In Twenty Years: A Novel

by Allison Winn Scotch

  “Maybe you should worry about you. I’m not worried about you.”

  “OK.”

  Annie rights her head, then scrambles to her feet. “Maybe we should all stop worrying about one another and worry about how fucked we are ourselves!”

  “Annie!” Catherine yelps, her tone a little too pierced, a little too cutting. She glances around, eyes darting.

  “What?” she yelps back.

  Colin stretches his hand up to her thigh and guides her back toward the grass. His fingers linger for a moment too long, and Annie’s not too drunk to notice.

  “That’s nice,” she slurs, right up against his shoulder. “You’re nice. You smell nice.”

  “Oh my God.” Catherine sighs.

  “Give her a break,” Owen says.

  “Give me a break,” she replies.

  “You two! Just shut up!” Annie says. “What is wrong with you?”

  “Nothing is wrong with us!”

  “Well, that’s what I can’t figure out,” Annie says too loudly, her arms spanned into a V, like wings. “If nothing is wrong with you, why the hell are you so unhappy?”

  “I’m not unhappy!” Catherine says, then catches Leon’s gaze. “What? You don’t know me! You don’t know us. You don’t even know her.” She pokes the air, a breeze floating through, as if she were poking Lindy.

  “No one knows anyone!” Annie shouts, and the rest of them clench their jaws, steel their eyes away from one another. But then Colin massages her neck, hard, deep into knots she didn’t even know had, and she quiets. Thirty-six hours ago, Annie couldn’t have imagined that Colin would be massaging her neck or that she wouldn’t be basically having an aneurysm that Colin is massaging her neck. But now, she deserves this. She deserves the tequila and the beer and the massage and how good he smells and the fact that for once, maybe someone really is going to rescue her like she deserves to be rescued.

  Oh God, yes.

  Colin.

  She’d wanted him to be her prince all along.

  31

  LINDY

  Lindy knew the Phillies cap would work for only so long. She kept it low the whole walk down to the river, taking her time, slowing her pace, just enjoying the sun setting behind her, the rays bouncing off the downtown buildings, then the water, then gone.

  She unplugs her headphones, turns off her phone.

  She tries to remember what it felt like when she was here and twenty and anonymous and maybe nothing special. But she had her friends, the crew of them, and she had her integrity. And as she wanders down to the Schuylkill, she realizes, as one often does in hindsight, that this had been enough for her then.

  And she had Annie. Even if she never had her in the way she wanted. It’s probably time to accept that it was never Annie’s fault in the first place. One of the first of a few small steps down the road to who she was then, closer to who she’d like to be now.

  She has to tell Leon about the baby. If she is ever going to even attempt to reclaim an ounce of her integrity, she has to tell him. And if she tells him, this makes it real, and if it’s real, she will keep it.

  She slows her stride, her breath deepening. She knows she can’t feel the baby kick this early, but she feels something in her belly. Maybe it’s just her nerves fluttering. Hell, maybe it’s that pretzel settling in. But Lindy steps forward and chooses to believe it’s the baby. She’s keeping it, of course. She almost laughs to herself at how deluded she was to convince herself otherwise. Well, she convinces herself of a lot of things. She won’t beat herself up for trying.

  She settles into her pace again. She’ll now also have to tell Tatiana. Although she may have burned down that bridge, it may be irreparable. She’ll miss T, of course, but she’ll recover. That’s who Lindy is. Or has become. After Bea, after Annie. Lindy could probably weasel her way out of it, but she finds that she has no energy to keep digging herself in deeper. No. It’s time to stop trying to outrun it, time to call Tatiana and explain. Apologize. Accept the consequences that accompany a royal fuckup. Which is quite possibly the last thing in the world she wants to do. But when was the last time she did something she truly, utterly didn’t want to do? She’d fled to Nashville rather than tell Annie the truth. Recording an album that she didn’t cowrite didn’t count. Sitting in a judge’s chair for $4 million didn’t count either.

  No. Something painful, something terrifying, something that she could write a song about because it unearthed a wound inside of her that might never heal.

  Bea’s funeral. That was the last time she’d done anything she truly couldn’t stomach. She hadn’t wanted to face the four of them; she hadn’t wanted to accept that Bea was really dead. But she went, she tried to forge peace, and when that went to shit, she resolved to never do such a thing again.

  Oh, Bea.

  She stops on the graffiti-covered bridge over the freeway, the traffic shooting back and forth below. People going on with their lives, to and fro, on to wherever, to whoever awaits them. She grasps the sides of the overpass, doubling over, a sudden cramp in her side, the ache of an old memory that she’d long ago erased. Bea. Lindy’s startled at her stream of tears, which come immediately, angrily, without warning. She mourned her friend a decade back and put all that to rest. So maybe that’s not what she mourns now. Maybe this isn’t just about Bea. It can’t be just about Bea; that would be the easy way to grieve. No, perhaps what she’s mourning is her old self, the younger her who lost so much along the way from then to now.

  No one would say that about her, of course. No one would ever think she had anything to grieve. You could read a million articles on Wikipedia, or Google her until the end of days, and no one would say that Lindy Armstrong didn’t have everything she ever dreamed of.

  But none of them would know what Lindy dreamed of.

  She thinks there’s a chance Leon and her friends might be here, at the battle of the bands—that if Leon wanted to find her, he’d know she’d gravitate toward a melody. It’s a small chance, sure, and if they’re not, she’ll hurry back to the house and tell him. Maybe she’s still biding her time—opting for a few more moments before she shifts the axis of everything. Because keeping the baby will, of course, turn her world upside down. Tatiana might roll over and play dead for most of their battles, but this humiliation will be too much. And Lindy knows it is indeed a humiliation. A terrible one. An unforgivable one. The tabloids will go bananas; Lindy’s publicist will go bananas. She’ll take it on the chin, she will. Because it won’t be as awful as what Tatiana will be taking on her chin. Lindy’s wronged a lot of people in small ways, she realizes this now to be true. But maybe no one as egregiously as this.

  She thinks of fucking Colin that night at the W after too much champagne and a plate full of marzipan-vanilla wedding cake. Maybe that one was just as awful too; it’s not like she didn’t know she was breaking Annie’s heart. She did. She slept with him anyway.

  Lindy squints across the lawn and tries to make out her old friends in the sea of the crowd. She’ll tell Tatiana to blame her, not Leon. The same she’d say to Annie if she’d ever had the gumption: This was on me. I wanted to wound you so you knew how it felt. I should have considered that we’re all wounded enough already.

  Yes, she’ll say the same to Tatiana, whom she’ll mourn because part of her loved T, but perhaps the whole of her didn’t. Lindy doesn’t know if she’s capable of loving the whole of anyone anymore. Maybe the baby. The little pea. She’ll start with that. She’ll say this to Tatiana too.

  But in a few minutes. She’ll say this to Tatiana in a few minutes. For now, she’d like to see an honest-to-God battle of the college bands, to remember what it felt like to play for the hell of playing—to be the best you could on that stage, on that night, in front of that crowd. And she wouldn’t mind seeing the fireworks afterward. She hasn’t enjoyed July 4th fireworks in years; she’s always working
, always busting her ass for a show, always shaking hands or speaking into a microphone or (most often) tossing back a shot or three to celebrate.

  But the lawn is dark, other than some cell phones and the dim light from the river lamps. More anonymous faces. Strangers. She can’t see any of them. Who knows if this is a wild-goose chase? Still, she feels like Leon could be here, that maybe he came to find her too. So she tilts up the Phillies cap and stands on her toes, hoping for a better view.

  Somehow, the hipster guy from the music room beat her down here and is at present inexplicably standing directly beside her. Unlike in the hallways of her old haunting grounds, he recognizes her immediately.

  “Holy shit!” He literally slaps his hands together. “Why didn’t you say who you were?”

  “Oh no. Shhhh. Please.”

  He has no regard for this at all. “Lindy Armstrong! Holy fuck! I didn’t know you went here. Why aren’t you, like, up on the wall at the studio? Now I can tell my parents, I can be Lindy goddamn Armstrong, and they can lay off my case!”

  “Shhhh, please. I’m really just looking for my friends. Please, I don’t want any attention.”

  “Pearson!” The dude is shouting at the direction of the stage perched by the water. “Professor Pearson!”

  “What?” Lindy whispers. “He’s here?”

  She’s suddenly mortified that he’ll think she came here for him, even though, of course, an hour or so she had gone in search of him.

  “Hell, yeah!” Hipster dude is easily excitable. “He organized this whole thing!”

  “Shit.” Lindy stubs the grass with her motorcycle boot and slams the Phillies hat back on her head. “Shit, shit, shit.”

  She swivels around to hightail it back toward campus, but hipster dude has a hand on her wrist, unafraid of personal space boundaries, and is tugging her toward the river, tugging her toward her past.

  “No, no, no,” she protests, literally digging in her heels. “I’m good. I’m OK.”

  “Are you shitting me? You gotta get up there! People will die to know that Lindy Armstrong is making a surprise appearance.”

  “No, I couldn’t. It’s not why—”

  He cuts her off. “Of course you can! Isn’t that the point you were trying to make back there? Of course you can! If you can, we all can. Lindy goddamn Armstrong! Holy crap!”

  Lindy sighs and acquiesces because, after all, this is what she does, this is who she is; this is why people value her. She’s Lindy goddamn Armstrong.

  Time to put on a show.

  32

  OWEN

  Owen feels a little guilty about how badly he screwed up the day. Maybe last night’s inebriation was forgivable—who doesn’t want to get a little hammered after years of politely sipping wine at an occasional stuffy dinner party?—but today, well, he royally tanked it. With the fight at the frat house. With the Jell-O shots. With everything. He’s not quite sure what he was thinking other than he wasn’t. Maybe he just wanted to touch the sun one last time like he thought he could back then.

  He thinks Catherine will forgive him for his mess, because he can’t imagine the alternative. He wants to, has to, needs to forge a bit of peace right now, sitting on the riverbank lawn. He says, “Cath, Cath,” trying to get her attention, but some guy keeps tapping the mic onstage, saying, “Testing, testing,” and then everyone shouts: “It’s working!” and Owen’s words float out into the air, swallowed up by the other noise. Owen wonders how much of a disaster this show is about to be; it doesn’t exactly seem like U2 at Soldier Field or even Lindy Armstrong at the United Center. He tries to catch Catherine’s eye again, to remind her of that U2 show, to make a joke about the couple they went with, a work colleague and his wife, who argued so much the entire night that he and Catherine later giggled that their theme song must have been “With or Without You.” Those two, they hated each other. Owen later heard that they’d split, but he’d left the firm by then, and maybe he should have reached out to see if his old friend was OK, but he didn’t. It felt like ancient history, like a different life.

  Catherine is focused on her phone, which chaps him. Goddamn it, why can’t she ever just enjoy herself, sink into the grass and be still and listen to the chatter and hum and buzz of life around her? When did she make the choice that work was more important than the rest of it?

  “Cathy,” he says. She doesn’t look up. Of course, maybe it’s not just work. It’s also possible that she’s just ignoring him, giving him the cold shoulder, something he’s grown used to recently. Neither of these two options brings him comfort.

  “Cathy!” he calls louder. He sees her eyes grow a little wider, her muscles clenching in her grip around the phone. She heard him. “Come on, stop working for one goddamn minute.”

  Annie lifts her head from Colin’s neck, her eyes a little unfocused, her cheeks a little flushed. “Yeah, come on, Catherine! Stop working for one goddamn minute.” She wiggles closer to Colin, then jolts up again. “There’s more to life than work!”

  “Like Facebook?” Catherine says, her fingers still tap-tap-tapping away. “Like Instagram?”

  Annie furrows her brow and juts her lower lip. Colin runs his thumb in figure eights over her hand and whispers something in her ear that Owen can’t detect but which must be pretty wonderful, because the lines across her forehead ease, the delight in the corners of her mouth returns, and she points her smile upward.

  “She’s right,” Owen says, facing toward the stage, a little irritated now at Catherine. “Annie’s right.” He clarifies because his mind is slippery from the painkillers and the beer, and he wants to be sure that he’s clear. “There’s more to life than work, Cathy. She took the words right out of my mouth.”

  He’s pretty sure he hears her snort. Why is he rehashing this again, here, now? Like she’s suddenly going to be entirely different from who she is, like this argument is going to end any differently than it always does?

  He winces and wishes the guy onstage banging on the mic would shut the hell up. His head hurts and his tooth hurts and frankly, everything about his being hurts right now. He stares toward the night sky and wonders what happened to his old office buddy, whose wife left him shortly after the U2 concert.

  Owen realizes you might think that back then, back whenever, it might feel like a different life, but it’s not, really. It’s all connected. U2 and this battle of the bands, then and now, twenty years ago and today. You might want to pretend you can reinvent yourself; you might want to give yourself that chance to wash it away into blank space, but you can’t. The past doesn’t change. That history doesn’t change. You don’t change unless you swim so hard upstream that you’re lucky not to exhaust yourself into drowning. It’s no surprise that no one else changes either.

  Maybe that’s why Bea brought them here. Maybe that’s what she’s trying to say.

  The past is who you are. The future is what you do with that.

  33

  CATHERINE

  Catherine can see that Owen is trying to get her attention. Annie and Colin are neck-deep in each other, googly-eyed and intoxicated, which irritates Catherine for no reason at all, and Owen keeps twisting his head around them, trying to catch her eye, murmuring her name, imploring her to stop working, and like, she doesn’t know, what? Party? Is that his way of apologizing?

  This is so Owen! Minimal effort, maximum expected reward.

  She gazes, instead, at her phone. Her team is keeping her abreast of the continued fallout from her outburst today: the memes are still coming, the YouTube hits growing by the hour. Her apology is the top story on People.com, but there’s no further word from Target. Most likely they’re strategizing on how to distance themselves from the absolutely catastrophic implosion of the nondomestic domestic goddess, Catherine Grant.

  Stop working. He wants her to stop working when what she really needs to do is scramble harder, faste
r, to try to fix this.

  My God, her husband has no clue about the complexities of her life, about how hard she’s tap dancing to salvage the company she’s sacrificed the past five years for. That might be the most insulting part of this whole mess—that she once loved all the things her company stood for. Loved testing homemade baby-food recipes for the kids. Loved inventing a toxin-free lemon cleanser. Loved mixing and melting a rainbow of hot waxes and molding them into lavender-scented candles for teacher gifts. That she might be thought of as a fraud, an interloper? Surely, yes, that is the most wretched part. Her mistake, she realizes, is that she had to be the best at all this, rather than simply enjoy it. In her quest to be on top, she turned into the biggest fraud of them all: someone who didn’t revel in the joy of it, someone who didn’t practice what she preached. That, she thinks, is the worst fraud of all.

  Her chin quivers, but she holds it steady. It’s hardly the most difficult thing she’s done today.

  Owen glances over one more time, and that’s it. She’s on her feet, sending him a clear signal. (She thinks.) She digs her heels in next to Leon.

  Try harder.

  She tries hard, for God’s sake! Maybe not with Owen, she realizes. But with everything else! Wouldn’t it be nice if he could carry her this one time, with this one thing?

  “Something you want to talk about?” Leon leans in.

  She folds her arms. “Does it look like there’s something I want to talk about?”

  He shrugs, then rises to his tiptoes in his unending search for Lindy.

  “It seems to me, since you’re out here chasing her, that you’re not the best one to give advice.” Catherine’s phone buzzes in her palm, and she can’t bring herself to look at it.

  “I never said I was the best one. Just one.”

  Catherine considers this and hates, then loves, then hates, that it makes so much sense.

  “I like being the best one, the most perfect.”