Falling Together (25 page)

“Hey,” said Pen softly, smiling.

“Hey,” said Will.

“Nice haircut.”

“Yeah. You like it?”

Pen felt fear steal over her because nothing was the way it should have been. The words she and Will said to each other were more or less normal, but everything else was wrong: the distance in his voice and in his eyes, the way he didn’t smile back at her. She thought it might have been the first time ever, since they’d met, that he hadn’t smiled back at her. He wasn’t angry anymore, at least she didn’t think so, but he wasn’t Will, either. Will would have rushed to meet her halfway. He would have understood that this bright room, everything clean, a world away from the squalor and the bloodstained porch, was meant to be the place in which they would fall back together. They’d had a very bad night, but now it was morning.

She tried again. “You hit your head pretty hard, friend. You didn’t, by any chance, suffer memory loss. Maybe lose the last fifteen hours or so?”

Still, no smile. He said, “You didn’t have to stay.”

“You don’t think so?” Pen asked. “Really?”

Will didn’t answer. He looked down at his hands, turning them over and back on the sheet in front of him, as though noticing the white bandages on them for the first time.

Pen walked to the side of the bed. She wanted to touch Will but was afraid he would stiffen or move her hands away the way he had his mother’s the night before, so instead, she held on to the metal arm of the hospital bed.

“Won’t you forgive me?” she asked. “You have to know how sorry I am.”

Will turned his tired, faraway eyes on her and said, “Don’t ask me that. It’s not about forgiving you.”

“
What’s
not about forgiving me?” asked Pen, gripping the bed rail. “Can there just not be an ‘it’? Please? Can we make it go away?”

“I don’t want to talk about this right now.”

“When, then?” Pen ordered herself not to cry. She wasn’t sure why, but she understood that her crying would doom the conversation. She needed to stay calm and optimistic and as normal as possible if there was any chance of ending the moment on a happy note. And Pen thought that if the moment didn’t end on a happy note, she would not be able to stand it.

With gratitude, she saw Will’s gaze soften a little, and he said, “Soon. All right?”

“All right.”

The next second, though, he was all business. “I called Philip. He’s on his way.”

“So when he gets here, we’ll go home,” said Pen.

“I can’t,” said Will. “Phil and I need to stay with my mom, figure out what to do. You drive my car home, okay? I’ll take a train later.”

At the thought of driving home alone, the panic from the night before came back, the fear that, if she left him, she would never see Will again. On impulse, she placed her hand on top of his bandaged one and carefully curled her fingers around it. “Let me stay. I don’t want to leave without you.”

He gave her a long, complicated look, his clear hazel eyes taking in her face bit by bit, a look that she would spend hours and months afterward trying to decipher. She would never figure out what he was thinking, but, eventually, what she understood was that, while other good-byes would follow, this look Will gave her was the real end. He leaned over and kissed her forehead.

“It’ll be okay. Go home.” He smiled at her, then, which should have made her feel better, but it didn’t. She didn’t want to go home, she didn’t think anything would be okay, but she let go of his hand and left.

A
MELIE SAID
, “C
AN
I
STOP HERE TO POINT OUT THE ELEPHANT IN
the room?”

“I know what you’re thinking,” said Pen. “And why you’re thinking it. I’ve even considered it myself, but nope, it’s not there. It’s not a real elephant.”

“When it comes to your personal life, honey, you wouldn’t know a real elephant if it bit you on the ass.”

“You didn’t know us.”

“
You
didn’t know you,” Amelie said. She sighed. “What happened next? After he got home.”

“You know what happened. He left. Eight years of friendship up in smoke.”

“Did you try to stop him?”

Pen told Amelie how she had yelled at Will the way she had never yelled at anyone. She had gone on and on and ended with:

“That’s it? That’s
it
? I watch you totally lose your mind and beat the shit out of another human being,
twice,
which I have to tell you is pretty fucking terrifying, and I don’t leave you. I don’t not forgive you. I know I shouldn’t have kissed that man, that I betrayed you and your mother and probably my mother and God knows who else, and I am sorrier than I have ever been about anything but come
on
! I lose my head for five minutes, after being a goody two-shoes
my entire life,
and you’re
leaving
?”

“What did he say?” asked Amelie.

Will hadn’t yelled back. He hadn’t even been angry. He’d been generous and loving and in pain about how much he was hurting Pen, from the second he arrived back home until the second he got into his car and left Philadelphia for good, but he was immovable as a mountain.

“He said, ‘I forgive you. I feel stupid even saying that. Of course, I forgive you. It’s not about that.’”

Pen could close her eyes and see him saying this to her and still feel what she’d felt then: the lights going out with a bang, total hope blackout. She knew right then that he wouldn’t stay, no matter what she said, but still she asked, “What is it about, then?”

“Pen,” he’d said, sighing, “my family is a disaster. I’m a disaster. I hate my dad. I hate business school. Damon”—he paused, and Pen flinched at the sound of Damon’s name—“was right when he said I was going to get myself killed one day. I need to get away and start over, figure out my life.”

But he didn’t meet her eyes, and when she said, “Do you hear how little sense you’re making? How none of those are reasons for leaving
me
? Don’t lie about this,” he didn’t contradict her. He leaned back in his chair with his hands on top of his head, staring at the ceiling.
He’s trying to think of how to say it,
thought Pen, bitterly,
how to let me down easy.

After a long time, Will reached across Pen’s tiny kitchen table, lightly raked his fingers down her cheek once—a ghost of a touch, there and gone—and slowly and carefully, with such kindness and sadness in his voice that Pen felt that maybe all wasn’t lost after all, he said, “The thing is, this won’t work, just the two of us.”

“We can make it work,” said Pen.

“I can’t.” In frustration, Will pushed his chair back from the table, so that he was suddenly far away, out of reach.

“So—what?” Pen lashed out at him, put words in his mouth that she knew weren’t true. “You’re saying that Cat’s the only reason you and I were friends? If it’s just me, it’s not worth it?”

“No. No way. Of course not. But Cat kept us—in balance.”

Pen was not above begging. If she hadn’t been sitting at the table, she might have gotten down on her knees. Instead, she reached out as far as she could and put her hands on the table in front of Will, palms up, as though asking him to take them. He didn’t, but she just left them there.

“We’re still here, together. Cat’s leaving was bad enough. It was a nightmare, but I could stand it if you were still here. You’re my best friend,” said Pen. “I love you.”

She realized they were words that she and Will never said. Cat had said them all the time, and they had said them back to her, but never to each other.

Will didn’t say them now. He said, “I don’t know how to be with you without her.”

“I don’t know what you mean,” wailed Pen.

“I know,” said Will. “And I’m so sorry.”

When Pen told Amelie this, Amelie knocked on Pen’s head and said, “Hello. Is anyone in there?”

“Stop it,” said Pen seriously. “We were friends. It was as big a deal as being in love.” She tried to think of a way to make Amelie understand. “It was a revelation, being friends like that. God, it was
holy
to me. But it wasn’t being in love.”

“Fine,” said Amelie. “And what about now?”

“We’re talking. We’re plotting,” said Pen. “Coming up with a plan to try to find Cat. Will’s going to talk to a neighborhood friend of hers.”

“You already told me that, and you know what I’m asking,” said Amelie impatiently. She waved her hands around. “What about
now
? Six years later. You’re both adults. Bygones are bygones. No Cat around to distract you at the reunion.”

“We wanted Cat around,” Pen reminded her. “A lot.”

“Still, she wasn’t there.”

Pen shrugged.

“So how did it feel to be with him again? Different? Come on, it had to feel different.”

Pen raised her eyebrows at Amelie. “You want me to say I’m in love with him. After seeing him for two days.”

“No, I don’t.” Amelie grinned.

“You want me to say that I was struck by the thunderbolt realization that he is the love of my life.”

“Nope.”

“Yes, you do. That’s how you are. But here’s a thought: it takes two to tango.”

“Ha! So you
are
in love with him!”

“Not what I’m saying, and you know it.”

“Oh, he wants to tango all right.”

“I don’t think so,” said Pen. “I didn’t see a single sign, not that I was looking.”

“History tells us you’re not so good at seeing signs. But let’s put tangoing aside. Were you attracted to him? Simple question.”

“I might have been, but not continuously. In flashes.”

“Why say ‘might’? You were.”

“Seeing him again was overwhelming. A shock. I can’t be sure of what I felt.”

Amelie gave her a skeptical look.

“And even now,” said Pen, “I can’t quite believe in him.”

“You don’t trust him?” Amelie ruffled her cropped blond hair in dismay. “Why not?”

Pen shook her head. “I trust him. Or I trust him in all ways except that I’m not completely sure he won’t disappear again. But what I meant was I can’t quite believe that those two days happened. You know what I did?”

“What?”

“On my way back from the reunion, I pulled off the road to call him because I needed to make sure he was real.”

Amelie smiled at her and said, “Was he? What did he say?”

“He said, ‘I was about to call you. I just passed a dead possum the size of a Volkswagen. I knew you’d want to know.’”

A
FTER HER CONVERSATION WITH
A
MELIE
, P
EN WALKED HOME DISTRACTED
and brimming with feeling, half of her still in the past, the other half walking homeward through the here and now. Outside her apartment door, Pen stopped to listen to Augusta, who was inside singing a song from her spring concert, when suddenly, above the bubbling clarity of this, she heard one word, like a bird landing on a branch, “Beautiful!”
Oh, my God,
she thought. Pen was fumbling with the key in the lock, when Jamie threw open the door with a smile like Christmas morning.

“Mom?” said Pen, stepping inside.

Pen’s mother sat in the leather armchair in a blue T-shirt with Augusta on her lap. The breath seemed to fly out of Pen’s body.
Everyone, everyone is coming back to me,
she thought.

“My girl,” said her mother, holding open her free arm. “I missed you every day.”

“Your heart leaps up, Mama!” said Augusta, clapping her hands. “Right?”

All Pen could do was nod.

“Come here, right this second,” said her mother, and Pen went.

S
AMANTHA
D
ENHAM
-D
REW MADE
W
ILL WANT TO SMOKE
. N
OT
in the same way that
Casablanca
made him want to smoke every time he saw it; chiefly because he was sitting on his back steps not seeing Samantha, just talking to her on the phone, but her luxurious, intriguingly placed inhaling pauses and her drawn-out velvet exhales sounded so satisfying that Will could feel them in his own chest. Will had smoked for eight weeks at summer camp when he was fifteen, exclusively on sloped roofs and exclusively at night, which caused him to associate the smell of cigarettes forever after with sliding and the sound of frogs, but, apart from that, he had never been a smoker and had no interest in becoming one. Still, Samantha Denham-Drew was a woman who knew her way around a drag.