Falling Together (9 page)

Liam’s mother smiles at the monster, who puts one hand over his eyes. He begins to count, and something amazing begins to happen. “Five…”—the monster shrinks to boy-size. “Four…”—his bristly fur silvers, turns to dandelion fluff, and blows across the sky. “Three…”—each stegosaurus plate along his back detaches, folds itself into an origami bird and flies away. “Two…”—the bat wings of the monster who is almost not a monster anymore close themselves like black umbrellas. “One…”—and then they
are
umbrellas and Liam holds one in each hand.

On the next page, Liam is back inside the post office in his winter coat, packages at his feet, and he takes the two umbrellas and slips them into the umbrella stand beside the post office door. Then he walks up to the woman who cut in line and taps her lightly on the arm. She turns disdainful eyes on him and asks him what he wants. Liam says, “Excuse me, but my mother and I have been waiting a long time. Our packages are heavy, just like yours. I think you should go to the end of the line. I think it’s only fair.” And, for a moment, the woman’s face twists in anger. She seems about to speak, then stops, closes her eyes, and takes a few deep breaths.

“You’re right,” she tells the little boy. “I’m having a hard day, but that is not your fault. Not your mother’s, either. And, yes, it’s only fair.” And she steps to the back of the line. Then Liam’s mother smiles as loving a smile as Pen had ever seen on any person, living or painted, and carefully bends her knees to set her bundles on the floor. She opens her arms to Liam, who fits himself inside them. “Liam 1,” she whispers to him, “Monster 0.”

Pen had not consciously known that Will had written
Counting Back to Liam
until she shut the book and saw his name on the cover, but what she would swear to be true forever after was that before she knew that she knew, she knew. About three-quarters of the way through the book, she had gotten the strange and specific sensation of a small light turning on inside her chest, lifting itself out of darkness like a miniature dawn, and starting to brighten and grow, so that by the time she’d found his name on the cover, she wasn’t stunned the way she might have expected she’d be. Her heart didn’t take off like a racehorse. Instead, she sat in the child-sized blue plastic chair and felt like one of the paintings in the book, imbued with a warm, lemon-colored radiance. It took her a few seconds to realize that what she felt was happy.

Good for you, Will,
she had thought, hard. She meant for writing the book, which was wonderful, for writing it in spite of his father, who would never have given his blessing to such a thing, but more than that, she meant good for him for getting better, for learning how to get the best of his temper, which had been so nightmarish and had made him feel so bad. Because that’s what the book meant, Pen understood. She lifted the book and leaned her forehead on it, briefly, eyes closed, in honor of the promise it gave that her friend was okay.

“It’s gorgeous, isn’t it?” said Selena.

“Yes. It’s gorgeous and moving and funny. I love it,” said Pen. “I know him.”

“Will Wadsworth?” asked Selena. “Is he a friend of yours?”

“He was,” said Pen, but the words sounded wrong, so she added, “We went to college together.” Still wrong, too limited and small. It had seemed very important to find the right words to describe Will’s position in her life, but the story was too long to tell. “I adore Will, actually. Just haven’t seen him in a while.”

“Oh,” said Selena. She had smiled, head tipped to one side, and blinked her twinkly eyes.
You need a hat,
thought Pen, thinking of Mrs. Piggle Wiggle,
a boater hat and an apron
. Because she was picturing this, it took her a moment to process what Selena said next, “Then you must know his mother?”

Will’s mother. Mrs. Wadsworth. Pen had flashed back to her, then, seeing her as she’d been the few times Pen had met her: flushed, faintly smiling, extremely quiet except for, now and then, a surprisingly witty remark, the fact of her drunkenness revealed only in her occasional shaky and incongruous bursts of laughter and in her clumsy hands. Pen had eaten three meals with the woman in her life, and at all three, she had knocked over a glass. But mostly, she was so lacking in presence, so overshadowed by Will’s father that it had been hard to tell that she was drunk at all.

“If I didn’t know your mom was an alcoholic,” Cat had said once, “I wouldn’t know she was an alcoholic. I don’t think I’ve ever seen her drunk.”

“You’ve never seen her not drunk,” Will had said dryly. “Trust me on that.”

The last time Pen had seen Will’s mother, she had been different. It was at the summerhouse, not long after Cat had left, the only time Pen had ever been there with Will’s mother and without Cat, a weekend that had started out calm and lovely and that had ended in disaster. She had been newly separated from Will’s father (Mr. Wadsworth, Pen always called him, even though he had asked her more than once to call him Randall), and there was something wild in her. Pen remembered her as loud and frenetic, in constant motion, laughing, whirling across the living room, sitting on the lap of a man just a few years older than Will, a painter she had met in an art class. Damon Callas.

Pen’s face had felt hot as she answered Selena, “I didn’t know her. Not well. She and Will weren’t really close.” Again, her words felt wrong. Will and his mother hadn’t been close the way Pen and her parents had been. There was no confiding, no easy camaraderie, and none of the starry-eyed hero-worship that marked Cat’s regard for her father, but what was written all over Will’s face whenever he spent time with or talked about his mother, while it might have been broken and sad, was clearly love.

“No?”

“You sound surprised,” said Pen. “Do you know her?”

“Oh, no,” said Selena. “But the illustrations and the words, they’re so wonderfully matched, so one with each other. It’s surprising to hear that they’re not close.”

Pen felt confused, trying to make sense of Selena’s pronouns. Then she looked down at the cover of the book again and saw what she had missed the first time. There, below Will’s name: “Illustrations by Charlotte Tully Wadsworth.” Pen read the name again, tracing it with her finger. What a wondrous thing.

Pen had gone back and paged through the book, then, through each glowing, intricate, color-drenched illustration, and had stopped at the picture of the monster, mid-transformation, the dandelion fluff touched by the sun into a kind of filigree, each feathery filament of each tiny blowing seed parachute precisely shining, the whole picture full of an almost palpable lightness. Pen looked, next, at the mother’s watching face in the kitchen window. The illustration had blurred, as Pen’s eyes filled. She smiled. If Charlotte Tully Wadsworth had walked into the bookstore right then, Pen would have hugged her, something she had never done in real life.

“You’re right,” she’d said to Selena, nodding, her fingertips resting on the beautiful thing that Will and his mother had made together. “Something must have changed a lot for her to be able to do this.”

Selena capped her Sharpie with a flourish. “Good. Better than good. The world could use more of that, couldn’t it? Kids and parents getting closer, instead of breaking apart and losing each other.” Then Selena pressed the back of her hand to her mouth for a few seconds and shook her head. “Oh, God. I’m sorry, dear heart,” she said. “I wasn’t talking about you and your dad, who were as close as any people could be. I didn’t mean—”

Pen reached out and squeezed Selena’s hand. “I know what you meant. And it
is
better than good. That’s just exactly what it is.”

A
FTER
P
EN HAD SPENT TEN MINUTES INTERCEPTING DIRTY LOOKS
from her fellow diners, including one from a child in an Elmo T-shirt who feigned gagging himself with his finger, and watching Kiki Melloy, nonstop talker and bestselling mystery author, try to simultaneously talk nonstop and cut her enormous rib eye without losing her grip on the unlit cigarette chopsticked between two fingers of her left hand, she said, “Kiki, maybe you should just put that thing down.”

Kiki’s gaze became patient and long-suffering. “Penny, honey, no one ever said personal protests were easy. Ask Dr. King about that.”

Kiki’s mysteries featured amateur detective Hildy Breen, an occasionally clairvoyant exotic small animal vet (fire-bellied toads, sugar gliders, bearded dragons, and the like), living in an adorable, if corpse-riddled, southern town. People categorized her books as “cozy mysteries” but there was nothing cozy about Kiki, not Kiki’s exterior anyway. Her interior was quite a different matter. She had been one of Pen’s first clients and had teased out of Pen the whole story of Patrick and Tanya and of how, after a long talk with Tanya, and after talks with other parents who had talked with Tanya, the headmaster at Pen’s school had suggested that she take leave from teaching to deal with her “disheveled personal life.” Kiki’s rapid-fire, profanity-laced excoriation of Tanya, Patrick, the headmaster, and all of “Purifuckingtanical, hypofuckingcritical, soy-slurping, 100 percent testicle-free upper-middle-class America” had caused Pen to laugh out loud for the first time in months.

Pen ignored the Dr. King remark, along with Kiki’s calling her “Penny.” Calmly, she said, “All I’m saying is that more of your outrageously expensive steak is flying off the table than is going into your mouth, for which your circulatory system is probably thanking you. From the bottom of its heart.”

“My father said that if a steak didn’t weigh more than the family Bible, it wasn’t worth his time, and the man’s going gangbusters at eighty-six.”

“Good for him, but you’ve still got twenty bucks’ worth of red meat sitting in your lap.”

Kiki closed her eyes and issued an extravagant groan. “Have you
read
the Bill of Rights?”

“Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Lung Cancer? That part?”

Kiki turned to the pregnant woman at the next table, who had been shooting her murderous looks since she’d sat down. “How about you? Have
you
read the Bill of Rights?”

“You’re a lunatic,” said the pregnant woman.

“Only if being crazy about freedom counts,” whooped Kiki. “That baby of yours will have a better future because of lunatics like me, lady.”

Pen sighed. “I do not, do not, do
not
want to talk about this, but the data regarding the harmful effects of secondhand smoke are looking pretty solid.”

A thoughtful expression stole over Kiki’s face; her chewing slowed. “‘Data
are,
’” she echoed. “Sounds wrong. Is it?”

“I don’t think so. Possibly, you can use ‘is,’ too. Probably.”

“Interesting,” said Kiki, nodding, then she jabbed the air with her fork to signal the end of their grammar facts sidebar. “Anyhoo. Data potata. Folks who don’t want to expose their candy-ass asses to hazards should stay the hell home. The world is dangerous. Deal with it, people.”

“I said I didn’t want to talk about it. Remember?”

The pregnant woman and her friend began ostentatiously slapping their napkins from their laps to their table and signaling their waiter.

“Oh, fine. Fine, fine, fine,” growled Kiki, and jammed the cigarette into the pocket of her immaculate pink Oxford shirt. Kiki swore like a dockworker, but she dressed like a Junior League president. Amelie called her a “Lilly Pulitzer fever dream.”

Kiki sawed off a chunk of meat and wedged it into her mouth, squinting at Pen as though sizing her up.

“What?” asked Pen.

Through meat, Kiki said, “Tell me about this Cat character, the one who dropped you like a hot potato and is whining for your help. Whine, whine, whine.”

Pen had told Kiki about the reunion by way of explaining why Amelie, not Pen, would be escorting Kiki to her speaking engagement at a big hospital benefit the following day (“the Lyme disease lunch,” as Pen and Kiki liked to call it).

“You’re gearing up to give me the ‘You’re Too Nice for Your Own Good’ speech, aren’t you?” Pen asked.

“No, I am not. Honest Injun.”

“I don’t think people say that anymore.”

“Good Lord, whatever. Cross my heart, then,” said Kiki, crossing her heart with her steak knife and alarming vigor. “Look, I strongly suspect that you are being too nice for you own good, but I
get
friendship, undying loyalty, all that crap. It’s one of the few varieties of crap that I do get.”

Because she knew this to be true, Pen thought for a moment, and then said, “Cat is the single most charming person I have ever met. She is beguiling. Bewitching. She pulls you in.”

Kiki frowned. “One person’s charming is another person’s full-of-shit, if you know what I mean.”

“I do know what you mean, and Cat likes attention, for sure. She likes to be fussed over and cuddled and adored and taken care of. She’s a kitten. But she’s a
real
kitten. She’s genuinely sweet, but in good way.”

Kiki chuckled. “Sounds like something I’d say. Okay, so what about Will? What was he like?”

Pen laughed, remembering. “Once, Cat asked Will if he was the WASPiest man on the planet.”

This had been in the spring of their freshman year. Without missing a beat, Will had said, “I used to be, until my brother, Philip, showed up.”

“Isn’t your brother, Philip, a high school sophomore?” Pen had demanded. “Are you saying that you were the WASPiest man on the planet until you were just three years old?”

Will had nodded and said, “It was a good run, though. A really good run.”