Falling Together (41 page)

“Toy poodles ride in the backseat while another dude drives?” asked Augusta skeptically. “By themselves?”

“Of course not,” said Pen. “Jason’s just making stuff up.”

Jason aimed a look of irritation at Pen and seemed about to start talking again, when Ruben said, “Dr. Cruz drives himself. I am the driver for the family.”

Jason widened his eyes at this, his blond brows shooting up his forehead. “Dr. Cruz has a
family
?”

“Yes,” said Ruben.

“This I did not know,” said Jason, nodding, and adding in an inexplicable and heinous French accent (inspired by Hercule Poirot? Jacques Clouseau? Cousteau? Impossible to say), “Zee plot thickens!”

“Look at the kids, Mama,” said Augusta, pointing. “All dressed the same.”

They were schoolchildren, lovely in their uniforms, walking serenely along the dusty, busy street, some of them so young that Pen marveled at their being out alone, until she saw that they weren’t alone. They walked in threes, fours, arms linked or loosely wrapped around each other’s waists, each one connected to another, the little ones in between the bigger ones.

“Little kids in school uniforms,” said Jason. “Doesn’t get much cuter than that.”

Pen caught Will’s eye and telegraphed,
So clucking weird how he can do that, shrug off asinine-ness like an ugly jacket and get real and wistful
.

“All those kids,” Jason went on. “You know something? It hit me last night that maybe that’s the reason all this is happening.”

Will looked at Pen, who shrugged.

“The kids?” asked Will.

“Yeah,” said Jason. “One anyway. Hell, why not two or three? We’ve talked about it. Or I have. Cat wasn’t ready to give up, I guess.”

“You mean adoption,” said Pen.

“It’s a Catholic country. Highly Catholic,” said Jason. “Some people are surprised by that, an Asian Catholic country.”

“We know it’s primarily a Catholic country,” said Pen, hoping against all odds that he wasn’t about to say something hideously insensitive in front of Ruben.

“So we’re talking no birth control. Families with seven, ten kids. Cat and I could adopt some, take them home, give them everything they’d never get here.”

Ruben didn’t speak or shift his gaze from the road.

“What’s birth control?” asked Augusta in a loud whisper, and Pen hushed her with a kiss.

“People say there’s a reason for everything,” Jason said. “And I’m thinking that maybe the reason for all this pain and upheaval is to give us the babies we’ve been wanting for so long. Because, as God is my witness, we would totally do right by them.”

Jason was still staring out the window at the children. Pen didn’t know what to say to him, but, looking at him, she could see that it didn’t matter: he had forgotten they were there. The car kept nosing slowly forward, so full of burgeoning sorrow and longing, Pen thought the windows might blow out.

A
RMANDO’S NEIGHBORHOOD WAS IN THE HILLS
. P
EN HAD NOT EVEN
been aware of hills, until the car passed the guard stand at the neighborhood’s entrance and began to wind up them. The houses weren’t mansions but were bigger than any houses Pen had seen so far, a far, far cry from the plywood and aluminum shanties they’d seen on their way from the airport to the hotel. (“Squatters” the driver had explained; Pen hadn’t known exactly what he meant by that and hadn’t asked, but she hoped it had something to do with temporariness, hoped that those shanties were a stop on the road to someplace better, though she worried that they weren’t.) As in the rest of Cebu, there were flowers in profusion, lopping over walls, bordering every doorway, banked against buildings, flaring along the roadsides: fiery pink bougainvillea, bushes thick with yellow bells, the white stars of sampaguita, which Ruben told Pen was the national flower. Here and there, bony dogs sprawled in scraps of shade.

“They look feral to me,” said Jason. To Pen, they looked haggard and introspective.

Ruben stopped the SUV in front of an iron gate set in a long white wall and beeped the horn, and, after thirty seconds or so, the gate swung open and they drove through. When Pen turned around, she saw two small boys in flip-flops pushing the gate shut.

The house was the kind of house that instantly made Pen want to live in it, fine-boned, graceful, but solid and comfortable-looking, with pebbled steps leading down through a steep, tiered garden to a deep, shadow-pooled lawn. It glowed white as a shell in the mellowing sun.

Ruben opened the car door and lifted Augusta out and set her feet on the ground in a gentle, but matter-of-fact manner that led Pen to think he must be a father. Through the open door Pen saw a man standing on the salmon-colored tiles of the verandah, and even before he began to walk toward them, she knew he must be Armando. He was maybe five-foot-ten, compact and lean, with wavy black hair and the bearing of a prince. He wore stone-colored cargo shorts, leather fisherman sandals, and a loose, short-sleeved linen shirt in a periwinkle blue that offset his skin so impeccably that Pen suspected a woman (Cat?) had chosen it for him.

“Hi,” he said with a smile. “Welcome.”

He shook hands with everyone and was composed and convivial, as if he were greeting old friends, instead of the large, volatile, cuckolded husband of his former (or not former) lover and the cuckold’s pals. As the five of them stood on the verandah, Pen saw the two boys who had closed the gate peeking their glossy heads around the corner of the house, and then a young woman, possibly a teenager, appeared with the boys in tow. They wore striped T-shirts and lovely, shy grins. The oldest could have been no more than eight; the smaller one a few years younger.

“Ask her,” the woman said to the boys, her hands on their shoulders pushing them gently forward. “The way I told you.”

Slowly, the boys approached Augusta, ducked their heads in miniature bows, and the older boy said, “My name is Paul, and this is my brother Nando. Would you like to play?”

After gaping at them with an expression of dewy-eyed enchantment, Augusta curtsied and said, “My name is Augusta,” and looked up beseechingly at Pen, who nodded.

“Sure, as long as you stay in the yard.”

“Yay!” she shrieked, breaking the spell, and the children bounded like terriers across the grass, the young woman following behind.

Pen smiled at Armando. “They’re beautiful,” she said. “Are they yours?”

“Beautiful maybe, but extremely loud,” said Armando with a chuckle. “They’re the sons of Lana, our cook.”

“You have a cook?” blurted out Jason. Pen glanced quickly at him and her heart softened at the regret she saw on his face: he hadn’t meant to sound so impressed.

“In the Philippines, a lot of middle-class households have helpers,” explained Armando. “Nannies, cooks, drivers, housekeepers. Maybe it’s because so many people are in need of employment. It’s that way in many developing countries.”

“Oh,” said Jason grudgingly. “Makes sense, I guess. Must’ve been tough back in Ohio, huh? Fending for yourself and all.”

At the mention of Ohio, everyone seemed to stiffen, social awkwardness setting in like rheumatism.

“Not so tough,” said Armando finally, a slight chill in his voice, and for a second, Pen thought he was talking about Jason.

Will was looking down into the yard. “That’s an amazing tree,” he said.

They all looked, and Pen knew what tree he meant right away: some sort of palm, but not like any she had seen before, tall and flat and wide and shaped exactly like a showgirl’s feathered fan.

“A traveler’s palm,” said Armando. “Although not a true palm tree, more closely related to a banana tree. Indigenous to Madagascar, so a non-native species.”

Pen caught a glimpse of the arrogance Will had noticed at the hospital. Armando was a man who liked to know things and liked to tell people what he knew.

“I like it,” said Pen defiantly. “Non-native or not.”

Armando laughed. “I like it, too. I think it’s cool.”

Just like that, he was warm again. Maybe it wasn’t real arrogance; maybe he resorted to didacticism in moments of social stress, the way she resorted to babbling and Jason to being a jerk (even though it could be argued—Pen had argued it herself, although she was less convinced of it than she once had been—that being a jerk was Jason’s natural state). Armando walked to the front door and opened it, with a welcoming, if slightly officious sweep of his hand. “Why don’t we go inside where we can talk?”

They all filed in, Pen and Will immediately, Jason after another leisurely look at the lawn in an act of rebellion for which Pen supposed he could not really be blamed. Still, it was embarrassingly transparent: Armando might have a cook, sculpted cheekbones, an affair with Jason’s wife under his belt, and a fancy tree, but he couldn’t make Jason go inside before Jason was good and ready.
You’re not the boss of me
. Pen could almost hear him say the words, sandbox voice and all.

They walked into a smaller version of Patrick and Tanya’s great room: kitchen, dining room, living room. It was nice, full of low, carved wood furniture, tall Chinese (at least, Pen assumed they were Chinese) jars, cushions in shades of gold, but it struck Pen as a little sterile, too tidy, as though most of the real living in the house took place elsewhere. Even the kitchen appeared pristine, unused. As she sat down on the sofa, she caught a glimpse of another room around the corner, kids, maybe teenagers watching television, its blue light washing over them, before one of the kids saw her looking and, with a smile, closed the door.

Armando called something in what Pen assumed was Cebuano, and a young woman—a different one from the one who had taken the children to play—appeared with a standing fan. She plugged it in and set it on rotate. When the stream of air hit Pen, she realized how hot she was. Pen smiled to herself, remembering how Cat used to say that if there were gods of fire and water and earth, there should be a god of air-conditioning because it was that elemental to human existence. She had joked about naming her firstborn child Freon.

“Can I offer you a drink? Coke? A beer?” asked Armando.

Pen would have loved a glass of water, but before she could ask for it, Jason said, “Let’s cut to the chase. I know Cat’s in Cebu, and it’s crucial that I find her. If you know anything about her current location, you should tell me. ASAP. Time is of the essence.”

Here we go,
thought Pen. She wondered if Jason thought people really believed he was a detective when he talked like that.

For a moment, Armando’s face grew contemplative. Finally, he said one word, calmly, like a person making his move in a chess game: “Why?”

Jason’s face began to redden. “Why what?” he spluttered, and then said, “No, wait. Forget it. You don’t get to ask questions. Just tell me what I need to know.”

Coolly and as if he hadn’t heard Jason take back the “Why what?” Armando said, “Why is it crucial that you find her? Why should I tell you where she is? Why is time of the essence?”

Jason rocked up out of the chair to his feet, one hand on his hip, the other pointing at Armando, and said, “Because she’s my wife.”

Pen was impressed by the simplicity of the answer, but she didn’t like the wild look in Jason’s eyes, which only grew more intense when Armando got up from his chair, too. He didn’t move toward Jason, just stood there, but still managed to look quick, wary, and light-footed, like a boxer. Pen looked over at Will. He was still sitting, but Pen saw that he was full of coiled energy, his hands poised on the arms of his chair.

“I think you should sit down, Jason,” said Will in a low voice.

“Fuck that,” said Jason loudly, never taking his eyes off Armando. “What do you know about Cat?”

“Have you considered,” said Armando coldly, “that if she wanted you to find her, she would not have left in secret, without telling you where she was going?”

“Shut up!” shouted Jason. “You don’t know what the hell you’re talking about.”

Pen waited for it to dawn on him that he was wrong about this, that, clearly, Armando did know what he was talking about, and, sure enough, after staring into space for a few seconds, he jabbed his finger at Armando again. “You’ve talked to her. You wouldn’t know that if you hadn’t talked to her.”

Armando seemed to consider his next move, before he raised his chin an inch or two and said, “Sure, I talked to her. We had dinner together the day after she arrived in Cebu.”

At the same instant that Jason lunged across the coffee table toward Armando, Will stood up as fast as a striking snake and grabbed him, his arm thrown across Jason’s wide chest.

“No, Jason!” said Pen, but Jason was struggling to get himself free. He wasn’t in shape, but he was a lot bigger than Will, and Pen knew it could be only a matter of seconds before he broke away. Without thinking, she lifted the delicate china bowl off the perilously positioned coffee table and cradled it in her lap.

“You son of a gun!” A great, loud bark of a voice, heavily accented.

All eyes turned in the direction of the voice. Standing in the entrance to the room was an elderly woman, very elderly, frail and tiny inside her loose batik housedress, but bristling with electricity. With her short gray hair puffed around her head like a nimbus, her ferocious black eyes, and her raised fist, she looked unreal, iconic, like a miniature goddess of vengeance.