In Twenty Years: A Novel

by Allison Winn Scotch

  “Crap. Crap, crap, crap,” Annie repeats.

  Leon has gone pale; the rest of them hover with quiet alarm, doing the math, putting the pieces together that Annie did just hours ago. Catherine looks particularly put out, her face folded into a permanent scowl with the rapid-fire admissions of the last five minutes, like they’d all somehow decided to purge themselves of the shadows of the past decade.

  Annie resolves not to apologize. The world owes her an apology, so too bad if she’s screwed up someone else’s day. Welcome to her life for a minute!

  She nudges her chin higher, self-righteously aimed directly at Leon. “Well, now you know.”

  Lindy croons out the final trill, and the crowd explodes like early fireworks.

  “Well, now I do,” he says.

  “You’re welcome.”

  Catherine glares at Colin. “We’re not done discussing this.”

  Before he can answer, Annie flips off Lindy’s general presence, yanks Colin’s elbow, and marches toward home.

  There’s so much to say between the two of them. Colin is angry, flustered; Annie can feel it in the heat emanating off his neck when he closes the door behind her, and she lingers too close. She should ask him about it, what really happened with Bea, but if she speaks, if she ruins this moment, she might lose her nerve. And the last thing Annie wants to lose is her nerve. So they say nothing. Colin latches the door, and Annie stretches out her arm to clasp his, and then together they descend the steps to his old room. Annie tries not to breathe. If she does, she might wake up from this; she might come to and discover that none of it is real.

  Now Annie finally breathes.

  Colin runs his fingers over her collarbone, down through the crease in her breasts to her belly button. His fingers feel nothing like Baxter’s, even though they’re just hands, limbs, extensions of one’s body, and Baxter has probably felt her collarbone and belly button a thousand times.

  He shifts on top of her, and his old bed squeaks, then lurches an inch lower. Colin laughs, low, deep in his throat, and Annie wonders if it always used to lurch like that, if he’s laughing because of an old memory, or if it’s because they’re both a little awkward, even though sex is so much more casual now in middle age, now that it’s not some sort of contract like it could have been back then.

  He kisses her neck and she inhales, her chest rising, and refuses to think of Baxter and how he probably did this all weekend with Cici. Instead, she finds her mind drifting to Lindy. She tells herself to focus. Focus, Annie, focus! This is what she’s dreamed of forever; she wants Colin to kiss her neck forever. She remembers all the moments she dawdled on this bed, sitting, feet flat on the floor, full of excuses to stay. Have you studied for chem yet? Maybe we’ll order in a late-night pizza? Lingering another moment in his room, waiting for him to notice her. But she had heard Catherine back on the lawn, heard what she said about Lindy, and now she replays it: “She’s only acting this way because she was in love with you.” Even as Colin’s fingers trail down her belly button and around her back and under the edge of her black lace underwear, sliding them lower, then off entirely.

  Annie sighs, and he asks, “Is this OK? Should we not be doing this? Is this not OK?”

  “It’s OK; it’s more than OK.” She links her hands behind his neck and pulls him down to meet her lips so he won’t ask again. She’s still woozy from the booze; she doesn’t want to stop and think about what they’re doing. She doesn’t want to stop and talk about it. If they do this right, if they do it well enough, she won’t be thinking about Lindy or Baxter or Cici much longer.

  But she does. She does think about Lindy at least for another moment or two. She plays back that kiss from way back in their dump of an apartment, when they lived together, separated only by that putrid green sheet. She plays back Lindy’s loyalty for so many years, her sisterlike possessiveness that went a step beyond kindhearted friendship; she plays back Lindy’s betrayal too, in taking the one thing she knew Annie wanted. But then Annie considers that perhaps she also betrayed Lindy in her own way; she wasn’t as naive as she pretended to be; she wasn’t just some dumb poke from Texas. Maybe she knew, knew enough, noticed how Lindy sometimes sang toward her at her shows, how Lindy never thought any of Annie’s suitors were good enough. (They usually weren’t.) Maybe Lindy should have told her, but also, Annie didn’t make it easy. She didn’t want to know. Didn’t want to lose the friendship when Lindy’s feelings went unreciprocated, at least romantically. Annie loved Lindy, sure, but not in the way Lindy needed her to. So instead, Annie behaved as if Lindy’s feelings were never there to begin with, imaginary, an apparition.

  She considers that perhaps she treated Baxter and his infidelity in exactly the same manner: close your eyes and act like it’s not there. Then maybe it never happened at all.

  Colin kisses her again, his fingers tangling her hair, then flitting down her back, pressing on her hip bones.

  “Hey,” he says, pulling back, pushing his arms straight so he hovers above her, stares right at her. Her cheeks burn from his stubble, but she finds she doesn’t mind.

  “Hey,” she says and bites her lip.

  “Are you with me?”

  She hesitates, examining the face above her, how she has loved it for two decades—the protruding cheekbones, the honest eyes, the flush of his tanned skin, the flicker of a scar over his top lip. She’s not going to let Lindy ruin this for her. She’s not going to let Baxter either. Her whole life, everyone has taken a tiny piece of something from her, etched out a sliver of her heart like she wouldn’t feel the twinge, wouldn’t notice it was missing.

  But Annie’s never taken anything she’s wanted just for herself in as long as she can remember.

  So if it’s Colin, then for once, goddamn it, so be it.

  She nods. “I’m here.” Then she eases his head lower until he kisses her.

  She is here with him, so very much here with him. She flushes the rest of it from her mind, until there’s nothing to think about at all.

  Colin falls asleep almost immediately, tucked under the navy sheets, the duvet lumpy atop his heavy chest. Annie is cradled in the nook of his neck, right under his chin, listening to his breath. The front door opens and slams shut, the others trekking home, she supposes. No one stayed for the fireworks, after all.

  She moves her hand over Colin’s warm skin, her palm covering his heart. She lets it linger there for a moment, worried she might wake him, that he’ll realize what they’ve done and bounce quickly to his feet, casting her off like any of the rest of the women who scurried up the steps, out of the house, and out of his mind.

  She rolls back onto her own pillow, palming her own heart. She’s a little more sober now; she has a little bit of clarity. And she can feel it there, beating to its own cadence, beating strong enough to echo all the way through her flesh and bone.

  Thump, thump.

  Thump, thump.

  Annie stares at the ceiling, with Colin on her left and her heartbeat in her right.

  She wonders if this is what it’s like to feel alive.

  36

  COLIN

  Colin wakes with a start, his throat parched, his neck sweaty. Annie is curled up into a C beside him, her spine a snaking line up her back, then disappearing under a mess of her hair. He climbs over her gingerly, careful not to wake her. She deserves this sleep, a chance to recover from all the blows of the day.

  He hopes that what they just did doesn’t add to her list of complications. He hadn’t thought it through—what it would mean exactly, where they’d go from here. He tiptoes up the steps, desperate for water, like he’s been stranded in a desert for days. He glances back through the dim light; she hasn’t woken. He hesitates, torn between going back to her, under the warmth of the duvet, and indulging his more immediate need to quench his thirst.

  His bare feet pad upward, the hardwood squea
king. He turns again. Still asleep. He can slip upstairs quickly and be back down to her before she realizes he’s gone. This isn’t a metaphor, he tells himself, no deeper meaning than that he’s truly parched.

  He reaches the living-room landing and flips on the light to get his bearings.

  “You.” Catherine is parked on the couch.

  “Jesus Christ!” Colin jumps.

  “Me.”

  “Were you just, like, sitting here in the dark? Trying to be creepy?”

  “I was sitting here in the dark, trying to figure out why you knew she was sick and none of the rest of us did. What made you lie, how that lie spun out of control.”

  Colin scratches the back of his head. “Don’t you have more important things to be dealing with right now?” He looks around. “Where’s Owen?”

  “Bathroom.” She nudges her head toward the second floor.

  “Well, maybe you should deal with your own business before nosing into mine.”

  “That’s just it,” she says, rising. “It wasn’t just your business! It was all of ours.”

  “Not really.”

  “That wasn’t your decision, your thing to decide! We were always a unit; who chose you to be special?”

  “God, Catherine! Bea did, OK? Bea chose me. Bea called me. Not you, not any of the rest of them. So Bea decided.”

  “That’s crap.” Catherine sits back on the couch. The cushions bounce.

  “I think it’s crap that you’re sitting here pretending that you care about the ‘unit,’ that you care about all of us.” He waves an arm toward the upstairs bathroom. “When was the last time you included Owen in your ‘unit’?”

  Catherine glares at him.

  “Owen texts me every once in a while, OK? He’s not as oblivious as you think.”

  Catherine sits up straighter.

  “Listen, I don’t judge. I don’t really even care that much. I’m not married, so before you point that out, don’t bother. But you’re not angry because Bea told me. You’re angry because she didn’t tell you. Because you have this martyr complex that maybe served you well once, but seems to me is not working too well for you now.”

  “Listen,” Catherine interjects.

  “No, you listen,” he retorts. “Start listening, stop telling. Stop goddamn telling everyone what to do, like you always know best.”

  Catherine grows a little smaller, fidgeting with her bracelet.

  “Fine. Fine. I don’t always know best.”

  “Well, that’s a small miracle.”

  “I just would have wanted to help her. Maybe try, you know?”

  Colin steps closer, then sits on the arm of the couch.

  “She was sick, Cathy. Really, really, sick.” He pauses. “She . . . she didn’t call me until it was almost the end.”

  “I don’t . . .” Catherine’s face twinges, and Colin rests a hand on her arm. He hopes he isn’t miscalculating, reading her wrong after all these years. But she’s a fixer, he realizes. She might be the only one of them who would get it, who would make the same choice that he did when Bea asked, when she begged.

  “It came back furiously, Cath. We see it often, too often. I mean, doctors do. Not me, in plastic surgery. But remission one minute, terminal the next.” He squeezes her arm and doesn’t let go. “She just . . . she was in so much pain. She wasn’t herself. Her eyes . . . they were cloudy, unfocused . . . you know how she always was. They weren’t Bea’s. She was breakable, so tiny, so thin. White and colorless. Her lips were cracking, her hair all but gone. And . . . she wanted to let go. Be done with it with dignity.” He shrugs and doesn’t dare look up. “So she called me. Not you. Not because she didn’t love you. But . . . because you couldn’t help.”

  Catherine’s chest rises and falls. Colin can hear her breathing.

  “She called you . . . because you’re a doctor,” she says finally.

  “Yes.”

  “Because you were the only one she could ask.”

  “Yes.”

  Catherine’s face twitches, and she bats her eyes quickly. She stares at the floor, and Colin stares with her.

  Eventually, she asks, “At the wedding? Was she sick?”

  Colin hesitates. “I . . . I don’t know. Truly. I don’t think so . . . or maybe she was sick and didn’t know. She would have told us.” He pauses. “Things probably would have gone differently if she had or if we’d known. But . . . no, I don’t think so.”

  “Oh, Bea,” Catherine says, her voice finally breaking, shrinking into the couch as if the enormity of this news is simply too much to carry. “Oh my God, Bea.”

  “She wanted it this way. She begged me, told me it made her happy. Or . . . made it easier.” He falls silent. “I mean, none of it made her happy.” He slides his hand off her arm and drops it back in his own lap. “Listen. I’ve never told anyone. That’s how she wanted it. That’s what she asked. It’s why she also asked me to lie about how it all went down.”

  “OK,” Catherine says. “OK.”

  “OK?”

  “It must have been awful.”

  “For her? Or for me?”

  Catherine’s nose pinches. “I suppose for both of you . . . I’m sorry I got so angry with you. I guess I don’t know everything about everything.”

  “Sometimes it’s better not to.”

  She manages a halfhearted laugh. “I suppose I’ve never thought of it much like that.”

  Colin shivers and crosses his arms, then rises to close an open window near the dining table. He cranks the pane closed, locking it. He wishes he felt better, relieved at his admission, but his stomach churns like he’s been cast out to sea.

  “So, please.” He turns toward her. “No one else knows. And I think that’s how it should be.”

  “We all have secrets.” Catherine narrows her eyes, and Colin senses her assessing him. Then her face falters, softening. She looks younger, almost the way she looked back then. “Bea’s entitled to hers too.”

  Colin nods and exhales. Then he flips the light off again, heading back down the steps to Annie, forgetting his thirst, forgetting why he came upstairs in the first place.

  37

  CATHERINE

  Catherine sits in the heavy darkness for what feels like forever—absorbing the brunt of Colin’s confession, considering what she would have done if Bea had asked her, how she’d live with her choice either way. She’s surprised to find herself totally devoid of anger at him, like she geared up for a war, and once she was on the front lines, discovered that, in fact, she was a pacifist. She doesn’t think she could have done for Bea what Colin did, and part of her admires him for his selflessness, even if she’s unsure how to feel about it. Catherine likes to think of herself as the type of person you call in a crisis, but the notion creeps up on her, slowly, like a tide ebbing, that acting strong and being strong aren’t the same thing. Bea was strong when she asked for Colin’s help. Colin was strong in breaking his own heart and granting it to her.

  Finally, when her legs feel steady enough to bear her weight, she rises. She slips up the stairs. The bathroom light still creeps out underneath the door; Owen is still locked behind it. She doesn’t know how long he’ll be in there, so she scampers up the ladder to the trapdoor, the best she can do for an escape from the claustrophobia she feels inside the walls of this house.

  He apologized on the walk home from the concert. Catherine had to give him that, even though she didn’t want to give him that. But he did, and she said, “OK.” Like words could just erase a day’s worth of disaster. More than a day’s worth. It had been months running into years. But she’s culpable for that part too.

  In marriage—one that manages to stay together—that’s what happens: someone apologizes, and what are you going to do? Hold your resentment against him forever? Maybe for a night, maybe you’re still pissed of
f when you click off the light for sleep. But the only other option, other than forgiveness, is letting your resentment seep down into you, into your pores, into your veins, eventually into the foundation that you built together, and that undoes everything.

  Catherine doesn’t know if they’re that far gone. Have they undone everything? When they shared Bruiser twenty years ago, she couldn’t have imagined they’d ever find a way to undo everything. Their foundation from back then, though, that’s maybe all they have left. Like a demolition site, they’ve gutted nearly everything down to the studs. Now they have what they built here, here; they have who they were and how they loved each other, and Catherine doesn’t know if that’s enough.

  The July heat still bounces off the roof deck, even at this evening hour. Catherine eases down her bun, her hair already clinging to the sweat on her neck. She leans over the brick ledge of the roof and spies Lindy sitting on their stoop—sullen, no doubt—sulking at the mess she’s made. An SUV pulls up and Lindy’s on her feet, suddenly alarmed, her raised voice echoing up to the roof deck. Probably her publicist, someone to make excuses for her. Catherine thinks to check her e-mail to see how many excuses her own publicist has made for her. She trembles, even in the heat, her hair on end, at the notion that she and Lindy aren’t so different, might actually be peas in a pod. Then she thinks about Bea and how she’d like to not be someone whom other people had to make excuses for. Ever.

  She peers over the ledge again, but rocks back quickly on her toes, a wave of vertigo overtaking her. It’s only three stories down, but it’s too far for her to look again.

  Catherine sighs and folds herself in half, stretching down to her toes, her arms flopping. Rag doll. One of her exercise DVDs called this the “rag doll” pose. Her back spasms, and she rights herself.

  She finds a deck chair toward the back edge of the roof and lies flat atop it. She imagines herself floating. Floating up into space, floating away from all her other problems—Owen and Target and TMZ and her moronic need to always be the best at everything. Why does she always have to be the best at everything? Would anyone care if she said, I cannot keep up this pace without stumbling. I cannot compete with twenty-five-year-old bloggers who discover muses in every jam jar, in every garden, on every corner. Then she considers that age isn’t the problem. The walls that she—she—built around herself are. All she wanted was to make beautiful things, candles, scarfs, centerpieces. No one cared that the used pea-green dining table never quite got white. No one cared that her French toast took twenty-three tries to master. Owen never complained when those boxers she sewed him sagged in the rear, or if the fly wasn’t quite big enough.