Falling Together

by Marisa de los Santos

  Will walked up, hugged Pen, took her bag, and offered to take Augusta’s, but Augusta wrinkled her nose, shrugged, and said, “I’m good.”

  “Thank you,” prompted Pen.

  “Thank you,” said Augusta. She put one finger on his arm. “I know who you are.”

  Will crouched down so that he was eye to eye with her. “I’m Will.”

  “Will Wadsworth,” she corrected. “You knew my mom before I was born, and you write books.”

  “Yep.”

  “I can read.” She narrowed her blue eyes at him. “Books. Signs. Anything.” She raised both eyebrows. “Even bad words.”

  Will looked at Pen, who shrugged helplessly and said, “Graffiti.”

  Augusta tilted her head to the side and dimpled demurely, batting her long lashes. “It’s a problem,” she acknowledged and broke into a tinkling laugh.

  Will stood up and stared at Pen. “Whoa,” he said. “You know who she reminds me of?”

  Pen laughed. “Of course, I do. It’s freaky, isn’t it?”

  “How did that happen?”

  Pen put up her hands in bafflement. “Cluck if I know. She just came that way.”

  “What way?” demanded Augusta.

  Will looked back down at Augusta and grinned. “The cutest-little-fairy-princess-person-in-the-whole-world way.”

  After considering this for a moment, Augusta shrugged lightly and said, “I like that way,” and after another eloquent glance from her mother, she added, “Thank you.”

  “OKAY,” SAID PEN, SPREADING THEIR PRINTED ITINERARY OUT ON the table in front of them, “New York to Vancouver, don’t get off the plane, then Vancouver to Hong Kong, get off the plane for a couple of hours, then Hong Kong to Cebu. Right?”

  “Right,” said Will.

  Pen glanced quickly at Augusta, who was happily eating a pancake at the airport diner near their gate (“Breakfast for dinner is my favorite forever,” she’d told Will) and said in a low voice, “That’s a hell of a lot of plane time, isn’t it?”

  “Are you worried about Augusta?” asked Will.

  “Oh, no,” said Pen. “It’s me. I have serious aviophobia.”

  “But birds are our friends, Pen.”

  “Ha ha. I never have actual external panic attacks, probably because of my acute fear of embarrassing myself, but I have multiple internal ones, even on short flights.”

  “What happens?”

  “Sweating, sobbing, disorientation, vomiting, loud outbursts of profanity.”

  “All internal?”

  “Yes.”

  “Ever try to wrestle open the exit door in midflight and jump out?”

  “No, but I will now, thanks.”

  “What if I keep feeding you drinks, one drink every hour for twenty hours?”

  “Could help,” said Pen, smiling.

  “Or you could just—” Will stopped. “Holy shit.”

  Augusta dropped her fork and covered her ears, laughing.

  “Sorry,” said Will.

  “Nothing she hasn’t heard before. She lives with Jamie, remember? And me. What’s wrong?”

  “I’ve read that itinerary. I had it stuck to my bulletin board for four days and I never put it together.”

  “You never put the itinerary together?” asked Pen. “What’s that mean?”

  “No. What Jason said, remember? How he hated the idea of his little Cat wandering around the Hong Kong airport. At the time, I thought he’d just chosen Hong Kong at random.”

  “This is Jason we’re talking about. In all likelihood, he’s lived his entire life without ever knowing Hong Kong existed.” Her eyes widened as she absorbed what Will had said. “He knew. About the flight. Because he checked on the flight.”

  “Maybe. I mean, there have to be a lot of other routes. And he’d be flying out of Cincinnati, right? Or Kentucky. Wherever. Those flights might not go through Hong Kong at all. It’s weird, though.”

  “And this was the conversation where you told him where Cat was, so if he already knew about changing planes in Hong Kong, then he already knew where she was.”

  “Or guessed.”

  “Why would he guess that? Cat flying to the Philippines on a pilgrimage to get to know her dead father better is a plausible idea to me,” said Pen. “But I wouldn’t have thought of it all on my own. And Jason, well, do you think he’s capable of that kind of prescience?”

  “No, but we don’t really know him that well, and we can’t forget that he’s been married to Cat for six years.”

  “I wish I could. I tried.”

  “So did Cat, apparently,” said Will. He and Pen exchanged wan smiles: it was a thing they preferred not to think about, that Jason knew Cat, had known her for all the years when the only thing Will and Pen could do was remember her, possibly—okay, definitely—knew things about her that they didn’t.

  “Whether he knew she was going or guessed, if he researched flights, it means we were right: he’s planning to look for her,” said Will.

  “Maybe he already is,” said Pen.

  Will didn’t know why he picked that moment to look over Pen’s shoulder. They had chosen a table at the diner’s outer edge, on a kind of pseudo-outdoor patio, so that they would be sure to hear the announcement that it was time to board. Walking toward them from the direction of their gate, across the flow of foot traffic, was Jason. He wore a cheesy grin, brown deck shoes, and a T-shirt emblazoned with an American flag and the words MADE IN AMERICA. Like there could be any doubt, thought Will. He shook his head. Whatever Jason’s limitations, the guy had a flair for the dramatic.

  “It’s a good thing,” murmured Will. “Just remember that. It’s what we hoped would happen.”

  “What?” asked Pen, knitting her brows.

  She turned to see what Will saw.

  “Oh, for the love of God,” she said, and Augusta put down her fork and covered her ears.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  WHENEVER SHE FLEW, WHAT SENT PEN OVER THE EDGE AND flailing into an aviophobic abyss was an image so sharp and three-dimensional that next to it, every fact or figure she had ever learned (percentage of crashes with survivors; chances of dying in a plane crash; percentage by which your chances decrease by sitting in the tail versus the nose, blah blah blah) paled to insignificance. The image slunk around Pen’s consciousness, waiting for its moment to dart in and terrify her. On every flight, she spent all of her energy warding it off in any way she could, reading, meditation, overeager conversation with co-travelers, prayer (if fervent and elaborate bargaining counted as prayer), but, every second, feeling, with her whole being, the image’s dark presence, muscular and chillingly patient, like a lion waiting for the baby elephant to break from the herd. Then she would be in the middle of some ordinary, full-cruising-altitude task—reading or watching a terrible, nearly inaudible movie or ripping open a package of Twizzlers, her traditional flight comfort food—and there it was to stop her heart: the plane so flimsy and small, an aluminum gnat, surrounded on every side by an immense, freezing, howling, loveless nothingness.

  And as she looked around at her fellow travelers, all of whom she believed were also secretly teetering on the brittle edge of being stark, screeching mad, her one (meager, selfish) comfort was that when the combination of hope and hubris holding them up gave out and they fell, at least they would all fall together.

  She had thought it would be worse with Augusta there. It was not Augusta’s first flight. Last year, she had gone to Paris with Tanya, Patrick, and Lila, a trip she did not (to Tanya’s disgust) appreciate and from which she’d returned cranky, exhausted, with a marked lack of interest in French culture or art but crazy for pastries. However, this was the first flight she and Pen had taken together, and Pen braced herself, figuring that her usual fear would be multiplied by maternal love into something so gargantuan that its very weight might be enough to tug the plane into the ocean. Yet, here she sat, miles in the air, Augusta beside her, book closed, Twizzlers package intact, per
fectly at peace.

  She remembered, suddenly, the last time she had felt this way on an airplane. She was nine and flying to Florida with her family. It was not her first time on a plane, but at some point between her previous flight (to the Grand Canyon, where she’d fallen headlong into beauty without a single fear of falling into the giant hole) and this one, she had crossed from an age of unconsidered trust into one of watchfulness and worry (an age that turned out not to be an age at all, but a permanent condition, although, thankfully, she didn’t know this at the time). When the plane hit a spot of turbulence, Pen found herself on the brink of hysteria, a state she recognized from her third-grade science class when her friend Minnie saw a photo of a real human brain and had to breathe into a paper bag.

  It was Jamie who saved her. He sat across the aisle from her, his gray eyes starry in his tanned face (the result of not only baseball and swim team, Pen knew, but assiduous, if clandestine, sunbathing in the backyard), his shoulders inside his T-shirt already on their way to broad, chock-full of lanky grace, and way more beautiful than any thirteen-year-old kid had a right to be, a fact that was anything but lost on him. He flirted with the flight attendants. He swanned down the narrow aisle without touching the seats on either side, giving dropped-chin, faux-shy smiles to anyone female who looked at him. He listened to his Walkman in a way that made you want to hand over your entire savings account to be him for five minutes. Even as she loathed him, Pen understood, with resentment and relief, that no one that full of himself, that purely obnoxious could ever die in a plane crash.

  Now, Augusta’s presence worked a similar kind of magic on Pen. The child sat there and every single thing about her—the pitch of her voice and the points of her elbows, her messy hair, her radiant curiosity and knobby wrists—made crashing impossible. No harm could come to someone so wholly loved, so at home in her own skin—it was a simple fact.

  Pen was so relaxed that, despite her considerable physical discomfort (the curse of the long-legged), her concern (unforeseen and exasperating but undeniable) about being slack-faced and open-mouthed in front of Will, and her long history of never, ever sleeping on planes (how would she get into the recommended crash position, let alone locate her inflatable life vest if she were anything but wide awake?), she spent most of the first leg of the trip asleep. As soon as Augusta, after one chattering, enchanted, snack-filled hour, curled up like a cat with her head in Pen’s lap and drifted serenely off, as though she did it all the time, as though she were not the child who, at age five, still failed to sleep through the night in her own bed four nights out of seven, Pen turned to Will, said, “I think I’ll just close my eyes for a minute or two,” and was out for hours. When she woke up, briefly, the plane was fuzzily dark, pleasantly warm, and, for a moment, Pen was flooded with a sense of connection and comradeship: all those sleeping strangers together, shoulder to shoulder, suspended in a hush that was almost holy.

  She woke up for good just before they began their descent into Vancouver. She didn’t know what time it was, but inside the plane, it was still night. Sleepily, she turned her face and found the only scrap of illumination in the soft dark: Will, awake and writing in a notebook, head bent, face still, hand moving, entirely contained within his own small, private cone of light. The sight made her ache. How can I not touch you? she thought hopelessly, and then she was doing it, her fingers on his wrist. He didn’t jump or even look at her, just stopped writing. Neither one of them moved, nothing moved, and the whole thing lasted three or four seconds at most, but when Pen took her hand away and started to breathe again, her chest hurt, as though she had been holding her breath for a very long time.

  Will didn’t give her a puzzled or dismayed or astonished glance. He didn’t pull her face to his and kiss her, even though she could almost feel his hand on her cheek. He smiled his usual smile and said, “Hey,” in a quieter version of his usual voice, as though nothing had changed. Pen was amazed. How could nothing have changed when everything had changed?

  Maybe because you’ve touched him a thousand times before? she reminded herself derisively.

  But this was a major touch, clearly a turning point touch, she shot back.

  Not clear to Will. To Will it was a business-as-usual touch, a “Pen and Will being friends like always” touch. Except on an airplane.

  On an airplane in the dark. How could he not know it was different?

  How could he know it was different?

  If he wanted it to be different, she said to herself in the smallest of voices, if he were waiting for it, he would know.

  She felt a lot of things at once, not primarily—not by a long shot—but including relief. No matter how you sliced it, Pen and Will being friends like always was a beautiful thing. In validation of this insight, the lights inside the plane came on, and it was morning.

  Pen said to Will, “These seats are insane. I feel like a Poppin’ Fresh roll, unpopped.”

  “I feel like a jack-in-the-box,” said Will, “in the box.”

  “Jesus freaking Christ, please tell me this isn’t the way you guys always talk.” Jason, standing in the aisle next to Will: loud, looming, big as a barn, American flag T-shirt blazing. “Or I might have to change my mind about changing my seat, when the black dude in the sleep mask gets off at Vancouver.”

  As Will and Pen looked over at him, the black dude on the other side of Augusta lifted his sleep mask, took a long look at Jason, and told them, “Lucky you.”

  A COUPLE OF HOURS INTO THE FLIGHT FROM VANCOUVER TO HONG Kong, an unlikely thing happened to Will, Pen, and Jason, more unlikely than the dissolution of Pen’s aviophobia or the brief, half-asleep, flatly unacknowledged move she’d made on Will: they became a team.

  When afterward Pen asked Will to give his best estimate as to where they were when this occurred, he guessed someplace over Russia, which wasn’t what you’d call pinpoint-precise, not exactly a zeroing-in kind of guess, but even if it had been accurate, it wouldn’t really have been accurate because while there was a single moment of clear-cut coalescence—Will’s eyes meeting Pen’s in agreement—the moment was more a culmination than a revelation. Their joining forces was a process that had begun back at the airport, not the second Jason had made his smirking appearance, but almost.

  As Jason approached, Will had shot Pen a look that said, Be as nice as you can, so that by the time he stood by the table at a slightly backward-pitched angle, his hands in his shorts’ pockets, thumbs sticking out, his head not so much nodding as bobbing like one of those red-and-white fishing things (later, Will would tell Pen they were called “bobbers”) in a manner that made Pen want to grab a pancake off Augusta’s plate and smack him with it, Will was standing to greet him, and Pen had turned her chair around enough to see him out of the corner of her eye.

  “Well, look who’s here,” he’d said with a smile so sharky that Pen could tell it set even Will’s knee-jerk good manners back on their heels because it took him almost a full five seconds to reach out to shake Jason’s hand.

  “We figured you’d show up,” said Pen, with a cool, sidelong glance, and for a second or two, Jason’s face collapsed into a look of injured disappointment that was downright toddler-like.

  “Did not,” he said.

  Listen to you, thought Pen, you are straight out of the clucking sandbox. It took her breath away a little, how Jason could, in the very same second, annoy the hell out of her and inspire a sympathy that was almost tender. Floundering in the face of these battling emotions, Pen took a prim sip of iced tea.

  “Hey, man,” said Will, “three heads are better than two, right?”

  “I have a head,” piped Augusta. “One head.”

  Before Augusta spoke, Jason hadn’t noticed that she was there, and for a few seconds, he seemed confused. Then something happened so quickly that it would have seemed like a magic trick, if it hadn’t been so obviously real: quite simply, before Pen’s eyes, Jason became a different man. His shoulders relaxed, his chest unpu
ffed, all the defensiveness and wannabe thuggishness and petulance vanished.

  “Really? Are you sure?” he said. “There’s not maybe a teeny tiny one you’ve been hiding someplace?”

  “No!” Augusta laughed. “And you know what else?”

  “What?” asked Jason.

  “Fifty stars and thirteen stripes.” She said it like “firteen.”

  Jason looked up, down, all around, frantically searching. “Where?”

  Augusta laughed again and pointed at his shirt. “Right there.”

  “Whoa,” said Jason. “You are one wicked-fast counter.”

  “No, no, no,” said Augusta, shaking her black-dandelion-fluff head. “No one counts that fast. Not even Mommy. Not even Albert. Einstein.” She pronounced “Albert” with three syllables: Alabert.

  “Then how did you know?” asked Jason.

  “I learned!” shrieked Augusta with joy. “From my teacher!”

  “Learned? Come on. How could you have learned that already? You’re only in—what? Fourth grade?”

  More shrieking.

  It had gone on like this, Jason becoming more starstruck, more unguarded, funnier, kinder, less and less of a horse’s ass by the minute.

  “Who is that guy?” Will had whispered to Pen, as the four of them lined up to board.

  “If you didn’t know him,” Pen whispered to Will, “you might mistake him for someone who doesn’t completely suck.”

  “Seeing him with her makes it kind of hard to hate him, doesn’t it?”