In Twenty Years: A Novel

by Allison Winn Scotch

  They married a month later at city hall.

  Afterward, she thought about e-mailing Bea to tell her the news. Her old friend would be so thrilled for her. Until she remembered that she couldn’t e-mail her at all.

  They took a real honeymoon to Bora Bora—Annie’s second stamp on her passport, and one of the women who was servicing their hut confided to Annie that this was the fertility season, that you couldn’t leave Bora Bora without a baby. Baxter overheard from the patio, emerged from behind the sliding glass door, and said: “Ooh, well, let’s not leave Bora Bora without a baby.”

  Annie giggled and agreed, even though Bea, whom she thought of during her lingering walks on the endless beach while gazing up at the impossibly vast, starry sky from the porch of their thatched-roof bungalow, might have told her to slow down, that there wasn’t any rush, that a lot had already shifted for Annie (and Baxter) in just a few short months. What was the hurry? (Not that Bea ever slowed down on her own: Annie remembered this as well. But she was wiser about others than about herself, kinder to others than to herself too.)

  Three weeks after they jetted back to reality, Baxter was already logging dawn-until-midnight hours at the office, chasing a partnership—having long forgotten about Bora Bora’s fertility season.

  And then Annie started puking. She figured it was from the stress of redoing Baxter’s apartment, making it her own; of leaving her job and filling the endless hours with homemade (but disastrous) dinners; of occasionally hearing her former best friend, Lindy Armstrong, on the radio when she flipped the dial.

  A week later, she realized it wasn’t stress. She sat with her underwear around her ankles and stared at the test for a good half hour. How could it be? she thought. Only five months ago I was a party of one.

  Five months changed everything, though. Annie again thought about Bea—the tops of her legs damp from her fallen tears, and she thought about all the ways her life, and Bea’s life, and all of their lives, could have taken different turns. If she’d slept with Colin freshman year; if Colin hadn’t slept with Lindy at the wedding; if they hadn’t gone to Bora Bora during fertility season; if, in whatever manner she’d died, Bea simply hadn’t.

  Then she blew her nose, pulled up her panties, and reapplied her eyeliner and mascara. She was going to be someone’s mother. And she was going to be the best mother this child could ever dream of. There wasn’t any space left for lingering what-ifs. It was time to seal those scars up entirely.

  Tonight, in Colin’s old bed, Annie feels her eyelids dropping lower, heavier, willing themselves shut. She wants one more moment like this, though, in case it never happens again, just so she can be sure she didn’t dream it.

  Annie rolls to her side and ever-so-softly, as if she almost isn’t there, runs her hand over the span of Colin’s back, winding down the butterfly of his shoulder blades, onto his waist, which cuts like a V into his Scottie boxers.

  She tilts herself away because that’s enough, that’s all it can be. Baxter got more than this with his affairs, but she isn’t Baxter.

  Then she shuts her eyes for real this time and tries to not consider the what-ifs that she thought she’d buried ten years ago when Gus was born. It’s harder now, though, and frankly, she’s relieved when sleep finally comes.

  13

  COLIN

  Colin sleeps soundly and wakes almost refreshed, relieved not to have dreamed of Bea. He used to all the time after she died. He dreamed of her falling off mountains in Maui, of her melting from acid rain in Bangkok, of plane crashes into the Atlantic, and car wrecks on the streets of London . . . and grim reapers from the world over that he never seemed to shake. They became less frequent after a year or so, but never quite disappeared entirely. They’d find him when he was least prepared, when his conscious mind was certain he was over it, but his subconscious mind wasn’t ready to forget.

  Annie is breathing deeply beside him, a spare pillow flung over her head. He smiles because Annie makes him laugh, even all these years later, even though she doesn’t mean to, never meant to. He’s surprised to find himself comforted with her here next to him, like a puzzle piece that fits in unexpectedly.

  She was always sweet, Annie. He remembers she was a virgin back then, and how he thought that was sweet too. Not weird like he thought she might think it was. Innocent. Colin hadn’t known that many girls from his high school who were still innocent in college, not that he was complaining. (He had “de-innocented” several of them.) But even at eighteen, he wasn’t such a throbbing hormone that he couldn’t recognize he didn’t want to be the one to screw Annie up. Not that sex would have screwed her up. He didn’t mean it like that. But he wanted to do right by her, treat her differently than maybe he would have someone else: he didn’t want a lifetime with someone—he was a freshman in college, jeez!—and he didn’t think sex was anything other than really pretty fucking fun. But he thought she might. She was wide-eyed enough to think it might mean everything, and Colin didn’t have everything to give.

  So rather than do the thing that a million of his buddies would do—sleep with her anyway—he broke up with her. It wasn’t that hard. He shouldn’t get too much credit. He wasn’t trying to earn accolades for not being the dick who took her virginity and dumped her. Besides, even if he had his doubts and changed his mind, the fire broke out that same night, and that’s when he realized it was Bea. Bea. She shared her story—orphan, cancer, broken back, for God’s sake—and it was love. Like the kind that strikes the hapless high school virgin in the movies. A lightning bolt.

  He told her a few weeks later: they split a bottle of Absolut in the student lounge, and he got handsy and tried to kiss her, but she pushed him off efficiently, somehow managing not to humiliate him.

  “I don’t want a fixer,” she said.

  “Who said I’m a fixer?”

  “Me. I’m saying it. You’re premed. You want to be a neurosurgeon! I told you my story, and you want to be my prince.” She smiled that crooked smile. “Who said I’m interested in a prince?”

  “I would be such a good prince, though,” he said. It was the type of line that usually worked.

  But she bit back a grin and shook her head, and they settled in as friends, then best friends. That didn’t stop him from loving her, though. Never stopped him. Later, in those last few days they spent together in her apartment, she told him it was also because of Annie: that she simply couldn’t, would never betray Annie. And he started crying then, and she did too, not because of missed opportunities, that they were destined to be soul mates, blah, blah, blah, but because that’s who Bea was: loyal to the end, but correct in her allegiances too. She should have chosen Annie back then. He loved her all the more, in that moment, for doing so.

  No woman had even come close to Bea since. He didn’t tell the others tonight, didn’t feel like getting into it, but there had been the failed engagement, at least two pregnancy scares, and some less-than-pleasant interactions with an on-call nurse from time to time.

  He really thought that Vivian, the last one, would stick. Fucking A, he proposed, which is what she said she wanted! But then she was going on and on about how he wasn’t “fully there,” which he didn’t understand because, goddamn it, all he did was be there. “I’m here! What else do you want from me?” But Vivian didn’t think he was “there, like, enough.”

  “I can just see it in your eyes,” she said before she grabbed her clothes from the top two drawers in his dresser. “You’re not there.”

  “I am,” he said, but maybe not forcefully enough. “I’m fucking there!”

  “Here,” she said, and she pointed to her heart, and frankly, Colin almost laughed. But she was a yoga instructor, and a revered one, and took that sort of shit seriously. “You’re not here.”

  Maybe he wasn’t. Hell, he didn’t know. He let her slip out of the bedroom and out the door, so he couldn’t have been as there, here, wha
tever, as he thought.

  He just didn’t really think he’d be forty and still sleeping around. Didn’t think he wouldn’t have found someone he’d love more than Bea by now.

  The actresses he dates bore him. They don’t eat. They don’t read the news.

  He’s not so sure he finds being the Boob King of Los Angeles particularly satisfying.

  Maybe he’d like a kid someday.

  Yes, Colin thinks. Maybe I would.

  Annie snores softly, muffled underneath the pillow. He rolls onto his back and worries about the lies he told the four of them just yesterday. Thirteen years ago and then again yesterday. He’d like to come clean, relieve his guilt, let them judge him—or ease his burden, if they’re feeling generous. But it’s been so long now, Bea has been dead for so long now, he doesn’t even know where to begin, how to tell them the truth about how she died. Also, he already bears plenty of responsibility for the wedding fiasco; he’d rather not double-down on the blame, the pointed fingers, the culpability. Of course, if he could, he would rewind and retract the stupidity of the wedding, but he can’t. Bea forgave him, and that’s what mattered most.

  He groans and pushes himself up on his elbows. He doesn’t want to contemplate any of this: the past and all the ways it still haunts him, or the future and all the ways it hasn’t gone as expected. He really just wants a superstrong cup of coffee and maybe some breakfast to settle his stomach. Something smells good in the kitchen, smells like it used to two decades ago. And like an easily distracted dog, he chases the scent that pleases his immediate senses. So he eases out of bed, then folds the comforter back over Annie, and rises to greet the day.

  14

  CATHERINE

  Catherine woke this morning with Lindy’s white-noise machine cooing, and she suddenly couldn’t remember when she’d last made French toast. When they lived here, it was something of a ritual, at least on the Sundays when they all found themselves in their own beds, which was less frequently than you’d think (mostly on account of Lindy and Colin skewing the odds). Back then, Catherine thought of it like a family sitting down together over Sunday dinner, the irony being that now, her family rarely sat down for Sunday dinner, and certainly she’s not mastering French toast in the mornings. The closest she’s come is whipping up brunch food on Good Morning America, but she really just whisked some ingredients together on-screen before magically presenting the finished plate. But honest-to-God homemade French toast, made with care and thought and love . . .

  When was the last time she made that?

  Not for Mason or Penelope in ages. Not for Owen either.

  So she resolved to make perfect French toast. She stared at the ceiling from Lindy’s bed and thought, Today, I’m going to be who I was when I was twenty, twenty-one. And made all sorts of things for my friends here—in this house, under this roof—that were filled with care and thought and love.

  She ran to Wawa for ingredients while the others slept, and then she cracked the eggs and melted the butter and added in a splash of vanilla extract that she found in the spice drawer and poured in just the right amount of milk. The slices sizzled on the pan. Yes, today’s the day that I remember why I started doing this in the first place.

  Also, she knew that the scent of French toast would wake them all—it used to back then too, when they’d emerge from closed doors one by one, bed-headed and sleepy, but hungry and thankful for her efforts. She’d drifted in and out of sleep in those few precious hours since she’d been granted a reprieve from Owen’s snoring, thinking of Bea, thinking of her wedding, of how poorly she behaved, then even more poorly at the funeral. She inhaled the aroma wafting from the pan and imagined that Bea was somehow looking down on her approvingly, like this particular French toast was absolution for the things set in motion that day at the brunch. As if this particular French toast would unite the five of them again.

  Twenty years ago, Catherine never believed she quite got the French toast right. She tore recipe after recipe out of magazines, xeroxed them from cookbooks borrowed from the library. There were a surprising number of tweaks to French toast that elevated it from decent to delectable—orange rind, lemon zest, jumbo eggs, nutmeg—and Catherine never trusted her own instincts enough not to heed someone else’s formula. Bea would sit with her sometimes while she cooked, dragging a chair over from the dining table whose paint job Catherine was equally dissatisfied with, and ooh and aah about the mouthwatering scent, about Catherine’s natural ability in the kitchen (“at everything!” Bea would marvel—“I’m just so terrible with my hands!”). But Catherine would shake her head and reread whatever egg- or milk-spattered recipe lay on the counter, and keep tweaking. She was never as good as she hoped. Never good enough, certainly. Not good enough to gamble and attempt a go from scratch.

  On this morning, Colin pops his head up the stairs first, pulling a Stanford T-shirt over his chest. He hasn’t changed much, Catherine assesses. Some finer lines around his eyes, but other than that, it’s as if time froze for him. He is simple. He is happy. He is unburdened.

  It must be nice to be unburdened. To not have readers to satisfy, board members to please, Target to placate.

  She slides him a plate, and he growls, pleased. His fork scrapes against the plate before she can even set it down.

  “You’d better have saved some for me!” Lindy barrels down the steps, coming from who knows whose room. Had she slept in Bea’s bed?

  “French toast! I’d know that smell anywhere.”

  A smoldering hipster-looking guy bounds down the steps behind her, and Catherine narrows her eyes, contemplating how on earth Lindy has managed to land a one-night stand, and just how typical that was. And then immediately regrets her judgment—What if Bea is watching us? What if I could have done things differently?—because she had earlier resolved to truly make amends. She drops two slices on another plate and offers it to Lindy. See, Bea? I’m trying!

  Smoldering hipster-looking guy tears off a corner of the top piece and chews slowly, thoughtfully. “Not so bad,” he says, his head cocked, his brow wrinkled. “But French toast is my specialty.” He winks at her, and Catherine sags.

  “Leon.” He extends his hand. “I’m just playing.”

  Catherine frowns. “Catherine. This is five-star French toast. It’s reader approved.”

  “Hey, man.” Colin bobs his head. “Colin. We didn’t officially meet last night.” He offers him another slice with his fingers, like this five-star French toast is disposable, like it’s not a goddamn work of art.

  Lindy grabs it and swallows it in three bites. Not how French toast is meant to be savored.

  “Do I smell French toast?” Annie sings from the basement. God bless her, Annie is going to make this right, appreciate it for all it’s worth. She bounces up the steps, her ponytail swinging behind her. “Oooh, Catherine! My favorite, you shouldn’t have!”

  Catherine waves her hand, like, no biggie. She hands a plate to Annie, who sits beside Colin but avoids his eyes and instead focuses—intently—on cutting her toast into perfect symmetrical squares before spearing them with a fork and relishing each bite.

  “Oooh, this is heaven,” she says. “Is this your old recipe? Is it on your site?” She turns to the others. “I check her site every day. She has the best holiday suggestions. I use them all the time for the PTA.”

  Her site! In the early-morning haze of revisiting her grief over Bea and outrunning Owen’s snoring, she’d forgotten. She never forgets about her site! And today, of all days, with the critical Fourth of July spread, the one Target would be eyeballing, the one with the stills from the HGTV pilot that surely their executives will be mulling over too. After the disaster of the test run, she’d insisted on a full redo with her own ideas (well, not her own ideas exactly: she hadn’t quite copied anything expressly, just took inspiration, maybe, and some tiny creative liberties from a few unknown mom-and-pop blogs that no
one would have heard of, no one would have ever seen!). She tried to manage the shoot from soup to nuts, 100 percent, but what with the board prep and the increasingly frantic e-mails from her CFO, she inevitably had to leave some of the details to Fred.

  “Oh!” She claps her hands and pulls out her phone. “I was having so much fun with the French toast that I completely forgot! We have a new photo spread up today.” She wipes her hands on a dish towel and hopes the others don’t detect the worry that surely spreads like a shadow across her face.

  Annie has her mouth full, so she gestures to the chair beside her, and Catherine sits with her phone aloft in her palm, while Leon inexplicably hovers over her shoulder too.

  “Leon,” he says to Annie.

  “That’s Annie,” Lindy says before Annie has a chance to swallow her bite and reply.

  Catherine is immediately sure she’ll be caught this time; that this will be it: her cover will be flambéed. Her eyes dart back and forth over the glossy shots, her thumb and pointer finger enlarging the screen for a better view. She’d been at the shoot, of course, the bulk of it anyway—present and accounted for (physically at least)—but now she can see that some small details slipped, even under her own watch. A few of the elements knock it out of the park: the towering centerpieces crafted out of cupcakes, mimicking an exploding firework; handwoven tablecloths braided like the American flag (found on a teeny-tiny homemade site that hadn’t appeared to be updated in seven months!); a giant Liberty Bell piñata (which Catherine personally papier-mâchéd after stumbling upon an image from a homeschooling blog out of Iowa), and a Statue of Liberty replica carved out of watermelon (discovered deep in the bowels of Pinterest).