Falling Together (49 page)

You are endangered,
she thought with grief.

So are you,
said a voice impatiently.
So is everything. But we’re here now, aren’t we?

Then the tarsier turned its head, hopped from tree to tree to tree, and was gone.

Afterward, she would admit, readily, that no conversation had ever taken place. Tarsiers didn’t talk, not even silently. She didn’t need Amelie to tell her that the voice answering her own inside her head was also her own. It was a thing she did all the time: talking to herself. But she also knew that, at the time, in the brief, wide, fathomless moment that it happened, that wasn’t how it felt at all.

She turned around and saw Will.

It would have been so easy for the two of them to simply fall together, to give in to gravity, but Pen wanted it to be clear, to be the very clearest thing they had ever done.

“I love you,” she told him.

“I love you, too,” he said, moving toward her.

She held up her hand. “I’m not talking about in a Will-and-Pen-business-as-usual kind of way.”

He smiled. “Then how?”

But he was already reaching for her, and when she kissed him, the rest of the world didn’t fade or fall away around them. It stayed, with Pen and Will firmly planted in its center, holding on to each other, all the Pens and Wills they had ever been but especially the ones they were now.

Before they left the forest for good, Pen said, “Listen, because of Augusta and Jason—God, especially Jason—we should probably, for now anyway—” She couldn’t think of how to say it.

“Play it cool?” said Will, kissing her fingertips, her inner wrist, the palm of her hand.

“Yes,” said Pen. “But I want you to know that if I ruled the world, I would never stop touching you.”

“You don’t rule the world?” said Will.

“Tell me that you love me,” commanded Pen.

“I love you,” said Will.

T
HEY WERE SITTING POOLSIDE AT THE RESORT EATING A DESSERT
called halo-halo and listening to Celine Dion sing the theme song from
Titanic
. It was not, by a long shot, the first time they had heard the song since arriving in the Philippines, but it was certainly the loudest they had heard it, Celine’s voice raining down upon them from the tree-mounted speakers, escalating from breathy to tremulous to so thoroughly full-throated and throbbing that Pen thought the ground might start to shake.

“Holy freaking hell,” moaned Jason. “What’s this song called, anyway?”

“‘My Heart Will Go On,’” said Will absently, eyeballing the contents of his raised spoon. “This has beans in it.”

He looked up from the spoon to find Pen and Jason staring at him.

“What?” he said. “I like it. It’s good. I’m just saying: it has beans in it. A dessert with beans in it. That’s not something you see every day.”

“How do you know that?” asked Pen.

“They’re right here,” said Will, holding up his spoon. “Beans.”

“No. How do you know what this song is called?” asked Pen. “Nobody knows what this song is called.”

Will looked from Pen to Jason.

“Sorry, dude,” said Jason, “I have to go with Pen on this one. Everyone just calls it that
Titanic
song, if they even call it anything. Except, you know,
you
.”

“So tell us,” said Pen, raising an eyebrow. “How do you know?”

“I just know,” said Will. “Come on, it’s not like I
like
it.”

“Man, you keep right on telling yourself that,” said Jason, giving Will’s shoulder a comforting pat.

Pen was happy to see that Jason was perking up a bit. Over the last twenty-four hours, the air of resignation he had adopted at the tarsier sanctuary had gradually deepened into a true, blue, dismal funk. Just a few hours earlier, on the floating restaurant cruise down the Loboc River, he had hit what appeared to be rock bottom, failing to go for even a second helping at the all-you-can-eat buffet and hardly noticing when, right in front of them, three little boys jumped what had to be thirty feet from the top of a coconut tree that leaned out over the river into the river itself and came up next to the boat, laughing.

Now, he seemed as close to lighthearted as he had since they’d arrived. Maybe it was the halo-halo, which was delicious. Maybe it was because they were leaving the next morning, going back to Cebu on the ferry, and Jason had resolved to return to the Lolas and ask them, one last time, to reunite him with Cat. (“I’m trying to think of the right approach,” he’d told them, and Will had suggested, “Ritual supplication. Burnt offering. Maybe a small animal sacrifice.”) In any case, with a playful gleam in his eye, Jason leaned over and tapped the shoulder of a man sitting with a group of people at the beer-bottle-covered table next to theirs. Pen recognized the man as one of the Australian divers.

“Sorry to interrupt,” said Jason to the man. “We were just wondering if you knew the name of this song.”

“Oh, wait, don’t tell me,” the man said, squeezing his eyes shut in concentration before guessing, “‘Total Bloody Shit’?”

“I think it’s from the album
Songs That Make You Want to Rip Off Someone’s Face,
” sang out another man at the table.

After the Aussies had recovered from the hilarity into which these remarks had caused them to dissolve, the first man pointed to a woman across the table from him. “Addie here just presented us with the question of what we would listen to right now if we could listen to any song in the world,” he said. “And now I am presenting it to you: What song would you listen to right now if you could listen to any song in the world? Please discuss.” And he turned back to his friends.

Pen said, “‘Wild Honey’ by U2.”

Jason said, “‘The Climb’ by Miley Cyrus,” followed by, “What? It’s inspiring!”

Will said, “‘Consecutive Seconds’ by Thelonious Monk.”

He said this partly because he loved the song, but mostly, Pen knew, so that she would make fun of him, which she did.

“Horrifyingly pretentious,” she said. “Choose again.”

“Oh, okay, sorry,” said Will, abashed. After a moment’s thought, he said, “Bach’s Goldberg Variation Number 25 by Glenn Gould,” which cracked Pen up, as he had known it would, and caused Jason to ask, “Do you want me to kick your ass? I mean, are you
asking
me to kick your ass?”

It amazed Pen, how they could sit there talking like they had always talked, as though the world had not been utterly transfigured, as though she and Will had not spent every waking hour of the last twenty-four driving themselves crazy trying to keep their hands off each other. Even as they sat, talking in the late afternoon sun, laughing, giving each other crap the way they always had, Pen was adding to the list inside her head of parts of him she wanted to taste: his sternum, the back of his neck, the skin beneath his left ear.

She loved him. She ached with loving him. He was her best and oldest friend and, also, he was a miracle to her. She looked at him and thought,
I would give you anything you wanted.
She wanted to tell him this, and then wondered if maybe, at some point, she already had because she realized that it had always been true. There was never a time, since the day she met him, when Pen hadn’t loved Will. He was her clear-eyed conscience, her kind, wry, sharp, beautiful man. No one had ever come closer to reading her mind than Will. When she tried to examine, with a clinical eye, what had changed, she realized it boiled down to two things: she wanted to touch him as often as possible and in ways she had never wanted to touch him before; and she wanted to be with him every day, to live with him, in the same house, for the rest of her life.

T
HAT EVENING, THEY WENT TO THE PLACE ON THE BEACH WHERE YOU
could choose your own fish, the afternoon’s catch displayed like necklaces (sapphires, rubies, diamonds) on a bed of crushed ice. Augusta took one look and chirped, “‘One fish, two fish, red fish, blue fish.’ Pizza, please,” and, under Pen’s disapproving eye, Will had taken off down the beach to get her some and bring it back.

It was a good meal. The outdoor café was full of people and festive, with Christmas lights strung all over the bar and winding up the trunks of the palm trees like twinkling snakes. People strolled by on the beach, music played at a reasonable volume, and their waitress was so devastatingly pretty—the Filipina Lana Turner of waitresses—that Jason even made a couple of goofy but not totally unsuccessful attempts at flirting with her. They ate at a table not twenty yards from the water’s edge with their feet in the sand and the ocean spread before them, the sun melting into it like a fat scoop of mango ice cream.

They didn’t talk about Cat. They talked about Pen’s newly formed and still mostly hazy plans to go back to teaching. They talked about Florida, where Jason had grown up, and about how when you read the news, every bad, crazy, unlikely thing to ever happen seemed to happen in Florida but how when you were there, it was wonderful. They talked about Will’s books, and this part of the conversation gave way to a moment in which Jason said, “Dude, that sounds like a pretty awesome gig. Getting paid to sit around in your underwear, drinking coffee and making stuff up.”

Will grinned and said, “Yeah. Plus, it’s portable. In case anyone ever wants to, you know, transport me someplace.”

Except to abruptly stop breathing, Pen didn’t move a muscle, and Will didn’t even glance in her direction. It was Jason who looked at her, at her, at Will, and back at her.

With his eyes on Pen’s, he said, “I bet before long somebody will.”

Jason, giving them his blessing. Pen didn’t answer, just held his gaze, grateful, but after about three seconds of this, everything began to feel too serious, and Pen cast around for something to say, but nothing came to her, which left her with no choice but first to hum and then to sing the opening lines of the song Jason had said he would listen to if he could pick any song in the world.

“God, do I love this song,” said Will, covering his ears.

“Aw, jeez,” said Jason, laughing and leaning back in his chair, “I’m telling you, it’s a great song!”

After a second, he joined in, then Augusta, and for a corny, beautiful minute, all three of them were singing the song (which Pen had to admit really was pretty inspiring), a song about how not the arrival but the journey is the point, until they were actually stopping traffic, people turning to give them amused and pitying glances, Will sinking lower and lower into his chair. Pen tapered off after a while, unsure of the words, but Jason and Augusta sang it through to the end. Jason’s voice was unexpectedly good, deep and resonant, and when they were finished, the people at the neighboring tables applauded, with the Lana Turner waitress clapping hardest of all.

They walked on the beach, Augusta on Jason’s shoulders waving, like the Queen of England, to passersby; Pen and Will walking several yards ahead of them, studiously not touching and thus whipping up around them such an atmosphere of buzzing, whirling sexual tension that Pen told him it was like walking inside a swarm of bees, a simile that made Will smile and shake his head and say, “Only you.”

“See? How did you live without me for six years?” teased Pen.

“Poorly,” said Will in a way that said he wasn’t entirely kidding.

They came to a resort that was more glamorous than any of the others, subtly lit so that it seemed to glow from within, with a wide white stretch of palm-tree-dotted beach leading up to elegant, Japanese-style villas and one of those pools that was designed to appear endless when you were in it, as though it wasn’t a swimming pool at all but an extension of the ocean itself.

“Look at that,” said Pen in a low voice. “Now, who do we know who would stay in a place like that?”

Will looked and his eyes widened. “Should we say something? Go up and see if she’s there?”

Pen shook her head. “He probably already checked there anyway.”

“Yeah, but what if someone checked who wasn’t acting like a seedy private eye and flashing cash?”

Pen took a quick glance back at Jason, who was talking up a storm and walking with a light step, in spite of the forty-pound child on his shoulders.

“You think we should leave it alone?” asked Will.

“He just looks so happy.” She sighed. “Maybe on the way back.”