Falling Together (23 page)

“You don’t really have an inner bad girl, do you?”

“Nope,” said Pen. “But I’m working on it.”

“U
H-OH
,”
SAID
A
MELIE, WHEN
P
EN GOT TO THIS PART OF THE STORY
.

“I know,” said Pen. “Famous last words.”

T
HE NEXT DAY, AFTER A LEISURELY BREAKFAST AND ANOTHER TRIP TO
the market, Pen and Will filled travel mugs with coffee, a paper bag with a lunch of leftover pie, packed up a blanket and the newspaper, and drove to the sandy beach on the other side of the peninsula. With the lambent bay before them, flat and silver as a platter, they sat back-to-back and ate and read, silently trading sections of the paper. Then they walked along the shore and talked about plovers, whether Will should quit business school, and Cat. In the almost-heat of the afternoon, Will rolled up his sweatpants and waded into the water, and Pen took off the Irish wool sweater she’d found in the guest-room closet and tied it around her waist. After a while, they walked back to the car, where Will stripped down to shorts, put his running shoes on, and took off down the road. Pen drove home, wrapped in tranquility and the smell of warm mothballs.

From the road, even before the blond stones of the driveway were crunching under the Saab’s tires, Pen saw the car, a long gray Mercedes with Connecticut plates. Before she had time to consider who it might be, a note of unease began sounding in her head, faint, barely audible, but throwing the harmony of the past thirty-some hours out of whack. She wondered who it was, although anyone would’ve been less than welcome in Pen’s opinion, now, when she and Will were leaving the next morning.

“You couldn’t have waited just one more day?” Pen asked the Mercedes, as she pulled up next to it.

If someone apart from herself and Will had to be there, she hoped it was Philip, whom she loved for being a goofier version of Will, or Tully, whom she loved for being part twenty-three-year-old girl, part cranky old man (“Andy Rooney in Juicy Couture” is how Cat summed her up). But the man sleeping in the rocking chair on the porch with his feet, in gigantic, beat-up, paint-splattered black Chuck Taylors, propped on a milk crate wasn’t Philip or Tully. He was older, maybe late twenties, with a long narrow face, Frida Kahlo eyebrows, and a head of oil-black Shirley Temple curls. One hand was tucked inside his toffee-colored Carhartt jacket; the other one dangled off the arm of the chair and was large and elegant and stained with something purple.

“Excuse me,” said Pen.

Possibly it had something to do with his oversized hands or his extravagant hair, but Pen expected the man to wake up dramatically, maybe kick over the milk crate or shout with surprise. But he didn’t move at all.

“Excuse me,” she said again more loudly, and, this time, the man lifted a hand very slowly and rubbed the back of it back and forth across his still-shut eyes. It was only after he’d dropped the hand heavily into his lap and had, with great languor, tilted his head from side to side, as though working the kinks out of his neck, that he opened his eyes. They were an unexpected cloudy bluish gray, like the eyes of a newborn baby. The man smiled at Pen, a fast-twitch smile that made the cheek muscles in his thin face pop out like two golf balls.

“You caught me napping,” he said. Actually, what he said was, “Yih cawt me nappin’,” all the edges of his words smoothed away by a southern accent so lush it was almost comical.

“I see that,” said Pen. She couldn’t help smiling back at him. He was at best an interloper, at worst a serial killer, but he was cute.

He stood up. Due to his immense height, this was a multistage unfolding activity that reminded Pen of setting up a music stand. The man rubbed his hands down the front of his jacket and offered the right one to Pen. “Damon Callas.”

Pen shook his hand. “Pen Calloway.”

“What sort of a name is ‘Pen,’ if you don’t mind my asking?”

“A nickname. For Penelope.”

“Good Lord, girl, you’re Greek!”

“No. Sorry.”

“Where’d you get a name like that, then?”

“It’s from
The Rise of Silas Lapham,
a book no one in the world but my mother loves. Penelope is Silas’s daughter, the plain, brainy one.”

“I’m sure only the latter adjective applies to you.” Somehow—maybe it was the accent—he could say this without sounding like a complete phony. “Does she get her man?”

“She does, actually.”

“I believe it.” He winked. Pen was not a fan of winking, and she averted her gaze, but Damon was the kind of person whose eyes never leave your face during conversation. When she looked elsewhere, he leaned so that he could keep looking at her.

“Hmm,” sniffed Pen.

“Sounds like she got a better deal than the other Penelope. Mrs. Odysseus.”

“Yeah,” said Pen, “you really never want to be the one who gets left behind.”

“I was thinking more about the loyalty, the fidelity.” He sagged his bony shoulders and made a bored face, “The chastity.”

“The never-ending sewing project.” Pen smiled.

“That, too.” He smiled back at her, not a quick smile like before, but a molasses-slow, whole-face event. He crossed his arms across his chest and kept smiling.

“So,” said Pen.

“Right,” he said, still smiling. “So are you one of Charlotte’s neighbors?”

Partly because of the way Damon pronounced “Charlotte,” partly because Will never referred to his mother by her first name, and partly because Pen never suspected that this sublime scarecrow of a man could have anything to do with Will’s mother, it took Pen several seconds to figure out what Damon was asking.

“Oh,” she said finally. “No. I’m a friend of her son Will. We’re just up for a few days.”

“Will.” Damon nodded. “The one in Philadelphia, right?”

“Yep, him.”

Damon continued to nod. Pen thought Damon might be the most unhurried person in the world. Standing before her, nodding in the sun, he had the aspect of someone who could stand there nodding in the sun all day long.

“Are you a friend of Will’s mother?” she said.

“I am,” he said. “We’re visiting for a few days, too. She’s upstairs having a little lie-down. Long car trip and all. Plus, we were up late last night.”

Something about the way he said “we” caused Pen to begin formulating a complicated word problem inside her head: if Will was twenty-six and the oldest child, which he was, and if Charlotte had gone to college, which she had, and if she’d gotten married after graduation, which Pen was pretty sure she had, even if it had been
right
after graduation, which it might have been, and even if she had been slightly pregnant at the time, which Randall Wadsworth liked to insinuate when he was feeling mean, how old would that make Will’s mother? Mental math was not Pen’s strong suit, but, eventually, her brain managed to eke out a number: forty-nine.

Will’s mother was, at the very youngest, forty-nine years old, and, unless Damon were a vampire—which was possible, since he sort of looked like a vampire—he might have been thirty at the very oldest, which would mean he was dating (and this word seemed entirely wrong, although Pen realized it should not),
if
he was dating her, a woman at least nineteen years his senior. And that woman was Charlotte Wadsworth, Will’s mother. When Pen, using emotional calculus, factored in the two measly months Will’s mother had been separated from Will’s father, along with the two measly months plus two measly weeks Will’s mother had been sober, assuming she still was sober, plus Will’s sky-high hopes and bone-deep worry for his mother, the only answers she came up with were these: a vision of her friend Will running, fleet and unsuspecting, toward a mountain of fresh worry and her own heart beating out the words,
Oh, Will. Oh, Will. Oh, Will.

P
EN’S FINDING DAMON CALLAS SLEEPING ON THE PORCH OF THE
summerhouse marked the point at which things got weird, but things did not progress from weird to surreal until after Pen got drunk.

Pen got drunk. Not falling-down drunk, but not just tipsy, either, which meant that she got drunker than she ever usually got. She didn’t plan to get drunk at all, but after she, Will, and Damon got back from their walk to the sea glass beach—a weirdly unweird excursion—while Will and Damon sat in Adirondack chairs in the yard, making conversation in a weirdly normal way, Pen went into the house to get herself an apple and found the bottle of Pouilly-Fuisse on the counter, open and half-empty. It should not have been on the counter, open. It should have been in the refrigerator, unopened, the way Pen knew it had been when the three of them had left the house, with Will’s mother still asleep upstairs.

Pen panicked. She could not let Will see the bottle. She could not let Will’s mother drink any more of it. With shaking hands, she got a large wineglass, a goblet really, out of the china cabinet in the dining room, poured herself a glass of the wine and gulped it down. Then she poured another big glass, draining the bottle, and hid the bottle in the cabinet under the sink behind dishwashing soap and two boxes of scouring pads. For a moment, she leaned on her hands against the counter, her stomach burning, her head bowed, and whispered an already drunken prayer inspired by the box of scouring pads, “S.O.S., S.O.S., please S.O.S.” Then she picked up the glass of wine, drank it, washed the glass, put it away, and walked outside.

“W
HY DIDN
’
T YOU JUST POUR IT OUT IN THE SINK
?”
ASKED
A
MELIE
.

“I should have, but, honestly, for some reason, I didn’t think of that.”

“That reason possibly being your subconscious desire to have a drink?” said Amelie.

“Or two,” said Pen ruefully.

W
HAT
P
EN SAW HAPPEN IN
W
ILL WHEN HE GOT BACK FROM HIS RUN
had struck her as both marvelous and chilling: after she’d raced out to meet him on the driveway, giving him a rushed explanation, as much as she had one, for Damon Callas’s presence on the porch, and after she’d watched confusion followed by anxiety followed by revulsion followed by anger pass over his face and she’d heard him spit out the words, “Oh, for fuck’s sake,” he had pulled out what Pen would later describe as “the big WASP guns.” He had slid his emotions into some noiselessly opening and shutting WASP filing cabinet, turned his face into a blandly friendly WASP mask, and put on good manners like a suit of clothes.

Instead of pounding Damon’s towering, scrawny body into the summerhouse yard, Will had made conversation, which is how Pen found out that Damon taught at the art school where Charlotte was taking a class (“Not my class, of course,” he’d told them with a quickness and a reassuring tone that effectively turned “Not my class, of course” into “Will, I am banging your mother.”), that he was a painter and collagist, that his hands were purple from dyeing cloth for use in one of his pieces, that he was “six-foot-six in stocking feet” but had not played basketball in high school or anyplace else.

When Damon asked if they’d mind showing him around a bit, Will had taken him to the sea glass beach, the two men walking ahead, talking in mellow tones about the history of the North Shore, and Pen following behind, fighting off the urge to fall to her knees on the stony beach and wail, “Will, let’s go home!”

It wasn’t until Pen had disappeared the wine and was walking unsteadily out of the house that she saw Will’s remote demeanor crack, just for a second. He looked hard at Pen’s face and said, “Everything okay?” The question made Pen want to weep.

She scraped together a feeble smile and said, “Should we start making dinner?”

“That reminds me,” said Damon, giving his forehead a light smack. “There’s a cooler of wine in the car I need to unload. Give me a hand, Will?”

Pen reeled at this, but everything else—Will, the house, the birds in the trees—seemed to stand still. She could see Will’s face, which was not full of rage, but of sadness.

“Oh, Will,” she said.

He turned toward Damon and said, “I don’t think that’s a good idea.”

“Why not?” asked Damon.

“I guess you don’t know that my mom’s a recovering alcoholic. She hasn’t had a drink in over two months.”

Damon drew his heavy brows together, confusion all over his face, then he closed his eyes and sighed. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I don’t know how to tell you this.”

Before he was even finished saying it, Pen had walked over to Will and taken his hand. “Don’t,” she told Damon.

The screen door sighed its sigh, and Will’s mother stepped onto the porch. She was tall and straight and wore a long, loose sweater dress and boots. Pen noticed that she’d cut her hair; it hung at either side of her high-cheekboned face, blunt and expensive-looking.

“Why don’t you say I’m a work in progress, Damon?” she said brightly. “Like all of us.”

“Mom,” said Will. His cheeks were red; he looked the way he looked when he had a fever, but his voice was ice-cold. Pen wanted to put her arms around him and take him away; she wanted to make his mother and Damon and the last couple of hours disappear off the face of the earth. Oh, please, she prayed, let it end, make them leave.

“Hello, darling,” said his mother. “I didn’t know you were coming. Lovely to see you.”

“Lovely to see me?” said Will.