Will smiled. “That’s the one.”
“And you got my number from Jason? I thought you and Pen hated Jason.”
Will flashed back to Jason standing outside the chapel, his hands open, hollow-eyed under the moon. “Well, I wouldn’t say ‘hate.’”
“‘Despise.’ ‘Despise’ was Cat’s word. Although she also said you beat the shit out of him the first time you met him, which sounds a little hotter under the collar than—what’s the noun form of ‘despise’? Despisery?”
“I don’t think so, but nothing else really springs to mind,” Will said.
“Huh! I thought you were English majors, you, Pen, and Cat.”
Will laughed. “Anyway, it was a long time ago, when I did that.”
“You’ve cooled off, you’re saying?”
“Yes, and I shouldn’t have done it in the first place.”
“Oh, I don’t know about that. So how did Jason come to give you my number?”
Will gave her a condensed version of the story, after which she was silent, except for the sounds of smoking.
Finally she said, “Question: Why? Are you and Pen looking for her for you and Pen or for Jason?”
Will puzzled over this. “I don’t know. We were worried about Cat because Jason said he was worried about Cat, and he was pretty convincing. But Pen and I haven’t really discussed why, even though we talk about finding her all the time.”
He thought for a while more, aware of the lengthening phone silence and wishing he had a cigarette to fill it. “So I don’t know, but knowing me and Pen, it’s for us, not Jason. Or it’s for Cat. Cat’s dad died. She was distraught. She took off. I guess we didn’t discuss why we were looking for her because it just seemed like the only thing to do. If that makes sense.”
Will heard sniffles.
“Are you—crying?” he asked nervously. He stood up as though to make a getaway.
More sniffles, one gulp, and then, tearfully: “That just has to be one of the sweetest things I’ve ever heard. So sweet and so you!”
“You don’t actually know me,” Will reminded Sam.
“I know,” she said. A bout of unusually staccato smoking followed. Puff puff puff. When it was over, Sam was calm and snarky again. “Sorry. I’m prone to emotional outbursts, having only recently broken up with my lying, cheating boyfriend.” Will sat back down.
“Joe,” supplied Will. “The sonofabitch.”
“See? You do know him.” Sam laughed. “Cat would love it that the two of you are looking for her. She’d be over the moon.”
“You think?”
“But she’d be jealous as hell that you guys are back together without her.”
“Do you,” said Will slowly, “know where she is?”
“I knew where she was going. I know that she got there. Which isn’t the same as knowing where she is at this precise moment. And then there’s the matter of how she is, which I also don’t know. Although not so good would be my guess.”
“Where she was going is a start, though. Will you tell me? I would really appreciate it.”
More smoking. Unless Sam’s cigarettes were a foot long, she’d lit another one without Will’s noticing, although Will doubted that a woman who smoked like Sam was capable of soundless cigarette-lighting. He would have imagined a big snapping Zippo or the loud, luscious cinematic scrape-whoosh of a match.
“On one condition,” said Sam.
“Okay. What?”
“I tell you in person. How could I pass up a chance to meet the famous Will in the flesh?”
“Seriously? I live in Asheville, North Carolina, and you’re outside of Cincinnati. That’s got to be at least six hours, one way.”
“You’d do it, though. You’d make the trip. For Cat,” cajoled Sam. “You know you would. You know you would.”
Will groaned. “Fine.”
“Ha! I knew you’d do it. Cat would love that, too,” she said. “But look, I don’t have a lot going on right now, to tell you the truth. A long drive could be therapeutic. How about we do a little Mapquest magic, pick a spot, and meet halfway?”
“How about you tell me where Cat is now, and you and I will plan a get-together for another time?”
“Ha! Nope.”
“All right, all right. I’ll meet you halfway.”
“You think there’s any chance Pen could come, too?”
For one clear instant, Will pictured Pen in the passenger seat next to him, reaching with one long golden-brown arm to close the air-conditioning vent. “I doubt it. She has a five-year-old daughter.”
“What?” shrieked Sam. “Is Pen married? Are you married? Oh my God, you’re not married to each other?”
“Maybe,” said Will. “Maybe not.”
“You’re not telling me? Are you kidding?”
“I’ll tell you when I see you,” said Will coolly.
“Ah. Payback.”
“Not payback. Insurance,” said Will. “Three hours each way is a long way to drive just to see me in the flesh. As enticing as I am.”
“Modesty! Sarcasm!” Will heard a sound that might have been Sam slapping the table in front of her. “That is just so you of you! Can I tell you how excited I am at how you you are?”
“Well, thanks. I’m sure you’re very you, too.”
“Oh, I am,” said Sam. “I totally, totally am.”
THE NEXT DAY, AS HE HEADED OFF TO JELLICO, TENNESSEE, TO MEET Sam, Will found himself remembering the conversation he had had with his mother on the day he got home from the reunion. After he’d walked through his front door, but before he had closed it behind him, the phone had started ringing.
“Welcome back, sweetheart,” she’d said.
“What do you have?” Will had said. “Spies staking out my house?”
“Intuition,” said his mother.
“You’re deeply, deeply creepy,” said Will. “I just want to go on record with that.”
“Done,” said his mother. She got down to business: “Now, tell me, did you see her?”
“Yes,” Will had said. “I mean, no.”
He had told her the whole story. It was the fourth time that day he had told it, since Philip, Gray, and his Asheville friend and former boss Jack, all of whom apparently lacked either his mother’s patience or intuition or both, had called him while he was on the road coming home. Unlike the other three, his mother didn’t punctuate his telling with “No fucking way,” or “Holy shit,” or similar expressions of surprise. Unlike the other three, she didn’t ask him if Pen was still hot. In fact, his mother had stayed almost perfectly quiet, and when Will had finished, the first thing she said was, “Isn’t it interesting how, in the years you’ve been apart, all three of you have lost a father?”
Will was caught off guard by this and didn’t say anything.
“Sad, of course,” his mother went on, “but there’s also something beautiful there, something synchronous. Maybe you’re coming back into each other’s lives to help each other heal.”
Will had thought about pointing out that his own father wasn’t actually dead, unless you counted his heart and soul, or that you had to first have a father in order to lose one, or that his father’s exit from his life had left nothing that required healing. But Will suspected that even though his mother respected Will’s right to think these things about his dad, it bothered her to hear them. His mother, who had been more despised, more broken by Randall Wadsworth than anyone, had forgiven him.
Once, four years ago, Will had asked her how she had accomplished this. She had reached out to cup the side of his head in her hand, her eyes full of tears, and said, “Oh, my darling, compared to forgiving myself, it was easy.”
“How, though?” Will had persisted.
“I did for your dad what I did for me,” she’d said. “I didn’t decide that his behavior wasn’t that bad or erase the memory of it from my mind, but I threw away the idea that he was a monster. I acknowledged his humanness. There’s a light inside every
human being; I chose to honor his inner light.”
“When?” asked Will. “How long did it take?”
His mother had given him a crooked smile and said, “When? Every morning when I get up and every night before I go to bed. Same as I do for myself.”
“Like brushing your teeth.”
“Yep.”
“I’m a long way from that,” said Will. “Probably, I won’t get there.”
“Maybe you won’t, and that’s okay,” said his mother. “But I don’t think you’re giving yourself enough credit. After all, you forgave me.”
She believed that he had forgiven her because she had asked him, once, and he had said yes, which he had been glad about because the answer had made her so happy (nothing he had ever done or said in his entire life had ever made anyone even close to that happy), but, in truth, he didn’t know if forgiveness was the right word for what had changed between himself and his mother after she’d stopped drinking. He hadn’t deliberately forgiven her. He had never thought the word forgive. Instead, gradually, without really meaning to, he had turned himself over to her, had begun to love her without wariness or sorrow.
“Oh, come on,” Will had said. “Dad is—. You don’t need to hear what I think Dad is, but I’ll tell you what: he’s not you.”
“Okay,” said his mother, “but for your sake, if not for his, I hope you’ll forgive him one of these days.”
“I might.” Will had shifted uncomfortably, then. “Whether I do or don’t, though, I figured something out.”
“What’s that?”
“I need him gone,” Will had told her, looking her straight in the eye. “For good. No seeing him. No more phone calls or e-mails. Nothing.”
He had braced himself.
“Good,” said his mother firmly. “Cut him out.”
“Really? I thought you’d be upset.”
“Of course not,” said his mother. “Whatever you need to do to take care of yourself, do it. And good riddance.”
“Hold on,” Will had said. “I thought you forgave him.”
“I did. I do. I let go of my anger and blame, but I know him.” She had given Will a look of such fierce tenderness that he knew he would never forget it. “And you are my child, and, unless that man undergoes a radical change, which could happen because miracles do happen, but which I’m sorry to say seems unlikely, he shouldn’t be anywhere near you.”
Now, four years later, Will was no closer to forgiveness, unless not caring much anymore counted as forgiveness, and Will’s father, if not dead, was as gone as ever, not as gone as Pen’s father, as Cat’s, but only technically. Will could still see Pen lying on the ground outside the old gray church, could still hear her voice saying, “My dad died two years ago,” and he knew that his father was gone in a way that Pen’s and Cat’s would never be.
But when his mother said that, about how they had all lost fathers, Will hadn’t launched into a conversation about degrees of fatherlessness or grief. Tired from his drive, his head full of Pen and Cat, he had looked out his window and said, “I think my lawn has grown a foot since I left. Is that possible?”
Will’s mother said, “Ben Calloway was an uncommonly good man.”
“Yeah,” said Will. “I wish he hadn’t died.”
“You wish it for Pen’s sake and for her family’s sake the most,” his mother went on, not noticing, or more likely ignoring, his terseness. “But also for your own. He was more a father to you than your father ever was. I know how you loved him.”
Sometimes, he thought, you are too much. Time to pull back. Time to set limits. “I haven’t seen him in a long time,” he said.
“Honestly, William, time?” his mother had snapped. “Distance? Those things have nothing whatsoever to do with love. Who knows that better than you?”
It happened the way it always happened: Will set limits and his mother rolled over them like a tank mowing down a picket fence.
Will hadn’t bothered bringing up his overgrown lawn again. He smiled a resigned smile, shook his head, and said, “Nobody.”
IN THE MIDDLE OF THE DRIVE TO JELLICO, PEN CALLED.
“Where are you?”
“Driving.”
“Where?”
Will looked around him. Highway. Hills.
“In my car.”
“Your speedy car,” said Pen, who had seen Will’s car at the reunion and given him the kind of look you’d give a traitor. “How could you?” she’d said. “This car is shiny and speedy and blue! The only thing it has in common with your old red Saab is that it’s German.” When Will told her that Saabs weren’t actually German, she had refused to believe it, saying, “Why would I have thought all this time that Saabs were German if they’re not?” to which Will could find no answer.
“I hope you’re not speeding,” said Pen.
“If by ‘speeding,’ you mean exceeding the speed limit, Grandma, then I am.”
“I don’t blame you,” said Pen giddily. “I can’t wait until you pick the brain of Samantha Denham-Drew. I bet the anticipation is killing you.”
“I wouldn’t say ‘killing,’” said Will.
A couple of days before, Pen had e-mailed Will a list of fifteen questions for Sam with the instruction that he should add them to his own, checking, of course, for redundancy and preferably arranging them in a subtly rising arc of intimacy and importance. Will had reminded Pen that nobody showed up to a conversation with a list of questions; went on to say that, as far as he could tell, Sam was the kind of person who would talk for hours, in detail, about any subject, especially Cat, unless a man were to hand her a list of questions and instruct her to answer them; and had added, “Besides, all we really need to know is where Cat went, right?” To which Pen had hollered, “Are you insane? It’s been six years! You have to find out everything! How can that happen if you’re not prepared?”
Now, as he had known she would, Pen asked, “Did you bring the list of questions?”
“I e-mailed them to her in advance,” said Will. “She’s putting together a PowerPoint presentation on the last six years of Cat’s life that she’ll project onto the wall of the barbecue joint.”
“Shut up,” said Pen, laughing her laugh. “So you’ll never guess what happened.”
“What?”
“Guess.”
“You said I never would.”
“Guess.”
“Uh, Augusta lost a tooth.”
“That’s mean, Will,” reproached Pen. “If you saw her perfect, little, square white baby teeth, you would know how mean it was.”
“Sorry,” said Will. “So what really happened?”
“My mother came home.”
Something in Pen’s tone was familiar to Will, and it occurred to him that maybe the tone was a universal, the way you sounded when your mother came back: like a little kid and so glad that you shine, even over the phone. Maybe he had heard Tully sound that way. Or Philip. Maybe he’d heard himself.
“Wow,” said Will, “that’s great news! You must be really happy.”
“I’m beside myself with happiness,” said Pen. “And gratitude. And relief. I just came home from work and saw her sitting there with Augusta, and it took my breath away. It was like someone fixed my television.”
For a second, Will considered saying what he figured most people would say to this, something like, “Man, you must really like television,” but the fact was that he knew immediately and exactly what Pen meant. “Colors got brighter,” said Will. “Edges got sharper.”
“Everything gleamed,” Pen said. “Like sometimes happens after it rains.”
“How is she?”
It took Pen a little while to answer, and when she did, something uncertain had edged into her buoyancy. “You know,” she said. “She’s fine.”
“Good. But if she’s fine,” said Will, “then why do you sound like that?”
“Like what?”
“You tell me.”
Pen sighed. “Worried?
A little?”
“About what?”
“Listen, are you driving with one hand while we’re talking? Because that’s dangerous.”
“I have a Bluetooth phone.”
“You have to know that I have no idea what that is.”
“I just talk. No hands required. So why don’t you tell me what you’re worried about.”
“Okay. I know this sounds crazy,” said Pen, “but she’s almost too fine. If you had seen her when she left—. I mean, my father had been gone for over a year and a half, but she seemed sadder than she was right after he died. More than just sadder. She was heartsick, despondent.” Pen quickly added, “And, Will, you know I would’ve given anything to make things better for her.”
Will remembered the last visit he’d made with Pen to her parents’ house, how he and Pen’s father had just come back from a bike ride and could hear, from the driveway, even before they’d gotten off their bikes, Pen and her mother singing in the kitchen: Michael Jackson’s “Ben” at full volume, their voices stretching for the high notes near the end, then collapsing into laughter.
“Sure, you would have,” he said. “You don’t even have to say it.”
“But there’s something about her now that’s more than what I expected,” said Pen. “I expected peace, acceptance. But she seems so actively happy. She has this—this luster to her.”
“She was in India and Tibet, right? Maybe she had some kind of spiritual awakening. Or maybe she’s just glad to be home.” Will could see how a spiritual awakening and coming home to Pen could amount to the same thing.
“Jamie, Augusta, and I are driving her home tomorrow morning. She mentioned that she has something she wants to tell us.”
“Could be the meaning of life,” said Will.
Pen laughed. “I’ll keep you posted.”
LEAVE IT TO CAT, THE MOST DRAMATIC PERSON WILL HAD EVER known, to have a friend who walked into a tiny barbecue joint in a tiny Tennessee town at twelve thirty on a June afternoon looking like a head-on collision between Marilyn Monroe and Johnny Rotten: white halter dress, white sandals, red lipstick, orange sea urchin hair. As every person in the restaurant—mothers and toddlers, men nursing beers at the bar, people on their lunch break—turned to look at her, Sam whipped off her enormous black sunglasses and flicked her green gaze over the room. Will started to raise his hand (he was that sure of who she was), but her eyes didn’t rest on him for more than a split second before she strode across the room to the bar, grabbed a giant of a man with a ZZ Top beard and a John Deere cap by his copious shoulders, cried, “Will Wadsworth, you are exactly what Cat described!” and kissed him, Euro-style, on both cheeks.
Falling Together Page 19
