Falling Together

by Marisa de los Santos

  “It makes sense that you’d be worried,” said Will neutrally.

  “Plus, I thought she was over her dad. His death, I mean. Come to find out she’s zipped off ten thousand miles to do what? Mourn at his birthplace? Get to know him? Discover her island roots?”

  “Yeah, I guess she’s not over it.”

  “Ya think?”

  He’s going to go after her, Will thought.

  “What are you thinking?” he asked. “That you’ll go look for her?”

  There was a silence and then, with the good-guy tone turned up a notch, Jason said, “Nah. My wife wants some alone time. I can respect that. I’ll just hang out, hold down the fort, as they say, until she’s back.”

  It was exactly the right answer, and Will knew a lie when he heard it.

  As soon as he hung up with Jason, Will called Pen.

  “Hey, Will,” she said. Her voice, hushed and quick, told him she was with someone, probably a client. “Call you back in an hour or two?”

  “Sure,” said Will. “Wait. Actually—” But Pen had already hung up.

  Maybe it was better, Will thought, take a couple of hours, settle down, get some perspective. He could admit that, on its face, his reaction to Jason’s reaction had been a little extreme, since all Jason had done was get mad, something Will had done plenty of times himself. A guy who had flat out attacked a whole slew of inanimate objects—and several animate ones—with his bare hands, whose temper had landed him (if not, by the grace of God, other people) in the emergency room more than once, should be able to cut Jason and his single outburst some slack. After all, the poor sap had just found out that his wife hadn’t just walked out on him but had pretty much walked as far away from him as it was possible to go—and all without leaving so much as a note.

  Still, Will couldn’t shake the foreboding. It was as if that single, knee-jerk “motherfucker” had punched a hole in Jason’s dopey-guy demeanor, and, through it, Will had glimpsed an interior that was uglier than he would’ve believed. Will’s mother was always telling her kids to “listen to your inner voice,” and Will’s inner voice was practically shouting that Jason’s heading off to find Cat with all of that ugliness churning just under his surface was a very bad idea.

  Will looked at the clock: 12:45, about seven hours later than Will’s preferred time for a run, especially in the summer, but he had a couple of hours to kill and there was no way he was getting any work done before he talked to Pen. He changed, zipped his cell phone into his pocket, gulped down a glass of water, and headed out. It was so muggy that his shirt was sticking to him before he’d gone a mile, but running had been a good idea. His worry unclenched, stretched and flattened like the hot ribbon of street, resolved itself into a flow of thought that was steady and more or less coherent.

  Even though he knew it was the middle of the night where she was, he imagined Cat under the same high white sun that burned above him, making her way through a busy city. He had no trouble bringing Cat to life inside his head, he never did, her black hair and thin wrists and sandals, glamour-girl sunglasses covering half her face, a flowered dress. And even though he couldn’t picture the city with any accuracy, had never even seen photos of it that he could remember, he sketched it in around her anyway: fruit stands, traffic, palm trees splayed against the sky, a goat tethered to a stake in somebody’s yard. Cat was there, a girl on a mission, walking where her father had walked, looking for what?

  Will came to the kind of hill that makes it impossible to think or do anything but force your body up it, but on the way down, inside his head but so clearly that he was tempted to look around to see who said it, Will heard a question being asked in a familiar voice: “How did your dad get to be your dad?” It took him only a second to realize the voice was Cat’s.

  The last day of sophomore year. Finals behind them and everywhere spring hitting its peak and toppling over into summer: humidity, old oak pollen balled like tumbleweed in the gutters, every kid on campus newly tan and as abundantly, showily happy as the trees were dense and green, except for Will who sprawled sullenly on the grass, the cast on his newly broken hand pissing him off with its whiteness, Cat next to him with her sunglasses on top of her head (she thought it was hideously rude to have a conversation with someone while wearing sunglasses) and her pink skirt tucked primly around her crossed legs.

  His parents had swung through town the day before on their way to meet a bunch of other rich couples—friends of his father’s—for a golf weekend at a southern mountain resort (the fact that his mother hated the resort, the couples, and golf evidently having no bearing on his father’s decision to take her along or on her decision to go). Things went about the way they usually went between Will and his dad, except that this time, after the obligatory post-paternal-visit fistfight with something immovable and hard (in this instance, his car windshield), in addition to the usual breakage (spirit, dignity), Will had thrown in a few cracked metacarpals for good measure.

  Cat and Will were drinking iced coffee and waiting for Pen, who was meeting with her nineteenth-century British lit professor to discuss a paper she’d written on images of women’s hair in Victorian poetry, despite a horrified Cat’s having pointed out to her that nobody, nobody, nobody in all of human history had ever made an appointment with a professor to discuss a paper she’d gotten an “A” on, especially on the last day of school before summer break. “He will be flabbergasted. Flummoxed,” warned Cat. “He will almost definitely keel over and die right there in front of you.” But Pen had gone anyway.

  “How did your dad get to be your dad?” asked Cat suddenly. “Have you ever thought about that?”

  “You mean how did he meet my mom?”

  “No,” said Cat impatiently. “I mean how did he get to be your dad in all his awful your dadness? How did he become the man he is?”

  Will found that the question irritated him. “Does it matter?”

  “Don’t get testy with me, mister,” said Cat, giving him what Pen called her “mad Persian cat face.” “I’m not talking about an excuse because nothing gets him off the hook for being the rat bastard he is. I’m talking about an explanation. Where did he come from? How does someone get so mean?”

  Oddly, Will had never really considered this question before, his father’s meanness having always been one of the immutable bedrock facts of Will’s life. With his family, Randall Wadsworth was either distant and indifferent or the coldest kind of cruel, and although there had always been moments when Will watched his father talk to other men and change into someone else, joking, backslapping, affable, the real man was still right there—Will could sense him—invulnerable and dangerous and enjoying his power.

  “I don’t think he became,” said Will. “I think he was just born.”

  “Come on,” said Cat. “He was a kid, right? He went to school. Drank chocolate milk. Wore pajamas.”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Even Hitler was, like, seven once, Will. There had to be a moment.”

  “A moment when he turned into a fucking, soulless monster?”

  “No. A last chance that someone missed. A moment when he could’ve been saved.”

  The only evidence Will had that his father had ever been a child was a handful of memories of a visit to his father’s mother’s house. Will must have been about three or four, and he had stayed, alone, at his grandmother’s for what had seemed like a long time, but was probably only a couple of days. The memories were more like fragments, tiny sensory scraps: a turquoise-and-white metal porch glider; the sound of the television going all day long in another room; crescent rolls that popped out of a cardboard cylinder and tasted like heaven; the silky edge of a scratchy blue acrylic blanket; and smoking, a lot of smoking: a cigarette perpetually balanced on the edge of a shell-shaped ashtray on the kitchen counter; his grandmother snapping beans on the porch with a cigarette somehow stuck between her fingers, sending the smell of smoke across the front yard to where Will dug in the mul
ch with a plastic trowel.

  “She wasn’t mean? Abusive?” asked Cat, when Will told her about this.

  “Not to me.”

  “You liked her.”

  “I think so. Her house seemed—safe. Pretty soon after I went there, she died. I don’t know how I know that, though. I can’t remember going to a funeral or anything.”

  “What did your dad say about her, over the years?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Nothing?”

  “My dad isn’t the storytelling type,” said Will sardonically. “He doesn’t spin yarns. When he does talk about growing up, it’s like he’s reading his résumé. The boarding school he got himself into in ninth grade, his whole thousand-mile-long record of achievement after that. His mother is nowhere, totally erased.”

  “What about his father?”

  “No idea. Maybe he never had one.”

  “Maybe it was Satan,” suggested Cat.

  Will grinned. “That would explain things, wouldn’t it?”

  Cat’s eyes grew serious. She touched her fingertips to Will’s, the ones that emerged from the plaster of the cast. “Maybe you’ll want to dig a little deeper one day,” she said. “If you knew more about him, maybe he’d lose his power to hurt you.” Even though Will didn’t believe this, he heard the kindness in Cat’s voice and felt the force of her friendship, her allegiance to him, and he thought, not for the first time, You are my family, more than the rat bastard has ever been, you and Pen.

  Now, thinking about Cat searching for her father, Will realized that he had never searched for his, had never taken her advice. He’d had his mother back for years and had never asked her anything about who his father used to be, never even asked about the trip to his grandmother’s house. Why had Will gone by himself? Where was that house, apart from inside Will’s head, turning itself into myth? It was crazy: to visit a place once and spend your whole life missing it.

  I might ask, he thought. One of these days. Maybe after I come back from finding Cat.

  Which is when he knew that he would go. Yeah, right. He could almost hear Cat saying this. Like there was ever any doubt.

  WHEN PEN CALLED, BEFORE WILL COULD SAY ANYTHING BESIDES, “Hey, Pen,” she said, “Okay. I have a story and a question. In that order.”

  “Is it a long story?”

  “What kind of question is that?”

  “I have something to say, too, believe it or not,” said Will, “which is why I called you.”

  “I called you.”

  “You’re calling me back.”

  “Of course. You’re right. Your story should take precedence, absolutely,” said Pen. “But can I go first, anyway?”

  “Okay.”

  “It is kind of a long story if you want to know the truth.”

  “Forget it, then.”

  “I just saw Patrick.”

  “Is that unusual?”

  “I mean I sat across from him at a table at a café and had a conversation with him.”

  “Which is—unusual?”

  “Highly. Ours is an Augusta-drop-off-pick-up relationship. That’s about it.”

  “I see,” said Will. “Hey, if I met Patrick, would I like him or would I want to slug him?”

  “Yes,” answered Pen emphatically, adding, “But I thought you were over the slugging thing.”

  “Over slugging, not over wanting to. I probably wouldn’t want to slug Patrick, though, because I’m guessing Augusta wouldn’t like it.”

  “Augusta,” began Pen, and for a second, she sounded on the verge of tears.

  “You okay?”

  “Possibly. I’m not sure. I just left him about five minutes ago, so I haven’t had much of a chance to sort things through.”

  Will was trying to stay neutral and open-minded, but he had to admit that he liked the sound of “left him.”

  “You want to talk about this later?” he asked.

  “God, no. How will I ever sort it out if I don’t talk to you about it?”

  She’d been on her way to drop Augusta at day camp and run a couple of errands afterward when he called. When she looked at her cell phone and saw that it was Patrick, she let Augusta answer it.

  “I am going to camp right now,” Augusta announced in her cell-phone voice, painstakingly enunciated and somewhere between a shout and a bellow. “We are having baking today, but I won’t be able to bring you any cookies because, generally, we eat them.” Generally was her new word. “Iloveyoubyebye,” she yelled and handed the phone to Pen.

  “Let me call you back after I drop her off,” said Pen. She cherished these mornings, walking through the city with Augusta, talking, feeling the delicate, stalwart bones of her daughter’s hand inside hers, new light washing the sidewalks.

  “Do you have any time today?” asked Patrick.

  “For what?”

  “To talk.”

  “You mean in person?”

  Patrick gave a halfhearted laugh. “Why do you make it sound like such an outlandish idea? We talk in person all the time.”

  Pen ignored this. “I need to do a few things, stop in at the office, but I should be home around eleven. Okay if I call you then? I have to pick up a writer at five thirty, but I have some time in the middle of the day.”

  “Well, yeah. Don’t want to put you out or anything.” Pen could hear the pout in his voice. “Just call when you get home.”

  But when she got home, before she even got to her apartment building door, there he was, sitting at a sidewalk table at the café across the street, waving her over.

  Will lay on his back on his front porch listening to this because Pen had called just as he was rounding the corner onto his street after his run, and he was too sweaty to lie anywhere else. The porch wasn’t particularly comfortable, but Will was too engrossed in Pen’s story to mind the porch boards grinding into his spine and shoulder blades. When a fly started buzzing around his head, he swatted at it absently, without fully registering what it was or even that it was there. In the old days, he and Pen had never really gotten the hang of phone conversations; they were together too much. Now, though, they had it down to a kind of art. With not a lot of effort, Will could close his eyes while Pen talked and have what she said come alive inside his head. At times, her descriptions were so vivid, it was almost like watching a movie, so that, in short flashes, he could even picture Patrick, whose face he’d never seen.

  Patrick was sitting at the café table nursing a beer, a bad sign, Pen knew, since Patrick never drank in the daytime; it made him too sleepy.

  After the waiter brought Pen an iced tea, she said, “All right, Patrick, what’s up?”

  “What’s up is that Tanya got a job offer from this big-time health advocacy group, and she wants to move us to Boston.”

  Move us, thought Pen, as though Patrick and Lila were pieces of furniture, such a maddeningly apt choice of words that Pen didn’t know whether to laugh or scream. She did neither, just sat there for a long, silent moment, feeling like a pond that Patrick had just dropped a rock into.

  “What about,” she said at last, in a flinty voice, “your daughter? Your other daughter, I mean.” She felt the same jolt of anger she’d felt so many other times because she knew that the “other daughter” was who Augusta was and would always be, to Tanya but also—and there was no getting around this, no matter how much he loved her—to Patrick.

  She waited for Patrick to defend Tanya, but he surprised her by getting angry instead, angry at Tanya. Patrick almost never got angry at anyone. Pen could never decide if it was due to inner peace or laziness or a kind of emotional ADD, but, whatever the reason, it just wasn’t in his nature to get mad.

  “It was almost comical,” Pen told Will. “Like when one of those adorable, shaggy lap-doggy dogs with chocolate-drop eyes thinks he hears a burglar and starts barking? That was Patrick, except blue-eyed. An enraged Lhasa apso. A choleric cocker spaniel.”

  “Wow,” said Will. “Could you do me a favor and n
ever describe me? To anyone?”

  “You want to know the sad thing, though? I liked it. I loved it. I found it so deeply satisfying—Patrick getting all husky-voiced and fiery-eyed and righteous on Augusta’s behalf—that it was just this side of a turn-on. How pathetic is that? To be on the verge of throwing myself at a man because he shows, after so many years, a little fire, a little fight for his own child?”

  “I’d say that if anyone in that scenario is pathetic, it isn’t you.” Right after Will said this, he wished he hadn’t. Even though he was just being honest, bad-mouthing Patrick behind his back made Will feel like a sneak. “Still,” he added, “good for him, right? What did he say?”

  He had said, “Like I would just pick up and go hours and hours away from Augusta. Like, ‘Oh sure, honey, I’ll just rip up roots and trail after you like some stupid puppy.’ Not to mention Lila, who has a life here, too, in case Tanya hasn’t noticed.”

  Pen had been too thrown off by his anger to do more than nod.

  “And here’s the thing: this place has been asking her if she wants to work for them for years. She’s had what amounts to a standing offer, and she’s never said yes. But we’ve been squabbling lately. Not full-blown fighting, but pretty damn close.”

  Even though Pen knew Patrick was waiting for her to ask what they’d been fighting about, she didn’t. She found herself to be peculiarly incurious, even slightly repelled at the idea of seeing into the cracks in Patrick and Tanya’s marriage.

  But Patrick went on as though she had asked. “Tanya’s just so controlling. Case in point, she cut down my tree, if you can believe that.” Pen wondered if he was speaking metaphorically, a thought that might have made her smile if her mind wasn’t becoming increasingly bogged down with sadness at the thought that Augusta might lose her monthly weekends with her daddy.

  “Your tree?” she asked.

  “My Japanese maple. My buddy Vince was making some landscaping changes and came over one night with this tree he’d dug up from his yard. Prettiest, most petite thing you’ve ever seen, almost bonsai-sized, with leaves that turn the best color red in the world every fall. I planted it in our side yard and it was thriving, for God’s sake, getting kind of shapely and lacy.” He squeezed his face between his hands, like the guy in Munch’s Scream. “It was a living organism! I put a little stone Buddha under it, you know, so that the tree was sheltering him, and one day, the tree was gone. She took a damn contract out on it and had it disappeared. And not gently, either. Turns out she had some asshole chop it down and dig up the roots. Obliterated it from the face of the earth. Because it didn’t work with her colors, her fucking plan. It was too Asian. Can you imagine that? I found the Buddha just sitting there, exposed. A Buddha! It wasn’t some damn garden gnome, you know? It was a religious icon.”