In Twenty Years: A Novel (19 page)

“I love you, Lindy, but it’s true.”

“I seem to remember you had no problems sleeping with me. My ‘shit’ didn’t bother you one bit back then.”

“It still doesn’t bother me. But then I’m not the one sleeping with you now.” He eases the bag of corn from his face. “Though it seems like you’re not quite sure who you’re sleeping with now either.”

Lindy huffs, tapping her foot. “So what happened to you anyway?”

“The girl I met last night.”

“The teenager?”

Colin nods.

“The teenager punched you in the face?”

“She’s eighteen.
Jesus.
” He pales. “And her boyfriend punched me in the face.”

“Come on.”

Colin winces. “It’s true.”

“So you’re pretty much, as you like to say, no different than I am. Hiding out in a bathroom avoiding your shit.”

“Touché,” he says. “And I think Owen may be out there defending my honor.”

“Well, that can’t be good for anyone.”

Colin’s phone buzzes. He holds up the screen to show Lindy.

“The eighteen-year-old. Wants to know where I disappeared to. Swears that guy isn’t her boyfriend.”

Another buzz. Another text.

“She’s apologizing. Wants me to come play beer pong.”

“Does she know that you’re practically a senior citizen?”

“I told her I was thirty-two.”

Lindy howls.

“Hey! She told me she was twenty-one!”

“So twenty-one was cool, but eighteen is not?”

Colin pinches the bridge of his nose, his phone vibrating against his forehead.

“I don’t want to be that creepy guy chasing around girls who could be his daughters.”

“Like,
literally,
she could be your daughter.” Lindy says this and thinks of her own potential daughter, spinning and growing and blooming inside of her. Her throat tightens, and she points herself toward the window so he can’t see her come undone.
What a mess I’ve created,
she thinks.
What a fucking, fucking mess.

But Lindy doesn’t like feeling accountable; she lost track of accountability years ago. In her world, sacrificing parts of yourself is simply how it’s done, the only way to success. You slice off a little and say: Yes, I can give that, I can expose myself to the audience, in my lyrics, in the way that I’ll compromise my music and then abandon my writing and then agree to synthesize my voice and the melody and be totally cool with the watered-down sellout that I’ve become on
Rock N Roll Dreammakers.
Of course you can use last year’s single “Independence Girl (Look Out)” in that tampon commercial.

“Hey,” Colin says. “Hey.” Like he can sense the approaching crest of tears.

She blinks them away before any glimmer of her accountability can penetrate her armor.

“It’s nothing,” she says, facing him.

“It can’t be nothing.”

“It’s nothing worth discussing.”

Colin nods, used to her hardened exterior by now, and exhales loudly—a punctured, deflating balloon. “God, I don’t think I’ve ever felt older.”

“Life sucks and then you die.”

He shakes his head and smiles. “You used to say that all the time.”

“It’s true.”

“It’s not true,” he says. “It’s not even close.” He drops the bag of corn into the trash. “Look at you, look at your life. It doesn’t even come close to sucking.”

Lindy shrugs.

“Fine, then, look at Bea’s.”

Lindy doesn’t have a quippy reply to this—no snark, no bite, no sarcastic, undercutting retort. She sits on the windowpane, trying to find the unfamiliar space in her emotional landscape for honesty.

Finally, “You asked me, back at the house, why I came back,” she says, then falters. She inhales and winds up her nerve. It’s too exhausting to keep up the façade when he knows her so well, when he could sense, just moments ago, that she was on the brink of vulnerability, on the edge of holding it together. “So here’s the truth, and it seems ridiculous because she’s dead. I mean,
she’s dead
, Colin.” Colin glances away to the filmy floor. “But I came back because I didn’t want to be the asshole who wouldn’t show up for Bea.”

He peers up at her, and now she’s the one who has to look away.

But it’s true. Maybe she initially wanted to show up to stick it to Annie, or maybe she wanted to seduce Colin again for sport, or maybe she just wanted to come and have them all fawn over whom she’d become and how far she’d left them behind, how she left them in the rearview mirror when they kicked her out, deemed her a pariah. Not all of them, but enough of them. Catherine. Annie. Even Bea in her own way, not leaping to her defense, not assuring her that sleeping with Colin didn’t ruin her character irreparably.

Nothing about Lindy’s life now connects with who they were then. And maybe she was a little resentful that when she left them—not just for Nashville, but
left them
behind—none of them tried to prevent her from going. That they chose sides, and not enough of them chose her.

But perhaps her deepest motivation was simply that she didn’t want to let down her dead friend, even if she still nursed a sliver of a grudge. She admits this to Colin now and feels a strange, confusing, foreign tug in the guts of her soul.

Reverence. Remembrance. Restitution.

She feels all of these things for Bea.

However they’re so foreign that Lindy can’t even recognize them, even if she truly tries (which, it should be noted, she does not).

Instead, she says, “Want to get a beer?”

Because one beer can’t hurt. One beer won’t kill her. One beer is just the antidote to wash this ridiculous sensation of nostalgia away.

20

OWEN

Owen is certain he
can take this guy.
He is sizing up this douchebag who clocked Colin and thinking,
I can totally take this guy.
Colin absorbed the hit and shrugged it off, but Owen is up for the fight. He really wouldn’t mind punching someone right now, and lucky for him, this dude has marked himself as a douche.

Said douche, in a yellow Delta Tau tank top and backward Yankees hat, is refilling his plastic cup on the weathered patio out back while Owen assesses his strategy. He hasn’t been in a fight, honest-to-God fisticuffs, in well, ever. In high school he played squash, which lent itself well to the lanky, late-puberty kids, but didn’t lend itself nearly as well to developing mad street-fighting skills. In college he wasn’t the meathead lug who spilled out of his fraternity door, wrestling some schmo to the ground over, say, a game of quarters. He did occasionally play Ultimate Street Fighter on his iPhone, and he’s gotten pretty decent, but real life hand-to-hand combat? Well, no.

But so what?
he thinks.
So fucking what?
He tackles those monster hills in spinning class; he used to take boxing classes at Equinox; he’s in pretty ass-kicking shape for a forty-year-old! Hell, he’s in pretty ass-kicking shape for a thirty-year-old!

Owen grabs a red Jell-O shot off the bar, then three blue ones just for good measure. They slide down the back of his throat like he’d spent the past two decades perfecting his Jell-O shot technique. Behind him, the overzealous bass of some hip-hop song is blaring, shaking the remaining Jell-O shots on the tray. He notices now that they’ve been arranged to look like an American flag.

How quaint. Catherine would totally dig that.

Except that he ruined the design when he grabbed four from the upper corner.

She would totally not dig that.

But no matter. Catherine isn’t here to tell him what to do and what not to do, remind him how much he screws everything up when,
please
, are the kids fed and bathed? Do they make it to school on time? Are they reasonable, generally polite human beings who do not resemble Cro-Magnons? Yes? Yes? Well, then thankyouverymuch, what is the problem?

The bass reverberates in the floor, and some guy also in a tank top (peach) and baseball hat (Red Sox) shouts something about booty shaking, and Owen nods his head, pumping his fist, swaying his shoulders, attempting to pulse his hips to the beat.

Yeah, he’s totally got this.

The douche has his back to him, waving his hands in the air, spilling his beer on his wrist, laughing like a tipsy hyena, completely oblivious, which bolsters Owen’s misguided confidence.
By the way
—he looks around—
where is Colin anyway?
Maybe he could use him for backup. That dude, Leon, is over in the corner with his eyes shut, swaying to the same inescapable bounce from the stereo, but Owen’s not sure he’ll be of much help. He’s not really sure how he’s standing, honestly.

Oh well. What’s that hashtag Penelope always uses?

YOLO.

Yeah. You only live once.

This gives him pause for a second, but not too long, certainly not long enough. He thinks of Bea, and how she only got to live once and it was too goddamn short. Why Bea? Why at twenty-seven? Catherine was better friends with her because they were girls. But he always admired her, both from afar and up close too.

He remembers their junior year: Catherine’s parents were divorcing, and it wouldn’t be an exaggeration to say that she and her brothers (and Owen) were in a state of shock that careened toward denial/emotional paralysis. Catherine’s home had always been the cheeriest one imaginable, at least it appeared so whenever Owen trekked home with her. He’d spent two Christmases there in college. Theirs was the house in the neighborhood whose decorations went up the morning after Thanksgiving dinner, the strung-up white lights illuminating the windows, the mulled cider beckoning in neighbors, the stockings hovering in a perfect line over the fireplace mantel. Catherine and her brothers (and Owen) cherished their home, their family, and it was easy to see why: theirs was the Hallmark card wrapped in Catherine’s Martha Stewart dream. Until her mom evidently grew weary of her dad and unceremoniously dumped him on an average Wednesday in October. No one was really sure what happened; if there had been long-simmering problems, her parents had masked them entirely.

“I don’t even remember ever seeing them fight,” Catherine said, shell-shocked and cried-dry. Owen, though he loved her, didn’t have the words to offer comfort. What could he say? He wanted to fix it, and he tried: he attempted to come up with a bunch of ways it could be fixed:
Maybe she should plan an elaborate dinner for them both and lure them each there under false pretenses? Maybe she should suggest some therapists? Maybe she should stage an intervention with her brothers? Maybe she should put together a photo album of their happiest family moments and send it to her mom?
But Catherine cocked her head and looked at him like he was speaking cyborg.

He couldn’t fix it, and maybe he was dumb to try. After all, he’d bought into their Hallmark life as much as Catherine had.

Late on one of those October nights, he overheard Bea and Catherine lingering on Bruiser’s stairs, their voices filtering through the just-ajar door to their bedroom.

Owen peered out the sliver of door space with one eye and watched them. Bea rubbed her back, and Catherine rested her head on her shoulder, and for a long time, the silence was enough. He was struck by how Bea let her
just be
. It took a lot of guts, he thought, to
just be
. To intuit that the only thing she could offer was a strong arm and a warm shoulder, and that was OK. He was, he remembers now, even in his drunken, hazy state in the bass-thumping living room of Delta Tau, amazed that this was all Catherine needed, and all the more amazed that Bea understood this.

Eventually, Catherine said, “I don’t know how my life will ever be the same.”

Bea replied, “Who said it’s supposed to stay the same?”

Catherine bounced her shoulders. “Me, I guess. I liked my life. My mom took that from me.”

“No, she didn’t, not really. It’s still yours to live.”

Catherine twisted her mouth. “But it’s different now. I feel a little lost.”

“Everyone feels a little lost, Cath. There’s nothing wrong with that. You only lose if you let someone beat you.”

Owen watched them from his perch by the door and felt his shame rise up, his cheeks burning, disappointment in himself lodging in the base of his throat. No wonder he couldn’t rescue Catherine: he’d led a perfectly cushy middle-class life. No one had died! No one had betrayed him! He grew up with a mom and a dad and a golden retriever and made the varsity squash team and got a used Toyota 4runner for his sixteenth birthday. He was ashamed, just for a minute, about how easy he’d had it, and doubted that he and Catherine could ever be as close. Not because Catherine had become a little shattered, but because he never had. Then there was Bea, who was triumphant in the face of loss, who literally scaled mountains to prove she hadn’t been defeated. No wonder Catherine turned to her, not him. No wonder she solved her problems, fixed them while Owen could not.

He thinks of Bea’s indefatigable spirit and bobs his head.
You Only Live Once.

You Only Lose If You Let Someone Beat You.

YOLIYLSBY. Too long for an anagram, but Owen wasn’t above trying.

No, Owen was not going to let this jackass in his tank top and Yankees hat beat him today. He burps out a hiccup of air and steadies himself.
No one punches my friend on my watch!
In his peripheral vision, he spies Colin and Lindy emerging from the bathroom, which is the final snap of motivation he needs. They’ll have his back! His old dear friends! Surely they will lift him up and carry him on their wings to victory.

Having never been in a street fight, Owen’s not exactly sure what happens next. It’s all a blur. He’ll tell the doctors this when he comes to. But witnesses claim he emitted some sort of primeval roar and charged across the living room, throwing himself down the two steps to the patio, lunging toward Robbie (he would learn his name later, when charges were being considered), who was still loitering by the keg. He tackled Robbie at the waist, leveling them both, but he miscalculated the depth of the abutting patio wall, and thus momentum tugged them both smack into the stone ledge, which simultaneously rendered Owen unconscious and dislocated his shoulder.

Robbie, because he was nineteen, spry, on the football team, and therefore padded with muscle, bounced to his feet immediately, a cheek laceration his only battle mark. Owen, because he was forty (and surely for other reasons too) blacked out for at least ten minutes while the fraternity dudes gathered around, hovering over him like curious toddlers, wondering who the hell this lunatic was, and how the old guy got into their party.