stinging her squarely above the eye. Owen saw it before Catherine did, Pen screaming by the kiddie pool, and even when Catherine did see it, she didn’t leap to her feet the way she should have. She was tired, and she was wipes-deep in a dirty diaper, and frankly, she figured Penelope was hysterical because one of the other kids had taken her plastic fishing rod that they’d bought at the overpriced gift shop. But Owen hung up on his client right there and then, and dashed to their three-year-old daughter whose eye was already the size of a walnut and growing.

  Why do I always compare injuries to foodstuff? Catherine wonders now, mulling Owen’s upper lip, a little lost in the memory of that day. How well he calmed Penelope, how he coaxed her into swallowing some Benadryl, how he turned his phone off for the rest of the day and bought her ice cream and somehow miraculously cajoled her into taking a nap (she had given up naps at sixteen months).

  He’s been a better husband than she’s given him credit for, she thinks. Or maybe it’s just that he’s been a better husband compared to Annie’s. Maybe neither of them—she or Owen—has been particularly good to the other recently. But perspective is everything today. Owen’s not screwing around; Owen’s not sending pictures of his dick to faceless women. Annie was right about promises, though, even if she hadn’t been referring to them, to him, to Catherine. No one tries to live up to them anymore, like the vows they took fell away when a sliver of space, of independence, squeezed into their union. When he left his job. When she discovered that she could do hers without him. But maybe Annie knew long before any of them that you don’t hold grudges for broken promises, because no one ever keeps them anyway. Maybe that’s what a happy marriage is: forgiving small lapses in the face of the bigger picture.

  It’s not what she thought at twenty, and it’s not really what she’d like to believe at forty, but refusing to accept the difference between idealism and reality is really just naïveté. Catherine
hasn’t made it this far in the surprisingly cutthroat world of domestic blogging on naïveté. TMZ could now tell you that. Her staff could now tell you that. Catherine, if she were being honest enough with herself to expose her own set of secrets, with her failing bottom line and desperation for a buyout, could tell you that.

  She wonders who she’ll be if the company goes bust. Sure, she’ll scramble and find something new—an advisor at Martha Stewart, an occasional expert on Good Morning America. But it won’t be her empire; it won’t have been built with her steady hands from the ground up; she won’t have the pride of ownership that made her willing—eager, almost—to make sacrifices in other aspects of her life that were inevitable. She watches Owen, with his easy demeanor, even when his lip is swollen like a potato, and he’s slapping Colin on the back, musing over something that is lost to her. Maybe she’d just return to being his wife, Penelope and Mason’s mom. She was “just” that for a while, and though it made her antsy, like she had an itch she couldn’t scratch, she knows too that there’s fulfillment to be found in all sorts of corners. Not forever. She wouldn’t want to do that forever. But reinvention isn’t always the worst thing in the world. She watches Annie, stumbling in her stride for a step, then grasping Colin for support. Annie knows all about reinvention; she’s managed to keep her head high.

  She thinks of Bea, who was always dodging a jab, shadowboxing against the punches thrown her way. But Bea would be the first one to tell her that she couldn’t have gotten into the ring alone, that she needed the five of them alongside her. Catherine shouldn’t be standing in the ring alone either. She didn’t mean to, didn’t expect to. Perhaps she should invite Owen into her corner too.

  The campus is full of shadows now, the last rays of the orange sun bouncing off the trees, casting unexpected glares that come and go, rise and fall. The colonial festival is nearly over; one of the men has changed out of his culottes but still dons his gray wig and topcoat; Betsy Ross complains loudly about the blisters on her fingers from all the sewing.