Falling Together (30 page)

“Fetuses don’t sit,” said Pen. “Fetuses recline.” She scratched her arm and eyed Jamie. “Can I ask you something?”

“Nope.”

“Since Dad died, do you ever feel like he’s—?”

“What?”

“I don’t know. Around?”

“You mean like a ghost? Tapping on a tabletop, Ouija board kind of thing?”

Pen recognized Jamie’s sarcasm for the wariness it was. Being at this house did it maybe, she thought, put Jamie on guard against sudden plunges into grief. She considered giving up and going inside, but who was there to talk to about this, apart from Jamie? Since her mother’s return Pen hadn’t really brought up her father much. As suspicious as she was of her mother’s new, vibrant cheerfulness, she was afraid of its ending.

“Sort of. I mean do you ever feel him with you. With you, with you. Not just like a memory.”

To Pen’s surprise, Jamie didn’t immediately shoot back a mocking response, but leaned back on his hands and appeared to be considering her question. It was something Jamie could do, take you seriously when you least expected it.

“His voice wakes me up sometimes,” said Jamie at last. “It doesn’t seem like a dream. And I can call it back up for hours, his voice saying whatever he said to me. Sometimes, after it happens, I can hear him all day.”

Oh, Jamie.
Pen felt, with a rush of urgency, that she needed to have another child and soon. For Augusta. There were some things with which no one should be left alone. Pen wished she could see Jamie’s face, but it was too dark.

“What does he say?”

“Nothing profound,” said Jamie, with a slight shift away from seriousness that Pen knew was deliberate. “No insights from the great beyond or anything. Mostly stuff he said to me when I was a kid.”

“Tell me.”

“Well, like once he said, ‘Come look at this, Jamie: Fibonacci’s sequence in an artichoke.’”

Pen smiled.

“He was here just now,” she said tentatively. “It felt like that, anyway. There was a fox in the backyard, and it looked me right in the eye, and then Dad was just—here.”

“Dad was a fox?”

“No, and I didn’t see him or hear him, but I felt him all around me. That’s never happened before.”

She waited for him to make fun of her, but, after a moment, he just said, “Nice,” and then, “Lucky.”

She could see him nodding. With a groan, he got creakily to his feet.
You’re a good brother,
thought Pen,
a good man.
She knew better than to tell him this.

“Looking a little stiff there, Grandpa,” she said, standing up, too. A mosquito bit her other arm. “Ow,” she said and slapped at it.

“Good mosquito,” said Jamie.

P
EN
’
S MOTHER HAD FOUND SOMEONE
.

Owing to the fact that Pen was engrossed in watching
Foyle’s War,
a show she adored, and to her mother’s odd use of the word
found
(and also, possibly, to what Amelie would say was Pen’s subconscious refusal to believe that her mother had found someone), Pen didn’t immediately understand what she meant.

“Was someone lost?” asked Pen sleepily, rubbing her eyes. What had happened in the yard (she hadn’t yet figured out what to call it—encounter? experience? visitation?) had sapped her.

“God, Pen,” said Jamie.

When she looked over at him, he was glaring at her. Before Pen could make sense of the glare or of Jamie’s tone of voice, he jumped up from the sofa where he and Pen sat, strode across the room, and switched off the television. It happened fast. The bright and everlasting calm of Foyle’s blue eyes vanished.

“Hey!” said Pen.

Jamie threw open eyes and hands in a gesture that meant,
What the hell is wrong with you?

Pen looked at Margaret, whose face was bright pink.

“Found someone?” said Pen, slowly. “You mean you—met someone?” Suddenly cold, she wrapped her arms around herself.

Margaret moved a stray curl off her cheek and tucked it behind her ear, a gesture that meant she was nervous.

“Yes,” she said. “And no.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” said Pen, mounting alarm turning her voice into a kind of bleat.

“Knock it off,” said Jamie to Pen. He looked at his mother. “Hey, Mom. You want to sit down or something?”

“I will if you will,” said Margaret with a bittersweet smile.

Jamie sat back on the couch, leaving his mother the armchair. She sighed and sat down. Margaret was short compared to Pen and Jamie, whose ranginess came from their father, but she had been a gymnast when she was younger and was still broad-shouldered and full of energy, even when she wasn’t moving. But sitting there, on the edge of the chair, her hands clasped, her face full of worry, she looked fragile.

“This won’t be easy for you two,” she said, but she was looking at Pen. “And the last thing I want to do is hurt you.”

“We just want you to be happy,” said Jamie.

Under other circumstances, the grave sweetness in his voice would have touched Pen and made her proud of him, but she felt stony and resentful.
Oh, sure, the old good kid/bad kid routine,
she thought acidly. Her stomach was full of knots.

“Thank you,” said Margaret quietly. “I didn’t think I could ever be happy again. I didn’t go looking for it, certainly.”

“You didn’t?” said Pen. “Why did you leave, then? You must have been looking for something.” She would have liked for this to have come out sounding less childish and bitter, but she
felt
childish and bitter.

“What did you think it was?” Her mother sounded genuinely curious.

Pen gave a cranky shrug. “Tibet. India. Rome. What do people usually go looking for in those places? Spiritual enlightenment, I guess. The meaning of life. God.”

Pen’s mother’s laugh was harsh. “God? I was looking for
God
?”

“Why is that funny?”

“Because I was furious with God, when I could bring myself to believe in him at all, which wasn’t very often.”

“Why did you choose those places, then?” asked Jamie. “You never told us.”

His casual tone impressed Pen because the fact was that she hadn’t just left out this one detail but had told them almost nothing. She had given them three days’ notice that she was leaving (to be fair, this was no more notice than she’d given herself), had a friend drive her to the airport, and had only made phone calls—brief, static-riddled—every few weeks, facts that had hurt and baffled even Jamie.

Their mother’s blue eyes were bright with tears. “Right before your dad died, we were talking all the time about traveling.”

“And those were places you talked about going?” asked Pen.

Margaret wiped her eyes. “No. We talked about Wales, Brittany, bicycling through Scotland. The Galapagos, Brazil, Paris, Tanzania, Barcelona. So many more places. Your father and his maps.”

Something softened in Pen, then, and she met her mother’s eyes.
My father and his maps,
she thought. Her mother smiled at her. “What I did was choose places we had
never
talked about going. It wasn’t easy.”

“But why go at all?” said Pen.

“I was broken,” said her mother. Her voice was steady and tender. “I had lost my capacity for anything but sadness. I don’t mean to scare you, but I left because I thought I would die, and there was only one tiny part of me that cared, and every day that part got a little bit smaller.”

“But it won in the end, right?” said Jamie quickly, still the kid who would read the end of the book before the beginning to make sure it ended happily. “The part that cared.”

“It was like in
Horton Hears a Who!,”
Margaret said with a sparkle in her eye. “Remember? The tiny part shouted at the top of its lungs for me to do something to save myself, and I almost didn’t hear it, but then I did.”

“It told you to leave?” asked Pen, narrowing her eyes.

“My girl,” said Margaret, “for whom leaving is always the worst thing.”

“Leaving
people,”
said Pen impatiently.

“It told me to do
something,”
said Margaret. “Leaving was the only thing I could think of. I had some money from your father’s life insurance. To tell you the truth, I didn’t think leaving was a very good idea, either, and I had almost no expectation that it would help, but I couldn’t think of one other thing to do. Please try to understand.”

The forlorn note in her mother’s voice was like a fire blanket, putting out the anger that had begun to smolder inside Pen with one colossal whack. She looked at her mother and saw that since the conversation had started, some of the youthful, sun-streaked radiance she had been carrying in her face since she’d gotten home had faded, and, instantly, desperately, Pen wanted it back. She got off the couch to sit on the floor at Margaret’s feet. She grabbed her hand, which was smaller than her own, and kissed it.

“I do understand,” she said. “And, look, it did help: you came back happy.”

Pen meant it. She did mean it, and she felt glad when she said it. Even so, when Jamie said teasingly, “All right, all right, cut the bonding crap and tell us about this international man of mystery,” Pen couldn’t help but give a sharp, internal flinch. As if her mother felt it, she rested her hand briefly, protectively on the top of Pen’s head.

“I don’t know quite where to start,” she said, flustered.

“Then start with where,” said Jamie.

“Bossy,” said Pen. “As usual.”

Margaret laughed a free, fluttering laugh. “In an airport in Mumbai. I was going to Vienna. He was going to Rome. Our flights were delayed and we got to talking, and I—I…” She broke off, blushing again. Margaret was a blusher, could go from zero to azalea pink in a matter of seconds. “I changed my flight.”

“Mom!” said Pen, laughing. Pen was aware of sadness, out there and waiting, a big, foggy shape that would surely overtake her later. Just now, though, she let herself be carried by the current of her mother’s happiness.

Jamie whistled. “Must’ve been some conversation.”

“It was,” said Margaret, “although it wasn’t as though I had anything particular to do in Austria. I was just going to go. But, yes, it was a good conversation. And we actually did end up going to Vienna later.” The “we” stung, but Pen closed her eyes and breathed past it.

“So you spent a lot of time together,” said Pen.

“Yes. He travels for his job. I went with him.”

Pen’s impulse was to ask her mother how serious this relationship was, but she weighed the possible consequences of the question—her mother having a meaningless European fling versus her mother in love with a stranger—and held back.

“Okay,” began Jamie. Pen saw the trace of uneasiness under his smile.
Oh, just don’t,
she thought, but, of course, he did. “How serious is this?”

“Oh. Well.” The way Margaret drew herself up and pressed the back of her hand against her mouth, she could have been holding tears or joy or both in check. Pen couldn’t tell, but she knew it wasn’t the gesture of a woman who was about to say, “Not serious at all.” In a moment, she moved her hand away and said decisively, “Very.”

“You’re in love?” asked Pen. She found that she couldn’t not ask it.

Margaret nodded, looking so demure with her lashes lowered and her hands folded in her lap that for a crazy moment, Pen imagined that the whole scene was ripped from a Jane Austen novel, with Pen and Jamie as the stern parents and their mother as the rose-fresh, marriageable daughter.
Gloves and a fan,
thought Pen,
that’s all she needs.

After a few seconds, Jamie sent these slightly hysterical fancies flying out the window by saying, “You know what? Dad would be glad.”

Pen remembered the fox in the backyard, her father’s kindness reverberating around her, not passive, but powerful, a force, and she had to admit that Jamie was right.

“I have never thought otherwise for one second,” said Margaret.

“Not that what Dad would think should’ve stopped you.” This was such a startling statement that, for a second, Pen wondered who could have made it, declared it, really, in that clear, certain voice.

“Holy cluck,” said Jamie, staring at Pen. “Did you really just say that?”

“Yes,” said Pen, trying to sound sure of herself. “Why? Do you think I’m wrong?”

“Oh, I think you’re right,” said Jamie. “I’m just not sure if you’re you.”

“What do you mean?”

“You know,” said Jamie. “
You.
The never letting go of stuff. Ever. The insane loyalty.”

At the mention of loyalty, Pen felt a little doubt inch in. “You think I’m being disloyal?”

“Of course, you’re not being disloyal,” said her mother.

“Jamie?” persisted Pen.

Jamie’s face tensed, reflecting what was rare for him: an inner struggle. Pen thought he was on the verge of just agreeing with Margaret, but then he said, “I think you’re being loyal to
Mom,
which is the way it should be because Dad’s dead and Mom’s alive. The living win, automatically. Especially if the living is Mom.”

It hurt him to say this, Pen could tell, and she understood because she felt the same way: that just acknowledging that Dad was dead, relegating him to that state, lumping him in, however sorrowfully, with other dead people, constituted a kind of betrayal all by itself. Which made her blithe pronouncement that it didn’t matter what her father would think about her mother’s loving another man even more puzzling.