Falling Together (52 page)

Will looked down at his lap and started to speak, but, like a slap, it struck her and she said, “Patrick.”

“He was next to you. He had his arm around you.”

Pen tried to remember. “I guess he did. I don’t remember.”

She looked at Will reproachfully. “But so what? Who cares if he was there? Why should that have mattered?”

“It mattered because I was in love with you.” He shook his head in disbelief. “Didn’t you know that? Maybe I always had been, but I only really knew it after Cat left.”

Pen absorbed this information and realized that she wasn’t shocked by it. For years, she had denied how Will felt about her to everyone, especially to herself, but all along, deep down, she had known.

“If you loved me, that was all the more reason for you to come be with me because whatever Patrick did, it didn’t work. We were way past the point where he could even reach me. He helped with Augusta, but he didn’t help
me.”

A wave of anger surged through Pen. “
You
could have, though. You are the one person who could have, on almost the worst day of my life, but you didn’t. Why? Because you were
jealous
?” The word
jealous
came out as a contemptuous hiss. “I needed you!”

She had meant to hurt him, to make him feel guilty, and she could read in his eyes that it had worked.

“I didn’t know that!” he said, a note of desperation in his voice. “You looked like a family. I didn’t see any place for me there. Yeah, I was jealous. I can be a jerk like anyone else. But if I had known that you wanted me, if I thought I could have helped you in any way, I would have stayed.”

Pen sat there, trembling with fury and staring at his face, the face that she loved, and she felt that his beauty was an affront, an indignity. He could have helped her. He could have
saved
her, and he had let her down. Then she thought of something that deepened her anger, turned it from hot to cold.

“Maybe I could have lived with all of this,” she said icily. “But do you know what I can’t live with?”

“Don’t say that,” he said. “I know what you’re talking about, it’s that I didn’t tell you before, and I know I should have, but don’t say you can’t live with it.”

Pen leaped to her feet.

“When I told you about Augusta, at the reunion, after our bike ride, you acted like you didn’t already know. When I told you that my
father died,
you acted like you didn’t know, and don’t use the excuse that we were playing the four-sentence game and that you weren’t supposed to comment on anything I said because that is such a cop-out.” By the end of this, she was shouting.

Will watched her pace.

“And what about the night on the porch in Bohol? I had never told anyone that story who I didn’t have to tell, but I told you. I trusted you! How could you not have told me that you already knew?”

He stood up and touched her, ran his hands along her arms, tried to look into her face, but she yanked herself away.

“Pen, I wanted to. I know how lame this sounds; I know it might sound like I’m making it up, but, listen, you were talking and I was with you. I wasn’t thinking about the newspaper article. I was listening to you tell the story, and you were so sad, and I wasn’t thinking about anything but how terrible it was that you had to go through what you went through. It wasn’t until you said the thing about thinking I was at the funeral that it even occurred to me that I should tell you.”

“But you didn’t tell me, and not telling me is the same thing as lying.”

“I’m telling you now.”

“Why?”

Will looked startled. “What?”

“Why tell me at all? Why not just let it go?”

He gave her a confused look, as though her question didn’t make any sense. “Because I want to be with you, and I don’t mean a relationship. I mean a life. How fair would it be to start that with something already between us that I know about and you don’t?”

Fair
. What a Will thing to say. Pen felt herself soften at this, just a little, but somehow, that wasn’t what she wanted. She wanted to stay mad. For reasons she could not explain, staying mad felt good, even hurting him felt good. Her bag was next to the door where she had dropped it. Deliberately, she walked over to it and picked it up.

“What are you doing?” asked Will.

“I can’t do this. I have to go.”

“Go?” Will sounded stunned. “Come on, you can’t really believe that leaving is the right thing.”

Pen turned on him, eyes blazing. “What the hell did you think would happen?”

“Do you think I didn’t know it was a risk?” asked Will, exasperated, throwing out his hands. “But I thought you would forgive me. I still think so.”

“God, do you know how arrogant that sounds?”

“We’re supposed to be together. Believing that is not arrogance; neither is having faith in you.”

“Faith in me? Like I’m supposed to fix this? You’re the one who screwed it up!”

Will flared at this. “I did! I made a lot of mistakes. But what about you?”

“Me.
Me?
I didn’t do anything.”

“Exactly. You talk about how much you needed me, but I was only at the funeral in the first place because I decided to come. If you wanted me, you could have called me. You know I would have been there in a second.”

“You can’t be serious. My father was
dead
.” She threw the words at him.

“And I’m not just talking about the funeral. You say a lot about how much you missed me all those years we were apart, but you never called and told me that.”

“You are the one who left!”

Will nodded, accepting this. “I know, and I shouldn’t have. I wanted our friendship to turn into something else, and I thought maybe you wanted that, too, or that you would at least be open to it, but you had twisted the three of us into an
idea,
this pure, untouchable thing.”

“We were.” Pen began to cry. “We were special.”

“We
were
special. It’s not an exaggeration to say that you and Cat saved my life, more than once. But we were three people. We weren’t a religion.”

“Who knew you could be so mean?” she said. She felt stung, right on the edge of hating him.

Will didn’t apologize or even react, just said in a quieter voice, “But I should have stayed, anyway. I should have been more like Jason.”

Pen snapped her head up and said, mockingly, “‘Delusional’? ‘Quixotic’?”

“Yeah, he carried it too far, but he
tried
. When he finally gives up, he’ll know that he did everything he could. I should have fought for you, been less proud, more patient, made deals with the devil, whatever. I should never have left.”

“Well, you did. I stayed and you left.”

Will made a disgusted sound. “Don’t you get sick of that? Feeling abandoned.”

“I was abandoned!”

“And you didn’t do one thing about it. All you had to do was call. I don’t know what Cat would have done, but I would have been there so fast. Why don’t you ask yourself why you never did?”

“Stop it,” she said bitterly. “Shut up. Why are you doing this?”

Will sighed. “I love you. I’ve never hurt you on purpose in my life, but we need to say these things to each other.”

She glared at him and said, “You shouldn’t have told me you were at the funeral.” She knew it didn’t make sense, to go from being angry that he hadn’t told her to angry that he had, but that’s how she felt. “You ruined everything.”

He said, “I knew you would be mad. I mean, I didn’t think you’d be
this
mad.” A glimmer of a smile. “The thing is,” he said gently, “if you end things between us because of this, you would have ended them eventually anyway.”

Pen didn’t know how to answer this. She couldn’t even process what it meant. She felt knotted and furious and wretched.

“But I don’t think you will,” said Will.

With two fingers, he touched her temple. He picked up a piece of her hair and kissed it. “‘Love is an imperative,’ remember you said that? And this time, I’m not going anywhere.”

Pen felt herself giving way, so she searched for a last reservoir of anger and found it, right in the middle of the memory of herself curled like a wounded animal on her childhood bed, a year after her dad had died.

“Fine,” she said, “I’ll save you the trouble.”

She turned and tugged open the door.

“Hey, come on, this is Will. Could you please look at me?”

No way was she turning around. She braced herself for his touch, but it didn’t come.

“Stay and get through this with me,” he said.

“I feel like you trampled on my father’s death, on our friendship, everything that is sacred to me. I’m going home,” she said. “You should, too.”

B
Y THE TIME SHE GOT TO THE APARTMENT, THROUGH SHEER FORCE
of will, she had stopped crying. It was only seven o’clock. Despite the jet lag, Augusta might have been awake, and Pen couldn’t let her see her like that. When she walked in, Jamie was watching television. He switched it off when he saw her face.

“Oh, crap, what happened?”

Pen shook her head. “I don’t want to talk about it.”

She went into her bedroom, grabbed an ancient duffel bag, and, indiscriminately began stuffing clothes into it. Jamie followed her and leaned against the door frame.

“You really think you’re gonna need those long underwear?”

Pen sighed. “All my summer clothes are still in the suitcase.”

“So—what? You guys had a fight?”

“Something like that. Can you stay with Augusta tonight?”

“Sure, where are you going? Back to Will’s hotel?”

“That’s over,” said Pen, stomping into the bathroom for her toothbrush. “I want to see Mom.”

“Hey! Crazy person!” In the bathroom mirror, she could see Jamie behind her, waving his hands in the air to get her attention. “You need to stay and work this out. People are allowed to have fights without the world ending, even you and Will.”

Ignoring this, she brushed past Jamie and headed for the front door.

“Mom can’t fix this for you,” said Jamie, catching hold of her arm. “What are you thinking?”

Pen spun around to face him. “Could you mind your own business? Is that possible?”

Jamie’s gray eyes grew flinty. “How many chances did you give Patrick?”

Pen turned her face away.

“So is that your policy?” asked Jamie. “Special deals for assholes and deadbeats. But for good guys, ones who might actually stick around and not suck, it’s one strike and you’re out.”

“You don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Because that’s brilliant, Pen. Really. That’s genius. Way to go.”

The phone rang, and even though the last thing she wanted to do was to have a phone conversation, she didn’t want to talk to Jamie, either. She answered it.

“Hello.”

“Hello.” A woman’s voice, unfamiliar, friendly. “Hey, this is Pen, isn’t it?”

“It is.” Pen rooted around in her handbag for her keys.

“Hi, Pen, welcome home. This is Susan, Susan Davis. Is Jamie there?”

“Oh, yeah, he’s definitely here.”

She turned around, and Jamie was standing there. He picked up her keys off the telephone table and tossed them to her, and by some miracle, she caught them in her free hand.

“Happy trails,” he said.

“Don’t tell him where I’m going,” she said, and she thrust the phone at him and left.

T
HE ANGER CARRIED
P
EN ALL THE WAY OUT OF THE CITY, WHOOSHED
her effortlessly past the billboard emblazoned with the ballerina’s sculpted back, past the X-rated video store, through the narrow South Twenty-Sixth Street tunnel that she had always hated, past the
DON’T FLY TO THE AIRPORT
sign that she, Will, and Cat had always liked, past the oil refinery with its flames and towers and plumes of steam, and over the bridge, before dumping her onto I-95 and deserting her completely.

For several miles, she didn’t think at all. She felt dazed, tingly, bruised, vaguely convalescent. What seeped in first was a baffled amazement:
How
had she gotten so angry? She wasn’t an angry person in general, but she had given herself to it so willingly, even with a kind of relish, like a person swan-diving into a burning lake. What had Will said? That he had never hurt her on purpose in his life, but that’s just what she had done to him. Hurt him and felt better for having done it. The thought filled her with so much shame that she almost scurried away from it, but at the last second, she gritted her teeth.
You have to understand this,
she insisted, and with deliberation, she began.

She had told Will that the part she couldn’t live with was the lie: the way he kept the secret, even through her telling the story of her father’s murder. He should have told her, that much was abundantly clear. He had chickened out, failed to step up, turned himself, in one fell swoop, from the most honest man she had ever known into a liar. No matter how you sliced it, he was wrong, ignoble, and she was justifiably aggrieved.