Falling Together (43 page)

M
AYBE IT WAS THE FOOD OR THE MUTED LIGHT OR THE CEILING
fan’s slow, hypnotic paddling of the air or maybe it was simply that every journey—and Pen had come to see herself as a person distinctly on a journey (in rare, solitary, un-ironic moments, “seeker” did not seem too strong a word, although what she was seeking, apart from Cat [and she was sure there was something else] she couldn’t say)—has its land of the lotus eaters, its drowsy slowdown in momentum. There would be time to winnow out the reasons later, but as she sat in the living room of the house in which Cat’s father had grown up, surrounded by someone else’s family—Cat’s family, the one she had flown across the world to find—with a plate of food on a tray in front of her, all Pen knew was that she wanted, with her heart, to become part of the place, to unpack her bags, hunker down, and stay.

Jason had wanted to call Dr. Ocampo’s sisters right away, the same night they’d left Armando’s house, right after Pen had recounted her conversation with Armando, giving Jason and Will a nutshell version (with a covert look at Will that meant she would tell him the rest later) that left out just about everything but Cat’s real reason for coming to Cebu. As soon as she had told Jason that she had the sisters’ phone number, he had stuck out his bear-sized paw, palm up, demanding it, and had gotten mad when she’d refused. Cat’s aunts were elderly, she told him, it would be much more considerate to wait until morning, but the truth was she wasn’t sure that Jason’s making the call at all was a good idea, since having him talk to anyone about anything, especially Cat, was almost never a good idea, and she wanted time to discuss the matter with Will in private.

“Who died and made you queen of the world?” Jason had protested, loudly, in the hotel lobby. “You’re not the boss. You don’t get to say what we do!”

He had been so whiny and Pen so groggy and irritable, emotional exhaustion and jet lag’s undertow pulling her down and down, that it was on the tip of her tongue to call him names, to say something low-down and cutting (
Your wife didn’t jump in the sack with Armando after all, moron; she just wanted you to think she did!
—an incongruous put-down if Pen ever heard one), but before she could, a little, niggling, adult voice inside her head reminded her that, blowhard or not, the guy had already been hurt pretty wretchedly in ways he knew about and in ways he didn’t and it would take an exceedingly mean-hearted person to hurt him more, at least right at that moment. Pen sat there trying to gauge whether she was mean-hearted enough and came down on the side of “No” but just barely. So all she said was, “Of course I’m not the boss, but I need to put Augusta to bed. Let’s have breakfast by the pool tomorrow and make a plan. Okay?”

When Jason had begun to sputter at this, Will had said, “Take it easy, man, you’re scaring Augusta,” which of course were the magic words.

With a guilty glance at Augusta, who was sitting in a chair playing with her new favorite toy, a bunch of miniature bananas, each one no more than three inches long, a gift from Armando’s Lola (“
You
are the tiniest!” “No,
you
are the tiniest!” “
You
are the tiniest and have three brown spots!”), and looking not the least bit scared, Jason mumbled, “My bad. See you in the morning.”

In the end, it was Pen who called. She spoke to an aunt named Lita, a short conversation but one full of radical highs and lows—yes, Cat had been there; no, she was not there now; yes, she might be back; yes, they knew where she was; yes, they might be willing to tell Pen—and ending with an invitation.

“Come to the house tomorrow,” said Lita, simultaneously bossy and kind. “As Catalina’s friends and husband, you are welcome. Let us meet you and plan from there.”

She hadn’t said, “Let us meet you and judge your worthiness and sanity so that we can decide whether or not to entrust you with information regarding the whereabouts of our beloved Cat,” but Pen had understood that this was what she meant.

Now, as she sat across from the three women, Lola Lita, Lola Fe, and Lola Graciela (“Lola” having turned out to be not a proper name, as Pen had assumed when she had met Armando’s lola, but a word meaning something like “grandmother” or maybe “respected elderly female relative,” since the three women could not [could they?] all be grandmothers to all of the people in the house—and there were lots of them—who called them “Lola”), their bright, dark eyes upon her, she knew she should have felt anxious, judged, but what she felt instead was intense contentment, a warmth that started someplace in the center of her body and radiated outward. As she bit into her second empanada, a golden half-moon stuffed with beef, raisins, potatoes, and heaven, she acknowledged that it was just possible that this central place was in the vicinity of her stomach.

The Lolas had thrown them a party. At least, Pen was fairly sure that this splendid profusion of food and people was a party, even though when she thanked Lola Lita for it, Lita waved her hand in the air, irritably, as though swatting away thanks along with the ridiculous notion that anyone had gone to any trouble, and scoffed, “It’s nothing. Relatives and a little food. Lunch. Nothing special!”

But there was nothing “nothing special” about it: great piled tangles of noodles rife with bits of vegetables, meat, and shrimp; a concoction of eggplant, okra, green beans, squash, and bitter melon called
pinakbet;
banana blossom salad; whole fish, crispy and gleaming with sauce; thin eggrolls called
lumpia
that Pen could have eaten like popcorn; and, glory of glories, down the center of its own special table, a roasted suckling pig, burnt orange, glistening, dizzyingly fragrant. Pen had a momentary qualm at seeing it whole—snout, ears, tail, the small, poignant hooves (“even-toed ungulate” is the phrase that appeared, unbidden, in Pen’s mind)—but once dismantled, the sublime combination of hard, crackly skin and nearly white, meltingly tender meat caused such rapture in her mouth that she gave hearty thanks to God that she was not a vegetarian.

Still, as astonishing as the food was, Pen knew that the source of her contentment was not solely, or even chiefly, gustatory, but had to do with her fellow partygoers. She would learn that nearly all of them lived there, if not in the main house, then in one of the two other houses that sat on the edges of the dusty backyard. Each tiny house was flanked by a riot of high-gloss green and flowers like little shouts of joy and faced a central space that bore a banana tree, a lanzone tree with cascading clusters of brown-yellow golf-ball-looking fruit, and, queening over everything, a green mango under which slept two black dogs. It was a compound, Pen supposed, although as un-Waco-like as it was un-Kennedy-like, surrounded by a high wall the top of which was spangled with broken bottles embedded in the cement. Despite this hint at a dangerous outside world, Pen felt that she had never been anyplace safer. Even the sharp shards of glass were pretty, glowing with mellow color under the sun.

Although she, Will, and Jason were introduced to each person individually, from the littlest, wobbly-legged toddler, to the skinny, pop-star-haired teenagers slouching in corners, to smiling adults, some chatty, some with shy lowered chins, Pen found that she could not keep straight how each was related to the others, how they all fit in. The titles (tito, tita, cousin, grandson, sister) blurred inside her head. But it seemed to her that specific relationships—who was married to whom, whose children were whose—mattered less here, in this household, than they would have at home.

What was clear was that they were a family, each person belonging to the other, held together by an intergenerational web of talking, teasing, scolding, feeding, pulling onto laps, shooing away, holding close. At the center of the web were the three Lolas. If Pen was initially impressed with their sameness—short gray hair; broad, brown, remarkably unlined faces; delicate hands; voluminous generosity; intelligent black eyes—she quickly began to see differences between them. Lola Fe was jolly, effusive, the one the kids came to when they wanted someone to say yes. Lola Graciela was quiet but watchful; she seemed a little younger than the others. Lola Lita was the boss.

After dessert (Pen, Will, and Jason had slices of leche flan, wondrously eggy and bathed in caramelized sugar; Augusta dove headfirst into a bowl of deep violet-colored ube ice cream, which Pen later learned was made from a variety of yam, a fact that she did not share with Augusta), the party scattered, people going back to their usual Sunday afternoons. Except for the roaming pack of small children into which Augusta had been immediately and thoroughly absorbed, they were alone with the Lolas.

Lola Lita began. “We have been discussing the three of you, and we have a question.”

“If you don’t mind,” added Lola Fe, giving her sister (if she was her sister; Pen wasn’t sure) a look of good-humored remonstrance.

“Of course,” conceded Lola Lita with a nod. “If you don’t mind.”

“We don’t mind,” said Pen.

“Sure,” said Will.

“Fire away!” said Jason. His voice was jocular and too loud. Pen stole a glimpse and saw that he wasn’t just stained red from collarbone to hairline; he was sweating and as antsy as a two-year-old. With reluctant but now familiar compassion washing over her, she thought that she had never seen him so nervous.

“Here is the question,” Lola Lita said, her voice perfectly calm but her eyes burning like coals. “Do you think that Cat would want you to find her?”

The Lolas leaned back in their chairs and folded their hands. Pen and Will and Jason all looked at one another.

“Please,” said Lola Fe quickly, sensing their uneasiness, “do not feel that one of you must answer for all. Maybe it would be best if you each spoke only for yourself.”

Silence. The ceiling fan went slowly round and round. Pen saw a lizard, pale brown and no more than three inches long, dart up the wall. Then Will’s voice, clear and easy: “I think she would. I don’t know if Cat told you about us, about me and Pen—”

“She did,” said Lola Lita with a droll look at the other Lolas. “She told us her life story. In some detail. You were included.”

“Well, then maybe you know that when the three of us last saw each other, we were basically kids,” said Will. “We meant well, but we were a little stupid.”

“Hmm,” sniffed Pen.

Will shot her a half-grin and continued, “Some of us were more stupid than others, but the thing is that each of us, in our own way, thought that if we couldn’t keep being friends in
exactly
the way we’d always been friends, then everything would fall apart.”

Did I think that?
thought Pen.
I don’t know if I thought that.

You have always hated change, have resisted it with everything you’re worth,
she reminded herself, and she had to admit that this was true.

“I think we were wrong about that,” said Will.

“You do?” said Pen, startled.

“Yeah,” said Will, reddening. “I think we should’ve taken more risks, had more—faith, I guess. And now, I think we could use another chance.”

“You think Catalina would agree?” asked Lola Lita.

Will nodded. “I do.” He paused, smiling. “Plus, nobody loves surprises more than Cat.”

Lola Fe laughed, a sweet, husky sound that filled the air inside the house.

“Thank you, Will,” said Lola Lita.

Pen expected Jason to jump in then, but he just sat, staring at nothing, jiggling his knee, looking like he might cry or run out of the room, so Pen took a breath and stared into the faces of the Lolas. A trinity of Lolas.
The three Graces,
she thought,
the three Fates.

“Cat would be as glad to see me as I would to see her,” said Pen finally, and was mortified to hear the trembling in her voice. “She would. We were like sisters. We loved each other.” She shook her head impatiently. “Not loved. Love.”

“Love?” asked Lola Graciela, speaking for the first time. “Even after so many years?”

“Yes,” said Pen staunchly. It was true. She felt the truth of it shine on her like a light. “Of course.”

In unison, the Lolas rustled like a flock of doves, nodding and humming murmurs of assent and approval, at Pen, at one another, before settling down again, their eyes sparkling. Pen felt a rush of elation, as though she had passed a test.

Everyone turned to Jason. Pen braced herself, waiting for belligerence or bravado, an oversized, embarrassing burst of something, but Jason didn’t say anything right away. He seemed to be willing himself not to fidget, with his knees pressed together, his hands gripping the sides of his chair seat. He opened his mouth and shut it again. Pen wasn’t sure he was breathing.

Suddenly, Lola Graciela, who had been so quiet, came alive. She slapped her knee with one hand, and said, with an edge of anger in her voice, “The question is ridiculous for him! She is his wife, no matter what. Naturally, he must find her!”

The other two Lolas did not seem surprised at this outburst. They exchanged a knowing glance between them, and Lita reached out and put her hand over Graciela’s.

“We know that you feel this way, Graci,” said Lita kindly, and, at her touch, the tension seemed to leave Graciela. She lowered her lids and nodded.

Jason cleared his throat.

“Jason would like a chance to speak, I think,” said Lola Lita.

Lola Fe gave him an encouraging thumbs-up with her tiny thumb.

“So, uh, contrary to popular belief,” said Jason, “I’m not an idiot.”