Falling Together

by Marisa de los Santos

Pen was beginning to get nervous. From long experience, she knew that the intensity of Will’s worry would be directly proportional to the length of time he spent on aimless chatter, rather than on answering her question. Go ahead, Will, she thought, give me an answer.

  “Damn window,” said Will, giving the window a baleful glance over his shoulder. “I should get it fixed.”

  “It’s been broken for seven years.”

  “I’ve been taking the laissez-faire approach,” said Will. “I’m the Ayn Rand of broken windows.”

  “You hate Ayn Rand.” Please don’t let it be that she’s drinking again, thought Pen.

  “Okay, then I’m the Alexander Hamilton of broken windows. Nobody hates Alexander Hamilton.”

  “Except that one guy.”

  “Except for him, but he was just one guy.”

  “He was,” said Pen, truly scared now. “He definitely was.”

  Then Will said, “Tully’s worried.”

  Pen shivered inside her coat. “Oh. Does Tully think she’s—” Pen found that she couldn’t say the word.

  “She doesn’t know. She hasn’t found direct evidence. Those were Tully’s exact words, ‘direct evidence.’”

  Will’s sister was in law school, a superfluous, if necessary, step, Will and his brother, Philip, liked to joke, since Tully had been born a lawyer. “When has Tully not been in law school,” Will had said when he got the news she’d been admitted. “It’s like Mephistopheles and hell. Wherever Tully is is law school.”

  “But if she’s drinking,” Will went on, “she’s different from how she used to be. Tully’s word was ‘agitated.’ Never sitting still, talking in long bursts, not sleeping, starting things and not finishing.”

  “Like paintings?

  “Paintings, meals, gardening. She dug holes in the side yard to plant bushes or something, which had to be hard because it’s still so cold, and then she left them there, empty, for days. The mailman stepped in one.”

  “Oh, no.”

  “Nothing broken and my mom’s lawyer says she’s in the clear because he shouldn’t have been walking across the yard in the first place. Not that the mailman threatened to sue. Actually, he was apparently really nice about it.”

  “But she checked with a lawyer anyway? That maybe sounds a little paranoid.”

  “Tully checked with the lawyer,” said Will. “Tully was born a little paranoid.”

  “So maybe Tully’s seeing a problem with your mom when there’s really not one?”

  She heard Will draw in a long breath, then let it out. “It’s not just Tully. I talked to my mom a couple of days ago. She said something odd.”

  “What?”

  “She said she doesn’t know how to live.”

  Pen thought about this and said, “Without your dad? Because that would make some sense. Yes, he was jerk, but they were married for a long time.”

  “That’s what I asked her. I said, ‘You mean without Dad?’”

  “And what did she say?”

  “She said, ‘I mean period.’ Her voice when she said it—” Will broke off, shaking his head.

  Without thinking, Pen unhooked her seat belt and reached out to hold on to Will, her forehead on his shoulder, her arm across his chest. It’s what she would have done for anyone she loved, for Jamie or Cat or her mother, and for a few seconds, everything was normal. She smelled the cold wool of his coat, felt its roughness against her face and her hand, and then something happened: Will took one hand off the steering wheel and rested it against the back of her head.

  Pen knew that it was nothing Will would not have done for Tully or Cat or anyone, something he probably had done for Pen herself, without her blinking an eye. She knew that it was an acknowledgment, a thank-you, Will being nice, but the fact of her knowing these things did not stop the touch from feeling different from any way Will had touched her before. It startled her. She tensed. Within seconds, she was detaching herself from Will, pressing her back against her seat, her hand lifting involuntarily to the spot on the back of her head where his hand had been, even as she scolded herself for being so foolish, ridiculous for imagining weirdness into Will’s hand on her hair, especially at a time like this. He’s thinking about his mother, she thought. He’s worried. He’s not hitting on you, you ridiculous person.

  “Thanks,” said Will, and for a moment Pen thought he meant for understanding that he hadn’t been hitting on her. Then she realized he meant for the hug.

  “De nada,” she said.

  With her peripheral vision, she saw him looking at her. “Hey,” he said.

  “What?” said Pen too quickly, pulling her hand off the back of her head and slapping it into her lap.

  “Buckle up.”

  Because Pen worried that the quiet that followed might be awkward, even though Will seemed fine, because she was concerned that, distracted by the hug/hand/hair event (non-event), she had dropped the subject of Will’s mother prematurely, Pen decided to say something, and because she wanted to say something appropriate and natural, she fell headfirst into cliché.

  “She’ll be fine eventually.” She hated the stilted sound of her own voice. “It will take time. Change is hard.”

  “Don’t worry about it,” Will said, his sarcasm making everything the way it should be. “I didn’t know what to say, either.”

  THEY HAD NEVER ARRIVED AT THE HOUSE IN THE DARK BEFORE; they had never come in March. Usually, it was early evening and spring or summer, the sky like a slice of nectarine to the west, low light striping the porch boards, the air smelling like black dirt and flowers. Pen had always loved the moment of arrival, the way the place opened its arms to her. She expected it to be different at night, with nothing in bloom, nothing singing in the trees, and, on the surface, it was different, drained of color and still. But the outline of the roof against the sky, the sigh of the wooden screen door were so familiar, Pen could have cried, and the house’s essence, as it settled over her, was the same as ever: clean and old and incandescently peaceful.

  Pen dropped her bag in the hallway and leaned against the wall.

  “I love this place,” she said.

  Will was fiddling with the thermostat, and Pen heard the radiators start to hum.

  “I called and asked Lacey and Roy to turn the heat on for us,” he said, “but I think their idea of warm enough might be different from yours.” Lacey and Roy were the caretaker couple who lived in town.

  He turned around and looked at Pen. “You always say that as soon as we get here,” he said, “that you love it.”

  “Because I always love it.” Pen turned around and planted a kiss on the wall, loving its chalky, bleached-seashell whiteness, the bumps in its thick plaster.

  “Cat was less sold,” said Will, smiling.

  “She loved it some. Definitely, she loved being here with us. You know Cat can’t love any place entirely that doesn’t have central air,” said Pen. “Comes from growing up in Houston.”

  Will walked through the house, turning on lights as he went, the heavy switches thunking. Pen stayed in the hallway with her eyes closed, breathing the place in. The house seemed to breathe, too. Leave it to this house, Pen thought, to not feel shut down or forsaken in the winter, to just be sleeping.

  “Are you hungry?” called Will.

  “No,” Pen called back. “I’m too tired to be hungry.”

  “Are you hungry if there’s a pie?”

  “Are you kidding?”

  At the enormous, scarred dining room table, they ate shamefully large slabs of Lacey’s apple crumb and drank the milk she had left in the refrigerator. Basking in gladness, Pen took in the room around her as she ate, the tall windows, the defunct brick fireplace, the great bronze, low-hanging octopus of a chandelier. The house wasn’t a showplace by most standards, but it was perfect nonetheless. The kind of house in which you’d look up to see sprigs of dried lavender in a glass milk bottle exactly, smack-dab, where sprigs of dried lavender in a glass milk bottle shou
ld be. The kind of house whose cramped, hot kitchen was rendered moot by the faded hydrangea-print wallpaper in the guest room and the sleeping porch’s view of the backyard.

  “This and my parents’ house are the only places I drink milk,” said Pen.

  “Same here,” said Will.

  THE NEXT DAY WAS SERENE, SUNLIT, AND CONSUMMATELY BEAUTIFUL. Pen woke up to white curtains full of light, and she and Will spent the daytime hours in an easy weaving between being together and being apart. They went for a morning run, parting ways after mile four, then drove to the market in town and bought green beans, new potatoes, and lamb for Pen to butterfly and rub with olive oil, garlic, and rosemary from the backyard and for Will to throw on the grill for dinner.

  In the afternoon, Pen sat on the porch in a trapezoid of sun and read an ancient copy of The Golden Bowl, turning the frail, sepia-colored pages with care and, stopping, now and then, to unknot a sentence, reveling in the opulent commas and old-book smell. Afterward, while Will worked at his computer, she walked on the rocky beach with a bucket to search for sea glass, an addictive, squatting, neck-kinking enterprise that consisted of Pen vowing to stop, then finding, at the last second, something rare—an aquamarine kidney bean frosted over with nicks, a needle of saffron-yellow—and keeping on until her eyes swam with black spots and shooting stars.

  It was only after dinner, when Will and Pen sat down to watch The Graduate, one of the DVDs from the crazily random selection (Mad Max, To Kill a Mockingbird, The Unbearable Lightness of Being…) that had accumulated at the summerhouse over the years, that a little awkwardness set in, at least for Pen. While Will crouched in front of the television cabinet, coaxing into action what could have been the DVD player prototype, Pen got herself a glass of water. When she came back into the living room, Will was sitting on the sofa, and Pen stood, water in hand, socked feet rooted to the rug, immobilized by uncertainty about how to sit in front of a television with Will without Cat.

  Don’t be stupid, she berated herself, you’ve done it before. Even though she knew that this was true, had to be true many times over, standing there, she couldn’t remember a single instance. What she remembered was Cat, with her instinct for cuddliness, plopping her head into Will’s lap and throwing her legs across Pen, Cat curling against one shoulder or another, Pen and Will sitting on the sofa with Cat on the floor, her arms hooked over their knees. When it came to sitting in front of a television or a fireplace or on a picnic blanket at an outdoor concert, they hadn’t been a triangle; they’d been an “H.” Now, every place Pen considered sitting seemed either too close to or too far away from Will. Too close to Will? Before this moment, such a thing had not existed. Pen didn’t understand why it should now. From the edge of the living room, she watched Benjamin Braddock ride the moving walkway, the white tile wall gliding by behind him, Ben’s shell-shocked profile going nowhere.

  “What’s up?” asked Will. “You’re having second thoughts about the movie?”

  “No,” sputtered Pen. “What do you mean? Why would you think I was having second thoughts about the movie?”

  Will gave her a mild, squinty “Are you crazy?” look, and said, “Because you’re not watching it?”

  “I’m listening to the sounds of silence,” said Pen. “Hold your horses.” To show herself who was boss, she strode across the room and sat next to Will on the sofa. There was about two feet of space between them, maybe two and a half, not that Pen was keeping track. Calm yourself, missy, she thought.

  When Benjamin took Elaine, with her shining hair and lily-white jacket, to the strip club and she looked up in mute misery, the tears in her big, angelic brown eyes rendering them bigger, more angelic, more brown, Will said, “Remember how Cat used to say you were Elaine?”

  “Cat and her backhanded compliments,” growled Pen. “The passive-aggressive midget.”

  “I’m glad she’s gone,” said Will, throwing a pillow into the air and batting it toward the television like a volleyball.

  “Oh yeah,” said Pen. “Way glad. Cat never did see my inner bad girl.”

  “Hello, darkness, your old friend.”

  “Damn right.”

  “You don’t really have an inner bad girl, do you?”

  “Nope,” said Pen. “But I’m working on it.”

  “UH-OH,” SAID AMELIE, WHEN PEN GOT TO THIS PART OF THE STORY.

  “I know,” said Pen. “Famous last words.”

  THE NEXT DAY, AFTER A LEISURELY BREAKFAST AND ANOTHER TRIP TO the market, Pen and Will filled travel mugs with coffee, a paper bag with a lunch of leftover pie, packed up a blanket and the newspaper, and drove to the sandy beach on the other side of the peninsula. With the lambent bay before them, flat and silver as a platter, they sat back-to-back and ate and read, silently trading sections of the paper. Then they walked along the shore and talked about plovers, whether Will should quit business school, and Cat. In the almost-heat of the afternoon, Will rolled up his sweatpants and waded into the water, and Pen took off the Irish wool sweater she’d found in the guest-room closet and tied it around her waist. After a while, they walked back to the car, where Will stripped down to shorts, put his running shoes on, and took off down the road. Pen drove home, wrapped in tranquility and the smell of warm mothballs.

  From the road, even before the blond stones of the driveway were crunching under the Saab’s tires, Pen saw the car, a long gray Mercedes with Connecticut plates. Before she had time to consider who it might be, a note of unease began sounding in her head, faint, barely audible, but throwing the harmony of the past thirty-some hours out of whack. She wondered who it was, although anyone would’ve been less than welcome in Pen’s opinion, now, when she and Will were leaving the next morning.

  “You couldn’t have waited just one more day?” Pen asked the Mercedes, as she pulled up next to it.

  If someone apart from herself and Will had to be there, she hoped it was Philip, whom she loved for being a goofier version of Will, or Tully, whom she loved for being part twenty-three-year-old girl, part cranky old man (“Andy Rooney in Juicy Couture” is how Cat summed her up). But the man sleeping in the rocking chair on the porch with his feet, in gigantic, beat-up, paint-splattered black Chuck Taylors, propped on a milk crate wasn’t Philip or Tully. He was older, maybe late twenties, with a long narrow face, Frida Kahlo eyebrows, and a head of oil-black Shirley Temple curls. One hand was tucked inside his toffee-colored Carhartt jacket; the other one dangled off the arm of the chair and was large and elegant and stained with something purple.

  “Excuse me,” said Pen.

  Possibly it had something to do with his oversized hands or his extravagant hair, but Pen expected the man to wake up dramatically, maybe kick over the milk crate or shout with surprise. But he didn’t move at all.

  “Excuse me,” she said again more loudly, and, this time, the man lifted a hand very slowly and rubbed the back of it back and forth across his still-shut eyes. It was only after he’d dropped the hand heavily into his lap and had, with great languor, tilted his head from side to side, as though working the kinks out of his neck, that he opened his eyes. They were an unexpected cloudy bluish gray, like the eyes of a newborn baby. The man smiled at Pen, a fast-twitch smile that made the cheek muscles in his thin face pop out like two golf balls.

  “You caught me napping,” he said. Actually, what he said was, “Yih cawt me nappin’,” all the edges of his words smoothed away by a southern accent so lush it was almost comical.

  “I see that,” said Pen. She couldn’t help smiling back at him. He was at best an interloper, at worst a serial killer, but he was cute.

  He stood up. Due to his immense height, this was a multistage unfolding activity that reminded Pen of setting up a music stand. The man rubbed his hands down the front of his jacket and offered the right one to Pen. “Damon Callas.”

  Pen shook his hand. “Pen Calloway.”

  “What sort of a name is ‘Pen,’ if you don’t mind my asking?”

  “A
nickname. For Penelope.”

  “Good Lord, girl, you’re Greek!”

  “No. Sorry.”

  “Where’d you get a name like that, then?”

  “It’s from The Rise of Silas Lapham, a book no one in the world but my mother loves. Penelope is Silas’s daughter, the plain, brainy one.”

  “I’m sure only the latter adjective applies to you.” Somehow—maybe it was the accent—he could say this without sounding like a complete phony. “Does she get her man?”

  “She does, actually.”

  “I believe it.” He winked. Pen was not a fan of winking, and she averted her gaze, but Damon was the kind of person whose eyes never leave your face during conversation. When she looked elsewhere, he leaned so that he could keep looking at her.

  “Hmm,” sniffed Pen.

  “Sounds like she got a better deal than the other Penelope. Mrs. Odysseus.”

  “Yeah,” said Pen, “you really never want to be the one who gets left behind.”

  “I was thinking more about the loyalty, the fidelity.” He sagged his bony shoulders and made a bored face, “The chastity.”

  “The never-ending sewing project.” Pen smiled.

  “That, too.” He smiled back at her, not a quick smile like before, but a molasses-slow, whole-face event. He crossed his arms across his chest and kept smiling.

  “So,” said Pen.

  “Right,” he said, still smiling. “So are you one of Charlotte’s neighbors?”

  Partly because of the way Damon pronounced “Charlotte,” partly because Will never referred to his mother by her first name, and partly because Pen never suspected that this sublime scarecrow of a man could have anything to do with Will’s mother, it took Pen several seconds to figure out what Damon was asking.

  “Oh,” she said finally. “No. I’m a friend of her son Will. We’re just up for a few days.”

  “Will.” Damon nodded. “The one in Philadelphia, right?”

  “Yep, him.”

  Damon continued to nod. Pen thought Damon might be the most unhurried person in the world. Standing before her, nodding in the sun, he had the aspect of someone who could stand there nodding in the sun all day long.