Falling Together (21 page)

“I’m glad you’re back,” said Pen kindly. “We were just talking about you.”

“Yeah, I bet,” said Jason. “My ears were burning.”

Because his attempt at belligerence was so halfhearted and because she remembered that his ears really were burned, hot pink and peeling, Pen’s heart softened a little bit more, and she said, “You want to sit down?”

“That’s okay,” said Jason. “I just want to say something.”

“Go ahead,” said Pen.

“The thing I told you back there, about why I e-mailed you. It wasn’t the real reason.”

“We wondered about that,” said Pen.

“You know, I thought there was an off-chance all that would happen, that she’d know it was me and come down here with you. An off-off-chance. But really what I wanted—” He pulled a hand out of his pocket and slapped at his arm. “Damn mosquitoes are out for blood tonight,” and then he looked at Will and Pen and smiled. “Literally. Since they’re mosquitoes, right?”

“The little suckers,” said Will.

Jason chuckled. “So anyway. It was the reunion that made me think of it, of getting in touch with you guys. After Cat left, I happened to find the stuff about the reunion that came in the mail, and thought,
Okay, so maybe this is the way to go
.”

“The way to go?” asked Pen.

“Backward, I guess,” said Jason. “Into the past. Because the present wasn’t really panning out.”

“What do you mean?” asked Will.

“I’m really worried about her,” said Jason. “Running off that way, all distraught.”

“That is worrisome,” said Pen. “I agree.”

Jason squatted down next to the bench. “So the deal is I was hoping you could help find her.”

Pen and Will looked at each other.

“I guess I’m wondering,” began Will carefully, “why ask us? We haven’t seen her in a long time.”

“Trust me,” said Jason sardonically. “If I hadn’t exhausted all my other possibilities, I wouldn’t have. I talked to a cop buddy of mine, but there’s no sign of foul play, and he said that a wife’s allowed to leave her husband,
not
that that’s what this is. Anyway, they might’ve checked into it, but she got in touch with this friend of hers, who told me she’s okay.”

“She did?” Pen said, startled. “Well, then why don’t you just ask her friend where she is?”

Jason snorted. “It’ll shock you to hear that Cat’s friends aren’t all that fond of me. Samantha won’t tell me a thing, apart from that Cat’s supposedly safe.”

“Jason,” said Pen, “maybe she just needs a little time. Maybe you should just wait for her to come home.”

Jason squeezed his eyes shut and shook his head. “The best I can explain it to you,” he said, “is that I have a sense of foreboding.”

“You do?” asked Pen, impressed at his use of the word
foreboding.

“Look,” said Jason, standing up again, “you guys knew her better than anyone. I think she’s in trouble. I want your help.” He took a deep breath and held out his hands in a gesture that could only be called beseeching. “I’m
asking
for your help. Please.”

Ten, maybe twelve seconds went by, a few heartbeats—Pen and Will looking from Jason to each other, getting their bearings—before Jason was taking off across the grass so fast he was almost running.

“You know what?” he yelled over his shoulder. “Forget it. My bad.”

“Jason!” called Pen, jumping to her feet. “We’ll help!”

Jason slowed to a walk, then stopped, his back still to them, his arms hanging at his sides.

Pen turned to Will, saying, “We’ll help, right?” but he was already moving past her. She watched Will run his long, loping run to where Jason stood, watched him put a hand on Jason’s shoulder, talking to him, turning him around, bringing him back.

K
IKI CALLED
,”
SAID
A
MELIE
, “
WANTING TO KNOW WHETHER
the three of you, um, connected.”

She lifted one sculpted eyebrow and smiled.

“Ha,” said Pen. “Kiki’s never used a euphemism in her life. What’d she really say?”

Amelie sorted through the phone messages, which were written on random scraps of paper, napkins mostly, a few receipts, the front page of the
Philadelphia Inquirer
. It was one of Amelie’s quirks: to be meticulously organized in some ways and almost pathologically messy in others. Once, Pen had found a used paper coffee cup on her desk with “Call your (yummy!) brother” scrawled across it in lipstick, along with the precise time and date he had called.

“Here it is.” Amelie plucked a take-out menu from the pile. “‘Need details on the group sex, pronto, Henny Penny. Hope you didn’t turn chickenshit on me.’”

“Charming,” said Pen. “Subtle.”

Amelie tapped her pencil lightly against her pursed lips and looked at Pen.

“What?” said Pen. “No!”

Amelie put the pencil down and sighed. “No?”

“No. I told you the whole story. Cat wasn’t even there.”

“So you’re saying that if she had been there—?”

“No!”

“Fine,” said Amelie lightly. “Fine, fine, fine. The subject of you, Cat, and Will is officially closed.”

Sure it is,
thought Pen. She waited, watching Amelie pretend to sort through the phone messages, then to examine her fingernails, which were perfect. She looked up at Pen, opened her mouth, closed it, then searched for a pencil and tucked it behind her ear.

“Oh, for crying out loud,” growled Pen. “Just say it.”

Amelie leaned back in her chair and folded her hands on the desktop. “I think you should tell me what happened between you and Will, way back when, why you stopped being friends. I think it’s time.”

“You do, do you?”

“Not for me,” said Amelie, her eyes widening with empathy. “For you.”

“Gosh,” said Pen, “you’re so thoughtful.”

The weird thing is that Pen found that she wanted to tell. She had never, in six years, told anyone, not Jamie or her parents, not the therapist she had seen a handful of times in a tired, haphazard, halfhearted (not even half: quarter-hearted, sixteenth-hearted?) manner at her mother’s insistence after her father’s death, not Amelie all the other times she had asked. But suddenly, she felt like telling.

She didn’t know why. Maybe it was because, after the reunion, the story of the end of Pen’s friendship with Will was no longer the story of the end of Pen’s friendship with Will. Maybe it was because she needed to set the story free from her own head, where it had circled for so long like a fish in a bowl, getting bigger and bigger and more and more neurotic, and send it swimming out into the narrative of her life with everything else. Maybe she needed closure or release or absolution so that she could move forward. Mostly, what she felt was, “Oh, go ahead and tell, for cluck’s sake.”

Pen knew that, in the grand scheme of things, it wasn’t such a terrible story, not especially shocking or sordid. Even so, it was the story of the worst thing Pen had ever done. If she could go backward in her life and change one thing (excluding—oh, God—everything she had done, everything everyone had done on the day her dad died), it would be pushing Will away, even though, she reminded herself, the real problem hadn’t involved pushing away, but pulling toward (her hand against the back of the man’s neck, her fingers in his hair), when she should have done anything but.

A
COLD
M
ARCH
, C
AT
TWO WEEKS GONE, TWO WEEKS OF
P
EN FEELING
as empty as Cat’s closet, as relinquished and obsolete as Cat’s twin bed, which drifted, with its flower-splotched Marimekko comforter, like a parade float in the middle of her empty room. Pen avoided her (their) apartment, went to classes in sweatpants, sat through gloomy meals of take-out food and self-blame with Will. With sadness, she noted that the two of them, unused to being the two of them, were awkward around each other for the first time ever. “Patience. You will adapt,” Pen’s mother assured her, and Pen believed her. He was still Will, after all; she was still Pen. But it hurt her, how moments of quiet between them felt, for the first time, like silences.

Things got better in the car. Even though Cat’s absence rode along with them the way her presence always had, unbelted, leaning forward between them from the backseat, even though the bottle of wine in the paper bag in the trunk was Cat’s favorite Pouilly-Fuisse (she’d left it in their refrigerator, further proof, Pen told Will glumly, of her eagerness to get the hell away from them as fast as her little legs could carry her), Pen and Will regained something like their old ease.

Maybe it was the act of putting the city in which they’d been a trio (the word they had long ago agreed upon, less loaded, God knew, than
triangle
or
threesome
[although
threesome
got Cat’s exuberant vote], less commanding, but more accurate than
triumvirate,
Pen’s personal favorite) behind them. Maybe it was the near impossibility of face-to-face conversation, of reading each other’s eyes. In any case, Will’s old red Saab, which, even in their college days, had hovered somewhere between being a classic and a piece of crap, was on its best behavior, and as they flew along the road, the still-bare trees and billboards and pearl gray sky streaming by on either side, Pen was glad that Will had suggested going to his family’s summerhouse on Boston’s North Shore for a few days. “It’ll be colder than here and grayer than here,” he’d said. “It might suck. But at least it won’t be here.”

They talked. Their conversation veered and backpedaled and bounced and stalled out and, from time to time, rocked to a rest, featherlike, before taking off, herky-jerky, in some unforeseen direction, which is to say that it was, for them, an ordinary conversation, apart from the fact that it was between two people, instead of three. Pen realized that others had often found the way she, Will, and Cat talked to each other annoying. “It’s like goddamn conversation bumper cars,” one of Cat’s boyfriends had said. “I get motion sick just listening.” But for Pen, talking this way with Will, the faint, familiar, pleasant-bad cracked-leather-dusty-attic-with-a-hint-of-street-vendor-peanuts smell of the car around them, the chilly air wailing through the permanently one-inch opened right rear window, was relaxing. More than relaxing. A homecoming. For the hours of the car ride, Pen was a creature in her natural habitat.

And though they didn’t exactly skirt the subject of Cat, they didn’t do what they’d been doing nearly every day back in Philadelphia: wallow in it, throwing around anger and sadness and what-ifs until the very furniture seemed saturated with regret. They talked about Cat, yes, but also about Roald Dahl, their favorite smells (Pen: the cold cream her mother used and bread baking; Will: coffee and the ocean), dyslexia, whether watching television makes kids overweight, Lance Armstrong, the Salem Witch trials, and why some people love horror films while others don’t.

When a solemn, smoke-colored dusk began to fall, Will brought up the subject of his parents’ marriage, a drawn-out, ugly thing that had recently begun coming to what would surely be a drawn-out, ugly end.

In mid-January, while Will’s father, Randall, was on a three-day business trip to San Francisco, in a burst of initiative and activity that shocked everyone who knew her, Will’s mother, Charlotte, had changed the locks on the family home, hired a lawyer, and enrolled in a painting course at the local arts college. She was two weeks sober, which didn’t sound like much, Will said, until you considered that it was two weeks longer than she had ever stayed sober before.

“Two weeks!” Pen had blurted out, then, “Do they recommend that, making so many life changes so fast? She didn’t waste any time cleaning house, did she?”

“Not unless you count the thirty years she spent married to the guy,” snapped Will.

Since then Pen had trodden lightly. Will had visited his mother in Connecticut twice, and both times had come back bearing a hopefulness in his face that was so simultaneously glowing and cautious that it broke Pen’s heart a little to see it. But right after he got back from the second visit, Cat had left, and, as they rode in the car together now, as Will said, “So Tully says the lawyers have made it so my dad can’t get anywhere near my mom’s money. Which is going to kill him,” Pen realized, with shame, how long it had been since she had asked about his mother, the extent to which she’d let Cat’s leaving usurp every other thing.