In Twenty Years: A Novel (11 page)

So it is Lindy who once again detects Annie’s horrified delight or delighted horror that Colin is lingering, half-nude, in the living room, much as he used to when they were in college. Lindy never really liked Colin, meaning she never really had the hots for him like Annie did. She recognized, of course, that he was attractive in a way that was universal—a Malibu surf bum, a Ken doll—but generic was never her thing. She hadn’t even really considered sleeping with him until Catherine and Owen’s wedding, when Annie was still pie-eyed over him, and Lindy couldn’t take it for one more second.

Colin rose to make a toast at the reception, holding his champagne glass aloft, rambling on about some bullshit about first love, lasting love, forever love . . .
and let’s raise a glass to Catherine and Owen,
and Lindy glanced to Annie across the table, wondering if she could catch her gaze, wondering if finally Annie would see what she saw, feel what she felt, but all Annie saw was Colin. Her chin tilted upward, her eyes lit by stars, her skin flushed like he’d been speaking of her in his toast, not their old friends.

And that was that. Lindy knew. Lindy got it.

It would never be her.

Why wouldn’t Annie notice her the way she noticed Colin?

After so many years of friendship, shared spaces, shared secrets, why wasn’t Annie a little bit in love with her too?

They’d lived together for four years in Manhattan. How hadn’t Annie known? Why hadn’t she reciprocated her feelings? Wasn’t Lindy good enough, wasn’t she sexy enough, wasn’t she kind enough, talented enough?

So, fuck Annie. Fuck her stupid crush and her stupid view of love and her stupid inability to see Lindy in the ways she needed Annie to see her. And so, when Colin left to hail a cab back to the W, Lindy left to hail a cab back to the W too. And thus it only made sense that they share a ride, and since they were both alone and intoxicated, and Lindy couldn’t find her key card to the room she was sharing with Annie, they wobbled back to Colin’s and ended up fucking.

Bea was in the elevator the next morning when they stepped in as a pair, as a couple, all of them late to the postwedding brunch. Bea assessed Lindy’s stubble-chapped cheeks and the shadows under Colin’s eyes and said nothing, but Lindy knew she was judging her, knew she’d crossed a line that she would judge herself for, if she judged herself for anything, which, perhaps from that moment forward, she no longer did. They stared up at the elevator lights in silence, ticking down floor by floor, and Lindy thought of a million excuses to absolve her role, to explain it to Bea, but mostly it was that this was Annie’s fault, and maybe she should have woken up and realized what was coming to her. Lindy was just giving as good as she got, giving Annie what she deserved. Reciprocating the hurt.

Annie figured it out piece by piece, or perhaps she knew faster than she let on. Maybe she caught a glimpse of them as the doors dinged open and the air still brimmed with intimacy; maybe she saw it in the way Lindy leaned in and stabbed Colin’s omelet for a bite after they surfed the buffet; maybe they still smelled of pheromones. Or maybe, actually, Annie was smarter than they all gave her credit for. Or, just as likely, it was that Lindy hadn’t returned to their room the night before. Probably a little bit of each.

Lindy wanted her to know. To show her what she could have had, what she was missing. She hadn’t showered that morning on purpose, hoping the scent of Colin’s sweat still lingered, that her bed-head hair betrayed her in exactly the way she wanted.

Lindy’s plan went as flawlessly as she could have hoped. Annie dabbed her lips with her napkin and pushed her chair back so abruptly that it toppled over, and then simply left. Bea called after her, even chased her down to the concierge desk. Lindy dropped her fork with a bit of uneaten omelet still stuck in its tines and refused to watch, wouldn’t even grant Annie that attention. She didn’t rise to say good-bye, didn’t wave; she didn’t do much of anything other than wonder why her immense sense of self-satisfaction was already ebbing from her veins, like someone had pricked a finger just microscopically enough to know there’d been a puncture, but not big enough to see the cut on the surface of the skin.

Catherine exploded on her just a few minutes later, and then Bea, who returned eventually and whom Lindy always thought of as an ally, said,
“I can’t . . . I don’t . . . I need a minute with this, Linds.”
She shook her head, like Lindy sometimes sensed her little sister did while on the phone with her.

And Lindy said, “Great, so let’s all just take Annie’s side!”

“This is pretty hard to defend,” Bea said, like she was reading a police report. “You knew there was a line there, Lindy. We all knew there was a line there.”

“So because poor little Annie wanted Colin, I wasn’t allowed to have some fun too?”

“Just . . . stop.”
Bea held up her hands.
“Stop talking. Stop making this worse.”
She chewed on the corner of her mouth and said,
“You have to make this right. If you don’t . . .”
She dropped her shoulders and looked Lindy square in the eye. It wasn’t a threat; it was a revelation of disappointment, and Lindy felt her face flush. Bea was their collective conscience, their Northern Star, and in Lindy’s quest to hurt Annie, she hadn’t considered (of course she hadn’t) how much she’d bruise the others too, and how much it would hurt to bruise them.

So Lindy flew back to New York the next morning, springing into their apartment, poised to apologize, poised to repent, and maybe even offer an honest explanation for her betrayal.
I wanted you.
But Annie never showed up that night, and by the next morning Lindy’s regret was replaced with indignation. She’d had nibbles down in Nashville: some good gigs, an offer to work on a demo with a hot producer, so she stuffed a hodgepodge of ripped jeans and Doc Martens and flowy dresses and lacy bras into three suitcases, frantic to get out as quickly as she could. Then she hailed a cab to LaGuardia and charged a one-way ticket to Tennessee. She tilted her head against the window as the plane lifted higher, the sprawling concrete of New York getting smaller and smaller, farther and farther behind, and Lindy decided that she was done trying to charm Annie Eisley, done trying to love her. That she didn’t owe Annie Eisley one fucking thing.

This morning, at 5:30 a.m., Lindy detects the hint of the twenty-year-old Annie in the blush of her cheeks, as she sits atop the steps and folds herself over her knees. She sees her old friend, and for the first time since those weeks after Catherine and Owen’s wedding, wonders what might have happened if she’d made different choices. If she hadn’t screwed Colin. If she’d admitted aloud that she knew Annie was in love with him. If she’d also admitted that she was in love with Annie.

If she’d been honest, would that have changed anything? Everything?

“Colin can’t hear the snoring in the basement,” Lindy says to Annie. “Go sleep down there.”

She means it kindly—a peace offering almost, a gesture to say,
“He’s not mine,”
though she knows, of course, that Annie is married, and knows, as well, that Colin is complicated for her old friend. So maybe Lindy means it only a little kindly. Maybe it’s actually a taunt, really. Which isn’t a kindness at all.

Annie’s face goes slack, though she tries to quickly recover.

“Oh no. Oh no. I couldn’t.”

Colin shrugs. “We’re old friends now, Ann. It’s all good.”

Lindy narrows her eyes and wonders if this is Colin’s way of apologizing for his own behavior at the wedding. It does take two to tango, after all. That morning at brunch when Bea was done admonishing Lindy, she dragged Colin into a corner by his elbow, and Lindy watched his face morph from neutral to confusion to gloom. He hadn’t realized he’d devastated Annie the way Lindy had, but he’d done it all the same. Consequences. Colin was perhaps more adept at accepting them than Lindy.

“I just . . . that’s OK.”

“I won’t peek if you don’t.” Colin laughs.

“I
wouldn’t
peek!”

“
I
would peek,” Lindy says. “But I wouldn’t need to, thanks to your fly.”

Colin’s right hand covers his boxers again; his uses his left hand to flip Lindy off.

“I’m going back to sleep. Ann, come on if you want.”

Annie sits horrified, her face a frozen statue that reminds Lindy of some medieval gargoyle. Maybe Annie really can’t survive on three hours of sleep: it turns her into a gnome.

“It was a bad idea,” Lindy says. “Forget it.”

But then Annie does something that surprises Lindy completely (who frankly thought she was unable to be surprised).

Annie straightens out the wrinkles in her floral cotton pajamas and says, “Well, all right, then. We’re grown-ups. I can behave like a grown-up. Besides, I have Baxter. I don’t need to peek.” And she marches all the way down to the basement, shutting the door loudly behind her. An exclamation mark, a victory crow, her own middle finger.

Lindy frowns, then smiles, then frowns again.

If Annie Eisley, now Cunningham, can surprise her, then anything is possible.

12

ANNIE

Annie can’t believe she’s down here, in Colin’s basement, sleeping beside him. Well, sleeping is a figurative term, because she isn’t. Instead, she’s lying rigidly next to him, her body like a wood plank, listening to the steady sound of his breathing, thinking,
I cannot believe that I’m down here, in Colin’s basement. OMG! Nothing good comes from being down in Colin’s basement!

Owen and Lindy used to joke about the parade of girls who would tiptoe up the steps, slink out the door—the tank tops and miniskirts and baby-doll dresses and high-waisted Levi’s disheveled from the hours spent in a ball at the foot of the bed.

“We should keep a Polaroid camera by the door,” Lindy once suggested. “Create a mural in the hallway with every last one of them. So avant-garde.”

“We should quiz him on how many names he remembers.” Owen laughed.

“We should hold a lineup, police-style, and see who he can identify,” Lindy howled.

And now Annie is down here—next to him! Not that she’ll be a Polaroid on the wall, another name he can’t remember.

She can’t believe she agreed to Lindy’s suggestion about the sleeping arrangement. She hadn’t thought about it clearly, really. What she actually thought of were those two stupid letters:
xo
, and in a brief fit of lucid rage, realized how idiotic she was being, enveloping herself in her naïveté, like she could discount Baxter’s indiscretions
again
when this time around she wasn’t at fault! No, those letters
weren’t
harmless,
weren’t
something silly and easily explainable, and
weren’t
something she could ignore. Well, maybe she could have ignored it if Lindy weren’t sitting on their old couch, eyes like lasers upon her, challenging Annie to a bit of a grudge match. None of this occurred to Annie consciously, but on some level it must have passed through her cerebral space, because before she had time to think about it, she was tromping down the steps, then down another flight, and opening and closing the door behind her. The Annie from before—wife to Baxter, mother to Gus, PTA ladder-climber—would never have done this. But then the Annie from before would have quietly disregarded that pesky
xo
too.

She pulls the navy duvet up to her neck and lets her head ease back on a pillow, and there’s no turning back from there. She isn’t about to give Lindy the satisfaction of retreating, and frankly, she’s a little bit electrified by this. A lot electrified. Maybe this is why Baxter is so casual with his fidelity! There’s something wholly titillating about the possibility of the unknown here, in this old room, and for an instant Annie forgives him, her husband, for being duped by this immediate, pulse-pounding gratification. That forgiveness evaporates quickly, but leaves enough space for Annie to forgive herself for lying here, to excuse herself from considering the notion of what could come next.

Why should Baxter be the one who has all the fun?

Annie stares into the blackness of the room, her eyes darting back and forth, her mind racing even faster. Not that infidelity has ever sounded fun to Annie before this, but with Colin, well, yes, it sounds a little exciting—a little bit like driving a race car in the goddamn Grand Prix (or even just in Baxter’s Porsche), like flying to the moon and back.
Maybe I deserve to fly to the moon and back every once in a while too.

Colin sighs in his sleep, not kept awake by his own moral debate of making moves on Annie, not lost in his fantasy of flying to the moon and back with her. No, he sleeps soundly, which punctures Annie just enough that she can almost feel the piercing in her heart.

Her crush planted its roots so long ago, Annie is almost embarrassed that she’s still hung up on it. It’s childish, really. And it’s gross now, she thinks. He’s been with Lindy, and it was no secret that he would have hung the moon for Bea way back when.

She met Colin the very first day of school. She was assigned to the freshman dorm, the Quad, a rambling three-story spread of crimson bricks that spanned two blocks of campus. Annie and Colin (and the rest of them too) had the misfortune of getting rooms in the unrenovated section: the overhead lighting flickered; the door hinges creaked; the dodgy linoleum floor chilled your feet, so all the girls shuffled around in these shearling slippers that Annie had never seen in Texas and couldn’t afford even if she had. After move-in day, Annie couldn’t wait to rinse the sweat residue off every inch of her body (a heat wave was passing through Philadelphia, and their wing of the dorm lacked air-conditioning), so she snapped off the tags to her new, never-been-washed towels and cranked on the shower. But the hot water took forever, and while the pipes whined and moaned and she stood there waiting, sweating, waiting, sweating, Colin popped through the door in a towel of his own.

Annie hadn’t realized the bathrooms were unisex.

Her jaw slackened, her sweat glands sped up though they were already in overdrive, and her cheeks flared emergency red. Annie had never had a high school boyfriend, had never let a man see her breasts, had never seen a naked man up close either. (She once inadvertently opened the bathroom door when one of her mother’s boyfriends was using the toilet and recoiled in mortification, but that wasn’t the same thing. Her mom’s parade of men and their flimsy commitments, their disappearing acts, steered Annie off boys through puberty—not that boys were flocking to her or she had to beat them off with a stick or anything.)

“Hey,” Colin said, not particularly put out by his near-nakedness and her proximity.

“Hey,” Annie warbled,
very
put out.

“I’m Colin.” He extended a hand, and Annie worried for a brief moment that his towel would drop, like it sometimes did in the movies. But it didn’t, and eventually the steam rose from the shower, and Annie indelicately weaseled her way in, removing her towel and blindly thrusting out an arm to find the hanging hook, only after she’d sealed the curtain as close to shut as she could. And it turned out that Colin must not have found her too horrifying, stranded there like a mute mouse in an off-brand towel from Marshall’s, because the next night, after everyone in their dorm shuttled to a mandatory group-bonding Phillies game and back again, he invited her into his neighboring room (his roommate was out, and Lindy, Annie’s roommate—still a stranger then—wasn’t about to be a third wheel). She tried to make herself as inconspicuous as possible while seated cross-legged on his bed, but he kissed her anyway.

She was still a virgin then (obviously), and she never let him go all the way. It wasn’t like she didn’t
want
him. She did. But she worried she’d do it wrong; she worried he’d laugh at her; she worried that she’d sleep with him and he’d discover that she was just like her mom: white trash, cheap, flimsy, not the type of girl to take home to his own mother. So for two months she stopped him. And he was kind and respectful, of course. Although his breathing was hard when she pushed him off her, his hand would always flop atop his forehead like he was flushed with fever. Eventually, he just stopped being in his room at night when she would swing by unannounced, and he wasn’t waiting for her in the cafeteria when she would stand with her tray in hand, casting about for a place to sit beside him.

The whole thing had lasted only two months; it shouldn’t have mattered the way it mattered to Annie for so long—too long, decades. But still, even now, as she lies beside him, the heat from his skin close enough to warm hers, she wonders whether that was why he ended it: if she’d given herself up to him, slept with him, let her become his completely, would she have had more of a chance? Would
they
have had more of a chance? Or was it that he knew deep down she
wasn’t
the type of girl he considered worthy, the type of girl whom his mother would approve of? That she was the type of girl whose mom bought Twinkies for the homemade bake sale?

The night Colin officially ended it (“It’s not you, it’s me”), the fire alarms blared on at three in the morning. Lindy, with whom Annie had forged an unexpected friendship, had convinced Annie that alcohol was the only way she’d sleep after heartbreak. They were dead asleep, practically catatonic, when Bea, their next-door neighbor, banged on their door until Lindy stumbled forward, opened it, and said, “What?”

Lindy winced against the piercing alarm and squinted toward the whirling red lights that bounced off the box on the ceiling. “Oh, shit.”

Then their RA ran by, noticeably unpoised, and shouted, “This isn’t a drill! Fire on the second floor! Get out!”

Lindy and Bea roused Annie, pulled sweatpants over her legs, stuffed her feet into sneakers, and scampered with her down the steps, out the first-floor exit. Colin was already outside, standing with Owen (who also lived on their hall and had quickly become Colin’s sidekick/wingman/bosom buddy), and Bea waved, unaware of the chasm Colin had axed into Annie’s heart just hours earlier.

The fire trucks pulled up, so loud that none of them could even hear themselves think, and soon word spread: a Goth girl who was always cloaked in an air of mystery (and black eyeliner) had inadvertently fallen asleep with a cigarette. Rumors spread that she’d been wheeled out on a gurney. Catherine slid up to Owen, folded her hand into his, and whispered that she heard the girl was actually dead.

“Dead!”
She whispered again, her blue eyes as shocked as they were wide. This turned out not to be true, but in the moment they didn’t know, and the horror was exactly what six not-yet-indoctrinated freshmen needed to find their people. They were one another’s people now. They’d retell that story—
remember how there was that fire, and we all stood outside the dorm and watched as they brought down the dead girl?
—forever. And that would be how they came to be, the initial structure of their six-point star. Bea had rescued Lindy and Annie, united them with Colin, and thus Owen, and thus Catherine. What didn’t they owe to Bea?

Eventually, nearly at dawn, the fire trucks cleared, and they were allowed back into their nook of the dorm, which reeked like a fireplace had exploded. Parts of the second floor had to be evacuated for the week. They stumbled back to their hall—stunned, baffled, exhausted—and piled into Bea’s room, falling on her bed, her floor, her overstuffed armchair.

Annie murmured, “I don’t know anyone who’s died.”

And Bea said, “I almost died. Twice.” And told them her story.

They gaped at her, and every one of them silently determined her to be a hero—to be braver than they were, and stronger and more admirable too.

Eventually, restless, unwelcome sleep cloaked them all.

And they woke up changed. They woke up a unit.

Not that this mended Annie’s heart. For the next week she curled herself into a tight ball on her bed, underneath those Ralph Lauren sheets, and cried. Lindy blared girl-power music like “I Will Survive” and “It’s Raining Men,”
and told Annie she was better than some dumb asshole. And Bea started coming by regularly, rubbing her back and telling her that he was just an eighteen-year-old guy, and this is the sort of silly shit they do. Bea had been dating since she was fourteen—high school guys for a while and then a guy from NYU last year—so Annie tried to zip up her pathetic sputtering and believe her. Bea seemed wiser than Annie—not just about men, but about everything. She read the
New York Times
; she’d been to almost all the countries in Europe (including Russia, which Annie hadn’t even realized you were allowed to visit); she dressed like she had somewhere to be, even if she didn’t.
Colin deserves someone like Bea, someone special,
Annie thought when Bea left her to go retrieve a cup of tea. Lindy offered her Jack Daniel’s while they waited. It’s no wonder she couldn’t hang on to him, she told herself, when there were girls like Bea out there.

It would have been healthier to exorcise herself from him, from them, to start fresh and make other friends, find a different crowd, a newer crew to run with. But now they shared late-night snacks (Corn Nuts and yogurt pretzels) and occasional late-night cigarettes (Parliament Lights), studied together, ate their meals together, and survived a girl
almost dying
together. Annie was never good at fighting inertia. Leaving Texas for Philadelphia was enough of a leap to exhaust her. So what was she going to do? She was grateful for their friendship, for their acceptance of her less-than-regal Texas self, and even though she still held out the hope that Colin might turn her doorknob one night and sneak into bed with her, she wasn’t about to ruin everything because he didn’t. Annie understood that everyone else could be casual, nonchalant, so she pretended that she could be too. Still, today, at nearly forty, she worked on perfecting her act.

Annie turns her head and tries to make out Colin’s profile in the blackness of his old room.

No, she isn’t going to ruin everything. Not then. Not now.

Footsteps from the living room echo across the ceiling: Lindy or that guy who showed up tromping into the kitchen. Annie allows herself to shift just an inch nearer to Colin, as if his proximity can stave off what she remembers next.

One particularly bleak night, just after she and Lindy landed in New York and it was gusting sheets of rain and their apartment windows rattled and the air inside was thick with curry from the downstairs take-out place and damp from the tears of their early twentysomething angst, Lindy threw back three tequila shots and beckoned Annie close, closer, no, closer still. They were sitting cross-legged across from each other on their apartment’s knotty wood floor, and Annie remembers—still, now—her heart beating, her thoughts unsure, as Lindy said,
“No, closer, come here scooch forward, closer.”
Annie smiled awkwardly and did as she was told until she was so close she could smell the tequila on Lindy’s breath, see the freckle that lay flat just above her top lip.

“What?”
She laughed nervously, so Lindy passed her a shot, sliding it a few inches across the floor, and Annie gulped it quickly, unsure why, but she gulped all the same. While the tequila burned its way down, before she even had time to process what was happening, Lindy leaned forward, breaking the divide between them, and kissed her. Annie was so startled, she froze, and Lindy pulled back. She must have seen the shock in Annie’s slackened cheeks, her wide eyes, so she cackled loudly and reached for another shot.