Falling Together (15 page)

Pen had stood under the peaked, snow-white sky of the tent, in the middle of the brightness and noise, with the wide-open, breathing spring night just outside, thinking about her dad and had felt the old sadness plodding toward her on its big, square feet.
Oh no,
she thought,
nope, not here, are you kidding,
and, as fast as she could, she had whirled away from it and chosen anger instead.

Once she had decided to fume, it was easy to start because it was so like Cat, so
exactly
like her to decide to meet Pen again, after so many years, at an enormous party, in front of an audience of strangers and, worse, non-strangers. And it was so like Pen to go along with the idea, to do things Cat’s way, instead of suggesting an alternate plan. Even as she thought these thoughts, getting angrier and angrier, Pen realized that they had little basis in fact. Although Cat had always loved parties, she had a firm sense of appropriateness and privacy, especially other people’s privacy, and though Pen had been occasionally happy to indulge Cat’s flights of fancy, she had never gone along unquestioningly when it came to something really important. In fact, it was the very abruptness and oddness of Cat’s request that had caused Pen’s uncharacteristic compliance, caused her to send an e-mail saying nothing but I’ll be there. Still, however makeshift, the anger felt good, coursing through her like a stiff drink and sending the sadness, shoulders hunched, clomp, clomp, clomping away.

I could be home,
Pen growled silently.
I could be in my apartment, right this second, with Augusta
. It had hurt to leave Augusta. It always hurt. Even the usual monthly weekend good-byes set a hard sadness thrumming inside Pen’s chest every single time, and this month, there had been more than one good-bye.

Augusta had been okay this time, though, which wasn’t necessarily to be expected. She didn’t balk often at being left at Patrick’s, but when she did, it was invariably high and excruciating drama. Last time it happened had been awful: Augusta wrapping herself around Pen, python-fashion, wailing like a blizzard, Patrick’s face crossed with sorrow, Tanya feigning applause in Pen’s direction, saying, “Nice. Very nice.”

Pen had been especially worried about this go-round because whenever Pen left, Augusta insisted upon knowing precisely where she was going, and, perhaps because she had so little in the way of a past, Augusta had had difficulty comprehending the concept of a reunion. In the end, this had probably worked in everyone’s favor, since, inside her imagination, Augusta had tidily substituted the unwieldy reunion idea with one of her own and decided that Pen was going to meet friends at the Union Street bakery in Wilmington where Augusta had loved to go with Pen’s mother.

Pen had driven Augusta over to Patrick’s in the early morning, with long, pink-stained clouds still floating low in the milky sky and with her child, bread-warm and messy-haired, sleeping in the backseat, and had prayed that the powers that be not mistake her recent uptick in leave-takings for a lack of love.
This is it,
she had vowed.
It, it, it. For a long time, all summer; except for Patrick’s weekends, this is the last time I’ll spend a night away from her
. On Patrick’s doorstep, as carefully as Pen had tried to make the transfer—one palm cupping the weight of Augusta’s head, the other arm supporting the curled rest of her—Augusta had awakened and reached for her. Pen had held her breath, but, instead of launching into a tantrum, Augusta had smiled, blinked extravagantly like a cat, and said, “You will bring me some jam-spot cookies like I like, right, Mama?” And Pen had asked Patrick, “How can I, how could
anyone
walk away from that?”

But she had. Because Cat had said that she needed her, Pen had left Augusta, and now here she stood, mute and rigid as a stump, her head full of noise, remembering the curve of her child’s perfect skull in her hand, and waiting for someone who was either taking her damn time (Pen hadn’t worn a watch in years and her satin wristlet bag was too small for her phone, so she didn’t know how long she had been waiting but knew it was unforgivably long) or who was never arriving at all.
God, I must be insane,
she thought,
or stupid.
And then she turned her face—what was it? fifteen degrees? ten? less?—and saw Will.

He wasn’t looking at her, was at such an oblique angle to her that his face was little more than a sliver, but she knew him at once. “It was like reading,” she would try to explain later, and she wasn’t talking about phonics. She didn’t break him into syllables—shoulders, hair, shirt collar, hand, nose, cheekbone—and put him back together again; she didn’t sound him out. He was a language she knew, and it was whole-word recognition: Will.

He looked at her and smiled, not a wry or wary smile, but an easy, sudden gift of a smile, like someone handing her a pear, a smile that only a crazy person would fail to return. But that’s just what Pen did. Not only did she fail to return it, but she stared at Will, frozen, for a long time, a fiery blush shooting up her neck and face, finally lifted one finger in a forlorn and inane gesture meaning
I’ll be right back,
then spun around and went careening—erratic, batlike—through the crowd of people and out the back of the tent.

Once outside, she kept walking, blindly, cursing herself, cursing the ridiculously high heels that sent her wobbling, knock-kneed, across the grass like a baby giraffe, then teetering down a brick sidewalk, clicks echoing like gunshots in the night.

“Idiot!” She bit the word out through clenched teeth. “Idiot, idiot.”

After a few more steps, she stood still, squeezed her eyes shut, and a thought came to her that was perfectly calm and in the voice of her mother,
You are overwrought and you need to sit down
. She opened her eyes and got her bearings: a long, beautiful serpentine wall made of bricks, a white gate. One of the university gardens. “Let it be unlocked,” Pen whispered, and it was.

Inside, plum trees stood in a row, flowers lifted their pale throats to the moon and stars, a magnolia held its tight-closed buds like white candles in its green hands. The place was so orderly, so full of grace that Pen hated to disturb it with her idiocy and her burning face and her raucous pulse, but then she saw a white bench, so she sat down.

She hadn’t walked far, but she felt like she had. The party was still there, right around the corner. She could hear it but not see it, and she took a few seconds to imagine it as a big, white, hoop-skirted ghost floating away over the grass or one of those Mississippi riverboats, its paddlewheel turning languorously in the brown water, carrying the music and laughter, the corseted women and wild-eyed gamblers farther and farther downstream.
You are weird, girlfriend,
thought Pen, shaking her head.
As weird as they come. A closet weirdo
. But the ghost and the riverboat called her back to herself enough so that she could sort out just what in the hell had happened back there at the party, to enumerate all the reasons (and she was sure there were legions of them) why she was an idiot.

It had happened fast. What had happened fast? Will had done a small, normal thing: he had looked at her and smiled. But as soon as he did it, the instant Pen really and truly saw him, she was overtaken, sucker punched, not once but twice: first by a terrible, rawboned loneliness, then by desire. For Will. Desire for
Will
. Although
desire
was too breathy a word for what she felt, and too narrow. Because it wasn’t just sexual desire (although it was that, too), but a voluminous, all-purpose longing. If Will hadn’t, by the grace of God, been too far away to hear her, she might have said it out loud: “I want you in every way a person can want someone.”

“Holy shit,” Pen whispered, panicked, into the stillness of the garden. “What have I done?” And then she remembered that, apart from running out of the party like a lunatic, she hadn’t really done anything. “Calm down, sweetheart,” she told herself, doing her best to channel her mom. “Chill the cluck out. Think.”

After briefly undertaking what she imagined to be yoga breathing, she did think, taking on the loneliness first, touching it cautiously, examining it, and she discovered that the loneliness was nothing new, but had been there all along. It was just that, before the moment at the party, she hadn’t been aware of its magnitude. She hadn’t been conscious of all the pieces of it—loneliness upon loneliness—all at the same time: her lost friendships, her misbegotten hopes for Patrick, her father’s dying (and, for a bad split second, sitting in the garden, she was that woman again, her father’s girl, kneeling next to him, asking him to wake up), her lonely windswept desert of a heart at her father’s funeral, the lost, folded-in-on-itself solitariness she felt when she rode her bike, the way she missed her mother, the way she missed Augusta every time she left her.

Stop it,
she told herself, disgusted.
Cut the crybaby crap
.
You have Jamie. And Amelie. You have Kiki and plenty of other people. And for God’s sake, you have Augusta
.

It was true that there was no way to be with Augusta and to feel alone. Just the sight of her girl holding a cup with her two hands, just the sound of her voice in the hallway outside their apartment not only connected Pen to Augusta, but turned Pen’s boundaries deliquescent, let some of the world flow in. But the rest of the time?
The rest of the time,
Pen understood, startled,
I am outside of life. I am sad. I spend so much time missing people
. She turned the idea over, parsed it out, tried it on—“Penelope Calloway is a sad and lonely person”—and found that it fit. How in the world had she let this happen?

For a few bleak seconds, she reeled, before snapping back to herself, or to herself-as-her-mother, or, more specifically, to herself-as-her-mother-on-an-especially-impatient-day.
Don’t be silly. You will fix
it,
she told herself sharply.
Of course, you will. It’s not too late
. Pen would do whatever people did to fix themselves, and even though she had no clear idea of what this was or where to start, just thinking the word
fix
—the short, no-nonsense briskness of it—made her feel competent. She sat up straighter on the bench. She clapped her hands together like Mary Poppins: spit-spot, that’s done.

As for her wanting Will, just because something felt like a revelation didn’t mean it was one. Wanting a man she hadn’t set eyes on in six years?
You don’t even know him,
she told herself meanly, but she didn’t really believe it. In any case, whether she knew him or not, whether the desire was a fleeting or a permanent condition, wanting wasn’t nothing, but it wasn’t all that much, either. It wasn’t love.
You have always loved Will,
a voice in her head reminded her.
That’s different,
she shot back with fierce practicality.
And you know it
. Then the garden gate creaked and there he was.

Neither one of them said hi. After a single, superfast, peripheral glance, Pen didn’t look at him, not even when he sat down on the bench next to her. She sat gazing vacantly at the flowerbed, unmoored, possibly not breathing, thoughts fluttering like moths through her brain—
Are those daylilies? Are daylilies supposed to bloom at night? Who are you, the daylily police?
—and listening to what might have been a mockingbird braid its long, rippling strands of shine in the magnolia tree (
Were mockingbirds supposed to sing at night?
), but mostly listening to the annoying bass line of her heart in her ears. Will was so still that, for all Pen knew, he might have been doing the same (daylilies, bird, even her own heart because it was that loud).

When the mockingbird finished singing, Will said, “So, are you gonna eat that?”

For the first time, Pen noticed that she still had the small Chinet plate. It sat in her lap. A piece of ham the size of a silver dollar sat on the plate, all that had survived her mad rush from the tent to the garden.
Intrepid ham scrap,
was her desultory thought.
Scrappy scrap
. She envisioned herself, trailing hors d’oeuvres; then as her mind cleared enough for Will’s question to register, she smiled.

“It’s all yours.”

“Awesome.”

She laughed and gathered herself and looked at him. To her relief, she wasn’t gobsmacked by desire. She didn’t burst into tears. There was Will, sitting on the bench, chewing ham, and the sight of him made her happy.

When he finished, he grinned a semi-shy, close-mouthed grin and said, “Hey, Pen.”

At the sound of her name, Pen flashed back to the Pen of a few minutes (five? twenty? more?) ago, hightailing it out of the tent in her cocktail sandals, and groaned.

“What?” Will asked.

“I guess I was hoping you wouldn’t recognize me.”

“You? Oh.” And then he smiled his true, guileless, transfiguring smile, the one he had given her back in the tent and so many times (how many?) before that, back when his smile was just an ordinary part of her life, like her books or her coffeemaker or the view from her window. “I would know you anywhere. Sorry about that.”

Pen shrugged. “It’s okay.”

“But, hey, did you see that woman back at the party? Blue dress? Ran out of there like a jackrabbit.”

“Whew.” Pen rolled her eyes. “Total nutjob.”

“Maybe, but fast. Her speed, and not just her speed, her
acceleration
was
very
impressive.”

“You think?”

“Oh yeah. In heels? And with a death grip on that little white plate? Not a lot of people could’ve pulled that off.”

Pen considered kissing him, then, not kissing him-kissing him, which would have been madness, but leaning over and kissing the plane of his cheek because, with an impossibly light touch, he had gotten them through it, set them both safely down on the other side. Not kissing him-kissing him, but kissing him because he was kind and funny, because he was a man who deserved to be kissed.
Ha! Forget it,
Pen told herself, derisively.
I
don’t trust you as far as I can throw you
.