Falling Together

by Marisa de los Santos

  Pen understood why this would upset Patrick, but it annoyed her anyway, the way he described it like it was the worst thing to ever happen, genocide and desecration rolled into one.

  “Well, but it was decorative, right?” she couldn’t resist saying. “I mean, you’re not actually a Buddhist.”

  “Still,” said Patrick, “a little respect. A Buddha’s a Buddha. And a tree is a tree no matter how small.”

  Pen had to smile. Patrick, channeling Dr. Seuss. “You are the Lorax,” she wanted to tell Patrick. “You speak for the trees.”

  Instead she hid her smile inside her glass of tea and then said, “I’m not sure I get it, though, how the, uh, squabbling has anything to do with her wanting to move you to Boston. I’m pretty sure people still bicker in Boston.”

  He looked surprised, as though he’d thought she would get it right away. “She’s worried I’ll go back to you.”

  Pen stared at him.

  To Will, Pen fumed, “‘Go back to you.’ As if that’s all it would take, his showing up on my doorstep.”

  Will couldn’t think of anything to say to this that wouldn’t qualify as maligning Patrick, so he didn’t say anything.

  “But then I thought about it,” Pen went on. “How my life might look to Tanya or even to Patrick. I’ve dated here and there, but, honestly, not much, never anything serious. Nobody Augusta’s even met, so Patrick probably doesn’t even know, which means that unless Tanya’s been having me followed—which is not outside the realm of possibility—she doesn’t know, either. And, God, the idea of their thinking that I’m just waiting around for Patrick makes me insane.”

  On an impulse, Will asked, “What have you been waiting for?”

  When Pen answered, her voice was solemn and sheepish. “How did you know? Because you’re right. I am waiting. It hits me now and then: that I’ve been saving myself for something. A sign. A person.” She gave an embarrassed laugh. “Mostly, though, I’m just busy.”

  When Patrick told her that Tanya was afraid he would go back to Pen, Pen said, “Well, that’s a ridiculous thing to worry about.”

  All Patrick’s bravado disappeared, and hurt filled his eyes. “We never bickered, did we?” he said.

  Oh for God’s sake, thought Pen.

  So quickly that it made Pen’s head spin, Patrick began to map out a plan: he would divorce Tanya at last, hire a cutthroat lawyer, file for custody of Lila; the four of them would be together, a family.

  “It’s what I should have done from the beginning,” he told Pen.

  There were so many things Pen could have said. “She would die before she let you have Lila.” “You’re mad at Tanya, but you won’t stay that way.” “You can’t come back every time you get restless or angry or bored with your marriage.” “It would be too confusing for Augusta, especially when you leave again, which you surely will.”

  “But I didn’t say any of those things,” Pen told Will.

  “What did you say?”

  “I said the thing that rendered all those other points, as true as they are, moot. I said it for the first time ever.”

  “What was that?” asked Will.

  She had wanted to be gentle. Whether Patrick deserved it or not, Pen found herself wanting to be as kind as possible at that critical moment. She leaned across the table and took, not Patrick’s hands, but his forearms, his skin warm inside her hands, and turned him directly toward her. She looked for a sign in his eyes that he knew what she was going to say, but they were hope-blue and as unsuspecting as a baby’s.

  “You can’t come back to me, Patrick, because I don’t love you,” she said. “I care about you and I will thank you in my heart forever for helping me to have Augusta in my life, but I’m not in love with you. More importantly, I don’t want you back, not at all, not anymore.”

  Will said, “Sounds rough.”

  “It was. Looking him in the eye and getting the words out was, but once it was over, I felt so good, like I’d been rained on by the cleanest rain in the world.” She laughed. “A fat lot of good it did, though.”

  “Meaning what?”

  “He didn’t buy it.”

  “Uh-oh.”

  “He said, ‘I know you’re protecting yourself and Augusta. I get it. Why wouldn’t you? You think I’ll come back and then leave again, but I won’t. I promise you that. We’ll be so happy.’”

  She had let go of his arms and told him, “I don’t think you really believe that. I know I don’t.”

  “You’re hurt,” Patrick said. “You’re angry.”

  “No,” said Pen. “I’m really not.”

  To Will, she said, “He said, ‘Don’t answer right now,’ like I hadn’t just answered.”

  “Did he tell you to sleep on it?”

  “He did. He used those exact words. And then, then he started talking about how Tanya’s moving them to Boston would really not have been that bad.”

  “Really?”

  “Yes. He said, ‘I’m glad I’m not going, so glad, even though Boston really probably wouldn’t have been as bad as it sounds. It’s not that far, when you think about it, and I could’ve kept my job, since I do most of it online and over the phone anyway. We have a lot of long-distance clients, in fact, maybe as much as forty percent of our business. I’d have to come here for meetings and such now and then, but that’s it. But then there’s Augusta, and, sure, when she gets a little older she could ride the train up by herself, under the care of the conductor or whatever, or even fly, and I’d get down whenever I could, not monthly, but fairly often. But it wouldn’t be the same. We’d have solid, quality time, I know that, but I’d miss things, concerts and school plays and…’ He went on like that for quite some time.”

  “‘Under the care of the conductor.’ Sounds like he’d considered the idea pretty … thoroughly,” said Will. Because this made Will feel weasly again, he added, “Which sort of makes sense.”

  “Oh, yeah,” said Pen dryly. “It all makes a lot of sense. How someone who had never had any intention of moving would consider every angle, in detail, except the one in which he stands up to Tanya and tells her that moving is a terrible idea for everyone.”

  “You think he’ll go,” said Will.

  “Unless Tanya changes her mind or unless she’s just been yanking his chain, which she might be doing, since she’s an inveterate chain yanker, he’ll go. Even if I said I’d take him back, he would go eventually.”

  “Patrick being in Boston will be hard on Augusta, won’t it?”

  “It won’t crush her, I don’t think,” said Pen. “But it will certainly hurt, and I could strangle him for that.”

  Will was quiet for a few seconds before he asked, “Are you sure about not taking him back?”

  “Yes,” said Pen. Will knew that he didn’t have to tell Pen that she didn’t sound sure. She groaned. “I’m sure for me,” she said. “But how will I tell Augusta that her father wanted to come live with us and be a family and I said no?”

  Will sat up stiffly, making the porch boards creak. He looked out across the grass, which needed cutting, and ran a hand through his hair.

  “I don’t know,” he said.

  “I don’t, either.”

  “Patrick’s still waiting for your answer?”

  “I’ll say what I said before,” said Pen in a tired voice. “What else can I do? But I’m not looking forward to it, I’ll tell you that. Which brings me to the question.”

  “What question?”

  “I told you I had a story and a question, remember?”

  “Now I do.”

  “Would it be terrible,” Pen began carefully, “would it be a huge betrayal of Cat, if I had an ulterior motive—a very secondary ulterior motive, but still—for wanting to go find her?”

  “I can’t imagine you ever betraying Cat, hugely or unhugely,” said Will. “But I don’t really get what you mean.”

  “I wanted to go anyway, before all this. At this point, it’s not even so much th
at I’m worried about her, although I am. We’ve just got this momentum, you know? I have never stopped missing her all these years, and, since the reunion, I’ve thought about her all the time. I want to see her more than ever. You know that, right?”

  “Sure, I do.”

  “But when I found out how far away she went, well, the distance made going to find her seem crazy, even impossible. What is it? Ten thousand miles? More?”

  “Something like that.”

  “But now, with my mom waiting for me to call and tell her I’m ready to get together with her new boyfriend and his entire family, which she wants to be my family, too, and with Patrick waiting for me to call and give his happily-ever-after plan the thumbs-up, which I can never do, no matter how happy it would make my child, well—”

  “Ten thousand miles is suddenly sounding less crazy?” said Will.

  “It’s suddenly sounding kind of great.”

  “You’re asking if it would be somehow unethical or insulting to Cat if you had more reason than just wanting to find Cat for going to find Cat?”

  “Exactly.”

  For what wasn’t the first time, Will imagined being with Pen in a faraway place, listening to her talk, her one and only voice shining against a backdrop of new sounds.

  “I think Cat would think it was okay. I think she would call you a goody-goody for even worrying about it and then would remind you that wanting to get away from your problems for a while is only human.”

  He honestly believed this. What Cat would think of his own ulterior motive (he shut his eyes and caught a glimpse of Pen, face, hair, shoulders, the brown and gold gloss of her under a tropical sun) was another matter altogether.

  “You want to go?” asked Will.

  “I’ll go if you go.”

  “I’ll go if Augusta goes.”

  Pen laughed. “I promise to pay you back for the tickets, although it might take a while.”

  “I know where to find you,” said Will.

  As soon as they hung up, Will realized he had forgotten to tell her about his conversation with Jason and called her back. After he finished, she made him say “motherfucker” in the precise tone of voice in which Jason had said it. It took Will a few tries, but when he got it right, she let out a single, flat, doomed “Holy cluck” then went silent.

  “Pen?”

  “Thinking.”

  “Sorry.”

  Will watched a full thirty seconds tick by on his running watch before Pen said, “The question is: do we tell him or not tell him?”

  “That we’re going?”

  “Yes.”

  “He’ll go either way,” said Will. “No way he’s not going.”

  “Exactly!”

  “You think he’ll try to beat us there?”

  “Do you think we should try to beat him there?” she countered.

  Will’s first impulse was to say yes, but after he considered the question for a few more seconds, he said, slowly, “We could, but just because we get there first doesn’t mean we’ll find her first. Or find her at all.”

  “You’re right, it doesn’t. And you know what I hate to think about?”

  “I can make a pretty fair guess, but go ahead.”

  “Jason running like a madman around that island or all those seven thousand islands, give or take, by himself, looking for her and maybe finding her.”

  “If he’s there, we want him where we can see him.”

  “Yes!”

  “So—we should invite him to come with us?” asked Will, and even as he asked it, even though Jason fit nowhere in his being-alone-with-Pen-and-Augusta-in-a-distant-land ulterior motive, he understood that this was the only thing to do.

  “I hate to say it, I loathe to say it,” said Pen, “but yes.”

  Will hung up, called Jason, had a two-minute conversation, and called Pen back.

  “He said no.”

  “No? Oh, no! Did he give a reason?”

  “He said, ‘Thanks but no thanks, bro. Like I said, I’m just keeping the home fires burning until Cat finds peace in her heart and makes her return.’”

  “He couldn’t possibly have said that. Nobody talks like that.”

  “Direct quote.”

  “Why didn’t he jump at the chance to keep an eye on us?”

  “If I had to guess, I would say that it hasn’t occurred to him, yet, that keeping an eye on us makes more sense than trying to beat us to Cebu. He’s not the kind of guy things occur to at the same pace that they occur to other people.”

  “You think he’ll figure it out?”

  “He might.” Will hesitated for a few nervous seconds before he added, “I told him I’d e-mail him our itinerary, just in case he changes his mind. I don’t know if that was the right thing to do, but I had to think fast.”

  Pen didn’t answer immediately, and Will tried to gauge from the quality of her silence whether she was just thinking over what he’d said or was wordlessly cursing him for being a clucking moron and ruining all their plans.

  “I could still not send it,” he said, “and just say I forgot or something.”

  “No,” said Pen decisively. “It’s definitely worth a try. Either he’ll figure out that it’s a good idea to go with us and he’ll call to say he’s changed his mind or meet us at the hotel in Cebu or something. Or he won’t figure it out and will try to get there first, which, as you said, doesn’t mean that he’ll find her first and really doesn’t make anything worse than it would’ve been if we didn’t tell him our plans.”

  “Okay,” said Will, relieved. “I’ll call the travel agent right now.”

  “Will?” said Pen.

  “Yeah?”

  “Thanks.”

  “For what?”

  “For being—” she began and paused. The tremor in her voice was so slight that it might have been something or nothing, a phone reception glitch. Will couldn’t be sure. “Back,” she finished and added, “For everything.”

  “Anytime,” Will told her.

  IN THE END, IT SEEMED EASIEST TO MEET IN NEW YORK. ACTUALLY, technically speaking, coming from two different cities as they were, it wasn’t very easy at all, not nearly as easy as meeting in Philadelphia and either driving to New York together or hopping on the same New York–bound plane at the Philly airport. But when they were discussing the various travel options, as soon as Pen proposed, shyly, meeting at JFK, they had both jumped on the idea. Will wasn’t sure why. Maybe because Philadelphia was still the city in which they’d lost each other. Maybe because they didn’t want to risk slowing down their momentum, which was sweeping them forward, into the future. They agreed to meet at the gate.

  As soon as Will’s plane landed at JFK, before they had even turned off the seat-belt sign or taxied to the gate, Will called Pen.

  She answered the phone like this: “Where are you?”

  “Just landed,” said Will. “Where are you?”

  “Still at home. We have almost three hours until our flight. Sorry you have to wait.”

  “No big deal,” said Will. “Listen, I have to tell you something.”

  “You sound so serious. What’s wrong?”

  “I’m not a natural with kids. I just wanted to warn you. I’m not bad, but I’m definitely not a natural.”

  “Okay, forget it. The trip’s off.”

  “Seriously, a lot of people expect me to be some kind of Pied Piper because of the books.”

  “Have you ever actually read that story? Because the Pied Piper might have played nice music, but, underneath the colorful outfit, he was a big fat brainwashing kidnapper.”

  “I didn’t know that. I never wear colorful outfits.”

  “Of course, you don’t,” said Pen. “Look, thanks for the heads-up but don’t sweat it. Augusta probably won’t even notice. As long as you do whatever she says, she’ll be happy as a clam.”

  “Good.”

  “See you soon.”

  As it turned out, he saw them before they saw him. In fa
ct, he saw them coming from so far away that he was surprised he could recognize them. The distance obscured Pen’s features, reduced her to nothing but shape and motion. She could have been anyone, any tall woman holding the hand of any little girl, but of course, she couldn’t have been anyone but Pen, whom Will would’ve known anywhere: her uprightness, the delineation of her shoulders, the way her head didn’t seem to just rest on her neck like most heads on most necks, but to balance, like an egg on the tip of a finger, if such a thing were possible. Mostly, he recognized the way she moved. Will shut his book and—registering every detail as though he might get quizzed on them later—watched Pen and Augusta come into focus.

  Pen wore a white T-shirt, flat red shoes, and the kind of black pants that Audrey Hepburn wore in Funny Face; she had a gray sweater tied around her waist. She pulled a wheeled carry-on bag. Her hair was tucked behind her ears. Without making a big, self-conscious production out of it, she made walking through the airport look like ballet. Augusta’s hair was bobbed and floating and almost black with a tiny, jeweled tiara riding on top. She wore a bright pink flowered party dress and neon yellow flip-flops decked out with floppy cloth flowers. She had a shiny red purse hooked over one forearm and bore a pink backpack on her back that was big enough for her to climb inside.

  When they were maybe thirty feet away, Will saw that the two of them were deep in conversation, Pen looking down, and Augusta looking up, so that even though they were close enough to see him, they didn’t. It was a good thing, too, because Will found himself suddenly choked up, which stunned him. He never cried, had just stopped one day when he was a kid (Ten years old? Eleven? Right around the time he’d started getting mad and hitting things) and had never started up again, but here he was with his eyes wet and his throat tightening at the sight of Pen with her daughter. He turned his face, ran his palms over his eyes; when he turned back, Pen looked up and saw him and smiled and became, like she always did, his old friend Pen, the clearest thing in the room.