Falling Together (8 page)

Then, sailing toward her from across the room: “Mama!”

High-pitched, even squeaky, it was the most soul-catching sound Pen knew. She was turning in its direction before she had even slid off the stool, and, when she saw the girl bounding rabbit-fashion through the great room, she felt what she always felt, her body opening toward her daughter in a great whoosh of breathless blooming.

“Sweetpea,” she whispered, smiling, and then Augusta flew against her with a whack, and Pen knelt down to gather all of the child into her, pressing her cheek into the cloud of dark hair, her palms against the narrow back. At five, Augusta was already losing her baby softness, was becoming pared down, almost sinewy, her back a delicate landscape of spine and shoulder blades that Pen could feel through her shirt.

“I am so happy to see you,” said Pen.

“My heart leaps up, Mama.” It was what they always said.

“My heart leaps up, too.”

She drew back and looked at Augusta’s face, which was smeared with colors, brilliant, glittery, and iridescent as a hummingbird’s neck. For the first time, Pen noticed the child’s outfit: black go-go boots so big they were merely drifting around her calves, a scratchy pink tutu, a silvery tank top slipping off one scrawny shoulder.

“Hey there, Pop Star.”

Augusta shimmied her shoulders and sang a few lines from a song about going out with her girlfriends and leaving the boys behind.

“Sounds good to me,” said Patrick.

Pen could imagine her before-kids self being utterly disapproving of this, the little girl in makeup and grown-up clothes thing, the pre-pre-pre-tween fascination with fabulousness. But seeing it in action, she found it didn’t bother her. Little girls were magpies and butterflies, gaga for everything shiny, in sheer, giggly, joyful love with transformation. Pen looked at Augusta, so at home in her body, so convinced of her own gorgeousness.
Keep it up, honey,
she thought.
Hang on to it with both hands
.

“Hi, Pen.” Lila stood behind Augusta, smiling and tugging at her T-shirt in a way that made Pen’s heart ache. At nine, Lila barely qualified as chubby, but, despite her parents’ efforts to celebrate her good points, which were many (smarts, big blue eyes, and an uncommon sweetness), self-consciousness was setting in.

“Hey, lovely,” said Pen, standing. Lila’s eyes widened with happiness. Pen did not spend enough time with Lila for the two of them to really be close, but Pen knew Lila regarded her with the kind of shy, eager interest that verged on adulation. She remembered feeling that way herself, about her fifth-grade teacher, her friend Sydney’s teenaged sister who began loading her neck with rosaries (to her family’s deep and everlasting horror) and her arms with rubber bracelets before most people in Wilmington even knew who Madonna was. Pen could not imagine Tanya’s enjoying Lila’s crush on Pen, but to her credit, she had never tried to squelch it.

“You guys have fun this weekend?” Pen asked.

“We totally did,” said Lila, reaching out and giving her sister’s hair a gentle tug. “Can Augusta come back soon?”

“You know what? I was just about to talk to your dad about another visit. You think you could help Augusta change and get her stuff together, while we discuss it? That would be a huge help.”

“Definitely!”

Pen and Patrick watched the girls zigzag through the furniture and out of the room, hair flying.

“Lila’s a doll,” said Pen. “Aren’t they supposed to get mean by the time they’re nine?”

“Yeah, she seems to be sidestepping that stuff so far. Hope it lasts.” He folded his arms across his chest. “So what’s up? You need another weekend?”

“My college reunion, ten year. It’s in two weeks.”

Patrick smiled at her. “Ten year, huh? I forget what a baby you are.”

“Oh, come on. You’re five years older than I am, which is nothing.” Five years wasn’t nothing really, not necessarily, but Pen had never felt the age difference between them. Most of the time, she felt as though she were the one who was older.

“Hey, you think you’ll run into Cat? It’s been ages, right?”

Pen hesitated, then told him about the e-mail. He’d known what Cat had meant to her. It might give him some extra incentive to persuade Tanya to take Augusta for another weekend. Tanya liked Augusta, never failed to make her feel welcome, but she was fiercely protective of “family time” on weekends. On weekdays, too. She and Patrick both made a point of being home by 5:30 and ruthlessly screened incoming phone calls in the evenings. A couple of years ago, Tanya had asked Pen not to call, unless Augusta had a “life-threatening emergency.” Wincing at the phrase “life-threatening” appearing in the same sentence with her daughter’s name, Pen had quickly agreed.

“I think it’ll be fine,” said Patrick. “I’ll talk to Tanya. But I hope that Will guy won’t show up.”

“Oh, Patrick.”

“Seriously. I’ve heard enough about his temper to think you’re not safe around a guy like that.”

It was ridiculous, this protective posturing, this misplaced, leftover, and far too easy chivalry. When Pen had met Patrick, Cat and Will were newly gone, and Pen was still reeling, her sadness still fresh and shot through with anger. She’d told Patrick too much, probably, and he had fixated on Will in a way that she’d briefly found touching, but that made no sense. Not safe with Will.
Will?
With whom had she ever been safer?

“He never directed any of that stuff at me. He wouldn’t in a million years. You know I’ve told you that.”

“I’m not so sure. Sorry, but I just don’t think he’s trustworthy.”

What about you? You walked out on me and our newborn baby. You gave up custody of her because your wife made you. How trustworthy are you?
Pen felt like saying these things, but mostly only because they were true, only to defend Will. She wasn’t really bitter anymore, not bitter-bitter, a fact that still surprised her.

“He probably won’t be there, anyway,” said Pen, although she knew that if Cat had written to him, too, he probably would be. Not probably. She didn’t know who Will had become in the past six years, but if he was now a person who could turn down a cry for help from an old friend, Pen would eat her hat.

“It’s been a long time. Do you still think about them? I mean, more than once in a while? Do you miss them?” said Patrick.

Lobster eater,
thought Pen, shaking her head,
lobster eater, lobster eater, lobster eater
.

“Not really,” she said.

T
HE LITTLE BOY IN
C
OUNTING
B
ACK TO
L
IAM
TURNS INTO A
monster when he’s angry. The monster is huge and gloriously ugly, toothy as a shark, carpeted with spiky slime-green hair, sporting bat wings, stegosaurus plates down his back, and a head that is an amalgamation of buffalo, werewolf, and Gila monster. When a man walking in front of Liam and his mother down a city street unwraps his sandwich and throws the wrapper on the ground, the monster erupts into thundering life, charging down the sidewalk—clunking into innocent bystanders along the way—and confronting the man with a roar that shakes the buildings around them, shattering the window of a bakery storefront, toppling the cakes. Then the monster stomps on the man’s foot. The man is hopping and stunned. The people on the sidewalk are appalled and rubbing their elbows and heads and other places the monster has bumped. The mother’s head is drooping, her hand over her eyes, and in this gesture and in the wilt of her shoulders, there is a profound discouragement, a near hopelessness that tells the reader that this is not the first time something like this has happened.

When the boy turns away from the man, he is Liam again, small in his T-shirt and jeans, shaky, drained of triumph, frightened by his own loss of control. In bed that night, he tells his mother, “I thought the man was bad, but maybe I’m the one who’s bad.” And his mother tells him, “You? No, you are my funny sonny, my curious, story-loving, cookie-sharing boy. That monster,
he’s
the one who’s bad.” And the boy says, “The monster makes me lonely. I mean he makes me feel alone.” “The monster makes me lonely, too,” his mother says.

Liam and his mother visit a wise woman. In the wordless illustrations that follow, Liam talks, sometimes laughing, sometimes sad, sometimes pressing his face into his mother’s arm, and the woman listens. Then she says, “I’m not a fairy godmother, you know. I don’t have a magic wand, and what a silly thing, to think that magic lives inside a wand!” “It doesn’t?” asks the boy. “Magic lives in here,” the woman says, placing one hand on Liam’s head. “And here,” she tells him, pointing to his heart. “And you are full of it and courage, too.” “Courage?” asks Liam. “I don’t think so. Me?” “Of course,” says the woman. “Now, listen: I think I know a way to get that monster
gone
.”

Pen read this book for the first time four months after her father died. She was sitting in Pollywogs, her favorite children’s bookstore in Philadelphia, a place to which she had escorted so many writers that she’d become friends with the owner, a Mrs. Piggle Wiggle look-alike named Selena Bass. Selena had invited her to come just after closing to help create some displays of new books.

It was one of Pen’s first ventures out of the apartment for anything other than work since her father had died, and she had walked the whole way there, a long walk. At first, she had almost turned back, shaky and tired, street noise loud in her ears, but after a few blocks, it had felt good to be out, walking among strangers, anonymous. She crossed streets, stopped at corners, shrugged her handbag more securely onto her shoulder, an oddly reassuring movement. On the busy sidewalk, she could have been anyone, someone who was grieving or not, had a father or didn’t. If Selena hadn’t been watching through the door of her shop, Pen might have walked right past it. She might have walked all night.

Inside, the shop was cozy and purple-walled. A former elementary-school teacher, Selena had whipped off freehand, typeface-quality signs with colored Sharpies, each sign featuring a quotation from a famous children’s book (one notable example from
Winnie-the-Pooh:
“If the person you are talking to doesn’t appear to be listening, be patient. It may simply be that he has a small piece of fluff in his ear”), while Pen had unpacked picture books, feeling moved and reverential, running a hand over each glossy cover before placing the books on the display shelf of the little backroom reading space called the Cuddle-upreadalotorium.

She was remembering a conversation with her father.

“Here’s what happened: you got fired, then you got discouraged. Who wouldn’t?” he had told her a few days before he died. “Then you started driving the writers around, you and that cute Amelie, and you liked it pretty well, and then you had Augusta, and you went with the flow. Makes sense. But my bet? You’ll be back in front of a classroom one of these days.”

“How do you know?” she’d asked him.

“I know because I know,” he’d answered.

Holding the new books in her hands, she missed teaching kids how to read. She missed having someone know her the way her father had.

Pen didn’t see Will’s name on the front of the book at first. She had been too arrested by the cover: jewel and earth tones soaked in light, looking more like a Vermeer than like any children’s book cover Pen had ever seen, the monster standing with one vast, clawed hand over its eyes, the other hand in the air, three fingers raised, counting.

“Ooh, that’s a good one. Brand-new and bound for greatness. It’ll win every kids’ book award under the sun,” said Selena, glancing over. “Why don’t you sit down with it for a minute?”

Pen had sat. From the beginning, the language was wonderful, clean, vivid, leaping upward into poetry at just the right moments, especially in the second half of the book. Liam and his mother wait in line at the post office, their arms full of packages. Outside the window, low afternoon light rests on the snow-covered street; pearly caps of snow top fire hydrants and parked cars and the wool hat of a woman who bustles into the post office with her own tower of packages. Snow caps the tower of packages. “Excuse me,” the woman says huffily. “I’m late for a very important appointment! I’m sure you won’t mind!” And she steps in line in front of Liam’s mother.

Slowly, Pen had turned the page and winced to find what she’d been afraid she would find. The little boy Liam is gone, replaced by the monster, who begins to take a step toward the woman, his awful, thick green leg hooked in the air, his arms raised menacingly. And then, quite suddenly, he freezes, and he puts his foot back down, the effort that it takes to do this written on his face. Then he closes his wild eyes—red lizard eyes with the dash-shaped pupils of a goat—and in a few moments, the walls of the post office fall away, the people and their packages and the snowy city turn translucent and disappear, and there is the monster, standing in somebody’s backyard. It is early summer and the yard is flush with blooming; a sprinkler glitters in the background, a giant oak tree cradles a wooden tree house in its branches, purple pansies with their tiny, winking faces bloom in a pot beside the backdoor of the house, and framed by an open window—it seems to be a kitchen window—is the face of a woman, Liam’s mother’s face.