Falling Together, Page 3

  “I’m sorry,” said Pen. She looked down at the profiteroles, the chocolate sauce in its plastic cup, and she ached for Jamie and herself and her mother in Tibet, and her father, who deserved better than to die on the dirty ground.

  Jamie leaned on the counter with both hands, his shoulders hunched.

  “You think I don’t miss him?” he said finally, without turning around. “You think you’re the only one?”

  “No.”

  Jamie turned around and looked evenly at Pen. “Forget moving on or getting over it or whatever because who does that? But I gotta tell you, it would be really good if we didn’t have another anniversary like last year’s. Good for Augusta, especially.”

  At this mention of Augusta, Pen turned her face away sharply, as though she’d been slapped.

  Jamie’s voice softened. “Good for you, too. Right? For all of us.”

  Pen didn’t look at him, but said, “I know.”

  “The bike ride is supposed to be a way to celebrate Dad, right? Everyone together?”

  “I know. All right? I know. I don’t have any plans to fall apart again, so you can stop worrying.” Pen’s voice was bitter, but she wasn’t mad at Jamie.

  Their father, Ben Calloway, had been a passionate cyclist, getting up before daylight for decades to ride with a group of people who, over the years, had become like family to Pen and Jamie, a tribe of aunts and uncles with sunglass tans and articulated calves. The rides would begin and end at the Calloway house in Wilmington, Delaware, and for Pen’s whole childhood, before she got old enough to ride with them, Saturday mornings meant watching for her dad and his friends through the screen door and then coming outside in her pajamas to greet them. She loved it, the clack of their shoes on the front walk, the way they’d drop onto their backs on the lawn and squirt her with their water bottles, her mother coming out to laugh and offer them breakfast.

  To mark the anniversary of Ben’s death, two of the riders, David and Tracy Hersh, had organized a long bike ride through the countryside. More than thirty people, including Pen and Jamie, had met that May morning in front of the house. Pen would never forget how perfect it felt just before they took off: the dewy grass, the laundered scent of her mother’s lilacs, everyone poised, one foot on the ground, ready to begin.

  Pen’s mother, Margaret, was still home then, hadn’t yet been chased off by grief or loneliness to faraway places, and the last thing Pen saw before she set out was her mother standing on the porch with Augusta half-asleep in the crook of one arm, her free hand pressed to her mouth, then waving in the air.

  But a few miles into the ride, as they came around a curve and the trees opened up to a vista of fields and stone barns and streaked-silk sky, Pen was overcome by a bleakness that made it hard to breathe, a comprehension that this road, this sky, the bikes rounding the curve together, swooping like a flock of birds, even the faint twinge between her own shoulder blades and the air filling her lungs, all of it belonged to her father, was rightfully his, except that he was dead, and so it belonged to no one and meant nothing.

  Pen had not finished the ride. She had slipped to the back of the pack and stopped her bike by the side of the road, willing the others not to notice, to keep going, but they turned back, all of them.

  “I don’t feel good,” she explained, forcing a smile. “A stomach thing. You guys keep going. I’ll be fine.”

  Even though she had tried to avoid looking in Jamie’s direction, he had pulled alongside her and stopped, leveling a gray-eyed stare at her that was fierce and pleading at the same time.

  “Stay. You have to,” he’d said in an urgent voice that only she could hear.

  But she had turned around, gone back to the house, stumbled past Augusta who sat at the kitchen table, a cup of milk in her hand, her eyes round and surprised, past her mother who stood at the counter, coiling dough into cinnamon rolls, and up the stairs into her old bedroom. She tossed her body onto the bed like bags of sand, and she stayed there for the better part of three days.

  When her mother tried to coax her to get up, she cried and said that she was too tired. When Jamie raged at her for being selfish and for scaring Augusta, she turned her face to the wall. When Pen woke to find the hard knot of her child jammed against her back, she turned over, put her arms around the little girl, and said, “I’m sorry, baby. Mama’s sick,” in a hoarse, remote voice that even she knew was the opposite of comforting. For weeks afterward, after they were home in Philadelphia and back to their regular routine, Pen would catch Augusta watching her with a mixture of hope and worry, an expression no one should ever see on a four-year-old’s face.

  “I wouldn’t do that to Augusta again,” said Pen, more to herself than to Jamie.

  “You sure?”

  Pen rested her chin on her palm and looked at the vase of flowers in the middle of the table, tulips, barely open, like little folded hands in white gloves.

  “I didn’t get it,” she said. “For that whole first year, I knew that he was gone from us and how unfair and sickening and sad that was. But I didn’t get that what was worse, the very worst thing, was that he was gone from himself and all the things he loved. The day of the bike ride, it fell on me like an avalanche.”

  She looked up at Jamie and shrugged. “So now I know. And it can’t fall on me again.”

  Jamie got a bag of coffee beans out of the freezer and poured them into his expensive coffeemaker with its built-in grinder and timer. Pen listened to the oily click of the beans, waiting.

  “Your reunion doesn’t start until, what, a week, week and a half, after this year’s ride?” said Jamie finally. “So if you’re not planning to be incapacitated, why don’t you go?”

  Pen stood up, slapping crumbs off her skirt in annoyance. “Why are you so sure I’d want to see Cat, anyway? It’s not like I’ve been holding my breath until she and Will came back.”

  “Uh, actually, if you think about it, that’s exactly what it’s like.”

  “Nice,” said Pen. “Very nice. They walked out on me. Why would I want to see either of them?”

  “Because they’re Cat and Will.” Jamie flopped onto the sofa and snagged a remote control out of the bafflingly large collection on the coffee table. Before he began pushing buttons, he added, “And you’re you.”

  WHEN PEN WAS STILL NOT ASLEEP AT 3:00 A.M., SHE GOT OUT OF BED and walked, as silently as she could, into Augusta’s room, a thing she almost never did. For Augusta, the state of sleep was a frail construction, something you could send toppling with a misplaced footfall or clearing of your throat. But every now and then, Pen risked it. Now, she closed the door behind her and stood, allowing her eyes to adjust to the powdered-sugar sifting of moonlight and streetlight on the windowsill and the thin blue glow of the nightlight that Pen allowed as a concession to Augusta’s fear of the dark, even though she’d read that nightlights could cause nearsightedness later in life. Glasses later, she decided, beats terror now, hands down.

  Augusta lay in one of her customarily untranquil positions, as though she’d been struck by sleep mid-snow-angel, her duvet and sheets heaped in drifts on the floor around her bed. Pen resisted touching her, but leaned in close to listen to her breath and smell her smell: honey soap, apple shampoo, and a fundamental Augusta scent that reminded Pen of dandelion stems.

  Without taking her eyes off her daughter, Pen lowered herself by increments into the chair next to Augusta’s bed and thought what she had thought so many times before: How can Cat and Will not know you? For weeks after Augusta was born, Pen had expected them to come, even though, when the three of them parted ways, first Cat leaving, then Will, they had all agreed to make it final, to never get in touch, not years later, not ever.

  “We’re all or nothing,” Cat had said, tears streaming down her face. “We can’t be fake or partial or now-and-then. That would be wretched.” Pen hadn’t been so sure, but she had agreed to it anyway.

  Even so, and even though she had no clear idea of how they wo
uld’ve found out about Augusta’s birth even if they had wanted to, she had waited for them to come. She had waited again after her father died. At the funeral, she had sat between her mother and Patrick, Augusta on her lap, feeling broken and absent, her body numb inside her black dress, and had suddenly felt them there, behind her, the certainty of their presence running like electricity along her shoulders and up her neck. She had stood and spun around, searching through the crowds of people who had loved her father, for Will and Cat who had loved him as much as anyone. Nothing.

  After that, over and over, for two years, Pen had imagined what she would say to them if she ever saw them again, all the ways she would be angry or indifferent, clever or cool. But from the beginning, from the very first day each of them walked out and for every second since, what she would have said if she were speaking truthfully was this: “Since you left there’s been a you-shaped space beside me, all the time. It never goes away.”

  “All right, then,” whispered Pen into the darkness of Augusta’s room. “What the cluck. She wants me to be there, so I’ll go.”

  CHAPTER FOUR

  WILL COULD STILL CONJURE THEM UP. LIKE NOW, FOR INSTANCE, as he worked at his desk, he could look through the window and watch them emerge from between the guesthouse and the japonica bushes and walk across his backyard, past the weird village of staked birdhouses his mother had set up, past the crab apple snowing white onto the grass. Pen all spare, pliant lines, with her hair pulled back, her hard cyclist’s legs. Tiny, animated Cat with her usual bird-of-paradise plumage: lapis-blue scarf, flame-red dress, green shoes.

  Sometimes, he had nothing to do with it; they showed up out of nowhere, with the fast sting of a static electric shock. Just yesterday, after he’d gotten the e-mail, he had seen Pen’s long, oval-nailed fingers wrapped around a stranger’s coffee cup in the Bean There, Done That Café. These visitations didn’t happen often, a few times a year maybe, but they always left Will a little out of breath, the sudden yank backward through time: Pen’s surprising, childlike laugh bubbling up over restaurant noise or her almost comically perfect posture (“Tut, tut! Chin up, shoulders back, stiff upper lip,” Cat would tease in a very bad British accent. “For God and Empire, you know.”) inhabiting the back, neck, and shoulders of a woman across the room at a party.

  Once, a couple of years ago, as he stood in line for a movie, he had heard Cat’s voice, winsome, tinny, and unmistakably off-key, singing a song he didn’t know but that was exactly the kind of sappy love song Cat would adore. He had left his place in line to find the singer, who turned out to be teenaged and blue-haired with a nose piercing that looked fresh and painful, a detail that had annoyed Will unaccountably, almost to the point of anger. How stupid of him, he had thought, how moronic, after so many years, to look for Cat and find this silly, attention-hungry kid instead.

  Now, though, he let himself fall into the act of imagining them, of hearing Cat’s silver bangles add themselves to the morning music—birds and, already, a distant lawnmower—of watching them balance each other the way they always had, Pen shortening her fluid, stalking stride, Cat stepping fast and light, like a sandpiper, so that she seemed, from this distance, to just skim the ground.

  Will shifted his gaze to the bulletin board on the wall next to his desk. He had read Cat’s e-mail once, then printed it out and pinned it to the bulletin board. Pinning e-mails to the bulletin board wasn’t something he usually did, and he didn’t analyze his reasons for doing it now. “You’re trying to make it more actual,” his mother had said when she’d seen it. “You’re filling a space,” which was just the kind of thing his mother said these days, although in this case, as in others, he had to admit that she might have a point.

  Dear Will,

  I know it’s been forever, but I need you. Please come to the reunion. I’ll find you there. I’m sorry for everything.

  Love,

  Cat

  It didn’t sound like Cat. Will had thought this as soon as he’d read it. A flat, sparse e-mail from a girl (Will still thought “girl” when he thought of Cat) who was never either of those things. The Cat Will had known was effusive and playful, hardwired for flirting. “Buckets of love,” Cat would have written. “Aeons, oceans, and mountains of love forever and ever.” “I need you,” though, that sounded like Cat.

  The e-mail was pinned next to a poem that Kara had given him, left for him to find there on the bulletin board, when they had first started dating. “I Knew a Woman” by Theodore Roethke. Funny, Will had thought at the time, for his girlfriend to give him a love poem in the voice of a man worshipping a woman. “This is what I want,” the gift suggested. “Love me like this.”

  Will liked the poem for its rhymes and because it didn’t praise the usual body parts—eyes, lips, et cetera—but the woman’s body in action, her specific way of moving or of holding still. After Kara had gone, moved out without ever having entirely moved in, Will had left the poem where it was. In his mind, it had never had all that much to do with Kara, who was pretty and smart, but not exactly graceful, a fact she freely acknowledged. Still, when the man in the poem asserts, parenthetically, more to himself than to anyone else, “(I measure time by how a body sways.),” Will had always known exactly what he meant.

  “‘I’m sorry for everything,’” Cat had written in the e-mail. Why should you be sorry? Will thought, and looked out the window again to see, not Cat or Pen, but his mother, in the flesh and saluting the sun. Even though she had been this woman for almost five years, Will still felt amazed at the sight of her, sturdy, lean, and clear-eyed. She traced arcs in the air with her arms; her gray hair flashed. Abruptly, she broke her posture to wildly shoo a fly away, hands flapping, elbows stabbing the air. When she gave the retreating fly the finger, Will grinned.

  He remembered the conversation they’d had on the first anniversary of her sobriety. They were celebrating at the summerhouse where his mother had lived year-round since the divorce. His sister, Tully, was upstairs napping with her new baby; his brother, Philip, and Tully’s husband, Max, had driven into town for lobsters, corn, tomatoes, and blueberry pies. Will had been working at his computer on the porch. He liked it out there, even though it was smotheringly hot and breezeless that day, the wind chimes hanging, listless, in the sticky air. His mother had come up behind him and pressed a cold glass of iced tea against the back of his neck. When he reached around for the glass, she’d given his hand a little slap.

  “Talk to me,” she had ordered, “or no drink for you.”

  Will had laughed, closed his laptop, jumped up, and pulled out a chair for her, into which she settled like a cat, tucking her feet underneath her, leaning forward, and eyeing him determinedly.

  “Oh, man, what are you up to now?” Will said warily.

  “I asked Philip and now I’m asking you.”

  “Uh-oh.”

  “It’s just this: I’ve done a lot of changing this past year, and I’m wondering how you feel about it all.”

  Her eyes were hazel, like Will’s, coppery brown near the pupils, shading to amber and ending with rims of dark green, and they were looking at him with a combination of patience and insistence. We will have this conversation, the look said, if it takes a hundred years.

  “Good,” answered Will. “I feel good.”

  The eyes waited, unblinking.

  “Proud of you,” he went on. “Relieved. Uh, happy at how happy you are. I’m glad you’re painting.”

  “Thank you,” said his mother. “All very nice. What else?”

  “Else?”

  “Yup.”

  He slapped his neck. “Mosquitoes.”

  “William.”

  “What was Philip’s answer?”

  “William.”

  Will thought for a few seconds, looking out at the wide lawn, the blue-purple hydrangeas and thick, leaning stands of black-eyed Susans, the blown-glass hummingbird feeders hanging from the trees, and, yards away, the vegetable garden looking like a tiny campgro
und, with its stakes and bean teepees. He loved this place. It had been the setting for some intense family ugliness over the years, and this very porch was the spot where his friendship with Pen had ended, smashed to smithereens, but the place itself had stayed pure, calm and unstained. Will felt oddly glad for it, glad that its days of bearing witness to meanness or betrayal or to the icy, cutting conversations that had been his father’s specialty were over.

  “Okay, how about this? Sometimes, I worry that you’ll change so much I won’t know you anymore,” he had said finally. “Some of those friends of yours, they’re nice, but they’re a little…”

  “Humorless?” his mother offered. “Annoyingly earnest? Overly huggy?”

  “Yeah, that,” said Will, laughing.

  “Say more. What else worries you?”

  “Apart from your maniacal insistence on openness and communication, you mean?”

  “Yes.” She folded her hands and smiled innocently, waiting. “Apart from that.”

  “All right, all right.” He thought for a few seconds, listening to the bees hum like tiny engines. “I’m getting used to the yoga and the vegetarianism. I can see the point of them. But the really hard-core New Age stuff makes me—” He searched for the right words (itch uncontrollably, vomit, run like hell), then gave up. “I want you to be happy, and you should do whatever it takes. I’ll adjust.”

  “But from a purely selfish perspective…,” prompted his mother.

  “You should get a job with the KGB. Seriously.”

  “I believe the KGB was dissolved some time ago. As you were saying.”

  Will picked a leaf of mint off the surface of his iced tea and chewed it.

  “From a purely selfish perspective, I’d say that I just want to keep feeling like we speak the same language. And I want you to stay funny.”

  His mother slapped the table and laughed. Then she leaned toward him and said, “How about this? Yoga, vegetarianism, and maybe just a bit of Buddhism. Tibetan. The joyful kind. But no crystals, personal gurus, or star charts.”