Falling Together (38 page)

“Yeah,” said Jason, “don’t get all one-giant-step-for-mankind on us, dude.” But under the scorn, he sounded the way Pen felt: optimistic, goofy with relief.

“I’m going back to sleep,” said Will, starting to turn away.

Pen tugged on his shirtsleeve. “Okay, okay, I’ll tell you what’s going on.”

“What?” said Will and Jason at the same time.

“We being on the same side,” she said.

No one made eye contact. Everyone fidgeted, each in her or his own way.

“Whatevs,” said Jason finally. “I guess it only makes sense. We’re all trying to find Cat, right?”

“Right!” said Pen. “Absolutely.”

But Will was shaking his head. “Not so fast,” he said.

“Fast?” said Jason. “Don’t forget I hated you for, like, a decade.”

Pen chuckled at this, and Will jabbed her with his elbow.

“What?” she protested. “It was funny!”

Being careful not to jostle Augusta’s socked feet, which still rested in his lap, Will twisted in his seat to face Jason. “You need to explain something,” he said.

“Oh, yeah?” said Jason with a brief flare of his old pugnacity. “And what might that be?”

“‘Motherfucker.’” Will didn’t load the word with venom, as Jason had done on the phone, just divided it into two parts and impassively placed them in front of him: thunk, thunk.

Jason sat still, his forehead wrinkled, processing this. Pen watched him figure it out, every step written all over his face. Whatever the opposite of a poker face was, that’s what Jason had. Finally, his brow cleared: he got it. But instead of answering, he pressed his lips together and rolled his eyes, hostile and bored at the same time. He looked like a teenager whose parents had just confronted him about the joint in his pocket.

“Come on, Jason,” Pen said softly. “Just tell us.”

He looked at her, then, and he didn’t look like a teenager anymore. Pen saw something private and broken in his gaze. Will and Pen watched him take deep breaths, collect himself, get his emotions in check.

He breathed out. “There was a guy.”

“Oh,” said Pen. It wasn’t what she had expected him to say, but as soon as he did, she realized that she wasn’t surprised. Of course, of course, there was a guy.

“It wasn’t her fault,” Jason said quickly.

“Okay,” said Will.

“We’d been doing the infertility thing for so long, her hormones were all screwed up. In addition, she was sad. Losing the baby at twelve weeks tore her up. Even when she was over it, she wasn’t over it. She’d never talk about it, bite my head off if I even thought about bringing it up. A thing like that leaves its mark.”

“I bet it does,” said Pen.

“My point is she was vulnerable.” He glared at Will and Pen, as if they might contradict him.

“Things can happen when a person’s defenses are down,” said Will carefully, “that wouldn’t happen otherwise.”

“You got that right,” said Jason. “And then there was the Freudian shit on top of that.”

This was unexpected. Pen and Will exchanged a glance.

“Go ahead,” said Will to Jason.

“You know how Cat was about her dad, thought he hung the fucking moon. Dude forgets her birthday every single year, and I’m talking about not even a crappy Hallmark card, but she thinks he’s Mr. Perfect. What’s it called, the thing where the guy killed his father and then ripped his eyes out of their sockets. But for girls.”

Pen winced. “I would hardly say she had an Electra complex.”

Jason shrugged. “None of us are psychologists, right? Let’s say that when it came to her dad, she was a little off.”

Pen started to argue, but Will gave her elbow a surreptitious squeeze and she stopped.

“We all know she was crazy about her dad,” said Will, “but what does that have to do with this guy?”

“Armando Cruz,” spat Jason. “What kind of soap opera name is that?”

A nice name, Pen mused, like music: Armando Cruz and Catalina Ocampo—it sounded like a poem. As Pen considered the name, a light began to dawn. “Wait. He was Filipino? Like Dr. Ocampo? Is that what you meant by Electra?”

Jason turned the back of his hand to them and shot up a stubby index finger. “Filipino.” He raised another finger. “From the same town as her dad.” One more finger. “And he was a fucking doctor, to fucking boot. Tri-fucking-Electra-fecta.”

A man’s face appeared above the seat in front of Jason. “Do you mind?” he said. “I got a kid up here.”

“My bad, bro,” said Jason. The man disappeared. “Bottom line,” Jason continued, “he took advantage of her.”

“What do you mean,” asked Pen, alarmed, “‘took advantage of her’?”

“Not like that,” said Jason. “I mean she was vulnerable—all those hormones bouncing around. He should have backed off, irregardless of her having a husband.”

Regardless,
Pen corrected inside her head. She wasn’t about to challenge Jason’s version of the story, but she wasn’t convinced by the picture of Cat as a manipulated innocent.

“What did he look like?” she asked.

Jason shot her a look. “Why does that matter?”

“I just wondered if he looked like her dad.”

“Oh.” Jason’s mouth worked itself into a hard line, and Pen could tell that he was picturing Armando Cruz next to Cat’s short, squat, round-faced father, trying to find some common ground. “Not exactly.”

I knew it,
Pen thought.
He was beautiful
.

Jason blew out a short, painful laugh. “Put it this way: soap opera name, soap opera looks. The guy was cheesy: expensive haircut, ten million teeth, kind of dipshit who runs without a shirt. Honest truth is when I first met him, I thought he was gay.”

“You met him?” asked Will.

“Dinner party some stupid neighbor threw. Out by the pool. Mr. Soap Opera was doing his fellowship or what have you at the hospital where her husband worked. Oh and listen to this,” he said eagerly. “You guys are the type who will hate this.”

“What?” said Pen.

“She invited him and Cat specifically to meet each other.” Jason slapped his hand on the armrest.

“You mean that she set them up?” asked Will.

“Naw,” said Jason. “I mean, she just assumed they would have shit in common because they were both Filipino.”

“I see,” said Pen. “How … presumptuous.” But what she was really thinking was that Cat and Armando did have some pretty significant shit in common, at least eventually.

“Anyway,” said Jason, “I saw him a few times after that. We kind of got to know him even.” He scratched his head. “Well, some of us got to know him better than others, obviously.”

Will said, “How did you know they had an affair?”

“I told you,” said Jason angrily. “He took advantage. It wasn’t your typical affair.”

“All right,” said Will. “But how did you know?”

“She told me,” said Jason. The pride in his voice was enough to make you cry. “My wife couldn’t stand to keep something like that from me, that’s how close we are and that’s how done with him she is. After he left, she came clean, told me everything. They had sex, but never in our bed!” He said it as though forgoing sex in their bed was proof that Cat loved him, and who knew? Maybe it was. “It seemed like she expected me to kick her out, but I would never do that.”

Pen turned and caught Will’s eye, wondering if he was thinking what she was thinking: that there was a fine line between “expected me to” and “hoped I would.” In answer, Will lifted one eyebrow, a fleeting, infinitesimal movement, and flicked his eyes back to Jason.

“Armando left?” he asked.

“His fellowship ended, and he went back to the homeland. Made it seem like it was this big noble thing, too. Who cares? Good riddance, asshole.”

Pen waited for Will to ask what had to be asked, but she could sense that he was waiting for her to do it. It was an awful question, since it canceled out or at the very least called into deep question Jason’s recent declaration that Cat was “close” to Jason and “done” with Armando, but, since they were on a plane to Cebu, there seemed to be no way not to ask it. When the pause in the conversation started to become unbearable, Will nudged Pen encouragingly. She ignored it. He nudged her again. She kicked him.

“So. Uh. Jason,” said Will, “do you think she went to Cebu to be with Armando?”

“Oh, Will,” Pen exclaimed, flinching. “‘
Be
with him’? God. Could you not do better than that?”

“Hey, it’s not like you were asking.”

“Well, clearly, I should have.”

“And you would’ve phrased it how?” demanded Will. “‘Visit him’? ‘Spend time with him’? Come on, we all know a euphemism when we hear it.”

“All I’m saying is—” began Pen, but Jason raised his hand.

“Hello? I’m sitting right here,” he said.

They both stared at him.

“Sorry,” said Will. “I was just wondering if that’s why you got mad on the phone that day when I told you Cat went to Cebu. Because you thought she’d gone to see Armando.”

“Shit, yeah, that’s why,” said Jason. “Actually, though? Before you told me where she went, I didn’t really believe she would follow him. I thought about it. I explored the possibility. I mean, I’m not completely stupid. But, in my heart, I trusted her.” He shook his head. “So shit, maybe I am completely stupid.”

Pen couldn’t help but admire the grim candor with which he said this.

“Jason,” she ventured nervously, “if Cat did that, if she did everything it’s looking like she did, well—. It would seem to me that in doing those things, Cat did not have your best interests at heart.”

“Ya think?” said Jason.

“I do,” said Pen. “As much as I love Cat, I have to say that, if everything happened the way you say, then don’t you think that maybe—and this is not rhetorical, I’m really asking—that maybe you should consider—” She broke off.

“What?” said Jason.

Pen sighed and said, as gently as she could, “Letting her go. Moving on.”

Jason didn’t look mad, just injured, like someone had punched him in the stomach. Injured and, suddenly, ten years older.

“I can’t,” he said raggedly. “Cat’s my girl. She’s everything to me.” He swallowed and sat up straighter. “And, look, she was a wreck when her dad died, like I told you before. Superfragile. It’s that Electra thing driving her: she’s looking for her dad, really, not Armando. She doesn’t need me to let her go. She needs me to help her.”

Everyone should be loved like this,
Pen thought.
Well, not exactly like this, but this much.

Will said, “We’ll look for him, then. Dr. Armando Cruz. Start looking as soon as we get there. It might take a while, but I bet we can find him.”

Her eyes met Will’s, and they both nodded, and, just like that, the three of them were a team. Co-conspirators. Partners in crime. God help them.

“I bet we can, too,” said Pen staunchly.

“Oh, I bet we can, too,” said Jason, a sly smile sliding onto his face, “especially since when Armando was bragging about how he was heading back to Cebu to work, guess what he told me?”

Pen thought for a second. Then her eyes lit up. “The name of the hospital.”

“Bingo.”

Jason winked at Pen and put out his fist so that she could bump it with her own, and even though she had never liked being winked at and, until very recently, had never liked Jason and still wasn’t sure if
like
was the word to describe what she felt about him, she took a breath, winked back, and bumped.

P
EN NOTICED THE SMELL BEFORE SHE NOTICED THE HEAT, ALTHOUGH
, when she considered the smell later (and it may have been the first smell ever that she had truly reflected upon), she realized that the two—smell and heat—were all of a piece, inextricably entwined, born of, borne by each other. She smelled the smell before she had even stepped foot outside the small, blessedly uncomplicated airport. It wasn’t a bad smell. In fact, she liked it. Charcoal fire and wood smoke, exhaust and hot road and baking earth, with undertones (or so Pen imagined) of leaves and fruit and the ocean. Even as she smelled it for the first time, she knew that it would be one of those smells that would haunt her, knew that she would be walking through some future time and place, get blindsided by the smell, and think, instantly: Cebu.