In Twenty Years: A Novel (2 page)

But it didn’t matter. What mattered was the six of us. What mattered was our star. What mattered is that in this moment in time, we were unbreakable. We were light and destiny and a meteor shower of invincibility.

We were twenty-one. We were allowed to believe impossible things.

2016–JUNE

1

ANNIE

Annie is not at all happy with the way Gus is smiling in the photo.

Why does he look like he needs to take a poop?
she thinks.
Why can’t he smile like a normal ten-year-old?

She immediately regrets the thought, because what sort of mother thinks her son isn’t the epitome of handsomeness and looks like he’s constipated in a picture? She narrows her eyes and stares at the image on her phone.
No. He is handsome. The cutest ever.
He looks more like Baxter than her, which is OK, because theoretically—though she fights the good fight (the best fight)—Baxter is better-looking than she is, even now that he’s forty.

Forty. Jesus.

Her fortieth is right around the bend in October. Annie tries not to think about it too much because she finds the concept of middle age to be depressing, and no one likes her when she’s depressed. Maybe her mother does. She sets her phone on her marble kitchen counter and remembers how, after Gus was born ten years back, just nine months after she and Baxter married, she found herself sinking deeper and deeper, mired in darkness, pedaling through the quicksand, with no idea how to pull herself free. She called her mom more often then; in fact, she was the only one Annie called. Every night when the hours grew too long, and sometimes in the mornings too. Annie’s mom always answered, and Annie could hear her sucking on a cigarette in her La-Z-Boy—her breath a long gasp, then an exhale—while Annie curled up on her white-tiled bathroom floor and confessed her guilt, her shame at her bleakness.

Annie nods to herself now: yes, her mother probably liked her, but no one else likes a stick-in-the-mud.

She shakes it off and refocuses on the task at hand: a suitable filter on Instagram to perhaps whitewash the pinched look on Gus’s face and thus capture their euphoria (and her very lean biceps and really cute bikini) from their weekend spent in the Hamptons. She settles on one that makes the ocean much bluer than it actually was that day, but the bluer the ocean, the better the picture! And the better the picture, the happier they seem.

So she uploads it and then almost immediately regrets her choice—maybe she should have included a shot with Baxter to show off his handsomeness, his wavy chestnut hair, his eyes that match the sea, their triangular, perfect threesome—but it’s too late now; she already posted it, and besides, he hates her obsession with social media, hates it when she uploads photos of him without his permission.

It’s not professional!
he says.
My clients can see them!

Annie attempted to sway him a few months back while she was pressing Hershey Kisses into the center of heart-shaped cookie cutouts for one of Gus’s school bake sales, but Baxter had already dismissed the notion, returning his attention to his own phone, his oxfords clicking on the marble floor as he headed back toward his home office.

It was hardly the worst of his dismissals; hardly, also, the worst of hers.

She’d started up with the pills after Gus was born, gulping them like they were jelly beans, the better to ease her postpartum depression, and then simply to ease, well, everything. So when she discovered that Baxter was seeking refuge, seeking
affection
elsewhere, she couldn’t blame him. Or at least, she didn’t blame him. She’d only discovered his indiscretions in a fit of paranoia, scrolling through his texts while he showered, and since she shouldn’t have been spying on him in the first place, she never quite worked out how to point fingers. She didn’t have the spine to dig too deeply into his old texts, more-than-likely-guilty e-mails; she wasn’t the type of wife who chased bad news with more bad news. So it was what it was. She was who she was. He was who he was. That was that.

He still took care of her, after all; he still offered her more than she’d have without him: the Upper East Side apartment, the tuition for Gus’s tony private school, the occasional dinner companion, and access to charity galas and theater and all sorts of interesting people who would never deem her worthy without him.

Sometimes it was simply better not to know, not to investigate too deeply into betrayal.

She’d mostly forgotten about the affair. Made her peace with it. Her pills helped, had a way of blunting the pain, distorting the truth of it. Then, on Valentine’s Day four years back, something shifted. Baxter clutched her wrist over dinner at Gramercy Tavern, then nudged a Cartier box around the candles and wineglasses. A diamond necklace. Her eyes welled, and his did too. Annie had read enough posts on CitiMama to know that unexpected generosity from a spouse often correlated with an affair (or the end of one), so she scrolled through his texts again that night while he slept, and indeed, he’d ended it on New Year’s Eve, while they vacationed in Aspen.

And thus, right there and then on Valentine’s night, Annie rose in the darkness of their bedroom, stumbled to the white-tiled master bath, and flushed the Klonopin, the Xanax, and the remaining Percocet she hoarded, for good. Once and for all. Really, this time.

Baxter never knew about the pills. Or at least she didn’t think he did.

Instead, in the years ensuing, Annie found other ways to quell her anxiety, her dissatisfaction, her guilt. Like Instagram. Or volunteering for the PTA once Gus hit kindergarten. (The all-boys private school Baxter had attended: they wore jackets and ties, which were just adorable. Annie incessantly captured shots of Gus on the way to school. It was too cute not to.) Or developing her long, lean biceps, which she liked to display on Facebook.

Slowly they found their way back to each other. Or at least as close to that as they ever had. Two years ago, Baxter’s father keeled over on the ninth hole at Shinnecock, and as they were driving home from the funeral, Baxter announced that he was making changes. That
his life was passing him by!
and that
he wasn’t getting any younger, for God’s sake! It is all about family, and you are my family, and by God, I am going to be HERE now.

Annie exhaled, the wind from her open window whipping against her blush-covered cheeks, and reached her left hand over to the nape of his neck, letting it rest there until she felt self-conscious. And knew it had been worth it: her silence, her nonconfrontational manner, how she buried his secrets until they became her own secrets too.

Baxter cut down on his office hours at Morgan Stanley, pawning off work to his underlings, then took up yoga, bought himself a Porsche, and for a very brief period, went on an ill-fated raw-food diet, which seemed to wreak more havoc on his digestive system than it was worth. He went from a passing ship in their household to an anchored liner in their port, and though they aren’t perfect, now, together, Annie believes they are happy. They started having sex again—usually twice a week after a few years of every now and again. (Annie refuses to even imagine him having sex with the other woman, whoever she was.) They go out to dinner, and he holds her chair, then scoots it in. He asks her if she likes the Porsche, and she doesn’t even tut, even though she’s terrified to ask how much it must have cost. She knows she should be used to niceties like a new Porsche by now, but every time she sinks into the supple leather seats and inhales the musky scent that just screams “filthy rich,” she feels a little sick, like the gods might smite them for their ostentatious display of new money.

She would never breathe a word of any of this to Baxter, though.

Today she picks up a dead sunflower leaf that’s fallen on the counter next to the crystal vase. She bought the flowers at the farmer’s market just yesterday, and here they are, already dying on her.

Annie’s phone buzzes. She swipes her screen, hoping for at least five or six “likes” to her Instagram shot in the past minute. But there is only a solitary text. She squints at it because she doesn’t recognize the number. It’s a Los Angeles area code, and she can’t recall anyone she knows who lives in LA. Well, there was that family from preschool who moved because the dad was a bigwig at Sony, but surely that mom, whose name she can’t recall—maybe Cynthia?—but whose child once bit Gus on the arm (and was a bit of a sociopath, Annie thought), wasn’t texting her now.

Did you get this shit in the mail today?

Annie rereads the message three times. She never checks the mail—her housekeeper usually does it for her—but even if she had, what sort of
shit
is to be expected? She fishes around in her kitchen drawer—the messy one where she allows Gus and Baxter to throw all their crap—for the spare mailbox key. But she can’t find it, and then her phone buzzes again.

Seriously, this is fucking weird. I mean, WTF?

Well, she can’t not reply to that.

Annie doesn’t get many WTF-type texts. She gets texts about sales at Bed Bath & Beyond and reminders for Gus’s dental appointments. Very rarely, nay, never, is there a WTF-type text.

She thinks of a million things to say, like:

If this is Cynthia Burton, then I hope you can apologize for when Henry bit Gus. He required three stitches! And I considered a rabies shot!

Or:

Perhaps you have the wrong number?

She taps her fingers along the perfect white Carrera counters. She wishes those sunflowers weren’t already dying. She really thinks they’re a pick-me-up for the kitchen.

Finally, she types:

Oh, I didn’t think it was weird at all!

She opens her Sub-Zero to pour the lemonade she made last night, satisfied that she’s covered her cluelessness well.

Before she can add ice to her highball, there’s a reply.

Annie, cut the shit. Check your mail. Text me back when you do. It’s Lindy.

Annie’s fingers are shaking by the time she has the wherewithal to slide on her Manolo sandals, jab the elevator buttons to the lobby, and retrieve the FedEx from her doorman, Frank. She clutches the envelope to her chest on the ride back up, her heart coursing blood so quickly through her brain that she loses her train of thought entirely. She finds herself back inside her kitchen with no memory of the prior few minutes—if she properly thanked Frank, if she said hello to her neighbor in the elevator, if, in fact, her neighbor was in the elevator at all.

She hasn’t seen Lindy, hasn’t seen any of them, in thirteen years.

She thinks her heart might stop at the notion.

Thirteen years. Has it really been that long?

Of course it was for the best; it was the only way Annie knew how to move on: to simply
move on
. After the disaster of Catherine and Owen’s wedding that June, after Lindy ran off to Nashville a few days later, and then, well, after Bea so soon after. It was like a ball of yarn that came unspooled too quickly: there wasn’t any way to roll it back up. She’s friends with Owen and Colin on Facebook, but Colin never posts, and Owen’s posts are usually just stupid sports stuff. She Googles him—Colin, of course—all the time, too often, then quickly deletes her history, her cheeks cherry-red, like she knows it’s silly, knows it’s almost shameful that she’s still out there wondering. He’s probably not Googling her back.

That was the last time she saw them all: thirteen years ago on that horrible, overcast day in October. The funeral. Annie tries not to think about that day too often—ever, really, if she can help it. She still thinks of Bea fondly every once in a while: when she hears the Macarena at a kid’s birthday party (nobody did a Macarena with more zeal than Bea) or spots a woman in a sunny yellow dress in Saks, in nearly the identical, impossible-not-to-stare-at hue that Bea wore to Catherine and Owen’s wedding. (The rest of the bridesmaids wore plum—it wasn’t the most flattering—but Bea read a special poem, and because of her special role, she wore a special dress. It was all so natural, so Bea, that none of the other bridesmaids thought twice about it.)

But the funeral? That day? No, Annie can’t bear to think of that. She’s found, after all, that if you force yourself not to think of things, they lose their power; they shift from reality to mirage, from true to almost imaginary. And Annie would so much rather pretend that this was nothing but make-believe.

Colin had been the one to call them all with the news. He’d heard it from Bea’s grandmother. It had been a car accident, though the specifics were hazy—just that Bea was the only one hurt, a solitary fatality. Annie remembers all this now, more than a decade later. How she rushed from the pews at the funeral to escape her fraying nerves and tumbling stomach, as well as the tension with Lindy; how Lindy trailed after her, hissing under her breath, perhaps trying to forge peace, to apologize, but unrepentant in doing so and thus failing entirely; how they stumbled into the bathroom and nearly collided with Bea’s grandmother, who was waxy and wan and resembled a ghoul. Annie remembers this even now. How she looked like something out of a horror movie, out of some zombie film she’d be too squeamish to sit through. Annie offered quiet condolences, spun around and strode back to the pews, never once acknowledging Lindy, never once relinquishing her anger.