Falling Together (24 page)

“You and Pen, both,” said his mother, smiling. “Hello, Pen.”

“Hello, Mrs. Wadsworth.”

“Charlotte, please.”

“Charlotte,” said Will with a raw laugh. “That’s great, Mom. Very hip. Like your new boyfriend and your cooler of wine.”

“Please don’t be rude,” said Charlotte.

Will turned to Pen and said, in a low voice, “I need to get out of here before I lose my mind.”

“I’ll go get our stuff,” said Pen.

“No, I mean right this second,” said Will. “I need to drive. Or something. I’ll come back.”

“I’ll go with you,” said Pen.

“No,” said Will, shaking his head and letting go of her hand.

“Why not?”

Will gave her an exhausted look with something scarier hovering behind it, “Because I really can’t talk to you right now about why in the hell you’re drunk and when you got that way.”

Pen took a step back, her eyes stinging. “Will!”

“You have the keys, right?” He held out his hand, and Pen gave them to him.

“Promise you’ll be careful. Promise you’ll come back,” she said, but Will was already turning away from her and running toward the car.

I
N ALL OF THE BIG HOUSE
, P
EN COULD FIND NO PLACE TO BE
. S
HE’D
started out in the guest room, but its door, like most of the doors in the house, was too warped by salt air and age to shut properly, and the music, along with the laughter and voices, poured hotly into the room just as the moonlight poured coolly through the white curtain to pool on the floor and make shadows on the wall. Pen gulped water and tried to read, but the words swam in front of her eyes, and all she could do was lie on the bed, trying not to hear the noise from downstairs, straining to hear the sound of Will’s car. Emotions washed over her: mostly anger—at Charlotte, drinking wine, dancing while her son’s heart broke somewhere out in the dark; at Damon for letting her drink, for dancing, for being attractive, for being here at all; at Will for leaving her alone with them—but also sorrow and worry and something else, a cut-loose reckless feeling that might have been desire if it had any suitable object to fix on.

At midnight, Pen could not stand it a minute longer. She pulled on her shoes and the fisherman’s sweater, yanked the quilt off the bed, and crept downstairs, wincing at every creak the steps made, wanting to be invisible. From the landing she could see Will’s mother in the living room, dancing with surprising grace across the floor to sit in Damon’s lap.
How could you?
she thought.
How
could
you?
She had to stop herself from shouting the words. Later, she would remember this righteous indignation with shame.

They didn’t see her. Pen let herself out, the sound of the screen door reminding her of how arriving at the house just a couple of days ago had felt like a blessing. She had planned to sit in the porch rocker, but it was too close to what was happening in the house and, when she looked at the chair, she remembered seeing Damon there, asleep, so she went out into the backyard to get one of the Adirondack chairs and clumsily carried and dragged the big, awkward bulk of it to the grass a few yards out from the porch, a spot that gave her a clear view of the driveway. Then she cocooned herself in the quilt, tucked her hands deeply into the cuffs of the sweater, and sat down to wait for Will.

She woke, or half-woke, to the feeling of hands on her shoulders.

“Will,” she whispered, with sleepy gratitude. “You’re home.” She opened her eyes.

Damon knelt on the grass in front of her, his face close. Pen blinked and leaned away from him, confused.

“Hey there,” he said, smiling. “You must be cold out here.”

“Where’s Will?” Her voice was a croak.

“Not back yet,” said Damon. He took his hands off her shoulders and put them on the wide, flat arms of the chair and said it again, “You must be cold.”

Then he kissed her, and, after a numb few seconds, his warm mouth began waking her up, and the restless free-floating wanting that had been moving through her for what she now realized had been days, weeks even, contracted and concentrated to the point at which their two mouths met. She didn’t think about Charlotte or Will or even Damon, because the man kissing her wasn’t Damon. Or he was Damon and at the same time wasn’t. It didn’t matter. When he began to pull away, she put her hand on the back of his neck and pulled him back to her. She kissed him because he was there. She kissed him because he was kissing her.

“T
RANSFERENCE,” SAID
A
MELIE
.

“What?” said Pen.

“You transferred your desire for Will onto Damon. Clearly.”

“Except that I didn’t have desire for Will.”

“Oh, please.”

“Trust me, he was my best friend. I definitely would have noticed if I had desire for him.”

“Or maybe,” said Amelie smugly, “that’s why they call it the subconscious. Because it’s subconscious.”

S
HE MIGHT HAVE PUSHED HIM AWAY
. S
HE MIGHT HAVE SLID FROM THE
chair to the grass, opened the quilt, and pulled him inside with her. Pen would never find out because what broke, ragged, through the night was Will’s voice, saying, “How could you do this?” And just as quickly as they’d come together, Pen and Damon broke apart, Damon dropping back to sit on the grass.

“Will, man,” said Damon, but Will didn’t even glance in his direction. Will stood in the darkness just beyond the circle of porch light so that Pen couldn’t see his features, but she knew he was looking at her. In alarm, she jumped to her feet, shucking the quilt off her shoulders and starting toward him.

Will held up his hand. “Stop.”

Pen stood still. “I’m sorry,” she said.

Will took a step toward her and the light fell on his face. His expression, not closed and angry, as she had expected, but wide open as a child’s, stunned and hurt, made her hate herself.

“Him?” said Will.

“I don’t know why I did it,” Pen said pleadingly. “I’m so sorry.”

“You—” Will broke off and just looked at Pen. “That’s not something you would do.”

“I didn’t mean to.”

“What does that mean?”

Pen didn’t know what to say.

“It means you’re down here making out with my mother’s whatever-the-hell he is. Boy toy. It means I don’t know who you are.”

“Yes, you do.” Pen was crying. “You know you do.”

“Will, brother. It was just a kiss,” said Damon, with an attempt at a laugh, and Pen shut her eyes (had he really said “brother”?), waiting for an explosion.

But when Will answered, his voice was simply cold. “My mom is what? Passed out someplace? Seemed like a good time to give old Pen here a go?”

He shook his head in disgust, then ran up the porch steps. Before Pen realized what he was doing, before she could stop him, Damon was trotting up after him. He put one giant, bony hand on Will’s shoulder.
Oh, God,
thought Pen, her chest tightening,
whatever you’re about to do, don’t, don’t don’t
.

“Listen,” said Damon, with a smile that was probably meant to be kind and ingratiating, but under the circumstances, just looked smarmy, “I want you to know that there’s no betrayal going on here. Nothing like that. Your mom and I are a no-strings operation, strictly casual.”

A frozen second. Then the bottom dropped out of the world, and all of them crashed downward into a roaring nightmare, worse than a nightmare because it was so real, so flesh and blood. Pen’s voice screaming “stop” might have been a fly buzzing. Nothing stopped. It went on and on. Until: Will’s mother on the porch in a yellow bathrobe, yelling, “William, William”; Will turning his head to look at her; Damon catching him off guard and, like a battering ram, knocking him across the porch and into the corner of a railing.

Will lay still, his head bleeding onto the gray-white boards of the porch.

Pen ran to him—stepping over Damon, who sat slumped against the wall of the house, holding his rib cage and gasping—with a single throbbing thought:
If he is dead, I will die.

Will’s mother got there first. She dropped onto the porch next to him, put her face close to Will’s, and pressed her fingers to the side of his neck. “My baby. My darling boy,” she cried out. “I am so sorry.”

Pen’s heart seemed to stop, but she saw Will put his hand on his mother’s hand and hold it for a few seconds. When he let go, he sat up, pressed his hand to the side of his head, groaned, then twisted sideways and vomited over the edge of the porch into the bushes.

“Forgive me,” said his mother in the most regretful voice Pen had ever heard. “It’s all my fault.”

“Not all,” said Pen. Will took his hand away from his head and stared uncomprehendingly at his wet red palm, and Pen saw that it wasn’t the time to sit around talking about blame.

“You’re going to the hospital,” she said.

Will turned his battered face up to her, and, to her amazement, laughed a short, bitter laugh.

“What?” asked Pen.

“Who will drive me?” said Will. “You’re all drunk.”

“I’m not,” said Pen. “I drank that wine hours and hours ago. I’m as sober as I can be.”

She watched the archness fall away from his face and the hurt flash back into his eyes. She knew what he was thinking as surely as if he’d spoken the words aloud:
You kissed my mother’s piece-of-shit boyfriend, and you weren’t even drunk.
Pen quashed the useless impulse to apologize again and said, “Can you walk to the car?”

Pen heard a long groan from behind her and turned to Damon. “What about you? You need to go, too?”

“I don’t think so,” he said, working his way slowly up the wall, until he was standing, hunched and still breathing hard. He shot a glance at Will. “You’re crazy,” he said, with a strange lack of anger. “You’re going to get yourself killed one day.”

“Maybe,” said Will.

“Go inside the house,” said Charlotte to Damon. “Go on.”

When he was gone, she started to help Will to his feet, but he picked up her hands in both of his and moved them off him, impassively, as though they weren’t his mother’s hands or hands at all. He reached for the porch railing and pulled himself up, wincing every time he shifted position. Blood was running down his neck and the front of his shirt.

“Wait,” said Pen. She ran into the house, catching a fleeting glimpse of Damon on the living room sofa, ran upstairs to the linen closet, and grabbed an armful of thick white towels.

Back on the porch, she handed Will a folded-up towel for his head and took hold of his arm.

“I don’t need help,” said Will balefully.

“Yes, you do,” said Pen.

T
HEY DIDN’T TALK ON THE WAY TO THE HOSPITAL
. P
EN DIDN’T TALK
because she couldn’t think of anything to say that wasn’t scolding or apologizing, and she assumed Will didn’t talk because he was too busy hating her and bleeding. He had refused to lie down in the backseat and sat with the towel between his head and the front passenger-side window, leaning as far away from Pen as it was possible to lean. The ride lasted twenty minutes, twenty minutes of silence, Pen catching glimpses of Will’s unmoving face in the occasional beams of light from outside, and by the end of the ride, Pen found she had reached an odd, wrung-out state that was almost like peace. The tumult of blame, anger, confusion, worry, regret was all gone, everything was gone, except for love, of course, from which there was no relief.

The emergency room was quiet, and the nurse took Will back right away to be triaged. Under other circumstances, Pen would’ve gone, too, but without asking, she knew Will didn’t want her with him. She sat in the waiting room for what felt like hours, paging through months-old magazines and watching close-captioned CNN, until a nurse came in to say that Will’s head was stitched but that he had a concussion and needed to remain there for observation.

“Does he want me?” said Pen.

The nurse gave her a concerned smile, looking, for a second, like Pen’s mother. “Not right now,” she said gently. “Are you his girlfriend?”

Pen started to cry, mostly from sheer exhaustion. “His friend,” she said. “His best friend. But he’s mad at me right now.”

“I’m sorry,” said the nurse. “He said you should go on home, and he’ll call when he needs you.”

“Can I stay?” said Pen, wiping her eyes. “For a little while more?”

“Sure you can,” said the nurse. “He’s not the boss of the waiting room, now is he?”

Pen fell asleep, her cheek leaning against her hand. When the nurse shook her awake next, Pen saw on the television that it was 7:05. Morning.

“Hey,” said the nurse, “I told Will you were still here. You want to come on back?”

Pen nodded.

The sight of Will sitting in the hospital bed in a blue-sprigged gown, the white sheets over his legs, flooded Pen with relief, even though he looked surpassingly bad, unshaven and weary and the color of oatmeal, apart from a purple, swollen cheekbone and a black eye. Pen saw that a patch of his hair had been shaved on the right side and had a short caterpillar of stitches running across it. But he was breathing. He was safe. She had known he would live, of course, but the ugliness of the night before had shaken her up, twisted her imagination into irrational shapes. Looking at him, she realized she had been afraid, terrified even, that she would never see him again. But here he was.