Falling Together (48 page)

“Stop it,” snapped Pen, giving his shoulder a shove. “Right now.”

Jason stared at her. “I just had a freaking nervous breakdown. You’re not allowed to boss me around. Or
push
me.”

“Too bad. Listen to me: you’re wrong.”

“Wrong, huh? Like you know.”

“Everyone knows.”

“Knows what?”

“That no matter what happens, loving someone to the best of your ability is exactly the right thing to do. It’s the only thing to do.”

Jason seemed about to dispute this, but then he shut his mouth and stayed quiet for a long time, staring at his hands on the railing instead of at the view. Finally, he said, “You really believe that bullshit?”

“Yep.”

He let go of the rail and turned his hands over, empty, palms to the sky. “What will I do if she leaves me?”

The answer was so clear, so obvious that Pen had to fight to keep the impatience out of her voice.

“You’ll love someone else.”

A
T THE BOTTOM OF THE HILL
,
WHILE THEY WERE WAITING FOR
L
UIS
the tour driver to bring the SUV around, Augusta ate ice cream, and Pen, Will, and Jason came up with a plan.

“How about if we narrow our tour down to the places that Cat’s most likely to go?” said Will, getting out the itinerary that the bartender/concierge back at the resort had made for them. “Then we can spend the rest of the time looking for her back at the beach.”

“Good idea,” said Pen.

“This is futile. We know that, right?” said Jason blandly. In the aftermath of his conversation with Pen, he seemed calmer, but whether this was because he felt better or because he was simply exhausted Pen couldn’t tell. “The chances of running into her at one of these tourist attractions is, like, practically null and void. Even the beach is a shot in the dark. I checked at all the resorts I could find. No sign of Cat and not one damn person, no matter how much I sucked up to them, would tell me anything.”

Will’s eyes met Pen’s, and she knew what he was thinking: that the whole trip to Bohol was a shot in the dark. It was a lot easier to believe in the hand of fate when you were sitting in the Lolas’ house with the Lolas’ sage, tranquil faces in front of you than when you were actually out in the world, searching.

“What should we do?” said Will to Jason. “If you want to go back to Cebu, we’ll do it. Your call.”

After staring up at the sky and frantically fiddling with the change in his shorts’ pocket, Jason released a hard, drawn-out, sagging sigh and took the itinerary from Will.

“‘Church of San Pedro,’” he read. “‘Early seventeenth century. Spanish.’ Blah blah blah. Boring. Forget it. ‘Hanging Bridge.’ Nope, she doesn’t like heights. ‘Loboc River Cruise and Floating Restaurant.’ Cruise, restaurant? She’d be all over it. ‘Tarsier sanctuary.’” He looked up. “What’s a tarsier?”

“A monkey!” sang Augusta. “A weensy, teensy, a-dor-a-ble monkey!”

“We found it online, back at home when we were looking up the Philippines,” explained Pen. “It’s not a monkey, really, but it is a primate, almost the smallest in the world.”

“How small?” asked Jason, squinting his eyes in concentration, as though the specific degree of smallness could make all the difference.

Pen held out her cupped hand. “Baby kitten-ish, give or take.”

“Cute?” asked Jason.

“
Yes!
” shouted Augusta.

“Huge, round golden eyes; button nose; round head; long, grippy fingers; soft brown fur. And a smile,” said Pen.

“Hell, that sounds like Cat,” said Jason dryly.

“A smile?” said Will.

“In the pictures we saw, it was smiling. No lie,” said Pen.

“Like this!” said Augusta, pressing her lips together and curling up just the corners so that her mouth was a prim, sideways “C.”

“Beautiful,” said Will.

“A tiny, big-eyed, smiling monkey,” said Jason. “Are you kidding me? Wild horses couldn’t keep her away.”

T
HE RIDE TO THE TARSIER SANCTUARY WAS SO LONG THAT BOTH
Augusta and Jason fell asleep, Augusta nestled into an ancient, threadbare booster seat (Pen had nearly kissed Luis when she saw it) in the SUV’s third row and Jason in the front seat, snoring over the saccharine stream that poured, ceaselessly, out of Luis’s radio. Bafflingly, the Philippines had turned out to be a bastion of old R&B and soft rock love songs (“Air Supply is all out of love everywhere but here,” Will had noted, with grim awe, on the second day). Pen and Will sat in the second row, looking out of the thankfully untinted windows at the Bohol countryside: hardwood forests, houses on stilts, nipa huts, thickset palm groves, gas stations, stunningly green rice fields.

“Isn’t it as though that rice field satisfies some little piece of your soul that’s been waiting for that specific shade of green all your life, without your knowing it?” Pen said, solemnly and without stopping for breath, to Will, who laughed and said, “I was going to say that it’s like the whole field is one of those glow sticks we used get at the beach when we were kids.”

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.

H
AD 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.