In Twenty Years: A Novel Read Online Free

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.
    At the funeral, they sat in the pew on opposite ends, like bookends, buffered by the three in between. Annie. Catherine. Owen. Colin. Lindy.
    Afterward, in a catatonic state, they wandered to a Greek place on Third, not because any of them particularly wanted to, but because it felt wrong to just scatter. Bea wouldn’t have stood for it.
    “I just don’t understand,” Catherine repeated again and