Falling Together

by Marisa de los Santos

Children played in the yards of long, one-story school buildings, some of which had big, glassless windows, so that you could see straight through to the green on the other side. Slow, curved-horned water buffalo swung their bony hips along roadsides or through fields. Women hung laundry or cooked in the open air. Despite her efforts to not romanticize the place (none of the lives she glimpsed looked at all easy), Pen couldn’t help feeling that a kind of peacefulness, a hazy, emerald quietude permeated everything she saw.

  “It’s beautiful here, isn’t it?” she said.

  “Yeah. It really is,” said Will.

  “Too bad Jason is missing it.”

  Will looked at the back of Jason’s head and said in a low voice, “It’s good, though. Poor guy needed a break.”

  “Wouldn’t it be terrible,” whispered Pen, “to love someone so much who didn’t love you back?”

  In the silence that followed her saying this, they drove past an entire rice field, one backed by hills and patchworked with bright quadrangles of water, more water winking like sequins between the dazzling shoots of rice.

  “Will?” Pen said finally. “Are you there?”

  “Sorry,” said Will. “I was just thinking about what you said.”

  “Oh. So tell me.”

  “You’re right: it would be terrible. But there are worse things.”

  “What do you mean?”

  Will stopped looking out the window and looked at Pen instead. Against the lushness of Bohol, the clean-lined precision of his face was startling. It’s what happened when beauty became familiar: you saw it and saw it and saw it without seeing it and then, suddenly, there it was to make your heart stand still inside your chest

  “At least he did it,” said Will. “Went all out. Gave her everything. He’ll always know that about himself.”

  Flushing, Pen said, “I just told Jason almost that exact same thing, back at the Chocolate Hills, and I believe it. I always have. The really great thing is to love someone, no matter what.” She smiled ruefully. “But I guess it’s a lot easier to have philosophies than to put them into action because I look at him, and all I feel is sad, and all I want is for her to love him back. God, can’t she just do that?” She stopped, feeling disloyal to Cat. “I mean, I want her to be happy, but I want the thing that makes her happy to be being with him.”

  Will nodded. Then he said, “And what about you? What’s the thing that makes you happy?”

  Look at him, Pen told herself.

  She looked at him and thought: Oh, just look at you. The words flooded through her, but she didn’t say them. How could she? That wasn’t the language she and Will spoke to each other.

  She said, “This trip. Augusta. Knowing you again.”

  “Well,” he said after a few seconds, “that’s good.”

  He smiled an unreadable half-smile at her, and the SUV kept moving and the two of them kept riding in it, and, through the windows, the green world kept offering them its extravagant loveliness, mile after mile after mile.

  HAD THE MAN AT THE VISITORS CENTER NOT HAD PUPPIES, THINGS might have turned out differently, but there they were in a fenced-in square of yard just outside the tiny museum’s open side door: black-and-white bundles, with fur so fuzzy it looked electrified. They were nothing like most of the dogs they had seen in Cebu, not bony and listless, but round-bellied and tumbling with a mild, watchful, well-fed mother nearby, whom Pen would’ve bet had more than a little border collie dog-paddling around in her gene pool. The second that Augusta spotted the puppies, everything else flew out of her head, displaced by rampant joy and utter besottedness. With one smiling nod from the visitors center man, whose name was Mr. P, she was in among them, sitting flat on her bottom on the grass, and she would not come out, not for love or money or even tarsiers.

  “Mama, you said we can’t touch tarsiers because they’re dindangered,” she explained. “But you can touch puppies! Touch and touch and touch!” Since her arms were full of them, it was hard to argue with this.

  “How about just a quick look?” said Pen. “Mama wants to see the tarsiers.”

  Mr. P was as bright eyed and rotund as the pups and exuded grandfatherly kindness, but there was no way Pen was leaving Augusta with a man she had just met or even with Luis, who was leaning against the SUV, texting with fast, expert thumbs.

  “I’ll stay with her,” said Jason.

  As soon as they had pulled up to the sanctuary, it had been clear that they wouldn’t find Cat there. Luis’s SUV was one of three cars in the dirt lot, and the visitors center was tiny, one well-lit room full of tidy displays, photographs, informative signs, and an eerie and delicate little skeleton with enormous eye sockets. Unless you counted Mr. P and a young man sweeping the porch, they were the only visitors in sight. After noting this, Jason didn’t get upset or seem eager to leave. He just shrugged and sat down on an outdoor bench near the puppy pen, looking like a man who had either achieved patience or had completely thrown in the towel.

  “That’s okay,” Pen told him. “You should go see the tarsiers.”

  “Nah,” said Jason, waving his hand dismissively. “You guys go on.”

  Mr. P nodded to the young man, who had stopped sweeping, and the man took off his straw hat, tucked it under his arm, and reached to shake Will’s hand.

  “I am Monching.”

  “Nice to meet you, Monching,” said Will. “I’m Will, and this is my friend Pen.”

  They didn’t have far to walk. Monching explained that the tarsiers lived wild throughout most of the sanctuary but that there were a few who had been rescued from captivity and were living in a small portion of the forest surrounded by a high fence. These were the tarsiers that they would see.

  “It is not like a zoo,” said Monching, perhaps anticipating disappointment. “The space is large, and they live as they do in the wild. But they are a little less shy than the ones out in the rest of the sanctuary.”

  “This is fine,” said Pen.

  Monching nodded and entered the dense forest. Will followed him for a few yards, then turned and held out his hand to Pen, and she didn’t stop to wonder why or to consider the implications of taking it. She just took it, and this was how they walked down the narrow path, until Monching stopped, pointing.

  “There,” he whispered.

  And there it was, just a few yards away, clinging to a low branch, its face turned away from them.

  “And there.” This one was closer and seemed to be sleeping.

  “There will be more, if you are quiet,” he said. “Please do not touch, but you can go close to them, take pictures.”

  Pen realized they had left the camera in the SUV, but it didn’t matter. She was following the advice of Lola Lita: really being there, seeing what there was to see.

  “I will wait,” said Monching, pointing, “just there, beyond the edge,” and noiselessly, he disappeared into the leaves.

  Pen and Will looked at each other. Under the canopy of trees, it was shadowy and so hushed that it felt as though they stood in the very heart of the woods.

  Will nodded toward the closest tarsier and whispered, “Go ahead. You first,” which was exactly what Pen wanted.

  Advancing slowly, placing her feet as silently as she could, Pen walked until her face was no more than a foot and a half away from the tarsier, close enough to look it in the eyes, if its eyes had not been closed. The creature was perfectly motionless and so exquisitely constructed, from the delicately wrinkled forehead to the flaring, rose-petal-shaped ears to the strong, knobby, shockingly human-looking hands. Pen stared and stared, happiness pouring through her, her heart beating so hard she could feel it in her wrists, and then the tarsier opened its tremendous eyes, and looked at her, giving her the gift of its wild gold regard, and she could have sworn that it wasn’t just she, but the whole forest that caught its breath.

  It wasn’t cute. It had nothing to do with cute. It was strange and dignified, and Pen believed that she had never in her life felt so honored
to be in anyone’s company. She had come across the wide, tilted, spinning world and landed here to become one of two animals, looking at each other in a deep green wood. She was overcome. She longed for the moment to never end, but the ending was right there, waiting. Stay, she wanted to tell the tarsier, but it couldn’t stay. It’s endangered, she thought, and the thought broke her heart.

  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.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  THEY 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.

  TH
AT 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.