Falling Together (12 page)

“Will?” asked Cat, again. “Are you okay? Did he hurt you?”

“Did he hurt him?” Pen said bitterly. “Is
Will
hurt
?”

“Stop it,” said Cat.

“I don’t think Will’s hurt, Cat, but I’ll tell you what; he is definitely not okay.”

“
Stop
it!”

“I’m sorry,” said Will. Even though she could hear the misery in his voice, Pen didn’t look at him.

“Don’t be sorry!” cried Cat. “The guy was an asshole. You were right to do it!”

Pen pressed her palms to her eyes and shook her head.

“I didn’t mean to,” said Will.

Pen looked down at his face, which was white against the grass. Pen saw that his lip was bleeding and that his face was familiar again. Will’s face was his face, his voice was his voice, and it would have been so easy for Pen to warm to him, to tell him not to worry, that she understood. But she couldn’t, and she didn’t really think he would want her to anyway, not that what he wanted mattered to Pen just then.

“What does that mean: you didn’t mean to?” she said, struggling to keep her voice low and even. “You did it. I tried to get you to leave him alone, back there at the party, and you wouldn’t stop. How could you not
mean
to?”

“Pen, let it go,” pleaded Cat, getting up and coming to kneel down beside Will. Tenderly, she placed a hand against the lean slope of his cheek, but he flinched, and she took it away.

“You’re right,” he said, looking straight at Pen. She didn’t want to be right.

“Oh, Will,” she said, and silence sprawled out between the three of them after she said it. Except for shivering, nobody moved. Pen could hear laughter and shouting spilling toward them over the edge of the Crater from what felt like a very long distance away.

“I don’t know what to do.” Will’s voice was hollow. “I don’t know how to fix it.”

Because Pen didn’t know, either, she unfolded herself and stretched out next to him on the grass. Cat did the same, flaring and settling the gray blanket out and across the three of them. They lay like that, not touching or speaking, in the center of Crater, with the moon like a white balloon and the ground like a cupped hand, holding them, and after a little while, they got up and walked home.

P
EN TURNED UP THE MUSIC
. I
N A CHARACTERISTIC COMBINATION OF
thoughtfulness and mockery (and because he was just a guy who liked to make playlists), for the trip, Jamie had made her a playlist of the music she had listened to in college. “The sound track of your youth. Total-body nostalgia immersion,” he’d intoned, dangling the iPod in front of her nose. “You know you want it.”

Because her car didn’t have an iPod hookup, she had taken his Land Cruiser, mammoth, black, and gas-gulping, a ridiculous vehicle for any non-outback dweller, but particularly for a man who walked to work and almost never had cause to take his SUV out of the shockingly expensive garage in which it languished. (In moments, Pen imagined it there, waiting, like a lonely, shiny hippopotamus.) It was Pen’s habit to make relentless fun of Jamie for owning it. “Who do you think you are, Puff Daddy?” she’d asked the first time he’d shown up with it, which had made Jamie shut his eyes and say, “Nobody calls him that. Nobody. For well over a decade, not one person has even considered calling him that.” Even so, Pen loved driving it. She felt like a badass driving it (and she was not someone who got a lot of opportunities to feel like a badass), and the playlist was marvelous, just what the doctor ordered.

Just as Pen came to the place in the highway where the mountains appeared like magic—up and over a hill, around a curve, and there they were in lines and layers, ghostly and blue-gray, more like clouds or billows of smoke along the horizon than like mountains—she remembered how Jason had never followed through on his threats. He hadn’t shown up on Will’s doorstep with a gang of fraternity brothers out for blood or with a lawyer out for damages. He hadn’t confronted Will at all, even though they had expected him to, Cat and Pen, fearfully, Will with a fatalism that, in Pen’s opinion, bordered, disturbingly, on hopefulness.

Instead, a week or so later, Jason did something entirely other: he walked up to Cat as she sat drinking coffee with Pen in a campus café and, with a great, serious sheepishness and a ducking motion that was almost a bow, handed her a letter. They hadn’t known who he was at first, having only seen him at night and dressed as a mummy. He could have been anyone: a big kid in a dark blue sweatshirt and brown cords, clean shaven, his blond hair newly cut, patches of pale skin beneath the sharp line of his short sideburns.

It was only when Pen noticed the partially healed cuts on his upper lip and the faded green half-moon bruises under his eyes and saw a wary expression replace Cat’s initial smile that she understood who he was. Pen and Cat looked at each other, then down at the white envelope in Cat’s hand.

“What’s this?” asked Cat.

“Just something I needed to say to you,” Jason said, shoulders high, hands shoved into the pockets of his pants.

Pen bristled and was preparing to say, “
You
needed? Do you think anyone here gives a shit about what you need?” when Jason surprised her by adding, in the small, taut voice of someone possibly about to cry, “I mean, something I hope you’ll read, even though I wouldn’t blame you if you didn’t feel like it.”

Cat’s eyes widened, and, absently, as though it had a mind of its own, her hand lifted and started to reach out in the direction of Jason.
Oh no, you don’t,
thought Pen.
Do not do it
. As though it had heard her thoughts, the hand drew back and landed in Cat’s lap. Cat shrugged.

“All right,” she said. “If I feel like it later, I’ll read it.”

Jason’s mouth gave a twist, and he seemed about to say something else, but then he just tugged a hand out of his pocket, lifted it in a good-bye wave, and walked out of the café. Through the window, Pen saw him take off running the instant he was out the door, the white bottoms of his sneakers flashing.

Cat set the envelope on the table gingerly, as though it were fragile or dangerous.

“My name’s not on it,” she said a little forlornly. “Maybe he forgot it.”

“Maybe he doesn’t know how to spell it.”

Cat smiled.

“What do you want to do, sweetheart?” asked Pen.

“Split a cinnamon bun.”

“Okay. What else?”

“Tell Jason to shove his stupid letter up his stupid ass.”

“Good.”

“Then throw it away without reading it.”

“Yeah, right. That sounds like you.” Pen smiled.

Cat laughed. “How about this: call Will, get him to meet us at our place, and read it together?”

“Well.” Pen paused. “Why don’t we call and tell him we’re coming to his place?” she said, raising her eyebrows. “Just in case.”

She waited. The subject of Will’s temper had come up a few times since Halloween, and they had always handled it with circumspection and gravity. In fact, there wasn’t one thing funny about it, and, although she didn’t tell Cat or Will this, Pen found the whole of Halloween night physically, chest-tighteningly, stomach-knottingly painful to discuss. (“Do you think he could have killed that guy, if you hadn’t been there to stop him?” Cat had asked once. “Of course not,” Pen had said, almost as sure as she sounded, but not quite.) But since the inherent seriousness of a subject had never stopped them from joking about it in the past, Pen thought it might be time to try.

Without missing a beat, Cat nodded. “Just in case he decides to throw a refrigerator through the wall.”

“I like our refrigerator,” said Pen. “It’s shiny.”

“And it has an in-door ice dispenser,” Cat reminded her. “Which is extremely handy.”

T
HEY SPLIT THE CINNAMON ROLL THREE WAYS
. C
AT WAS TOO NERVOUS
to read the letter aloud, and no one brought up the idea of Will’s reading it (he seemed averse to even looking in the direction of the white envelope), so the duty fell to Pen. The letter was unexpectedly long and, more unexpectedly, lucid. Although everyone hated to admit it (and didn’t admit it out loud for some time), it was quite a good letter, particularly the end:

Like a lot of people, even though I knew I could be a jerk at times, I always thought of myself as a good guy, but after what I did to you, I can’t think that anymore. A good guy does not leave a girl by herself outside on the ground at night (even if she does have a blanket over her), period, let alone having a seizure. I’ve done a lot of thinking since Halloween and I realize that I am turning into someone I don’t want to be. I think a big part of the problem is drinking, so as of one week ago, I quit for good. I know you probably don’t care about that in terms of my health or well-being because you probably wish I would drop dead (justifiably), but I wanted you to know that I will never do to anyone else what I did to you. I am sorrier than I can explain.

Sincerely,

Jason Rogers

P.S. I have a younger sister and if any shit-for-brains did to her what I did to you I would summarily kick his ass.

L
IKE THE MUSIC POURING OUT OF
J
AMIE’S RIDICULOUSLY SOPHISTICATED
sound system, the past seemed to come at Pen from all sides, sharp and clear and real, and, momentarily, she felt the urge to turn the SUV around and head home.
Nerves,
is what her mother would have said,
just a minor nerve-quake.
Pen decided to buy herself some time. She steered off the main road and drove through an ancient town of woods, upright, stoic houses, and what might possibly qualify as the most charming post office on the planet.

She was surprised at how well she remembered the letter. Partly this was due to, after that first, breathless, trisected cinnamon-bun reading, many subsequent readings (mostly in Cat and Pen’s apartment, mostly by Cat, who would, for months, interrupt Pen’s eating, or television watching, or studying—once even her sleep—with an “Okay, listen to this,” followed by an excerpt from the letter), and partly due to the fact that bits of the letter became, irresistibly, stock phrases for all three of them, and eventually for their friends and family members, for a ridiculously long time. (Just last month, Pen had scolded Jamie by saying, “You shouldn’t stuff your sweat-drenched running clothes into the hamper, period, let alone having a seizure.”)

But more than any of that, Pen knew that the reason Jason’s letter had stayed with her so resolutely was that reading it out loud that day had triggered in Pen what could only be called an epiphany, although she had never called it that to anyone but herself, suspecting, as she did, that what had hit her, at age twenty, like a ton of bricks, was an understanding that most people acquired much earlier in their development. It was simply this: for the first time, she understood that it was possible to form an opinion about a person, an opinion based on solid evidence and a vast quantity of justified self-righteous anger, to even have this opinion reinforced by trusted colleagues, and to be, at least partially, wrong.

Actually, this was something Pen had already known to be true about other people. Other people could and often did form wrong, negative, vehemently held opinions about their fellow human beings. But as Pen read Jason’s letter, she was shocked to discover that she, Cat, and Will—
she, Cat, and Will
—were fallible in exactly the same way everyone else was. If a boy they had branded, once and for all, as a complete and irredeemable cad could reveal himself to be an incomplete and potentially redeemable one, what else might be possible?

With more than ten years gone and oceans of water under the bridge, Pen couldn’t help but regard the long-gone college-boy Jason in yet a different way: as somebody’s son. For someone out there, Jason had been the sun and moon, the basket into which someone had placed innumerable eggs, a walking, talking universe of promise and heartbreak.
You screwed up in a way that you should not have screwed up, but good for you writing that letter,
the mother in Pen said.
Well done
.

With the Replacements jangling, growling, and banging around her, Pen thought again about Halloween night, the moment after Will had told her that she was right, that he had done, on purpose, the ugliest thing that Pen had ever seen up close. She remembered the hard ground and the burning moon and the stillness and the cold seeping into them all. For Pen it had been a moment of truth, a fulcrum moment. She had stood on the fine point of all that had just happened and she had teetered.
I could walk away,
she had considered.
Get up, brush the dirt off my dress, and go
. The thought was appealing. It caught her by the wrist and pulled, but at the last second, she had stopped teetering. She had yanked herself loose from the idea of leaving and had stayed.
I’m in. For better or for worse
. She had sat on the ground thinking those words, making a vow.
For better or for worse
.

Pen realized now that she had never regretted it, not even after Cat left, after Will left. It mattered, being a person who stayed, who counted herself in, for good. Paul Westerberg rasped out a song Pen had always loved, “Hold My Life.” With a sigh, but without bitterness, Pen thought,
When did I ever do anything else?