Between Me and You
Table of Contents
PRAISE FOR THE AUTHOR IN TWENTY YEARS “Scotch hits a grand slam with this novel . . . With wonderfully fleshed-out, relatable characters, this is an absolute must-read that lovers of women’s contemporary fiction will devour in one sitting.” —Library Journal, starred review “Told from five vastly different perspectives of characters who are deeply developed and relatable in their flawed ways, this novel captures the nostalgia many feel for the friendships and simple nature of youth . . . Heartfelt . . . Well written and memorable.” —RT Book Reviews “Allison Winn Scotch is the ultimate beach read. If you plan to sink your toes into the sand and need a fab book to kick back with . . . this is the one.” —Parade “The perfect beach read.” —PopSugar “Both heartbreaking and funny, this novel explores how we cope with the disappointments of adulthood and come to terms with our past.” —Real Simple “A story about youthful dreams and middle-age reality, this is a page turning book to talk about.”
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ALSO BY ALLISON WINN SCOTCH Time of My Life The Department of Lost & Found The One That I Want The Song Remains the Same The Theory of Opposites In Twenty Years
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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental. Text copyright © 2018 by Allison Winn Scotch All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher. Published by Lake Union Publishing, Seattle www.apub.com Amazon, the Amazon logo, and Lake Union Publishing are trademarks of Amazon.com, Inc., or its affiliates. ISBN-13: 9781503941229 ISBN-10: 1503941221 Cover design by Ginger Design
For anyone brave enough to fall in love.
CONTENTS START READING 1 BEN NOVEMBER 2016 (NOW) 2 TATUM OCTOBER 1999 3 BEN JULY 2015 4 TATUM DECEMBER 2000 5 BEN AUGUST 2014 6 TATUM JULY 2001 7 BEN APRIL 2013 8 TATUM FEBRUARY 2002 9 BEN MAY 2012 10 TATUM MARCH 2003 11 BEN FEBRUARY 2011 12 TATUM JULY 2004 13 BEN MAY 2010 14 TATUM MARCH 2005 15 BEN JUNE 2009 16 TATUM OCTOBER 2006 17 BEN JUNE 2008 18 TATUM MAY 2007 19 BEN DECEMBER 2007 20 TATUM FEBRUARY 2008 21 BEN SEPTEMBER 2006 22 TATUM AUGUST 2009 23 BEN JULY 2005 24 TATUM OCTOBER 2010 25 BEN AUGUST 2004 26 TATUM MARCH 2011 27 BEN SEPTEMBER 2003 28 TATUM SEPTEMBER 2012 29 BEN JUNE 2002 30 TATUM JULY 2013 31 BEN SEPTEMBER 2001 32 TATUM NOVEMBER 2014 33 BEN DECEMBER 2000 34 TATUM DECEMBER 2015 35 BEN OCTOBER 1999 2016 (NOW) 36 TATUM NOVEMBER 37 BEN NOVEMBER 38 TATUM DECEMBER 39 BEN DECEMBER 40 TATUM DECEMBER 41 BEN DECEMBER 42 TATUM DECEMBER 43 BEN DECEMBER 44 TATUM DECEMBER 45 BEN DECEMBER 46 TATUM CHRISTMAS 47 BEN CHRISTMAS 48 TATUM NEW YEAR’S EVE DAY 49 BETWEEN ME AND YOU BY BEN LI
Nobody has ever measured, not even poets, how much the heart can hold. —Zelda Fitzgerald
1 BEN NOVEMBER 2016 (NOW) I told myself that if she showed, that would be the sign I needed. If she showed, maybe we could find a way to rewind, rewrite, do it all over. Do it all better. Do it all again, only differently. It’s silly; it’s something out of a Hollywood ending, and I’d know that better than most. It’s not how I’d write it, but it’s how the studio would want it, what would appeal to the demographic they were courting: Men will want to go home and screw their wives, call their girlfriends; women will weep and know that love conquers all. I snort to myself, though it’s lost in the bluster of the wind, the squeal of a motorcycle racing too quickly down Ocean Avenue, empty on this overcast Sunday morning. Did I ever believe that? Did I ever pin my hopes that love could conquer all? It feels like so long ago: when we met each other, when we loved each other without conditions. A familiar tornado of grief spins inside me. Though it’s not just grief for her. It’s for both of us.
2 TATUM OCTOBER 1999 I made a bet with Daisy that I could get at least three numbers by midnight. It’s not something I’d do normally, this bet, these numbers, but she is pushing me outside of my comfort zone, part of an acting exercise assigned to us by Professor Sherman—Move past your comfort zone into that sticky territory of inhabiting someone else—and so I agree. Besides, it’s better than deflecting the cheesy pickup lines that come with being a bartender, the lecherous looks of patrons who somehow think you’re up for grabs, the self-criticism that would otherwise clang around my easily infected brain. By playing the part, slipping into a role, it’s easier to step outside myself. That’s half the reason I want to be an actor in the first place. I can be anyone I want to be. So of course I said yes to the bet. “They can’t be trolls, guys you’d never go out with to begin with,” Daisy said, pouring a shot of whiskey down her throat, untying her black apron and passing it to me when we
3 BEN JULY 2015 “Constance is sick,” Tatum says. “Or else I’d have sent her to get him.” It was part of our separation agreement: that Constance, our nanny, would do most of the handoffs, though we’d gotten more casual about it in the four months since I moved out. Tatum shrugs and stares at my pathetic doormat, which is gray and muddy and in need of a wash. But how do I wash a doormat? I don’t even know. We both let our eyes linger on it for a beat too long. “I’m throwing that out,” I say, and point downward. “I’m getting a new one later today.” I don’t know why I care about impressing her; I’m angry with her; I am untangling myself from her. These are the words I use with Eric when he takes me out after work to nurse my wounds. He tells me to consider a real therapist, not my best friend from college who is now my producing partner and is not really good at advice for shit, especially since he is still single at forty-one and trolling Tinder. “OK,” Tatum replies. “Though you could ju
4 TATUM DECEMBER 2000 Ben sneaks a small bottle of vodka from the inner pocket of his down coat, which is too puffy and threatens to swallow his chin. “You saved my life; you know that, right?” He leans in close, shouting in my ear. “You barely know me,” I shout back. “And you’re already giving me credit for saving your life?” He grins and shakes his head. Around us, the crowds’ cheers rise in swells that envelop us and carry us up with them. “It’s a small miracle you got me here on New Year’s Eve,” he yells. “This is a native New Yorker’s worst nightmare.” “Well, you said you’d do anything I wanted in return for doing your film for free.” I gaze up toward the flashing billboards, the neon lights. “This is what I wanted.” Also: him, this is what I wanted to do with him. Times Square at midnight. With a boy I might want to kiss for the rest of the year by my side. I didn’t really think he’d come; I didn’t really think I’d ask. But when I’d called Piper, my little sister, who was still b
5 BEN AUGUST 2014 Jesus, somehow I turned forty. Am turning forty. Tomorrow. I let the hot water from the shower pulse against my face and neck for too long, and by the time I flip the shower handle to off, my skin is pink and a little angry. I grab one of the white towels hanging on the pewter hooks and knot it around my waist, then stare at the full-length mirror in the bathroom that is half packed because we’re moving next week. Tatum needs a house with better security; Tatum needs a house that moves us one more step toward isolation. We’re stuck in this bubble that is entirely our creation, and it feels as if there’s no way out, no room to breathe. I blame her for this. I run my hand over my stubble, meet my eyes in the mirror. It’s an unkind thought, and I chastise myself for it. She loves this house, loves the family we built here, though now that family is tenuous at best, though we are doing an excellent job at pretending that we’re not falling apart—both to each other and to t
6 TATUM JULY 2001 It is too hot for a funeral. That is what I keep thinking. It is too hot for a funeral, and how am I e
xpected to be burying my mom when it is 103 degrees, and I can’t think straight because of the heat? I am sweating and clammy and red faced, and my hair is sticking to the back of my neck and my skirt is flush against the backs of my thighs, and the sun is so bright I wonder if I might go blind. She wanted to be cremated, scattered in our garden. She told Piper as much when it became clear that this time the cancer was too furious to be beaten back. “Just some of the gals from the hospital, you girls, and some cake afterward, OK?” They hadn’t told me it was as bad as it was until just a few days before she was gone. And June, with Ben, had been blissful: he had found the money to turn the Romanticah short into a feature, and we’d celebrated his Tisch graduation with a real—if low-budget—shoot, spending the days tromping through Central Park with his small crew, his sm
7 BEN APRIL 2013 I’m dreaming again, as I do so often now, have for the past year since everything turned bleak. This time I know I am dreaming and yet I can’t pull myself out of it. This time, as it has been recently, it’s Leo. Always Leo, though it used to be my dad. Now it’s a distorted version of something out of real life: that night on April Fool’s Day when he ran away in seventh grade, when I was a senior in high school. He was pissed at my dad for something—in real life, it was that my dad threatened to pull him from the football team because his grades were so mediocre (for my dad, Cs and Bs), but in the dream, it’s because my father drowned in the Atlantic Ocean off East Hampton Beach, and Leo was there, watching, unable to save him. So Leo ran, and unlike how it really happened—where we thought it was a prank until one a.m. rolled around and my mom started crying and my dad started cursing, and I finally found him at his friend Nate’s apartment, smoking cigarettes and skimmi
8 TATUM FEBRUARY 2002 The snow is piling up in Park City, but Ben and I are oblivious. I push him to the ground in the heap outside our hotel and fall on top of him. “Oh my God, oh my God, oh my God,” I say, before I press my lips to his. He laughs so hard he can’t keep kissing me, so I roll to his side, sinking into the eight inches of powder that fell overnight, and flap my arms and legs to create an angel. When he stops laughing, we each tilt our heads together and stare up at the gray sky, the flakes falling on top of our batting eyelashes. It’s been months since either of us has been able to entirely forget everything else: the horrors of New York on September 11; the grief we wear like our own shadows. I’m able to lose myself in my performances: since my mom died, my work has never been stronger. One professor pulled me aside just before Christmas and told me he’d be happy to recommend me personally to the best agency in the city if I pursue theater. “I don’t know what happened b
9 BEN MAY 2012 I sink beneath the bubbles in the hot tub and wonder: If I stay under long enough, can I force myself to drown? Not that I want to drown, necessarily, but it’s not that I don’t either. I float my hands toward my face: my fingers and gold wedding band weave in front of me like an apparition. I count to twenty, holding my breath, swooshing my arms at my sides to keep me under the too-hot water, but as my lungs grow tighter I find that I don’t have it in me to sink, to not stretch for a gasp of air. The flats of my feet find the bottom of the Jacuzzi, and I shoot upward, toward the open sky, toward the California sunshine. Tatum appears on our back deck now, on the phone, pacing in a circle, her forehead knotted into something that signals a crisis. But what constitutes a crisis anyway? That the test screeners to Army Women: 2.0 aren’t positive? That her publicist has overbooked her interviews? Bad press for forgetting to thank me in speeches? I buckle my knees and head ben
10 TATUM MARCH 2003 We marry in Santa Barbara in March. Neither of us wanted much of a to-do; I’d have been happy at City Hall, and Ben is so busy now that he is Hollywood’s It boy that, through no fault of his own, he couldn’t involve himself in more than showing up. “I will show up very enthusiastically,” he says, before throwing me atop the duvet and kissing my neck. “But the flowers, the cake? I don’t care. Only care about the woman waiting for me at the end of the aisle.” But after the wreckage of the previous year—his dad, my mom—it felt like we owed something more to our families, well, to his mom, Helen, and to Leo and to Piper, my sister, and if giving them a wedding also gave them something to be happy about, it was a small concession. Not a concession. It was a celebration. But the typical trappings of a formal wedding weren’t for me. Not without my mom here, anyway, and maybe even if she’d been here, not then either. I take a week off work: I’m the Tuesday–Saturday bartende
11 BEN FEBRUARY 2011 My face hurts from smiling, and I hate that I’m aware of this. I’m happy for Tatum. But the press line on the red carpet is endless, and her publicity team keeps shuttling me to the side for each interview, escorting me to the back when the photographers call out for a “single.” Single meaning just her. Single meaning all the ways she outshines me. I’m not throwing a pity party; it’s simply true. Tatum has ascended above me in all the ways that matter to this town. “I’m sorry,” she’ll say each time as she’s swept off into that photographer sea. “It doesn’t mean anything other than they want a shot of my dress”—but it’s hard not to feel like she’s splintering off from me, leaving me behind. I wave to Eric, who is on the arm of a producer he’s been dating, as I wait for her to wrap another interview. Ryan Seacrest now, fawning, making her spin in a circle. The racket on the carpet is too loud to hear the two of them, but I see Tatum throw her head back into a complet
12 TATUM JULY 2004 My “big” break comes fifteen months of slinging cosmos and sex on the beaches and chardonnays for tourists at P. F. Chang’s. I don’t mind the work so much. It keeps me busy, though the children are often ill-behaved and whiny, and the tourists are loud and don’t tip well. But Mariana, who logs most shifts with me, has become a good friend, and with Ben still working unending hours, this time prepping for One Day in Dallas, a Kennedy biopic set to shoot next spring, the stint gives me structure, fills my days with something other than scanning the trades for shitty auditions, staring at my cell phone in case my (relatively dodgy) agent calls, running on the beach to lose a few pounds which will take me from girl-next-door to girl-someone-wants-to-fuck. (In Hollywood terms.) I’m contemplating adopting a dog for the companionship, but Ben isn’t home often enough for me to get an affirmative. “I might just do it without you,” I said to him one night while he was nose-dee
13 BEN MAY 2010 My mom has asked me to give a toast, which should be easy, which should be cake. I’m a writer, after all. Tatum leans over, kisses my cheek, adjusts my tie, and says, “Breathe.” I rise with a flute of champagne held aloft, though if anyone were to look closely enough, they’d see a tiny tremor, a small betrayal of my feelings. I want to be happy for her, for her new life, but I’m trapped in this bubble of melancholy, of what-ifs. What if he hadn’t been on the plane that day? What if he’d been around to see my success? What if he’d been around to see that success falter? How would I be changed? How would I be unchanged too? We’ve spent the month in New York for Tatum’s shoot, so I’ve gotten to know Ron a bit better, broken down some of my walls. We’ve gone to the movies, drunk wine, taken in a Yankees game; he even joined me for Joey’s music class, which was filled with mothers and nannies, and made a pretty funny wisecrack about our levels of estrogen rising just by cros
14 TATUM MARCH 2005 Piper calls with the news while I’m in hair and makeup for Scrubs. It’s nothing glamorous, a guest star as a college student who comes down with shingles, but the exposure is good, and it’s another line for my résumé. Since The O.C., the work has been steady, though not swift, nothing so lucrative and assuring that I’ve wanted to quit P. F. Chang’s. Well, I always want to quit P. F. Chang’s, but I still take a shift now and then, and I still stop in on Thursdays to keep Mariana company or sometimes jump in for her hours if she has an audition of her own or a gig that’s come up. None of the customers recognize me, no one thinks I’m anything to double-take at. I’m not. Half the waiters have booked guest spots of their own or have made it all the wa
y to testing for pilots. At Tisch, I was something special; in LA, I’m a slash—a bartender/actress. I have an audition next week—a period piece called On the Highlands that would shoot later in the year in Scotland—that woul
15 BEN JUNE 2009 The doorbell rings early, too early. The sun has barely risen, and I can’t imagine who could possibly be at the front door before seven a.m. I roll to my left but Tatum’s side of the bed is empty. She must have gotten up for a crack-of-dawn run on the beach. She’s been doing that lately to lean down to ensure that she fits back into the corsets for As You Like It after gaining fifteen pounds (all muscle) for Army Women (a break from the awards-bait films in an attempt to go commercial and expand her fan base). The doorbell rings again. Shit. This had better be an emergency. And whoever it is had better not wake the baby. I push myself to my elbows, then flop my feet to the carpet. Then I remember the last real emergency from eight years ago, when my dad—when three thousand people—died, and chide myself for ever wishing for something so stupid. The best you can hope for is that there’s never an emergency again, you dumb fuck! I haven’t slept well, and the left side of m
16 TATUM OCTOBER 2006 The fact is this: nothing is done for you in this life if you don’t do it for yourself. I don’t care how many people claim they are “on your team”; the only person who can helm your team is you. We talk a lot about “teams” in our family therapy sessions, which I now do every month with my dad. It’s part of the outplacement of Commitments. “We are committed to a life of recovery,” they say in their brochures and in their e-mails and in real life. Also, when we checked my father out after his thirty days, and every single time we have revisited since. Not that my father has needed to revisit for drinking. Rather, we drive down once a month for family therapy. Well, for father-daughter therapy. Or: Dad-and-me therapy. Piper is back in Ohio, back to her life of nursing and living in our childhood home and back to dating Scooter Smith, who, she has confided, might propose soon. We brought my dad home after his month at Commitments, and he hasn’t left, which was not my