“They don’t find it amazing, I don’t think,” said Cat. “Marisol and her mom were part of the family by then. It’s just how they do things here.”
“You’re lucky,” said Pen a little wistfully, “to be part of that.”
“I am straight-up blessed,” said Cat with fervor.
She stood up and waved to Marisol, who began to gather her belongings, and Will stood, too. Pen knew he couldn’t help it, that it was his dyed-in-the-wool courtliness kicking in, but she felt betrayed. There they both stood, as if standing up were fine, as if anyone could possibly be leaving.
“Wait!” said Pen, flustered. “Sit down! We need to make a plan. When will we see you? When are you coming back?”
“Oh,” said Cat blankly, “I thought I told you. I’m not.”
“You mean never?” said Will.
“Well, I don’t know,” said Cat slowly. “I’m extending my visit for as long as I can, and then, well, I’m thinking of applying for permanent residency.”
She didn’t meet their eyes but began rummaging through her tote bag. She took out a small, bright red leather case, out of which she pulled a card.
Reluctantly, Pen got to her feet. She is not actually going to hand me a business card, thought Pen, but that’s just what Cat did. Pen stared down at it without really seeing it.
“It’s my e-mail address,” said Cat.
She walked around the table and hugged Pen.
“I loved seeing you,” she said. “Be happy together—that’s an order!”
Pen pulled back to look at Cat. “You’re saying good-bye?”
That’s when Pen saw it, a glimmer of impatience passing over Cat’s vivid, black-eyed, smiling face. She has moved on, Pen understood with bewildered shock. We are only part of who she used to be, not of who she is now.
“I might have to come back to deal with the divorce or pack my things or something,” said Cat. “In which case, I will definitely and absolutely call you.”
Pen knew when she was being thrown a bone, but, still, she said, “But we only just found you!”
“I know,” said Cat regretfully.
She put her arms around Will and kissed his cheek. Then she put her sunglasses on and gave them both a winsome, affectionate smile.
“And I will stay found. I promise,” she told them. “But I also have to stay here.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
BECAUSE PEN AND AUGUSTA HAD A SIX-HOUR LAYOVER IN NEW York and, more significantly, because Pen and Will could not stand the thought of saying good-bye to each other, when their plane landed at JFK, they rented a car and drove to Philadelphia. It was just the three of them, Jason having decided to remain in the Philippines for “a few more days.”
“I’m not staying because I think I can talk Cat into changing her mind,” he had told them. “I know when I’m beat. I guess I just can’t stand the thought of going home to our empty house, yet.”
Will and Pen hadn’t really believed him, but if they had learned anything about Jason, and they had learned a lot, it was that, once he had made up his mind to do something, there was no talking him out of it.
“He’s steadfast,” said Pen admiringly, “persevering.”
“Delusional,” added Will, “quixotic.” But Pen could tell that Will admired him, too.
Jason had gone with them to the airport in Cebu, and before she had left him, after Augusta had cried and covered his face with kisses and Will had shaken his hand and told him to keep in touch, Pen had grabbed him by his enormous shoulders and said, “Listen to me: you keep the faith, all right? You will find someone who loves you the way you deserve to be loved. I know it,” and he had given her a crooked smile and said, “Isn’t it weird how you kind of like me, now?” and Pen had agreed that it was.
At a rest stop, Will called a hotel near Jamie’s apartment and reserved a room.
“You could stay with us,” Pen told him.
He had leaned in almost close enough to kiss her and, with a wicked gleam in his green, gold, orange eyes, said, “Or—you could stay with me.”
When they were about half an hour away, Pen called Jamie on his cell phone to tell him they were coming.
“Did you find her?” he asked.
“We did,” Pen told him, settling in. “It’s kind of a long story, but basically, she went there to (a) leave her husband and (b) find her—”
“Yeah, yeah. Details later,” said Jamie cutting her off. “Cut to the chase: Is Cat still smokin’ hot or what?”
“You’re a degenerate,” said Pen.
“Just hurry up and bring my Gusty girl home, okay? I’ll leave work early.”
Pen smiled. “You miss the crushed goldfish crackers all over the floor, don’t you?”
“And I’m getting way too much sleep,” said Jamie. “It’s completely out of hand.”
As soon as Pen opened the door of the apartment, Augusta was a blur of hair and skinny legs and wild screeches, rushing Jamie like a miniature linebacker.
“Oof!” he said, staggering backward. “What were they feeding you in the Philippines?”
“Pizza!” shrieked Augusta. “And pancit! And the weensiest bananas you never saw!”
“You’re right,” said Jamie pulling her onto his lap and smiling at Pen through Augusta’s tangled hair. “I never did.”
For a moment, Pen just stood, watching them, until she noticed the flowers on the table, calla lilies, tall, white, posing like fashion models in a curvaceous vase.
“Jamie! You bought us flowers!”
Jamie gave the flowers a sidelong glance. “Uh, yeah, well, welcome home, right? Hey, where are the rest of your bags?”
“Oh,” said Pen, with a wink at Augusta, “they’ll be here shortly.”
“Shhh,” Augusta told Jamie. “It’s a surprise.”
When Jamie saw Will, he set Augusta on the ground and stood up. “Will Wadsworth, as I live and breathe. So good to see you, man.”
“Good to see you, too, Jamie,” said Will, grinning. “You got me flowers and everything.”
“Come here, you little ray of sunshine,” said Jamie, and he walked across the room and clenched Will in a hug that caused him to grimace and say, “I guess you started working out since I last saw you.”
“Being famous must agree with you,” said Jamie. “You look good, brother.”
“Not ‘brother,’” Pen said quickly. “Anything else but ‘brother.’”
Jamie stared at Pen, and then a smile started in his eyes and spread across his face. “Well, maybe ‘brother-in-law’ would be a better choice?” he said, raising an eyebrow.
“Don’t get ahead of yourself, big guy,” said Pen.
“Smartest thing you’ve ever done. One of the only smart things you’ve ever done,” said Jamie to Pen. “What happened over there? Did you get hit on the head with a coconut?”
“Anyway, I was thinking I’d move in here, too,” said Will, sizing up the apartment. “You don’t mind, do you?”
Pen knew he was joking, but for a few seconds, she was transported back to the Lolas’ house, grandmothers, babies, nephews, sisters, everyone together, and she felt a pang of longing.
“Hey,” said Jamie, opening his hands in welcome, “always room for one more.”
LATER, PEN WOULD WONDER IF WILL HAD PLANNED TO TELL HER right away, as soon as she arrived at his hotel room, because when he opened the door, he wasn’t smiling. His face was unusually serious, taut and focused and full of intention, but overcome by her own intentions, Pen didn’t let him say anything, just stepped inside and pulled him into her, sliding her hands under his shirt, so that before the door was even closed, he was pressing her against it, lifting a fistful of hair to kiss her neck, her collarbone, and a minute went by filled with nothing but the ragged noise of their breathing, before he pulled away and said, “Wait.”
“It’s okay. I don’t want to wait,” Pen said, gasping, thinking he was worried about rushing her, his innate sense of chivalry compe
lling him to slow down, which turned out to be true, but not in the way she thought.
“Before we do this, there’s something I have to tell you,” he said, and despite his solemn tone, she wouldn’t have been afraid, except that when she looked into his eyes, that’s what she saw there: fear. He sat down on the edge of the bed.
“Can you sit for a second?” he asked. “And let me talk to you?”
“No,” she said, her voice pleading, like a child’s voice. “Please. Let’s not talk right now.”
“We have to. I’m sorry. I should have told you this before.”
She shivered, took a breath, and instead of sitting on the bed next to him, she walked over to an ottoman a few feet away, sat on its very edge, and folded her hands in her lap. Let him not be sick. Oh God, let him not be dying.
“I was at your father’s funeral,” said Will.
This was so unexpected that it took Pen a few seconds to understand what he had said. She shook head. “No.”
“I didn’t follow Cat’s rule, about not looking each other up. I read it online, first the newspaper report, then the obituary, and I came.”
“So I was right. You were there.” For a moment, all she could do was marvel at the fact that she had sensed him—and she had felt his presence in the church more acutely than she had felt anything all that long, numb day—and, lo and behold, she had been right. But as the awful implications of his having been there began to dawn on her, the wonder and satisfaction dissipated, and she demanded, “Why? What was the point of coming if you didn’t even let me see you?”
“I came into the church before it got crowded, and I saw you right away, just the back of your head, but that was enough to know it was you. I saw your mom next to you, and I saw Augusta, sitting on your lap.”
“Augusta.” At the mention of Augusta, she slid back on the ottoman, farther away from him. “Did you know she was my daughter? Did you even know I had a daughter?”
“Not until I read the obituary.”
“But if you knew about her before you came, why would that stop you from coming up to me?”
Will looked down at his lap and started to speak, but, like a slap, it struck her and she said, “Patrick.”
“He was next to you. He had his arm around you.”
Pen tried to remember. “I guess he did. I don’t remember.”
She looked at Will reproachfully. “But so what? Who cares if he was there? Why should that have mattered?”
“It mattered because I was in love with you.” He shook his head in disbelief. “Didn’t you know that? Maybe I always had been, but I only really knew it after Cat left.”
Pen absorbed this information and realized that she wasn’t shocked by it. For years, she had denied how Will felt about her to everyone, especially to herself, but all along, deep down, she had known.
“If you loved me, that was all the more reason for you to come be with me because whatever Patrick did, it didn’t work. We were way past the point where he could even reach me. He helped with Augusta, but he didn’t help me.”
A wave of anger surged through Pen. “You could have, though. You are the one person who could have, on almost the worst day of my life, but you didn’t. Why? Because you were jealous?” The word jealous came out as a contemptuous hiss. “I needed you!”
She had meant to hurt him, to make him feel guilty, and she could read in his eyes that it had worked.
“I didn’t know that!” he said, a note of desperation in his voice. “You looked like a family. I didn’t see any place for me there. Yeah, I was jealous. I can be a jerk like anyone else. But if I had known that you wanted me, if I thought I could have helped you in any way, I would have stayed.”
Pen sat there, trembling with fury and staring at his face, the face that she loved, and she felt that his beauty was an affront, an indignity. He could have helped her. He could have saved her, and he had let her down. Then she thought of something that deepened her anger, turned it from hot to cold.
“Maybe I could have lived with all of this,” she said icily. “But do you know what I can’t live with?”
“Don’t say that,” he said. “I know what you’re talking about, it’s that I didn’t tell you before, and I know I should have, but don’t say you can’t live with it.”
Pen leaped to her feet.
“When I told you about Augusta, at the reunion, after our bike ride, you acted like you didn’t already know. When I told you that my father died, you acted like you didn’t know, and don’t use the excuse that we were playing the four-sentence game and that you weren’t supposed to comment on anything I said because that is such a cop-out.” By the end of this, she was shouting.
Will watched her pace.
“And what about the night on the porch in Bohol? I had never told anyone that story who I didn’t have to tell, but I told you. I trusted you! How could you not have told me that you already knew?”
He stood up and touched her, ran his hands along her arms, tried to look into her face, but she yanked herself away.
“Pen, I wanted to. I know how lame this sounds; I know it might sound like I’m making it up, but, listen, you were talking and I was with you. I wasn’t thinking about the newspaper article. I was listening to you tell the story, and you were so sad, and I wasn’t thinking about anything but how terrible it was that you had to go through what you went through. It wasn’t until you said the thing about thinking I was at the funeral that it even occurred to me that I should tell you.”
“But you didn’t tell me, and not telling me is the same thing as lying.”
“I’m telling you now.”
“Why?”
Will looked startled. “What?”
“Why tell me at all? Why not just let it go?”
He gave her a confused look, as though her question didn’t make any sense. “Because I want to be with you, and I don’t mean a relationship. I mean a life. How fair would it be to start that with something already between us that I know about and you don’t?”
Fair. What a Will thing to say. Pen felt herself soften at this, just a little, but somehow, that wasn’t what she wanted. She wanted to stay mad. For reasons she could not explain, staying mad felt good, even hurting him felt good. Her bag was next to the door where she had dropped it. Deliberately, she walked over to it and picked it up.
“What are you doing?” asked Will.
“I can’t do this. I have to go.”
“Go?” Will sounded stunned. “Come on, you can’t really believe that leaving is the right thing.”
Pen turned on him, eyes blazing. “What the hell did you think would happen?”
“Do you think I didn’t know it was a risk?” asked Will, exasperated, throwing out his hands. “But I thought you would forgive me. I still think so.”
“God, do you know how arrogant that sounds?”
“We’re supposed to be together. Believing that is not arrogance; neither is having faith in you.”
“Faith in me? Like I’m supposed to fix this? You’re the one who screwed it up!”
Will flared at this. “I did! I made a lot of mistakes. But what about you?”
“Me. Me? I didn’t do anything.”
“Exactly. You talk about how much you needed me, but I was only at the funeral in the first place because I decided to come. If you wanted me, you could have called me. You know I would have been there in a second.”
“You can’t be serious. My father was dead.” She threw the words at him.
“And I’m not just talking about the funeral. You say a lot about how much you missed me all those years we were apart, but you never called and told me that.”
“You are the one who left!”
Will nodded, accepting this. “I know, and I shouldn’t have. I wanted our friendship to turn into something else, and I thought maybe you wanted that, too, or that you would at least be open to it, but you had twisted the three of us into an idea, this pure, untouchable thing.”
“We were.” Pen began to cry. “We were special.”
“We were special. It’s not an exaggeration to say that you and Cat saved my life, more than once. But we were three people. We weren’t a religion.”
“Who knew you could be so mean?” she said. She felt stung, right on the edge of hating him.
Will didn’t apologize or even react, just said in a quieter voice, “But I should have stayed, anyway. I should have been more like Jason.”
Pen snapped her head up and said, mockingly, “‘Delusional’? ‘Quixotic’?”
“Yeah, he carried it too far, but he tried. When he finally gives up, he’ll know that he did everything he could. I should have fought for you, been less proud, more patient, made deals with the devil, whatever. I should never have left.”
“Well, you did. I stayed and you left.”
Will made a disgusted sound. “Don’t you get sick of that? Feeling abandoned.”
“I was abandoned!”
“And you didn’t do one thing about it. All you had to do was call. I don’t know what Cat would have done, but I would have been there so fast. Why don’t you ask yourself why you never did?”
“Stop it,” she said bitterly. “Shut up. Why are you doing this?”
Will sighed. “I love you. I’ve never hurt you on purpose in my life, but we need to say these things to each other.”
She glared at him and said, “You shouldn’t have told me you were at the funeral.” She knew it didn’t make sense, to go from being angry that he hadn’t told her to angry that he had, but that’s how she felt. “You ruined everything.”
He said, “I knew you would be mad. I mean, I didn’t think you’d be this mad.” A glimmer of a smile. “The thing is,” he said gently, “if you end things between us because of this, you would have ended them eventually anyway.”
Pen didn’t know how to answer this. She couldn’t even process what it meant. She felt knotted and furious and wretched.
“But I don’t think you will,” said Will.
With two fingers, he touched her temple. He picked up a piece of her hair and kissed it. “‘Love is an imperative,’ remember you said that? And this time, I’m not going anywhere.”
Falling Together Page 37
