In Twenty Years: A Novel (20 page)

21

ANNIE

Annie is concerned that Catherine might kill Owen. Not without good reason. Catherine is pacing the waiting room of the ER, muttering things like:

What the hell is wrong with him?

I might kill him.

I think I’m going to kill him.

Annie was the one Lindy called, because Catherine’s phone was dead from her conference call, and Annie’s was always charged, always lying in wait. Not that she’d heard from Baxter today.
Where the hell was Baxter?
She was starting to panic that something had gone horribly awry at the Hamptons: that he and Gus had accidentally left the gas burner on and were dead on the floor of their summer rental. Or some terrible accident involving, oh, she didn’t know, a helicopter crashing into Scoop Du Jour on Main Street, just as the two of them were striding in for double-helping rainbow-sherbet cones. But she’s scanned Facebook a bunch of times, and none of her friends have posted anything alarming, so she’s trying to defuse her concerns (
xo
) and not go from justifiably a tad paranoid to completely shrill and crazy.

Still, though! Why hasn’t Baxter texted her back? Or called! Would it be too much for him to pick up the phone and call?

What the hell is wrong with him?

Annie starts at the thought. Even through the thicket of their worst years, when she was drowning in her postpartum depression, then chasing that depression with pills (and then more pills), and when Baxter was finding comfort elsewhere, she hadn’t considered that something was wrong with
him.
Baxter was the gold she’d been lucky enough to stumble upon. Never once did it occur to her that she might want to kill him.

She stares at her blank phone screen.

She kind of wants to kill him now.

But regardless, it was Lindy who buzzed her phone to say that they were on their way in an ambulance from Delta Tau, but not to panic because she’d seen worse before and that Owen would be fine, but he may or may not require shoulder surgery, and incidentally, he also knocked out his front tooth.

Annie and Catherine ran here when they couldn’t find a cab (holiday hours). And now her hair is winging out behind her ears, her mascara is flaking, and her T-shirt is sticking to her stomach, the perspiration marks like a Rorschach imprint against her Pilates-flattened abs. She stands by an air-conditioning vent, but it’s no help. Then Colin turns the corner from the hallway, and her heat rash rises in the crease of her elbows.

She glances around the waiting room in an attempt to avoid Colin and perhaps find an escape, but there’s nowhere to seek refuge. The ruby-red chairs are littered with all sorts of misfits from the holiday: at least a dozen drunk kids with various broken-ish-looking limbs, several guys with unfortunate facial hair that appears to have been singed by fireworks.

Annie raises her phone and clicks on her camera app, finding her own refuge of sorts. She can already think of a million captions:
Slice of real, red-blooded American life! Fractured arms, not fractured spirits! Hospital (red) (white) (and) blues.

She likes the last one the best but, just before posting, remembers how much she hates hospitals, how she begged Baxter for a home birth because no good ever comes from the inside of these walls. She knew it was illogical; she knew it made her sound like the redneck hick she was deep down, where you soothed your licks with Band-Aids and an ice pack, and even if you wanted to see a doctor, no one had insurance, and they weren’t about to blow their weekly pay on a visit to the doctor no one trusted anyway. Annie thinks of Bea. They hadn’t saved her after the car accident, and if they could have saved anyone, with her money and resources and tenacity, surely it should have been Bea.

And of course, the doctors hadn’t exactly fixed Annie either, after Gus was born and she wasn’t quite right. Gus was an angelic baby: he nursed easily, he slept through the night at two months, and he didn’t even mind a wet diaper. And yet, Annie couldn’t seem to appreciate it, couldn’t appreciate
him
. She knew it wasn’t normal, as she’d read enough of those mommy boards to understand postpartum depression, but that couldn’t have been what she was suffering from. She was just exhausted, even though Baxter had hired a night nurse; she just needed her hormones to stabilize. Still, though, after four months, her crying jags never subsided; her adoration for Gus was not at all what she’d anticipated—she’d been prepared to be the mother of the century! All she wanted to do was pass him off to the newly hired nanny and hide.

She couldn’t tell Baxter. She
didn’t
tell Baxter. When he arrived home from work, she was showered and pulled together and sometimes, if it was early enough, she’d made something like a pot roast. She saved the breakdowns until the apartment was quiet, when the nanny took Gus to a music class or out to the park. Sometimes, if she was desperate and they were home, Annie locked herself in the bathroom and turned on the shower to conceal her cries.

At her six-month checkup, her OB-GYN recognized the symptoms—the lethargy, the deadened eyes, the way Annie appeared to be sinking, even just sitting there on the stirruped exam table.

“I do sometimes feel like I’m moving through quicksand,” Annie confessed. “But I’m sure it’s nothing.”

Her OB-GYN was much less sure it was nothing, and promptly wrote her several prescriptions to ensure that the quicksand dried up. And it did. After just a few weeks, Annie felt almost like her old self. Almost, because her old self was a moving target, but close enough. The Xanax helped, and on bad days, like when the other moms were talking about milestones (none of which Gus had yet hit), a Klonopin too. And then, on other days, when the stretch of hours rose up and it was only her and Gus, and Baxter was barreling toward a partnership and made no promises about when he’d be home, and the swell of the empty apartment felt like it might drown her and she doubted all of her parenting instincts because she hadn’t exactly had a wonderful mother, and when Gus outgrew his angelic newborn phase and morphed into a fussy infant Annie couldn’t hope to understand: when she’d changed him and fed him and made a million silly faces, including eight rounds of peek-a-boo, and still he wouldn’t stop crying . . . well, maybe she’d take another pill on top of that.

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!”