Falling Together (4 page)

Jamie ran a hand across his forehead. “Yeah, I remember.”

“Do you?”

Jamie shook his head, picked up the plate with the remains of Pen’s rabbit on it, and pushed back from the table. Pen watched him as he scraped, then rinsed the plate, first one side then the other, and slid it into the dishwasher. Jamie had always performed small tasks this way, ever since he was a kid, as though he were being graded for thoroughness.

“I’m sorry,” said Pen. She looked down at the profiteroles, the chocolate sauce in its plastic cup, and she ached for Jamie and herself and her mother in Tibet, and her father, who deserved better than to die on the dirty ground.

Jamie leaned on the counter with both hands, his shoulders hunched.

“You think I don’t miss him?” he said finally, without turning around. “You think you’re the only one?”

“No.”

Jamie turned around and looked evenly at Pen. “Forget moving on or getting over it or whatever because who does that? But I gotta tell you, it would be really good if we didn’t have another anniversary like last year’s. Good for Augusta, especially.”

At this mention of Augusta, Pen turned her face away sharply, as though she’d been slapped.

Jamie’s voice softened. “Good for you, too. Right? For all of us.”

Pen didn’t look at him, but said, “I know.”

“The bike ride is supposed to be a way to celebrate Dad, right? Everyone together?”

“I
know
. All right? I know. I don’t have any plans to fall apart again, so you can stop worrying.” Pen’s voice was bitter, but she wasn’t mad at Jamie.

Their father, Ben Calloway, had been a passionate cyclist, getting up before daylight for decades to ride with a group of people who, over the years, had become like family to Pen and Jamie, a tribe of aunts and uncles with sunglass tans and articulated calves. The rides would begin and end at the Calloway house in Wilmington, Delaware, and for Pen’s whole childhood, before she got old enough to ride with them, Saturday mornings meant watching for her dad and his friends through the screen door and then coming outside in her pajamas to greet them. She loved it, the clack of their shoes on the front walk, the way they’d drop onto their backs on the lawn and squirt her with their water bottles, her mother coming out to laugh and offer them breakfast.

To mark the anniversary of Ben’s death, two of the riders, David and Tracy Hersh, had organized a long bike ride through the countryside. More than thirty people, including Pen and Jamie, had met that May morning in front of the house. Pen would never forget how perfect it felt just before they took off: the dewy grass, the laundered scent of her mother’s lilacs, everyone poised, one foot on the ground, ready to begin.

Pen’s mother, Margaret, was still home then, hadn’t yet been chased off by grief or loneliness to faraway places, and the last thing Pen saw before she set out was her mother standing on the porch with Augusta half-asleep in the crook of one arm, her free hand pressed to her mouth, then waving in the air.

But a few miles into the ride, as they came around a curve and the trees opened up to a vista of fields and stone barns and streaked-silk sky, Pen was overcome by a bleakness that made it hard to breathe, a comprehension that this road, this sky, the bikes rounding the curve together, swooping like a flock of birds, even the faint twinge between her own shoulder blades and the air filling her lungs, all of it belonged to her father, was rightfully his, except that he was dead, and so it belonged to no one and meant nothing.

Pen had not finished the ride. She had slipped to the back of the pack and stopped her bike by the side of the road, willing the others not to notice, to keep going, but they turned back, all of them.

“I don’t feel good,” she explained, forcing a smile. “A stomach thing. You guys keep going. I’ll be fine.”

Even though she had tried to avoid looking in Jamie’s direction, he had pulled alongside her and stopped, leveling a gray-eyed stare at her that was fierce and pleading at the same time.

“Stay. You have to,” he’d said in an urgent voice that only she could hear.

But she had turned around, gone back to the house, stumbled past Augusta who sat at the kitchen table, a cup of milk in her hand, her eyes round and surprised, past her mother who stood at the counter, coiling dough into cinnamon rolls, and up the stairs into her old bedroom. She tossed her body onto the bed like bags of sand, and she stayed there for the better part of three days.

When her mother tried to coax her to get up, she cried and said that she was too tired. When Jamie raged at her for being selfish and for scaring Augusta, she turned her face to the wall. When Pen woke to find the hard knot of her child jammed against her back, she turned over, put her arms around the little girl, and said, “I’m sorry, baby. Mama’s sick,” in a hoarse, remote voice that even she knew was the opposite of comforting. For weeks afterward, after they were home in Philadelphia and back to their regular routine, Pen would catch Augusta watching her with a mixture of hope and worry, an expression no one should ever see on a four-year-old’s face.

“I wouldn’t do that to Augusta again,” said Pen, more to herself than to Jamie.

“You sure?”

Pen rested her chin on her palm and looked at the vase of flowers in the middle of the table, tulips, barely open, like little folded hands in white gloves.

“I didn’t get it,” she said. “For that whole first year, I knew that he was gone from us and how unfair and sickening and sad that was. But I didn’t get that what was worse, the very worst thing, was that he was gone from himself and all the things he loved. The day of the bike ride, it fell on me like an avalanche.”

She looked up at Jamie and shrugged. “So now I know. And it can’t fall on me again.”

Jamie got a bag of coffee beans out of the freezer and poured them into his expensive coffeemaker with its built-in grinder and timer. Pen listened to the oily click of the beans, waiting.

“Your reunion doesn’t start until, what, a week, week and a half, after this year’s ride?” said Jamie finally. “So if you’re not planning to be incapacitated, why don’t you go?”

Pen stood up, slapping crumbs off her skirt in annoyance. “Why are you so sure I’d want to see Cat, anyway? It’s not like I’ve been holding my breath until she and Will came back.”

“Uh, actually, if you think about it, that’s exactly what it’s like.”

“Nice,” said Pen. “Very nice. They walked out on me. Why would I want to see either of them?”

“Because they’re Cat and Will.” Jamie flopped onto the sofa and snagged a remote control out of the bafflingly large collection on the coffee table. Before he began pushing buttons, he added, “And you’re you.”

W
HEN
P
EN WAS STILL NOT ASLEEP AT
3:00
A.M.
,
SHE GOT OUT OF BED
and walked, as silently as she could, into Augusta’s room, a thing she almost never did. For Augusta, the state of sleep was a frail construction, something you could send toppling with a misplaced footfall or clearing of your throat. But every now and then, Pen risked it. Now, she closed the door behind her and stood, allowing her eyes to adjust to the powdered-sugar sifting of moonlight and streetlight on the windowsill and the thin blue glow of the nightlight that Pen allowed as a concession to Augusta’s fear of the dark, even though she’d read that nightlights could cause nearsightedness later in life. Glasses later, she decided, beats terror now, hands down.

Augusta lay in one of her customarily untranquil positions, as though she’d been struck by sleep mid-snow-angel, her duvet and sheets heaped in drifts on the floor around her bed. Pen resisted touching her, but leaned in close to listen to her breath and smell her smell: honey soap, apple shampoo, and a fundamental Augusta scent that reminded Pen of dandelion stems.

Without taking her eyes off her daughter, Pen lowered herself by increments into the chair next to Augusta’s bed and thought what she had thought so many times before:
How can Cat and Will not know you?
For weeks after Augusta was born, Pen had expected them to come, even though, when the three of them parted ways, first Cat leaving, then Will, they had all agreed to make it final, to never get in touch, not years later, not ever.

“We’re all or nothing,” Cat had said, tears streaming down her face. “We can’t be fake or partial or now-and-then. That would be wretched.” Pen hadn’t been so sure, but she had agreed to it anyway.

Even so, and even though she had no clear idea of how they would’ve found out about Augusta’s birth even if they had wanted to, she had waited for them to come. She had waited again after her father died. At the funeral, she had sat between her mother and Patrick, Augusta on her lap, feeling broken and absent, her body numb inside her black dress, and had suddenly felt them there, behind her, the certainty of their presence running like electricity along her shoulders and up her neck. She had stood and spun around, searching through the crowds of people who had loved her father, for Will and Cat who had loved him as much as anyone. Nothing.

After that, over and over, for two years, Pen had imagined what she would say to them if she ever saw them again, all the ways she would be angry or indifferent, clever or cool. But from the beginning, from the very first day each of them walked out and for every second since, what she would have said if she were speaking truthfully was this: “Since you left there’s been a you-shaped space beside me, all the time. It never goes away.”

“All right, then,” whispered Pen into the darkness of Augusta’s room. “What the cluck. She wants me to be there, so I’ll go.”

W
ILL COULD STILL CONJURE THEM UP
. L
IKE NOW
,
FOR INSTANCE
, as he worked at his desk, he could look through the window and watch them emerge from between the guesthouse and the japonica bushes and walk across his backyard, past the weird village of staked birdhouses his mother had set up, past the crab apple snowing white onto the grass. Pen all spare, pliant lines, with her hair pulled back, her hard cyclist’s legs. Tiny, animated Cat with her usual bird-of-paradise plumage: lapis-blue scarf, flame-red dress, green shoes.

Sometimes, he had nothing to do with it; they showed up out of nowhere, with the fast sting of a static electric shock. Just yesterday, after he’d gotten the e-mail, he had seen Pen’s long, oval-nailed fingers wrapped around a stranger’s coffee cup in the Bean There, Done That Café. These visitations didn’t happen often, a few times a year maybe, but they always left Will a little out of breath, the sudden yank backward through time: Pen’s surprising, childlike laugh bubbling up over restaurant noise or her almost comically perfect posture (“Tut, tut! Chin up, shoulders back, stiff upper lip,” Cat would tease in a very bad British accent. “For God and Empire, you know.”) inhabiting the back, neck, and shoulders of a woman across the room at a party.

Once, a couple of years ago, as he stood in line for a movie, he had heard Cat’s voice, winsome, tinny, and unmistakably off-key, singing a song he didn’t know but that was exactly the kind of sappy love song Cat would adore. He had left his place in line to find the singer, who turned out to be teenaged and blue-haired with a nose piercing that looked fresh and painful, a detail that had annoyed Will unaccountably, almost to the point of anger. How stupid of him, he had thought, how moronic, after so many years, to look for Cat and find this silly, attention-hungry kid instead.

Now, though, he let himself fall into the act of imagining them, of hearing Cat’s silver bangles add themselves to the morning music—birds and, already, a distant lawnmower—of watching them balance each other the way they always had, Pen shortening her fluid, stalking stride, Cat stepping fast and light, like a sandpiper, so that she seemed, from this distance, to just skim the ground.

Will shifted his gaze to the bulletin board on the wall next to his desk. He had read Cat’s e-mail once, then printed it out and pinned it to the bulletin board. Pinning e-mails to the bulletin board wasn’t something he usually did, and he didn’t analyze his reasons for doing it now. “You’re trying to make it more actual,” his mother had said when she’d seen it. “You’re filling a space,” which was just the kind of thing his mother said these days, although in this case, as in others, he had to admit that she might have a point.

Dear Will,

I know it’s been forever, but I need you. Please come to the reunion. I’ll find you there. I’m sorry for everything.