In Twenty Years: A Novel

by Allison Winn Scotch

  Annie grimaces. She hates that today has stirred all this up. She’d blocked out those hazy days with the pills, as if forgetting about them meant they never happened. She thinks of Bea, of when she was sick. She wishes she’d known Bea back then, in her youth, isolated with her illness, isolated with her frigid grandparents in their lonely, grand apartment. Bea didn’t like to talk about her illness much, said she never wanted to burden them with sad tales, with images of a girl who was so different back then from who she was now: vibrant, ready to scale a mountain. She already felt like a burden to her frigid grandparents, who never wanted to raise more children, who certainly didn’t have the emotional space to raise a sick girl.

  Annie surveys the waiting room: the buzz of the fluorescent lights, the click-clacking of clipboards and pens, the downcast faces and the groans of discomfort. If she’d known Bea back then, she would have taken her to chemo, if that’s what she needed. She would have brought her clear broth and ice chips and trashy novels and wacky nail polish to make her laugh. She would have picked up prescriptions, scheduled her next appointments. How could Bea perceive anything about that to be a burden? None of it would be burdensome; all of it is the beautiful weight of friendship, and Annie would have been honored to carry it on her back. Then she realizes something else: if Bea had misperceived her burdens, maybe Annie had misperceived her own trials. Maybe Baxter could have carried her on his back too.

  “I wish Bea were here,” she says to no one and all of them too.

  Catherine is chiding Colin for something like he’s a little kid, and he looks appropriately apologetic. Lindy is tucked into a corner, her back to both Annie and the waiting room, with Leon’s hands firmly grabbing her ass. The PDA makes Annie sick. Actually, it makes her think of Baxter, which subsequently makes her even sicker.

  “I wish Bea were here!” she says louder, but still, they’re all wrapped up in their little enclaves. Before she can implore them again, to pay attention to why they’re here and what matters, her cell buzzes.

  Finally! Baxter!

  “Hello?” She is breathless. There’s nothing wrong, nothing wrong in the world at all.

  “Hello?” A female voice. Annie scowls.

  “Hello?”

  Silence. Annie hears the beeping of an open car door, then a loud bang as it slams shut.

  Oh my God, Annie thinks. This is the call, the one you never hope to get. There has been a disaster, an emergency of epic proportions, and the police are calling to tell her that she never should have left Baxter and Gus, and this is her fault, and she should have known better, and why would she ever deserve to think she had a right to be happy? Or . . . maybe it’s Cici. Cici!

  “Are you sleeping with Lindy?” the voice says.

  “I’m-I’m sorry?” Annie stammers.

  “Are you sleeping with Lindy Armstrong?” The voice has gone from not particularly kind to cuts-like-a-knife sharp.

  “What? What on earth are you talking about?” Annie presses her finger to her ear. “I think you have the wrong number!”

  “I saw her on your Instagram, so tell me the truth: Are you fucking Lindy?”

  “I am not fucking Lindy!” Annie says too loudly, and two nurses turn and stare. “Why on earth would I be fucking Lindy? I am very happily married, thank you very much. So I do not appreciate the phone call! If this is some stupid reporter, please know that you have your facts wrong. Lindy is here with Leon, so leave me the hell alone!”

  Annie can’t believe she said that, but it felt pretty exciting, pretty goddamn thrilling, to stand on bravado—partially false bravado, but bravado all the same.

  She waits for a response, but the line has gone dead. Annie checks her phone to see if she missed a text or a “call waiting,” but it’s as empty as it’s been all day, so she watches Leon grope Lindy’s butt. But then Annie figures whatever happens next, she’ll stay out of it.

  Life is easier, after all, when Lindy’s not involved.

  “What the hell is wrong with you?”

  Annie has hit the hospital cafeteria on a coffee run. She’d like to be the type of person who’s useful in a crisis, so coffee seems like the right gesture, even though it’s shortly after five o’clock, and no one is in dire need of coffee. She’s not going to stand idly by and solely consider which filter would best illuminate Owen’s crises in her Facebook feed. (She already knows it would be X-Pro to better contrast the horrid hospital lighting.) In fact, she practically vows to go on an anti–social media kick for the rest of the day! Well, maybe not the whole rest of the day. She has to document the fireworks, after all. Maybe until this crisis is wrapped.

  She is tenuously balancing four coffees on a tray in one hand and cradling her phone in the other when she’s assaulted by Lindy’s vitriol.

  “What the hell is wrong with you?” Lindy repeats.

  “What is wrong with me? I went and got coffee.”

  Lindy swipes Annie’s phone from her hand.

  “Seriously, what the hell is wrong with you?”

  At least five drunk/bruised/facial-hair-torched patients have fallen quiet and are staring. Annie doesn’t know why Lindy hates her so much. Annie is the one who should hate Lindy. Annie is the one who hates Lindy!

  “I was just getting lattes. Here.”

  She offers the tray forward, which Lindy dismisses with a wave of her hand, nudging the tray off-kilter. Foam tumbles out of the little baby opening on all four lids.

  Leon slides next to Lindy, easing her back, guiding her by the elbow. “Babe, come on now.”

  “Oh, stop it, goddamn it, Leon! You don’t know anything about this. And don’t call me babe!”

  Leon looks rattled, his eyebrows raised, his jaw lowered. He turns to his right, which points him toward Catherine, who is still fully, heatedly engaged with Colin, who himself is staring at the too-bright lights on the ceiling and appears to be counting to five hundred in his head rather than absorb her diatribe. Leon makes another abrupt turn again—completing a full 360 degrees, then readjusts to the left and shuffles down the hallway toward the bathrooms.

  “Can I have my phone back, please?” Annie says.

  Her palm feels empty without its comforting weight. Also, Baxter may call at any second.

  “You are a goddamn idiot,” Lindy snaps, then slaps her own phone into Annie’s open hand. “Look. Look at what you’ve done.”

  Before Annie can even curl her fingers around it, Lindy’s phone buzzes, then buzzes, then buzzes again, the screen illuminating like bomb explosions, one after the other. Texts, a dozen of them, maybe more.

  Annie thrusts it back at Lindy.

  “Congratulations! You’re more important than I am. Do you feel better about yourself now? Let’s all bow at the feet of the great Lindy Armstrong!”

  “You’re still not getting it.” Lindy sighs like Annie truly is the biggest idiot she has ever encountered, and Lindy surely has seen her fair share of idiots. “You’re responsible for this!”

  “I’m responsible for . . . people texting you? What is wrong with people texting you? Isn’t that what you always wanted: popularity, people falling at your feet?” A little spittle flies out of her mouth and land’s on Lindy’s shoulder.

  “Do you not understand what happens when you push that little button that you like to push so much, the one that says, ‘POST’? You know what ‘POST’ means, correct?”

  Annie’s neck throbs, her heat rash spreading up across her collarbone. She doesn’t need Lindy to patronize her!

  “Of course I know what ‘POST’ means!”

  It occurs to her, the phone call, the conversation.

  “Then that is exactly how I—and the rest of the free world, and probably part of the unfree world—got it! Have you not heard of privacy settings? Actually, have you not heard of privacy at all?”

  Privacy settings. Oh.r />
  Annie had changed hers a few months back because she discovered that she got so many more “likes” when her Instagram was open to anyone. Also, what a thrill when a perfect stranger discovered something fascinating enough about her life to want to “like” it. So, yes, she had heard of privacy settings and chose to be utterly un-private.

  “I have heard of privacy settings,” she says flatly.

  Lindy mutters to herself as lights from her phone bounce off her face. “What on God’s great goddamn earth would compel you to tell Tatiana about Leon?”

  “Tatiana? Who? Wait, what?” Honestly, Annie had spoken so quickly, so roused in the moment, she hadn’t really remembered exactly what she’d said.

  “Obviously, you wanted to screw me! Thanks, well, you did it. Tatiana will officially probably never forgive me.”

  “Tatiana is a reporter?”

  “Stop acting like a total moron,” Lindy snaps. “Tatiana is my girlfriend.”

  Annie’s chin juts out. Oh. She’d read about the girlfriend in US Weekly, but figured it must have been a ruse, since she was witnessing the very real boyfriend in the flesh. And it’s not as if Lindy wasn’t known for ruses. Wasn’t known for bullshit. Also, since when did Lindy start dating women?

  “Since when do you like women?” Annie asks.

  “Give me a fucking break, Annie!” Lindy’s face turns the exact hue of decadent apple-red, and for a second, with her wild hair and worse temper, she reminds Annie of Ursula from The Little Mermaid. (Gus went through an endless Little Mermaid phase. Annie didn’t judge.)

  “I don’t think this is her fault,” says Colin.

  “She called me,” Annie squeals, her humiliation rounding the bend to tears. “And how did she get my number?”

  “She’s a goddamn celebrity publicist! Getting your number is probably the easiest thing she’s done all day!”

  “Honestly, Lindy, you can’t blame Annie here.” Colin again.

  “This was dumb,” Lindy says. “This was a dumb fucking idea. To come back here and think that we could all get along. Pretend like we actually like each other.”

  “I do like everyone,” Colin interjects. “Even when you act like a bitch.”

  “Oh, Colin,” Lindy steps close, too close, and Annie loses her breath, worried she’s going to kiss him and spark things up all over again. “Go fuck your beautiful fucking self.”

  Her motorcycle boots echo on the linoleum floor as she strides toward the exit.

  “Lindy really has a girlfriend? I thought . . . genuinely, I mean . . . I read about it but . . .” Annie says to Colin, who sighs deeply and drops his head like an anchor that’s simply too much to hold afloat for one second more. Then Annie remembers: “Lindy! You have my phone!”

  But Lindy is past the sliding glass doors now, so Annie chases after her, the doors whooshing to open, then easing closed behind her. She can hear Colin on her heels, then Catherine’s voice trailing them—“Hey, where is everyone going? What’s going on?”

  She catches Lindy on the sidewalk.

  “My phone. Can I please have it?”

  Lindy narrows her eyes, considering. Then she grabs it from her back pocket, holding it high, prepared to chuck it through the dusk air like a football. But then it buzzes, and Lindy, surprised, instinctively lowers it to eye level.

  “Incoming text from Hubs.”

  That was Annie’s screen name for Baxter.

  “I’ve been waiting on that! Give it to me.”

  Lindy holds up a finger. “Pause, please.”

  Then her eyes broaden like an open window, and even though the late-day sun casts shadows underneath the hovering trees, Annie and Colin (and Catherine too, as she’s dashed out to join them) can see the color drain from her face.

  “Is it Gus? Oh my God, is it Gus?”

  Annie thinks of all the things that could go wrong. She should have never left them! She took Baxter to be responsible, but anyone can make a mistake! Annie knows this! Annie knows this so well! Fires! Gas leaks! Car accidents! Locusts! Who knows? The list is long!

  “It’s not Gus,” Lindy says.

  She averts her eyes and limply passes the phone to Annie.

  No, it’s not Gus. It’s Baxter.

  Naked Baxter.

  Naked, full-frontal Baxter.

  Even without his face, she’d know it anywhere. He has three moles just below his belly button, aligned just so, a perfect arrow shooting south. On their honeymoon, Baxter joked that they were like Orion’s Belt—a gateway to all the stars in the galaxy.

  Underneath his Orion’s Belt, a message:

  We shouldn’t have. But . . . tonight again after the fireworks?

  22

  LINDY

  Well, fuck.

  Lindy is at a total loss. Which is at least the second time she’s been rendered emotionally incapacitated in the span of twenty-four hours.

  “Is that . . . is that . . .” Catherine is peering over Annie’s shoulder, trying to make sense of just what exactly she (and they) are staring at.

  No one answers.

  Did I just see a dick pic from Annie’s so-called perfect husband, who is clearly much less than perfect?

  Lindy tries to catch Colin’s eye, as if to share a collective WTF?!, but Colin is rubbing his chin, furrowing his brow, looking a little panicked himself.

  Annie palms the screen and clutches the phone against her chest.

  “Give me that.” Lindy reaches for Annie’s phone, swiping it from her limp hand. “No one should have to see that. Like . . . no thanks.”

  “Lindy,” Colin says, then stops.

  “Seriously, when did men decide that women want to see pictures of their dicks up close and personal?”

  “Be quiet, Lindy,” he says.

  “Why? I’m not wrong. You’re a guy, so you have no—”

  “Shut up, Lindy!”

  Shut up, Lindy! As if she’s responsible for this!

  “I’m trying to lighten the mood.”

  “It wasn’t funny.”

  “I’m trying to distract her.” She tuts. “She’s not the first person whose husband has sent a junk shot to another woman.”

  Well. There. She hadn’t meant to say it so succinctly, but she did. Now it’s out in the open. No pretending it’s anything else than what it is. She says to Annie, “If it makes you feel any better, it’s happened to me.”

  It doesn’t appear to make Annie feel any better, who’s currently walking in a teeny circle over and over and over again, as if she’s entered some sort of fugue state.

  “Seriously. It happened to me! Does anyone remember that time when I was dating the guitarist from the Strokes?”

  Colin and Catherine stare at her like they’ve been lobotomized. Or maybe like she has been lobotomized.

  Lindy shrugs. “Well, anyway, he did it. And I was just trying to be helpful.”

  “Shut up, Lindy!” Annie whispers, as close to seething as any of them have ever witnessed. She stops circling long enough to march over and snatch her phone back. Then it’s right back to perfectly round orbits on the sidewalk.

  Shut up, Lindy! From Annie? Lindy blows air in and out of her nostrils and clenches her fists into tiny, tight balls. Shut up, Lindy! How about you, Annie! How about you shut up? In fact, shouldn’t Lindy still be angry at Annie for unleashing this shit storm on her? Shouldn’t Lindy be the one telling Annie to piss the hell off? If memory serves, that’s exactly what she was doing—and still intends to do!—when her depraved husband accidentally blasted out a shot of his penis right into Lindy’s unsuspecting eyeballs! Lindy is the one who should be furious!

  “Listen! Don’t shoot the messenger here,” Lindy snaps. “Like I had any interest in seeing that disgusting close-up of your husband’s genitalia. I’m just trying to be nice!”


  “Well, you are terrible at nice,” Annie says.

  Lindy opens her mouth, because oh, does she have a million things to say to that, like: All I used to be was nice, kind, generous, loving to you, and a lot of good that did me, a lot of notice you paid to that! But suddenly Leon appears, having apparently stumbled out of the waiting room and into their dysfunctional huddle.

  Leon. What is Leon doing here?

  “Why are you here anyway?” she asks. Something wicked is rising up from her stomach, and it gurgles loudly. Lindy squashes it down, and then it occurs to her that this bubble of queasiness may be the baby, and that baby is saying that Leon is here because he’s the goddamn father.

  “Are we starting this again?” Leon sighs. “I can go. God knows, I will go. But you told me to stay.”

  Then Annie stops circling the pavement and starts weeping, so quietly at first that none of them notice, but then her shoulders are quivering, and then her body is shaking, and Lindy regrets her stupid anecdote about the Strokes’ guitarist.

  Lindy contemplates her own infidelity, her own broken promises, and knows she should check her cell to see how many of Tatiana’s calls she’s now missed; in other words, how many furious voice mails Tatiana has now left her. But even tone-deaf (not literally), Lindy recognizes that when your former best friend has been sent an inadvertent dick pic from her husband, which was clearly meant for someone else, now is not the exact moment to focus on all the ways your own personal life is going to hell.

  Annie’s phone hums to life just then. She has it set on this cutesy ringtone that Lindy pinpoints as an electronic version of Pharrell’s “Happy.”

  “It’s Baxter,” Annie whispers.