Falling Together (20 page)

With wonder, Pen noted that there wasn’t a single mocking note in Will’s voice; more than anything, he sounded kind.
Wow,
thought Pen.
Kindness? Now?

But Jason didn’t seem to hear it that way because he jumped up and hissed, “You know what? Go to hell.”

At this, Pen flared. “That must be some marriage you’ve got, Jason.”

“Fuck you, you condescending fucks,” said Jason, spit flying out of his mouth with each “f.” He threw his plastic cup on the table and left.

For at least half a minute, Pen and Will just stared at each other, or in each other’s general direction, since they were both lost in their separate, if overlapping, thoughts, with the party whirling to a blur around them. A woman came up and asked if she could take Jason’s chair, and Pen didn’t even look at her, just nodded.

“I think he likes us,” said Will finally.

Pen sighed. “I’m sorry.”

“Why are you sorry?”

“That last thing I said about his marriage. It was a low blow.”

“It wasn’t anything he didn’t know,” said Will.

“I know, but he’s a sad and desperate case, setting this whole thing up the way he did. He’s lost.”

“We believe him, then?”

“I don’t know,” said Pen. “I’m confused. I’m dumbfounded.”

“Maybe we should get out of here,” said Will, “take a walk. Unless you wanted to stay, hang out, have a beer, maybe go for a whirl on the dance floor.” He smiled.

“That sounds fun,” said Pen, standing up, and together they walked out of the tent.

“D
O YOU MIND IF WE DON
’
T TALK FOR A LITTLE WHILE
? M
Y BRAIN IS
so full it hurts,” said Pen.

“Brain indigestion,” said Will.

Even outside of the tent, the air was so humid that Pen felt as though she were wearing the night like a coat of paint. They ended up at the university chapel, a small, stone Gothic Revival structure that Pen had always loved, perched moodily as it was, all its eyebrows arched, amid the gleaming neoclassicism. As if by agreement, she and Will stopped walking when they got there, Pen dropping onto a wooden bench, Will standing around awhile like a person waiting for a bus, then sitting on the brick walkway in front of her, elbows hooked over his knees, arms dangling.

“We’re mosquito bait,” he said. “You know that, right?”

“Little vampires.” Pen sighed heavily. “I’m too discombobulated to care.”

“You want to talk about what we’re thinking?”

“Maybe,” said Pen.
No
.

“What are you thinking?”

“You first.”

Will leaned back on his elbows and looked at the sky. Pen waited for Will to start the conversation about Cat and Jason but wished he wouldn’t. She wanted to keep it at a distance for a few more minutes.

Will said, “I’m thinking it’s way too muggy for June. That moon looks like it’s suffocating.”

Pen looked at the hazy moon. “It looks like an Alka-Seltzer dissolving.”

“You’re right. So what else are you thinking?”

She closed her eyes and rested her head against the back of the bench. “I’m thinking how I’ve always liked this chapel.”

“And your little friend who lives in it,” said Will. Pen could hear him smiling.

“Edith,” said Pen.

For the most part, the chapel’s stained-glass windows were lovely but generic, sporting geometric patterns or expressionless religious figures with blue robes, iconic noses, and bony, rectangular feet. But the first week Pen had arrived at college, before she met Will and Cat, when she was homesick and drowning in lonesomeness, she had wandered into the chapel and found herself drawn to one high, almond-shaped window (she’d find out later that it was called a
mandorla
, a beautiful word) that seemed different to her: a girl’s face, intimate-eyed and human and looking straight at Pen. Pen figured that she was supposed to be an angel, but to Pen, she looked like a regular person, a girl like herself, shy, brown-haired, smart, out of breath, slightly lost. Something about the girl, about being alone with her in the dim, high-ceilinged hush of the chapel made Pen feel less lost, befriended even.

Though she knew that having an imaginary friend at the age of eighteen meant she’d hit a point so humiliatingly low that she must never, ever tell anyone about it, one night, she told Cat and Will. They made fun of her, of course, but they liked it, and, straightaway, the two of them, especially Cat, wove the girl into the fabric of their friendship. “Edith says hi,” Cat would say, or “I couldn’t finish my sandwich, so I gave half to Edith.” On the bench under the fizzy moon, Pen held Cat’s voice in her head, cradled it in the palm of her memory.

“I miss her,” Pen said sadly, a sob in her throat. “I was so sure I would see her.”

“It’ll be okay,” said Will quickly, and Pen remembered how worried he’d always gotten when anybody cried.

“I know it will,” said Pen, rubbing her eyes and sitting up. “You know I was always a crier.”

“You always were,” he agreed. “I was sure we’d see her, too.”

“You want to know the truth?” Pen said. “The truth is that, all these years, I have missed both of you more than I can describe. I have pined for you. I wanted you back the whole time.”

Pen felt lighter after she’d said it. She had not planned to say it. In fact, she had planned
not
to because what in the world would be the point? To make herself as vulnerable as a newborn chick? To make Will uncomfortable? To put him on the spot? And still: this lightness. Something about the night, about having listened to all that Jason had said and to be sitting in this precise spot under this precise sky thinking about Cat with Will made saying what she harbored in her heart feel natural. She didn’t expect him to say it back or to even acknowledge it. She just wanted him to know.

“You know what,” said Will after a long moment. “I was in town for my friend Gray’s wedding a couple of years ago, not at the chapel, at an inn down the road, and I stopped in to see Edith.”

“You didn’t.”

“Yep. I did, and there happened to be a tour going on, so I asked the tour guide about her.”

“You asked about Edith?”

“Turns out she’s special.”

“Of course, she is!”

“Hers is the only Tiffany window in there. The others were made by someone else. And it also turns out that she’s a real person.”

“Of course, she’s a real person.”

“I mean, she was. The window’s a portrait of a real girl. Who lived.”

Pen considered this information. “Was her name Edith?”

“No.”

“Then don’t tell me about her. I don’t want to know.”

“Well, yeah, I was pretty sure you wouldn’t.”

Pen thought about Will stopping in to see Edith, asking about her, two years ago, four years after Pen and Will had last seen each other. She thought about how there was more than one way to say, “I missed you, too.”

“Thank you,” she told Will, “for checking on her.”

“No problem.”

“Do you believe Jason’s story?” Pen asked. Time to dive in.

“I think I did, until you pointed out that his reasons for getting us to come down here made no sense. That made me doubt everything he’d told us.”

“And the thing he said afterward. When you described it back to Jason—how he pretended to be Cat so that Cat would know it was him pretending to be her, et cetera—it sounded so convoluted. Convoluted to the point of crazy.”

“Can you think of another reason, though? His real motive for setting us up?” asked Will.

“No. I tried. It made my head hurt.”

“I had one idea,” said Will slowly. “It’s pretty far-fetched, though, and grim.”

“You think he hurt her?”

“It’s probably just too much
Law and Order,
but I had the thought that if he did something to her, looking for her afterward would be a way to make it look like he hadn’t done it.”

Pen shivered and wrapped her arms around herself. “Do you think he would hurt her?”

“Do you?”

Pen thought about this and said, “No. I don’t, and not just because I can’t stand to think it. Remember that letter he wrote after he left her in the Crater? As much as I loathe being around him, I think he’s decent at the core. What do you think?”

“I think he loves her,” said Will. The word
love
coming out of Will’s mouth caused a brief fireworks display to go off in Pen’s chest. She ignored it. “When he was talking about her, that’s the impression I got. It’s what I always thought about him: he’s a huge pain in the ass, but he loves Cat.”

“Still,” said Pen, “maybe we should check out his story. Maybe Cat’s safe at home, and he made all this up for a mean joke. Because he hates us.”

“After all this time?” said Will.

“Maybe,” said Pen. “Maybe the thought of us wanting Cat not to marry him rankled and rankled his soul for six years. Probably not, though.”

“I hope she’s safe at home,” said Will. Then, in a hesitant voice, he asked, “Do you know where home is? Do you know where Cat lives?”

Pen’s rib cage tightened at the question and her cheeks got hot. She looked down at her hands. “We weren’t supposed to look for each other. We weren’t even supposed to google. Those were Cat’s rules.”

“I remember.”

“I guess you could say”—Pen paused and took a breath—“I broke them.”

“Oh.”

“For the first year, I googled you both. Often. Obsessively often, I would go so far as to say. I didn’t know you’d moved to Asheville, but I know you ran a 10K there in March of 2004. For example.”

“How’d I do?”

Pen smiled. “Not bad, but not great. 42.47.”

“I was out of shape,” protested Will. “My friend Jack—I moved down there to work with him after I bailed out of Wharton—he
made
me do that race. I’m way faster now.”

“Sure, Will. Sure you are,” said Pen.

“What about Cat? You find out anything about her?”

“Not really. We knew she and Jason were moving to Tampa when they left Philly. I saw their wedding announcement, I guess, but after that, nothing, and, as I said, after a year, maybe a little more, I stopped. I started following the rules.”

“Any particular reason?”

“Augusta was born. I got busy, and also”—Pen gave a nervous laugh—“I was on the verge of becoming a stalker. I wanted my daughter to have a mother with a little more dignity than that.”

Pen could remember the day, typing Catalina Rogers (Cat had sacrificed her musical name for Jason’s, a semi-tragic misstep, in Pen’s view) into the narrow box, then looking down at Augusta asleep in her Moses basket next to Pen’s desk. Augusta had stirred, her arms flying outward, her hands startling open into two stars, and for some reason, that had been the sign Pen had been waiting for without knowing she’d been waiting. “Enough!” She had said it out loud and had not only deleted the name, but had turned the computer off altogether, then had rested her forehead on the desk in front of her.

“But then you went and became a famous writer,” said Pen, grinning, “and all bets were off.”

“You started stalking me?” Will asked hopefully.

“No, but I buy all your books, and I looked at your website a few times.”

“Yeah?”

“It’s nice, all those interactive games and great graphics, but there’s no picture of you. That was kind of disappointing.”

“Don’t want to scare off the kids.”

“Ha ha,” said Pen. “So, anyway, I don’t know if they’re still in Tampa or not.” Then, tentatively, she asked, “What about you? You ever break the rules?”

When he answered, Will’s voice was odd, tight and fast, as though he wanted to put the question behind him, get rid of it. “No. It seemed easier that way.”

“Oh.”

She waited for him to say more, but he didn’t, and Pen felt rebuffed, even though she couldn’t think why he would resent her question, when he had just asked her the same thing. In the brittle lull that followed, Pen watched a couple walk past about thirty yards away, coming from the direction of the reunion, the man talking fast and eagerly, telling some kind of story, his hands in motion, the woman walking with her head tilted back, languidly fanning herself with a newspaper.
Give it up,
Pen thought about telling the man.
No way she’s interested.
And because she was distracting herself from the little wall—not wall, she thought hopefully, hedge, low hedge—that had sprung up between herself and Will by imagining the inner lives of these strangers, she didn’t realize that the man walking a short distance behind them, his shoulders slightly bunched, his hands in the pockets of shorts, was Jason, until he was cutting across the grass toward them, a stone’s throw away.

“Jason,” she whispered to Will. “Behind you.”

When he got to them, he didn’t sit down, but just stood, a few feet away, and there was something about him, not his face, which Pen couldn’t really see, but his posture—duck-footed, slump-shouldered, backward leaning, his hands in his pockets, his elbows jutting—that was so old-mannish and forsaken that Pen wanted, almost, to hug him, to put her arm around him and lead him back to the bench.