In Twenty Years: A Novel (22 page)

23

CATHERINE

The doctors have given Owen a hit of Vicodin for his pain and have sent him on his way. Maybe if it weren’t a holiday, and there wasn’t a line of boozy idiots winding out the door to the ER, they would have kept him overnight. But it’s only a missing front tooth, and really, just a veneer that popped off from when he was struck in the mouth with a squash ball in high school. He’ll be fine once the swelling subsides and his dentist back home slaps on a new one. They managed to pop his shoulder back in with little fanfare, so other than his drowsy eyes and pronounced lisp, Owen is mostly in one piece.

After Lindy stomps off, Catherine and Owen taxi it the few short blocks back to Bruiser, awash in silence, each pressed to their respective sides of the backseat. The campus, adorned in American flags for the evening’s festivities, whizzes by in a red-white-and-blue blur, and Catherine can’t help but feel like that’s how time has gone too—how it sped up all at once, and now twenty years have passed and suddenly you’re here, staring out the window wondering where you’ve been the whole time. They stop at a light in front of the Quad, and some kids with Bud Light cans walk by, laughing, howling, hooting—too loud but also exactly the right level of loud for where they are in this moment of time.

Forty. This age, this decade, the complications present—a fractured marriage and a pressure-cooker career and two children who both fill you up but also sometimes drain the last vestiges that you wanted to save for yourself—no, they’re not even a blip to those kids. Back then they weren’t even a blip to Catherine.

The light changes, the taxi driver accelerates too quickly, and the Quad is a blur now too.

Speeding up, slowing down, speeding up again.

This is pretty much life until we die,
Catherine thinks.
Why don’t we stop moving for a minute to appreciate it? Why don’t
I
stop moving for a minute to appreciate it?

Bea did. Bea appreciated all of it, which is probably why they all loved her. Even without recognizing this back then. At eighteen or twenty, Catherine couldn’t have known how precious this was: Bea’s reverence for the path in front of her, Bea’s gratitude for the path behind her. When was the last time she’d felt gratitude? She snips at her kids all the time:
Be grateful for what you have! Stop asking for a new iPhone, another app! Do you know what kids in Africa get by with?
But it’s not as if she doesn’t want, want, want, herself. She wants more spots on
Good Morning America
; she wants that HGTV pilot; she wants more spots on the Top Ten Best Designer lists; she wants more website traffic and more staff support. Right now, she very much wants Target, and after today’s outburst, it may be the one thing she can’t have, regardless of how deeply she covets it.

Also, of course, she wants more of everything from Owen.

Owen has closed his eyes, tilting his head back, missing everything.

Catherine is waiting for him to apologize for this mess, but his lip is stuffed with gauze, and she’s not even sure he would if it weren’t. No, that’s not fair. If they were home in Highland Park—safe in their ways and patterns and balances—he’d apologize. He might not mean it, but he’d say it all the same, and Catherine would pretend that the words were enough, even without the right intention behind them. That’s what encompasses at least half of their conversations anyway: they speak, they converse, they’ve braided themselves into each other’s lives, but that’s different than meaning it. A few years ago, Owen would have apologized without hesitation; a few years ago, Owen would never have found himself in this position in the first place: behaving like a misguided freshman, picking ridiculous fights, going on a twenty-four-hour bender. Now? Who knows. This isn’t the Owen she loved for her four years here; he’s not the Owen she loved in Highland Park before they started going sideways, with his time at home and hers always in her office. He’s listless, he admitted as much. And it occurs to her—and truly resonates for the first time—he’s unhappy. She glances at him as the cab turns down the narrow, cherry blossom–lined alley toward their old row house and wonders,
How have I missed how much you’ve changed?

With the swelling of his front lip and the cotton packed in there too, he doesn’t even look like himself. She taps his elbow, and his eyes flutter open.

“We’re here.”

“Where?”

“Our house.”

“We’re back in Chicago?” He’s highly drugged, but even Catherine can hear his disappointment, which sounds surprisingly sober. Owen doesn’t want to go home.

“No. Walnut Street. We’re home at Walnut Street.”

“OK,” he says, closing his eyes again. He sighs and tries to steady his head upright.

Catherine wonders what he’s thinking, with his eyes shut tight, his hand clenching the taxi cushion. She wonders, but still, she doesn’t ask.

Leon has used the spare key left under the mat to let himself in. He’s watching the local news—coverage of the parade near the Liberty Bell—when Catherine unlatches the door. There’s no sign of Annie and Colin, who were winding their way back here through campus. Annie needed air, but when she announced this, she kind of looked like she just needed Colin. Maybe things haven’t changed as much as Catherine thought they had.

“Hey,” Leon says, then shifts back to the TV.

“Hey,” Catherine says, as if it’s totally normal that he’s now crashing at their old house. She was hoping for some quiet; she was hoping Owen might nap, and that she could simply be left alone. Catherine is never left alone anymore, and would it be too much to ask for a few minutes without Sasha ringing her, without her team needing her, without her kids asking one thing or the other from her, without her husband knocking out his front tooth because he clocked a nineteen-year-old college football player after emptying out half the contents of a keg? (Catherine is unaware that it was actually
numerous
Jell-O shots that ultimately did Owen in.) Everything in this house, their six-some, was always about togetherness, about inclusiveness. What is so goddamn wrong with wanting to go at it on your own?

Also, who does this guy think he is, insulting her French toast, creaming her in butter churning?

Owen shuffles in and plops on the couch next to Leon.

“Whars Windy?”

Leon shrugs. “I didn’t catch up to her. But I have her wallet.” He pulls it from his pocket. “So she’ll be back. She couldn’t have gone far.”

Catherine wants to say,
Lindy can run farther than you could imagine, and even if she doesn’t, why would you want her back anyway?
But Leon’s not her problem, so she says nothing. Lindy’s not her problem either. She has enough problems. Those two can figure out their dysfunction on their own. She’s sick of people getting bogged down in their own crap, refusing to take responsibility for sticking their own two feet firmly in the pigsty in the first place.

Her temples pinch as she considers her own set of problems: the earlier video on
TMZ
(was that just today?—it feels like a month ago), and her displeasure at the details she overlooked for today’s Fourth of July spread, and she thus clods up the stairs to retrieve her phone from its charger. She should also probably check in with her mom, who’s watching the kids for the weekend, but if there had been an emergency, surely someone would have called. Then she regrets her passivity; these are
her
kids, for God’s sake, and they already see too little of her to begin with.

Not that they’d want her home all the time. Catherine knows she’s not that type of mom. As it is, on the rare free weekend when Catherine has no event to attend, no copy to edit, no photos to approve, no competitor websites to browse, and she attempts to corral the two of them in to bake banana bread or play Monopoly, Penelope usually leaves the room, and Mason, sweet boy, still attempts to appear interested. But he’s lanky and reedy and growing, and Catherine knows that soon enough he’ll itch to scamper away when she tries to pin him down for those free hours.

She calls her mom’s phone but gets no answer, so she tries the home phone and leaves a cheery message on the machine, detailing how much she misses them. She thinks to tell them to call back, but she’s so very tired and doesn’t want to have to put Owen on with his lisp, so promises a vague return call later.

She belly flops onto the bed, which squeaks loudly, then quiets. She doesn’t want to scroll through the forty-two new e-mails or the thirty-seven texts. This flurry of incoming communication can’t be good news. She drags a pillow over her head and mentally rewinds the scene from earlier today, wishing she’d done it all differently. She flings the pillow off and reminds herself to stop being a baby. She’s a goddamn CEO. She needs to man-up in a crisis. (She hates that term “man-up,” but it’s what she thinks all the same.)

The coverage on
TMZ
has gotten no kinder, despite her publicist’s assurances that Catherine’s apology—and finger pointing toward her marriage—will change the narrative. True, no one is buzzing about her faulty homemaking skills, but that hasn’t stopped other rumors from spreading like hives. The slit-your-throat meme has gone viral, hashtagged, a sensation. Now that the reporters have made the connection between her and Lindy, they’ve uploaded one of Lindy’s songs as background music to a three-minute video comprised of clips of Catherine using various steak knives on her
Today Show
segments. They’ve tracked down alleged members of her staff who offer anonymous quotes about their suspicions about her dissolving marriage, and potential affair with the pastry chef at the Ritz Carlton.

The pastry chef at the Ritz Carlton!

Catherine is used to her competition attempting to outdo her—with more succulent stew recipes or more folksy but still hipster homemade laundry-detergent ideas—but this? Oh God. She hadn’t even considered that this would be the fallout. She’d simply been trying to salvage her brand, deflect attention, and save the Target deal, because the Target deal meant saving The Crafty Lady. Her hand rises to her mouth and stays there. She hadn’t meant to betray the loyalty that, despite their spiraling few years, they’d spent half their lives building.

Bea used to say that there couldn’t be secrets between them. That secrets were like walls: you started erecting them and before you knew it, you’d built yourself a moat—you couldn’t jump over it, you couldn’t knock it down. You were stranded on the island without anyone to come to your rescue.

Catherine wishes so very much that she weren’t on her island, but she’s been here for so long, what can she do about it now? Besides, it occurs to her suddenly, angrily, that Bea had plenty of secrets of her own. The hypocrisy! The standing on ceremony.
Who is she to judge?

She opens her e-mails, which bring no better news than the
TMZ
videos. Her CFO writes from Martha’s Vineyard that Target has demanded a conference call on Monday. He expresses his concerns that this unexpected request means a dead deal. He doesn’t need to express what a dead deal means. There’s no word from HGTV, but Catherine doesn’t need word to know she can kiss that stint good-bye too.

Catherine furiously punches her publicist Odette’s e-mail address into her phone, determined to rectify this, to clean up this mess before it gets any worse. She rage-types and thinks of how coming back here could have potentially cost her the past decade of hard work, of the company with her name on it, of the proudest thing she’s ever done. (Of course, she’s proud of her kids too.) How Owen ruined that because he was drunk and hungover and embarrassed her and she snapped. How stupid Lindy and her pretense that consequences don’t matter ruined that too.

Also, who is this person in her office who suspects her marriage is on the rocks because of a pastry chef? Her marriage isn’t on the rocks because of a pastry chef! People can say a lot of things about her (evidently people
do
say a lot of things about her, which, naively, Catherine had never considered; she’d just merely shut her office door and assumed that, at the risk of sounding like a silly high school girl, people
liked
her), but it’s never even occurred to Catherine to entertain the notion of finding someone else to fill the pocket of emptiness that occupied the space that Owen once did.

There’s a knock on the bedroom door, and Catherine, surprisingly, hopes it’s Owen. That maybe she can say something to make this all go away—not the
TMZ
stuff (though that too), but the rumors and the truths between them too. But then Leon opens the door just a crack, and she regrets her instinct that he could come repair her.

“Sorry to bother.” He casts his gaze downward. “Uh, your husband needs you.”

Catherine sighs, blowing out her breath like it’s her last.

“Uh, he has something oozing from his mouth, and I’m pretty cool with bodily fluids, but I think I’m gonna step aside on this.”

Catherine throws her phone against the pillows and sits up straighter, clasping her hands behind her back, stretching her shoulders, coaxing out the knots.