Oh, God, thought Pen.
“That’s what she’d say. She’d say, ‘I can’t help it, little boy. No matter how mad I am, I see you and my heart melts.’ She calls me ‘little boy’ which is hilarious when you consider how big I am compared to her.”
If anyone found this hilarious, they didn’t let on. Unexpectedly, Pen found herself thinking of Augusta. Augusta and her addled sleep habits, how on any one of thousands of nights her sobbing and shouts of “Mama!” would drag Pen out of sleep, two, three, even four times, how by the last wake-up, usually near dawn, Pen would be shaking with exhaustion and a resentment so acute it was almost rage. Her head throbbing and full of static, she would throw off sheets and comforter and stomp down the hallway to Augusta’s room, muttering expletives, even threats (threats that, no matter how empty, would make her reel with shame in the light of day), but within seconds of arriving at her child’s bedside, as soon as she saw the pale, wet face, the skinny shoulders, her anger would dissipate, lose itself in the warm, Augusta-scented air of the room. Her heart would melt. Pen would lie down next to Augusta and pull the small, baby animal bulk of the girl into the curve of her body, and give herself over to the business—her life’s work—of loving this person who needed her.
Maybe Cat feels something like that; maybe that’s why it was so hard to leave him, thought Pen, which should have been a nonsensical thought, since Jason was a full-grown (even, it could be argued, an overgrown) man, but Pen found that it made an absurd, sad, slightly unsavory kind of sense to her.
“Thank you,” said Lola Lita, nodding elegantly, like an empress. “Thanks to all of you. Thanks and apologies; we do not usually interrogate our guests.”
“That’s okay,” said Will and Pen.
“No prob,” said Jason. “Totally understandable.”
Pen wondered if the Lolas would retire someplace, perhaps to an inner fate-deciding sanctum, to discuss whether to tell them where Cat had gone, but they didn’t budge, just set about wordlessly conversing through nods, raised eyebrows, almost imperceptible shrugs, and some of the mild dovecote sounds like the ones they’d made when Pen said that she and Cat still loved each other. Pen didn’t feel impatient. She believed that she could sit and watch the three of them do that forever.
When the cooing and humming had concluded, Pen expected Lola Lita to speak first, but instead it was Lola Fe.
“Fine, but if we are telling them where Catalina is, I think we must also call her to let her know they are coming,” she said.
“No!” said Jason, so loudly that Pen jumped.
The Lolas did not jump, just turned their heads in unison to gaze at him. He reached up and wiped the sweat from his brow. Seeing this, Lola Graciela leaned over to turn the electric fan in his direction.
“I mean, please,” he said. “Could you—do you think you could just not tell her?”
The Lolas exchanged a complicated, lightning-quick set of looks.
“Why do you ask this?” said Lola Fe.
“Uh, like Will said,” said Jason, forcing a grin, “Cat loves to be surprised.”
Lola Fe did not react, except to keep her eyes trained on him, waiting for more.
“And, you know, like I said, she might think she doesn’t want to see me. She might even leave if she knows I’m coming. Probably not, but it’s possible. When I show up, though, she’ll be very happy, rejoicing even. I swear to God.”
Pen saw Lola Fe’s eyebrows go up. She wondered if it was a good or bad idea to swear to God, here in this house that had an Augusta-sized Virgin Mary statue standing, wistful and blue-robed, in the yard and a crucifix—at least one—on nearly every wall.
“We should honor his wishes,” exclaimed Lola Graciela with fervor. “He is her husband!”
Lola Fe stirred in her chair and seemed about to speak, maybe even speak loudly, but after a second, her face relaxed into cameo-blank inscrutability. Her eyes met Lola Lita’s gaze and held it. Lola Lita closed her eyes and nodded, before turning to Will, Jason, and Pen with a smile.
“You must wait until tomorrow to go find Catalina, in any case,” she said. None of them asked why this was so. The fact of her saying it was enough to make it indisputable. “We hope you will consider spending the night here, since you are Catalina’s friends and family. I’m afraid our home isn’t luxurious, but we would be most honored if you would stay.”
“Oh, thank you! We’d love to,” cried Pen, without so much as a questioning glance at Will or Jason and so hot on the heels of the invitation that Lola Lita laughed, a deep, buttery chuckle. Pen turned sheepishly to Will and Jason. “I mean, if it’s okay with you guys.”
Will smiled a smile that managed to be private, in spite of the other people in the room, and said, “You like it here. It’s a Pen kind of place.”
“I do,” admitted Pen.
“We’d be honored to stay,” said Jason.
“Good,” said Lola Lita. “Now, why don’t you go to pick up your things at the hotel? My nephew Everett will be glad to drive you.”
“Great,” said Will. “Thank you.”
“Sounds good,” agreed Jason.
Pen tried to imagine herself getting up and walking out of that house, even just for a short trip, and failed utterly. “Please,” she said to the Lolas, “may Augusta and I stay here, while the boys go to the hotel? If I promise to stay out of your way?”
“Of course!” said Lola Lita. “If Will and Jason are willing.”
“Would you mind?” she asked Will. “Our stuff is pretty much together. If you could just throw it all into my suitcase and Augusta’s backpack?”
“Sure,” said Will, shrugging. “But if I come back and you’ve polished off that pig? You’re dead meat.”
“Ha!” said Jason. “Pig. Dead meat. Get it?”
“Got it,” said Pen, and all the Lolas nodded.
TUCKED AS SHE WAS INTO A SHADY CORNER OF THE BACKYARD, despite the children playing tag and screeching, despite the cold glass of calamansi juice in her hand, despite the tart perfection of the juice itself, Pen might have fallen asleep. Time changed in that yard. Minutes flowed by with rich, honeylike slowness. Pen’s body felt more and more deliciously heavy. But before she could drift off, she opened her eyes to find Lola Lita sitting next to her, fanning herself with a large, woven palm-leaf fan, and regarding Pen with an amused affection that reminded Pen of her mother. Pen shook the sleepiness from her head and sat up.
“Sorry,” she said, laughing. “I don’t usually go falling asleep in people’s yards, at least not people I’ve just met.”
“Perhaps it means you feel at home here. I’m very glad.”
“It’s a marvelous place.”
“Thank you,” said Lola Lita, looking about her. “It isn’t fancy. It’s even a bit shabby, but it’s home. My family moved here after the war, when we were all quite young. Manuel was no more than a baby.”
“Manuel?” asked Pen. “Oh. Cat’s father.”
“Yes,” said Lola Lita sadly. “My baby brother.”
“I’m so sorry for your loss,” said Pen and felt ashamed and surprised at herself for not having offered her condolences earlier, when they had first arrived. It wasn’t that she had forgotten about Dr. Ocampo. It was just that this place seemed to Pen to be a world away from grief.
“Thank you,” said Lola Lita again. She reached over and touched Pen’s hand. “We have made a decision regarding your wish to find Catalina.”
“You have?” Pen held her breath.
“We will tell you where she went,” said Lola Lita.
Tears prickled Pen’s eyes. She blinked. “Thank you. Thank you so much.”
“She is visiting a resort island, quite enchanting as I have heard. We have secured tickets for you on the ferry for tomorrow morning, and we have made hotel reservations, as well. Our niece’s friend from college is a travel agent, which made it possible for us to make the arrangements on a Sunday.”
“Oh, that’s wonderful! I c
an just imagine it, seeing her across the hotel lobby—” Pen broke off, overcome with gladness.
Uneasiness swept over Lola Lita’s face and she gave Pen’s hands a squeeze. “I am afraid that it won’t be quite so simple.”
“It won’t?” asked Pen, worried. “Why?”
Lola Lita sighed. “We can be so stubborn. Fe, Graci, and I, we are usually in agreement, but when we’re not, well, it can be—difficult.”
“I can imagine,” said Pen.
“The problem is that we have decided, after much discussion, to abide by Jason’s wish that we not tell Catalina you are coming.”
“I see,” said Pen. “Well, it might be for the best. She might leave if she knows that Jason’s coming.”
Lola Lita’s eyes glinted. “The best for Jason, maybe, and for you and Will. Possibly not the best for Cat.”
“I guess you might be right,” admitted Pen uncomfortably.
“But it also presents a problem for you because we know where she is but not precisely where.”
“Oh.”
“Bohol Province is composed of a large island and many smaller ones. We know that Catalina was planning to stay on Panglao Island. We also know which region of the island, but we don’t know which resort. We’re not even sure that she is still there, although I think she probably is.”
Pen sipped her juice, then pressed her glass against her forehead.
“We have reserved rooms for the four of you at a resort on Panglao Island,” Lola Lita continued, “but if we don’t call Cat to say you are coming, we can’t find out exactly where she is.”
“Can’t you call her to ask where she is, without mentioning us? Or call her travel agent and try to get the information from her?” Even as Pen said it, she realized how sneaky it sounded.
Lola Lita shook her head. “No. I’m sorry, but no. We can only tell you what we know about where she went, and even that feels—”
“Disloyal?”
Lola Lita smiled tenderly at Pen, “You must understand that this trip was very important to Cat. She wanted to be—undisturbed.”
Pen’s heart sank. “But we might not find her.”
Lola Lita made soft hums of comfort and brushed a lock of hair away from Pen’s cheek. “It is not a large beach, not even a kilometer long,” she said. “And you can go to some of the Bohol tourist attractions that Cat will surely visit. I have heard that you do not want to miss snorkeling along the black coral reef.”
Pen had her doubts about the snorkeling, fearing sharks and figuring that one sure way to decrease your chances of finding someone was to immerse yourself in the Pacific Ocean. She envisioned Cat swimming toward her, through shoals of brilliant fish, waving wildly, her hair floating like seaweed around her face. She smiled.
As if Lola Lita had read Pen’s thoughts, she said, kind reproval in her voice, “I know you want to find Catalina, but who knows when you and your daughter will come back to the Philippines? So many people never get to go anywhere. Allow yourself to really be here. See what there is to see.”
Pen nodded thoughtfully. Ever since she had arrived in the Philippines, Pen had been dazzled by a sense of improbability. We were there, she had thought, and now we are here. How could it be true? But it was true. The world was big and Pen was in it. The least she could do was pay attention.
“Okay,” she agreed. “But can you tell me something?”
Lola Lita nodded her empress nod.
“Do you think we’ll find her?” Pen held her breath, waiting.
Pensively, Lola Lita narrowed her eyes, sending sunbursts of wrinkles shooting from their corners. No one can see the future, thought Pen, breathlessly. But if someone could, this is exactly how she would look.
“Yes,” said Lola Lita, “I do.”
PEN DIDN’T KNOW WHAT WOKE HER, BUT SUDDENLY SHE WAS SITTING up, her senses prickling, her chest full of rising, undefined emotion. In near perfect darkness, in the bed next to hers, Augusta shifted, sighed, and drew herself into a tight ball, like an armadillo. Pen waited for her daughter’s breathing to ease back into its cradle-rock rhythm and then noiselessly swung her legs over the side of the bed. They were in a tiny inner room, windowless and square. What light there was slid in over the tops of the room’s walls, which did not quite reach the ceiling. Pen knew that Will was sleeping in the matching room next door. All around her, in every room, enfolded in the same heat, the same velvet silence, people slept.
Pen found the closed door, sliding her feet across the smooth tiles, and walked out into the narrow hallway that she knew would take her to the front of the house. Light from the front windows turned the darkness gray. Uncertainly, Pen rocked on the balls of her feet in the center of the living room, weighed down by what she now recognized as sadness. She knew that she needed to sit down, to be someplace solid and solitary when it overtook her completely, so she let herself out the front door onto the narrow, L-shaped porch. Her body felt separate from her, like a brittle, wounded thing; with care, she set it down on a wooden bench. Then she stepped off an edge and into the sadness and was lost.
After several minutes or thirty or an hour—it was impossible to say—Pen was called back to herself by the sound of the front door opening. Someone sat down next to her, someone put an arm around her shoulders, someone said, “Poor child.” Pen wasn’t sure who it was and for a moment, didn’t think to ask or check. The person was pure kindness, consolation embodied, and Pen buried her face in the person’s shoulder until she was calm. The shoulder was the most comforting spot Pen had ever been. It smelled like baby powder.
“I’m so sorry you are sad,” said the person. Lola Fe.
Pen sat up and wiped her face but didn’t pull away. “I’m sorry I woke you up.”
“Don’t be silly,” admonished Lola Fe. “It is just what happens when you’re my age. Your body forgets how to sleep.”
“Does it also forget how to be tired?”
“No,” said Lola Fe with a chuckle. “That it remembers very well.”
They sat in companionable quiet, until a voice from the front yard, somewhere near the Virgin Mary statue, proclaimed, loudly, “Tuk-o!”
Pen looked at Lola Fe.
“Listen,” said Lola Fe, pressing her finger to her lips.
“Tuk-o, tuk-o, tuk-o!” The voice began to slow, stretching the space between the syllables, like a toy running down; then it squawked and started over again, “Tuk-o!”
“Was the Virgin Mary doing that?” asked Pen. She hoped it wasn’t a terrible joke to make.
Lola Fe laughed. “Not her. Her pet, our friend the tuko lizard.”
“I like him,” said Pen. “Or her.” The sound of the lizard was like so many other things in this place, completely strange and, at the same time, completely natural, even inevitable. She hadn’t felt the absence of the lizard before it began to sing, but as soon as it had sung, she understood that nothing would have been complete without it.
“My father died two years ago,” said Pen, breathing the words out in a long stream into the quiet that was somehow different from the pre-lizard quiet, more resonant.
“I am very sorry,” said Lola Fe. “You must miss him.”
“I do,” said Pen. “And this place, your home, makes me miss him more than I usually do. Even though he’s never been here. Isn’t that odd?”
“I don’t know,” said Lola Fe. “Maybe it’s a place he would like.”
“It is,” said Pen. “He would love it, maybe for the same reason I do.”
“The empanadas?” teased Lola Fe.
“Yes,” Pen said, smiling, but her thoughts were solemn. It seemed important for her to articulate to Lola Fe what this place meant to her. “I just feel that the way things are here is the way things should be.”
Lola Fe did not dispute this. She nodded and asked, “What do you mean?”
“A lot of things, but mostly I’m talking about the way everyone is together. Nobody leaving, nobody gone. Do you know what I mean?”
“I think so,” said Lola Fe. She smiled at Pen. “You’re wrong, of course. So many have left. Manuel and my sister Maria who died when she was just a girl and my parents and my cousin Gigi, who lives in New York, and my nephews and nieces who have gone to the States or to Canada or Dubai or Australia to live and work.”
Lola Fe turned her smooth face to the dark yard, her eyes alert and tender as though she could see all of the missing standing out there among the shrubs and flowers. Then she looked back at Pen and said, “But you are right that nobody’s gone.”
Pen nodded, wanting her to go on.
“What is that saying? Gone but not—?” asked Lola Fe.
“Gone but not forgotten,” said Pen.
“Yes, but it’s more than that. Gone but not gone.” Lola Fe laughed. “Gone but here. It must be why the house feels so small. We keep them all.”
Gone but here, thought Pen. “How?” she asked.
“I don’t know,” said Lola Fe with a touch of crustiness. “How not? It’s how things are. Just because someone happens not to be here doesn’t mean he is lost.” She said it as though the very idea of people being lost was ridiculous.
“Oh.”
“You just make room for more. Always room for one more!” She laughed her wonderful, sandpapery laugh again.
“So you keep everyone?” asked Pen.
“Sure,” said Lola Fe with an impatient shrug. “What else?”
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
IT WAS EVEN BEFORE SHE WAS ACTUALLY IN THE OCEAN, BEFORE she was surrounded on every side by streaming, swirling, darting, infinitely varicolored glory, while she was still riding in the snow-white water strider of a boat (delicate outriggers arching over the blue water) that took them from Alona Beach to Balicasag Island that Pen realized it: sometimes there is nothing to do but surrender yourself to wonder. You must stop searching for one small, dark-haired woman in a world of small, dark-haired women. You must stop missing your father. You must stop measuring—over and over—the line between loving and being in love. You must offer yourself, whole, to the cobalt starfish (and the orange one and the pale pink one and the biscuit-colored one with the raised, chocolate-brown art deco design) and to the clear, clear water and to the sweep of shining sky and to the silver scattershot of leaping fish (an entire school skipping across the ocean like a stone).
Falling Together Page 32
