In Twenty Years: A Novel (23 page)

“I guess I owe you an apology?”

“Sorry?” Leon appears genuinely confused.

“For my behavior at the butter churning. I should apologize for how I behaved.”

“Oh.” He hesitates.

“I’m used to being the best.”

“OK.”

“And I don’t like losing.”

“That’s cool.”

“So . . . that’s what happened.”

“Well, all right.” Leon nods, ready to be done with it.

Catherine is a little miffed that he’s not more gracious. Or maybe she’s more miffed that he’s not Owen. Or that she wanted, hoped, for him to be Owen.

“I mean, it wasn’t that big a deal,” she adds.

“It wasn’t.”

The front door slams downstairs, and Annie yells something unintelligible.

Leon lingers on the landing, poised to rejoin the fray on the ground floor, but then turns back toward Catherine.

“What else?” She sighs.

He gazes at her for a moment too long, and Catherine can’t decide if he dislikes her (add him to the list!) or pities her. What happened to the reverence of just a few hours ago, in the kitchen, over the French toast, when he realized she was
Catherine
from The Crafty Lady?

“Look.” She juts out her jaw. “I’m sorry! OK? I’m having a pretty spectacularly bad day.” He nods. Then she adds, more quietly: “I’m not usually like this. I mean, I don’t think I am.” Her hands sweep from behind her back into her lap. “Well, I don’t know.”

He hesitates, then steps nearer. “I work with a lot of artists who lose track of their A game.”

“Like Lindy?”

Leon smiles but shakes his head. “No, not like Lindy. She knows who she is; she just doesn’t like you to see it. That’s actually why I like her. It’s both the best and worst thing about her.”

Catherine says nothing.

“I guess, listen, it’s none of my business . . .” he starts.

“No, it’s fine. Say what you want. I mean, tell me the truth. People don’t do that often anymore. Or maybe I’ve gotten used to not listening.”

Catherine thinks of Bea, how if she were here, she’d set Catherine right.

Leon twists his wooden prayer beads on his wrist.

“You’re different from who I thought you would be,” he says. “I know, it’s lame, I’m a closet obsessive crafter . . . what can I say? It helps me de-stress.” He laughs at this, and Catherine manages a smile. “But what I mean to say is that what I thought of you . . . well . . . I thought there would be more joy.”

“More joy?”

“Yeah, like, you bring so much happiness to people, so I figured your own life would be full of the same thing.”

“Oh.” She stares at the comforter.

“It happens a lot,” he says. “Mistaking people you don’t know, like, famous people, for who you think they should be.”

“I’m really that far off?”

“Well, I guess I have to believe, because I’m used to drawing out authenticity in someone in the studio—even if it takes staying there all night or scrapping a track if they can’t find honesty—but I guess what I’m trying to say is that it seems to me like there has to be joy left in you too.”

“You don’t even know me.”

“That’s true.”

Then Catherine says, “You remind me of Bea. If she were here, I think she’d tell me the same thing.” Catherine feels the pinch of tears behind her eyes. “My company is struggling, having some problems. Owen doesn’t know.” The words come out before she can think about all the reasons she should stay quiet. She waits to regret it, but instead she feels a slight glimmer of relief to have shared her burden and eased it off her solitary shoulders. “Today made things worse.”

“I’m sorry,” he says. And he seems genuinely so. “Maybe you should tell Owen?”

She shakes her head. “It’s complicated now.”

He nods, and they both realize this is about as far as he can take her. He’s a producer; he’s not the one behind the microphone, not the one who has to turn a simple melody into magic. Also, he’s not really Bea.

“Anyway.” His boots echo closer. “This was downstairs. The rest of them took theirs, so I thought you might want it.”

He holds out her frame, her old letter to herself. Catherine’s not sure if she wants it, but he takes her silence as a tacit yes, and so rests it on her bed and then slips out. She hears his
thwomping
down the steps, taking them two by two. She recognizes the pattern—
thwomp, thwomp, thwomp
—from years back, when one of them was late to a midterm or racing off to a party that felt like the party that might change their lives, or just scurrying off to wherever because wherever couldn’t wait. There was always an urgency about everything, even though there was also an urgency about nothing.

Where will you be in twenty years? Write down your wildest dreams!

Unlike the rest of them, Catherine remembers what she wrote. She doesn’t need to read it, to prop the frame up on her nightstand or a mantel or wherever else you’d rest a framed letter to your old self, like you might a piece of artwork. Like a letter to your old self merits a place on your wall, merits homage or nostalgia or even a second thought. At twenty-two, you had no clue about anything!

Catherine’s phone buzzes a million times more, and she listlessly scrolls through more Google alerts on her, none of them kind. New rumors of divorce lawyers being retained, a quote from the pastry chef citing “No comment.”

She pulls the framed letter closer, her fingers fluttering over the glass, fanning an old memory. She wasn’t an idiot back then. She knows this. She was wise and hopeful and naive, perhaps, but she wasn’t an idiot. Catherine has been many things, but she always kept her head down, focused on the road before her, aware of the potholes ahead and behind.

In twenty years, this is what I hope for you, this is what I want you to be:

Be inspired.

Be your best.

Don’t hesitate to fail.

Don’t hesitate not to.

Undercook your bread. Enjoy the goo.

Overcook your bread. Enjoy the crust.

Love Owen forever.

Let him love you forever back.

Build a big white kitchen.

Make cookies with your children there often.

Be honest. Never less.

Don’t lose track of everything because you think something else is your everything. It’s not.

Your wildest dreams? Don’t limit yourself to those.

Catherine’s phone beeps again. She curls her knees in tight and starts to cry for real.

24

COLIN

Colin is rubbing Annie’s back in concentric circles as she mutters over and over again about how she should have
known
. He finds this calming almost, being here, comforting her, playing hero. That’s why he got into medicine in the first place, though plastic surgery isn’t exactly saving lives, and that’s also why he didn’t say no to Bea when she called and said,
Please help
.

“I should have known,” she moans for at least the hundredth time, and Colin shushes her for at least the ninety-ninth time and assures her that she couldn’t have. “How did I not know this? Am I the dumbest wife in the history of marriage?”

Colin’s hands falter on her shoulders, and he tries to pry the tequila bottle out of her clenched hands. But she lifts it to her lips and cringes as it burns down her throat. Leon, who’s parked on the sofa with worried (half-mast) eyes, silently indicates that Colin should just let her drink. Owen, who’s parked next to Leon, slouches into the couch pillows and offers nothing.

“Men are assholes,” Colin says, which makes Annie cry harder, so he apologizes for the comment. He tries not to think of the various ways
he’s
been an asshole, including but not limited to the lies he told them all just yesterday. He regrets how easily those lies come to him, how quickly he rattled them off, even after all these years. Isn’t the whole point of being here, of this exercise, to peel back the layers and get at the truth?

He wonders what Bea wants of him now. If she finally wants him to deliver the truth.

“You’re not the problem,” Annie says, wiping snot on her sleeve and gazing at him in much the same way most women gaze at Colin. “I mean, you were, once. But not today.” She nods, as if she’s given this quite a hearty dose of thought. She cups his cheeks with both hands and stares for a beat that makes Leon fidget. Colin does not fidget. “I should have slept with you freshman year. I deeply, deeply regret not sleeping with you freshman year.”

Now they’re all a little uncomfortable, but that’s really the least of their problems.

Annie sighs. “What was my virginity? What was it, really? But I guess there was Bea. I mean, you always loved Bea. After the fire anyway. And I always loved you.” She hiccups into her hand, so casual in her admission that Colin’s not sure he heard her correctly. He knows he did. Part of him always knew she loved him just a tiny bit, but not
love
love. Just . . . you know. Well, he always knew that Annie was a tiny bit hung up, but so were a lot of women. And then there was that atomic bomb at Catherine and Owen’s wedding, but he’d chalked most of that up to drama between Lindy and Annie—
girl drama
—so he hadn’t given Annie’s actual feelings for him too much thought. But then Bea told him, of course, how Lindy—well, both of them, he wasn’t absolved from it—crossed the line that Bea said was understood they shouldn’t cross.

So when she says this tonight, and he thinks about it more honestly, he realizes that he did know, and he
did
cross a line, and her admission is only surprising in its bare honesty.

He doesn’t know a lot of women who are honest. He doesn’t know a lot of women like Annie, actually. She is kind; she is sincere; she does not have inflated, bee-stung lips; she isn’t at all interested in him because he’s the Boob King of Hollywood. She knew who he was when he wanted to get into neurosurgery. He liked that guy. He still likes that guy. If Bea were here, she’d remind him of that guy; she would have reminded him for years how far he’d strayed from him too. But after Bea . . . well, after that whole mess and what it took out of him, he buried that guy. Rightly or not. But that Annie can do this now, remind him of who he thought he could be, so effortlessly, without trying, spins his brain a bit, muddies his usually simplistic thoughts.

“Baxter doesn’t deserve you,” Colin says, more sure of this than ever. “What sort of shithead would do this to a woman he loved?”

“Love,” Annie whimpers. “Who knows anything about love?”

Love, to Colin, meant end-of-the-earth-level devotion, flying to the stars. He went to the end of the world for Bea, but it was too late, and it shattered him so completely that he never dared come close to it again.

Baxter has called seventeen times, but Colin has seized the phone at Annie’s halfhearted request, though she keeps asking for it back, then keeps changing her mind. Colin makes the executive decision to tuck it into his pocket until she’s at least breathing properly.

“Just for a while,” he says. “A little break won’t change anything.”

So Baxter has taken to texting.

“What a pussy,” Leon says, though no one has asked him. “Texting your wife to explain your dick shot? Like, is romance officially dead or what?”

“Romance is officially dead,” Annie echoes.

Then she gazes at Colin, who gazes back, blood flushing his cheeks. He knows he shouldn’t, shouldn’t enjoy playing the hero so much. Just look where it got him with Bea. But he can’t help himself. He feels something new rising within him for Annie, and damn if Bea wouldn’t support that, wouldn’t endorse it.
That’s why we’re here!
she’d say.
I want you to be happy!
In fact, she did say this, nearly exactly, when he logged a few vacation days and flew back to see her after she beckoned. She was so frail already, the leukemia having wormed its way into every part of her. Well, not her heart. Her heart, the thing Colin had cherished most about her, was still clear, pure, generous. He linked his fingers into hers and noticed her tiny wrists, then her damp, downcast eyes, and he knew he’d do it, knew she couldn’t suffer through one more moment of agony, one more moment of the horrors that come with losing sight of your life, your sense of self that cancer destroys. She said it felt like her bones could snap when she shifted in bed.

It wasn’t even a choice, what they did.

It was an understanding that he loved her enough to grant this for her. Before he did it, before he gave her the pills and then sat with her as her breath slowed and her eyelids fluttered then dropped, they talked for hours. About how she
wanted him to be happy
, about
how she didn’t want the others to know
(not about this anyway), about
how the only thing that mattered in life was family
, and he was hers, and so were the rest of them, even if they’d lost track.

He’d get booted from his residency if he were ever caught, and Bea made him promise that he’d slip out of the apartment and disappear before the nurse came for her shift. It would look natural, like it had been the leukemia all along. And since that’s how she wanted it, Colin obeyed. His fingers finally unwound from hers, only to wipe his unremitting tears, and only once he’d found a way to steady both his feet and his breath did he dare stand. He couldn’t leave her. He knew the nurse was due any moment, and yet he couldn’t leave her all alone, dead now, almost as if she were merely sleeping. Finally, he willed his legs to move, just a minute before he’d be caught, and took the apartment’s service stairs, two by two, vomiting in the alley between Park and Madison.

That’s love,
Colin thinks today.
Annie deserves that kind of devotion. Not this asshole shit of a husband who won’t stop texting, contrite only because he’s been caught.

Colin kept his end of the bargain and never told a soul, certainly never told any of the four others. Some mornings he woke up and couldn’t believe that he’d done it, like it was a mirage, like someone else’s life. Other mornings he woke up and made his peace with it, knowing she would have died either way, knowing that he granted her a bit of peace before she did. Bea always did things on her terms. That wasn’t any different. And still other mornings, he woke up and hated himself for not fighting harder to find a cure, to heal her, even though, of course, this was impossible.

But back then, they still believed in impossible things.

“I need something!” Annie announces, standing abruptly. “Who has something they can give me?”

“Anything,” Colin says, without thinking. Yes, that’s what he does for people he loves,
anything.
He was born to play hero; there’s nothing he does better than that.

Catherine, who has joined them from upstairs, coos, “I can make you some tea from the spice rack.”

“Tea,” says Colin. “Yes, let’s get her some tea. What else? Ann, what else do you need?”

“Something to kill Baxter with!”
Annie screeches. Then she adds, “I need another drink!”

Colin grants her the tequila bottle, because if there was ever a time for balls-out liquor, this is it, and if it’s really what she
needs
, then Colin, with his new figurative superhero cape tied firmly around his neck, will be her savior. “No! Something stronger! Who has something stronger? Give me something stronger!”

Colin reaches for her arm, to tug her back to the couch, to massage her shoulders, to placate her, to make this all better, maybe make it evaporate for a flicker of a second. But her arm slips through his hand. She’s already marching forward, on her way up the stairs like a thunderbolt to Lindy’s room.
Thwomp, thwomp, thwomp.
Taking them double-time.

The door creaks open above them, then slams so loudly the banister shakes. Colin rises to go rescue her, but Leon says, “Dude, let her be.”

And Catherine shrugs and says, “Yeah, I don’t know. This is a complete mess.” Owen appears to have drifted off to sleep. Colin flops back next to them.

He’ll save her later. This time, he’ll be sure the hero saves the damsel in distress.