“You didn’t?” said Pen. “Why did you leave, then? You must have been looking for something.” She would have liked for this to have come out sounding less childish and bitter, but she felt childish and bitter.
“What did you think it was?” Her mother sounded genuinely curious.
Pen gave a cranky shrug. “Tibet. India. Rome. What do people usually go looking for in those places? Spiritual enlightenment, I guess. The meaning of life. God.”
Pen’s mother’s laugh was harsh. “God? I was looking for God?”
“Why is that funny?”
“Because I was furious with God, when I could bring myself to believe in him at all, which wasn’t very often.”
“Why did you choose those places, then?” asked Jamie. “You never told us.”
His casual tone impressed Pen because the fact was that she hadn’t just left out this one detail but had told them almost nothing. She had given them three days’ notice that she was leaving (to be fair, this was no more notice than she’d given herself), had a friend drive her to the airport, and had only made phone calls—brief, static-riddled—every few weeks, facts that had hurt and baffled even Jamie.
Their mother’s blue eyes were bright with tears. “Right before your dad died, we were talking all the time about traveling.”
“And those were places you talked about going?” asked Pen.
Margaret wiped her eyes. “No. We talked about Wales, Brittany, bicycling through Scotland. The Galapagos, Brazil, Paris, Tanzania, Barcelona. So many more places. Your father and his maps.”
Something softened in Pen, then, and she met her mother’s eyes. My father and his maps, she thought. Her mother smiled at her. “What I did was choose places we had never talked about going. It wasn’t easy.”
“But why go at all?” said Pen.
“I was broken,” said her mother. Her voice was steady and tender. “I had lost my capacity for anything but sadness. I don’t mean to scare you, but I left because I thought I would die, and there was only one tiny part of me that cared, and every day that part got a little bit smaller.”
“But it won in the end, right?” said Jamie quickly, still the kid who would read the end of the book before the beginning to make sure it ended happily. “The part that cared.”
“It was like in Horton Hears a Who!,” Margaret said with a sparkle in her eye. “Remember? The tiny part shouted at the top of its lungs for me to do something to save myself, and I almost didn’t hear it, but then I did.”
“It told you to leave?” asked Pen, narrowing her eyes.
“My girl,” said Margaret, “for whom leaving is always the worst thing.”
“Leaving people,” said Pen impatiently.
“It told me to do something,” said Margaret. “Leaving was the only thing I could think of. I had some money from your father’s life insurance. To tell you the truth, I didn’t think leaving was a very good idea, either, and I had almost no expectation that it would help, but I couldn’t think of one other thing to do. Please try to understand.”
The forlorn note in her mother’s voice was like a fire blanket, putting out the anger that had begun to smolder inside Pen with one colossal whack. She looked at her mother and saw that since the conversation had started, some of the youthful, sun-streaked radiance she had been carrying in her face since she’d gotten home had faded, and, instantly, desperately, Pen wanted it back. She got off the couch to sit on the floor at Margaret’s feet. She grabbed her hand, which was smaller than her own, and kissed it.
“I do understand,” she said. “And, look, it did help: you came back happy.”
Pen meant it. She did mean it, and she felt glad when she said it. Even so, when Jamie said teasingly, “All right, all right, cut the bonding crap and tell us about this international man of mystery,” Pen couldn’t help but give a sharp, internal flinch. As if her mother felt it, she rested her hand briefly, protectively on the top of Pen’s head.
“I don’t know quite where to start,” she said, flustered.
“Then start with where,” said Jamie.
“Bossy,” said Pen. “As usual.”
Margaret laughed a free, fluttering laugh. “In an airport in Mumbai. I was going to Vienna. He was going to Rome. Our flights were delayed and we got to talking, and I—I…” She broke off, blushing again. Margaret was a blusher, could go from zero to azalea pink in a matter of seconds. “I changed my flight.”
“Mom!” said Pen, laughing. Pen was aware of sadness, out there and waiting, a big, foggy shape that would surely overtake her later. Just now, though, she let herself be carried by the current of her mother’s happiness.
Jamie whistled. “Must’ve been some conversation.”
“It was,” said Margaret, “although it wasn’t as though I had anything particular to do in Austria. I was just going to go. But, yes, it was a good conversation. And we actually did end up going to Vienna later.” The “we” stung, but Pen closed her eyes and breathed past it.
“So you spent a lot of time together,” said Pen.
“Yes. He travels for his job. I went with him.”
Pen’s impulse was to ask her mother how serious this relationship was, but she weighed the possible consequences of the question—her mother having a meaningless European fling versus her mother in love with a stranger—and held back.
“Okay,” began Jamie. Pen saw the trace of uneasiness under his smile. Oh, just don’t, she thought, but, of course, he did. “How serious is this?”
“Oh. Well.” The way Margaret drew herself up and pressed the back of her hand against her mouth, she could have been holding tears or joy or both in check. Pen couldn’t tell, but she knew it wasn’t the gesture of a woman who was about to say, “Not serious at all.” In a moment, she moved her hand away and said decisively, “Very.”
“You’re in love?” asked Pen. She found that she couldn’t not ask it.
Margaret nodded, looking so demure with her lashes lowered and her hands folded in her lap that for a crazy moment, Pen imagined that the whole scene was ripped from a Jane Austen novel, with Pen and Jamie as the stern parents and their mother as the rose-fresh, marriageable daughter. Gloves and a fan, thought Pen, that’s all she needs.
After a few seconds, Jamie sent these slightly hysterical fancies flying out the window by saying, “You know what? Dad would be glad.”
Pen remembered the fox in the backyard, her father’s kindness reverberating around her, not passive, but powerful, a force, and she had to admit that Jamie was right.
“I have never thought otherwise for one second,” said Margaret.
“Not that what Dad would think should’ve stopped you.” This was such a startling statement that, for a second, Pen wondered who could have made it, declared it, really, in that clear, certain voice.
“Holy cluck,” said Jamie, staring at Pen. “Did you really just say that?”
“Yes,” said Pen, trying to sound sure of herself. “Why? Do you think I’m wrong?”
“Oh, I think you’re right,” said Jamie. “I’m just not sure if you’re you.”
“What do you mean?”
“You know,” said Jamie. “You. The never letting go of stuff. Ever. The insane loyalty.”
At the mention of loyalty, Pen felt a little doubt inch in. “You think I’m being disloyal?”
“Of course, you’re not being disloyal,” said her mother.
“Jamie?” persisted Pen.
Jamie’s face tensed, reflecting what was rare for him: an inner struggle. Pen thought he was on the verge of just agreeing with Margaret, but then he said, “I think you’re being loyal to Mom, which is the way it should be because Dad’s dead and Mom’s alive. The living win, automatically. Especially if the living is Mom.”
It hurt him to say this, Pen could tell, and she understood because she felt the same way: that just acknowledging that Dad was dead, relegating him to that state, lumping him in, however sorrowfully, with other dead people,
constituted a kind of betrayal all by itself. Which made her blithe pronouncement that it didn’t matter what her father would think about her mother’s loving another man even more puzzling.
She considered Jamie’s idea, that the living win, automatically. It wasn’t exactly what she had been thinking when she’d said what she’d said, but it was such an elegantly simple statement, so translucent and true, while what she had been thinking had been so scattered and unformed (although nonetheless urgent)—more an impulse than a thought—and also so potentially embarrassing to piece together and articulate in the presence of Jamie that Pen just nodded and said, “Right.”
WHEN PEN CALLED WILL LATER THAT NIGHT, WHEN SHE GOT TO THIS part of the story, she added, “I said ‘right’ because Jamie was right, but that’s not really what I’d been thinking.” It came out in a rush, unplanned. Pen closed her eyes. Blurter, she thought with exasperation. Spiller.
“Oh,” said Will. “So what were you thinking?”
“Will you promise not to make fun of me?”
“Can’t do it,” said Will.
Pen sighed.
“How about if I promise not to make fun of you immediately.”
“Fine,” said Pen. It was more than she would’ve gotten from Jamie. And because she felt suddenly overcome by shyness, she launched into a little conversation with herself inside of her head:
You want to say this thing, she said to herself.
Obviously. The question is why.
You have no idea why, but you want to say it. You need to hear yourself say it out loud.
But why now? And why to Will?
Because you just figured it out, and now is when you want to, and if you want to, why not to Will? He’s as good at listening to the things you say as anyone, isn’t he?
“Pen?” It was Will. “You still with me?”
“Yes,” said Pen decisively.
From where she was sitting on the guest-room bed, she could see a ladybug creeping up the white lampshade on the dresser, and she remembered a story Amelie had told her about ladybugs infesting her aunt’s house, how it became like something out of a horror movie, ladybugs everywhere, a scourge of tiny, lacquered bodies, a plague of cuteness. According to Amelie, they bit. Pen thought about telling this story to Will, along with Amelie’s interesting assertion that “anything in huge numbers becomes horrific,” but she realized it was no time to dither. Just say what you have to say as clearly as possible, she instructed herself. How hard is that?
“What it comes down to is that I just don’t see it as a choice. I mean, not really,” she said.
“You don’t?”
“Well, of course, technically, it’s a choice. Free will and all that crap. Cartesian, right? Free will? Like the plane, I guess. René. It’s a name a man can only pull off if he’s French. But just because you get to choose doesn’t mean there isn’t one right choice. Right?”
“Descartes thought the pineal gland was the seat of the soul,” said Will.
“That’s disgusting.”
“It’s not what you think.”
“Of course, there are situations in which it’s the wrong choice,” Pen went on, “for the same reason that anything is the wrong choice: you hurt people, you break promises. Although I suppose that not everyone would agree with that.”
“Maybe not.”
“But if you’re not hurting anyone, then I think you have no choice but to, well, honor it.”
“Honor? What do you mean honor?”
“Acknowledge it. Follow it. Chase it. Hold on to it. Whatever.”
There was a silence on the other end of the line, during which Pen watched the ladybug fly, a black blur, from the lampshade to the curtain of the window next to the bed.
Will said, “All right, I give up.”
“What?”
“I’m not getting it. Your pronoun reference.”
“What are you talking about?”
“The ‘it.’ I need a real noun. The right choice, the thing you follow, hold on to, et cetera.”
“Love,” said Pen impatiently. “What else would I be talking about?”
Another silence.
Finally, Will said, “So you’re saying, ‘Love wins, automatically.’”
“No. Well, maybe. Except that makes it sound easy when it’s not. Or not most of the time. It’s stringent. Exacting,” said Pen. “I think love is an imperative. It obligates you.”
“You think that because your mother fell in love with this man, she should be with him, even if your father would not have approved.”
Pen recoiled from this, leaning back against the pillow propped against the headboard, but she said, “Yes. Even if it’s hard. My mother. This man. Anyone. And I’m not just talking about being in love. I mean any kind of love. You don’t mess around. You don’t walk away. You can’t.”
“Can’t. Can’t is hard-core.”
“It’s what we’re here for,” explained Pen. “It’s what we’re for.”
Pen realized that her face was burning, that the phone was pressed so hard between her ear and shoulder that she would probably have bruises, and that she was clenching the quilt that lay spread over the bed underneath her until her tendons popped out. Deliberately, she relaxed, released the quilt, cradled the phone in her hand, but as the silence between her and Will stretched on, she began to get anxious, fidgety.
“I think this is the good kind of ladybug,” she said. “It’s a true red. Like a Red Delicious apple. Or lipstick. Porsche-red. I’m pretty sure the infesting kind are more orange. And anyway, it’s summer.”
“Pen.”
“They only go inside in groups in the cold weather. What’s the word for that?”
“Hibernation?”
“Overwintering.”
“You thought I would make fun of you?”
“Jamie would. Amelie would. Maybe even my mom would. They’d call me a romantic.”
Will laughed. “‘Love is an imperative’? Not exactly hearts and roses stuff. You make it sound like joining the army.”
“I guess.”
“And, hey, look at that,” said Will. “I was right.”
“About what?”
“About what your mom had to tell you. Remember when I was on my way to see Sam and I was talking to you?”
“On your Bluetooth phone,” said Pen quickly, “with both hands on the wheel.”
“Even if that’s not what she went looking for, it’s what she brought back and gave you.”
“What?” Then she said quietly, “Oh, I know. I remember.”
“What?”
“The meaning of life.” Pen looked up and caught her reflection in the full-length mirror on the back of the guest-room door. She was smiling. Not even the sight of her face, lit up and smiling into an empty room, made her stop smiling. Pen thought back to the conversation she had had with herself a few minutes earlier, when she’d said that if she had something to say, she might as well tell Will. As if she’d picked him at random. As if she could have told anyone else.
Time to tell the rest.
“You’d think that I would’ve gotten to enjoy it for a while,” she said. “Knowing the meaning of life. You know, rest on my laurels.”
“What happened?”
“It got put to the test. My meaning of life! Challenged! Tested! Can you believe that? After, what? Thirty seconds? How unfair is that?”
“What happened?” said Will again, and Pen knew that he wasn’t fooled by her joking tone, as he should not have been. Even now, nothing about what had happened next in her conversation with Jamie and her mother struck her as funny.
She told him, then, how Jamie had said, “Do we get to meet him?” and how something in her mother’s face after he asked it made Pen remember herself asking, “You met someone?” and her mother saying, “Yes. And no.”
Before her mother could answer Jamie’s question, Pen jumped in with, “What did you mean before: ‘Yes. And no’? What did you mean when
you said you ‘found’ someone? Why ‘found’?”
Pen’s mother smiled at Pen, the lines of her face holding affection and worry and something that looked like pleading. “You know why, don’t you?” she said.
Pen was still sitting on the floor and she shifted, now, slightly away from her mother. “Why, but not who,” she said bluntly.
Jamie looked from his mother to Pen and back, confused. “Did I miss something?”
“I was seventeen when I met your dad,” said their mother. “It was my gift, my blessing to love him and no one else for forty years. If I had my way, that would have gone on forever.”
“You don’t even have to say those things, Mom,” said Jamie, surprised.
“I want you to understand.” She was looking at Pen.
“Okay,” said Pen. She knew it wasn’t enough, that the moment demanded more from her, but she felt so physically tense with waiting, her rib cage tightening and tightening, that it was hard to breathe. The name hovered around them. The air in the room was thick with it. She just needed it said.
“Who is he? Someone from high school? Someone you grew up with?” Pen asked, and she marveled at this for a moment, the possibility that someone you knew forty, fifty years ago could circle back into your life and make you fall in love with him.
Pen’s mother slumped a little at this. She shook her head.
“Could you please just tell us?” said Pen.
“Mark Venverloh.”
Pen stared at her mother. She opened her mouth, but no sound came out.
“Mr. V?” said Jamie in a choked voice. “You’re in love with Mr. V?”
It seemed impossible, but of course, it wasn’t. Pen didn’t know why it hadn’t occurred to her: that the man wasn’t someone from her mother’s distant past, that he was someone they all—even their father, their father especially—had known.
“Mr. Venverloh,” said Pen, who had never called him “Mark” and was only vaguely aware that it was his name at all. Saying the name out loud failed to make her mother’s loving him any more plausible.
To Will, Pen said, “Mr. Venverloh. Can you believe that?”
Falling Together Page 22
