Falling Together (37 page)

As Will and Pen looked over at him, the black dude on the other side of Augusta lifted his sleep mask, took a long look at Jason, and told them, “Lucky you.”

A
COUPLE OF HOURS INTO THE FLIGHT FROM
V
ANCOUVER TO
H
ONG
Kong, an unlikely thing happened to Will, Pen, and Jason, more unlikely than the dissolution of Pen’s aviophobia or the brief, half-asleep, flatly unacknowledged move she’d made on Will: they became a team.

When afterward Pen asked Will to give his best estimate as to where they were when this occurred, he guessed someplace over Russia, which wasn’t what you’d call pinpoint-precise, not exactly a zeroing-in kind of guess, but even if it had been accurate, it wouldn’t really have been accurate because while there was a single moment of clear-cut coalescence—Will’s eyes meeting Pen’s in agreement—the moment was more a culmination than a revelation. Their joining forces was a process that had begun back at the airport, not the second Jason had made his smirking appearance, but almost.

As Jason approached, Will had shot Pen a look that said,
Be as nice as you can,
so that by the time he stood by the table at a slightly backward-pitched angle, his hands in his shorts’ pockets, thumbs sticking out, his head not so much nodding as bobbing like one of those red-and-white fishing things (later, Will would tell Pen they were called “bobbers”) in a manner that made Pen want to grab a pancake off Augusta’s plate and smack him with it, Will was standing to greet him, and Pen had turned her chair around enough to see him out of the corner of her eye.

“Well, look who’s here,” he’d said with a smile so sharky that Pen could tell it set even Will’s knee-jerk good manners back on their heels because it took him almost a full five seconds to reach out to shake Jason’s hand.

“We figured you’d show up,” said Pen, with a cool, sidelong glance, and for a second or two, Jason’s face collapsed into a look of injured disappointment that was downright toddler-like.

“Did
not,”
he said.

Listen to you,
thought Pen,
you are straight out of the clucking sandbox
. It took her breath away a little, how Jason could, in the very same second, annoy the hell out of her and inspire a sympathy that was almost tender. Floundering in the face of these battling emotions, Pen took a prim sip of iced tea.

“Hey, man,” said Will, “three heads are better than two, right?”

“I have a head,” piped Augusta. “One head.”

Before Augusta spoke, Jason hadn’t noticed that she was there, and for a few seconds, he seemed confused. Then something happened so quickly that it would have seemed like a magic trick, if it hadn’t been so obviously real: quite simply, before Pen’s eyes, Jason became a different man. His shoulders relaxed, his chest unpuffed, all the defensiveness and wannabe thuggishness and petulance vanished.

“Really? Are you sure?” he said. “There’s not maybe a teeny tiny one you’ve been hiding someplace?”

“No!” Augusta laughed. “And you know what else?”

“What?” asked Jason.

“Fifty stars and thirteen stripes.” She said it like “firteen.”

Jason looked up, down, all around, frantically searching. “Where?”

Augusta laughed again and pointed at his shirt. “Right there.”

“Whoa,” said Jason. “You are one wicked-fast counter.”

“No, no, no,” said Augusta, shaking her black-dandelion-fluff head. “No one counts that fast. Not even Mommy. Not even
Albert. Einstein.”
She pronounced “Albert” with three syllables: Alabert.

“Then how did you know?” asked Jason.

“I
learned
!” shrieked Augusta with joy. “From my teacher!”

“Learned? Come on. How could you have learned that already? You’re only in—what? Fourth grade?”

More shrieking.

It had gone on like this, Jason becoming more starstruck, more unguarded, funnier, kinder, less and less of a horse’s ass by the minute.

“Who is that guy?” Will had whispered to Pen, as the four of them lined up to board.

“If you didn’t know him,” Pen whispered to Will, “you might mistake him for someone who doesn’t completely suck.”

“Seeing him with her makes it kind of hard to hate him, doesn’t it?”

“Don’t go soft on me, Wadsworth,” growled Pen, but it was Pen who was going soft. In her mind’s filing cabinet, she maintained a list of things that she would’ve otherwise disdained but liked because they made Augusta happy, and she could feel Jason taking his place on it, muscling in with his big shoulders, until he was wedged into a spot well below hair glitter but several notches ahead of chicken fingers and stickers.

When Jason moved his seat in Vancouver, both he and Augusta were in hog heaven for hours. They played I-Spy. They watched the same cartoons and Disney movies on their individual seat-back screens, headphones on, commenting to each other on the action in voices booming enough to generate a flutter of smiling, gentle remonstrance from the ballerina-like Asian flight attendants. They colored in the coloring books Pen had purchased for the trip, Jason scrunching his large form into painful-looking positions in order to chase runaway crayons. They played seemingly endless rounds of Old Maid and tic-tac-toe, until Will offered to read to Augusta, and the four of them shifted seats, so that Will sat between Augusta and Pen and Pen sat next to Jason.

She recognized Will’s offer as an act of mercy, one she herself would have appreciated, since her own tolerance for mindless and repetitive children’s games topped out at around fifteen minutes, but which appeared to deflate Jason. Once Augusta was gone, he was visibly at loose ends, aimlessly channel surfing, flipping through the duty-free catalog, finally digging out a thick, daunting slab of a hardcover book, which Pen recognized with surprise as a recent, prizewinning presidential biography. When Jason said sarcastically, “Don’t look so shocked. We graduated from the same college, remember? I do know how to read,” Pen had the grace to be ashamed.

Still, ten minutes into the book, after a period of repeated head lolling and jerking awake, Jason was fast asleep. His left arm was inches from hers, his face maybe a foot away. She never got used to it, the forced intimacy of airplanes, and it took a while for her to look at Jason directly.

“Geez,” she whispered to Will. “He looks so vulnerable, like an enormous baby chick.”

“Don’t do it,” cautioned Will.

“Do what?”

“Put that little airplane pillow over his face. Augusta would be bummed.” They both glanced down at Augusta, who was sleeping again, tucked under her blue blanket, her feet in Will’s lap, and then looked back at Jason. “Plus, it might be too small. You might need something bigger.”

“Seriously,” whispered Pen, “it’s weird to be this close to him.”

“Better you than me, pal.”

“Thanks a lot.”

But she had to admit that Jason’s face in repose held a kind of sweetness, smooth cheeks, dimpled chin, blond hair like a freshly mown lawn on top of his head. Seeing him like this, especially after seeing him with Augusta, it was slightly more possible to imagine why Cat married him. Maybe he had reservoirs of goodness under all that bluster. Maybe this face was his real face.

Maybe not,
she told herself, sharply. He had lied and misled them multiple times; he had driven Cat away; he said “dude” frequently and without irony. Now was no time to get sappy.

Hours passed, who knew how many? Pen’s inner clock had gone helter-skelter, befuddled by time zone switches, the plane’s interior darkenings and illuminations, and the indeterminate meals, randomly served (she liked the fish congee, but was it dinner? breakfast? Pen had no idea). Time on the plane seemed to alternate between clotting to an immovable mass and thinning and dissipating, like air on a mountaintop. After that early gift of plane sleep, Pen couldn’t even manage a catnap. She read; she watched several episodes of a crime show that made you desperate to be a forensic detective, if only for the sleek, glowing, is-it-a-lab-or-is-it-an-art-installation interiors and scuba-suit-tight pantsuits; she walked around and around the airplane like a panther in a cage; she ate every single thing the flight attendants put in front of her. Mostly, she talked to Will, talked and talked, like a thirsty person at a mountain spring, an enterprise that made time disappear altogether.

It was when she was giving up on her fourth nap attempt in an hour that it happened: Jason, still sleeping, shifted his knees and caused a minor earthquake in his seat, dumping an open bag of caramel corn onto the floor and sending the presidential biography tumbling over the armrest and onto Pen’s lap. When she picked it up, it flopped open. Two photographs slid out and rested, facedown, on her knee. Even as her mother’s voice told her to slip the photos back into the book without looking at them, she was switching on her reading light and turning them over in her hands.

The first was a wedding picture, Cat on Jason’s lap, laughing, her whisper-delicate neck and shoulders rising from the bodice of an upside-down lily of a dress, her button nose pressed against Jason’s cheek; Jason’s face shining with beatific joy. The second was Cat by herself in leggings and a tiny T-shirt, turned sideways, her arms spread in a gesture that said
Ta-da!

Because she was taking in Cat’s lovely, devilish smile, her long hair (Cat had never had anything longer than a long bob in all the years Pen knew her), it took Pen a moment to understand the significance of the gesture, and then she saw it: an almost imperceptible rise above Cat’s narrow hips, what would’ve just looked like ordinary stomach on anyone less waiflike. A baby bump.

As Pen stared and stared at the photo, her eyes burning with tears, she heard a small sound, the sound of a person clearing his throat deliberately: “Ahem.” It came from the direction of Jason. Pen froze. People made a lot of noises in their sleep, but, in her experience, this wasn’t one of them. Filling with dread, she braced herself and looked up.

Jason’s eyes were on the photograph, and the expression on his face wasn’t angry; in fact, it might have been the opposite of angry. Gently, he took the photos from Pen’s hands.

“Twelve weeks,” he said. “It’s as far as we ever got. A couple of days after I took this picture, she started bleeding and, poof, our baby was gone.” When he said “our baby,” his voice was like the expression in his eyes: honest, bleak, rife with longing. Pen remembered what Sam had said, how Cat had told her that wanting a baby had nothing to do with her husband and everything to do with Cat’s wanting to be a mother. Looking at Jason, Pen thought Cat had gotten it wrong. She wasn’t the only one who had been stockpiling love.

“I’m so sorry,” said Pen.

“She was at the grocery store when it happened,” Jason went on. “And then for, like, weeks afterward, she couldn’t go back. Started ordering groceries from this online delivery service.”

“Poor Cat. Poor both of you.”

For the first time, Jason’s eyes met hers. “You know, she didn’t even tell me? I’d come home from work and the fridge would be full of food, and I didn’t think twice about it. You know how I found out?”

“How?”

“I complained about the bananas.” He squeezed his eyes shut for a second or two, as though trying to clear his head of something. “Can you believe that? They were too ripe, all those strings sticking to them when you peeled them. I hate that.”

“So does Cat,” said Pen, suddenly remembering this fact. “She liked them when they were so green you could barely peel them.”

“Yeah, well, right about then, she wasn’t eating much of anything, which also took me a while to notice.” He shook his head in disgust. “My wife can’t walk into a goddamn grocery store without having posttraumatic stress, and I’m complaining about bananas.”

“Listen,” said Pen with great seriousness, “if you didn’t know, it was because she didn’t want you to know. It wasn’t your fault.”

Jason looked at her for a few seconds before he said, with equal seriousness, “Thank you.”

They sat in a prickly, awkward silence, until Pen couldn’t stand it anymore. She turned to Will, who was facing the other direction, sleeping, and tapped lightly on the back of his head. He swatted at her hand for a few seconds and then turned around.

“Hey,” he said reproachfully, glaring at her with half-closed eyes and running his hand across the top of his head, “I was asleep.”

“I know and I’m sorry,” said Pen. “But someone has to save us.”

“Me and you?” asked Will. “From what?”

“Me and Jason,” said Pen. “From ourselves.”

Will peered across Pen at Jason. “You were fighting?”

“We were getting along,” said Pen with a shudder.

“Yeah,” snorted Jason, “Pen was
nice
. It was freaky.”

“That is freaky,” said Will.

Pen punched him in the arm.

“Ow!”

Rubbing his shoulder, Will narrowed his eyes into the Clint Eastwood squint and looked from one face to the other. Then he nodded. “Okay, fine,” he said, “but if we’re going to do this, we need to clear up a few things.”

“Wait,” said Jason, alarmed. “Do what?”

“Hey, you started it,” said Will.

“We failed to treat each other like radioactive waste for a whole half a minute. So what?” said Pen.