Pen felt herself giving way, so she searched for a last reservoir of anger and found it, right in the middle of the memory of herself curled like a wounded animal on her childhood bed, a year after her dad had died.
“Fine,” she said, “I’ll save you the trouble.”
She turned and tugged open the door.
“Hey, come on, this is Will. Could you please look at me?”
No way was she turning around. She braced herself for his touch, but it didn’t come.
“Stay and get through this with me,” he said.
“I feel like you trampled on my father’s death, on our friendship, everything that is sacred to me. I’m going home,” she said. “You should, too.”
BY THE TIME SHE GOT TO THE APARTMENT, THROUGH SHEER FORCE of will, she had stopped crying. It was only seven o’clock. Despite the jet lag, Augusta might have been awake, and Pen couldn’t let her see her like that. When she walked in, Jamie was watching television. He switched it off when he saw her face.
“Oh, crap, what happened?”
Pen shook her head. “I don’t want to talk about it.”
She went into her bedroom, grabbed an ancient duffel bag, and, indiscriminately began stuffing clothes into it. Jamie followed her and leaned against the door frame.
“You really think you’re gonna need those long underwear?”
Pen sighed. “All my summer clothes are still in the suitcase.”
“So—what? You guys had a fight?”
“Something like that. Can you stay with Augusta tonight?”
“Sure, where are you going? Back to Will’s hotel?”
“That’s over,” said Pen, stomping into the bathroom for her toothbrush. “I want to see Mom.”
“Hey! Crazy person!” In the bathroom mirror, she could see Jamie behind her, waving his hands in the air to get her attention. “You need to stay and work this out. People are allowed to have fights without the world ending, even you and Will.”
Ignoring this, she brushed past Jamie and headed for the front door.
“Mom can’t fix this for you,” said Jamie, catching hold of her arm. “What are you thinking?”
Pen spun around to face him. “Could you mind your own business? Is that possible?”
Jamie’s gray eyes grew flinty. “How many chances did you give Patrick?”
Pen turned her face away.
“So is that your policy?” asked Jamie. “Special deals for assholes and deadbeats. But for good guys, ones who might actually stick around and not suck, it’s one strike and you’re out.”
“You don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Because that’s brilliant, Pen. Really. That’s genius. Way to go.”
The phone rang, and even though the last thing she wanted to do was to have a phone conversation, she didn’t want to talk to Jamie, either. She answered it.
“Hello.”
“Hello.” A woman’s voice, unfamiliar, friendly. “Hey, this is Pen, isn’t it?”
“It is.” Pen rooted around in her handbag for her keys.
“Hi, Pen, welcome home. This is Susan, Susan Davis. Is Jamie there?”
“Oh, yeah, he’s definitely here.”
She turned around, and Jamie was standing there. He picked up her keys off the telephone table and tossed them to her, and by some miracle, she caught them in her free hand.
“Happy trails,” he said.
“Don’t tell him where I’m going,” she said, and she thrust the phone at him and left.
THE ANGER CARRIED PEN ALL THE WAY OUT OF THE CITY, WHOOSHED her effortlessly past the billboard emblazoned with the ballerina’s sculpted back, past the X-rated video store, through the narrow South Twenty-Sixth Street tunnel that she had always hated, past the DON’T FLY TO THE AIRPORT sign that she, Will, and Cat had always liked, past the oil refinery with its flames and towers and plumes of steam, and over the bridge, before dumping her onto I-95 and deserting her completely.
For several miles, she didn’t think at all. She felt dazed, tingly, bruised, vaguely convalescent. What seeped in first was a baffled amazement: How had she gotten so angry? She wasn’t an angry person in general, but she had given herself to it so willingly, even with a kind of relish, like a person swan-diving into a burning lake. What had Will said? That he had never hurt her on purpose in his life, but that’s just what she had done to him. Hurt him and felt better for having done it. The thought filled her with so much shame that she almost scurried away from it, but at the last second, she gritted her teeth. You have to understand this, she insisted, and with deliberation, she began.
She had told Will that the part she couldn’t live with was the lie: the way he kept the secret, even through her telling the story of her father’s murder. He should have told her, that much was abundantly clear. He had chickened out, failed to step up, turned himself, in one fell swoop, from the most honest man she had ever known into a liar. No matter how you sliced it, he was wrong, ignoble, and she was justifiably aggrieved.
But when she considered the lie now, from within the small, safe space of the car (hermit thrush), with her hands on the wheel and the clear black sky overhead, she realized that it was something she could understand. She imagined his struggling with how to say it, how to edge it in, between her heartbroken story and his own grief (tears—tears—on his face, his hand against her cheek). If she were in Will’s place, she might have wondered how telling would make anything better, how that particular truth could possibly set anyone free; she might have worried that telling would drive away the person she had loved for years. She might have let the moment for truth-telling slip right by.
No, the thing that had pushed her over the edge and into rage had not been the lie of omission, but the thing omitted: he had not been with her at her father’s funeral.
Even this, she could understand. She remembered his stricken eyes, his voice telling her that if he had only known she needed him, he would have stayed. She had believed him then, and she believed him now. Still, that didn’t change—nothing changed—the fact that Will hadn’t helped her, he hadn’t saved her from not only that hard, sorrowful day, but from the two hard, sorrowful years that followed it.
And there it was, the reason for her fury: she had made her suffering Will’s fault.
It was his fault! a voice inside her cried, high and thready, like a child’s voice.
But what could he have done? He could have put his arms around her. He could have told her he was sorry for her loss, and the words would have been different from other people’s words and would have been in his voice, and they would have soothed her. He could have come back into her life and been her friend and e-mailed her and called her on the phone. He could have flown out for the first anniversary bike ride and the second and ridden beside her and made her feel less lost.
See all the things he could have done? wailed the angry child.
Yes, she answered, and your father would still be dead.
Pen had raged against Will with a child’s rage because he hadn’t fixed it, hadn’t made it better, but Pen knew that losing someone you loved was like a virus, and people could make you soup and hold your hand and press cool washcloths against your face, and you might feel better for a moment, but the virus would still be there, on the other side of the moment, waiting, and all you could do was get through it—cough, fever, chills, body aches, crying jags, devouring loneliness, bursts of rage—step by painful step. Pen was getting through it. She was learning how to keep her father, as Lola Fe had said. But she wasn’t there, yet, and that was no one’s fault, not Will’s, not even her own.
Oh, Will, my friend, forgive me.
MAYBE BECAUSE WHEN PEN WAS ALMOST TO HER MOTHER’S HOUSE, she remembered Jamie saying, “Mom can’t fix this,” or maybe because she suspected that her mother wouldn’t validate her breaking up with Will, or because she suspected that she would, or because Pen just wanted to be alone for a little while more (and she knew that as soon as sh
e pulled into the driveway, her mom would be running out the door to greet her), when Pen drove into her neighborhood, with her house still a half mile away, she pulled over, parked in front of someone else’s house, got out of the car, slung the duffel bag over her shoulder, and began to walk.
The air rang with the high, heartbeat singing of cicadas. The trees stood tall next to the street. Pen passed house after familiar house. Her mind was loaded with things to figure out, but she was tired after all that concentrated thinking in the car, and for the duration of the walk, at least, she decided to let it wander. She thought about the tarsiers, and the snorkeling, about Jason’s face when Cat told him he shouldn’t have come. She thought about the Lolas and about the pride in Cat’s voice when she said “My sister.” She heard the voice in her head that was not the tarsier’s saying, “But we’re here now, aren’t we?” She heard Will telling her to ask herself why she had missed him all those years but never called. She heard Will saying that he had wanted their friendship to change, saying, “We weren’t a religion.” She heard Jamie saying that she only gave second chances to the deadbeats, the ones who wouldn’t stay.
The thoughts began to coalesce, to press forward more and more steadily, moving Pen toward a point she couldn’t see, but before she got there, she was standing in front of her mother’s house. With a touch of peevishness, she noted that she needn’t have worried about pulling into the driveway because there was already a car in it, or not a car, but a truck, a dark, slightly battered, mud-spattered pickup that looked as though, unlike most of the pickups around there—and there weren’t many—it might actually be used to pick things up. As Pen looked at the truck, a bell began to ring, faintly, someplace in the back of her mind.
Except for the porch light with its veil of bugs, the front of the house was dark, so Pen walked around to the back and saw that the kitchen lights were on, turning the windows to bright saffron squares. From where she stood, Pen didn’t have a clear view of the kitchen, but she could sense movement, shadows on the yellow walls, and, without making a conscious decision to spy, she bent her knees, hunched her back, and padded, catlike, to the lowest window, staying close to the ground and close to the brick walls of the house so as to evade the sensors on the garage floodlights.
I love you, house, she thought, with her heart in her throat. I love you, Daddy. She stood on tiptoe and looked.
They were washing dishes. If they had been kissing or dancing or even cooking, Pen’s reaction might have been different, but they stood there doing the dishes, Mark Venverloh at the sink, his back to Pen, her mother next to him, drying a pan (the old cast-iron skillet she used to make cornbread) with a dishtowel (one of the fish-print ones from the store in South Bethany that sold kitchenware, sandwiches, and the best seafood salad in the world), before holding it up and eyeing it to make sure it was clean. They weren’t talking, just working, performing this comfortable, commonplace task in the kitchen in which Ben Calloway had made coffee for his wife every morning—for what had to have been thousands of mornings—since before Pen was born until the day he died. Pen wasn’t resentful or jealous or hurt. She understood that she was looking at the bravest thing she had ever seen: her mother, after all she had lost, after she had broken apart and believed she would die, starting all over again, giving herself, plunging in, risking everything.
Pen crept away from the window. She walked back down the driveway, the sight of her mother and Mark still aglow inside her head, and sat down on the brick retaining wall at the edge of the yard. She looked out at the house across the street, at the particular darkness of neighborhoods, easeful, full of families that you couldn’t see but knew were there, and, gingerly, took up the question of why she had, for six years, never called Will, who most surely would have come.
You know why, she told herself. Because of that.
Because of what?
Because you knew he would come.
Yes, he would have come. Of course, he would have.
He would have come and he would have been there, with you, the way he was with you at the summerhouse after Cat left, the way he was with you in the hotel room in Philadelphia, and you would have had to run away or make him leave.
Or I could have stayed.
And your life would have changed.
I would have had to love him.
You would have had to give him everything.
Jason, Cat, Will, her mother, the Lolas, everyone around her giving themselves away to the people they loved. Suddenly, she heard the unfamiliar voice from earlier that night: “This is Susan, Susan Davis. Is Jamie there?”
Jamie.
Even Jamie. Everyone and Jamie, too.
Pen reached into her bag and pulled out her phone.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
AS SOON AS HIS PHONE RANG, WILL KNEW WHO IT WAS. HE turned the music down.
“Pen.”
“I’m sorry I kissed Damon Callas,” said Pen.
Will smiled. “You mean just now?”
“I’m sorry I never called you, all those years, even though I missed you.”
“You’re calling me now, right?”
“Will, there are a lot of ways to run away from someone.”
“Yes, I guess there are.”
“Is that the Talking Heads?” she asked.
“Yes.”
“Where are you?”
“In the car.”
“You’re driving?”
“Yes. I don’t have a driver,” said Will. “I’m not Armando, you know.”
“So you’re using the Bluetooth thing?”
“No. This isn’t my car, remember?”
“You mean to tell me that you’re driving and holding your phone and talking to me?”
Will laughed. Pen. “I love you.”
“I know, but, come on, Will, hang up and find a rest stop.”
“Uh, I don’t think there’s a rest stop anytime soon.”
“Where are you?”
“Where are you?” he asked.
“Sitting on the wall outside my mom’s house.”
“In that case, I’m about two minutes away.”
“From here?”
“One minute and fifty-six seconds. Fifty-five. Fifty-four.”
“You mean you’re not on your way home?” asked Pen. Will could hear the joy in her voice.
“Not unless you mean you,” he told her. “I’m on my way to you.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
ANOTHER MINUTE AND WILL WAS GETTING OUT OF THE CAR and walking toward her, the sight of him more astonishing than a blue starfish, than an entire coral reef. I could watch you do that forever, she thought, but already she was impatient, fairly leaping off the wall and into his arms.
“How did you ever find me?” she asked.
“Lola Lita arrived on a silver cloud from Mt. Olympus and told me where you were.”
“Jamie,” said Pen, “the little traitor.”
“It wasn’t his fault. I tortured him until he spilled.”
“I’ll bet.”
Pen kissed Will’s mouth, the skin beneath his left ear.
“Can we start over?” asked Pen.
“If you really want to, but I was thinking we should hang on to all of it, everything that brought us here.”
Pen nodded. “You’re right. That’s what we’ll do. Will, I want to say something.”
“Uh-oh.” He smiled. “Say anything you want.”
“Lola Fe was right.”
“Of course, she was. About what?”
“About keeping everyone.”
“Gone but not gone,” said Will.
“Gone but here. Like my dad, Cat, Lola Fe herself, all the Lolas, and you before you came back into my life,” said Pen. “And ‘gone but here’ is a wonderful thing, a gift.”
Will kissed Pen’s forehead. Soon, the two of them would leave this spot and walk into the house together and see Pen’s mother and the man she had found to love, walk into the house and into a
whole changed world, but for now they would stay where they were.
“But if you can possibly swing it,” Pen went on, “just plain here is better. Here is the best place anyone could ever be.”
Will held her face between his hands and smiled in amazement. “And look,” he said.
“I know,” said Pen, looking with all of herself, with everything she had. “Here we are.”
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
THANK YOU, THANK YOU, THANK YOU TO THE FOLLOWING people:
Jennifer Carlson, agent and precious friend, who does every single thing she does with uncanny insight and clear-eyed grace;
My lovely and gifted gift of an editor, Laurie Chittenden, and all the good people at William Morrow, including Liate Stehlik, Sharyn Rosenblum, Tavia Kowalchuk, Lynn Grady, Mike Brennan, Seale Ballenger, Shawn Nicholls, and Trish Daly.
My treasured early readers Kristina de los Santos, Dan Fertel, Susan Davis, Annie Pilson, Amanda Eyre Ward, and Sarah Davis Brandon (you are all so smart and kind);
Katie Martin for letting me steal Middlemarchian, Arturo de los Santos for answering my Cebu questions, John Willis for solving the mystery of the chapel window, and Annabel and Charles Teague for revealing that, in early childhood, both of them believed that the greatest jazz singer to ever live was named Elephants Gerald.
Anna Carapellotti, ballerina babysitter extraordinaire and all-around sweetheart;
My parents for loving me unreservedly and for cheering loudest of all;
Charles and Annabel Teague, brave, exuberant, and funny children among whom I am blessed to spend my days;
And David Teague, best writer, best reader, best friend, best everything.
This book is dedicated to my first family, but there have been so many families since, in Charlottesville and Houston and Philadelphia and Cebu and Wilmington and places in between. Some are gone but here. Some are just plain here.
I’m keeping all of you.
Falling Together Page 38
