Falling Together (19 page)

Pen almost said, “And this is all about you.” Instead, she didn’t confirm or deny what he’d said. Neither did Will.

“Please tell us what happened,” said Pen.

“Her dad died, like, six weeks ago, give or take,” said Jason, darting his eyes from Pen’s face to Will’s, as though watching for their reaction.

Instantly, Pen’s eyes filled with tears, both because her eyes always filled with tears at the mention of dead fathers and because the dead father in question belonged to Cat.

“She was crazy about her dad,” said Will.

“How did it happen?” asked Pen, trying not to picture her own father, curled on his side, his cheek slack against the cement.

“Heart attack,” said Jason. He squinted at them. “You’re telling me you didn’t know? Her dad died and she didn’t tell you.”

“How would I know?” said Will. “I haven’t talked to Cat in six years.”

“Neither have I,” said Pen.

“Yeah, right,” said Jason snidely. “I forgot.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” asked Pen.

“It means I don’t believe that, no matter what Cat said. I’m not an imbecile. Not one phone call? Not one e-mail?” said Jason. “It means I think you’re all a bunch of liars.”

“Cat, too?” snapped Pen, forgetting to be nice. “Cat who thinks you’re awesome and would never leave you? You’re calling her a liar, too?”

Jason tensed and opened his mouth, but nothing came out. His right knee started to jitter, causing his beer to slosh out of the glass and down his leg. “Fuck.”

Will handed him a napkin, and he slapped at his leg with it.

“Her dad died,” prompted Will. “Go ahead.”

Jason tossed the napkin onto the table and said, “She lost it. It was weird.”

“Weird to lose it when your dad dies?” said Pen. Will shot her a look.

Jason glared at her. “Believe it or not, I was
sensitive
to the fact that she was grieving. I was
there
for her. And, at first, you know, she was dealing with it the way you’d expect.”

Pen tried to imagine how Cat would deal with something as big and final and grim as death, Cat of the twinkling eyes and sly sweetness and witty quips. Cat, who so much of the time, had seemed to float.

“I don’t know what I’d expect,” said Will. “I haven’t seen her in a long time, and when I remember her, she’s usually laughing.”

A cloud passed over Jason’s face. “Well, you know, she’s an adult now. No one stays like that.”

“So tell us,” said Pen, “how she reacted.”

“When she first heard, she was sad. Understandably, right? She said stuff about how she didn’t know him that well, even though he was the only family she had. Which was true, by the way. She thought he was the greatest thing since sliced bread, and I guess he was charming and all, but he wasn’t exactly a guy who showed up, if you know what I mean.”

Pen thought that she did. She and Will had only met Dr. Ocampo twice (which in itself said a lot), once at their graduation and once in Philadelphia when he came to lecture at a medical conference at Penn, and both times, Pen had liked him. It was impossible not to. He had been one of those compact people who fill up a room, a person who shimmered with charisma. It was there when he shook your hand, there in conversation, when he talked and even more when he listened, giving you his steady, absorbed attention, his eyes alive with intelligence. She still remembered the conversation they’d had about neuroscience and teaching kids to read. “You have learned, through experience and fine-tuned observation,” he had told her, so animated he seemed to crackle, “what science is only just beginning to give us!” Pen had felt understood, cherished, and at the same time, gleeful, like a baby tossed into the air, and all the while, there had been Cat, rapt, flamelike and flickering in her father’s presence, her face full of dazzle.

But he was the kind of father who was good in the flesh, but bad at a distance, who almost never returned Cat’s phone calls, who sent extravagant birthday gifts two weeks late, who forgot the classes Cat was taking, the names of her friends (“Persephone!” Cat told Pen once, hooting with laughter. “He thinks you’re the Queen of the Underworld!”), and, at least twice, the day and time of her arrival home for Christmas break (she called him from baggage claim, he sent a town car). “It’s not his fault. He never learned
how
!” Cat had once explained. “Blame my mother, who kept track of everything, everything, everything for him!” Later, alone with Pen, Will had said, “Cat’s mom died when she was two. The guy’s had seventeen years to learn how,” but neither of them said it to Cat.

“She said she thought they’d have a lot more time to get to know each other, but then he died. Plus, she said she was an orphan, which is big, having no family. There’s her mom’s sister out in Oregon or someplace, but Cat hardly knows her. So she was sad,” Jason went on. “For like forty-eight hours, she even let me take care of her, which you guys know isn’t easy for a person like Cat.”

Pen’s and Will’s eyes met, and Pen knew that he was thinking what she was thinking and that he was thinking it in the same way, without a trace of resentment,
What was ever easier for Cat than letting someone take care of her?

“But then we flew to Houston for the funeral, and she was her old self and then some. Totally took charge of the arrangements, organized this big after-party at her dad’s house, ordered the food, flowers, talked to all the people, shaking hands like frigging Jackie O. No crying. She was amazing.” Even in the midst of her shock at hearing about this unfamiliar, take-charge Cat, Pen had to smile at “after-party.”

“That does sound amazing,” said Will.

“It does, right? And then I flew home and she stayed for another week or so, getting his estate in order and whatnot. Meeting with his lawyer, sorting through his stuff, getting the house ready to sell—”

Jason broke off, stared into his nearly full cup of beer, bolted it the way you’d bolt an espresso shot, and then stared into the empty cup. Pen waited for him to crumple the cup in his fist, but he didn’t.

“I couldn’t stay,” he said, looking at them defiantly. “Cat was a student, so she could leave for a week, get incompletes or whatever, but I had a
job
.”

“Makes sense,” said Will.

“I’m an accountant,” said Jason. “This was April, for God’s sake.”

“What was Cat studying?” asked Pen. She was surprised to hear that Cat had gone back to school because, as smart as she was, Cat had loved everything about college
except
school.

“Physical therapy. She thought about nursing, but it would’ve taken forever. As it was, she had to take a bunch of undergrad science courses before she could even think about PT.”

If Jason had said that Cat had gone back to school to be an elephant trainer or a pole dancer, Pen could not have been more flabbergasted. (In point of fact, pole dancing was a stretch only because it did not, as far as Pen knew, involve costumes covered with spangles and feathers; she wasn’t even sure if it involved costumes at all.) In Philadelphia, Cat had worked as a salesperson in an upscale men’s clothing store, a job she had adored. “It’s like a game!” she’d said. “A dance! A play!” And Cat wrinkling her nose at the fit of a pair of pants, recommending charcoal over navy as though the fate of humanity depended on it, saying, “You would be completely out of your mind not to buy that tie,”
that
was Cat. But Cat healing the injured? Cat laying her tiny, perfect hands on imperfect bodies? Cat taking
science
courses? Pen’s mind boggled. As a physical therapist, she would wear what? Sweats?
Scrubs?

“Anyway, she came back different,” said Jason in a very tired voice.

“Different in what way?” asked Pen.

“Every way. She basically stopped eating. Not even candy. Not even
pastries
.”

Pen smiled, remembering Cat, sighing with bliss over éclairs, napoleons, palmiers, chocolate croissants, and, especially, scones, the ones from her favorite Rittenhouse Square bakery, hockey-puck-heavy, studded with currants, and blanketed in Devonshire cream.

“And she didn’t sleep,” said Jason. Cat, who could sleep anywhere, on a kitchen chair, on a subway, at a Phillies game, as instantly and peacefully as a cat in a shaft of sun.

“She got really careless about her medication.”

“For the Cat we knew,” said Will, “that wouldn’t have been much of a change.”

“Yeah,” said Jason. “It’s not like she was ever great about it, but she got worse. In fact, she got really bad. I even yelled at her about it once, that’s how bad it got, and she just gave me this thousand-mile stare. It was spooky.”

Pen felt a pulse of something uncomfortably like affection for Jason, so obviously still riddled with guilt for having yelled.

“But if she wasn’t crying, she was like that, a million miles away, even when she was right there. Distracted. And then she’d leave for hours, say she’d been driving or at a friend’s. Then a few days before she left, she got better. Still really distant, but she got calm, started taking care of herself. And then whammo: she left me a note saying she had to get away for a while, to please not try to find her.”

“But you did.” Pen sounded judgmental, although she didn’t mean to. She wasn’t even sure if she felt judgmental. She knew from experience that just because someone wanted to be alone with grief didn’t mean they should be. But maybe Cat didn’t want to be alone; maybe—and this was abundantly easy for Pen to believe—she just didn’t want to be with Jason.

Jason’s face hardened. “Have you seen her? That’s all I want to know.”

Pen shook her head.

“No, man. Sorry,” said Will.

“And she didn’t tell you where she was going.”

Pen and Will shook their heads.

“I guess I have no choice but to believe you.”

“Guess so,” said Pen.

“Then it looks like my work here is done,” said Jason.

“Will you let us know,” said Will, “when you find her?” Pen could tell by Will’s face what it cost him to ask this favor of Jason.

“Oh, I’ll find her,” said Jason, lapsing into a cocky nonchalance that, again, filled Pen with the urge to slug him. “No worries there. I got it covered.”

He started to drum on the back of chair and look around the party. He actually yawned.

Why doesn’t he leave?
thought Pen.
What’s he waiting for?

In the midst of her exasperation, a thought began to take shape.

“Hold on,” she said. “Give me a second.”

Will and Jason looked at her. She closed her eyes.

“You know what?” she said to Will, opening her eyes.

“What?” he asked.

“It doesn’t make sense.” She reached across the table and took hold of Will’s wrist. “It doesn’t.”

“Okay,” said Will, waiting.

“Think about it,” Pen said, getting excited. “If he really suspected we were with Cat or had seen her or knew where she was, how could he have thought his trick would work? ‘I know it’s been forever, but I need you.’ See?”

Will looked puzzled; then his face cleared.

“We wouldn’t have believed the e-mails were from her,” he said, “because we would’ve been in touch with her.”

“That’s right! We wouldn’t have come down to see her if we were
with
her or knew where she was!” Pen dropped back in her chair, breathless.

“Everything happened so fast I didn’t even think of that,” said Will.

Pen’s heart started to race. What if Jason was insane? What if he had hurt Cat and was just pretending she’d left him? Then she remembered that the only reason she thought Cat was missing was that Jason had said so. Maybe she wasn’t. Maybe she was. Maybe Jason was a psychopath. Psychopaths existed. Maybe Jason was one of them. Pen felt sick to her stomach. But when she turned to face Jason, he didn’t look like a psychopath. She reminded herself that this didn’t mean he wasn’t one. But, red-faced and squirming in his seat, Jason looked embarrassed, near tears even, like a third-grader who has been caught in a lie.

“What the hell?” said Will in a flat voice.

Jason opened and closed his mouth a couple of times without saying anything.

“Did you do something to her?” blurted out Pen.

Jason’s eyes went wide. “No! Of course not. God!”

“What, then?” said Will.

“I figured that—” Jason ran a hand down the center of his sweating face. “I figured that if she was with you, she’d make you come, okay? To see who was pretending to be her. Except more than likely, she’d know it was me. Even though I didn’t use my own e-mail address, she’d figure sending that e-mail to try and find her would be something I’d do, and she’d send you to the reunion. Or maybe she’d even come with you.”

“Why would she do that?” asked Pen, whose head was beginning to hurt with trying to follow Jason’s train of thought.

“To laugh at me. Why else? You three could have a big old chuckle together at my expense. But at least I’d get to see her, maybe talk her into coming home.”

Pen and Will sat staring at Jason for a long, stunned moment. Then Will said, “You sent e-mails to us pretending to be Cat so that Cat would know it was you pretending to be her and would come down here, even though she’d left and asked you not to look for her? Jason, that’s”—Will scratched his head—“pretty complicated.”