Falling Together (32 page)

“But Mark Venverloh looks, to the untrained eye, like a—step up. Possibly even a gigantic one.”

“Richer,” said Will.

“And better dressed, which let’s face it, isn’t saying that much. And handsomer.”

“Your dad was a good-looking man.”

“He was, but he was regular-guy-handsome, not movie-star-handsome. I feel sort of sorry for my dad, and feeling sorry for him makes me feel terrible.”

“I bet your mom doesn’t think he’s a step up.”

“Of course not!”

“And I bet your dad could’ve handed him
and
his ten-thousand-dollar bike their asses in a mass start hill climb.”

Pen smiled.
This is why I love Will Wadsworth,
she thought.

“On a platter,” she said.

L
ATER THAT NIGHT, CLOSER TO MORNING REALLY, THE DOUBLE
whammy of the fox and Mr. V having electrified Pen’s usual insomnia so that the inside of her head was beehive-crowded, bristling with light, and a million miles away from sleep, Pen went downstairs to get herself some tea and was surprised to see lamplight coming from the family room. She looked in and saw Margaret tucked into one corner of the big sofa reading a book, and the sight of her made Pen catch her breath. She looked purely alone but content, as complex and self-contained as a Russian doll, inward and inward and inward. As Pen watched, her mother smiled a private smile at something in her book, and Pen thought she had never seen anything so incandescently lovely as her mother alone, until her mother glanced up and saw her and shut her book and became lovelier still, open-faced and alive.

Pen thought,
You are like me. You like your little pockets of solitude, but you’re not made for being alone for long.
There were people who could live on their own and be happy, and then there were people like Pen and Margaret who needed the falling together, the daily work of giving and taking and talk and touch.

Even so, love? Commitment? Again? How much easier to just settle into a life of family and friends, of dating even, of traveling and reading and being at peace. She felt happy for her mother, but she felt scared for her, too.

“Come here, baby,” said Margaret, and Pen sat down next to her and rested her head against her shoulder.

“I’m happy for you, Mom,” said Pen. “I really am.”

“I’m glad,” said her mother. Then she added, “Mark wants us all to come to dinner at his house. He wants to know you and Jamie and Augusta, and for us to know his boys. He has three sons.”

Agree,
Pen told herself,
just suck it up and say yes.
But she pictured them, sitting around an enormous table, a chandelier sparkling overhead, casting its coins of light over them all, turning them into a family, and she could only think,
Oh, Daddy.

She kissed her mother’s shoulder. “Is it all right if I say ‘Yes, but not quite yet’?”

“Can you say ‘Soon’?”

Pen had to smile. Of all the things her mother was, she had never been a pushover.

“Yes,” said Pen, closing her eyes. What else was there to do? “Soon.”

T
HREE DAYS AFTER HIS LUNCH WITH
S
AM
, W
ILL STILL HADN
’
T
told Jason what he’d found out about Cat’s whereabouts. He knew that he should. He knew that even Pen, who had, during more than one phone conversation, argued vehemently (and cantankerously) against telling him, knew that they should, even if she hated to admit it.

“We told him we would try to help him,” Will had reminded her the night before. “We wouldn’t have even known to call Sam if it weren’t for him.”

“We didn’t
promise
that we’d tell him what she said,” Pen had countered.

“The promise was implied.”

“That’s not how promises work,” scoffed Pen. “They aren’t implied. They’re overt. There’s a universally accepted method to them.”

“And what’s that?”

“You say, ‘I promise.’ Especially if the person asks you to promise, which Jason distinctly did not do.”

“Maybe he didn’t think he had to.”

Will had waited, then, for Pen’s innate sense of justice to come to the fore or, if not come to the fore, at least to start nagging her like an itch.

“It
might
be different if we actually knew where she was now,” she had said finally, grudgingly. “We only know where she used to be: the name of a hotel, where she’s probably not even staying anymore. We don’t even know if she’s still in the same city. When it comes right down to it, we don’t even know if she’s in the same country!”

“She told Sam fifty-nine days, which leaves her with about twenty-five to go.”

“She’s
allowed
to stay for fifty-nine. That doesn’t mean she will. She’s
Cat,
remember? She’s whimsical. She might have changed her mind last week and headed to Australia to see a wallaby. She might be sailing around the world this minute on some guy’s yacht.”

“Don’t you get the idea that this trip was serious for Cat, though? Not some wacky adventure?”

“Maybe. Yes.” She made an exasperated cat-hiss noise. “Okay, but even so, she might not be where she was when she called Sam. It’s a big country, right? I mean, not relative to this country, but relative to Cat, it’s big. I googled it, and it has, like, seven thousand islands. She could be on any one of them.”

“I googled it, too, and I’m pretty sure that a lot of those islands don’t have people on them. They’re basically just bumps in the ocean.”

“Really? I didn’t know that. What else did you find out?”

“Well, some people say that the number of islands changes, depending on the tide, although that could just be a myth.”

“Hmm, I bet it’s not a myth. What do you think?”

“I think you should hold it right there, Penelope.”

“What?”

“You think I don’t recognize a diversionary tactic when I hear one?”

“From what would I be trying to divert you?” asked Pen innocently.

“The fact that none of this really matters. The exact number of islands in the archipelago that is the Philippines doesn’t matter.”

“Maybe not to you, Yankee,” interjected Pen, “but the Filipinos might care.”

Will ignored this. “How whimsical or not whimsical Cat is doesn’t matter, either. Neither does her exact location at this very second. We still have to tell Jason what we found out. It’s only fair.”

“What about what’s fair to Cat?” snapped Pen. “She doesn’t want him to find her. She doesn’t like him.”

Will had smiled. “Come on, she might
like
him.”

In the turbulent silence that followed, Will had imagined that he could hear Pen struggling with her conscience the way he was struggling with his.

“Look, I know she doesn’t want him to find her,” Will had said finally. “Why do you think I didn’t e-mail him right away?”

“No, you’re right, you’re right,” said Pen grimly. “We’d be jerks not to tell him.”

“We’ll be jerks either way, when you think about it.”

“Don’t think about it,” growled Pen. “Just send Jason the damn e-mail.”

“At least if we tell him, we can be jerks taking the high road.”

“Great,” said Pen. “Very comforting.”

However, that conversation had taken place the night before, and it was now almost noon, and Will was still treating his e-mail account as though it were radioactive. Not only his e-mail, but his entire computer, which meant that he was trying to write his novel (about a boy whose scientifically-doctored-with doghouse transports him into the mind of a twelve-year-old giant named Lulu) at the kitchen table with pencil on a pad of paper. This never worked for him before, and it didn’t work now. He liked to see the words on the screen. He liked to delete words and have them be gone, extinguished, annihilated. When his pencil lead broke, he threw it across the room, aiming for the trash can, which was closed because it was always closed. It had a stainless-steel, spring-loaded lid, the kind that stays closed. Still, when the pencil bounced off the lid, fell on the floor, and rolled under the refrigerator, Will took it personally.

“Jesus. Fine,” he hollered at the trash can.

There were seven messages from Jason in his inbox, their subject headings comprising a tidy narrative of Jason’s frustration. The oldest one said “Hey man!”; the second newest, “WTF?” The most recent was the longest: “Once a dick…,” which struck Will as mildly funny by ordinary standards and mind-blowingly clever when you considered the source. He thought about opening that one to see if Jason had actually finished the sentence, but he deleted the e-mails without reading them and started a new one. At about the middle of the second paragraph, though, it hit him: Jason might never write back. What was there to stop him from grabbing the information and running? Will had to admit that, after waiting so long to fill Jason in, he probably deserved this, but it wouldn’t work. He needed to witness Jason’s reaction. He needed to know what he would do.

Will scratched his head, hissed “Shit,” shot a malevolent look at his cell phone, and typed, I have some info about Cat. Give me a call, followed by his telephone number, which he stabbed in hard with one resentful but fatalistic finger. After he clicked Send, he got up to get himself a cup of coffee (actually, he jumped out of his chair like it was on fire), but the phone rang before he had even opened the cabinet where he kept the mugs. Cursing under his breath the whole way, he walked back to his office where he’d left his phone.

“Hello,” he said and braced himself for a loud tirade, but Jason was surprisingly calm, even—disturbingly—friendly.

“Yo, dude,” he said. “I thought you’d never call.”

Will decided not to point out that Jason was the one who had called. He said, “Sorry, man. It’s been a little crazy around here.”

“No worries, no worries. Just glad you’re not dead.”

“Thanks.”

“So…” Jason stretched the word out like gum and pronounced it “Sue.”

Right there? That?
Will told Jason inside his head.
That’s why nobody likes you.

Aloud, he said, “I saw Sam at that barbecue joint in Tennessee.”

In an act of blatant procrastination, Will considered how he never used the word
joint
to mean “place,” except when it came to barbecue. Or maybe gin. No, not gin. Who was he kidding? Burger? He looked out the window at the birdbath, which was empty, causing him to question, in a perfunctory manner, the hygiene of the local bird population. Jason breathed, audibly, into Will’s ear. It still wasn’t too late to hang up. Change his cell-phone number. Move.

“Hel-lo?” said Jason. “You saw Sam. What’d you think?”

“I liked her. I mean, she’s a little, uh, theatrical, but she seems solid underneath all that. And funny. I can see how she and Cat would end up friends.”

“Yeah, she hates me,” said Jason casually and with a notable lack of malice. “Thinks I’m a pathetic idiot.”

“Oh,” said Will. “That’s … too bad.”

“Naw. No skin off my back. No problemo, you know what I mean?”

Neyeeeewww problemo
. Will shut his eyes, overcome by nostalgia for the days when a phone receiver was substantial enough to effectively bang against your forehead.

“Anyway, we talked about Cat,” he said.

“Take it with a grain of salt, that’s all I have to say,” said Jason. “Whatever Sam says requires a major grain. Not just grain,
grains
. Many a grain.”

“Right,” said Will and was busy making a mental record of “many a grain” for when he told Pen about the conversation later when it hit him that, in addition to mocking what Jason had just said, he could use it. “And that’s exactly how I took everything she told me. She might know what she’s talking about, but then again, she might not.”

“She might be full of shit.”

“Definitely possible.” Will sent out a silent apology in what he estimated was Sam’s direction.

“So, uh, what’d she say, anyway?”

Jason did not sound like a person who had begged abjectly for help in the moonlight or one who had shot off six e-mails in three days, jam-packed with escalating anger. His voice was nonchalant, bordering on breezy. It said,
Dude, since you happen to have gotten me on the phone and I have a sec, dude, you might as well, you know, tell me what you know:
the voice of an obsessed and desperate man desperately trying not to sound obsessed and desperate, maybe not the most pathetic sound Will had ever heard, but one of them. How could he tell this sad man where Cat was? How could he not? Will picked up a pen and wrote “Shit” three times on the back of an old envelope.